Bruce Sterling on Thu, 29 Jul 1999 20:28:24 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> At Last Postmodernism's Over




<< CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA--

The "postmodern" condition of alienated, disjointed late-20th-century
humanity was officially upgraded to "pre-apocalyptic" Monday, when new
findings from leading postmodernist theorist Richard Rorty were published
in the new issue of Semiotexte. "I was flipping through the cable channels
the other night, trying to get an abstract sense of the way emergent
processes of change and transformation generated by contemporary high-tech
society are challenging cultural assumptions regarding diverse aesthetic
forms to create a novel state of history," Rorty said, "when, all of a
sudden, I realized that everything I was looking at was the biggest load
of unimaginably horrific crap ever." At this point in the socio-cultural
discourse, Rorty said, the key question is no longer whether or not social
fragmentation, cultural meta-juxtaposition and socioeconomic problematics
require new modes of experience and interpretation, but rather, "When will
the seven-headed dragon of the End Times descend upon us all in unholy
fury?" 


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