I’m sick and tired of hearing academics, politicians and public figures blurting about post-modernity as if it is a truism; a dead set fact of reality. If modernism is dead where is the body. Will someone tell me because when I’ve asked where modernism was buried I have received that old time glass-eyed stare. This is often followed by a laugh and the laughee asking me to confess I was stirring him or her up to just get a rise out of them, but that is not the case. I would like an answer to my question. I would like to know the date modernism died. Now, if there is body I want a mob like CSI or the FBI to perform a forensic investigation to determine what killed modernism. Once it has been established modernism is dead I want the murderer or murderers brought to justice. Who killed modernism? Who?
No one killed modernism. Post stands for something that has passed or after something that has occurred. In other words something that has come to an end. If modernism is dead then when was there a funeral service and why wasn’t I or anyone else for that matter notified of the time and place? And, lastly where is the burial site? The answer is obvious. modernism didn’t die it just grew up.
If modernism hasn’t died then why did the term postmodernism come into fashion? Well the reason lies in environment that academics and so called great thinkers live in. They reside in pseudo cloistered environment that is bound within a sanitized atmosphere. They existed in a insular world of the university culture or they are chained to the corporate body.
Once a upon time in another age the universities and companies were open to all sorts of new ideas and innovations, but that doesn’t occur anymore. Universities and corporations have become elitist bureaucracies and what arises is bureaucrats that uses titles that have no link to the functions they perform. At the very heart of the bureaucrats’ world is to maintain the status quo or in other words to freeze time. The greatest threat to the bureaucrat’s world is change and thus creativity and innovation have no place in these environments.
The bureaucrats of the universities and corporations spend their time regurgitating old theories and old concepts by paraphrasing, deconstructing and reconstructing all of it inside institutions of mirrors. What we have now is parrots, educated parrots, yes; A parrot is still a parrot even if it is able to use and quote text with Latin and Greek derived language. This is the environment where the term of postmodernism arose out of.
Postmodernism is a byproduct, a symptom of modernism’s evolution. There is no postmodernism, but postmodernism is term that seeks to misdirect all. This age we live in is the age of ‘Hype(r)modernism. Everything is speeded up. The means of communication that in some respects has made the world smaller. The speed of travel across the world and movement of ideas and new technology that are quickly dissimulated throughout the world. All of which are the obvious manifestation of the hyper within Hype(r)modernism.
Now the darker side of the Hype(r)modernism and Hype(r)modernist world we live in is revealed by the manner it is concealed behind the term postmodernism. In other words this is the most obvious example of Hype(r)modernism in action. Advertising, PR consultants, spin doctors, image makers and politicians are the high priests of the hyper hype that exists within Hype(r)modernism. It is streamlined exaggeration that smothers facts and suffocates the reality of ever given situation. This is wonderland where lies are triumphed as diverging points of view which are now suddenly given greater credence than actual facts, and truth is only allowed when it furthers the interests of the high priests of Hype(r)modernism. Facts that may allow one to come to a certain truth are now removed, concealed or reinterpreted in manner that favours the powerful.
The individuals’ freedoms and rights are eroded by Hype(r)modernism running rampant. The individuals privacy is a dead thing because commercial interests are more valuable than the individual. Individuality, the word has been subverted, corrupted and bastardized to mean a major section of society is selfish and chained to consumption. This is not individuality this just Hype(r)modernism at play. The herd mentality that corporations and governments across the world have engendered has nothing to do with one being an individual, but it has everything to do with the deceitful application of Hype(r)modernism. Modernism never died to be replaced by postmodernism. Modernism grew up to become Hype(r)modernism. So, postmodernism is just another devious expression of Hype(r)modernism at play.
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