Perry Anderson — The Origins of Postmodernity

114 published claims from this book.

• Advanced capitalism needs two contradictory legitimating discourses at once
• American literary modernism inherited an elite tradition insulated from working-class energies
• American postmodern poetry revived the international collage line via Black Mountain
• Architecture’s extreme dependency on clients forces its utopian impulses into pure form
• Architecture’s postmodern turn began with celebrating Las Vegas’s commercial signs
• Art has no unitary essence or unfolding logic
• Avant-gardes shared an anti-bourgeois stance against market culture
• Baudrillard never theorized postmodernism and actively repudiated it.
• Belting and Danto independently declared art’s end in the 1980s
• Both modernism and postmodernism were coined in Hispanic America before Europe.
• boundary 2 was founded to break literature from New Critical formalism
• By 1959 the postmodern was a pejorative marker of cultural decline
• By the early seventies the conditions producing Western Marxism seemed finished.
• Contemporary art has escaped the frame of art history
• Culture and politics both rest on inescapable critical judgement and division.
• Danto’s account of artistic freedom is really Fichtean self-positing, not Hegelian
• Digital media transformed artistic recycling from haptic nostalgia to spectacle mediation
• Every major early theorist of postmodernity either lamented or celebrated it
• Expansion of capital and demography dilutes inherited culture into a lower postmodern level.
• Fear of PCF power launched the Nouveaux Philosophes to prominence
• Federico de Onis coined postmodernismo in the 1930s as a conservative reflux.
• Fiedler celebrated the postmodern at a CIA-funded conference
• Figuring France’s poststructuralists as conservative is a fundamental misdescription.
• Film was excluded from early postmodernist debate because it was deemed non-modernist.
• Function followed from experimental form, not the other way round, in modernism.
• Gramsci’s Fordism notes are the only Western Marxist precedent for Jameson
• Gramsci’s prison analysis of fascism offers the best analogy for postmodern transformation
• Habermas held modernity unfinished yet irreversible, needing protection from market and bureaucracy.
• Habermas’s critique gave postmodernity its first major negative pole in mainstream thought.
• Hassan repudiated postmodernism by 1987 as kitsch and frivolous
• Industrial modernity rendered the city aesthetically unrepresentable.
• Industrial workers’ jouissance in grinding hardship was essential, not just their suffering
• Industrialization posed three distinct challenges architecture initially failed to meet.
• International competition forced down profit rates ending the postwar boom
• Jameson argues Marxism and Chicago-school neoliberalism both dispense with autonomous political thought.
• Jameson captured ‘postmodernism’ for the Left via discursive struggle
• Jameson describes postmodern life but rarely calibrates the political effects of movements
• Jameson distinguishes levelling plebeianization from genuine democratization
• Jameson grounded postmodernity in identifiable features of multinational capitalism as of the early eighties.
• Jameson periodized postmodernism into a creative seventies phase followed by regression.
• Jameson treats economic factors as internal to aesthetic form rather than external causes.
• Jameson’s first two major books reconstructed both Western Marxism and structuralist linguistics
• Jameson’s postmodern problematic predates his adoption of the term by a decade
• Jameson’s postmodernism theory is the culminating synthesis of Western Marxism.
• Jameson’s three-fold stance divides taste, analysis, and political evaluation of art
• Jameson’s totalization occupies the role the avant-garde once held
• Jencks declared the avant-garde obsolete in an information society
• Jencks defined postmodern architecture as stylistic double-coding of old and new, high and low
• Late modern and postmodern architecture differ on allusion to the past
• Lyotard abandoned revolutionary socialism before writing The Postmodern Condition
• Lyotard and Habermas gave postmodernism no historical periodization
• Lyotard argued exploited workers experienced exploitation as erotic enjoyment
• Lyotard borrowed the postmodern term directly from Ihab Hassan
• Lyotard grounded capitalism’s force in neguentropy, not human desire
• Lyotard naturalized capitalism’s victory as pre-human cosmic natural selection
• Lyotard redefined the postmodern as a perennial inner renewal of the modern
• Lyotard replaces grand narratives with little narratives and temporary contracts
• Lyotard’s trajectory from communism to metaphysics explains his postmodern fable.
