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This collection of essays from international scholars across various disciplines addresses the compelling theme of technological pessimism—the conviction that technology has simultaneously given humanity the means to achieve unlimited progress while simultaneously providing the tools for self-destruction and the degradation of our most cherished values.

Edited by Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard P. Segal, this intellectually rigorous anthology examines the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in contemporary technological society through a postmodern lens. The contributors explore how technology shapes human experience, culture, and social structures in the late twentieth century, questioning the foundational narratives of technological progress and enlightenment that have dominated Western thought.

David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism’s transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet. 

However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey’s work, then the idea of humans as analogue beings he argues this arising new human condition of digitality leads to alienation not only from technology but also the environment. This condition he suggests, is not an ideology of time and space but a reality stressing that Harvey’s time-space compression takes on new features including those of ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ globalisation and the commodification of all spheres of existence. 

Lastly the author considers culture’s role drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s theories to make the case for a post-modern Marxism attuned to the most significant issue of our age. Stimulating and theoretically wide-ranging The Condition of Digitality recognises post-modernity’s radical new form as a reality and the urgent need to assert more democratic control over digitality.

The Fate of the Object traces the historical shift in focus from the "difficult" essential object of modernist theater, art, and poetry to its transformation as a sign in a postmodern field of signs. In modern art, the central object had been the abstract painting; in theater, the body of the actor; in poetry, the sonic, visual and grammatical elements of the poem. Spanning several disciplinary boundaries, this ambitious and pioneering book examines how the very process of refinement to locate the essential modernist object dissolves the figure of that object into its signifying ground. Jon Erickson argues that this historical shift from modern object to postmodern sign reflects significant transformations in capitalist society -- among them the shift from a production economy to a service economy, the change from a sensually rich to a conceptually alienated cultural consciousness, and the rise of poststructuralist theory as the predominant determiner of value within contemporary art culture. Erickson examines the body as the central object of theater and performance through the theories of Craig, Sartre, Brecht, Artaud, and Grotowski. Paradigmatic for the problematic relation of body/object to sign within postmodernism is his analysis of Genet’s The Balcony and Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. The art chapter discusses such artists as Malevich, Ad Reinhardt, Duchamp, Warhol and Kosuth, tracing the progression of the abstract painting to its reduction or disappearance in conceptualism and minimalism. The poetry chapter examines Pound's Imagism, Concrete and Sound Poetry, and the contributions of Gertrude Stein and the recent Language Poets. Finally, the author questions the role poststructuralist theory has played in the shift from modern object to postmodern sign and how it may affect our attitudes toward the materiality of the world. Jon Erickson is Assistant Professor of Drama, Ohio State University.

If the postmodern is a collage—as some critics have suggested—or if collage is itself a kernel of the postmodern, what does this mean for our way of understanding the world? The Frame and the Mirror uses this question to probe the distinctive character of the postmodern situation and the philosophical problem of representation. Brockelman’s work is itself a collage of sorts, using juxtapositions of critics and art historical figures to conduct a debate between such figures as Karsten Harries, Gianni Vattimo, Rosalind Krauss, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Slavo Žižek, and Le Corbusier about issues such as truth in art, perspectivism, theatricality, the sublime, psychoanalytic theory, politics, and urbanism.

More than an introduction to the postmodern, The Frame and the Mirror advances our understanding of the contemporary world by relating its features to the peculiar characteristics of collage. Ultimately, Brockelman shows how collage demands that we reinterpret modernity, conceiving of it as suspended between a loss of certainty and a new kind of knowledge about the human condition. In doing so, his work challenges many of the claims made in the name of postmodernism—and offers in their place a new and ironic view of the cultural space in which contemporary and historical events occur.

Rethinking bureaucracy through the lenses of modernity, postmodernity, and administrative imagination.

Coping with the practical problems of bureaucracy is hampered by the limited self-conception and the constricted mindsets of mainstream public administration thinking. Modernist public administration theory, although valuable and capable of producing ever more remarkable results, is limiting as an explanatory and catalytic force in resolving fundamental problems about the nature, size, scope, and functioning of public bureaucracy and in transforming public bureaucracy into a more positive force.

This original study specifies a reflexive language paradigm for public administration thinking and shows how a postmodern perspective permits a revolution in the character of thinking about public bureaucracy. The author considers imagination, deconstruction, deterritorialization, and alterity. Farmer's work emphasizes the need for an expansion in the character and scope of public administration's disciplinary concerns and shows clearly how the study and practice of public administration can be reinvigorated.
 

Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed dynamically. In The Postmodern Condition Jean-Francois Lyotard extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information and knowledge are controlled in the Western world. Lyotard emphasized language; the world of postmodern knowledge can be represented as a game of language where speaking is participation in the game whose goal is the creation of new and ever-changing social linkages.

A major reevaluation of collaboration’s role in art since 1968.

The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions.

Green looks at three distinct types of collaboration: the highly bureaucratic identities created by Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, and other members of Art & Language in the late 1960s; the close-knit relationships based on marriage or lifetime partnership as practiced by the Boyle Family, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; and couples-like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, or Marina Abramovi´c and Ulay-who developed third identities, effacing the individual artists almost entirely. These collaborations, Green contends, resulted in new and, at times, extreme authorial models that continue to inform current thinking about artistic identity and to illuminate the origins of postmodern art, suggesting, in the process, a new genealogy for art in the twenty-first century.