YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.
If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.
The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.
But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.
As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.
And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.
So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?
In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.
To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.
Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.
But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.
Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.
As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.
TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.
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