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Despite recent technological advancements and the possibilities that quantum physics is awakening in our imagination, the totality of our vital experiences will, for most of us, take place on this planet. Never before in human history we have felt closer to one another, as if an analogous consciousness allows us to conceptualize human reality from common perspectives. This does not mean, however, that this analogous, common consciousness has already erased all the objective and subjective differences that keep revitalizing the feeling that we remain confined in an individual experiences. Reality has turned into a set of multiple realities where interdisciplinary perceptions both atomize and suggest cohesion to our understanding of the meaning of being alive. And this human and gnoseological condition infuses our imagination -our most fascinating “natural” technology- to push our mindset to take epistemic risks that indeed could place our very existence amidst a set of frameworks composed of existential risks, as well as possible futures that, for the moment, we can only imagine.

The concept of Postmodernity in its genealogical core emerges from the possibility, and also impossibility, to legitimate knowledge through the ways we apply it directly towards material life. Jean-Francois Lyotard reported that totalizing narratives were not enough to bring humanity together (1984, p. xxiv), and he does so by borrowing the word post-modern from “sociologists and critics” to refer to the “condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies” (xxiii). From this vantage point, now that we are already in the wake of the third decade of the 21st century, it is inevitable to question ourselves regarding current global affairs that keep capturing our intellectual attention even if we attempt to avoid by all means any possible engagement. What would be the meaning of scientific progress, in terms of establishing common goals, when a vaccine serves some users as the antidote while it embodies for others the very means of their vital demise? From this ethical dilemma, following the path paved by Lyotard, we must approach reality as a multiplicity of aspirations, understandings, languages, shrieks, that altogether render consensus ultimately impossible.

From this postmodern clash of rationalities and existential rationales, an undeniable division emerges when it comes to assign a place in the so-far microhistory of the 21st century to the continuity of historical events such as the Gaza War (October 07, 2023-ongoing), which some call a Genocide, while others accept it as a teleological liberation struggle, and even others seem unable to understand. Or the Sudanese Civil War (April 15, 2023-ongoing), which appears as perhaps the most crimson stain in our century so far and yet it remains ignored at the global level. Or the Russo-Ukrainian War (February, 2014-ongoing) that is staging under the eyes of global spectatorship the uncomfortable acceptance of the systemic struggles of the supranational European order to successfully tackle the Russian economic and military strength without resourcing to the military aid of the United States; some perceive this war as a self-determination battle for the Ukrainian identity survival, while others name it a proxy battle where global superpowers are only testing the weight of their cognitive warfare capabilities.

Amidst the conflicts mentioned above, one must grant Lyotard’s diagnosis as accurate as the “hero of knowledge” working towards universal peace has evidently failed and seems to be already outside of the negotiations room. If we are to trust the accomplishment of global peace to “universal” explanations of the role of each of us withing the global order, we might only end under the umbrella of frustration. Lyotard unravels Pandora’s box to unleash, borrowing a term from subaltern studies, the multiple unattuned voices that scientific discourse has left unheard. The fact is that the “most highly developed societies” are already inhabited by the unheard and forgotten voices that have historically contested scientific advancement and economic progress from their manifold everyday life maneuvers of self-realization.

Countering this fragmented, never-ending debate towards consensus, Jürgen Habermas viewed modernity as an unfinished project, which was beginning to be prohibited to continue by the “antimodern” influence of the emergence of postmodernity. Habermas goes as far as stating that “the term ‘modern’ again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past and antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new” (1981, p. 3). In this sense, Habermas privileged communicative rationality, reporting that discourse was the very means to build common values and truths that would enable consensus possible by virtue to enabling the communication between the old and the new, the irrational and the rational, in favor of a possible universal reason.

In this sense, Lyotard was a radical thinker that claim that inhabiting a multiplicity of realities was inevitable, while Habermas subtly championed the protection of the status-quo, patriarchy, and a given order -modernity- that was worth keep nurturing through the known western means of pursuing knowledge since the “good” times of Plato.

The simple act of imagining a distant future implies a constant conceptualization of the present. Yet, despite this epistemological inertia, it has arguably never been more difficult to provide a unifying explanation of the global order. This order —often without us noticing—shapes the decisions, trains of thought, and actions that model our immediate reality.

Let’s face it: the accelerated emergence of Artificial Intelligence —a cognitive engine capable of producing written thought faster than any human group ever could—has captivated our senses, leading us to surrender to the apparent magic of AI. We are beginning to think systematically less than previous generations. We can now produce hundreds of pages with the amicable aid of advanced reasoning language models… (pending continuation…)

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Bibliography

Jürgen Habermas (1981), Modernity versus Postmodernity. New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism, pp. 3-14.

Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press.