There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his failures and rendered literally impotent by his best friend’s success, is sitting in a low-lit suburban room beside a girl (not his wife) named Belladonna: ‘She was definitely younger than him. He was a modernist. She was the thing that came next.’
Stuart Jeffries argues in his new book that the thing that came next was in fact a thing that started a couple of decades before Amis wrote The Information. In Jeffries’s telling, postmodernity can be dated to 13 August 1971, when Richard Nixon held a closed-door meeting that led to America’s abandonment of the Bretton Woods policy of gold-backed currencies. ‘Nixon nixed the system,’ he can’t resist writing (and the line isn’t bad).
According to Jeffries, postmodern culture is a diffuse, prolonged effect of this ‘liberation of capital’ in the summer of 1971.
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