A Review of 20th century Cultural Praxis

20th century was an age of differences. Popular culture had become a polynomial of discontinuous memes. Difference of ideologies, consciousness, ethnicity, culture, theory, identity and so on permeated every universal act and belief system. Differences decimated meaningful constructs into abstract signs. Art and aesthetics also had its share of pie in this divergent flux.

Cultural theoreticians delineated the aesthetic universe into categories of high art — low art. High art was further decomposed into formalistic, epistemic and emprical. Low art dilapidated into the pebbles of ocular, ephemeral, evolutionary and libidinal. Libidinal diverged into anthropocentric and ecocentric. The spirals of segmentation continued to ferment into miniature dimensions.

Cultural theory was always porous to the effervescence of segmentation. Postmodernism had one of the most fragmented locus among the theoretical formations. Paragons of postmodernism observed the multitude of differences spread across semantics, semiotics, linguistics, anthropology and so many other fields of knowledge. They wrote about similarities and differences. Threads and needles of syn-chronic perspectives razed through the dialectic epochs in the history of human kind.

Every semantic elements lost their functional continuity and thus they became the sign posts of a concocted semiotic parallax. In this parallax of meanings, the aspect of synchronicity and isomorphic occurrences gets fragmented in the contours of experience.A rational caliberation of experience becomes next to impossible in this flux. Life gets morphed into a fancied stage act or gamified narrative or an irrational myth in this state of affairs. This metamorphosis becomes an order of the day when we step into the 21st century in the wings of flattened senses and fuming emotions.