Community and New Communications

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

Mark Poster points to a tension between the modern institutions of production and the postmodern technologies of communication, particularly as they impact the formation of the self: “If modernity or the mode of production signifies patterned practices that elicit identities as autonomous and (instrumentally) rational, postmodernity or the mode of information indicates communication practices that constitute subjects as unstable, multiple and diffuse. The information superhighway and virtual reality will extend the mode of information to still further applications, greatly amplifying... Read more

Telephone

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Prior to World War I, Telefon Hirmondo, the telephone system of Budapest, was used as a broadcast system, with a published schedule of programs that were restricted to certain classes of people in Hungary. Only later did it develop into a communications system in which everyone could pass information to anyone. Read more

Consumerism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:49 pm By Peter Leithart

Consumerism is a popular category of analysis, but what exactly does it mean? How is consumerism or the consumer society different from anything else? Haven’t every economies had producers and consumers? In his The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism , Colin Campbell offers this description of consumerism: “that distinctive cultural complex which was associated with the consumer revolution in eighteenth-century England, and which embraced the rise of the novel, romantic love and modern fashion, is related to... Read more

Aesthetic proletariat

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Bohemians, Featherstone suggests, were the first “true artistic proletariat,” living next to lower class people in low-rent areas of the larger cities, and imitating the lifestyle of the lower classes: “They cultivated similar manners, valuing spontaneity, an anti-systematic work ethos, and a lack of attention to the sense of ordered living space and controls and conventions of the respectable middle class.” Transgressive gestures of this sort were not new to the middle class, but had already been evident in middle... Read more

Aestheticization of life

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:45 pm By Peter Leithart

Featherstone isolates three aspects of the postmodern aestheticization of daily life: 1) Artistic movements such as Dada and Surrealism attempt to break down the boundary between art and daily life by turning toilets and such into art objects. This is both an attempt to “dissemble [art’s] sacred halo and challenge its respectable location” and also a sense that art could be found anywhere, in the “detritus of mass culture, the debased consumer commodities,” and even in “anti-work.” (more…) Read more

Theater of the Absurd

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

In a lecture on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Ian Johnston makes this helpful distinction between existentialist drama and the Theater of the Absurd. “In the Theatre of the Absurd the protagonists are discovered in a world which they do not, indeed they cannot, understand. It has no reliable meaning. Often, it is featureless. The confusion is not a matter of a conflict between competing meanings, but rather the absence of anything that might help one to understand... Read more

Postmodern mathesis

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Modernity attempts to spatialize time, and to chart temporally shifting reality in a fixed mathesis. So argues Catherine Pickstock at least. But in this sense postmodernism is hypermodernism. Featherstone notes that MTV “seems to exist in a timeless present with video artists ransacking film genres and art movements from different historical periods to blur boundaries and the sense of history. History becomes spatialized out, aesthetic hierarchies and developments are collapsed with the mixing of genres and high art, popular and... Read more

Turn of the Century Bobos

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:50 pm By Peter Leithart

Mike Featherstone, expounding on the “aestheticitization of everyday life” that he claims is characteristic of the postmodern ethos, notes that similar motifs are evident in the early development of the fashion industry: “The intensified place of fashion increases our time-consciousness, and our simultaneous pleasure in newness and oldness gives us a strong sense of presentness. Changing fashions and world exhibitions point to the bewildering plurality of styles in modern life. For the middle classes the retreat to the interior of... Read more

Meta-Narrative’s Revenge

Last updated on: February 21, 2006 at 5:57 pm By Peter Leithart

Postmodern intellectuals believe they have seen through the arrogant or naive efforts of earlier generations of intellectuals. Now we see the folly of foundationalism, now we see that all knowledge is intertwined with regimes of power-knowledge, now we know that all thought arises from knotty aporias. We see that their meta-narratives of scientific progress were illusions, if not unConstitutional. As Featherstone says, “the focus on the apparent naivete of the intellectuals of yesteryear, with their universalistic schemes, bring in a... Read more

Meta-Narrative’s Revenge

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart