Maintaining all of the original content, format the following into proper paragraphs: we find ourselves in strange times
historical forces are currently at work
which it seems safe to say no one saw
coming in which one feels less safe
saying but completely out of control the
climate grows unstable institutions are
failing coalition's are shifting in the
whole geopolitical order once held
together by American influence was
collapsing
welcome to 2019 since the early 2000s

the groundwork for a new cultural
paradigm was being laid the paradigm
which had held sway since the end of
World War two had been transitioning to
something altogether different something
we now in 2019 find ourselves smack in
the middle of and not quite comfortably
so from a politics of centrist
neoliberal global ism we have come to
witness the rise of ethnocentric
autocrats their foot soldiers clashing
in the streets with progressive social
justice warriors of the resistance from
free-market global consumer capitalism
to increased protectionism and localism
from mass media to online subgroups and
digital counter cultures and from an art
once obsessed with sardonic play and
cynical irony we are now seeing a
revival of earnestness idealism even
spirituality it is almost as though the
world has contracted someone soberly
snapping out of some fin de millionaire
splurge or else recoiling from the
specter of a rootless generic worldwide
cosmopolitanism whose consummation had
already been baked into next quarters
profit report by the smug suits at davos
all signal rupture from a familiar past
and the advent of a new and very
different present
in these videos I will explain more what
I mean by all of this I want to argue
that we have indeed entered a new and
distinct cultural period a period after
post-modernism the characteristics of
this new period I think will shed some
light on the otherwise boggling and
unprecedented events now appearing daily
in our headlines social media feeds in
public spaces finally in my closing
videos I'll talk about how my own work
relates to these developments for those
who may be interested as a lot of it is
a direct expression of this emerging
sensibility here goes

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historians often like to talk in terms
of historical periods not because they
think these are somehow real objective
things but because they offer useful
shorthand tools for talking about the
past by referring to the medieval period
the Renaissance the Enlightenment the
Romantic period the modernist period and
so on we can talk in broad terms about
stretches of historical time that seem
to share common features and this can
help us make greater sense of historical
developments the last cultural period
generally recognized in this vein is the
postmodern period and it's on this
period that I want to focus for a moment
despite achieving ubiquity in academia
considerable confusion has surrounded
the term post-modernism since the
beginning this is due to a number of
factors not least of which being the
postmodern tendency to deliberately
avoid the neat closure of definitions
and to critique the over simplistic
sense of clarity such constructions
offer
largely because of the terms rapid and
wide-ranging profusion it has become
difficult to get a hold on it do you
assess precisely what unites a
postmodern architecture and postmodern
dance or to see why we should call
phenomena as disparate as pop art and
linguistic turn both postmodern the term
has become so commonplace a designation
for cultural developments in the
post-war period that its particular
qualities can seem obscured in fact some
now argue that the term is essentially
so broad as to be meaningless I disagree
I find that the notion of post-modernism
still does meaningful even necessary
work in conversations about
periodization it's clear for instance
that the label modernism is not
particularly useful just for discussing
dominant trends in late twentieth
century culture having a general term to
refer to such cultural production than
is valuable in and of itself moreover
despite the admitted diffusion of the
words meaning it still retains
meaningful power as a descriptive term
for example no one would walk into a
Catholic cathedral today and say to
themselves how postmodern nor would they
offer any such a pronouncement on
anything considered very old or
traditional or even something new but
still serious or lofty in common usage
then postmodern retains a particular
character and quality for example of
subversiveness irreverence self
reflexivity incomprehensible 'ti irony
and cynicism which mark it off from
other labels as a discrete modifier but
more importantly than all this is the
fact that the post modernism as a period
is essentially over it still remains
quite culturally significant even or
perhaps especially in this less precise
more expansive sense
while less of interest academics these
days post-modernism is increasingly
being interrogated and scrutinized in
other venues and with big impact its
legacy has been attracting a growing
critical response from contemporary
intellectuals occupying diverse corners
of the political spectrum in fact this
reaction is playing out in an
interesting and often nuanced ways among
the so called intellectual dark web for
instance a group which includes
conservatives like Jordan Peterson whose
critiques of post-modernism explicitly
channel the Objectivist Stephen Hicks
and others but also atheist and
socialist voices such as sam harris and
brett weinstein respectively such
intellectual reactions against
post-modernism and the wide influence
our audience they are finding our
crucial component of the new period now
rising i think and should be taken as a
serious sign that post-modernism at
least as a meaningful label is still
alive and well if this is true then what
can we say about it
our broad impressionistic associations
of styles and attitudes the best we can
do or is it possible to say something
more specific about the period what
really was post-modernism

