What happens after postmodernism?

it's about pretending there's meaning, finding stories and truths even though you know they can't "Ultimately" be "True". people with fingers in their ears, once again able to love, hope, believe.

Postmodernism in general is very embarrassing if it really is what is going to pass as the most pervasive (modern-Western, of course=) "philosophical concept" or even deconstructing lens / way of looking at texts/ "the werld" for the first few decades of this lifetime.

It's self-conscoiusly shallow; I'm quite looking forward to its demise. We could have done much better.

-- Jetlag Willy (noodle_vagu...), June 8th, 2005. Thats something only one who's proud of a universal Ignorance can claim (and you can't project fears of damnation onto future generations based on the sins of the past). Sorry, there are some Absolutes =)

Okay, our minds shall never meet (2nite) - I should go to bed for now...adios

I don't think denying certainty equates with celebrating ignorance. Postmodernism needn't be a master narrative. The process is about unravelling binaries. Even mine.

Shantih.

And for that matter, the question's a bit weighted: Is the world heading inexorably to a universal postmodern age, whatever that is? That's a metanarrative of which I'm suspicious.

I think people understand life through narratives because our brains are wired that way. Memory uses links with events. So we'll act as if we can make progress, or as if there's Truth, or as if 'right-thinking people think such and such' even though We All Know this isn't the case.

beanz: I don't know why, but I had a theory prof in the fall of 2001 who very carefully was able to shepherd his usual discussions up the preceipitous hill of current events and recontextualize it in terroristic terms - that perhaps, what Sept 11th (or a series of them) will signify on a grand scale is a collecive need to embrace the master narrative again for the obvious reasons of latching onto a "good vs. evil" paradigm again, a way to define those terms in order for the attacked to defend themselves, and defend their consequent reactions,on that theo level. there are surely ess obvious reasons.

coming to think more of it, I think I can agree w/ Leon when it comes to saying that the late imperial Romans had a "postmodern style" in terms of art and such forth. but not a philosophy (if i'm allowed to temp call it that) like we do; they still celebrated their Saturnalias with as much if not more gusto than the early Romans. Suicide, victory, the harvest...all still had meaning to them

Noodle Vague - I don't mean championing ignorance on a conscious level, and if i must get wholly honest with you (but wouldnt that be a boring modernist convention? =) I'd admit that personally i myself believe that there are only, oh, say, two or three absolutes, with one of them being that everything on Earth (aside from these coupleo f exceptions!) are governed by Relativity! i just don't want yo uto misunderstand me, but with my limited elaboration, well, _that's_ a certainity =)

[[[and can i just re-emphasize here that this ENTIRE DISCUSSION must strictly be kept within the "quotes" of a modern/western paradigm which is wholly irrelevant to other civilizational world-views / phil systemz? the Islamic master narrative is doing JUST fine - partying like it's 1426 because it IS 1426 in the year of Teh Prophet - nvrmind that fearmongering abt the Great Satan thk u v much, and the hindu grand narratve, which has the advantage of being cyclical (thus prone to a cop-out abt eternity) is proceeding very nicely in what some are arguing is the ascending age of dwapara yuga...a grand master narrative that will endlessly play out until Pralaya (the "end of the cosmos")]]]

one more thought: i guess my conclusion abt the lack of insta-nostalgia in previous epochs is a bit shallow in itself, as it doesnt allow for the fact that the technology (such as that VH1-television) was missing for the Romans of the 140s to idealize the aesthetics of the 120s in the first place. maybe this leads to a differing question: could PoMo, as we know it today only have blossomed as it did with the certain set of unique factors we find aiding its growth in "modern" times such as technology, or is it ind'pt of all this in its place in the development of western thought after modernism?

Probably more so w/ the rise of Mithraism, and the influence of the hero cults and other religions from the Orient, that could have only expanded after the empire did. All that really was just resaging Xianity in the first place, with Jesus ultimately standing in for Mithra

It's basically taking laziness one step further.

My feeling is that it's too early to give up on uncertainty, that it has its own fruitful avenues to pursue. And maybe pomo, or a version of it, provides an entry for non-Western philosophies to rearrange Western thinking just a little? Which was certainly the case for the Romans.

dinosaurs, ww2, spacesuits, the tao, and pez.
m.

Some people don't seperate experience from understanding by saying "We All Know this isn't the case" but instead look through a different lens that is more coherent. They say the same thing that makes brains wired that way, also gives Truth and morality.

How is it possible to deny the concept of truth without claiming any truth value for that denial? ... our actions and thoughts conform to certain narratives, but we don't explicitly know what they are.

Denying Truth is not a reasonable conclusion. It takes an unjustifiable seperation of Fact and Value. Many narratives include within them the part that man will not fully know about the narrative they are following. There has to be a high power to know about it.

http://www.enjoyart.com/library/travel_tourism/america/large/chicago_world_fair.jpg

so i guess i feel the question is a non-starter since postmodernism (meaning non-metaphysical thought) never really happened.

