Just some random thoughts for now...
One of the problems with trying to come up with a possible cultural response to the "Postmodern Condition" which we live in at the dawn of the 21st century is that postmodernism doesn't function on the same level as most previous sorts of cultural shifts. Whereas previous changes, such as the shift from the Romantic period to the Victorian Age in Western Europe, involved a specific reaction against some perceived flaw in the previous society, Postmodern thought is less a specific cultural program and more a method of thinking about culture. The downside of deconstructionism is that it's all-encompassing; no matter what you come up with, a faithful postmodern deconstructionist can integrate it into their theories and then deconstruct the work. The Hegelian dynamic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is broken.
The only possible reaction is, I feel, a rejection of the underlying theory of deconstructionism: that there is no bedrock on which our thought rests, and that all we can think about is references to other references to other references, and so on in an infinite regress. Although acceptance of this notion that everything was open to interpretation and the shifting of symbols was never entirely complete (see: most organized religions, which recoiled in horror), the existential crisis that this theory has provoked is also becoming clear to the Left as well as the traditional conservative opponents to this sort of relativistic thought.
(A sidebar: "What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality." --Charles Krauthammer. When a journalist for Fox News says something that postmodern with a straight face, you know that postmodernism has infected the very fabric of society.)
I don't wonder if groups like the Slow Food Movement or the readers of publications like MAKE Magazine aren't the vanguards of a deeper change in society, back toward a conception of reality that is relatively materialistic -- that is, rooted in physical objects, "access to tools", the importance of place and time. As our actual, everyday experiences become more and more digital and based in the "cloud" of the internet, these physical experiences might become mental touchstones.
Yeah, but the problem is we've already had a postmodern response to structuralism and it's attendant formality and rigidity. We can't go backward, or the postmodernists will just absorb the theory into general deconstructionism again...
