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This is an objective dialectic that populists have often found repellent and which has often been more narrowly rehearsed in the form of the paradox or the paralogism: the emergent groups as so many new markets for new products, so many new interpellations for the advertising image itself. Is not t…

The other definition of reification that has been important in recent years is the "effacement of the traces of production" from the object itself, from the commodity thereby produced. This sees the matter from the standpoint of the consumer: it suggests the kind of guilt people are freed from if t…

I think we now have to talk about the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period. This release was something a good deal more mome…

But something more fundamental can be argued from the spirit of the works themselves, and in particular from a renewed scrutiny of the same high-modernist celebration of the self that the anti-political critics adduced to support a notion of the modernists' subjectivism (in this, they joined hands …

Perhaps it can also be added that what is also thereby lost from the postmodern is modernity as such, in the sense in which that word can be taken to mean something specific and distinct from either modernism and modernization. Indeed, our old friends base and superstructure seem fatally to reimpos…