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Originally Posted by Textcritic
So I understand you correctly: Are you suggesting that pluralism / relativism / uncertainties of the postmodern age will become external "authorities"? It sounds to me like your "ubiquitous mass culture" and "conformist ideology" serve as replacements for everything postmodernism hopes to retain: Do we become so pervasively integrated in our knowledge, political structures, and ideals that any sort of social or cultural diversity is wiped out? I suppose that if the "global village" that has resulted from increased technology progresses to its natural end, this would seem to be the case. Or am I misreading you?
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I think you are. In essence, I think "postmodernism," inasmuch as it really meant anything anyway, was a decidedly mixed bag. There was an intellectual movement that sought to decenter authority but it went hand in hand with an expanding mass culture that reinscribed authority/ideology, but now in a subtler, more pervasive form.
Now, in the post-post-modernity, it seems to me like there's a reaction against the decentering of authority, but no similar reaction to the cultural problems that attended post-modernity. If anything, mass culture is more pervasive and more uniform--look no further than the total banality that passes for entertainment television nowadays for an example. Political discourse has been replaced by paint-by-numbers partisanship, rife with false dilemmas and false choices designed to fool the citizenry into thinking that they have real power to effect a new and different future. In the meantime, the ideologies of state power/economic power are transmitted as the real content of the medium of mass culture (hey if you can borrow from McLuhan, so can I, right?
) while keeping most of us entertained just long enough to shuffle off our mortal coils and make room for the next generation of shills and suckers.
To return to the question--I wonder if post-post-modernity isn't a little bit like post-feminism. That is, it's merely an attempt to reclaim external authority while affirming postmodernism's assertion that this same authority isn't accessible--at least not to you. Make sense?