Reflections upon the ‘post’

The prefix ‘post’ by definition comes before something, in order to signal its afterwards. Discussions of (for example) postmodernism, posthumanism, the post-industrial, and indeed the post-digital have remarked that the ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ suggested in these framings is not necessarily categorical, nor even clearly demarcated by way of a date. In this case, the ‘post’ often contains significant features of what came before, and the presence of a name (the modern, the humanist) marks a continuity however much it is also always renounced. As Hal Foster suggested in 1983, addressing a trajectory from modernism to postmodernism, ‘modernism is now largely absorbed. Originally oppositional, ... today, however, it is the official culture’ (Foster 1985: ix). This raises a fundamental question concerning the ‘post’ as a cultural descriptor. To what extent does it mark a radical break, and to what extent is its precedent figured in the very shapes and expressions of the thing that it now describes? This tension is at the heart of cultural process, and thinking about the ‘post’ can help us understand principles of change within culture, society and politics, and therefore also within performance.