Humanity has never been capable of originality, since the beginning of language everything is already present. Why does it need to be going somewhere, each generation is new, they just recycle old stuff. You don't need to reinvent anything, everything is new for each individual being (for someone who hasn't read Plato he is new so he doesn't need to be reinvented). And, because everything is mediated via text an I for instance only have access to Plato, and Thomas Pynchon via text, there cannot possibly be any distinction between those two and therefore there cannot be any progress from one to another because they always both exist in the eternal textual present. Modernism was the hyper indignant angry bitter movement so you know that's just not true(about post modernism). Postmodernism was antifascist, antisexist, antiracist, antipower and the reason it was so because all other discourses including modernism still speak from conventional white middle class perspectives whereas postmodernism told us that all those concepts were only language constructs. -Peter