first let's take a look at the
historical matrix of the period itself
predominant structural elements say from
1950 to 2001 might include in economics

hyper commodification mass production
and the dominance of laissez-faire
global consumer capitalism in politics
the sovereignty of the bureaucratic
nation-state the spread of Western
neoliberal democracy predicated on the
Pax Americana and a political center
based on these in philosophy the triumph
of post-structuralism anti
foundationalism and pragmatism the
critique / decline of metaphysics the
linguistic turn and the sharp divide
between analytic philosophy so-called
continental philosophy or critical
theory in critical theory
deconstructionism relativism emphasis on
and exegesis of traditional power
dynamics critiques of the pre-modern and
early modern traditions from the
perspectives of historically
marginalized and oppressed identities in
architecture and public space
eclecticism in a preference for
irregular playful flair over the
rigidity of the older modern modernist
designs increased sub / urbanization and
the infrastructural dominance of the
automobile in art the ubiquitous
proliferation of pop art and the
aesthetics of consumer culture the
official institutionalization of the
avant-garde by the elite a decline of
formalism and the profusion of quote
unquote experimental forms in letters
metafiction and hyper reflexivity and by
that I just mean a hyper awareness our
self-awareness non-linearity and
extensive elusiveness or illusion
to all sorts of things from the literary
past in general the cultural production
that is arisen from this historical
matrix can be said to bear a sort of
family resemblance by dint of the fact
that it arose out of similar conditions
and in response to similar social
circumstances what does that look like
cynical say the general consensus of
theorists relentlessly ironic self
referential self-conscious exhausted by
multiplicity taking few things if any
very seriously
glib the reverent world weary resigned
to with not cheekily celebrating the
commercialization of every facet of life
disillusioned with lofty ideals seeing
all action is expressions of power
through a singular hermeneutics of
suspicion dealing in surfaces images
simulations a reproduction of a
reproduction of a reproduction boredom
interrupted only by the exhilaration of
some novel chaos such attitudes can be
seen for instance glorified in the
cheeky superficiality of Jeff Koons and
Damien Hirst celebrated Robert Venturi's
& Co Mia two architectures of the Lucas
and sublime din the warped shiny curves
of Frank Gehry's lamented in the
cynicism of Radiohead two grunge
circumambulated in the literature of
Joseph Heller Thomas Pynchon Kurt
Vonnegut Dave Edgar's
theorized by Baudrillard pathologized in
films like The Matrix and satirized on
television by The Simpsons like all
cultural periods post-modernism was
complex to be sure but general
observations about its worldview such as
its pessimism skepticism hyper
reflection hyper capitalism can I think
be fairly pointed out as representative
of the time of course cultural theorists
don't aim simply to describe the period
but to analyze it ask how and why it
came about and what lies in the root of
its development in this regard certain
thinkers have been particularly
influential for their explanatory models
of post-modernism so in my next video
I'd like to take a deeper look at these
assessments and consider the
characterizations of post-modernism by
Jean Francois Lyotard David Harvey in
Fredric Jameson
after that we'll turn our attention to
the passing of post-modernism
and the emergence of a new cultural
paradigm out of its ashes cultural
paradigm for better or worse that we're
all now in