Post-postmodernism
 
>From Wikipedia


 
Consensus on what makes up an epoch can hardly be achieved while that epoch 
 is still in its early stages. However, a common positive theme of current  
attempts to define post-postmodernism is that faith, trust, dialogue,  
performance and sincerity can work to transcend postmodern _irony_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony) . The following definitions,  which vary 
widely in 
depth, focus and scope, are listed in the chronological  order of their 
appearance. 
In 1995, the landscape architect and urban planner _Tom Turner_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Turner)  issued a  book-length call for a 
post-postmodern turn in urban planning. Turner criticizes  the postmodern credo 
of “
anything goes” and suggests that “the built environment  professions are 
witnessing the gradual dawn of a post-Postmodernism that seeks  to temper 
reason 
with faith.” In particular, Turner argues for the use of  timeless organic 
and geometrical patterns in urban planning. As sources of such  patterns he 
cites, among others, the Taoist-influenced work of the American  architect 
_Christopher  Alexander_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander) 
, _gestalt psychology_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology)   
and the _psychoanalyst_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis)  _Carl 
Jung_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung) ’s  concept of _archetypes_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes) . Regarding  terminology, 
Turner urges us to “embrace post-Postmodernism – and pray for a  better name.
” 
In his 1999 book on _Russian  postmodernism_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_postmodernism)  the Russian-American 
Slavist _Mikhail Epstein_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Epstein)   suggested that postmodernism 
“is 
[…] part of a much larger historical  formation,” which he calls “
_postmodernity_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernity) .” Epstein  
believes 
that postmodernist aesthetics will eventually become entirely  conventional 
and provide the foundation for a new, non-ironic kind of poetry,  which he 
describes using the prefix "_trans-_ (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trans-) ": 
In considering the names that might possibly be used to designate the new  
era following "postmodernism," one finds that the prefix "trans" stands out 
in  a special way. The last third of the 20th century developed under the 
sign of  "post," which signalled the demise of such concepts of modernity as 
"truth"  and "objectivity," "soul" and "subjectivity," "utopia" and 
"ideality,"  "primary origin" and "originality," "sincerity" and 
"sentimentality." 
All of  these concepts are now being reborn in the form of 
"trans-subjectivity,"  "trans-idealism," "trans-utopianism," 
"trans-originality," 
"trans-lyricism,"  "trans-sentimentality" etc.
As an example Epstein cites the work of the contemporary Russian poet 
_Timur  Kibirov_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timur_Kibirov&action=edit&redlink=1) 
. 
The term post-millennialism was introduced in 2000 by the American  
cultural theorist _Eric Gans_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Gans)  to 
describe 
the  epoch after postmodernism in ethical and socio-political terms. Gans 
associates  postmodernism closely with “victimary thinking,” which he 
defines as being based  on a non-negotiable ethical opposition between 
perpetrators and victims arising  out of the experience of _Auschwitz_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz)  and _Hiroshima_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima) . In  Gans’s view, the ethics of 
postmodernism is derived from 
identifying with the  peripheral victim and disdaining the utopian center 
occupied 
by the perpetrator.  Postmodernism in this sense is marked by a victimary 
politics that is productive  in its opposition to modernist utopianism and 
totalitarianism but unproductive  in its resentment of capitalism and liberal 
democracy, which he sees as the  long-term agents of global reconciliation. 
In contrast to postmodernism,  post-millennialism is distinguished by the 
rejection of victimary thinking and a  turn to “non-victimary dialogue” that 
will “diminish […] the amount of  resentment in the world.” Gans has 
developed the notion of post-millennialism  further in many of his internet 
Chronicles of Love and Resentment and the  term is allied closely with his 
theory 
of _Generative  Anthropology_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_Anthropology)  and his scenic concept 
of history. 
In 2006 the British scholar _Alan  Kirby_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alan_Kirby_(writer)&action=edit&redlink=1)
  formulated a 
socio-cultural assessment of post-postmodernism that he  calls 
“pseudo-modernism.” 
Kirby associates pseudo-modernism with the triteness  and shallowness 
resulting from the instantaneous, direct, and superficial  participation in 
culture 
made possible by the internet, mobile phones,  interactive television and 
similar means: “In pseudo-modernism one phones,  clicks, presses, surfs, 
chooses, moves, downloads.” 
Pseudo-modernism’s “typical intellectual states” are furthermore described 
as  being “ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety” and it is said to produce a  
“trance-like state” in those participating in it. The net result of this  
media-induced shallowness and instantaneous participation in trivial events 
is a  “silent autism” superseding “the neurosis of modernism and the 
narcissism of  postmodernism.“ Kirby sees no aesthetically valuable works 
coming 
out of  “pseudo-modernism.” As examples of its triteness he cites reality 
TV,  interactive news programs, “the drivel found […] on some Wikipedia pages,
”  docu-soaps, and the essayistic cinema of _Michael Moore_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moore)  or _Morgan Spurlock_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Spurlock) . In a  book published in 
September 2009 titled 
Digimodernism: How New Technologies  Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure 
our 
Culture Kirby developed further  and nuanced his views on culture and 
textuality in the aftermath of  postmodernism. 
In 2010 the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker  
introduced the term _metamodernism_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism)  as an  intervention in the 
post-postmodernism debate. In their 
article 'Notes on  metamodernism' they assert that the 2000s are characterized 
by 
the emergence of  a sensibility that oscillates between, and must be 
situated beyond, modern  positions and postmodern strategies. As examples of 
the 
metamodern sensibility  Vermeulen and van den Akker cite the 'informed 
naivety', 'pragmatic idealism'  and 'moderate fanaticism' of the various 
cultural 
responses to, among others,  climate change, the financial crisis, and 
(geo)political instability. 
The prefix 'meta' here refers not to some reflective stance or repeated  
rumination, but to Plato's _metaxy_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaxy) , 
which intends a  movement between opposite poles as well as beyond. 
------------------------------------------------- 
Re: The following paper 
BR Note:  Very thoughtful, filled with useful ideas, a  good place to 
commence
thinking about post-pomo, but waaaaay over the  top. 
Philosophy Now 
June / July 2015 
The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond
Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and  buried. In its place comes a new 
paradigm of authority and knowledge formed  under the pressure of new 
technologies and contemporary social forces. 
I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British  
university English department’s website. It includes details of assignments and 
 
