THE POLITICS OF MEMORY GUEST EDITORS’ FOREWORD
THE POLITICS OF MEMORY GUEST EDITORS’ FOREWORD

Summary/Abstract: In retrospect there is no surprise whatsoever about the emergence of postmodernism as a popular lebensgefühl, public fashion, and philosophical interpunction of the “grand narratives of modernity” in the 1980s basically everywhere in the global North. Les trentes glorieuses of the western welfare states were now indisputably over - stagnation, unemployment and public indebtedness were marking the day - and its Soviet competitor, too, had lost its credibility and increasingly its very legitimacy – similar debts and not un-similar stagnation had destroyed its pretensions. Commentators did not know what would come but sensed what was gone. The postmodern sensibility emerged as a classical instance of turning necessity into virtue: the modern teleological sense of destiny, of a spreading and deepening abstract individualist-cum-rationalist emancipation, expressed by the growth of cities and sponsored by national states, industrial technology and large-scale bureaucracy had given way to urban crises, cultural relativism, irony, equifinalism, petits histoires, and emergent claims for communal identities and a search for roots. While the working classes had already begun their intensifying trajectory of downsizing and disenfranchisement, postmodernism now emerged as an expression of the creeping self-doubt and melancholia of the modern national intelligentias as they sensed the coming of the end of a national industrial regime of accumulation of which they had been a prime historical product.

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