How Does Newness Enter the Postmodern World?

Abstract

Although discontinuous histories and multiple temporalities surely coexist within the restless landscapes of the global postmodern, the term postmodernism itself, and therefore its temper, remain curiously static. It is forever mired in definition by negation, in belatedness—“as an afterthought to modernism—”or, as Fredric Jameson memorably puts it, in “an eternal present and much further away an inevitable catastrophe.”¹ We find ourselves alive after the end of history, philosophy, and metaphysics; the death of the subject, the author, and the book; the waning of the historical avant-gardes, the bankruptcy of Enlightenment promises of progress through rationality. We affirm our suspicion of metanarratives, foundational assumptions, totalizing theories, utopian ambitions, large-scale pronouncements of any kind. Art speaks in pastiche, repeating the forms of the past since, as Raymond Federman puts it, “imagination does not invent the SOMETHING-NEW we often attribute to it but rather now … merely imitates, copies, repeats, proliferates, plagiarizes … what has always been there.”² Few of us actually believe in the progressive possibilities arising from our “new” world order, and we lack a sense of agency; therefore, pursuing what might be genuinely new becomes increasingly impossible. Within the condition of postmodernity, the future presents itself as foreclosed if it presents itself at all; the year 2000 has already happened.