Utopia, Downsized: A Farrago

This piece is a farrago meant both to satirize and embrace post-modern sensibility. Does post-modernism harbor its own version of big ideas behind its moves of deconstruction and its tone of deflationary irony? The piece argues that post-modern thinking sneaks in elements of hope and vision indirectly, through the door of more humble expectations. Post-modernism’s strengths are: its critical recognition that freedom is not the same as the free market; margins are as important as centers; local conditions can contradict global powers, etc. Post-modernity is our current condition in world cities and it includes both confusion and a productive richness of complex, polyglot experience.