Post-s

"Post-crash, post-consumer, post-materialist, post-racial. We are now familiar with newspapers, cultural commentators, academics and artists talking in terms of post. We are a post society, if not actually post-society. The crash has made us post-consumer if not post-economic. Which makes us post-materialist, too. Obama is the post-racial president, which means we are living in a post-racial society, a post-prejudice world. Benjamin H Bratton would add a whole host of other posts to that list, with the proviso that their posterity is uncertain. We might be all of these things, and then again we might not. 'Post-War period, Post-Watergate, post-modernity, post-fashion, Post-humanism ... post-bubble, post-finance, post-production, post-consumption […] post-American, post-leverage, post-abundance, post-secular, post-social, post-urban'. Add to that 'post-cinema, post-art, post-security, post-object, post-opacity, post-border, post-crime' and quite possibly post-post-modernity.

Quite what we are post- and what we are pre- was the subject of Bratton's talk at April 2009's Postopolis! event held in Los Angeles. It was a rumination began by the title of the five-day cycle of talks and presentations, and was made more prescient by the recent and ongoing collapse of world financial security. Society appears conscious of its changes but can't name them. We are precariously placed between a post- and a pre-, neither of which has an identity we can describe."

Tentative start to the big paper I have to write by 27th October...