"“Postmodernity” is not so much a word to describe a series of years or decades, beginning in the 1970s or what have you, but rather the name of a condition of stylistic overdevelopment in which the modernist break no longer obtains. Such a condition can appear and reappear at various points in history, a kind of motile Mannerism or Rococo, in the same way that the modern break itself has reappeared in any number of historical guises, from the Socratic break, to the Galilean break, to the Duchampian break, and on and on. Postmodernity, then, is better understood as a kind of depressive state, a psychological Thermidor in which the militant break becomes well-nigh impossible on the existential plane. (It is no surprise, then, that the greatest thinker of militancy in our times, Alain Badiou, emerged in the anglophone world precisely at the point when postmodernity outgrew its utility, Badiou’s project formulated on the basis of a reinvigorated modernism in which all subjects are militants of some form or another.)"
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- bill 1-04-2015 3:37 pm