a week-by-week reading list for the optional module ‘Postmodern Fictions’, 
and  if the university is to remain nameless here it’s not because the 
module is in  any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module 
parts which  will be taught in virtually every English department in the land 
this coming  academic year. It assumes that postmodernism is alive, 
thriving and kicking: it  says it will introduce “the general topics of ‘
postmodernism’ and  ‘postmodernity’ by examining their relationship to the 
contemporary writing of  fiction”. This might suggest that postmodernism is 
contemporary, but the  comparison actually shows that it is dead and buried. 
Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge.  
This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation 
and  an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over  
has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially 
 asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any 
more, and  from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness 
in this  analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and 
suppositions of  philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about 
to shift – and many  academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer 
to stay with Foucault  [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. 
However, a far more  compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead 
by looking outside the  academy at current cultural production. 
Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year 
will  have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s 
primary texts  were written before their lifetime. Far from being 
‘contemporary’, 
these texts  were published in another world, before the students were 
born: The French  Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s  
Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and  Blade Runner), 
White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture.  Some of the texts (‘The 
Library of Babel’) were written even before their  parents were born. Replace 
this 
cache with other postmodern stalwarts –  Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, 
Waterland, The Crying  of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark,  
Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all  about 
as 
contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as  Betamax 
video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the  
existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the  
possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, 
email,  the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on 
the moon  – which today’s undergraduates take for granted. 
The reason why the primary reading on British postmodernism fictions 
modules  is so old, in relative terms, is that it has not been rejuvenated. 
Just 
look out  into the cultural market-place: buy novels published in the last 
five years,  watch a twenty-first century film, listen to the latest music – 
above all just  sit and watch television for a week – and you will hardly 
catch a glimpse of  postmodernism. Similarly, one can go to literary 
conferences (as I did in July)  and sit through a dozen papers which make no 
mention 
of Theory, of Derrida,  Foucault, Baudrillard. The sense of superannuation, 
of the impotence and the  irrelevance of so much Theory among academics, also 
bears testimony to the  passing of postmodernism. The people who produce 
the cultural material which  academics and non-academics read, watch and 
listen to, have simply given up on  postmodernism. The occasional metafictional 
or self-conscious text will appear,  to widespread indifference – like Bret 
Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park – but  then modernist novels, now long forgotten, 
were still being written into the  1950s and 60s. The only place where the 
postmodern is extant is in children’s  cartoons like Shrek and The 
Incredibles, as a sop to parents  obliged to sit through them with their 
toddlers. This 
is the level to which  postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in 
pop culture aimed at the  under-eights. 
What’s Post Postmodernism?
I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural  
fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time 
are  conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever. There is now a gulf 
between  most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in 
the late  1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from 
modernism to  postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the 
conditions of  cultural production and reception; all that happened, to 
rhetorically  exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written 
Ulysses  
and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody  Chamber instead. But 
somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the  emergence of new 
technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature  of the author, 
the 
reader and the text, and the relationships between them. 
Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie  
placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict 
 or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now 
fetishises  the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial 
or  
whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of 
culture;  pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the 
cultural  products thereby generated (at least so far). 
Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a  
spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions 
 
