Postmodernism - Living Tomorrow Today. "Quo vadis, Homo sapiens?"

Postmodernism - Living Tomorrow Today

"Quo vadis, Homo sapiens?"

Dr Abe V Rotor

Living with Nature School on Blog

Postmodernism is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought. Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism (the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known)

"Postmodernism claims that modernity which began with 'the Enlightenment', industrialism, Darwin and Marx, has collapsed. We now live in an endlessly contemporary culture full of contested meanings. The resulting postmodern culture embodies parody, pastiche* and cultural cross-over. It is a virtual world of hyperreality containing such strange phenomena as post-Holocaust amnesia, Disneyland, cyberspace and Fukuyama's proclaimed 'end of history'..." - Authors of Introducing Postmodernism

To a layman, postmodernism is

1- living in a home twenty years or so to pay;
2- driving a car likewise acquired through down payment and installment;
3- selling the potential harvest of a wheat field even before the planting season (future marketing);
4- melting clocks of Salvador Dali, surrealism;
5- supplying the missing arms of Venus de Milo, and at the end deciding not to.

6- carrying smartphone or tablet all the time, and updating its features with new models;
7- model of [de]FORM[mation] in Picasso's art, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon;
8- credit cards, advantage cards, discount cards, VIP cards in a wallet;
9- wearing oversized or undersized RTWs, fashion or for whatever reason;

10- couple Elton John and David Furnish, gay marriage;

11- wearing coat-and-tie, short pants and rubber shoes;
12- drive-in funeral parlor (e-libing);

13 e-learning, e-library, e-mail, e-commerce;

14- man-induced calamities creating never heard havoc;
15- bitcoin, software currency;

16- rise of nones, people who move away from organized religions; 

17- Lady Gaga
18- globalization, homogenization, global village, terms about our "shrinking" world;

19- from Einstein's E=mc2, comes the discovery of now Higg's Boson that gives mass to matter, known as God's Particle;

20- Human Genome Map tells a person's genetic makeup - reference for health, job, career, marriage, etc.

21- longevity increasing, more and more centenarians all over the world;

22- music revival of classics and oldies, on the other, avant-garde music on the rise; 

23- Drone unmanned war machines - drones (e-warplanes) PHOTO

24- rise of cybercrimes, scammers, etc;

25- "humanizing" pets as members of the family, often in lieu of children.

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*A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, music, or architecture that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche pays homage to the work it imitates, rather than mocking it. Wikipedia

ASSIGNMENT: Add on to the list your own interpretation of postmodern living as you encounter every day, learn on social media, observe in school, church and community.  You may conduct further research as special topic or thesis. To what extent does postmodernism lead you personally and as member of society? "Quo vadis, Homo sapiens?" (Where are you going, Homo sapiens?) is a phrase that poses a fundamental question about humanity's future and its direction, prompting reflection on its current path and ultimate destiny.) ~