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Books

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries

David McKay enjoys Stuart Jeffries’ lively take on postmodernism.

Another book on post modernism? Isn’t that yesterday’s news? Or maybe last decade’s? Surely postmodernism has been analysed virtually to death; and hasn’t contemporary thought moved on, anyway?

To some degree that may be true: the label ‘postmodern’ is perhaps not attached to ideas and practices as frequently as it was a few years ago, and the number of studies explicitly dealing with postmodernism has declined. That, however, doesn’t mean that postmodernism has gone away. The historical pattern for idea development, is often that a set of ideas bursts onto the intellectual scene and becomes the dominant talking point for a time, until some of its principles are absorbed into the perceived wisdom of the day, part of the accepted way of thinking, whilst their origins are gradually forgotten. Given that postmodernism was a diverse movement rather than a unified philosophy, such piecemeal absorption was all the easier. So what’s postmodern in our culture now?

But first, what is postmodernism (or as Stuart Jeffries prefers it, ‘post-modernism’)? Even a fairly modest acquaintance with postmodern practices shows that it’s difficult to come up with a single definition that covers the whole field.

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