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The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium

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Simply put: this book is an award winner from the two guys who have published the classic survey text Postmodern Theory, and who then followed up with the book that pretty much inaugurated the field of Critical Postmodernism in America, The Postmodern Turn, in which they mapped the emerging intersections of critical theory, art and aesthetics, philosophy, cultural studies, and the quantum changes in the sciences. That book won the Michael Harrington Award for the Best Book of 1998, New Political Science Section.

I can honestly say that The Postmodern Adventure is twice the book that the last in the series was (and that book was clearly no slouch!). Best & Kellner clearly (but sophisticatedly) chart the complex novelties of our present moment -- illuminating the relationships between such diverse phenomena as Virtuality and the Internet-work, American war and terrorism, Cosmology, Animal Rights, and Biotechnology and Cloning. All of this is seen through the guiding lens of Thomas Pynchon's multiplicitous vision of the Rocket in Gravity's Rainbow.

At the end, Best & Kellner point thinkers and scholars alike toward a future which is fast emerging everywhere at the extremes of Utopia/Dystopia. It is our Adventure to fight creatively and constructively for the former, while critically analyzing the latter, to make of theory a space of practice, and to open our narrow frameworks for living up and out toward the cosmic whole in the name of social justice.

Yes, if you are looking for salon-swinging Frenchmen, their cigarettes held dramatically aloft as they speak incomprehensible oaths to the end of metaphysics, then this is not the Postmodernism for you. This is Critical Postmodernism -- an analysis and a synthesis, a great college text and an interesting read after work, a political statement and a theoretical foundation for others to make their own. Think Deep Ecology meets Cyberpunk meets the Fight for Democracy and you may begin to appreciate just what's going on here...do you think that's a Frankenstein's monster? Good -- that's in there too: go ahead and read!

We live in a revolutionary time -- this book awakens the Postmodernisms afoot in both American soil and abroad to the grander narrative of this amazing moment: counselling the age-old wisdom that "Philosophy begins in wonder," but to this we must add the Postmodern element of flow, of "wander." Adding wonder to wander, Best & Kellner arrive at "Adventure" -- the Postmodern Adventure.

This college-level survey of science, technology and cultural studies provides challenges to theory, politics and issues which we face in modern times. A cross-section of disciplines is revealed in a title which is billed as philosophy but which includes a strong examination of science and culture. Students within many scientific disciplines will find its discussions intriguing - and scholarly.

Part of the fun of reading postmodern criticism is its outlandishness,its attacks on conventional modern modes of thought. Best and Kellner, well-versed in the theories of Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Bordieu and the other wild beasts of France and their worldwide acolytes, manage to take much of the fun right out them. In a style that is pendantic, dull, but full of insight, they trace the interpenetration of the modern with the postmodern and talk reasonably about the irreasonable. Good content, bad style.