• Mallarmé had a record of explicit political engagement, not just aestheticism.
• Mallarmé’s symbolist essays appeared alongside anarchist and Marxist texts in La Revue Blanche.
• Mass commercial culture is always secretly utopian because manipulation needs a fantasy bribe
• Modern art’s drive came from Kant’s gap between the conceivable and presentable
• Modernism emerged from a field spanning semi-industrial economy, fresh invention, and open revolt
• Modernism failed from too much faith in planning, not from market subordination.
• Modernism was named retroactively while postmodernism preceded its practices
• Modernism’s decline stems from political defeats rather than economic change
• National state regulatory power persists, so no capitalist epochal break has occurred
• Neo-imperial domination now operates through ideological consent, not military force
• No coherent universal history of art remains possible
• Painting anticipates cultural shifts because its production costs are lowest
• Painting’s low formal barriers made it modernism’s pioneer
• Pastiche, blank parody without satiric impulse, is the postmodern signature device.
• Political closure in the West masked persisting revolutionary energies globally
• Post-punk treated Reagan’s rise as Ballard’s fiction coming true
• Postmodern ‘waning of affect’ fragments the subject into depthless, spasmodic flux.
• Postmodern aesthetic practices respond to an environment of image-and-message saturation
• Postmodern architecture rejected utopian planning in favor of market-driven spontaneity
• Postmodern culture’s vector is a new professional stratum between multinational capital and weakened classes.
• Postmodern nostalgia-laden films yearn for the present while rendering the actual past inaccessible.
• Postmodern oppositional identifications are weaker than modernist class antagonisms
• Postmodern political change flows from markets rather than mass struggles
• Postmodern subjectivity loses active historical consciousness and lives in a perpetual present.
• Postmodernism arises when its defining adversary, bourgeois morality, vanishes
• Postmodernism represents the plebeianization of modernist culture
• Postmodernism theory was born in the euphoria of the Reagan bull market
• Postmodernism was named but not theoretically unified by 1981
• Postmodernism’s founding dichotomy distinguished restorationist from radicalizing impulses
• Postmodernism’s high-low cultural fusion is populist, unlike avant-garde transgression.
• Postmodernity is defined by the delegitimation of metanarratives
• Sartre’s lost book on Mallarmé would have exceeded his Flaubert biography
• Stalin’s and Hitler’s victories destroyed the interwar revolutionary avant-gardes
• The 1962 stock-market crash triggered Abstract Expressionism’s collapse
• The bourgeoisie disappeared as a self-conscious class by the 1970s
• The canonical Lyotard-Habermas debate originated from mutual ignorance of each other’s work.
• The first affirmative postmodern elements were assembled yet never crystallized
• The left’s defeat may have been a slow disintegration rather than a battle
• The modern’s present-absolute nature generates recurring postmodern markers
• The neo-avant-garde completed the original avant-garde project by attacking art institutions
• The postmodern aesthetic of hybridity rendered the manifesto obsolete
• The Postmodern Condition grew from far older aesthetic-political commitments
• The postmodern periphery is often more creatively potent than the center
• The Second World War made technological progress appear menacing for the first time
• The Soviet collapse and neoliberal advance explain Jameson’s sharpening postmodern critique.
• The term metanarrative was originally aimed squarely at Marxism
• The triumph of market liberalism refuted Lyotard’s claim that grand narratives died
• Toynbee dated the postmodern age from industrialism breaking the bounds of nationality.
• Toynbee introduced ‘post-modern’ as an epochal category, not an aesthetic one.
• Toynbee’s postmodern age begins with the crash of bourgeois complacency in 1914.
• Walter Benjamin’s Situationism climaxed Western Marxism by igniting May 1968.
• Warhol’s late work embodies full postmodernism
• Warhol’s subversive legacy coexisted comfortably with his Reaganism
• Western Marxism advanced aesthetics but never extended Marxist political economy
• Western Marxism’s central concern was the aesthetics of developed capitalist culture.
• World War II’s outcome destroyed modernism’s spurring historical forces