Abstract
It has been said that it is easier to conceive the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If that is indeed the case, the static quality of cultural imagination brought about by the post-modern condition has a great deal to answer for. In this section, I am going to discuss how post-modernism came to be conceived of as a cultural condition.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean Francois Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) at pg 37.
- 2.
Not coincidentally this is why “grand narratives” were used as synonym in the book for the more technical Lyotardian term.
- 3.
Jurgen Habermas. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008).
- 4.
James K.A Smith. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).
- 5.
See Galen Watts. “The Religion of the Heart: Spirituality in Late Modernity.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2020.
- 6.
Joseph De Maistre. The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions: Studies on Sovereignty, Religion, and Enlightenment, ed. Jack Lively (London, UK: Routledge, 1965).
- 7.
Terry Eagleton. The Illusions of Postmodernism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996) at pg 33.
- 8.
Fredric Jameson. Valences of the Dialectic (London, UK: Verso Press, 2009).
- 9.
The exemplar here being Laclau and Mouffe’s. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Second Edition (London, UK. Verso Press, 2014).
- 10.
Personally, I prefer to refer to it as the cultural condition of neoliberal society, both because I find the teleological implications of a term like “late” capitalism troubling, and because Mandel’s own Marxism strikes me as deeply tied to the welfarist period when his seminal book was written. Consequently, I’ll be referring to it as such throughout the book.
- 11.
Limitations which Jameson thinks a dialectical approach supercedes. See Fredric Jameson. Valences of the Dialectic (London, UK: Verso Press, 2009).
- 12.
Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992) at Chapter One.
- 13.
Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992) at pg 21.
- 14.
Mandel also made more timeless contributions via his excellent unpacking of Marx’s philosophical methodology. This is an ambiguous point in Marx’s own writings, since he never got around to writing a purely methodological text. But Mandel’s careful reading of the dialectical movements of his thought as regards the concrete to the abstract and back was very helpful. See Ernest Mandel. Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres (London, UK: Verso Books, 1980) at pgs 16–17.
- 15.
David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990) at pg VIII.
- 16.
What I am referring to is a reading of Marx’s account of labor and value which situates it dialectically and historically; labor became conceived of as the basis of exchange value within the historical epoch of early capitalism, a result of changing material and ideological factors. Framing it this way can save Marx’s account of labor from the anachronistic qualities which surround the other labor theories of value common to classical political economy.
- 17.
Louis Althusser. Reading Capital. (London, UK: Verso Books, 1997).
- 18.
Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue—A Study in Moral Theory: Third Edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre-Dame Press, 2007) at pg 263.
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McManus, M. (2022). Post-modernity as a Cultural Condition. In: The Emergence of Post-modernity at the Intersection of Liberalism, Capitalism, and Secularism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98970-5_8
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