Life After Postmodernism?

To glimpse the distinction between postmodernism and post postmodernism, I find the following recent events in the world of art a helpful illustration. Back in 2018, a Banksy painting, “Girl With Balloon”, was auctioned for $1.4 million. Upon the slamming of a gavel and the sale being declared, a hidden mechanism in the frame was triggered, shredding more than half the painting into thin strips. Banksy himself later took responsibility for the scheme, revealing that he himself had built and concealed the shredding mechanism, clearly to execute what he intended as an art exhibition. From a modernist perspective, a painting being physically damaged or destroyed would reduce its value, and so the shredding incident can be interpreted as a form of postmodern critique of modernity, in that it destroyed the art object as such and manifested a kind of paradoxical dialectic between the two levels of artistic expression: namely, between the art object as such and the “artistic performance” of its destruction by shredding. Now comes the juncture where postmodernism ends and post postmodernism begins: the public’s reaction to the shredding. The painting, half-shredded, instead of becoming less valuable in the eyes of its consumers as a result, became, with a dose of irony befitting postmodernism, more valuable. Indeed, three years later, in 2021, the shredded painting, now entitled “Love is in the Bin”, went up for auction again and sold for $25.4 million to an Asian art collector. Particularly interesting here is the public’s seeming affirmation not only that the value of art can be multiplied through its destruction, but that even the elusive and ephemeral postmodern performance is not immune to commodification. Truly, I wonder whether Banksy intended for someone to become $25.4 million wealthier through his performance. A final interesting sidenote: Banksy also later revealed that he intended the painting to be shredded in its entirety, and not only half-way; perhaps this signifies a faint glimmer of symbolic hope.

Now, with the dynamics of these events in mind, let us reflect. Postmodernism is an uncreative, amorphous parasite which derives its phantasmic life from true being. By ‘uncreative’, I mean that it operates only through placing things into paradoxical relations, ultimately rendering their previous meanings relativistically enclosed at best and vacuous at worst, both of which are at bottom synonymous. So, although the breadth of its activity, in its myriad guises, is too great to cover in a brief space, I will nonetheless attempt to touch on a particular thread of its progression in culture and society: the economy of brand and its effects on personal identity. I am concerned to do this not only because of postmodernism’s own perniciousness, but also because its alleged defeat at the hands of post postmodernism is in truth no defeat at all (nor is it a redemption thereof, depending on how one prefers to frame the matter)—rather, it is quite the opposite: namely, an embedding of the parasite deeper into the life of man. With its emphasis on deconstructing normative cultural and societal categories along relativist and subjectivist lines, the postmodern parasite’s strategy had been, for much of its early life, clandestine subversion; though, in recent decades, its patterns of operation having run their course and become more brazen, what we still see of the postmodern as such is merely an ideological specter of something now dead—an echo of a delirious incantation once chanted into the world. What sprouted from the soil where the seed of its corpse was planted, however—post postmodernism, as some have named it—is no resurrection to eternal life. Rather, again, it is quite the opposite: a metamorphosis of ideological death into social death.

In our post postmodern culture, branded products, including cult personalities in the form of streamers and influencers, who offer themselves up to consumers as branded products, comprise a pseudo-sacramental means of social self-relation, instantiating a type of meaningless, hellish, counterfeit eternity. This counterfeit requires the abandonment of the mutual interiority of past, present, and future, and a detachment of the present from past and future. This detachment accomplishes the teleological blindness required to forge entirely novel, and thus empty, patterns and ways of being. This novelty, being cheap and easily imitated, dies virtually as soon as it is born. Within the virtual world generated by this Sisyphean engine of novelty, perhaps most appropriately referred to as a circus, past and future become impediments instead of temporal anchors for the present, lest it find genuine resonance with eternity. The sort of novelty engendered within post postmodern time, held together by sacramental brand-worship, involves a turning of teleological time in on itself, halting its proper development for those who enter in through participation, rendering their worlds a perpetual reshuffling of lifeless novelty. Accordingly, those who so participate subject their own identities to a process of deformation, becoming formed and filled by this emptiness they consume.

The sacrament of the branded product is an inversion of reality as symbolic. Indeed, the adornment of one’s identity with brand is an act of anti-symbolism. This can be seen by considering its dynamic: man fashions and sells himself branded products as a kind of false heaven so that he may reach up and take their meanings, attempting to make a name for himself; but the problem lies precisely in that these meanings do not come truly from above man, but from himself (or some other fallen spiritual source). Genuine symbol is the union of heaven and earth, whereas the sacrament of branded product is a union of earth disguised as heaven with earth.

In a flat, postmodern landscape, symbol and meaning become vapid, phantasmic, and impossible to grasp. If, then, we conceive of post postmodernism as an attempt to escape this boundless, postmodern prison man has built for himself, we can see that not only does this attempted escape fail, but, quite to the contrary, it becomes the very concretization of those ideological prison walls of postmodernity into the social order via branded products, the pinnacle of which is the influencer, which is rapidly displacing the traditional notion of celebrity. But the irony is—and these matters are always clothed in irony—that man has tricked himself into believing that this new post postmodern prison he built according to the pseudo-heavenly blueprint of postmodernism actually constitutes a meaningful world; in fact, it is for man no more than an endless desert of empty novelty feeding its dust to his passions, for which, in their state of disorientation, they have come to acquire an insatiable appetite. Under the delusion that this post postmodern world has broken free of the postmodern fever dream and is thereby imbued with meaning, the ensuing firestorm of anchorless moralization burns man alive; but this fire, because its source is ultimately the void of a self-relational imposition of meaning by his own brand, is nothing more than the hellish torment of non-being—but this time externalized as a self-relational social economy.

Postmodernism collapses the teleological and hierarchical structure of being in all its dimensions, while post postmodernism attempts from these ashes to rebuild a world which, because of its postmodern blueprint, can never truly get off the ground. Post postmodernism is a surreal and dreamlike tower whose endless spiral staircase leading to a non-existent spire of meaning is a mirage; because it has the form of reality but is void of the Spirit which gives life, man can ascend its Sisyphean steps only endlessly down into the depths of non-being. In short, postmodernism is the blueprint for uncreating society from within, and post postmodernism is the execution and externalization thereof.

Shout-out to

Siculu

, whose article, “Hypomodernity”, prompted my reflection on these matters.