ABSTRACT
The prefix ‘post’, by definition, means to comes before something in order to signal its afterwards. Discussions of (for example) postmodernism, posthumanism, and the post-industrial have remarked that the ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ suggested in these framings often contains significant features of what came before. To what extent does the ‘post’ as a cultural descriptor mark a radical break, and to what extent is its precedent figured in the very shape of the thing that it now describes? This tension is at the heart of cultural process, and thinking about the ‘post’ can help us understand principles of change within culture, society, and politics, and therefore also within performance. This piece addresses a plethora of ‘post’s that describe significant socio-cultural developments. It explores the negotiations of past and present, convention and innovation, in such formations. It examines relations between (post)postmodernism and (post)postdramatic performance, to explore how socio-economic structures and cultural expression interrelate amid changing and challenging times. In doing so, the chapter addresses what might be thought a defining trope of post-postmodernism – the conjunction of performance and politics in a single combination of public appearance – and suggests that the ‘post’ in this (post-Truth) setting returns us history, process, and epistemology.
