The word postmodern gets thrown around more than a cheap South-Korean hooker. Every now and then, a friend or acquaintance of mine recommends me some piece of art or literature, citing this word and the vague characteristics associated with it as sufficient proof that I'll fall in love with whatever they recommend. "It's so postmodern! Things explode and it makes absolutely no sense! You'll love it!" 

Shrugging off the implicit suggestion that I'll love anything nihilistic, I almost always find that whatever has been recommended, though often fun and interesting, is not postmodern, and when I try to explain why, I'm stuck trying to explain this odd post-existence we're experiencing post-millenium; this odd ambiguous period in art and literature that has been loosely dubbed post-postmodern.

I first came across this term in an essay by Barry Lewis titled  "Postmodernism and Fiction", wherein,  according to Lewis, postmodernism met it's demise in 1989, post-Pynchon/Acker/Auster, but pre-Wallace/Coupland/Gibson. Though authors under both umbrella terms use the same techniques and have similar distinguishing characteristics like temporal disorder, pastiche, paranoia, and cyclicality, post-1989 writers are considered post-pomo by Lewis because their techniques hit the mainstream and were no longer subversive.

While the quality of being subversive, though integral to postmodern art and fiction, definitely met its end at the end of the eighties, I find it hard to describe the writing in the nineties as post-postmodern. The prefix "post" denotes something greater than just "after", especially when used in art and literature. To call something post - modern, we suggest that a new form came to replace the modes of Joyce's and Woolf's modernism; that new techniques were being used and a period had come that was definitely distinguishable from the earlier movement. We can't particularly cite any such distinguishable break or change in postmodern literature. What has come to replace these ambiguous cyclical parodies of late capitalism? 

As a child of the nineties and an adult of the new millennium, my generation has witnessed the death of cultural absolutes. Postmodernism was the grand narrative of the death of grand narratives, finding its conclusion in our present. It seems as though this concept of post-postmodernism is not the introduction of a new movement, but the logical conclusion to the aim of postmodernism; we have had our metanarratives stripped away, and we are now at a point where our cultural ideals, if any, must be rebuilt individually. Post-pomo is somewhat of a post-apocalypse; the new fragmented narrative of the accelerated interconnected world. New writing is post-pomo not because it provides something that renders postmodern lit obscelete, but rather, uses the fragments of cultural ideals that postmodernism destroyed to rebuild a relative reality that resists definition simply because it represents the new concept of relativity, not another collective force.

We inhabit this odd post-pomo existence alongside the paradoxical anti-ideologies of postmodern thinkers and writers, whose violent destruction of collective culture simultaneously and cyclically continues in the western world. Post-pomo suggests our building of something new that resists definition, and any attempt, even mine, to definitively define it at this point in its development would be useless and contradictory. I, like many artists and writers of this new age, intend to just enjoy my relative reality and the bizarre concept of this age of the imperial individual with curiosity, and maybe a few cute Asian prostitutes.