Secondly,
whereas postmodernism favoured
the ironic, the knowing
and the playful, with their
allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s
typical intellectual states
are ignorance, fanaticism
and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden and
their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful
masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism was
not born on 11
September 2001, but
postmodernism was interred
in its rubble. In this context
pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated
technology to the pursuit
of medieval barbarism – as
in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the
use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond
this, the destiny of
everyone else is to
suffer the anxiety of
getting hit in the
cross-fire. But this
fatalistic anxiety extends
into every aspect of
contemporary life; from a
general fear of social
breakdown and identity
loss, to a deep
unease about diet and
health; from anguish about
the destructiveness of
climate change, to the
effects of a new
personal ineptitude and
helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how
to clean your house, bring up your children. This
technologised cluelessness is
utterly contemporary: the
pseudo-modernist communicates constantly
with the other side
of the planet, yet
needs to be told
to eat vegetables to
be healthy, a fact
self-evident in the Bronze
Age. A fusion of the
childish and the advanced,
the powerful and the
helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable
of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued
typified postmodernists.
This
pseudo-modern
world,
so
frightening
and
seemingly
uncontrollable,
inevitably
feeds
a
desire
to
return
to
the
infantile
playing
with
toys
which
also
characterises
the
pseudo-modern
cultural
world.
Here,
the
typical
emotional
state,
radically
superseding
the
hyper-consciousness
of
irony,
is
the
trance
– the
state
of
being
swallowed
up
by
your
activity.
In
place
of
the
neurosis
of
modernism
and
the
narcissism
of
postmodernism,
pseudo-modernism
takes
the
world
away,
by
creating
a
new
weightless
nowhere
of
silent
autism.
You
click,
you
punch
the
keys,
you
are
‘involved’,
engulfed,
deciding.
You
are
the
text,
there
is
no-one
else,
no
‘author’;
there
is
nowhere
else,
no
other
time
or
place.
You
are
free:
you
are
the
text:
the
text
is
superseded.
