David Bowie and the spirit of postmodernism

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere
Stuart Jeffries
Verso
2021
ISBN: 978-1788738231

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Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, the thin white duke, goblin king and elephant man. David Jones adopted all of these titles and more during his career as a shapeshifting rockstar, adopting and casting them off one after another, his only consistent moniker as fake as any of the rest: David Bowie. Everything, All the Time, Everywhere makes a bold claim: the spirit which moved Bowie to don a new mask – or dress and wig – with every album was the same spirit which animated Thatcher, Trump, Tarantino, gender theory and Grand Theft Auto. We call this spirit postmodernism.

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, written by journalist and author Stuart Jeffries, takes the form of a convincing and coherent revisionist history of the past half-century, broken up into about a dozen digestible, disparate, almost postmodern chunks. Each of these chunks tackles a year since 1979, examining three notable figures or events which pertain to postmodernism. In this way the disintegration of what we understand to be the West is tracked, like following a series of bullet-holes. We have Bowie, The Sex Pistols, Salman Rushdie, Nixon, Las Vegas, Apple, London – the book is not comprehensive, per se, but it casts its eye over a huge variety of subjects. The subjects – or suspects – are each accused of the capital crime of postmodernism. We’ll come back to exactly what that means.

The scope and variety of studies is excellent. No avenue of life or art is omitted and nobody is safe, no matter the conclusion. It upsets this reader, for instance, to think of Tarantino’s films as part of a generally undesirable phenomenon. Surely Pulp Fiction could not be instrumental in the collapse of Western civilisation? After all, I love Pulp Fiction! But then, perhaps you’ll feel similarly about Margaret Thatcher, or your nephew will feel the same about Grand Theft Auto. This commitment to diversity in approach is commendable; a book like this is surely doing something wrong if it doesn’t make its reader feel at least a little uncomfortable.

The language isn’t bad, and best when Jeffries doesn’t reach too far. There are some lovely sentences here – “Docklands rose from London’s luftwaffe-bombed, toxic eastern wastelands to accommodate incoming greed” – but, unfortunately, Jeffries’s metaphors and similes are often more confusing than enlightening. There’s a strangely unhelpful chess simile involving white pieces linking arms and forcing their way to the back row of the board which had me scratching my head and scanning back over the previous lines. It seemed either so obvious as to be banal or so complex as to be useless. This crops up often in the early chapters but it’s a communicative strategy which Jeffries mostly, wisely, seems to abandon as the book goes on.

There are deeply compelling reflections on identity. Using David Bowie and his many names as an example, Jeffries illustrates the postmodern view that identity is not intrinsic, but instead is something produced by the person, never static, always in flux. Person isn’t a particularly helpful term, in a postmodern context – better to use “persona”. But it goes further! Science, too, does not reflect anything essential, does not hold a mirror to something we might refer to as “reality”. Science produces reality like an assembly line produces cars, and this is actually a perfectly rational view if you’re of the mind that there’s no such thing as discernible reality to begin with. Advocates of postmodernism will hold this view earnestly.

These analyses – of how our perception and categorisation of phenomena are supposedly distinct from any essential reality which underpins them – go a long way towards helping us understand some of the distinctive characteristics and confusions of the modern West. The fluidity and transience of gender, the surge of social media influencers, the “alternative facts” of modern politics – we can dispute the value judgements made about these seemingly distinct trends, but we don’t have to look far to see that they exist. For this alone I am inclined to recommend the book.

Those of us concerned about the increasingly prominent and ever-expanding role that technology plays in our lives will enjoy the explanation of how Silicon Valley convinced us that they’re the good guys, and how Steve Jobs and his contemporaries smuggled in mass surveillance through the Trojan horse of a sort of skimmed-milk, watered-down hippie culture. “Big Brother was imagined as working from the Kremlin, not corporate offices in Cupertino.” Capitalism (and by extension, Silicon Valley) did not need to be tough – it needed to be seductive, and many of us are quite happy to be seduced.

If you suspect that this may be a confusing read for readers entrenched in one political encampment or the other, you’d be correct. Jeffries is obviously left-wing and he obviously regards neoliberal capitalism as poison. But he is also strongly and passionately critical of gender theory and its proponents, criticising in detail Judith Butler and the philosophies she espoused. What’s more, he spends the entire book critiquing postmodernism – an idea broadly associated with the left. What do we make of this? Although neoliberal politics might be firmly in its line of fire, it’s crucial to understand that the book is an explanation and criticism of a philosophical or cross-disciplinary concept, not a strictly political one. There is plenty here to bother those of all political persuasions and none.

It might be worth defining what postmodernism actually refers to. Central to it, according to French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard, is the idea that all “grand narratives” are necessarily false and that objective facts don’t exist, or at the very least cannot be perceived. It is also much more than that. The book deals with a complex notion which is easier discussed using examples than definitions, something which Jeffries seems to have understood. As a result, he wastes little time trying to express a unifying theory by which postmodernism might be defined – but this is also to the project’s detriment.

After three-hundred pages, I was still unclear as to what the book’s central theme actually referred to. Something which followed modernism? Presumably. Something to do with French literary theorists? Possibly, but I was far from certain. He dances around definitions in the early pages but it’s ultimately lost in the noise, quickly forgotten as he hits us with case study after case study. This lack of clarity invades those too; engaging though they were, I would occasionally finish a chapter and immediately begin flicking back through it, perplexed as to what the point was. The book, with its pop-culture premise, assumes interest rather than expertise. As such, it has no excuse for ambiguity.

It’s crucial to understand what Everything, All the Time, Everywhere is not, and where its scope ends. Postmodernism is described as a cancer which needs to be controlled or cut out. What isn’t addressed is that really, it’s just a symptom. Much is owed to Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist and philosopher who coined the term “liquid modernity” and who accurately described and predicted the current state of the West, but Jeffries doesn’t go far enough in emphasising just how liquid we have become. Critically, he avoids the two-thousand-year-old elephant in the room, which is that not only was Christianity holding the West together as an idea, arguably it was the West. This isn’t precisely a criticism – a different book will tackle that in depth. But it would have been nice to see it mentioned nonetheless.

Paul Kingsnorth, the Christian novelist, essayist and environmental activist, discusses exactly the above in his continuing series of essays, The Abbey of Misrule. These writings are fascinating and may prove a useful companion piece to Jeffries’s book, which tells us how the West is being destroyed, but not what it is we’re losing. Is it worth reading? Certainly, with a small disclaimer: Everything, All the Time, Everywhere implores us to be more aware of the parts of ourselves which have become postmodern; it does not provide a guide for what happens next.