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plpietra 's review for:
The Off-Modern
by Svetlana Boym
In the twenty-first century, modernity is our antiquity. We live with its ruins, which we incorporate into our present. Unlike the thinkers of the last fin de siècle, we neither mourn nor celebrate the end of history or the end of art. We have to chart a new road between unending development and nostalgia, find an alternative logic for the contradictions of contemporary culture. Instead of fast-changing prepositions—"post," "anti," "neo," "trans," and "sub"—that suggest an implacable movement forward, against, or beyond, I propose to go off: "off" as in "off the path," or way off, off-Broadway, off-brand, off the wall, and occasionally off-color. "Off-modern" is a detour into the unexplored potentials of the modern project. It recovers unforeseen pasts and ventures into the side alleys of modern history, at the margins of error of major philosophical, economic, and technological narratives of modernization and progress. It opens into the modernity of "what if," and not only postindustrial modernization as it was.