Postmodernism?
Postmodernism!* once upon a time, was a name to conjure with. Bemoaned by a host of big-heads as the “collapse of metanarrative” the post modern was decried by fascist talk radio, fussy academics, and crackpot psychologists alike; feared by mom and pop, while being celebrated by the teens watching MTV: “Madonna is so postmodern.” In the art world, it became the last avant-garde. Meanwhile the war in Iraq—the first one—was brought to the level of entertainment. The so-called fragmentation of the psyche followed hard upon the fragmentation of the soviet state. The once robust fantasies of the postwar era were in tatters, even while industrial production continued to accelerate apace. Torn between boredom and atrocity, we settled for mindless consumption, but we did so ironically. It was literally “the end of history.”
While many large books and ten thousand think pieces have been written detailing this cultural upheaval, as if it heralded some new catastrophe, if not the collapse of meaning itself (the shockwaves from the transcendental object at the end of time), it is all too obvious now that all the anxiety and hand wringing over this big mean era and its seas of relativity, was only a kind of chintzy millenarianism (before the fall of the millennium) that only hid more of the same privatization and violent expropriation that we had been stuck inside of for the last 400 years; in other words it was still just plain old capitalist modernity and whose own alienating and materialist metanarrative was yet very much in order: get rich or die trying*.
As revealed by Madonna in her hit song Material Girl (1984), the 17th century material reality established by science (that most people still believe in without question) in which nature and the body is dead and inert, its resources waiting to be extracted by Man, is the necessary condition for the accumulation of material wealth. Because, obviously, you can’t take your money to the grave.
Material Girl, 1984, Madonna
*I wrote this, unwittingly, on the day that Frederic Jameson died at the age of 90. From a certain view point postmodernism is his term, although it is certainly now living a life of its own. Postmodernism probably has some narrow validity as a genre recoiling from late capitalism; and of which genre I am not particularly interested. After further consideration, however, I do think that it is valid to assume that something did change after the bomb at the level of epoch, although it may only be the technological amplification of being inside of a tightening noose… Terminal Modernity? The radical doubt of “what we are being told”, as expressed by the conspiracy theorist, is a doubt arising and displaced from the certainty of both material reality/wealth. The era following the bomb, that some call post modern, would be characterized as a new indulgence in the paranoiac nature of knowledge, of which the non-material UFO is the ultimate epiphany…
*the grand metanarrative “get rich or die trying,” has been referred to else where as Capitalist Realism.
