Media and Visual Culture through the Paradigms of Modernism(s): from Modernism through Postmodernism to Post-postmodernism and Hypermodernism

Abstract

Departing from the premise that postmodernism does not disappear in the course of the historical demise of cultural–epistemological paradigms but is instead transversally incorporated into a new metanarrative of techno-aesthetic hypermodernity, this paper reconfigures the categorical foundations for the analysis of visual and media culture within the context of the post-postmodern transition. Its central thesis does not imply either a regressive reaffirmation of modernist formalism or a normative repair of postmodern fragmentation, but rather the articulation of an epistemologically expanded field within which postmodern poetics—including the simulacral, intertextual, pastiche-based, spectacular, and rhizomatic—are refunctionalized as the techno-ontological infrastructure of a new visual regime. Relying methodologically on heterogeneous yet compatible conceptual modules (assemblage / visual code / cyberspace / algorithmic affectivity), the authors approach media culture not as a phenomenological epiphenomenon, but as an apparatus-based formation of subjectivity in which the aesthetic, the political, and the technological are not separated, but operationalized through modes of digitally mediated (self-)representation. Within this discursive framework, the postmodern no longer exists as a historically “past” concept, but as a semiotic code undergoing algorithmic mutation—reconfigured within a hypermodern environment in which visuality has become the primary mode of affective and cognitive articulation of reality.