What is Post Modernism, 2nd Ed.

'What is Post-Modernism?' Is it a new world view, or an outgrowth of the Post-Industrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture? In this fourth, entirely revised edition, Charles Jencks, one of the founders of the Post-Modern Movement, shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, using diagrams designed especially for this edition, he reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. But why has post-modern culture arrived? In an ironic parable, 'the Protestant Crusade', Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden the Modernists' abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudo-religion led in the 1920s to the famous 'vacuum-cleaning' period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the 'Protestant Inquisition' which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared - a Counter-Reformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism. However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of Post-Modernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of Late-Modernism. This takes the de-creation and nihilism of its parent to extremes. The main engine that drives global culture today - post-modernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network - is analysed in its close relation to other 'posts': Post-Fordism, Post-Socialism and the post-national world of trading blocs and unstable nations. Jencks argues that this mayresult in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations. The most radical idea of this challenging book is the the notion that the post-modern world does not mean the end of metanarratives, but something quite different. Belief