The Origins of Postmodernity [Paperback]

Perry Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1998 | ISBN-10: 1859842224 | ISBN-13: 978-1859842225

Trenchant and panoramic, The Origins of Postmodernity traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the notion of the postmodern. Beginning its exhilarating intellectual tour in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, it follows the changes in the meanings and usage of the concept through to the late 1970s, when its adoption by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jurgen Habermas first gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency. Central attention then falls on Fredric Jameson, whose work today represents the most outstanding general theory of the postmodern. Reconstructing the intellectual and political background of Jameson's interpretation of the present, The Origins of Postmodernity looks at its after-effects in the debates of the 1990s. Anderson enriches his much-cited analysis of modernism by placing postmodernism in the force field of a declasse bourgeoisie, the growth of mediatized technology and the historic global defeat of the left symbolized by the end of the Cold War. Rigorously pursuing his interpretation of postmodernism as the cultural logic of a multinational capitalism "complacent beyond precedent," Anderson ends with a set of historical reflections on the fading of modernism, shifts in the system of the arts, the rise of the spectacular, debates on the "end of art," and on the fate of politics in the postmodern world.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Perry Anderson is editor of New Left Review. He is the author of many books, including Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Considerations on Western Marxism, Arguments Within English Marxism, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, English Questions and A Zone of Engagement, all from Verso. His works have been translated into twenty languages.

Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: Verso (September 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859842224
• ISBN-13: 978-1859842225
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #732,482 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A survey of the subject as a whole and of Jameson's centrality, November 21, 2006

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Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Origins of Postmodernity (Paperback)

This is a wonderfully concise and illuminative examination of the genesis and development of the contemporary debate concerning the postmodern, beginning with its earliest precursors, through its first contemporary uses in the seventies, through the major figures debating its meaning and significance, including Lyotard and Habermas, but especially Fredric Jameson. I have not read much in quite a while about the debates over the postmodern since reading some fifteen or so years ago works of Jencks, Habermas, Lyotard, and others on the concept. I did not read Jameson at that. Anderson has convinced me that I left out the crucial thinker on the topic.

One thing that is infuriating if you read the major figures in the eighties debates over the postmodern (excluding Jameson) is that there is not quite agreement over what is being debated, what caused its development, and what its significance is. Both the force and sharp limitations of both Lyotard and Habermas's works are readily apparent. Jameson's work, on the contrary, is of a whole different magnitude. While Lyotard's book focuses primarily on the philosophy of science and Habermas's on trends in modern thought, Jameson uses the concept of the postmodern to illumine virtually every aspect of the contemporary world. Whereas for other thinkers the postmodern has been a movement within art or thought, for Jameson it is simply the stage the world has reached as conditioned by late capitalism. As Anderson writes near the end of the book: "Jameson construes the postmodern as that stage in capitalist development when culture becomes in effect coextensive with the economy" (p. 131). It is this economic dimension and the way it ties into globalism that is lacking in the accounts of the postmodern by the other theorists.

Anderson makes a powerful case for Jameson as not merely as the foremost figure within late 20th-century Western Marxism, but as one of the great theoreticians of his age. Certainly he has made me want to read and study Jameson to a degree that did not previously.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE BEST INTRO TO POSTMODERNISM, September 28, 2003

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Nathan D. Backlund "blue collar intellectual" (Rio Vista, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Origins of Postmodernity (Paperback)

"New Left Review" editor Perry Anderson is as erudite and engaging as ever in this short review of the varied conceptualizations of the postmodern. His chapter on the work of Fredric Jameson is bursting with intellectual energy. Anderson displays an almost boyish enthusiasm for Jameson's intellectual achievements that is quite infectious. If you have any interest in Jameson, Postmodernism, or the state of contemporary marxism, this book cannot possibly disappoint. Like the late Edward Said, Anderson possesses great literary gifts that make reading his books and articles a genuine pleasure.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pomo Revisited, September 24, 2011

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Niklas Anderberg (the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Origins of Postmodernity (Paperback)

Reading The Origins of Postmodernity some thirty years after the beating of the waves is a delight. Perry Anderson has rapidly become one of my favourite writers. A former editor of The New Left Review, he wears his political heart on his sleeve. But being one of those rare intellectuals who do not view the world with their blinkers on, he readily admits his admiration for the fertile dynamics of Oakshott and Hayek as opposed to the dour prose of Habermas and Rawls. In his collection of essays entitled "Spectrum", he states without hesitation that in reality Hayek has been far more influential than Rawls, despite the vast amount of writings on the latter.

With sentences like: "The postmodernism of 'neoconservatives' welcomed the reification of separate value-spheres into closed domains of expertise armoured against any demands of the life-world, with conceptions of science close to those of early Wittgenstein, of politics borrowed from Carl Schmitt, of art akin to those of Gottfried Benn" (p.39), Anderson occasionally crams a bit too much information into one sentence. Granted, this is taken out of context and of course ¬"reification" is a standard notion in Marxist theory. One could at least have hoped he'd leave out that unbeautiful expression "the life-world" (from the German "Lebenswelt"). But for the most part his arguments are brought forward with imposing force and learning.

I remember, when studying at the Art Academy in Copenhagen, how Postmodernism yes, with a capital P, as befits a grand narrative) swept the art-scene like a veritable tsunami. Anything goes, as the war cry went. And so the circus started, leaving the poor modernists fending with their "unfinished" squares and circles. At the time all the buzz was Lyotard, Bataille, Kristeva, Feyerabend, you name them. As the dust has since settled, this book helps sort things out.

