SWM Archive: Modernity

I've never liked the term #PostModern - not because of the styles & Ideologies it is attached to, but because I question the premise. #PostModern is founded on the premise that there was a fundamental change made durring the post War Years: a "paradigm shift." Thomas Kuhn defined a paradigm shift a fundamental break in understanding between to regimes of understanding - in science. Late 70s theorist like Jean-François Lyotard & Rosalind Krauss began using the term paradigm shift to describe…

Modernist Hangover: The Masterpiece - There is no such thing a Post War American masterpiece because there is no such thing as a masterpiece. It is a totally bogus category.

Middle Modernism - Jane Jacobs is the God mother of a new strain of Modernism that Stewart Brand, Steven Johnson, Gail Collins, and Malcolm Gladwell are all examples of. The most recent expression of an vulgar intellectual strain that threads through modernity from it's earliest moments - a strain that is usually disparaged as Middle Brow. They are "Middle" because they share an understanding that we are deeply embedded within modernity, that its final shape is far from being expressed.

Francis vs Bob 2011 is to the future what twenty-two is to adolescence. In the roll call of millennial benchmarks 1999 was thirteen, the year we finally become teenagers (and we could finally party like it was Prince had promised us we would). Stanley Kubrick made 2001 a far more adult benchmark, it was more akin to a sixteenth birthday, we got our drivers licence, but we were becoming aware that this future/adult thing was happening right now. 2008 turned out to be our like an eighteen, it…