I don’t think we’ll ever completely separate ourselves from
postmodernist notions. After all, some postmodernist ideas have been
percolating around in discourses of consciousness and meaning-making processes at
least since Dante’s 13th-century Letter
to Cangrande della Scalla in which the author (presumably Dante) discusses
the fact that his work is polysemous. He expounds upon that notion and
discusses four types of meanings which result in multiple strategies for
interpreting texts.
Further, if postmodernist expanded the notion of “text” to
include signs, natural phenomena, and more, well, we’ve had that in our
consciousness ever since early Babylonian astrologers. In terms of creating
patterns and developing codes / numerical strategies for text interpretations,
we’ve certainly had that since Jewish gematria,
and then also Kabbalistic practices.
This is not the place to develop a genealogy of
postmodernist thoughts. I would love to do so, but I don’t want to deviate from
the central idea, which is to say that for the last 10 or 20 years, theorists
of all sorts have been attempting to declare postmodernism has declared
officially “over” – and have proposed a wide array of alternative theories,
many of which have to do with culture, technology, gender, and ethics.
There are aspects of postmodernist thought that I find very
useful and I would not want to give them up. For example, I don’t want to give
up some of the more interesting notions of reality and reality construction.
Perhaps it’s not productive to say that the world is
completely an illusion, but it’s fun to think so. I also like the social
constructivist ideas, especially when connected with power. For example, I have
to say that I agree when Foucault and Baudrillard suggests prisons exist not
only to enforce behavioral norms, but also to delude us into thinking that
there is a “free” world and that “freedom” is an absolute, when in reality,
there are all kinds of constraints to our freedom, beginning with language
itself, and ending in behaviors, beliefs, and values that may be, in essence,
coercive.
I think it is interesting that many of the new ideas of
post-postmodernism have much to do with new technologies and the impact on
identity (digital communities), selfhood (genetic engineering), privacy
(Internet, surveillance, UAVs), communication (communications technologies), understanding
the world (computing, Big Data), and more.
In fact, once one uses technology as the primum mobile of consciousness and global
epistemological constructs, it’s easy to see how a next logical step would be a
preferential shift to technocratic social organization, from individual
communication to bodies politic. The implications could pretty scary.
Technocracies are notoriously dehumanizing, especially when combined with command
economies or oligopoly-tending capitalistic economies.
Here are a few recent ideas:
Pseudo-modernism /
digimodernism: Digital technology can dismantle persistent postmodern
issues such as “existential uncertainty” and “artistic anti-essentialism.”
Kirby argues that the post-postmodern generation reverts to modernism, at least
in the sense that there is a renewed belief in agency and in individual ability
to influence others (by means of technology).
See Kirby (2009) Digimodernism:
How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture.
Automodernism: Robert Samuels argues that new technology
allow a new level of neutrality to emerge. At the same time, postmodernist
identity “flux” is supplanted by new, hardened identity politics.
Complexism: Philip Galanter has created a fusion of
technology and the arts; it has been suggested that he echoes and updates the
Russian and Italian Futurists (who were certainly pro-technology, with the idea
that technology helps establish a coherent New World Order. Some of the
enthusiasm died in WWI and in the early Soviet Union.
Hypermodernism: Hypermodernism, coined in the 1990s, is a
chaotic, high-intensity, fast-paced world of rapid and always evolving identity
and social relationships. The hypermodern is not characterized by indeterminacy
(as would the postmodernist world), but in quick moments of stasis, followed by
discrete, lenticular “pods” of culture / socioeconomic / socio-political
ontology.
Altermodernism:
Nicolas Bourriaud embraces alterity and takes it further, suggesting that the
creolization of our cultures in the global context will create a universal
aesthetic. Multiculturism is worn out. The next stage is the “creole” (which
will probably change, given the colonialist overtones implicit in the word
itself.)
***
References
Alighieri, Dante. Letter to Can Grande della Scala. Accessed
November 13, 2013 http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/cangrande.english.html
Awet (2013). Other Post-Postmodernisms: A Glossary. Heterodoxia.
April 2013. Accessed Nov 15, 2013. http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia/?p=896#more-896
Kirby, A. (2009) Digimodernism: How New Technologies
Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture. London, NY: Continuum
Publishers.