What happened to postmodernism?
That great intellectual movement of the late 20th Century
that questioned all objective conceptions of truth?
What happened to it? Did it end?
Most people seem to agree that- Yeah, it did end...
But if you ask those same people, when postmodernism ended...
they can't really give you an answer.
This may be due to the fact that the idea of postmodernism is still
pretty foggy.
It's hard to define it, except as a reaction to the modernism it was created to refute.
The simplest way I can describe it is like this:
Postmodernism is a good "catch-all"
for all the various and chaotic ways of thinking that characterize the later part of the 20th century.
But as we neared the millennium,
and the need to react to or refute modernism seemed
less and less relevant.
Postmodernism sort of fell apart and we were left with...
well...
... Nothing.
Indeed, one of the key characteristics of our time
is its inability to define itself with a set of intelletual ideas.
Why is this? Why have categories like this broken down?
Why don't they seem to suit the contemporary age?
Is it because everything's just too chaotic now?
Or is it because we have too much information, and too much access for any one movement
to congeal and rise to prominence?
Yeah. I think that's probably true,
but it only tells us so much.
If we dig a little bit deeper, we can see that what's really changed
is our relationship to history.
As science fiction author, Bruce Sterling, once said
What Sterling means is that 'History'
studying it, or writing it, or knowing it,
has always been a game of meanings.
We look back, and based on certain material facts and contemporary writings,
try to tell a coherent story about past cultures and their values.
The meanings they ascribe to their time and existence.
Now, modernism and postmodernism had something in common
their access to history was enabled
by paper. By books. Books with covers and bindings
but more importantly with beginnings, middles, and ends.
Modernist & postmodernist thinkers had to resort to books. They had no other choice.
They learned the authoritative sources on a given subject,
either to accept or refute them,
and by responding to the tradition,
They, themselves, became a part of it.
But these are different times.
The Book was replaced...
it was replaced with The Network.
And the Network doesn't respect history or tradition.
Let's say you wanna know something about... I don't know...
The Philosophy of Stoicism.
I bet the very first thing you would do is open up a search engine, probably Google,
and let a complex, ever-changing algorithm, based on views, recency, filters, phrasing, and much more
prioritize a list of results.
Within that list are all kinds of different and contradictory positions
all the way from top university professors to some guy on his couch.
And in each article there is usually a comments section
with opinions about those opinions.
Then if you can find the author's name, you can go back to Google and type that in
see if you can somehow determine via their wikipedia page or number of twitter followers
what other people consider the level of their authenticity to be.
Or you can just go to YouTube, which I often do,
and see if someone's made a video about Stoicism that's a little bit easier to digest.
In the network culture, everything is fluid.
Poorly organized but extremely persuasive narratives accumulate,
alter and change as quickly as Google's algorithm does.
And we have access to all of them.
Instantaneously.
Sterling and fellow author, William Gibson, named this unnameable transition period of culture
Atemporality.
in which we have this great unmooring from historical knowledge.
This makes for a lot of unease in our time.
The maps we have: The Network,
The Internet and all its social function
Can't seem to do its job. It can't map a strong master narrative onto the world we see in front of us.
Now, maybe someday it will. Sterling gives it ten years.
But it won't look like any of the master narratives from literary culture.
Really, we have no idea what a master narrative in network culture could look like.
Now, it's easy to see that such a disruptive break from the past also means
an uncertainty about the future.
About what progress looks like...
A lack of confidence in the market, in nation states, in groups of nation states like the EU
in the belief that democracy can be exported around the globe are all symptomatic of this
Atemporal transition period.
In the world and in the Arts, what you get is this collaging of past and future in the present.
The re-purposing of old structures and obsessions with predicted futures of the past that
never came about.
I mean what's more out-of-time, for example, than stuff like steampunk.
It's tempting to see this new historical situation as a problem.
But you can look at it as an opportunity too.
Why not take up the whirling elements of the past and the future
and design the contempoary moment that you want to see?
In art, in your personal life, or in the public space.
Maybe the high-brow philosophy of the future can't be canonized.
Maybe there never will be another Charles Dickens or George Orwell,
but there's a great freedom in losing the canon, as well.
As Sterling notes, historians really used to worry that their interpretations of the past
were clouded by their own values.
Maybe the good is that for us, right now,
we just don't know what our values really are.
So that whether we're looking back or looking forward, the Atemporal age and
the Atemporal person can finally see
with clear eyes.
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