What is next?

What comes after Postmodernism? We're already in this "phase" that comes after Postmodernism, and it won't be termed until it's more fully developed, but what are we seeing? We see some sort of extreme post-irony and meta-irony, but how will this impact literature? What style of literature will be developing in the next ten to fifteen years, and how will it respond to Postmodernism? Will it be Neomodernism, or some Post-Postmodernism? Some people worry that Literature has died, but I doubt that. I am more interested in the metanarrative of the Western Canon + Literature as a whole and the dialogue we see as authors respond and develop upon previous ideas: what sort of things will develop now?

I'm not seeing post irony in actual literature or in any kind of art that actually requires effort.

>>6881 "Postmodernism" is just an anglo buzzword for a bunch of frenchies in the 20th century. You seem to be assuming that "literature" or whatever is split into phases that aren't self aware until they pass, and also that the later phase addresses the prior stage.

Art is downstream of power. So decadent postmodern decline / left-wing propagandization of art will linger for a while. Once the wheels fall off, we'll get one of the following depending on the new regime Reactionary Christian Neotraditionalism (scenario: US Military Junta) >Metrical poetry back in a big way, New Criterion most prestigious imprint. Reappraisal of Melville's Clarel. >The best pomo novelists like Pynchon retain respect, but lose readership. Hemmingway overwhelmingly popular. >Philosophy suppressed by theology, even the best postmoderns like Deleuze are buried. >Reappraisal and assimilation of Popul Vuh's Hosiannah Mantra, which spawns new lineage of avant-garde liturgical music >LARPy revival of sculpture and figurative oil painting. Warhol demonized. Full Commoditization of Art (scenario: Bitcoin demonetizes US dollar) >Crypto punks and other early NFT's sell for the value of small countries >VR cannibalizes other art forms >Pornography attempts to stake its claim to high art status, with mixed success. >Huge bidding wars over cutting-edge generative art technology >Most "artists" are fake identities generated by software conglomerates. Deepfaked artist interviews become a medium in themselves. >Poetry and the novel die in a roadside ditch Multicultural third-worldism (scenario: The Great Replacement goes off) >Hip hop is king. The most popular artists are strongmen, drug lords, and Jihadi. >Interesting and multifaceted world music fusion ecosystem >Graffiti becomes dominant visual medium >Decline in written literature, nobody even pretends to care about Toni Morrison or the Harlem Renaissance, though Malcolm X remains popular.

>>6881 >or some Post-Postmodernism? Nothing can come after Postmodernism. Modernism made people too aware of their position in history, and Postmodernism made us aware of that awareness. I don't think being aware of the awareness of being aware will add anything more, so some kind of recursive Post-postmodernism is unlikely. Premodern culture believed in absolutes and it was barely aware of history in a critical and relative sense. Medieval painters pictured Alexander the Great as wearing medieval clothes and armor; the past was not perceived as distinct from the present, and neither was the future imagined to be different (unlike the idea of "progress" that is a motive force of Modern culture). Medieval people imagined feudal society would have gone on and on until the second coming of Christ and the coming Doomsday, and that would have been the end of it. Any attempt at offering some kind of new absolute is doomed to fail. Black Lives Matter is trying to do this by judging great men of the bast through the lens of our modern ethical standards and therefore every white man is being labeled as racist, but this will not produce a new culture, it is a merely destructive behavior that will result in scorched earth and it will create nothing new, because even BLM and other similar movements are still enamored with PROGRESS, and thus their supposedly absolute standards will CHANGE in the span of a few years and thus cancel culture will start canceling even the people who today are regarded as woke, because their behavior will no longer be considered woke enough at some point in time. Some post-apocalyptic scenario after World War 3 may be the only hope to move beyond Postmodernism and start believing in some other absolute because only a shock of that kind could cause to forget about the excessive awareness we have gained in the Modern era. Postmodernism is the logical endgame of the Enlightenment project; legitimate doubt unchecked by authority will snowball into hyperbolic doubt. Sextus Empiricus and other skeptics were widely read during the Renaissance and influenced Montaigne, who in turn influenced later thinkers who led to the Enlightenment. Postmodernism is at its core metastasized skepticism where any claim to knowledge is regarded as suspect and merely as a tool to make a claim to power. It is ultimately about accepting our ignorance; it is the graveyard of reason where we will lay it to rest after realizing it didn't have the power to attain the certainties we wanted.

