Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism New Edition book cover

Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism New Edition

Author(s): Jeffrey Nealon (Author)

Publisher: STANFORD UNIV PR
Publication Date: 1 Aug. 2012
Edition: New
Language: English
Print length: 248 pages
ISBN-10: 0804781451
ISBN-13: 9780804781459

Book Description

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era.Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Nealon's periodizing work certainly contributes to the field of postwar literary and cultural studies . . . The book's eclectic style and turn to the liberal arts is somehow both unexpected and well-suited to the conversations in which it intervenes, and Nealon's sharp-witted, cogent assessment at this pivotal moment in cultural/economic history is just in time."-Matthew Mullins, American Book Review "This is a work of very considerable importance. Now perhaps more than at any other time, culture and the economy constitute a seamless whole: everything can be given its price. Nealon poses the question: if postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, what is the cultural logic that has accompanied our current regime of accumulation? His answer is novel and ingenious."-Kenneth Surin, Duke University "Post-Postmodernism is Jeffrey Nealon in full flow: biting, smart, funny, and demonstrating his rare ability to combine philosophical insights with the most irreverent aspects of the popular. He propels us into thought through capital, through the popular, through the philosophical, through the political. Nealon has much to teach us, and he does so in splendid fashion."-Grant Farred, Cornell University

About the Author

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), The Theory Toolbox (2003), and Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, 2008).

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POST-POSTMODERNISM or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism

Name: Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism New Edition
Author: Jeffrey Nealon (Author)
ISBN: 9780804781459

By Jeffrey T. Nealon

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................viiPreface: Why Post-Postmodernism?..........................................................................................................ix1. Post-Postmodernism. Periodizing the '80s: The Cultural Logic of Economic Privatization in the US.......................................12. Intensity. Empire of the Intensities: A Random Walk down Las Vegas Boulevard...........................................................253. Commodity. The Song Remains the Same: On the Post-Postmodern Economics of Classic Rock.................................................434. University. The Associate Vice Provost in the Gray Flannel Suit: Administrative Labor and the Corporate University.....................66Interruptive Excursus: Rereading. On the "Hermeneutics of Situation" in Nietzsche and Adorno..............................................875. Deconstruction. Postdeconstructive? Negri, Derrida, and the Present State of Theory....................................................1136. Interpretation. The Swerve around P: Theory after Interpretation.......................................................................1267. Literature. Can Literature Be Equipment for Post-Postmodern Living?....................................................................146Coda: Liberal Arts. Not Your Father's Liberal Arts: or, Humanities Theory in the Post-Post Future.........................................171Notes.....................................................................................................................................195Works Cited...............................................................................................................................213Index.....................................................................................................................................225

Chapter One

Post-Postmodernism

PERIODIZING THE '80S: THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF ECONOMIC PRIVATIZATION IN THE US

Any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. —GILLES DELEUZE, Negotiations

How Soon Is Now?

After the economic meltdown of fall 2008, it may have seemed for a moment like the era of unbridled faith in free-market or neoliberal capitalism was waning. When the US government orchestrated huge bailouts of the private sector, it might have seemed logical that the slick era of "small government and big business," born in the Reagan 1980s and intensified through the Clinton '90s, was definitively over and that we were on the verge of a retooled era of mid-twentieth-century Keynesianism. When Paul Krugman can wonder out loud in the New York Times magazine, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?," you'd almost have to conclude that, more than a decade into the new millennium, 1980s-style neoliberalism was soon to be a discredited thing of the past.

This of course turned out to be wishful thinking, or at least sadly mistaken—neoliberal capitalism was temporarily discredited, maybe, but is hardly a thing of the past. In the wake of the bailouts, the budget and debt battles in the US were fought and won not by liberal Keynesians offering a government-backed New Deal 2.0, but by free-market conservatives who take their neoliberal mantras directly from the 1980s book of Reagan: "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem," as Reagan infamously put it in his 1981 inauguration speech. Likewise, what we saw in the financial meltdowns and the budget-cutting debates that followed were not really changes of course or swerves away from market dictates at all—quite the contrary. What you see when you see a government bailout of private industries is not so much the beginning of a brave, new socialism, but simply the other shoe dropping: with the privatization of wealth on a massive scale comes the socialization of risk on an almost unthinkable scale, $1.2 trillion of what amounts to "success insurance" loaned out to private companies in public, taxpayer funds. Ultimately, these bailouts were not the abandonment of free-market ideology, but simply the other face of the privatized, free-market coin we've become so familiar with since the 1980s.

Indeed, it feels a lot like the 1980s both economically and culturally these days. Even the fashion and entertainment segments of CNN are '80s saturated: the hottest new radio format is "all '80s," with several stations having gone from the ratings cellar to number one in about the time it takes to play the extended dance remix of "Tainted Love." On the fashion front, the runways and malls are filled with '80s-style fashions-I recently saw a designer-ripped T-shirt that said, somewhat confusedly, "Kiss Me, I'm Punk," and the skinny tie has made its inevitable comeback. All kinds of diverse media (from Iron and Wine's post-postmodern cover of New Order's 1984 "Love Vigilantes" to Hollywood fare like Hot Tub Time Machine and Wall Street 2) stocks our collective iPad with reminders that we both have and haven't come a long way since the 1980s. But, as always, the real confirmation comes in the TV commercials: Joe Jackson urges us to Taco Bell "One More Time," while the Clash add rebellious street cred to the Nissan Rogue. I swear not long ago I heard the Smiths, whose myopic '80s anthems to frustration were perhaps second only to American Music Club for their sheer misery quotient, playing over an upbeat commercial for a sport utility vehicle.

While the return of the '80s is hardly surprising—how long could the nostalgia industry keep recycling '70s hip-huggers?—it remains a decade with something of a PR problem. Put most bluntly or economically, the '80s are haunted by the specter of Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" speech in the 1987 film Wall Street. It's difficult for the '80s to shake its reputation as the decade in which self-interested capitalism went utterly mad; indeed, it's hard to imagine the '80s without conjuring up pictures of cocaine-addled yuppie scum with slicked-back hair and suspenders, floating worthless junk bonds to finance leveraged buyouts (LBOs) that callously ravaged what was left of "good jobs" in industrial America. Mary Harron's 2000 film version of Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 American Psycho cannily tries to replay some of the madness of the 1980s—the kind of madness thoroughly documented in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate, on the mother of all LBOs, 1988's KKR hostile takeover of RJR Nabisco.

The '80s, in short, was the decade when the dictates of the market became a kind of secular monotheism in the US, thereby opening the door to the now-ubiquitous "corporatization" of large sectors of American life: welfare, media, public works, prisons, and education. In fact, such a market dictatorship, honed in the many palace coups that were '80s LBOs, has become the dominant logic not only of the US economy, but of the fast-moving phenomenon known as "globalization." Downsize, outsource, keep the stock price high—those are the dictates of the new global version of corporate Survivor.

Indeed, it seems clear that the American TV hit Survivor and its clone shows can be dubbed "reality" television only if we're...

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Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism New Edition