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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