New Sincerity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

>>6901 And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamodernism

>>6883 Seriously fuarrrk france bunch of arrogant retards started shouting "we the modern age now!!! oui oui croissant!!" because they thought they just reached the peak of civilization and now we have, modernism, postmodernism and what the fuarrrk will come next?? postpost-late-stage-modernism???

Doesn't matter. Society is devolving further into consumerism, and it isn't going to become any better, unless a truly cataclysmic event happens and resets a good portion of humanity. To be precise, the current situation of the industry has to be disrupted. The entire world industry is built upon work division. If enough parts break out of the machine, the whole thing breaks apart. But yeah, if we even get to such a point (which I hope), we will get something like neo-romanism, where the new generations will be look at the romantic aspects of the past, and try to build upon it.

Yeah it'd be nice to go back to sex with femboys to be honest

>>6893 >Postmodernism is at its core metastasized skepticism where any claim to knowledge is regarded as suspect and merely as a tool to make a claim to power. It is ultimately about accepting our ignorance; it is the graveyard of reason where we will lay it to rest after realizing it didn't have the power to attain the certainties we wanted. It isn't really about accepting ignorance, it's more about putting our own knowledge in the bounds of what is knowable (transcendental reason) >legitimate doubt unchecked by authority will snowball into hyperbolic doubt not necessarily >Premodern culture believed in absolutes What do you mean by this? And how would we know "absolutely"? >and it was barely aware of history in a critical and relative sense are you talking about culture at large (like the common people) or scribes specifically? I wouldn't really say we are all that different >the past was not perceived as distinct from the present, and neither was the future imagined to be different (unlike the idea of "progress" that is a motive force of Modern culture). Medieval people imagined feudal society would have gone on and on until the second coming of Christ and the coming Doomsday, and that would have been the end of it. The idea of progress is eschatological, much like the Christianity and the persian religion. In order to have a notion of doomsday, it requires them to postulate time. Maybe the serfs in the middle ages had a more primitive notion of time because they were less literate? >Some post-apocalyptic scenario after World War 3 may be the only hope to move beyond Postmodernism and start believing in some other absolute because only a shock of that kind could cause to forget about the excessive awareness we have gained in the Modern era. what makes you think we don't believe in absolutes?

