postmodern postmortem

'I recently gave a lecture to a group of young artists: 20-somethings living in Berlin, born elsewhere. Among the languages I could identify I heard French, Portuguese and Swedish. Despite the linguistic diversity, my lecture went smoothly - until I made a joke about Postmodernism. No one laughed because no one knew what Postmodernism was. [...] The problem here was not a generational gap - that Postmodernism was replaced by globalization - but a shift in the way a common culture becomes, well, common. Our problem was not what we shared but how. Before the Internet, Postmodernism linked different people by designating different cultural phenomena. [...] These artists didn't need a culture - let alone a neologism - to bring them together:.Their Postmodernism is Facebook: not a catch-all phrase but a catch-everyone technology. The common comes automatically: the culture can always change. In light of social networks, the ubiquity of Postmodernism appears as its most revolutionary trait. The term likely disappeared so quickly because its force was not its multifaceted meaning but rather its capacity to link once-disparate cultural phenomena and once-distant people. Postmodernism may be the first word to become obsolete because it was replaced, not by another word like globalization, but by a technology that did the same job more effectively.' [...] The last bastion of subculture is not a particular style, let alone a super-hybrid version of Goths channelling Bad Brains, but an outdated technology, which resists online sharing. Writing in The Guardian in March, Dorian Lynskey noted how underground music labels like Scotch Tapes are reviving the near-defunct audio cassette - not just for nostalgia. "It keeps (the music) from becoming mainstream," said one fan. In short a subculture may rely on format, not content, to maintain its status and politics. Imagine telling a Rastafarian that vintage hairdryers, eight-track tape recorders and wooden long-stem pipes are more potent than dreadlocks, reggae and weed. But in our era of super-hybridity, the medium is truly the message.'

Allen, Jennifer (2010), Postmodern Postmortem: Has a theory been replaced by a technology?, frieze, Issue 133, September 2010, p.21. 

The September 2010 issue of frieze was a front to back, page-by-page read for me. Entitled super-hybridity?, it addressed my thoughts and fears on the acceleration of life, reality, media, culture, discipline, technology, communication, and on. I don't really understand the notion, if there even is a clearly defined one, of super-hybridity. It seems to skirt around origin; ownership; culture; identity; material; pace; method and a multitude of other constructs that start to make the term super-hybrid seem more like a headfuck than a sexy neologism. What I feel I do know, however, is that the experience of media plays a heady part in the discussion, and that makes it pertinent to my current position. I keep asking myself why I'm casting these objects. Yes, I believe it indexes an absence, combining that which is present with that which is the other, and also in a sense dematerialises the object by removing the original function, materiality, weight, density, opacity, etc (essentially the only recognisable element is form). But I don't think, at this stage, that that is enough.