Johanna: I am spinning a party with Hakim Bey speaking next week.
GorillaMan: I grew up in a postmodern era, so I was commenting not on modernity, but post-modernism, where there is a certain despair at trying to excel, and the idea of excellence is even called into question, as we saw many “accomplishments” that we question the validity of. This permeates most art and culture that we were bombarded with over the past 15 years, a cynical look at what we considered to be “progress”, and the things we left behind as a result of it. So if Modernity was about the progress, Post-Modernity is about a malaise in regards to progress in general, we still march toward progress almost automatically, but why? Or better yet, what does progress mean anyway?
Now we are getting into a phase where we ask why we are doing the things we did, just because we could. Why live if I have to take pills that make me numb in order to function in a modern society? If not me that takes these pills, why do so many of my friends and neighbors do so?
To call this awakening phase “Post-Post-Modern” is a cheapening of it in my opinion.
The reason I was referring to the art scene specifically, is all the paintings that are like scribble drawings with a little blurb about the scribble drawing. Artists stay somewhat aloof from their work, because they only half believe in it. It’s sort of a nihilistic malaise that came after modernism. That nihilism has been a source of irritation for me in myself, and I have long had a feeling of moving into a new time but being somewhat stuck in the prior, that post-modern era, and I think the new era is going to be an increase in conciousness of the world around us brought about by increased communications technology attaching us to the rest of the globe.
I don’t think it’s a reaction to Post-Modernism in the same way as Post-Modernism is to Modernity. Post-Modernism is like the closing of the chapter on Modernity and we are opening up to a new cycle, so it’s reactionary in that it’s a reaction to what came before it, but I think Modernity and Post-Modernism are one package and this is another, like Johanna said, a synthesis of sorts, and I agree it will have more to do with feeling and awakening one’s awareness within their own senses.
I was talking about the nihilism in the art community, as an example of post-modernism, where success is reduced to buying and selling commodities that have very little meaning to us. A vast number of us over the past 20 years have had any real connection the products we sell, we have been cogs in the wheels of progress, being told progress is on it’s way, be patient while we work out the kinks. So the art world has artists that don’t even paint their own work, they just mass-produce like a corporation, and even have a corporate structure, and are a reflection of that corporate structure than they are of more personal inner connection. This can be seen in the lack of connection many people have to the community around them. The not knowing your next-door neighbor syndrome. People getting excited if they run into a celebrity even if they don’t particularly like that celebrity. People are wealthy only because they know how to buy and sell stocks, with no real method to their madness other than making the most dividends come their way.
That’s what I was referring to about post-modernism. The whole Gen X bitching and moaning about how they are the first generation that’s gonna be worse off than their parents while Magazines were publishing articles about the 19 year old head of Yahoo being worth $ 100,000,000, and plenty of kids were going to work at established corporations with baggie pants and dyed hair because they knew how to turn on a computer. Then the dotcom bubble bursting and all those kids getting out of school having been promised this fancy economy when they went in have trouble when they realize they aren’t going to be making as much as the kids just a few years older than them just were.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is a limit to knowledge. I think that we must now go back to increase our awareness of our physical bodies. The next big advances coming along the way are advances in power systems, Genomics, Robotics, AI and Nanotechnology. Not to mention the amount of information added to the internet on any given day that is accessible at our fingertips from our living rooms. So now it’s just a matter of assimilating a lot of the sudden access to the ability to communicate the proper information more directly to the proper person/organization, and the advances that the interconnection of existing technology will bring. So as people get connected to people all around the globe the flow of ideas increases.
So while I think there is a sense of being overwhelmed by it, I see it as being slightly less cynical and reactionary than post-modernism.
YMMV
Erek