Abstract
What is postmodernism? What political implications does it have? These were the two questions which I set out to answer in this essay. As I went on, it became increasingly clear that they were inseparable. Determining the referent of the word ‘postmodern’, a word suddenly, in the mid-1980s, on everyone’s lips, turned out to depend on understanding one aspect of politics in the Reagan-Thatcher era.
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Notes and References
J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester, 1984), p. xxiv.
Id., ‘Defining the Post-Modern’, ICA Documents 4 (1986), p. 6.
Id., ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, appendix to Postmodern Condition, p. 82.
See especially J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, 1987).
Id. ‘Sovereignty and the Führerdemokratie’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 September 1986, p. 1054.
Id., ‘Modernity — an Incomplete Project’, in H. Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture (London, 1985), p. 9.
A. Callinicos, Is There a Future for Marxism? (London, 1982),
and ‘Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism, Post-Marxism?’, Theory, Culture & Society 2:3 (1985).
See also P. Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London, 1987).
C. Taylor, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, in D. C. Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford, 1986), p. 102 n. 46.
D. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (London, 1974), pp. 212, 294.
See R. Heilbroner, Business Civilization in Decline (Harmondsworth, 1977),
and K. Kumar, Prophecy and Progress (Harmondsworth, 1978).
See N. Harris, Of Bread and Guns (Harmondsworth, 1983),
and The End of the Third World (London, 1986).
D. Gordon, ‘The Global Economy’, New Left Review 168 (1988), pp. 30–8.
Bell, op. cit., p.343.
Financial Times, 15 October 1986. See also the analysis of contemporary Los Angeles in M. Davis, ‘Chinatown Part Two?’, New Left Review, 164 (1987).
Kumar, op. cit., passim.
C. Jencks, What is Post-modernism? (London, 1986), pp. 33–4, 42, 14–15, 43.
S. Spender, Eliot (London, 1975), p. 9.
P. Fuller, Images of God (London, 1985), pp. 13–14.
U. Eco, Reflections on ‘The Name of the Rose’ (London, 1984), pp. 66–7.
F. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 146 (1984), pp. 85, 86, 88, and passim.
M. Davis, ‘Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism’, ibid. 151 (1985), p. 107.
F. Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971), pp. xvii–xviii, 105, 95–106, 105.
Id., ‘On Magic Realism in Film’, Critical Inquiry 12:2 (1986), p. 303.
See also the rather longer definition of ‘nostalgia film’ on p. 310. Compare the analysis of The Conformist in R. P. Kölker, Bernardo Bertolucci (London, 1985), pp. 86–104.
Id., ‘Postmodernism’, pp. 66–8.
See Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question’.
Jameson, op cit., pp. 76–80, 91.
Lyotard, ‘Complexity and the Sublime’, ICA Documents 4 (1986), p. 10. It is a pity (and also rather surprising) that Terry Eagleton’s critical remarks at an ICA conference on postmodernism, to which this text was a response, were not published along with it.
See, for example, Marx, Capital, I (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 433.
R. Rorty, ‘Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity’, in R. Bernstein (ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, 1985), p. 163.
I. Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford, 1973), I, pp.90, 92.
Jameson, ‘Postmodernism’, p. 76.
Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question’, p. 81.
Spender, op. cit., p. 106.
See D. Held, ‘Crisis-Tendencies, Legitimation and the State’, in J. Thompson and D. Held, eds, Habermas: Critical Debates (London, 1982).
R. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1977).
M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London, 1979), pp. 117, 154, 158.
Aglietta’s concept of Fordism does not, however, provide an explanation of the post-war boom: see C. Harman, Explaining the Crisis (London, 1984), pp. 141–7.
J. Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity (ed. P. Dews, London, 1986), p. 179.
Bell, p. 318 n. 30. Many would see television as responsible in large part for the emergence of what they believe to be a postmodern epoch. But while television has certainly contributed to the atomisation of social life, it arguably places the viewer in a less passive position than does cinema. Its effects are in any case complex, and require more careful analysis than they have received at the hands of most theorists of postmodernity.
P. Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution’, New Left Review 144 (1984), pp. 104–5.
Ibid., p. 107.
See C. Harman, The Fire Last Time (London, 1988).
See A. Callinicos and C. Harman, The Changing Working Class (London, 1987), esp. ch. 1.
See P. Dews, ‘Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity’, New Left Review 157 (1986).
Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question’, p. 81.
See M. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London, 1986), Ch. 5, for a provocative analysis of the US economy which places great emphasis on the notion, of ‘overconsumptionism’. Raphael Samuel painted a brilliant social portrait of the lifestyle and outlook of the new middle class in New Society, 22 and 29 April 1982.
See A. Callinicos, Making History (Cambridge, 1987).
Habermas, Autonomy, p. 158.
See M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (London, 1983).
See M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow, ed., A Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, 1986).
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© 1990 Alex Callinicos
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Callinicos, A. (1990). Reactionary Postmodernism?. In: Boyne, R., Rattansi, A. (eds) Postmodernism and Society. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20843-2_4
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