Post-everything
Last night Benjamin woke me up in a critical moment and could not get into sleep for awhile. In those moments all kinds of thoughts begin to circulate, most being not worthwhile remembering next morning. This is one those, but here it comes anyway.
It appears that if you present yourself as on the hip you'd better name it post-whatever. (In my lately reading I've run into terms besides post-modernity such as post-evangelicalism, post-theology, and some other post's.) Being "post" gives you freedom to link your thoughts with the good part of the respective set of ideas, without being identified with all the representatives, or poor applications of those ideas. Besides all the cases when "post" is an appropriate prefix, it also gives freedom to publish incomplete ideas that perhaps are not even expected to hold thoroughly consistent, because they are laid out as a critique towards what the thinker is being "post".
For big amount of cases the usage of "post" as the key definition demonstrates more inability to express what's the idea is for - what characterizes it. Simple "post" is more of a negative on what it's not - or what it's going-beyond.
Perhaps that the case with postmodernity too. Perhaps the term will be later on replaced with something more contentful. It might be that it would be impossible to define it by the person involved, anyway (like you cannot objectively know yourself - if anything) Perhaps renaissance was not named by the contemporaries either - modernity might have - but the meaning of the word has certainly got new twists afterwards.
I would think that either all the post's will be relatively short eras giving in to something better definable, or then future post's wont' be post-post-modernity etc, but rather they have defined the current post through another characteristic.
...Luckily then, I fell asleep again and had a restful morning...
1 Comments:
Just a couple of thoughts ...
(1) Some people (like Thomas C. Oden, IIRC), like to call postmodernism "ultramodernism" instead. They believe that it is the necessary outcome, the climax, of modernity, and, as such, not that much different from its predecessor.
(2) "Post-post-modernism" is actually already used by some other thinkers (can't think of a name right away, but I know I've come across this somewhere recently), who claim that we're already past the real postmodernism. In the theological realm, the ideas of the "Radical Orthodoxy" movement, for example, might go a little in this direction.
(3) In the Evangelical world, "postconservative" Evangelicalism has become a biggy (and a big threat in the eyes of many). Concepts that come to mind would be e.g. the "openness of God" or "condiditional immortality." Newer writers tend to speak of "generous orthodoxy" in order to avoid the negative post... terminology, but, at the end, it amounts to the same thing.
God bless you, Toph.
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