What comes after postmodernism?

>On a more practical level, the wake of postmodernism is clearly visible in the educational arena. Because everyone’s experiences are now privileged over investigation of a shared, knowable world, young scholars are increasingly finding venues for articles that tout their own experiences. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the humanities where alleged experience-based methodologies, such as autoethnography and ‘action research,’ have gained traction in peer-reviewed journals. With that traction comes increased Impact Factors when academicians cite the personal experiences of others as evidence to bolster supposedly scholarly claims.

This paragraph seems to be the “meat” of the article; standard complaints about postmodernism constitute the remainder. It is an interesting point, but it is not fleshed out very much.

This sounds less like serious academics more like "kids these days, am I right?". Identity politics, nationalism, tribalism are all very pre-modern and just never went away. I think you could easily argue that they've diminished to an all-time low and not the other way around. The reason we hear so much about it now is that in past generations, race and class strata of society were simply an unspoken fact of life and the current trend of public whining is just a reaction to the walls coming down. Asking for social justice is not new, it's just being listened to now instead of stamped out.

The sense of massive deja vu settles over me when I see these pieces. Or more accurately: hasn't this been done already?

I studied continental philosophy as a graduate student about ten years ago and have kept up since as much as possible.

Continental philosophy was the spawning pool for the loose cluster of tendencies[0] that form the concept of postmodernism in the imagination of most - Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard.

At this time, it seemed definitively that this set of ideas this lot was on the way out. There was even a term for what was bad about them, as captured in After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux: correlationism[1]. The idea that human thought never "got at" the truth because of intermediate cognitive or societal structures or biases. There was a whole movement against correlationism called speculative realism[2]. In the UK at least, indeed, the focus of continental philosophy that preceded it seemed to oppose this postmodernism taken as a name for this cluster of thinkers. Broadly, a solid focus on Deleuze resulting in "new materialisms" (often scientifically informed) and a figure like Alain Badiou (Meillassoux's tutor) who very much attempted to stake out the ground for Truth with a big-olde-capital-T.

So to me that it is still a live term and people are talking about it so much is pretty strange. Of course that continental philosophy influences other discourses, and that both Derrida and Foucault were quite interdisciplinary in their work. So one could say this is some sort of institutional lag. But it is an odd thing to observe[3].

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[0] I say this because Foucault and Derrida are better described as post-structuralists and this is what they would have considered themselves as. Lyotard helped assist the terms with his work certainly in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir but it was a term of societal diagnosis rather than support. I feel that postmodernism as a cluster term was the result of the reception of these theories in American literary theory departments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Criti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism

[3] I'm not actually adjudicating here on the merits or otherwise of those thinkers grouped as postmodern. That's another topic.

I see a great divergence coming: take a look at a culture divide in between rich Chinese cities, and the rest of the country. The divide is visible in everything from aesthetics in art, to attitudes to marriage, the proletariat and 1% are a world apart.

I see the same coming sooner or later to the rest of the world.

I think postmodernism also affected journalism. It was more important to invite both sides of the argument rather than care about facts. But I think the attitude has been changing lately, with the ecological dangers and dangers of fascism that this system brings.

It's gratifying to see a deep understanding of the origin and current reality of this situation emerge after so many years of chaos and culture warring. Hopefully with understanding, and greater exposure to society at large, will come a remedy.

Post-postmodernism/metamodernism, perhaps best embodied by the type of "post-irony" found on imageboards?