Daniel M. Jr. Bell - Economy of Desire, The: Christianity and Capitalism in a Postmodern World

Series Editors Foreword

J AMES K. A. S MITH

One of the reasons postmodernism is misused and misunderstood is that the term is often associated with what we might call a disruption thesis: the notion that postmodernism names something entirely new and radically differentthat postmodernism names a now that is somehow discontinuous with all that has gone before. When people hear postmodernism bandied about in this way, they look around, see an awful lot that is all too familiar, and dismiss such claims as overwrought, the sorts of things you can convince yourself of if youve spent a little too long in Left Bank cafs (or graduate school).

But the best thinking that employs the heuristic term postmodernism doesnt subscribe to such notions of discontinuity. To the contrary: the subtitle of Fredric Jamesons classic work, Postmodernism , describes it as The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. On this account, postmodernism is not less modern but more moderna kind of hyper -modernism, the intensification of forces unleashed by a variety of revolutions: Copernican, Industrial; French, American; Digital, Sexual.

This is especially true in fiction: those sometimes described as postmodern novelistsThomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillopaint pictures of worlds dominated by consumption and the unique malaise that characterizes late capitalism. Indeed, in Wallaces Infinite Jest , time itself is organized by corporate sponsors. The calendar no longer belongs to the gods and emperors (Janus, Mars, Julius, Augustus) but rather is owned by corporationsthe new divine powers. (Most of the action in Infinite Jest takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.) This world is postmodern not because it signals some romantic escape from the modern or some jarring break with modernity but because it is one completely saturated and dominated by the forces of modernity. Postmodernity isnt a world where modernity has failed; it is the world where modernity is all in all. Or as Daniel Bell puts it below, its the world where were all capitalists now.

Most Christian thinking about discipleship and spiritual formation has failed to appreciate this reality. Indeed, much of contemporary North American Christianity not only blithely rolls along with these realities; in many ways, it also encourages and contributes to it with a vast cottage industry of Christianized consumption. By locating the challenges for Christian discipleship in arcane cults or sexual temptation or the secularizing forces of the Supreme Court, evangelicalism tends to miss the fact that the great tempter of our age is Walmart. The tempter does not roam about as a horrifying monster, but as an angel of light who spends most of his time at the mall.