July 27, 2011
The Death of Postmodernism
means the arrival of what Kirby called pseudo-modernism in 2006:
To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them. There have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterday’s giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.
I spent half the night worrying about this, particularly considering how much time I spend mucking around the internet.
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Post-modernism will always exist as long as there are people who take themselves too seriously, and as long as there is a need to defend oneself from those who do.
This essay has a great concluding paragraph, with the wonderful description of “a new weightless nowhere of silent autism.” I share a sense of the implicit irony here that a market economy generates pervasive technological power and solipsism at the same time. Individual power is realized by unmaking the authority and stability of all worlds through instant world access and publication. But this illusion of power renders imagination significant only in quantitative terms, while making unfounded opinion a gesture suitable for all possible responses. World conquest is measured against the virtues of one’s ability to reduce that world to ashtrays and Coke cans around the keyboard. In such a world fiction writes itself and is read by fictional beings–with no sense of the metafictionists reflexive irony ever appearing.