[...] in the modernist texts the effort is to identify form and content so completely that we cannot really distinguish the two; whereas in the postmodern ones an absolute separation must be achieved before form is folded back into content.
[...] In this new configuration, even the paintings of classics like Van Gogh or Picasso regain a new lustre; not that of their origins, but rather the novelty of widely advertised brand names.
[...] political and cultural commentators have returned to the ideal of modernity as something the West can successfully offer the underdeveloped parts of the world (euphemistically called ‘the emerging markets’) at a moment when modernization itself is clearly as obsolete as the dinosaur. For mode…
[...] I began to realize that it was globalization that formed, as it were, the substructure of postmodernity, and constituted the economic base of which, in the largest sense, postmodernity was the superstructure. The hypothesis, at that point, was that globalization was a new stage of capitalism,…
[...] All extremely uplifting—and just as unfocused: because the function of gerunds consists in leaving an action’s completion undefined, thus depriving it of any definite contour. An infinitely expanding present emerges, where policies are always in progress, but also only in progress. Many promi…
