Postmodern Politics Research Articles

The postmodern urban condition

Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Taking Los Angeles Seriously. 2. Mapping the Postmodern. 3. Postmodern Bloodlines: From Lefebvre to Jameson. 4. The Premature Demise of Postmodern Urbanism. 5. Reading the Modern City: A Colonial History of Los Angeles 1781--1991. 6. Deconstructing Urban Planning. 7. Postmodern Urbanism. 8. A Tale of Two Cities 1. Tijuana. 9. Film, Architecture and Filmspace. 10. A Tale of Two Cities 2. Las Vegas. 11. From Sidewalk to Cyberspace (and Back to Earth Again). 12. The Personal Politics of Postmodernity. 13. The Power of Place. 14. The Geopolitics of Postmodernity. 15. Epistemological Politics. Epilogue: Beyond Postmodernism. A Beginnera s Guide to Postmodernism. Index.

The Postmodern Ethical Condition A conversation with Agnes Heller

Many of Agnes HellerOs previous works explore the contingency of the modern condition and how social actors establish or choose themselves as ethical beings within this contingency. Both The Postmodern Political Condition and Can Modernity Survive? concentrate on images of contingency whilst General Ethics and A Philosophy of Morals explore the nature of an ethics framed around the question of what a decent person is. The contingency of modernity has entailed, for Heller, that it is increasingly difficult to continue to make ethical and moral judgements, which includes the ability to distinguish good from evil. The thematisation of good and evil was possible in an age of grand narratives; the loss of grand narratives has meant that the thematisation of good and evil becomes increasingly difficult, the result of which is ethical indifference.

Ethics and meaningful political action in the modern/postmodern age: a comparative analysis of John Dewey and Max Weber

In this article I address a number of central problems in modern and/or postmodern political and ethical life. I do so largely through an explication and comparison of John Dewey’s and Max Weber’s theoretical approaches and prescriptions for ethics and political participation. According to both Dewey and Weber, the modern world fragments both the ‘individual’ and ‘community’. This fragmentation impairs meaningful political action. Thus, the question becomes, how is the fragmentation on the individual and community level to be reconciled, coherence regained and meaningful action restored? Dewey and Weber have conflicting answers to this set of questions. I argue that however wanting one might find Dewey and Weber’s insights, the questions and their insights are still relevant to this day. I argue that the problems brought on by modernity still flourish under ‘postmodern’ conditions. Further, I propose that given contemporary conditions (at least for some) a supplemented combination of Weber and Dewey’s views is the most suitable and politically efficient response to the demands of the day and would best serve our need for coherence and allow for meaningful political action. The article ends by proposing a blend of their views that is supplemented by the work of Judith Butler.

"A Small Incisive Shock": Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of the Avant-Garde in Underworld