>>6902 https://vimeo.com/113901626

>>6907 >It isn't really about accepting ignorance, it's more about putting our own knowledge in the bounds of what is knowable (transcendental reason) Is it really? Most postmodernists don't believe in any objective reality in a strict sense, so there can be no objective (and thus inter-subjective) knowledge. Postmodernism puts modern medicine and tribal witchcraft on the same level when it comes to objective truth. >not necessarily Murphy's law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Once you no longer have a religious authority restraining your morals and your speculations, it's only a matter of time before someone starts claiming that everything is acceptable and someone else starts saying that nothing is true. Which is the same thing Dostoevsky meant when he said that without God everything is permitted. Lacking God, some other authority might try to restrain the masses, like the state authority which commands the police and the military, but anything that is mortal can be challenged, no matter how powerful it appears to be. When people no longer believe in an almighty God, they won't ever feel genuinely restrained. >What do you mean by this? I mean that there was no real "interfaith" in the Middle Ages. I mean that there was no Second Vatican Council that praised the "important truths" of Islam. People coherently believed in absolutes. Nowadays a Christian believes his religion is the correct one but he hypocritically makes allowances for other religions as if they were equally valid. A genuine Christian is supposed to spread the Gospel and evangelize the world (and a genuine Muslim should do the same thing). We tolerate pagans and idolaters as if their opinions were as valid as the true faith. >And how would we know "absolutely"? Because I'm not a postmodernist myself so I don't self-sabotage myself like they do. I don't believe I know much of anything with absolute certainty, but there are opinions and viewpoints that appear to me as more valid than others. I do not espouse unrestrained radical skepticism. And by the way I'm not even a theist so my remarks about religion are merely observations concerning what medieval people used to believe. I do not believe in Christianity myself (nor in Islam or any other religion). With some reservations, I believe in the Enlightenment project, which is the thing Postmodernists hate the most (even though the Enlightenment project in a pathological and aberrant form ultimately caused Postmodernism). >are you talking about culture at large (like the common people) or scribes specifically? I wouldn't really say we are all that different I'm talking about the "scribes" as well. And we are different. We have grand theories of history or at least attempt to contextualize historical events. People like BLM gave up on contextualization, but like I said before their behavior is self-destructive and self-contradictory. >The idea of progress is eschatological, much like the Christianity and the persian religion. In order to have a notion of doomsday, it requires them to postulate time. Maybe the serfs in the middle ages had a more primitive notion of time because they were less literate? Time and "progress" are two different things. The Egyptians spent several millennia of their history with virtually zero technological progress. And in the Middle Ages technology moved backwards rather than forward. Doomsday shall come after enough time has passed, but nothing says there will be any progress in the intervening period. Medieval life was supposed to trudge along as it always had, only to come to an abrupt end with the Apocalypse. The eschatology of progress is open-ended; there is no definite terminal point like the Apocalypse. 19th-century visions of progress were all about an "infinite progress" which asymptotically got use closer and closer to some kind of man-made Eden, but withhold ever fully reaching it. Eden was a mirage we were supposed to continuously strive for, not an actual reality that was supposed to discontinuously materialize itself on a set expiration date. >what makes you think we don't believe in absolutes? Not everyone is a Postmodernist, therefore some people probably believe in absolutes, or at least they try. But the number of absolutes admissible in public discourse has been on a steady decline. I would say that the dogma of liberal democracy is the only one that is still uncritically upheld as an absolute in present-day Western society. John Rawls and other liberals could never fully justify liberalism on some other premise. Liberalism itself is THE premise on which they build, and any attempt at justifying it is inherently weak and flawed (based on negative hedonism and risk-aversion, for the most part, which are not universal traits of humankind, if you ask me). Liberals are fine with any religion and any philosophical doctrine so long as it is compatible with liberalism itself. So whereas in medieval public discourse the Bible was an absolute nowadays any religion who has any claim to being absolute is deemed illiberal and thus unacceptable. Propping up a certain economic and political system is the only thing on which the elites of our present world won't compromise, because at the end of the day it is the only thing that matters to them. Everything else is optional superstructure.

>>6920 >Murphy's law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. In that case we'll be hit by a rogue exoplanet and the point will be moot. >I mean that there was no Second Vatican Council that praised the "important truths" of Islam there were certainly catholic theologans who held Muslim philosophers in high esteem.