of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or 
the  cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes  
the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product.  
Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of  
programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed  
by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with  
their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a  
telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football  fan are doing, 
they 
are not simply viewing or listening). 
By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist 
unless  the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will  
exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished  
writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘material  
textuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its  
meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its  
material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that 
is,  its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only the meaning was the 
domain of  the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical  
pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to  
vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of 
the  programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If 
it were  not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would 
 then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful 
exhibitionists  inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after 
hour. 
This is to  say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of 
phoning  in. 
Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose 
content  increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on 
the news  items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate 
here, since  there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – 
writes a  segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive 
role.  Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place 
the  individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within  
pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the 
game  varies according to the particular player. 
The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the  internet. Its 
central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to  move 
through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway  through 
cultural products which has never existed before and never will again.  
This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything  
literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the  
individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with 
 the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that 
anyone  knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the 
individual to  make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit 
him/her to add to  them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, 
media websites. In  all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can 
easily make up pages  yourself (eg blogs). 
If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new 
era  has also seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in 
the  pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, 
which  once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and 
edited together  by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or 
emotions – are now  increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. 
Where once special  effects were supposed to make the impossible appear 
credible, CGI frequently  [inadvertently] works to make the possible look 
artificial, as in much of  Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving 
thousands 
of  individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look 
as if  they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given 
cultural  ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but 
to the  computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer. 
Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV  
(yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which 
the  viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning 
money. It  also favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than 
bemoan the new  situation, it is more useful to find ways of making these new 
conditions  conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity 
currently evident. It  is important here to see that whereas the form may 
change 
(Big  Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to 
 their television screen and consequently what broadcasters show have  
incontrovertibly changed. The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as  
with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the 
busy,  active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called 
its  recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed 
necessary;  the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to 
the status of  the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, 
or becomes simply  irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is 
characterised both by its  hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is 
made up 
by the ‘viewer’, if not  in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’
t read Middlemarch by  going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you 
might well, and justifiably,  read Ceefax that way. 
A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say,  
Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their  original 
form, 
since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the  possibility of 
phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive  entity. Ceefax 
text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they  referenced an 
internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically  re-cast so 
quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in  their 
original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more  
stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic 
state. 
 Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very 
soon  obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – 
certainly not the  burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which 
informed modernism  and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, 
pseudo-modernism is thus  also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the 
present 
moment with no sense of  either past or future. 
The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as  
I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts 
 which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script 
stands in  stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s 
technical effects.  Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison 
with 
what people of all  educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, 
a shallowness  dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a 
cultural desert.  Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can 
adapt them for  meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative 
label I have given  pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we 
are confronted by a  storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any 
lasting or even  reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings 
might look at again  and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time. 
The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years 
dominated  by postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for 
instance, 
products  of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on 
the level of  signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than 
pop or rock). They  also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance 
music is to be danced  to, porn is not to be read or watched but used, in a 
way which  generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, 
the  pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic 
text by the  downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an 
iPod, selected by  the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s 
creation of  compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, 
in that what was a  marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and 
definitive way of  consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a 
coherent work of art, a  body of integrated meaning, obsolete. 
To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated  
shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed 
(similarly,  metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it 
was by 
 postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as 
 theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as 
a  necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into 
them. There  have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, from carnival to 
pantomime.  But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, 
and so they  dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts –
 whereas the  pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the 
central, dominant,  paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although 
culture, in its margins,  still knows other kinds. Nor should these other 
kinds be stigmatised as  ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. 
Reading, listening, watching  always had their kinds of activity; but there is 
a physicality to the actions of  the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a 
necessity to his or her actions as regards  the composition of the text, as 
well as 
a domination which has changed the  cultural balance of power (note how 
cinema and TV, yesterday’s giants, have  bowed before it). It forms the 
twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural  hegemony. Moreover, the 
activity 
of pseudo-modernism has its own  specificity: it is electronic, and 
textual, but ephemeral. 
Clicking In The Changes
In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In 
pseudo-modernism  one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, 
downloads. There is 
a  generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 
1980. Those  born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, 
expressive,  dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and 
heard:  postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem 
elitist, dull, a  distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes 
them. 
Those born  before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts 
which are  alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, 
 
consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some  
Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came 
before  pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence,  
creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name ‘pseudo-modernism’ 
also  connotes the tension between the sophistication of the technological 
means, and  the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it – a 
cultural 
moment  summed up by the fatuity of the mobile phone user’s “I’m on the bus
”. 
Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism  
defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. 
Thus,  pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is 
reality, and  a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an 
uncomplicated form:  the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by 
displaying individuals aware  of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion 
of 
participation); The  Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive 
pornography 
and  reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. 
Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant  
intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism’s cultural products 
have  
been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and romanticism, 
its  intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find themselves 
isolated  in the new philosophical environment. The academy, perhaps 
especially in  Britain, is today so swamped by the assumptions and practices of 
market  economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their 
students  they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies, 
world-views  and voices can be heard. Their every step hounded by market 
economics, academics  cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated 
by what amounts in  practice to consumer fanaticism. The world has narrowed 
intellectually, not  broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw 
the eclipse of Grand  Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of 
globalised market economics  raised to the level of the sole and over-powering 
regulator of all social  activity – monopolistic, all-engulfing, 
all-explaining, all-structuring, as  every academic must disagreeably 
recognise. 
Pseudo-modernism is of course  consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving 
around 
the world as it is given  or sold. 
Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the  
playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence,  
pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and  
anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the 
more  
numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to 
a  world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment 
of the  United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious 
Israel, and  a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: 
pseudo-modernism  was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was 
interred in its rubble.  In this context pseudo-modernism lashes 
fantastically sophisticated technology  to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – 
as in 
the uploading of videos of  beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile 
phones to film torture in  prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone 
else is to suffer the anxiety of  getting hit in the cross-fire. But this 
fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond  geopolitics, into every aspect of 
contemporary life; from a general fear of  social breakdown and identity loss, 
to a 
deep unease about diet and health; from  anguish about the destructiveness 
of climate change, to the effects of a new  personal ineptitude and 
helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to  clean your house, bring 
up 
your children or remain solvent. This technologised  cluelessness is utterly 
contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates  constantly with the other 
side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat  vegetables to be healthy, a 
fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can  direct the course of 
national television programmes, but does not know how to  make him or herself 
something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish  and the advanced, 
the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are  people 
incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued  typified 
postmodernists. 
This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable,  
inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which  
also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical 
emotional  state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is 
the  
trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of  the 
neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism  
takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent  
autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding.  
You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, 
no  other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is 
superseded. 
© Dr Alan Kirby 2006 
Alan Kirby holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of  
Exeter. He currently lives in Oxford 
------------------------------------------------ 
Altermodern, a _portmanteau word_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau_word)   defined by _Nicolas 
Bourriaud_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourriaud) , is  an attempt at 
contextualizing art made in today's global 
context as a reaction  against standardisation and commercialism 
In  his keynote speech to the 2005 Art Association of Australia &  New 
Zealand Conference, Nicolas Bourriaud explained: 
Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: 
 What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups 
and  to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of 
modernism  according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called 
altermodernism, a  movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the 
fight 
for autonomy,  but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more 
and more  standardized world.
Altermodern can essentially be read as an artist working in a _hypermodern_ 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermodernity)  world or with  supermodern 
ideas or themes. 
---------------------------------------------- 
 
Ernie:
Point well taken but "the latest"  -at least that I know about-
is that we in a  post-post modern era. Post-modernism is  passe.
What is post-post modernism?  Best I can say is that it is
similar to modernism but "informed by po-mo ways of looking
at the world and is not nearly as naive as modernism.
Maybe call it "playful realism,"  or realism that also
is imaginative.
 
 
Suits me quite well; I like it.
 
Billy
 
 
-------------------------------------------------
 
6/6/2015 8:42:05 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]  
writes:

Hi Billy,

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 6, 2015, at 11:28, BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the  Radical 
Centrist Community <[email protected]_ 
(mailto:[email protected]) >  wrote:



This view of  the Christian faith provides a unique combination of 
individualism with a  strong community of fellow believers supporting the 
individual 
in his  decision. It allows  individuals to be both religious and modern. 
That is a pretty  powerful package.

Great article. Though being modern is actually rather old-fashioned in a  
postmodern world...


E


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