Postmodernism Is Not What You Think : Second Edition

Highly readable, the second edition of Postmodernism Is Not What You Think responds to the widespread claim that postmodernism is over. It explains the historical connections between the postmodern and globalization. Those who wish to kill the term postmodernism still must face the facts that the former nationalistic world-system has collapsed and is slowly being replaced by a more global set of structures.

The book is completely revised and updated with an entirely new section on globalization. The media and popular culture, identity politics, the science wars, politics and cultural studies, structuralism and poststructuralism, and the new sociologies are also put in perspective as signs of the new social formations dawning at the end of the modern age. Lemert shows that the postmodern is less a theory than a condition of social life brought about by the trouble modernity has gotten itself into.

In the view of Lemert (sociology, Wesleyan U.), modernism is a culture that justifies the world-system of capitalism and its "extraction of surplus value on the basis of stolen resources and impoverished cheap labor." Postmodernism, then, can be seen as the conditions where modernism fails to cover up the dirty secrets of capitalist modernity. Seen in this positive light, postmodernism is driven by processes of globalization, and is the cultural corollary to a global political economy. This understanding of postmodernism and globalization underpins his wide-ranging discussion in which he addresses questions of the media and popular culture, identity politics, the science wars, politics and cultural studies, and structuralism and postculturalism. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Charles Lemert is Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. He is author most recently of Sociology after the Crisis, Second Edition (Paradigm, 2004), and Dark Thoughts: Race and the Eclipse of Society (Routledge, 2002).