Postmodern mathesis

Modernity attempts to spatialize time, and to chart temporally shifting reality in a fixed mathesis. So argues Catherine Pickstock at least. But in this sense postmodernism is hypermodernism. Featherstone notes that MTV “seems to exist in a timeless present with video artists ransacking film genres and art movements from different historical periods to blur boundaries and the sense of history. History becomes spatialized out, aesthetic hierarchies and developments are collapsed with the mixing of genres and high art, popular and commercial forms. It is argued that the continuous flow of diverse images makes it difficult to chain them together into a meaningful message; the intensity and degree of saturation of signifiers defy systematization and narrativity.”