Taking off the safety catch: communication and culture in the Anglosphere and Continental Europe

The paper consists of an argument for the adoption of an aggressive postmodernism that opposes materialism, monism, and the supremacy of scientific reason as fundamentally outdated twentieth century notions. It attacks the models of planning, strategy, and experience as hopelessly Fordist anachronisms and posits a turn away from scientistic understanding towards visionary motivation. What Postmodernism means: • the downgrading of science • the resurrection of religion • coming to terms with the Death of Man • the futility of strategy • opposition to Culture and to Cultural Studies Such an aggressive postmodernism can have no respect for the notion of Culture, which is in thrall to that of the Human. In a world comprised principally of information, the privileged position of the human species and indeed of awareness itself is undermined. Academic obsession with post-s has resulted in little real sense of what is ‘before’ and what is ‘after’. Bogus chronologies abound. Whereas the study of Communication and of Culture have been considered to be largely the same, we contend that they are actively opposed.