[...] 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 promises, and very few facts. ‘Everything has to change, in order for everything to remain the same’, wrote Lampedusa in The Leopard; and the same happens here. All change, and no achievement. All change, and no future.

[...] 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, a third stage, which followed upon that second stage of capitalism identified by Lenin as the stage of monopoly and imperialism—and which, while remaining capitalism, had fundamental structural differences from the stage that preceded it, if only because capitalism now functioned on a global scale, unparalleled in its history. You will have understood that the culture of that earlier imperialist stage was, according to my theory, what we call modernity; and that postmodernity then becomes a kind of new global culture corresponding to globalization.

[...] 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 modernization, offered by the Americans and the Soviets alike in their foreign aid programmes, was posited on heavy industry, and has little relevance in an era in which production, profoundly modified by information technology and relocation, has undergone its own postmodern turn.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

[...] no description of the postmodern can omit the centrality of the postmodern economy, which can succinctly be characterized as the displacement of old-fashioned industrial production by finance capital.

I follow Giovanni Arrighi in seeing the emergence of a stage of finance capital as a cyclical process: as Fernand Braudel memorably put it, ‘reaching the stage of financial expansion’, every capitalist development ‘in some sense announces its maturity’; finance capital ‘is a sign of autumn’. Arrighi’s three cyclical stages can then be summarized as: the implantation of capitalism in a new region; its development and the gradual saturation of the regional market; the desperate recourse of a capital that no longer finds productive investment to speculation and the ‘fictitious’ profits of the stock market. [...]

[...] at the very heart of any account of postmodernity or late capitalism, there is to be found the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present—reduction to the body as I call it elsewhere—an existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like. Clearly, this is a political diagnosis as well as an existential or phenomenological one, since it is intended to indict our current political paralysis and inability to imagine, let alone to organize, the future and future change.

[...] Postmodern philosophy is most generally associated with two fundamental principles, namely anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism. These may be characterized, respectively, as the repudiation of metaphysics, that is, of any ultimate system of meaning in nature or the universe; and as the struggle against any normative idea of human nature. [...] It is generally identified by its adversaries—most of them modernists, even where they have spiritualist leanings—as relativism.

[...] the modernists tended to express such principles in accents of anguish or pathos. Nietzsche’s battle cry about the death of God was their watchword, along with various laments about the disenchantment of the world, and various purely psychological accounts of alienation and the domination of nature. What distinguishes postmodern philosophy, in my opinion, is the disappearance of all that anguish and pathos. Nobody seems to miss God any longer, and alienation in a consumer society does not seem to be a particularly painful or stressful prospect. Metaphysics has disappeared altogether; and if the ravages to the natural world are even more severe and obvious than in the earlier period, really serious ecologists—the radical and activist kind—do something about it politically and practically, without any philosophical astonishment at such depredations on the part of corporations and governments, inasmuch as the latter are only living out their innate instincts. In other words, no one now is surprised by the operations of a globalized capitalism: something an older academic philosophy never cared to mention, but which the postmoderns take for granted, in what may well be called Cynical Reason. Even increasing immiseration, and the return of poverty and unemployment on a massive world-wide scale, are scarcely matters of amazement for anyone, so clearly are they the result of our own political and economic system and not of the sins of the human race or the fatality of life on Earth. We are in other words so completely submerged in the human world, in what Heidegger called the ontic, that we have little time any longer for what he liked to call the question of Being.

Today we no longer speak of monopolies but of transnational corporations, and our robber barons have mutated into the great financiers and bankers, themselves de-individualized by the massive institutions they manage. [...]