Why I Now Use 'Off Normal' Instead Of 'Postnormal'
Svetlana Boym inspired me to do it.
For many years, I characterized the time in which we live — since about 2005 — as the Postnormal. Basically a disruptive break between the social, cultural, economic, and aesthetic milieu of the postmodern era and the present.
But then I read Svetlana Boym’s The Off-Modern, and was seduced by her fire and rhetoric. She got me with ‘Off-modern reflection involves exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity. In other words, it opens into the “modernity of what if” rather than simply modernization as it is.’
She writes,
Instead of fast-changing prepositions—“post,” “anti,” “neo,” “trans,” and “sub”—that suggest an implacable movement forward, against or beyond, and try desperately to be “in,” I propose to go off: “Off” as in “off quilter,” off Broadway, “off the path,” or “way off,” off-brand, off the wall and occasionally “off-color.” “Off-modern” is a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side-alleys of modern history at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic and technological narratives of modernization and progress. Off-modern reflection involves exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity. In other words, it opens into the “modernity of what if” rather than simply modernization as it is. (Critic and writer Victor Shklovsky proposes the figure of the knight’s move in chess that follows “the tortured road of the brave,” preferring it to the master-slave dialectics of “dutiful pawns and kings.”)
Off-modern follows a non-linear conception of cultural evolution; it could follow spirals and zigzags, the movements of the chess knight and parallel lines that on occasion can intertwine asymptotically. Or as Vladimir Nabokov explained: “in the fourth dimension of art parallel lines might not meet, not because they cannot, but because they might have other things to do.” As we veer off the beaten track of dominant modern teleologies, we have to proceed laterally, not literally, and discover the missed opportunities and roads not taken. These lie buried in modern memory like the routes of public transportation in the American cities that embraced car culture a little too wholeheartedly. Off modern has a quality of improvisation, of a conjecture that doesn’t distort the facts but explores their echoes, residues, implications, shadows.
She's highly metaphorical, but 'off' does offer lateral imagery rather than the linear progress of 'post'.
The preposition “off” is a product of linguistic creativity and fuzzy logic. It developed from the preposition “of,” with the addition of an extra “f”, an emphatic and humorous onomatopoeic exaggeration that imitates oral speech.
The “off” in “off-modern” designates both the belonging to the critical project of modernity and its edgy excess. It signifies both intimacy and estrangement, belonging and longing to take off.
In the twenty-first century, modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins, which we incorporate into our present, leaving deliberate scars or disguising our age marks with the uplifting cream of oblivion.
Off modern then is not antimodern; it is closer in fact to the critical and experimental spirit of modernity than it is to the existing forms of industrial and postindustrial modernization. In other words, it opens into the “modernity of “what if,” and not only modernization as it was.
Post normal is not anti-normal, and opens to the search into our time in the spirit of ‘what if’ and not only as a linear contrast with the now lost era when things were normal.