CO-OPTING A REVOLUTION

A wide-ranging survey of postmodernism traces how the movement that revelled in irony and deconstructing power and meaning became a tool of capitalism.

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

Pop culture parody: Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog sculpture in a 2008 exhibition at Versailles, in France.

EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME, EVERYWHERE: How we became postmodern,

by Stuart Jeffries (Verso, $45 hb)

In a 1997 television interview, the novelist David Foster Wallace was asked to define postmodernism. He looked bored and amused simultaneously. “It's after modernism," he replied, adding, “It's a very useful catch-all term because you say it and we all nod soberly as if we know what it means."

That was back when the term was fashionable in academic circles: today when we hear it in the wild it's usually from conservatives lamenting the decline of everything: provocateur and bestselling author Jordan Peterson is always railing against Marxist postmodernism but can never quite say what this means. It's something to do with left-wing politics, something to do with abandoning truth, belief in moral relativism, complicated books and baffling academic jargon. But what?

In 2016, long-time Guardian writer Stuart Jeffries released Grand Hotel Abyss, a history of the Frankfurt school, a group of Marxist intellectuals whose ideas swept through the humanities and social sciences in the late 20th century. The Frankfurters were famously dense, forbiddingly cryptic, but Jeffries deciphered their labyrinthine German sentences into clear and witty prose.

Now he's here to do the same for postmodernism. Which is, he explains, the cultural logic of neoliberalism. It's the form of music, art, architecture and literature we see in a globalised, technological world dominated by financial capital. Madonna was postmodern. So were the Sex Pistols, Cindy Sherman, Grand Theft Auto, Quentin Tarantino, Sophie Calle, Jeff Koons. Postmodernists, all of them.