The Story of Progress

In our postmodern reality, the global divisions between production and consumption have distorted our relationship to the world. The world is no longer made, it is thought, symbols become realities and fictions truths. This volume is designed to provide a theoretical and empirical perspective on the story of progress, the grand narrative of modernity, which seeks to penetrate deeply into private culture. The idea is to portray the cultural displacement of faith and facts, of nostalgia, violence, objects, and machines. Progress, the imaginary, is bound to forms and appearances. It has a language, a space of fantasy, transforming the materialist reality into seductive power. The essays included here mirror an ongoing discussion, concerning the broad fields of investigation into the postmodern world.