Living the Post-Modernity

 

Living the Post-Modernity: In a recent conversation, the name of Baudrillard came up, followed by a discussion of how in the 1980s and 1990s there was an interest in genuine scholarship, research, debate as compared to the frenzy of the discourse-driven post modern montage of images and sensations that pass by – never sticking – because they are not supposed to stick. If it stuck, and if there was a fixity and authenticity of meaning, then we would still be in the modernity and not graduated to post-modernity. Not too long ago, “post modernity”  was the theoretical future – and people like me who were studying the oncoming phenomenon hypothesized that we would someday live in a World where all things stable will be destabilized, all meanings will become meaningless, reality will be completely constructed, and unscrupulous “thought leaders” will try to create passing fads that the numbed and stunned population will believe to be true; in most parts, this was a fictional future because no one saw exactly how this future will be manufactured. Because, when we discussed these issues in lively debates in the doctoral seminars, the most advanced phone a well-to-do family possessed was a cordless phone – a relic of the time when you could walk around your home untethered to a wall outlet of the landline phone. At the time, when post-modernity was a theory, charlatans had a difficult time trying to advance their agendas – from Herbalife to the pet rock – from scientology to faux Zen – all came and went because we were in the modern World where “truths” were based in evidence. As my dear friend and teacher, Professor Hyde would remind me – “show me the data – show me what you got.” Because in modernity, the hyperactivity of the hyperlink (actually first imagined and made by Apple as the HyperCard) was yet to come. Meaning and senses were driven by a relative calm because there was an accepted sense that a truth exists and that truth can be found. The hyperlink changed that. Truth disappeared. Meaning has now been infinitely regressed; for instance, if you thought you knew the meaning of a word the enormous database will instantly show you that there is another meaning, and another, and yet another, until it does not matter anymore. We invented the technology that made the post-modern dream real. And then came the imposters and fraudsters and the influencers and mind benders. Armed with a plethora of secondary information, and realizing that truth can be manufactured without evidence – many different kinds of movements began that could be sent to the personal consumption device – the screen – where there was no way to question the obvious “truth,” presented with wily craft and a lilting voice because “truth” had already left the building. Anyone could say anything with no evidence but “touch the heart” of the vulnerable and we are in the Baudrillard’s World of post-truth and Anderson’s “imagined communities” that Anderson could not have even imagined. But this is just the beginning of the new post-modernity. There is much more to come especially when the tricksters and impression makers will mobilize the technologies to push their agendas on the impressionable for a fleeting sense of “success” and gain. Yet it these impression makers who will eventually be the victim of the exact condition that they are exploiting, because we all know in the post-modern World, where nothing is fixed and everything is relative, what seems to be the final Word today will be replaced by a new final Word tomorrow. And the exciting idea of today will be the spent energy of tomorrow just as the final “person” today will be abandoned tomorrow because suddenly a new person captures the “real” truth – who too shall soon be replaced. Many of us who lived in the modern and now graduated to the post-modern, watch with amusement how people are taken for rides and recall the song by Who where they warned, “Then I'll get on my knees and pray/We don't get fooled again, no, no”