Basically, I don’t understand how we label historical periods. People refer to the present as post modern, and a few years ago, it was the modern period. But I read that modern means “the actual / current period” so when do we go back to being in the modern period again?
When someone in the present says “omg that house looks so modern” will we eventually have a name to label that modernity” (modernity being the current thing right now)? Do we stop referring to the present as modern until someone labels the period?
Confused
You're not wrong, and it is confusing! Why does my small local art museum have "Contemporary Art" on the 2nd floor and "Modern Art" on the 3rd?
The quick and dirty answer is that there are three "moderns." There's the dictionary definition of "the current thing." There is "modern history," which means different things depending where you work but generally refers to "history when governments and other institutions as they exist today began." There is also Modernism, a loosely connected set of philosophies that was particularly interested in being "the current thing" and can be found roughly from 1890-1960. There is Modern architecture, art, literature, political philosophies, etc., just like there is Classical architecture or Romantic poetry. I can look at this Modern church or this Modern desk and go "Yup, that's old." Indeed, people in the 1970s were already asking "What was modernism?"
Much has been said on this topic on this sub before, so I'll link some answers you might find helpful.
/u/Cedric_Hampton discusses modern architecutre and the difficulties with categorizing/periodizing it.
/u/abbot_x has provided several examples of the Latin mordernus to new or contemporary movements from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages
/u/sickhobbit has discussed what modernism means to historians
/u/Outlander converses about the nature of the "modern state" in this thread
Lastly, this post from /u/NMW might seem tangential, but gets more specifically at where I think your confusion is. We can talk about a period in literature called Modern, when people were writing Modernist books, but that doesn't mean that the literature produced then was necessarily all Modern. There was a disco era, but, for some outrageous reason, people are still releasing disco albums.
Historical periods aren't names like the name of people or places. They're names that, as you suggest, are given by historians. But they aren't given by historians to classify things, as an entomologist might do when they discover a new bug. Rather, they are tools to help quickly group things together as "more like each other than other things," to help us make sense of things and think about them in productive ways. It's easy to find some things that are definitely Modern (or Baroque, or Englightenment, or Dutch Rennaissance), but it can be difficult to find the edges of where those start and end, whether you are living through the transition or not.
The longer answer that might not be as relevant but is worth bringing up here:
There are many scholars who would reject the notion of a post-modern era, or that we haven't quite yet entered post-modernity. There are many who argue that post-modernity exists here and now. These people don't usually define it as "after the modern era," that is, temporally, but as a critique/rejection of Modernism, that is, the ideological values of that specific movement. Again, it's not "post" modern because it is "after" modern and that is the natural name for such a period, but because it's both a critique of Modernism and a continuation of capitalism that drove it. David Harvey gives the following characteristics of post-modernity:
The experience of time and space has changed, the confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgements has collapsed, aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations have shifted from the realm of material and political-economic groundings towards a consideration of autonomous cultural and political practices.
What does Harvey mean by this?
Most of these are pairs of modern vs. post-modern values. The easiest to grasp is the second, "the confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgements has collapsed." One can easily see the association between science and morality in mid-century projects like Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House or Walt Disney's original plan for EPCOT. Humanity's social problems, they believed, might be solved through the newest materials and most innovative designs. But capitalism would get the better of them- humanity's social problems, after all, were quite useful for the men at the top. Not only does Fuller's technology feel dated, but so does his perspective: people aren't really into utopias so much anymore. That's a meaningful difference that suggests a modern/post-modern line might be drawn.
What of the historicity of this?
Harvey's discussion relies heavily on the idea of "time-space compression." If the Enlightenment was about exploring time and space to then order it neatly in maps and formulas, Modernism emerged from the technological developments that collapsed space by reducing the time it took to travel or communicate. First telegraphs and trains, then radio, planes, and cars, turned the ordered space into disorder by making everything seemingly closer together. And then the World Wars, well, happened. The response? For Modernists, an embrace of fragmented space and the universalizing hope of science. Modern artists, architects, and thinkers perceived themselves to be either universally applicable to all space (e.g. "Here's one mass-produced house for everyone") or disconnected from it entirely (i.e. "Recognizable forms are overrrated".)
But then in the '60s time itself got compressed, and Harvey points to two shifts in consumer culture. The first is the prioritization of instant, disposable goods: fast food, Jell-O, and cinema. The second is an increase in the consumption of services rather than goods. As a consequence, life becomes harder to plan, attachments to places and people become interchangeable, and images become a commodity. Images of things, rather than things themselves, take on a universal importance in post-modernity. Harvey expands this by describing how, in Blade Runner, robot replicants attempt to prove their humanity by sharing what they claim to be photographs of them as children. History itself, Harvey, argues, has been reduced to images. This is of course easy to see in the present day, but that is beyond the scope of this sub. Lastly, while Modernism embraced universal ideals, the volatility of post-modern consumer culture has turned people to the comforts of local familiar traditions. Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign is perhaps most emblematic of this. Though the '80s are often thought of as the start of contemporary consumer culture, with the franchise films, video games, comic books, and cartoons-as-toy-advertisements of the decade still dictating current media, it was also the decade that saw the intensification of the religious Right as we know it today, when blatant American nationalism could once again win elections.
This is why some scholars have chosen to draw a line between modernity- an era defined by universalizing sentiments of progress and innovation in response to the anxieties of technology and global war- and post-modernity- an era defined by the acceleration of capitalism to commodify ephemerality and a return to local subjective comforts in response.
