ASSISTANT
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In my last video, I laid out some broad assessments of what post-modernism was in an attempt to lay the groundwork for talking about the new cultural period in which we find ourselves today. A period after post-modernism. I said it would be helpful to look at the views of three very influential thinkers on post-modernism before explaining how our current period came to be.
So here we go. The first thinker is Jean Francois Lyotard, whose highly influential 1979 work "The Postmodern Condition" suggested that post-modernism had arisen out of what he called an incredulity toward meta-narratives or, more simply put, a loss of belief in big stories. Such stories once served to orient society and provide the grounding for knowledge, but have since lost their credibility with the population. As a result, all notions of an objective absolute truth or any claim to universality become inherently suspect. Post-modernism, then, is a culture that rejects any and all such master narratives, any grand truth or meaning that would claim to give an orienting purpose to the world. Because of this, postmodern society is characterized by fragmentation into countless micro-narratives, a motley array of different localized realities all playing incommensurable language games. Truth becomes relative, and technocratic elites seek only knowledge that is useful for gaining wealth and power, asking only, "Is it saleable?"
David Harvey gives a slightly different reading. For him, what postmoderns lost wasn't exactly a grand narrative but a commitment to any sense of eternal and immutable elements in modern life. Modernists, since Baudelaire, took stock of the fact that their brave new world of industrialization and scientific progress marked a real break from traditional modes of existence. They noted that the hallmarks of this new thing, modernity, were "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent." While pre-modern lifestyles were based on enduring practices and beliefs rooted in the ancient past, modern life was just the opposite, with ever-changing technologies, ideologies, and increasingly novel goods. Because of this growing sense of change and ephemerality, modernists sought to give voice to whatever was still enduringly timeless and unchanging. After the First World War, a new urgency arose to articulate such a stable truth. However, the attempt to create an orienting mythology for the modern age ended in base nationalist domination and racist genocide, discrediting the search for a transcendent vision or mythic goal. In the postmodernist world that took shape afterward, a life defined by the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent was simply accepted as the way things are. The hope for some eternal and unchanging truth, goal, or myth was given up on. All one could do was hurl themselves into flux, discontinuity, and transience.
Finally, Frederick Jameson argues that post-modernism is, in part, the loss of the entire hermeneutic model or interpretive approach to experience. In the past, people tended to seek some deeper meaning to things, to look for symbolic significance or authenticity in actions. However, in the postmodern turn, this notion of a deeper truth or meaning is abandoned. Depth is replaced by surface, and any attempt to seek something beyond or beneath our immediate mundane experience of life is considered futile. All we have is the appearance, the sign, the show. Life is simply the play of surfaces, a perspective that aligns with the narrative of consumer capitalism.
Reading these three thinkers in light of one another, some fascinating similarities emerge. All three define post-modernism negatively, as signaling the loss of something. Lyotard highlights the loss of grand narratives, Harvey points to the loss of eternal and immutable elements, and Jameson emphasizes the loss of a hermeneutic model. This structural overlap suggests that these thinkers might be missing the larger picture, like the three blind men in the parable. There seems to be an "elephant in the room" that unites them all. I will return to this in a future video as it is crucial to the argument I aim to make about our new emerging period.
Equipped with the insights offered by Lyotard, Harvey, and Jameson, we can have a better understanding of what has come after post-modernism. Post-modernism dominated cultural and intellectual production during the 70s and 80s, but in the 1990s, its energy began to dissipate. Some influential writers of the time were now critiquing postmodern strategies from within. David Foster Wallace, despite being associated with post-modernism himself, increasingly voiced concerns about the role of cynical irony in postmodern culture. He argued that irony had lost its power as an effective tool of critique in an irony-saturated culture, which had become complacent and complicit. Wallace looked forward to a post-cynical, post-postmodern ethos that eschewed irony in favor of sincere engagement. He believed that by dispensing with irony in a fully ironic culture, subversion would be achieved. The prospect of a new avant-garde that embraced sincerity and credulity opened up as a novel possibility.
While Wallace and others posed their critiques, many cultural critics were also recognizing the decline of post-modernism. Linda Hutcheon, in her influential book "The Politics of Postmodernism," concluded that the postmodern moment had passed. She called for a new label to define the contemporary period and suggested that post-postmodernism needed to have its own characteristics rather than being defined in opposition to post-modernism. Several new labels, such as re-modernism, performanceism, and Netta-modernism, have been proposed by a new generation of cultural theorists. These labels aim to periodize post-postmodernism and shed light on the current state of the world.
Exploring these labels and their commonalities can reveal trends and trajectories common to all, helping us understand the current period in 2019.