“A Small Incisive Shock”: Modern Forms, Postmodern Politics, and the Role of The Avant-garde in Underworld Philip Nel (bio) On May 13, 1997, Don DeLillo spoke at the New York Public Library’s “Stand In for Wei Jingsheng,” an event that coincided with the American publication of Wei’s letters from prison and that was designed to call attention to human rights in China. The essay he read that day, “The Artist Naked in a Cage,” draws parallels between three men in cages: Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, Franz Kafka’s hunger artist, and Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng. Reading a reprint of DeLillo’s lecture in The New Yorker later that month, I was struck by the analogy because it was at once precise and imprecise. It was imprecise because both Kulik and Kafka’s hunger artist chose to live in a cage, but Wei Jingsheng had been jailed against his will. 1 Yet, on the other hand, the analogy between Kulik and Wei is apt, and perhaps performance art can act “in opposition to the state,” as DeLillo says of Wei (“Artist” 7). Near the end of “The Artist Naked in a Cage,” DeLillo argues that “the more nearly total the state, the more vivid the [End Page 724] dissident artist” and concludes, “The deeper they conceal him—the more remote the cell, the smaller the cell, the colder and stonier the walls of the cell—the more vivid and living is the writer” (7). In the strength of this image DeLillo finds a kind of hope in fatalism, a still-living writer opposing the state that is simultaneously killing him. It is a mixed message, but DeLillo’s ambiguous juxtaposition tries to accomplish what Wei, locked in a cage, could not: to use art as a way of confronting the public with Wei’s incarceration. I open with this example in order to consider DeLillo’s language as a kind of performance art that functions in apparently opposite ways. In the tradition of the avant-garde, it can shock the reader into a new awareness of the material world; however, just as any avant-garde invariably gets absorbed by the culture it strives to critique, so DeLillo’s style can at times replicate the structures of power that it wants to oppose. And DeLillo realizes this. His comments on Kulik, for example, indicate an awareness of how fine a line there is between shock and complicity: “It offers a genuine sense of the latitude of free expression and places a small, incisive shock in the midst of all those SoHo apparel shops and restaurants. But it also suggests the grim idea that the performance artist, liberated from Soviet state control, hair cropped, and dog collar secured, may be carrying his own culture’s atavistic wish for order and repression” (“Artist” 6–7). What DeLillo says of the Russian performance artist’s impersonation of a dog applies equally well to his own writing: it both offers a “small, incisive shock” and registers the anxieties and repressions of the world in which he lives. The ambiguities in his writing are both provocative and merely representative, actively shocking and passively matter-of-fact. I have begun with DeLillo’s essay on Wei in order to introduce Underworld as at the nexus of a series of questions concerning the relationship between DeLillo’s politics and his aesthetics, between modernism and postmodernism, and between the historical avant-garde and mass culture. In its richly layered language and careful structure, Underworld is DeLillo’s most “high modernist” novel to date; however, it also draws on avant-garde techniques in a more subtly effective way than his previous work. DeLillo has refined the montage technique that has characterized his writing style, crafting more nuanced and provocative juxtapositions than he has before. This essay argues that Underworld complicates traditional distinctions between modern and postmodern [End Page 725] by drawing on both a high modernist aesthetic and those residual elements of the historical avant-garde that characterize certain postmodernisms. In relation to Wei, the essay claims that DeLillo’s language aspires to both the status of formalist perfection and performance art, and that this dual allegiance...

The Socio-Spatial Making and Marking of 'Us': Toward a Critical Postmodern Spatial Theory of Difference and Community

The modernist surveillance of strict, arbitrary borders between 'real space' and 'imagined space' both produces and hides 'Othered' spatialities. While assuming that spatialities are simultaneously real-and-imagined,postmodernspatial theory seeks to recover the identities that emerge in relation to the veiled, lived realms of 'social space'. Furthermore, critical postmodern spatial theory privileges the lived spatialities of left-margined communities as sites of socio-spatial critique. A postmodern identity politics enacts critical postmodernspatial theory by nurturing the developmentof, and solidarity between, 'counterpublics', which are subaltern community spaces where private spatialities of alienation are brought to public discourse.

Justify My Love

Justify My Love

Book Reviews: The Politics of Postmodernity, The Sociological Revolution. From the Enlightenment to the Global Age, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics, Managing like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology, Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation

Book Reviews: The Politics of Postmodernity, The Sociological Revolution. From the Enlightenment to the Global Age, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics, Managing like a Man: Women and Men in Corporate Management, The Golem at Large: What You Should Know about Technology, Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications, Harvey Sacks: Social Science and Conversation

Sport and the Analysis of Symbolic Regimes

The authors evaluate the role of sport in the construction of a symbolic project for the city of Sheffield. They seek to illustrate that although in regime analyses, the ideological dimensions of the activities of regimes in urban governance are often neglected, regime approaches can provide appropriate frameworks through which to analyze the mobilizing of interests behind the development of a symbolic project, a new image for the city (as a city of sport). The authors conclude that the nature of postmodern politics is such that analysis of symbolic projects is key to understanding regime activity in deindustrializing urban contexts.

Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus

Book reviewed in this article:BARRY D. ADAM and ALAN SEARS, Experiencing HIV: Personal, Family and Work Relationships.MARY LOUISE ADAMS, The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality.RICHARD ALTSCHULER (ed.), The Living Legacy of Marx, Durkheim & Weber: Applications and Analyses of Classical Sociological Theory by Modern Social Scientists.ABIGAIL BAKAN and DAIVA STASIULIS (eds.), Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada.JON CAULFIELD and LINDA PEAKE (eds.), City Lives and City Forms: Critical Research and Canadian Urbanism.Patricia M. Evans and GerdA R. Wekerle (eds.), Women and the Canadian Welfare State: Challenges and Change.BENT FLYVBJERG, Power and Rationality: Democracy in Practice.J. BARRY GURDIN, Amidé I Friendship: An Investigation into Cross‐Cultural Styles in Canada and the United States.ROBERTA HAMILTON, Gendering the Vertical Mosaic: Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Society.THOMAS M. McKENNA, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines.ANDY MERRIFIELD and ERIK SWYNGEDOUW (eds.), The Urbanization of Injustice.ROD MICHALKO, The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow of Blindness.RICHARD MORRIS, Sinners, Lovers, and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures.DIANE SINGERMAN and HOMAHOODFAR(eds.),Deuelopment Change and Gender in Cairo: A View from the Household.LESLIE PAUL THIELE, Thinking Politics: Perspectives in Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Political Theory.

Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (review)

Book Reviews 165 political grubbing from our chief executives, then we had better impose major structural changes. Yet the remoteness of that prospect means that the presidency will always be supremely political, both in the best and worst meanings ofthat term. Robert J. Spitzer SUNY Cortland Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. By Bent Flyvbjerg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998: pp. xiii + 290. $45.00 cloth; $17.00 paper. Urban planning is an intersection of several kinds of politics and communication . Technical expertise meets with entrenched interest groups; demands for openness butt up against the desire of "experts" to retain control over the process; and public needs meet private demands. Rationality and Power traces the attempt of a Danish city, Aalborg, to create a "master plan" for urban redevelopment. The "Aalborg project" attempts to design a viable plan for automobile, bus, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic in the downtown area of the city. At the same time the project tries to create a livable downtown space where residential housing, retail shops, and public recreation are all accommodated. Flyvbjerg uses the history of the project to delineate the interaction of what he calls "rationality" and "power." In doing so, he weighs into the current debate about the relationship of knowledge to power. He contrasts what he characterizes as the Enlightenment's commitment to "rationality" with the realities of power politics. His central finding is that "rationality is context-dependent and that the context of rationality is power" (2). In the case of Aalborg the rationality of city planners is contrasted with the "rationalizations" presented by their opponents in the chamber of commerce, the police department and other interest groups. How one evaluates this book depends primarily on two points. First, does the reader accept the use of "narratology" as a viable method to expose the relationship of knowledge to power? Second, does one accept that the experience of a small city in Denmark can be extrapolated to wider questions of the relationship between "rationality" and power in modern or postmodern politics? If the answer to both these questions is yes, then the reader will find Flyvbjerg's project enlightening and provocative. If the answer is no, the reader is likely to reject his findings. A third possibility also exists. If rationality is context-dependent, then so is power. This suggests that, as postmodern thought would have it, power and not rationality should be the true subject of our concern. This conclusion from the text presents an even greater and more provocative task. It is here that Rationality and Power both intrigues and disappoints. Flyvbjerg delineates the relations of power among actors in Aalborg with great skill. But his own preference for rationality over power makes those willing to employ power into villains. The rhetoric of the chamber of commerce , its mobilization of support from its members, and its use of the media all 166 Rhetoric & Public Affairs appear as somehow illegitimate uses of power. Flyvbjerg argues that power is central to all political relations, but he yearns for a stable situation of equality where rationality can have free play. In many ways, he is a disappointed Utopian unwilling to accept the reality of his own conclusions. A final point: Flyvbjerg traces the plan in great detail. He makes continuous references to streets, squares, intersections, and the location of stores and other features central to the project. While a line map of downtown Aalborg is provided, the reader's understanding of the debate and conflict over the project would have been helped by more detailed maps of both the downtown area of the city and of the surrounding county. Mark S. Jendrysik University of Mississippi Feminism and the New Democracy: Re-Siting the Political. Edited by Jodi Dean. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997; pp. ν + 274. $29.95 paper. Jodi Dean's project, re-siting the political in an era of new democracy, is part of a larger Sage publications series on philosophy and social criticism. Dean's specific goal is to "re-site" the political, "to recognize the multiple terrains and spaces producing and produced by politics" (2). Her interest is in locating the sites from which social and political groups are...

Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism

Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism

Vampires, Postmodernity, and Postfeminism: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In this article, I explore the popular series Buffy the Vampire Slayer through the intersections of post-feminism, postmodernity, and the vampire metanarrative. In particular, I discuss the manner in which this television narrative appropriates body rhetorics and narrative agency from traditionally masculinist metanarratives in the horror and mystery genres. Moreover, I examine how the fictional characters negotiate the politics of feminism and postmodernity in contemporary American suburban life. Social and mystical powers (on the side of good) are matrilineal in the series: only females can be vampire slayers, only females can have supernatural powers, and only females can discern who the predators are. (The sole exception is the “Watcher,” Giles, a decidedly femininized male.) Through the narrative frame of the series, each episode is grounded in the tension between the embodied female heroine and the varied embodiments of evil she and her friends encounter.

CyberResistance: Saudi Opposition Between Globalization and Localization

The information society, late capitalism, and globalization raise serious questions about many tidy categories through which the world has conventionally been understood. Resistance, the subject of this essay, is one of these categories. The proliferation of globalizing means of communications such as the satellite dish and the internet has added new dimensions to our world. One is the collapse of premodern conceptions of space and time. Our phenomenological world is one that compresses time and in turn annihilates space, as Harvey suggests,David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). or delineates space and time and liberates them from their local markers, asGiddens argues.Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21. As space shrinks phenomenologically, people in different places experience the same events at the same time.The globalized world and modernity and their impact on our understanding of the social phenomenon are not tied to the works of Harvey and Giddens alone. Other theorists such as Roland Peterson, Ulrich Beck, and Scott Lash are central to the globalization debate. For a good summary of the Globalization debate, see Malcolm Walters, Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995). In light of the confusion stemming from the increase in global political, economic, and social activities, the world seems beset by the paradox of homogenizing and fragmenting impulses. Complicating this picture even further is our increasing dependence on the mediaFor a debate on the media, information society, and globalization, see Karamjit S. Gill, ed., Information Society: New Media, Ethics and Postmodernism (London: Springer-Verlag London Limited, 1996); Lance Starte, Ronald Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson, Communication and Cyberspace (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); Sandra Braman and Annabelle Mohammadi, Globalization, Communication, and Transnational Civil Society (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, Inc., 1996); and Andrew King (ed.) Postmodern Political Communication: The Fringe Challenges the Center (Westport, CT: Braeger, 1992). to bring world events to our homes, giving us the illusion that we were taken there to witness these events. In this heavily mediated world, the “signs for the real,”This is Baudrillard's argument. For more, see Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. text and image alike, seem more real than the real itself. Nowhere has the impact of globalization been felt more intensely than in the Middle East. Data from the Gulf states in particular raise new questions about our understanding of resistance, national boundaries, and territoriality as well as other social science concepts such as sovereignty, the nation state, and citizenship.

