Review Essay: Confronting Postmodern Uncertainty

• Author: Peter F. Cannavò
• Published date: 01 October 2007
• Date: 01 October 2007
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591707299822
• Subject Matter: Articles

676

Political Theory

Volume 35 Number 5

October 2007 676-685

© 2007 Sage Publications

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Confronting Postmodern

Uncertainty

Political Insights from

Cultural Practice

A Kinder, Gentler America: Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s, by Mary

Caputi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 216 pp. $58.50

(cloth); $19.50 (paper).

How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal, by

Marcie Frank. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 176 pp. $59.95

(cloth); $17.95 (paper).

The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish, by Gay Hawkins. Lanham,

MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. 168 pp. $69.00 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).

Urban Encounters, by Helen Liggett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2003. 216 pp. $78.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper).

In A Kinder, Gentler America, Mary Caputi remarks that “our epoch is

characterized by constant motion and unchecked energies” (p. 46). We are

“caught in a free fall of multicultural, postmodern indeterminacies” (p. 98).

Caputi is, of course, articulating an oft-cited theme of modernity and, now,

postmodernity: the increasing destabilization, fragmentation, and incoherence

of identities, social relations, roots, belief systems, and natural and built envi-

ronments. The four works reviewed here all look at postmodern uncertainty

through the lens of cultural studies but seek insights for politics. All respond

in some measure to pioneering cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s earlier

attempts to come to terms with modernity and its uncertainty. Benjamin

sought, in Caputi’s words, “the deeper correspondences that lie hidden” within

the “whirling, confused melange of disparate things” (pp. 53–54, 62), the

“moment of hushed transcendence that lies hidden in the modernizing world

enamored of the new” (p. 56). The authors of these books translate Benjamin’s

own quest into two possible approaches, one minimalist and the other more

ambitious: (1) accepting postmodern uncertainty while seeking some political

and ethical meaning within the current cultural milieu and (2) building on