Schönes Must-Read über das Ende der Postmoderne mit Fokus auf Popkultur und vielen Beispielen aus Film, Musik und teh Internetz, das mich mal wieder fragen lässt: in welcher Epoche leben wir eigentlich? Und ich meine damit den Namen. Moderne ist toll. Postmoderne eher uärks und Post-Postmoderne geht gar nicht. Rokoko finde ich als Namen ja totschick, gibt’s aber schon und passt auch nicht wirklich, wenn man kunsthistorische Maßstäbe anlegt.
Im Namen unserer Epoche müsste mindestens einmal das Wort „Cyber“ auftauchen, vielleicht auch „Virtual“… Virtual Cybermodernpixel? Der Begriff „Pseudo-Moderne“, den der Text vorschlägt, finde ich auch doof, von Moderne hab ich die Schnauze voll, aber Pseudo passt dann doch irgendwie zu virtuell. Was weiß ich. Hier jedenfalls ein paar schicke Zitate:
Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
[...]
The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product.
[...]
Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.
[...]
Dance music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation.
(via)
