In You Are Here: Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif, Cornerhouse Books.
Proliferations of discourses that are decidedly ‘post-’ inundate artistic and intellectual life today: a post-Fordist mode of production gives way to post-politics and post-capitalism, which is accompanied by a post-media, post-digital, post-internet landscape populated by post-identitarian post- humans that are post-feminist, post-race, and post-queer. It is an era that, easily enough, has been summed up as post-contemporary, and not so long ago, postmodern. Such a postal deluge encourages the question: what is this prefix that stretches across the world to account for myriad global conditions?1 If ‘post-’ is commonly used to signal an ‘after’, then what does its excessive use convey about the historical present? Are we ‘after’ everything, supplanted in endless, elusive passings, a never-ending fractal vortex, where post-isms spin past all horizons to infinity?