Are We Postmodern, or Post-Postmodern?

 
"Postmodern" is a term that most people have probably heard of, but do they truly know what it means?

Ihab Hassan, in his essay "The Culture of Postmodernism," grapples with this very issue.  He presents several ways of looking at and defining postmodernism, some of which I will quote below:

"But what better name have we to give this curious age?  The Atomic, or Space, or Television, Age?  These technological tags lack theoretical definition.  Or shall we call it the Age of Indetermanence (interdeterminancy & immanence) as I have half-antically proposed?  Or better still, shall we simply live and let others live to call us what they may?" (121)

"Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or Chinese Wall; for history is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future" (121)

"Postmodernism, by invoking two divinities at once, engages a double view.  Sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, all must be honored if we are to attend to history, apprehend (perceive, understand) change both as a spatial, mental structure and as a temporal, physical process, both as pattern and unique event" (121)

"Or is it a 'theory of change' itself an oxymoron best suited to ideologies intolerant of the ambiguities of time?  Should postmodernism, then, be left -- at least for the moment -- unconceptualized, a kind of literary-historical 'difference' or 'trace'?" (122)

"Postmodernism can expand into a still larger problem: is it only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon, perhaps even a mutation in Western humanism?" (122)

(photo: found here and used in accordance with a Creative Commons license)

I do think that postmodernism is a social as well as literary phenomenon, so much so that the philosophy behind it has permeated into virtually every aspect of our culture, causing us to take many of the tenets of postmodernism for granted.  For example, the Internet blurs the boundaries of traditional media so completely that we are left with no other choice but to consider it an entirely new media onto itself, and we as a society do not challenge this idea or consider it in any way unnatural.  The Internet has also made new ways of collaborating possible.  We've become so accustomed to "news feeds" containing a stream of status updates from the people we follow on social networking sites (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) that most of us don't stop and ask, "Who's intellectual property is my news feed?"

Can it be, then, that we've entered a post-postmodern era?  Feel free to weigh in on this philosophical debate by leaving a comment.

Works Cited:

Hassan, Ihab. “The Culture of Postmodernism.” Theory, Culture, and Society 2.3 (1985): 119-131.