>>6920 >Nowadays a Christian believes his religion is the correct one but he hypocritically makes allowances for other religions as if they were equally valid. that's because there is (I'm convinced) an underlying "secular" religion that emerged from the enlightenment that their Christian belief exists "on top of" the absolute they believe in is the "secular" religion of our time >Is it really? Most postmodernists don't believe in any objective reality in a strict sense, so there can be no objective (and thus inter-subjective) knowledge. Postmodernism puts modern medicine and tribal witchcraft on the same level when it comes to objective truth. the whole skepticism thing was way before the postmoderns. Both Kant and Hume said it (the cause of our sensations) was "unknowable". Also what do you mean by "objective reality" in the first place? >Murphy's law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Once you no longer have a religious authority restraining your morals and your speculations, it's only a matter of time before someone starts claiming that everything is acceptable and someone else starts saying that nothing is true. When you say "anything that can go wrong" that's a universal claim about "any thing". You list one of the things that can go wrong, but it doesn't follow because any other thing that is wrong could also happen for the record I've yet to see any example of a society without some sort of ethical code. People have been saying "nothing is true" for a while, but just because traditional religious authorities are less relevant now does not imply that there are no religious authorities. We just don't refer to them as religion (because doing so in "secular" societies would be heretical), but the same dynamics of power continue to operate. >I do not espouse unrestrained radical skepticism They generally don't do this, this is just a straw man of people referred to as postmoderns. And for the record the word "postmodern" lumps a bunch of authors together who really don't belong in the same category >which is the thing Postmodernists hate the most You're generalizing here. Of the people I have read who are "postmodern", all they do is reiterate things that enlightenment figures said. "Postmodern" is just a buzzword thrown around by jordan peterson types who don't have a clue what the fuarrrk they're talking about >People like BLM gave up on contextualization, but like I said before their behavior is self-destructive and self-contradictory. I'm not familiar with the intellectual backing of that movement but any movement that tries to "change the world" is positing some kind of teleology and agreement on what "the world" is >The Egyptians spent several millennia of their history with virtually zero technological progress. They did develop important agricultural techniques and systems of writing >The eschatology of progress is open-ended; there is no definite terminal point like the Apocalypse. It depends on what kind of progress you are talking about. If we are talking about how the marxists see it, there is an eventual "end of history" where society is classless. If we're talking about how capitalism postulates progress, I don't think it does this. I think capitalism utilizes ideals like progress and plays them for the sake of optimizing the flow of cash. >Doomsday shall come after enough time has passed, but nothing says there will be any progress I can't really speak about what peasants believed in the middle ages >But the number of absolutes admissible in public discourse has been on a steady decline. I would disagree. People in the past couple years have been more insistent than ever on absolutes, but from my own experience the insistence moves like a sine wave >Liberals are fine with any religion and any philosophical doctrine so long as it is compatible with liberalism itself. I'm assuming liberal here means classical liberalism as opposed to people who think and vote democrat. >So whereas in medieval public discourse the Bible was an absolute nowadays any religion who has any claim to being absolute is deemed illiberal and thus unacceptable. Propping up a certain economic and political system is the only thing on which the elites of our present world won't compromise, because at the end of the day it is the only thing that matters to them. We're sort of assuming that economy is an organized system. I don't know if it is. I don't think there is a system elites are trying to "keep afloat", just there are current divisions of wealth and power which act in their own interests

>>6922 >When you say "anything that can go wrong" that's a universal claim about "any thing". You list one of the things that can go wrong, but it doesn't follow because any other thing that is wrong could also happen I meant existential and not universal quantifier

At any given point in history there are thousands of works, movements, trends, reactions, "-isms" circulating as part of a society's overall intellectual discourse. But only a very few of those will ever be significant enough to stand in for an entire era. Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism are a few of these. Why is that? If you want to know what comes "after" postmodernism, you have to understand why it is that this is a useful way to talk about literature in the first place. If we accept that there are, in fact, distinct eras that each of these movements describe (not all do, and that depends on your overall outlook on history, aesthetics, and political economy), then we have to know what is actually different about each of them. Each era corresponds to a different set of relationships within the society that developed the movement. Here's where I stop being objective and start to editorialize: these are economic relationships of *class*: who owns what and who does what labor to make the society function--which might not seem intuitive relative to literary theory, but this also extends to who gets to write and who gets to read literature, not to mention who is actually literate. It's maybe not a simple 1:1 correlation, but the overriding principle here is that the emergence of new classes in conflict with each other basically shows us what is happening in the literary world: the maudlin despair of aristocrats on their vast estates that gave us the Romantics, the close contact with industry that told Modernists to "make it new", the faceless sea of proletarian misery that gave us the postmodern reaction--we can draw some connective tissue here. So to answer the question, "what comes next?" you have to first understand that something new isn't going to come into our literary imagination until we have some indication that the present way of organizing our society is about to give way (or, put another way--whatever comes next will help us start to conceive that). History never runs backwards, but the early 21st century has basically been governed by conflicts from the 20th that were not so much resolved as postponed--the long crisis that heralds the falling rate of capitalist profits, the re-emergence of ur-fascist sympathies, the reformation of socialist tendencies, the complete breakdown of liberal consensus--almost nothing *NEW* is happening here. It's all happening again; and it'll be new, it'll have a new look and a new way of speaking maybe but it won't necessarily be a wholly novel way of seeing the world. So what comes after postmodernism? A reconciliation with the past that allows us to have a future. That's about the best I can do.

>>6924 >A reconciliation with the past that allows us to have a future But how do we know that the future and the past are reconcilable in the first place? We can say that history merely repeats itself, but I ask: how do we know that we haven't just run out of ideas to describe history?

