PostPostModernism

Quora Answer : Is it silly to call the period after modernism, postmodernism? What will people call the period after postmodernism?

Feb 24, 2020

No sillier that calling something "Baroque" or "Regency" or "Queen Anne" or "Old Skool" or "Medieval".

These are just labels for styles. All styles inevitably have a historical and a non-historical aspect to them.

Or even calling a city "New York". What's "new" about it?

Will there be a period "after postmodernism"?

As an aesthetic style? We're already in it. And people call it all sorts of things.

As a more philosophical concern? Possibly not ... postmodernism is the rejection of totalizing meta-narratives like psychoanalysis and Marxism. Maybe people will stop thinking that there has to be a grand unified cultural theory of everything, and will accept that culture is just within schools or genres that follow their own independent logics.

Quora Answer : What lies beyond postmodernism?

Oct 31, 2014

Diffusion.

We clump together the things we call "post-modern" because they were all reactions to the same things that came before them. But under that heading we have very different thinkers whose ideas point in different directions and have different implications.

As time goes on, some of those directions get followed and developed further, and it becomes less and less plausible to see a commonality between them. Post-modernism as a "thing" (if it ever was one) simply evaporates and the new things take on a life of their own. (Hopefully cured of the pretention to be THE new thing.)