There are many out there claiming that Postmodernism has come to an end. I think it is morphing into a more vicious form of itself. POMO is so thoroughly enured in the electronic culture that most can't see past it. Postmodern theory's "...view of language is the idea of "play" text. In the context of postmodernism, play means changing the framework which connects ideas, and thus allows the troping, or turning, of a metaphor or word from one context to another, or from one frame of reference to another. Since, in postmodern thought, the "text" is a series of "markings" whose meaning is imputed by the reader, and not by the author, this play is the means by which the reader constructs or interprets the text, and the means by which the author gains a presence in the reader's mind." Basically what we are talking about is programming - the author as programmer rather than narrator. Meaning is determined in the reader's interaction with the text rather than the text determining the meaning for the reader.

In this article by Alan Kirby he delinates the "psuedo-modern" as the step beyond Postmodernism - he describes the direct effects of POMO's linkage to electronic media. As in POMO culture the"reader" imputes meaning from the text and then melds this reading with the speed of electronic culture creating a violent critical rupture between dialetical thinking and communication. Kirby states..."somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them." This was true in the visual arts as well. The final shift away from abstraction to figuration was a telling moment for painting, and it's one that abstraction has not recovered from. Even the current THIRD resurgence of decorative optical abstraction (in the last 10 years) delineates the emptiness of electronic POMO sensibility. "By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them." For Dr. Kirby interaction has replaced interpretation. Meaning having morphed from author to reader - no longer matters. Interaction is the completion of the program and existence is determined through the digitization of physicality allowing the "reader" or "viewer" to finish the programming sequence. "A culture based on these things(programmed ephemera) can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future."

Through the electronic we've made historicism irrelevant. In the 1980s POMO theorists claimed to have done away with history - electronic programming made this true. We live without continuity, without history and without memory. Culture, especially visual culture, processes this amnesia through waves of neo movements. It's strange really. The 20th Century was defined by isms - the 21st Century is defined by neos. History drove the isms, non-history drives the neos - "isms" were about defining new visual ideas, "neos" are about refining old ones. I'm not sure about the term "pseudo-modernism" - it smacks too much of Postmodern theoretics on steroids. But I whole-heartedly agree with the idea that POMO is morphing, speeding up and becoming something else. McLuhan often talked of tetrads which described the processes of cultural ideas. For McLuhan the final step in the life of an idea is an overloading of the idea's first principles which causes it to flip into its opposite. POMO is now speeding up and overloading. What will its opposite look like? Read on!