For what it's worth, I found the following, which was used in courses and
talks I was giving on the subject way back then. I don't want to defend it
now; it's way out of date. Thanks, Alan
ostmodern Checklist
(I used this for teaching - and still use versions of it; it's only an
outline but at least provides a basis for discussion - Alan)
>From modernity to postmodernity, the following processes occur, primarily
within post-industrial societies:
Transformation of society from industrial to service to information econ-
omy.
Transformation from analog to digital processing technologies.
Transformation from knowledge to knowledge management, and from knowledge
management to the articulation of fragmentary flows of information.
Exponential growth of knowledge and emergence of the knowledge industry.
Increased ad hoc attitudes towards labor, coupled with vocational disin-
vestment (i.e. flexiwork).
Transformation from late capitalism to ad hoc transnational managerial
capitalism and bricolage entrepreneurialism in post-industrial nations.
Weakening of the nation state and growth of bricolage governance (local
mafias).
Replacement of essentialisms by constructivisms, combined with the hard-
ening of essentialist positions as a rearguard action (i.e. backlash to
the woman's movement).
Breakdown of materialist/idealist distinctions.
Increasingly reified ethnicities, political consciousness and symbolic
capital stressing 'traditional' geographic boundaries (homelands), at
times coupled with anti-development attitudes.
Increased breakdown and reification of traditional models of public and
private (personal) relationships (sexual, civic, social, institutional).
Proliferation of entertainment forms tending towards technological ef-
fect (representations, media, programming) and distribution channels re-
sulting in the breakdown of network hegemonies (Internet diffused gov-
ernance for example).
Proliferation of information flows into the private spaces such as the
home, the body, etc.
Semiotic transformations from inscriptive (hardened, maintained, stable)
processes to fissuring (weakened, stuttering, pre-oedipal/symbolic, de-
stabilized) and fissuring regimes.
Likewise from classical matter (stabilized signifier/sememe demarcations)
to non-classical matter (problematic signifiers, significations).
Increased leakage of the signifier (excesses, supplement).
Increasing jostling of signifying regimes within information flows.
Increased incommensurabilities, including languages, teleologies, and
scripts.
Problematizing of space-time and stable categorizations.
Development of mathematics of non-classical spaces (monster curves, frac-
tals, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, eccentric or abject spaces).
Mathematico-physical inclusion of disorder.
Development of "intermaths" (massive parallel processes (Bailey)), with a
tendency towards discrete, computational, digital, mathematical develop-
ment (four-color theorem, reliance on the computer, artificial life).
Endocolonization everywhere, coupled with the manufacturing of romanti-
cisms (not only among minority ethnicities but also among the left - i.e.
the "radical" effect of Wired magazine).
Increased gaps between richer and poorer, in terms of both economic and
cultural/informational capital.
Emergence of subcultural-noise cultural phenomena, simultaneously using
micro-technologies (pirate radio) and abjuring technology altogether.
Ecological destabilizations and managerial or fundamentalist responses.
Intensification of apocalyptic and survivalist subcultures.
Increasing rhetorical/idiolectical emissions and distorted communica-
tions.
Increased problematic or property in general (including the technology of
reproduction, birthing; intellectual property; farmlands).
Increased development of _discursive fields_ and their receptors, and
their interpenetrations (hypertext, punk rock).
Simultaneously totalization of universal (computational) languages and
functional idiolectical autonomies, the commodification of idiolects
(rants, serial murders, dualities).
A = A (Shelling's identity, totality) replaced by 0 = {X: x not-= x} (the
null set as equivalent to the set of those x not equal to themselves -
displacement and slippage).
Semiotic emissions of symbols which appear sourceless and undirected
(Disneyland effect).
Stabilized "rigid" objects replaced by part-objects, incompletions,
fragments.
Transformation from cultural hegemonies taken for granted (with their
associated margins) to competitive multiculturalisms within hegemonic
regimes.
Advent of microelectronics expanding the tacit environment of the body,
tending towards full (seamless) virtual realities.
Seamless virtual realities as the current _horizon_ of the technological
subject.
Destabilization of world economies coupled with exponential population
growth.
Increased reduction of DNA variability, increased toxicity of the planet.
Massive plant and animal extinctions.
Deep pollution of local and usually urban environments.
Increased "natural" catastrophies as the result of human interference
(Mississippi flooding).
Proliferation of shack cities (favellas, colonias) without sewage, water,
electric, and the growth of world-wide shack cultures.
