Jennifer Egan, an American writer, is rare for still being able to register incredulity at the weirdness of this process. The brisk destruction of old ways and the foreclosing of possibilities have become such an accepted fact – not least in the social sciences, from Daniel Bell to Fredric Jameson – that it is easy to forget what a large-scale re-engineering of human lives they have led to. It already seems as if it was a long time ago that America, transitioning from industrial to consumer capitalism, lurched into the age of postmodernity. Had she lived longer into the 20th century, one can only imagine what she would have made of the many organisation men, hidden persuaders and lonely crowds still to come, or of the other ideological prisons created by the national security state and the Cold War. By 1933, Stein had already witnessed the industrialisation of America and the new technologies of standardisation and control unleashed by Fordism and Taylorism. Toklas, ‘and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a 20th-century life, America having begun the creation of the 20th century in the sixties of the 19th century is now the oldest country in the world.’ She meant, quite reasonably, that America was the oldest country in the world because it was the first to be modern. ‘America created the 20th century,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B.
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