Post-post-modernism?

Being a good post-modern student, I've been trying to find new ways to define post-modernism. I think I've got a good one: it’s whatever you’re self-aware of. Modernism, says Stanley Cavell, is when art begins to question, in the very act of making art, what art is. Post-modernism, says I, is when the artist becomes aware of it being cliche to ask what art is. He makes art that questions art and simultaneously questions the questioning of art.

The worst of post-modernism--the stuff that makes you cringe like you’ve done four times now while reading that awful word--is the result of that awareness taking too great of a stage. It’s the art that tries to defend itself by making the risk inherent in art a joke of the art itself. It’s a questioning of the questioning of the questioning that’s become as meaningless as this very sentence. (Which of course means that this article has now become the worst of post-modernism right? But then what does this sentence mean?) In short, it’s Derrida.

But to be fair to post-modernism--and to all those people who take poor Jacques seriously--this is actually the condition faced today.

Real, actual people find themselves worrying about whether or not the things they say in conversations with their lovers and in fights with their children are just poor paraphrases of old lines from poorly reviewed movies. I’ve listened to people crying about relationships gone bad or some other slight tragedy eke out through gritted teeth some commentary about how typical it is for a person in their place to be acting like they are. And you can see that awareness beginning to take away from the honest emotion that actually matters.

A friend of mine once said that “the worst part about emo is that it made emotion trite.” But he was only partially right: emo certainly did so, but the people who made making emotion trite trite have done much more damage to the American psyche. (Really, friends, I apologize for the trite post-modern syntax.)

American culture has come to the point where it oscillates between pure emotion and meaningless nonsense. It’s emo or it’s dubstep/post-ambient-noise-somethingorother. And of course, the common denominator is everyone’s favorite punching-bag, the social group that exists despite the lack of a single person claiming ownership to it: the hipster. Pathos and it’s denial are all that remain, and the cultural battle has taken place in arguing over who fits into that very matrix. The secret, of course, is that everyone does and no one admits it.

At some point, when you begin arguing over the difference between irony and meta-irony and meta-meta-irony, everything starts to blend together.

Of course, I’m neither denying nor arguing for something like the moment at the end of Madonna’s half-time show, where the camera pans back and ‘world peace’ is displayed in bright lights across the field as an aging pop star faux-sings the end of a song about dancing. Our overwrought complexities can’t be solved by such simpleness.

The question really is about experience. Namely: where did it go? Louis CK will brilliantly tell you how our shitty generation watches everything through a tiny smartphone screen and misses out on the glory of actual life experience. And he’s right, as always. But I wonder why it is that everyone is so worried about doing things in some novel way that they don’t do anything. In other words, why the people without the smartphones are so intent about not having a smartphone that they still don’t enjoy anything.

But then again, you shouldn’t take my word for it. I just wrote a self-aware blog post about post-modernism. I must be the biggest asshole hipster of them all.