>>6925 Maybe that wasn't the right way to put it--my point is just that we won't know what comes next in literature until we have some idea of where our political economy will go next. With the triumph of capitalism in the 90s, the last few decades have felt aimless and adrift because it took questions of political economy off the table for a generation, meaning we were stuck talking about the same literary trends going in circles for a while. >how do we know that we haven't just run out of ideas to describe history? What reason do you have to think that we've run out? I've put forward a definite view of what history is and how it relates to literature--so long as one of those continues, it will drive the other. To that extent, I'm confident that we never run out, even if (as I describe above) there's an interregnum in which it *feels* that we've run out. You can dispute that view of history, which we can certainly talk about, but if you accept it then you accept that we always do have a future, and that it never really runs out after all.

>>6926 >meaning we were stuck talking about the same literary trends going in circles for a while I don't disagree with this, but I do disagree with saying we can know it from some methodology >my point is just that we won't know what comes next in literature until we have some idea of where our political economy will go next But what I am saying is this: we don't know what comes next. We can convince ourselves that what comes next falls within the categories we've constructed from past experience, but as far as I am concerned it isn't really knowledge it's just opinion >What reason do you have to think that we've run out? Because you describe history as a series of eras which correspond with class relationships. How do we know that this is how history "actually" occurred? I'm convinced that when we do this, it says nothing about history "in actuality" but definitely tells us about ourselves >Here's where I stop being objective and start to editorialize: these are economic relationships of *class*: who owns what and who does what labor to make the society function I really don't disagree with this, but at the same time I think that we can't know whether the set of historical events that came before our birth actually happened (because they are outside of experience). I'm not saying that they DIDN'T happen, but that it's not provable in a way that rules out future debate So in a sense I agree with the materialist conception of history, but only in the sense of an opinion that could be useful for understanding the society of today (and not historical events "in actuality")

>>6927 >we don't know what comes next. Right, and neither do I--notice that I never advanced a specific notion of what it would actually be. But, working from the historical method that I've found to be useful, I can at least know what it is that moves things in the first place and *points* towards what *could* be next. It is, as ever, historically contingent and unknowable, but in some ways predictable. I can say that any activity that tries to supplant the existing order is going to generate its own movement worth paying attention to in this regard. >How do we know that this is how history "actually" occurred? If it hasn't been clear, I'm working from the Marxist understanding of historical materialism. I'm happy to jump into an explanation of the validity of historical materialism, but I think that might be a little bit off-topic--I will say, though, that it's basically empirically verifiable. I should probably qualify my statements, however, as "if you accept this view, then we might say that comes next could look like..." >I think that we can't know whether the set of historical events that came before our birth actually happened Glad to hear you agree with the materialist conception, and what I'll say here is that it doesn't make much sense to argue about whether these events "happened" in the metaphysical sense or whether we can truly know them in the epistemological sense, because like you say what matters is how that guides our actions in the present moment and helps us make sense of today. So in that sense, I don't think it matters too much, so long as we agree that we're talking about the same thing.

>>6928 >So in that sense, I don't think it matters too much, so long as we agree that we're talking about the same thing. To me the way you initially talked about history sounded pretty hegelian. When I say "materialist", I don't necessarily mean "historical materialist" It seems pretty self-evident that what is valued in a culture is conditioned by power (or more specifically for our time: wealth) But I don't think these power relations reconcile with each other in any sort of teleological movement. I think that there are fundamental issues in the hegelian position, specifically how hegelians define freedom. The notion of people (or the proletariat) freeing themselves through labor sounds like doublethink and raises my bullshit filter

>>6924 agree with first two paragraphs in the context of earlier posts > the maudlin despair of aristocrats on their vast estates that gave us the Romantics I would not describe the movement of scholars travelling villages to collect folk fairy tales and such related to romaticism as a movement of and for sneering aristocrats. There must be more dimensions to this. >the close contact with industry that told Modernists to "make it new" In a "capitalism drives innovation" kind of way? There might be something in there. >the faceless sea of proletarian misery that gave us the postmodern reaction I'm not sure how you read a working class movement out of postmodernism.