Emancipation increasingly tied to communication and communicative strat-
egies - including weapons and weapon technology as media - the void (of
power, territory, language) becomes integral to the emancipated society
which is cast adrift.
World-wide growth of the Internet, including dark-net domains.
Tendency towards "technology with a human face" by the development and
proliferation of increasingly higher-level languages - tendency towards
cyborg-regimes.
Elimination of _master narratives,_ replaced by situational micro-narra-
tives (Lyotard).
Backlashing through an insistence on non-transcendentalist ethics among
tight subgroups (survivalists, fundamentalists) coupled with a freezing of
inscriptions (reliance on biblical word).
Confluence of genders, transgressive sexualities operating within an
_engendered field._
Increased problematizing of gender within queer/theory/feminist debates.
Institutionalized transgressions, abjections.
However, circumscribed abjections and alienations replaced by irreducible
abjections.
Traditional rites and rituals transformed into simulacra, combined with
the exhaustion of tradition (interior horizons of tradition, and _tradi-
tion_ replaced by _traditions_).
Growth of technological vulnerabilities and parasitologies (manufacture of
illegal domain names on the Net, hacking, cracking, pirate radio and
television, phone phreaking, etc.).
Art replaced by techne, and an exhaustion of traditional artistic/cultural
notions of progress and development.
Questioning of historic, geographic, anthropological methodologies and the
emergence of self-reflexive discourses (Mike Davis, Michael Taussig).
Increased serialities (manufactured "inauthentic" relations beneath and
within the sign of capital).
Increased cultural tourisms, relativisms, equivalences, beneath and within
the same.
Increased splitting of academic fields, discourses, languages.
Commercialization of the university, alliance of business and education -
i.e. _the business of education,_ _education of business._
The simulacra of desire's liberation and the potential of infinite choice.
Replacement of the spectacle by the simulacrum (no longer strings to pull)
(Baudrillard).
Replacement of the body by the cyborg-body, of the symbolic by the imag-
inary masquerading as the symbolic, of the real by the symbolic.
Replacement of the televised real by the symbolic-real, the real-symbolic
by the real.
The perception of life as the _condition_ of the real (Mars-life, diffu-
sionist theories).
--------------------
A split among _postmodernisms_ themselves into _apartment postmodernism_
characterized by wealth, personal telecom terminals, and a mobile urban-
ism; and a _postmodern poor_ characterized by nomadicisms, urban inten-
sifications, information economies (de Soto), available tech/telecom
strategies, and_electric media_ (loudspeaker, telephone, telegraph).
The development of _postmodern geographies_ which include nomadic and
telecom geographies (electromagnetic spectrum for example), body/gender
territories, and noise culture domains.
The development of telecommunications as a _third space_ beyond the
_second space_ of time and the _first space_ of traditional geographies.
Appearance of the _postmodern body,_ part-object, cyborgian, simulacra
appearing as _transgressive logics_ across and within its surfaces, the
new frontier corrupted by violent social/environmental decay (appearance
of immune deficiency and other diseases, increased medical technologies,
disappearance of the dead (Gulf "War," etc.).
Entrepreneurship within the digital realm, realm of the body - the sub-
tending of the real.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The postmodern remains unnamed; what drives it, its drives, are unnamed.
Names reproduce within the modern; their semantics are Kripkian, held in
place as rigid designators true in all possible worlds (counterfactuals).
In the postmodern, rigidity is problematic, deconstructed; worlds them-
selves are fuzzy, interwoven, partial. Communication at the speed of light
(Virilio) brings time to a standstill.
(Postmodern poor: Postmodernism occurs within a critical space, a space of
the catastrophic, emptied of symbolic legitimation and stability. Because
of capital flow, emigration, and struggles for individual survival and
autonomy, the space begins to "fill up," creating a cacophony of (infor-
mal) regimes competing for cultural and economic power, gaslines, water,
labor, prostitutions, and so forth. The resulting struggle produces com-
peting domains in which the symbolic itself is at stake; nothing, not even
communication, can be taken for granted. The zone is a chaotic accumula-
tion of intensities, condensed matter and languages, a dead or deligimi-
ized zone. The planet itself is becoming an accumulation of such zones.
Poor postmodernism is life which skips modernism, and heavy industry,
jumping when possible to radio, television, Internet - just a short dis-
tance from the maquiladora poisoning the environment - the early post-
industrial revolution of electronic assembly plants, tourisms, and small
manufacturing. (But here too is a myth (and where is "here"?); unemploy-
ment also grows, scarcity and desertification increase; but here, too,
a telenovella...))
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