It's self-conscoiusly shallow...

I dunno. It seems like the most natural and useful vehicle for philosophical dilettantism. You can't really reconcile being anything but repulsed by all but a few schools unless you approach them with a postmodern mindset, no? Not that I know what I'm talking about.

A few things...First, wasn't postmodernism more a reaction to the whipping away of certainty than a cause of it? The whole 20th century was an argument for uncertainty, starting with Einstein and carrying through the Holocaust and the Killing Fields.

I don't think that uncertainty is going away, no matter how much Pope Ratzinger rails against relativism. But I do think postmodernism is a form of atomization and dismantlement -- a useful form -- and that, like particle physics, it will have to be succeeded by further attempts at reconstitution. Unified theories, in other words, which are of course master narratives. But they'll be more nuanced and flexible master narratives, and they will incorporate the perspectives offered by postmodernism.

I think they've already started to emerge in the last few decades, under various names: chaos theory, complexity theory, network theory, all these different ways of trying to think systemically but not ideologically (at least, not ideologically as we currently understand ideology).

How does postmodernism make these reasonable?

the inability to say anything foundational or metaphysical about reality prevents us from embracing the relative certainty of a feeling like despair or pessimism--the idea is to keep our ears open, to continue the metaphor, and try to hear what's going on now.

OTFM. And I haven't even read Foer yet.

although I don't think he's ever really succeeded at the post-PoMo synthesis he's trying for

But that only makes him a more perfect example. What happens after postmodernism? Either a desperate retreat into the Iron Fortress Of Certainty/Master Narrative/Nom Du Pere or a repetition of postmodernisms forms (which were, of course, only modernism's forms without modernism's certainty), so weary as to be exhausted, at the last, even of irony.

please return my half of the brain when you're done with it...

The Übermensch

If we're looking for new forms, I'd humbly submit that the sorts of collaborative media we're working in right here seem a more natural successor. talk about exploding the notion of an author. they're texts certainly, and who's to tell to what degree they're not fictions...

I'm less concerned with forms though than with the ethos that drives them. which is kind of what I was gettting at in my earlier post. e.g., the usual litany of formal pomo hallmarks are pretty much all found (front and center) in the modern. the break is in ethos, not in praxis. as High Art bleeds cultural capital, it gets harder and harder for serious artists not to act as though no one's looking and start, in the most serious way possible, to wank. often with spectacular and unexpectedly moving results (search: Barthelme)

haha, yeah, I just did a Google search and got a ton of hits, half of them dead links, most of them from university English departments in the mid-'90s. Way more noodling theory than actual attempts at fiction, and such attempts as I found were pretty primitive. But it's hard for me to believe that the experience of hypertext -- growing up with it, or even reacting against it -- won't somehow shape the next few generations.

If we're looking for new forms, I'd humbly submit that the sorts of collaborative media we're working in right here seem a more natural successor.

Right, the Internets is the McDonald's playland of complexity theorists. And the potential and predilection for collaborative, adaptive, flexible authorship raises a whole bunch of interesting questions. (Like in the Wiki- model, where the reader becomes an author, but in so doing kills the idea of an auteur, etc. There must be theses written on all these things...)

And if ethos is the question, then I think it's true that what we're doing here is part of building it. There's a sort of metanoia going on, at least in pockets of the globe, and it's going to produce some very interesting things (if given the opportunity and not, like, blown up or jailed). I think those of us here now are -- like DFW -- too early in the process to have much sense of its fruits. But it'll be fun to sort of hang around and see what happens.

video games vs. hypertext fiction vs. choose your own adventure novels. all three really kill a story. when was the last time somebody cried over a videogame? and not because of frustration... but from the beauty/richness/whatever of the experience. (i'm reading "Theory of Fun" right now... it's "Understanding Comics" for video games...so i'm paraphrasing from there a bit.)

i was gonna humbly suggest mmorpg video games... or role playing game worlds... loose fragments of fictional culture to work with... and then the users of the media create their own stories within the fictional culture... including in-game vs. out-of-game relationships.

of course, that probably feels a lot like the MUD/MOO business circa hypertext fiction times... hehe...
m.

is hypertext in the ghetto yet? in the hands of the desperate folks?
m.

Dude, the way everyone keeps bandying the word about, it was always finished.

a. reconvene after midnight
b. move the venue to a dormitory lounge (research university acceptable but national 4-year liberal arts college preferred)
c. gird our loins (and buffer our synapses) with insane quantities of primo humboldt pie

U-unless consideration of the epiphenomena of being implies a priori reliance on a metaphysics of presence, in which case the entire debate becomes prepostmodernist but not modernist and cancels itself in a puff of smoke and blinding flash of white light.

U-unless we invoke said metaphysics of presence self-consciously (but not ironically), in which case we achieve postpostmodernity and stumble happily to bed. In the morning we will remember nothing.

WOLF.

Our slips are healed.

Agreed that it was quite the dumbshow, but not so sure there was a serve there to return...

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a115/Seawitch_/fundies.jpg