What comes after Postmodernism?

Question

Sure, modernism came in the Industrial Revolution pre-war, and Postmodernism after the world wars. But what comes after Post-modernism? Is there even such a next step?

If you can cite an article, more the better. Thanks.

Answer 1

I've been trying to find a book that I have that deals with this issue, but I think I must have it in storage. It talked about how there really have only really been 2 or 3 philosophies ever in man's history, and they keep cycling with different "flavor." If you look at the beliefs of post-modernism and compare them with the Gnostics of the first century, for example, there are a lot of similarities. If you read the writings of most scientists, however, they seem to sound very similar to modernism. Galileo, Newton, Pascal, etc., all sound very modernistic. The author also argued that no society has ever fully embraced one philosophy and forsaked the others. Man will always hold some belief in the spiritual realm, for example, but will never stop believing in science. I'm sorry that I couldn't find the source for it.

Aggylu - While I agree with you that Pomo does not necessarily embrace or reject spirituality, historically it has promoted spiritual beliefs, especially the more "mystic" ones. A truly modernistic society would have never accepted John Edward. The rise in post-modernism thinking is also responsible for the increase of interest we have seen in ghosts, spirits, and even witchcraft in the 20th century. When you reject the view that all things can be explained by science, you naturally end up exploring beliefs in the supernatural.

Answer 2

After postmodernism, there will be(is?) another swing towards conformity. I agree with ServingJesus that our outlooks cycle, but disagree with the comments about postmodernism and spirituality.
Postmodernism doesn't reject or embrace spirituality. It rejects overarching rules about religion, literature, morality, the role of science. . .It embraces the small picture, the underdog.
The most comprehensive and clear presentation I've read on postmodernism is in a book written for Harry Potter fans.
Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-images/0972322124/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0/104-0701951-6931146?ie=UTF8&s=books&index=0#gallery
I know, I know. So cheesy. But I promise that the author really does a great job on this topic, and it is not necessary to be a HP fan to understand what he is saying.

Answer 3

future shock -

Future Shock is a book written by the sociologist and futurologist Alvin Toffler in 1970. The book is actually an extension of an article of the same name that Toffler wrote for the February 1970 issue of Playboy. The book has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated.

Future shock is also a term for a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies, introduced by Toffler in his book of the same name. Toffler's shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time". The concept of future shock bears resemblance to the late 20th/early 21st century concept of "the technological singularity", and may have been influenced by Kuhn's concept of a technological paradigm shift.

Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution, this change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also coined the term "information overload".



when you read it with the article on Simulacrum & Simulation
you know you are in it .(Goodbye, ruby pomo
Who could hang a name on you?
When you change with every new day
Still Im gonna miss you...)


Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et Simulation in French) is a philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard that discusses the interaction between reality, symbols and society.

Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of images, signs, and how they relate to the present day. Baudrillard claims that modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are signs of culture and media that create the perceived reality.

A specific analogy that Baudrillard uses is a fable derived from On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. In it, a great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire crumbled, all that was left was the map. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that people live in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is crumbling away from disuse.

Answer 4

After postmodernism??

"Welcome to the desert of the real."

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacrum & Simulation:

Jean Baudrillard's death did not take place. "Dying is pointless," he once wrote. "You have to know how to disappear." The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries and asked Baudrillard: "What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?" Baudrillard replied: "What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself."

Baudrillard, whose simulacrum departed at the age of 77, attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced, imperturbably, that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that the war was conducted as a media spectacle. Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile's-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by simulation.
***

Jean Baudrillard, the eminent sociologist and philosopher who died on Tuesday, is almost the last representative of the great generation of French philosophers, born in the 1920s and 1930s, to have defined postmodernism as an intellectual field.

This generation has suffered several significant casualties in the last decade or so: Gilles Deleuze died in 1995, Jean-François Lyotard in 1998, and Jacques Derrida in 2004. The intellectual formation of each of these philosophers was shaped above all by the political hopes and disappointments that were inseparable aspects of the experience of 1968. Certainly, like that of his deceased contemporaries, Baudrillard's philosophy was defined in the late 1960s and 1970s by a disillusionment in Marxism, which had come to seem fatally tainted to him because of its association with the intellectual and political deformations of Stalinism. The depressive atmosphere that prevailed after the left's defeat in 1968 created the preconditions for his brilliant but politically pessimistic critique of consumer society. The euphoria of the 1960s was at the same time preserved in the fantastically playful qualities of his philosophical prose, which can be summarised as a kind of social-science fiction.

Baudrillard embodied some of the most positive qualities of the European intellectual in the second half of the last century, as in his restless appetite for making provocative political interventions in the public sphere, in a philosophical rather than journalistic form; and he embodied some of its most negative qualities, as in his restless appetite for making provocative political interventions in the public sphere, in a journalistic rather than philosophical form. His infamous prophecy, in an article for the Guardian in February 1991, that the Gulf War would not take place, exemplifies this contradiction. Understood as part of his sustained philosophical attempt, since the mid-1970s, to understand the role played by simulation, as opposed to imitation, in fundamentally reconfiguring the relationship of the real and the unreal in contemporary society, it demonstrated his almost forensic capacity for detecting the complicated deceptions of capitalism in the epoch of consumption. Read as a merely journalistic gesture, it dramatised his closeness to those cartoonish postmodernists that claim, absurdly, that reality itself has, so to speak, virtually disappeared.

Baudrillard's death raises timely and important questions about the intellectual culture of the early 21st century. Simply put, what comes after postmodernism?


Answer: The present Age, Simulacrum & Simulation.
"Dying is pointless,"




Good luck

Answer 5

We are still in the postmodern period.

Answer 6

[e-mail]