Post-postmodernism

I love the word "post-postmodern," first of all because it is so silly, but also because I'm so excited about finding out what "post-postmodernism" will be, as well as what its real name will be (because by its very nature, "post-postmodernism" is emphatically the wrong name for it).

I think post-postmodernism will be defined by the blurring of the line between reality and construct. In the post-postmodern world, life, art, and commerce will be one. This development will be dehumanizing according to our old definitions, but rehumanizing in our new ones, which will resituate money, advertising, capitalism, and the market, moving them from the status of parasites feeding off of humanity's blood to something more like the blood itself. I know, it sounds very bleak. But I think it's the real answer, because capitalism is here and it's not going anywhere, and we've waited far too long to devise some real, humane way to deal with its realities.

I'm not quite up to figuring all that out, but what I am up to are some ideas about how art and culture will respond. I think the new style, like the new geopolitics, will attempt a reconciliation between the realism we can't ignore and the humanism we strive for. The new "answer" in the arts will be neither a desperate search for meaning nor a flat rejection of it, but an acceptance that meaning is both real and unreal: intrinsic to humanity, yet "only human." Under the new pragmatic humanism, we will no longer be devastated by the recognition of our own perspective's arbitrariness--rather, we will accept it, and this acceptance ("ironically," although irony really will be dead this time) will enable us to lift up and celebrate art even more than we did in the twentieth century. Art and meaning will no longer be "only" constructs, but plain-old constructs--just like every single other thing we experience in our extremely subjective human way.

Art will moreover be recognized as essential therapy for humanity. I think anthropologists and psychologists will identify art's emergence along with civilization as an adaptation humans evolved in order to deal with the extremely traumatizing experience of living in a society. We will then turn this new information about art to our advantage, finding ways to use the arts to ease our transition into the modern world.

This new art will be totally unlike what we've seen before. It will be everywhere, and everyone will be a part of it. It will be awesome.