Dead is the New Perennial

When someone's last name is verbatim the file format for a word document, you know they've probably got something going for them. That anecdote remains true with Edward Docx's "Postmodernism is dead" critique, which I'll concede was a great read, and healthy food for thought. Despite that, though, I find that postmodernism is as ever-present as it has always been, and that what has really died is simply a contingency of starkly opinionated yet maladroit artists who get their kicks out of the closest thing to "trolling" in the art world.

For the majority of his critique, Eddy summarizes the existence of postmodernism as "really an attack not just on the dominant narrative or art forms but rather an attack on the dominant social discourse" and "that we are all in our very selves nothing more than the breathing aggregate of [social] structures. It contends that we cannot stand apart from the demands and identities that these structures and discourses confer upon us." Postmodernism is everything that modernism wanted to be—the righteous vandals who scurry under the radar, leaving their marks and dropping hints to help the rest of the art world, instructing them to follow the white rabbit out of the matrix that is these "structures" that dictate what art should be. And yet, wasn't that what modernism already was? From the Wikipedia article on Modernism: 

"In art, Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody in new forms. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator."

The irony in this is that in Edward's article, he himself pokes fun at how postmodernism tears apart the predisposed ideas we developed in the Enlightenment.

What I see here isn't a unique new genre of music or art or expression, I see the rustled jimmies of displaced modern artists who felt as though their established state of unestablishment became too established, so they moved on to create something less established. An endless cycle of who can be the most disconnected. As a highschool student, this is pretty evident with the way basic trends work, too. Remember "Call Me Maybe"? Remember when it first came out, how cool it was to be into it, because not everyone was? But then it became uncool, because everyone was into it! So now Call Me Maybe isn't cool anymore. It's just overplayed. Need another analogy? Think of the Twilight Book series. When it first emerged and hordes of teenage girls were in ecstatic tumult about it, the few and the proud who remained contrary to that mentality were the cool ones. Slowly but surely, as the series ended, more and more people flocked to the "We hate Twilight!" crowds, though. And now, hating Twilight isn't funny anymore. Now, you don't even talk about it. The same thing happened with Justin Bieber. I could go on.

But given enough time, all of it moves in a cycle. This cycle tends to be very subjective, but probably at some point in the future, Call Me Maybe will be remembered fondly again, without any of the baggage it's developed from being played and talked about so often. Even now, the people who adopt the "Well, it's a very good song with a catchy tune and fun lyrics, it's simply overplayed" attitude are considered level-headed and adult, as they've again separated themselves from the crowd. 

So, then is postmodernism really dead? Was it never alive? Was it simply a bastardization of a legitimate genre that somehow weaseled itself into the annals of art history? None of the above! I see postmodernism as a genre that is ever-present, and continues to live on in the genres that it riffs upon. In this case, that genre is modernism. But the people with the aforementioned attitude are always there, as they themselves are the people who, hundreds of years ago, began the Enlightenment. The people who detached themselves from the group and looked for answers outside of social structures and discourse are not postmodernists, they are an ongoing mindset that is only defined by the establishment that they tear themselves away from. 

And while my tone towards these people has been slightly less than accepting, I do believe that there are absolutely lessons we can learn from these separatists, but all in moderation. Society as a whole can benefit from the teachings of those who have dared to dream beyond the boundaries of accepted discourse, and as evidenced by the Enlightenment, we already have. And we will continue to do so, for as long as society exists. But what we want as a society are truly unique viewpoints and attitudes delivered by scholars who've separated themselves from society purely for the purpose of enlightenment, not washed up existential cynicism from hipsters who thought their last clique wasn't obscure enough.