Post-Postmodernism is a general term used to describe new developments emerging from postmodernism. A similar term is metamodernism. Put less simply, post-postmodernism is a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.

History[change | change source]

Modernism began around 1900. It was a rejection of tradition and an attempt to see the world differently. Events such as World War 2 and the Great Depression made many feel modernism had failed. This led to postmodernism, which is cold and skeptical of the grand narrative of Western Society. This grand narrative is explained by Jean-François Lyotard as something.^[2] Postmodernism is a very broad term that cannot be defined by specific themes. It is an all-encompassing way of thinking.

Advances such as the internet have changed the way we live, making the world a smaller place but also making communication and interaction with things around us less intimate. Post-Postmodernism takes this as a key reason why a return to sincerity and authentic expression is the way forward for the 21st Century.

Definitions[change | change source]

Post-postmodernism is a very new idea that is still forming. There are many different ideas about how post-postmodernism could evolve and shape culture. They look to where faith, trust, dialogue, performance, and sincerity can work to overcome postmodern irony.

‘The search for authenticity’

Most scholars would agree that modernism began around 1900 and continued on as the dominant cultural force in the intellectual circles of Western culture well into the mid-twentieth century.^[1]

Like all eras, modernism encompasses many competing individual directions and is impossible to define as a discrete unity or totality. However, its chief general characteristics are often thought to include an emphasis on “radical aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic, rather than chronological form, [and] self-conscious reflexiveness”^[2] as well as the search for authenticity in human relations, [Emphasis mine] abstraction in art, and utopian striving. These characteristics are normally lacking in postmodernism or are treated as objects of irony [Emphasis mine]

May 2021

Postmodernism arose after World War II as a reaction to the perceived failings of modernism, whose radical artistic projects had come to be associated with totalitarianism^[3] or had been assimilated into mainstream culture. [Emphasis mine] … Since the 1960s, postmodernism has been a dominant, though not undisputed, force in art, literature, film, music, drama, architecture, history, and continental philosophy. Salient features of postmodernism are normally thought to include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels,^[6] a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a “grand narrative” of Western culture,^[7] a preference for the virtual at the expense of the real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what ‘the real’ constitutes)^[8] and a “waning of affect”^[9] on the part of the subject, who is caught up in the free interplay of virtual, endlessly reproducible signs inducing a state of consciousness similar to schizophrenia.^[10]

Since the late 1990s there has been a small but growing feeling both in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism “has gone out of fashion.”^[11]

A common theme of current attempts to define post-postmodernism is emerging as one where faith, trust, dialogue, performance, and sincerity can work to transcend postmodern irony. [deleted]

In his 2006 paper The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond, British scholar Alan Kirby formulated a socio-cultural assessment of post-postmodernism that he calls “pseudo-modernism”.^[23] Kirby associates pseudo-modernism with the triteness and shallowness resulting from the instantaneous, direct, and superficial participation in culture [Emphasis mine] made possible by the internet, mobile phones, interactive television and similar means: “In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads.”^[23]