THREE SHORT NOTES ON THE OFF MODERN

We often talk about the off modern as well as Off Modern, as a concept that is; Harvard professor Svetlana Boym coined the phrase, our reading of it forms the theoretical basis of Off Modern (that is to say, us, and what we do) and it is a development of her radical alteration of how we see art history and its container, history, in more general terms. It is based around a development of the post-modern, in relation to the off modern as supplanting it. Post-modernism is a rejection of the great cultural psychological truths that modernism put forward in the early 20th Century. Now, in the early 21st century, the theories of the Off Modern place themselves as a rejection of the position held by the post-modernists, but also, and critically, it is not a re-affirmation of the theories of the modernists. It links the two, inter-relates them, and sees them as two parts of the same artistic whole, unified by their opposition, like black and white, which are shades of each other and not separate entities. Both positions are, essentially, different forms of the same strand of psychological modernism; they are concerned with the same thing, humanity as community and as individual within said community.

 We often talk about off modern as a pan-history; this means that, in relation to modernism, it encapsulates all historical and personal environments in which modernism can occur. Modernism creates for Man a great, unifying psychological truth, symbolised in the figure of the everyman, Leopold Bloom for example. Post-modernism dissociates man from this truth; it says he is alone and that his life is absurd, alienating, terrifying and formalistic. The great psychological truth of post-modernism is that humanity, or more correctly the individual, is alone, and although surrounded by society he can never truly connect to it. The off modern takes every single, alienating section of human discourse, and says, whilst there is no single great psychological truth that unites us, there are instead millions of different psychological truths, and that they are all related via the implications of a new arbitrary pan-historical study.

We often talk about a ‘new arbitrary historical discourse’; this is how we relate the disparate individual events of our pan-historical study. Two examples of this, which are gone into in more detail on this website are in the comparison between the histories of Ireland and Poland, and also in comparison between Marc Auge’s theories of non-place and the city of Dubai. Through a comparison of the unrelated events, of what the post-modern would separate, as disparate, unrelatable and alienating, through discussion we can draw comparison and thesis. The off modern allows us, from this, to form a new arbitrary historical discourse that doesn’t relate to the common historical notion of cause-and-effect, and thus bankrupts all old theories of historical study. This causes a new historical temporal reality that rehabilitates and detourns all old and forgotten histories, all of the millions of different individual psychologies are no longer in a state of alienation, because at random, we can prove everything is related through the off modern.