Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 1)

Launching a new Superstructure series, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson to explore the ins and outs of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism is a heterogenous and disputed regime of aesthetics and theory that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Dated to midcentury, but promulgated as a discourse from the 1970’s to 1990’s,  postmodernism is known primarily for its preoccupations with multiplicity, difference, surface, language, image, constructedness, reflexivity, and the integration of art and everyday life. Decades past its heyday, postmodernism today frequently serves as a pejorative for reactionary critics of social and ecological justice and aesthetic diversity. In their conversation, Rob and Scott critique noxious voices both outside and inside of today’s Modern Monetary Theory movement, who similarly wield postmodernism as epithet to discredit and police money’s contestable public capacities to provide for all. Our co-hosts dismantle such false zero-sum invectives by weighing the historical nuances and semantic surfeits of terms including modernity, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism. As a result, this episode prepares the groundwork for a forthcoming engagement with B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. 

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Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

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