Old-Fashioned Postmodernism

A culture poised on an edge of time

My Dear Grandchild,

I have subjected you to a series of gloomy letters in which I have compared the dark mood of Europe in 1914 to that of the United States in 2025. I have one last comparison in this vein to make, but instead of emphasizing the similarities between that moment and this one, I’d like to note what I perceive to be a significant difference.

In a recent letter to you, I described one of the more striking aspects of the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century: a series of related movements gathered under the umbrella concept of modernism. I’ve kinda pushed my luck in this correspondence by veering a little too close to a lecture and away from an admittedly one-sided conversation, albeit one in which your presence, however opaque, is nevertheless palpable to me. But in short, modernism was an exceptionally wide-ranging and bold challenge to the status quo, which centered the subjectivity of human experience, and used that subjectivity to restructure the means and ends of artistic expression. The patron saint of modernism (as a Jew, he’d likely be amused by the metaphor) was Sigmund Freud, the founding father of modern psychology. Most of Freud’s “scientific” arguments about the human brain have long since ended up on the ash heap of history, but his core insight—that consciousness is a multilayered experience, aspects of which a person is largely, even wholly, unaware—proved to be hugely influential. It laid the foundations for the fractured paintings of Pablo Picasso, the fragmented musings of James Joyce, and weird polytonality of Igor Stravinsky, among other pathbreaking works of the era. In the early twentieth century, modernism was a bracing revolt against the pieties—religious as well as scientific—of the Victorian era, moving from the avant-garde of cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century to its commanding heights by mid-century.

The second half of the twentieth century, by contrast, has been known as the age of postmodernism. As its name suggests, postmodernism is closely connected with modernism, particularly in terms of the way both challenge, even reject, the notion that human experience can be captured by tightly concatenated conventions that depict universal truths. (Universal truths: once upon a time, this was regarded as the quintessence of what art should be about.) But unlike modernism, whose driving imperative was, in the words of poet Ezra Pound, to “make it new,” postmodernism was typically conceived as a collage of historical referents from which meaning and identity were constructed (as opposed to generated or discovered). I think that the quintessential idiom of American postmodernism at the turn of the twenty-first century was the musical idiom of hip-hop, a pop genre based on the practice of sampling older recordings and constructing mirror-houses of reference to its own history.

My dear Leila, I’ve largely been a happy child of a postmodern culture. It suits your historian grandfather, for whom the past is a closet full of mental memorabilia, very well. But I am also uncomfortably aware that there’s something shopworn about a culture that defines itself as after rather than a bold assertion of something new. I don’t doubt that there is an avant-garde bubbling beneath my radar, which I’m not especially likely to recognize, much less like. But the mood of the moment I’m trying to report is that of a civilization that seems suspended somehow, waiting for what comes next. I’ll confess that I just don’t see our modern-day Picassos, Joyces, or Stravinskys out there, who may yet shape your life. I hope you’ll find things to like, love, and identify with in the post-postmodern world—and be able to connect that brave new world to the one your forebears knew.