Enter Frederic Jameson; in Perry Andersons view a thinker in a different league. After a brief survey of the roots of the term "Postmodernism", Anderson spends time on Lyotard and Habermas respectively. Lyotard admits to never having read "a quantity" of books to which he had referred in his (in)famous " The Postmodern Condition" - he later called it his worst book (p. 26). Habermas just barely admits to the postmodern being "on the agenda", without, according to Anderson, being able to explain exactly why. He offers no coherent historical or theoretical understanding of its emergence. Paradoxically, both Lyotard and Habermas were "deeply attached to the principles of high modernism" (p. 45).

Nobody in the avant-garde of bygone days had ever heard of Jameson. An American literary critic and Marxist theorist born in 1934, he is one of the most radical thinkers to throw light on postmodernism. Contrary to many others, he does so from a far-left perspective. Maybe his main effort has been to demonstrate how postmodernism grew logically from late capitalism. He thinks it is futile to oppose, or indeed endorse, the phenomenon from a moral standpoint. Although he set out with his focus on the West, Jameson is also one of the few intellectuals who have a truly global vision. He has written about Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Senegalese, Mexican, and Cuban writers and filmmakers. His lectures in many countries, especially China, have been influential. Furthermore, his writings feature a style of complex splendour. We are dealing with a great author (p.72). Who else can match this (p.75)?

The last part of the book offers a rather complex discussion of the arts, notably the purported Death of Art. This was the title of American critic Arthur Danto's 1984 book, preceded a year by the German art historian Belting's "Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte". One can wonder how many times the death of something or other has been and will continue to be announced (Hegel, Kojève, Fukuyama, Harris to name a few). The nature of art may have changed but it has proven capable of many a resurrection. Strange thing is, the more Anderson analyses its contemporary status, the more the once so revolutionary power of postmodernism appears to have been weakened by internal discrepancies. Some artists embrace the spectacle, others find it abhorrent; some architects love embellishment, others are quite constrained and so on. There are critics who prefer to instead talk of ultramodernism. Postmodernism is a reaction against modernism but nevertheless shares some of its characteristic features. Even its celebrated conflation of High and Low culture has of course been an important aspect of both Surrealism and Dada. Strangely, Dada doesn't figure in Anderson's analysis; was it perhaps too postmodern?

In an effort to sort out two contrasting strands of modernism, he offers a rather strained argument by making a distinction between August Strindberg and James Ensor, among others (p. 103-104). Is it possible to classify Strindberg as belonging to the zone of "the upper atmosphere of titled leisure," taking into consideration his famous socialist novel "The Red Room", his "A Thousand Years of the History of Swedish Culture and Manners" (originally titled "The Chronicle of the People"), and the explosive class- and gender-problematics of his play "Miss Julie"? And how can one plausibly categorize Ensor as investing in "the lower deeps of manual labour?" He did paint "the ordinary man", but probably more out of personal misfortunes and an aversion against a narrow-minded petty bourgeoisie than on account of any clear-cut working class commitment. Inspired by the souvenirs, chinoiserie, and masks in his mother's shop, he developed his singular carnivalesque style. After having been rolled up for thirty years, his most famous painting, "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889", was for the first time exhibited in 1929. Measuring over four meters by two fifty, its' now in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. When he belatedly did achieve success and a title (baron), he could be seen strolling up and down the beach boulevard of Oostende in his finery. The Ensor house is now a museum, with the souvenir shop belonging to his uncle and aunt left intact on the second floor. Reproductions of his celebrated paintings are displayed, cheaply plastic-coated, on the walls. The ultimate postmodern modernist museum, if you ask me.

Anderson's argumentation as to why a painter should be more prepared for the postmodern than other artists is also less than convincing. He states that a painting is cheap to produce, but so is of course a poem on a sheet of paper. In contrast to the painter a writer would then need a printing press to reproduce the poem. The painter is solely responsible for his work and "as a rule needs no further intermediation to realize a work of art" (p.94). This reawakens the age-old question of how to define Art. In many definitions the setting - the art-scene, the audience, the collector, the critic and so on - is a crucial ingredient. Anyone can make a painting, sure, but is it thereby art? In my experience there are a lot of things to factor in before a painting can reach its audience, all of them more or less costly. Another criterion for Anderson is that, although the artist produces his work alone, painting is "objectively" the most collaborative of modern arts. Training at the academy is supposedly a deciding factor in this. Of course, one is free to speculate, but that these features should have marked painting out in advance for a transition to the postmodern sounds far-fetched to these ears.

Be this as it may, Frederic Jameson has himself retracted some of his early enthusiasm. He seems especially troubled by the revival of the aesthetic in cinema and art (and religion!). The "cult of the glossy image" is like the "ultimate packaging of Nature in cellophane" (p.102). In short, the borderlines between the modern and the postmodern are blurred. Which makes for all the more fascinating reading... With a final discussion on the tension between aesthetics and economics and their relation to politics proper, one is left exasperated by the sheer range of thought Perry Anderson puts on display. From Gramsci to Lucàcs and Adorno, from Mallarmé and Braudel to Giovanni Arrighi; this slender book calls for a lot of homework indeed. This would have to include his 2009 "The New Old World", on the history of the European Union, as well.

The Origins of Postmodernity - Verso 1998, this paperback 2006

Spectrum - From right to left in the world of ideas, Essays, Verso 2005

The New Old World - Verso 2009