The socio‐political context of zero tolerance policing strategies

This paper commences with the recognition that so‐called zero tolerance policing strategies have been implemented and sustained ‐ both in the USA and Britain ‐ in response to a very widespread public demand. It is argued that dismissing this support as part of a reactionary political backlash fails to address some very legitimate public concerns. Consequently, this paper considers the socio‐political circumstances that have provided the conditions for this popular support in terms of the notion of postmodern politics, whereby political demands and subsequent strategies are introduced that appeal to a wide range of interest groups, and which cross over the traditional liberal/conservative divide. Examples are cited, from New York City in the USA, to various geographical locations in Britain, in order to support the argument that zero tolerance‐style policing needs to be driven by the concerns of the particular community in order to receive widespread legitimacy.

History without a Subject: The Postmodern Condition

* Postmodernism in America: An Introduction * Postmodernism and Social Theory * Postmodern Identity and Postmodern Political Mobilization * Postmodernity as a Regime of Accumulation?: From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation * The Globalizing World Economy, the Compression of Time, and the Spatial Reorganization of Social Domination * Postmodernity and Flexible Stratification: Is Class Still Material? * Reorganized Capitalism: New Processes of Power and Motivation * The New Professionals: Changes in Authority and Formal Organization * Postmodernity and the New Class * Conclusion

Professionalism and Australia's Security Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, Responsibility

This article examines critically the systemic 'professionalism' which has overtaken Australia's defence and security community in the 1990s. It focuses on the unhealthy convergence of academic security studies at the Australian National University with an overriding foreign policy priority of the Australian Government: the formation of a new regional identity based on themes of 'engagement' and 'enmeshment' with Asia. It argues that the main consequence of this 'professionalist' trend is a mode of inquiry that expunges politics, ethics and responsibility from academic discourse on security. The article also addresses briefly an emerging postmodern politics of dissidence in the disciplines of security studies and political geography which has transformed our understanding of the role and social responsibility of security intellectuals.

Postmodern politics and the battle for the future

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this study, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one‐sided positions which dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the coming millennium.

Cultural Studies and the Problems of the Political

In 1992 Alice Kessler-Harris wrote a piece for American Quarterly in an attempt find a mediate position for American Studies in the debate between cultural pluralism and American national For Kessler-Harris multiculturalism is best understood part of a process of redefinition of an inherited, static and exhausted shared American The critical attention given the flowering of multiple identities is not inevitably an invitation to abandon the concept of American identity. It may be understood, rather, a process of questioning which encourages us enter into a new conversation about whether there is still a 'we' at the heart of American culture and wonder how that 'we' is constituted . . ..'>I The redefining process, she pointed out in a familiar argument, was necessitated by the 'silencing' of female and minority voices, silences that in effect underwrote the liberal national narrative which American Studies had helped construct in the 1940s. And the attempt reimpose consensus by contemporary conservatives, understandable an attempt recover a lost sense of community or cultural unity, is deplorable in its imposition of a static tradition, a sense of America as fixed and given. Kessler-Harris's piece addresses one of the mainstays of cultural studies (and postmodern politics) the rise of ethnic particularism often defined (positively and negatively) aggressively anti-nation-state. Working against this context, Kessler-Harris attempts ground multiculturalism in

Postmodern Politics: Rorty on the Self, Agency and Liberalism

Postmodern Politics: Rorty on the Self, Agency and Liberalism

Green parties and political change in contemporary Europe: new politics, old predicaments

Published in 1997, This book offers an up-to-date guide to the Green parties of Western Europe as the optimism of the 1980s confronts the ‘Green fatigue’ of the 1990s. The approach is both thematic and comparative. Green politics in Europe is located in its historical and cultural context. There is a comparative analysis of the principal ideological questions , policy issues and strategic dilemmas that have confronted the European Greens. There are national profiles of Green politics throughout the European Union. The conclusion addresses the critical issue of political change in post industrial societies. It discusses the contribution of Green parties to the ‘New Politics’ and assesses their likely impact on post-modern politics