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After Postmodernism, We Need a New Idea of Plasticity
Why the future may require something between modern rigidity and postmodern fluidity
There is a peculiar question hiding inside the phrase after the folded world. What does “after” mean? It does not necessarily mean that the world has been rejected, defeated, or proven wrong. To say “after” is not to say that something has disappeared. It may simply mean that we have reached a point at which the old vocabulary no longer seems sufficient. The world has not ended. What has ended, perhaps, is our ability to describe it using the same concepts.
That is where the question of what comes after postmodernism begins. For several decades, we have been accustomed to describing modernity as something rigid:
ordered, hierarchical, universal, standardized and directed toward a future that could, at least in principle, be designed in advance.
Postmodernism challenged much of this confidence. It preferred fluidity, plurality, fragmentation and uncertainty. If modernity said that there was a road leading forward, postmodernism asked who built the road, who decided where it should lead, and who had been excluded from it.
But what happens after fluidity? Maybe neither rigidity nor fluidity quite describes where we are now. We seem to be living with both at once:
