Postmodernism: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Your Self

From monstrouspossibility

Kenneth Fairfield Monstrous Possibility: scholarship and academia for nothing April 11, 2008

In short, this is to be a contribution to the death of what's next. --Curtis White

Postmodernism: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Your Self

Authors note:

You are about to read K…er, look up. Good job. Continue. That is, that is, that is. There it is: take off your clothes, turn off the heat, and remain standing...on one foot if possible. Uncomfortable? Well, you will be soon. I am not the writer you are not the reader we are not. here. to. relate. Language has corrupted the ability to communicate. We are separate. We separate. We separate every time we speak, every time we write, every time, everytime, all the time all the time further apart thanks to language. Thanks language. But surely we can communicate some basics, such as the reasons to abolish language as it currently exists and operates? Let's try. Let's try something. Trial and error. Try and err. Try and air. Try and air it. Let's try and air it. Air it out, at least. Allow me to apologize now, before you begin, for my use of "we." I, of course, refer to the mythological "we," just like "you" and "me." And don't even get me started on "I"!

"Sit here and read. Then you can tell me what you think. Who knows? Maybe you'll be able to make some sense out of it." --Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

I will begin by undefining deafening terms. What do I mean, more or less, by the term "postmodernism"? I do not mean anything, for I am firmly entrenched within the imagined era of postmodernism, a child of the times, fish suffocating from lack of fresh water, furiously and futilely applying theory After Theory in hopes to make the water at least appear clear. I peer. I peer. My peers peer. My peers and I peer (and pee, it has been pointed out to me) through murky water which will remain murky as long as we peer through tired eyes: tether balls of bias and belief, being banged back and forth with each theory: lofty, callused hands readied for the next slap, which will unfortunately not be strong enough to knock off our binary bifocals, smudged with the taint of history. Hoping for an Other to change the water in our tank for us results in the cul de sacs of religion, the dead ends of government, the inherent paranoia of teleology. “Heidegger does not think of language [as] what you or I say, it has an existence of its own in which humans come to participate, and only by participating do we become human at all” (Eagleton, 55). The thinner the permeability of personality the thicker the relationship with Other. As fish, we are not separate from the water (language). "All is fluid," indeed (White, 67). We are not static fish. We are not being fish. Change self, water changes, vice-versa. Fish and water are becoming the Other. We are fish and water and tank and Other, all simultaneously becoming something else Creating, asking, and doubting work to both make more Other and close the distance between. Theory is part of the process, but those Fish are mistaken when they assume theory (no matter how tall the T) can exist outside or remain objective, let alone be universally applied to all areas of the tank.

There is a process that light goes through before its parts are assembled as images in the brain. Included in this process is an opportunity to confuse the brain by projecting images/light on to the screen (let’s say) that rests between the eyes and brain. The person may think they see something without it actually being “out there.” Like how Bush won the election(s) with voting machines being hacked from outside (for a crude example). We are looking at the world (or so we think) and making connections (no matter the protestations of postmodernism), but is this simply because our nervous systems are structured in a similar way--millions of separate cells connected and firing off rapid signals to produce thought, images, sounds, and other sensations that give one the impression of wholeness, a body, and a stable, material environment? "With a shudder I dismiss the thought that the prison is my mortal body and the escape that awaits me the separation of the soul, the beginning of a life beyond this earth" (If on a, 62). To heighten the paranoia level this problem engenders: do we see organic systems such as our brain in this way only because of another separate mechanism instilling the desired delusion of connectivity? Is the Industrial Revolution to blame for seeing our bodies as machines? The Age of Information to blame for seeing our brains as computers or internet-like and double you double you double youed (wedged within webs). Or do we lack a language to properly describe ourselves?

What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat every thing from the beginning (26).

I'd like to buy a vowel, please.

When does the illusionary postmodern era begin? When did man first gaze back into history with skeptical retrospectivism and was this an example of growing self-consciousness? Postmodernism likes to think it provided a lens through which to view Western Civilization's blindness towards historic oppression; its inability to provide safety and security; with Orpheus overcome by skepticism, all trust evaporated with the image of atrocities acted out for the imagined good of humanity. No mirror will work, however--we remain with the fish, eyes in the way. Projections in the way. We put too much faith in the author when we assume that he has the power or authority to control language effectively enough to deliver what one truly means, what one absolutely intends. Nearness, sure, I'll buy, but I cannot accept that language is the servant of the master manipulator rather than co-worker in symbiotic relationship or, more diabolically: that it is not the entity in command, leading us upon literary leashes. Never mind the complexity of establishing the origin of meaning between authors, outside readers, and texts. What is happening when authors read their own text, maybe months later, and attempt to decipher the original intent? How do they know that the meaning has remained unchanged? Their agreement with what the text appears to mean is no trustworthy calibration. People change, and even if the words are still the same, placed in the same order upon the page, what we read is never the same when reread (David Bowie knows all about the trickery of change via time).

Or, if fish are too slippery a metaphor to grasp, hold on to the side of this cage: “[W]e are human subjects only because we are practically bound up with others and the material world, and these relations are constitutive of our life rather than accidental to it” (Eagleton, 54). So, no escape from cage. Cage = World and people. Heidegger removes man from center (cousin to Copernicus?). Science and theory are only partial abstractions of real, as map to actual landscape. The map is not the territory. Only possible way out is if both cage and captive morph together. Human Becoming, never a finished product to be understood. Not moving through time, but made out of and part of (same with language). We don’t use language--it is an ingredient of us. (54)

Is not a thesis only able to propel itself, as a rocket, by pushing against a steady foundation? Does not a thesis statement imply meaning? Where is any ground or meaning to be found since postmodernism crept into our consciousness? Who can we trust anymore? Not even ourselves, as our selves currently exist. Just how jaded are we? Are Calvino's presumptions justified when in If on a winter's night a traveler the reader supposedly "no longer expects anything of anything"? What kind of life is it to "know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst" (4)? Has all motive been destroyed in the revealing of the illusion of progress; has this resulted in our resignation to merely play games with our own schizophrenic minds; and who is to blame for designing a language that has delivered us to this state? It seems such a distraction from the "real" that one can only think that it was purposeful (hello again Demiurge, think I'll call you Demi for short). Or is this all part of, as Calvino would have us believe in his essay Cybernetics and Ghosts, "a typical human need: the production of disorder" (13). My distrust of this tricky author (what is he, a Discordian, praise Eris?!) grows when I reflect that the very opposite has always seemed true, both in my own catalogic behavior and information I've gleaned elsewhere, particularly pertaining to the "properly" functioning brain (it again). In If on a winter's night it is often difficult to tell who Calvino is addressing and what he is referring. When is he purposely playing with the audience and when am I reading into it and making connections and finding meaning where there is none (paranoia). It is a metamindfuck. More games, which can be fun...but is it good writing? Is it literature?

If literature is to be more than a game, it must, as Calvino optimistically assumes, "struggle to escape from the confines of language [and] stretch...out from the utmost limits of what can be said" (18). Continuing on, he states that "the power of modern literature lies in its willingness to give voice to what has remained unexpressed in the social or individual unconscious" (19). In the Age of Information and access to more-than-enough on the internet what could possibly remain unexpressed? Is the task simply to make more people aware of that information? "[T]he world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration" (If on a..., 62). Is the answer simply more computers? Or is the task to trick those who would rather remain blind to certain information into receiving and processing it? The labyrinth has never been denser than as it appears now. At the same time, I have a feeling that this also means there are more ways of conquering the labyrinth, with devices just as intricately designed to breach its walls (and appearances, of course, are only just that).

It is perhaps true that postmodernism has achieved a major blow to belief in absolutes, largely abolished expectations of a savior, and added a few more swift kicks to a dead god, but it does this to humanity's detriment. There is a purpose to belief, to goals of reaching an ideal. Whether or not there is an ideal or not is of no importance. What is important is that the process continue. The process of life on this and other planets. To continue, to go on (insert overused Beckett quote here), one need not postulate gods, paradisiacal afterlife, karma, dharma, or a strife between good and evil. One may well be a nihilist and continue on. There is no sole way. But if there is a way to the soul, and if life is to be enjoyed (of course that desire can be called into question) and realized to its fullest intent (what would that look like?), I have found that a foundation greatly helps...no matter how unsteady, precarious, or fragile. If we have no ground to stand on, no point to look from nor towards, what can we possibly sight with the useless scope of postmodernist theory? How can the writer of an essay say anything, via the spell-it-out and prove it all-powerful thesis statement, after such a hurricane as postmodernism? Where within the eye of the storm can one take a temporary stand, without risk of being swept away? What is needed is an anchor to prevent our minds from being overcome by the power of language. "The search for an anchor in which I am engaged seems to indicate to me an avenue of escape, perhaps of a metamorphosis, a resurrection" (If on a..., 62). It is my hope that literature can provide this anchor.

This is not to say that we must remove doubt and rely on faith. Man says “I am.” Theory asks “Are you?” Theory = doubt. Doubt prevents discovery. No. Doubt invites discovery, but discovery uncovers further avenue to doubt, which is paradox, which is as close to truth as possible? What is truth? An endpoint? Is all we search for rest? Rest is not completion but temporary luxury…and one must give up everything for this luxury.

Does postmodernism, unfortunately(?), in its demolition of decaying structures of belief, excuse guilt? Erase causality? Literary theory, within postmodernism, should dispel the myth of a better society resulting from increased exposure to literature and involvement in academia, therefore relegating itself arbitrary. If indeed theory forces readers and writers to think deeper and analyze what they read or produce (through the postmodern lens), then the conclusion they should eventually come to is that there is not only no need for theory, but that it is only cluttering the field. Literary theory, within postmodernism, fails in that it attempts to explore work that breaks rules, and wishes to encourage an atmosphere of change that welcomes the breaking (or moving beyond) rules by inventing new rules and refusing to move outside of standard scholarly, essay/thesis/rational/argumentative form. Using rational discourse to explore and explain the irrational is...er...irrational. We may say something about postmodernism, but to interpret the works of postmodernism and dig for modernist meaning is to exercise our imaginations, not our reason. I have no problem with such stretching of the imagination, but let's call a spade a spade and not a shovel with which we will only dig up more dirt. With the mess theorists have made so far (and their partners in crime: philosophers, psychologists, critics, professors) the sandbox has become a disaster area. Adorno's nightmare. (How do you talk about anything without metaphor? Everything is metaphor (postmodernism is largely to blame for this or, at least, me thinking this is so). The real is too monstrous to even begin to deal with.

With postmodernism, there is the desire to free oneself from history, but I would argue that the real problem is language. World War II was not such a cataclysmic event, compared to all of the atrocities throughout history. It did not thrust us into a meaningless world. Postmodernism seems to me to want to address a greater inherent evil than those carried out by the Third Reich. It seems to me that (hu)man has thoroughly ensconced hirself within a labyrinth of language; a cold, hard system of signifiers that have now come to signify nothing. Postmodern texts do not contain meaning. Their function is to reveal how the reader attaches meaning, to show how language works in ways that lead one to look for or apply meaning, and to trip up the normalized processes we are trapped into using to think with. Using language against language. Breaking out of the box is the goal. However, does postmodernism succeed in doing this or simply replace the old box with a new, bigger box? Becketts and Steins may thrive in such an environment, feeding on themselves, their inner monologue dialogue debate shat out for all of the world to swim through, and they are able to make the water fun and interesting to play around in...perhaps providing a castle and some artificial bubbles, but I fear for the health of most of those in the tank (dissatisfied with playing in their own feces) who find themselves in this confusing situation, and I believe that it is safe to assume that most would wish to escape this tyranny of tongue-tied tropes, this maze of mixed metaphors. This wish to break through to a meaning beyond language drives both those who would push language to its breaking point and those who would shut their stinking trap. If it is paranoia to attach meaning to everything, then certainly I am not paranoid in wishing to escape the device that allows this function to operate (I, I, I, I). I'm not your stepping-stone!

Various theorists certainly have addressed this problem (the futility of language), but have managed to further the confusion by assuming (like the dung-dropping purveyors of literature) that language can be overcome by more language. The situation is only further complicated when one attempts to study the problem of language by using language. If the problem is language, then we must move away from language. How do we analyze language without using language? We need more options (I speak to you, Reader (who'd rather be reading "Rough for Radio" or "Rockaby")), or we must learn how to be silent and, in that silence, observe how language attempts to enter us. We must still or quiet the mind that feeds on (or may well consist of) language. Only when we have an experience that arrives with the absence of language (and without then attempting to put that experience into a form that language can describe) can we objectively view language. It is hoped that, having had this experience, we will be able to either develop a new language, or use language in much more precise, careful, and efficient ways. Only then will we be able to assume that a new period has arrived--a true postmodernism(?)…or something else. Postmodernist theories may offer us myriad ways of deconstructing, destabilizing, and destroying past concepts, but what does it offer as solutions and methods to continue the exploration of self, of life, of what it means to be human? There was a need, certainly, to remove the pseudo-foundations of Western Civilization (in all its capitalizedist glory) that so few stood comfortably upon, but if it was only to leave us in free fall through empty space, then perhaps we need to fall back and retreat to a time when we could find meaning. If we are responsible for creating our own meaning, at least provide us with a means to do so that will not be immediately dismissed by the been-there-deconstructed-that mentality of postmodernism.

Perhaps a holistic approach is needed. We cannot expect to find what makes a text work by dissecting it as one would a cadaver. The message, the meaning, can only be beheld in the whole. If part of postmodernisms analysis stems from the critique of the failure of Western Civilization’s methods of exploration via specialization, then it must turn its critique upon itself and find new methods. A method, perhaps, that includes many various methods in the way that Calvino’s If upon a winter’s night… contains many various literary devices. The discovery that we are for the most part hallucinating and dreaming when we create these tunnels to look through need not cast a bleak shadow upon the human psyche. The ability to experience and create a healthy, enjoyable, meaningful life need not be threatened by the wet blanket of postmodernism, not even if Einstein has Shakespeare's baby.

A Monstrous Possibility: Only a theory that evolves from glimpses behind the curtain, resulting from such shocks as the "primal scene," ecstatic states of unordinary consciousness triggered by dance, drugs, sex, and other methods can supply interpretations that near, for lack of a better word, "reality." When the theorists begin testing their nervous systems in the way so-called primitives, shamans, mystics, and Timothy Leary have, then perhaps they will have something to offer to the conversation of being, human nature, and even literature. Curtis White, in Italo Calvino and What's Next: The Literature of Monstrous Possibility, makes the point (I know not whether Wittgenstein shifted in his grave) that although "the idea of postmodernism may not constitute a truth,...that doesn't make it any less useful" (8). This seems both frivolous and precisely what I am trying to postulate with the idea of creating/becoming Other (whether we have the power to do that or whether there already is an Other or whether or not there is anything anybody anywhere at all). Except that I argue that postmodernism has outworn its usefulness, has dangerously approached nihilism, and that we must replace it before it carries us over the cliff. Besides, do we really want our possibilities to be monstrous?

Are we doing what we're doing because that's what we do? Are we a Self/Other tautological sandwich? Questions and answers forever. Or, for the Jews, questions and questions. When we ask a question, we assume there is an answer. Our question half produces an answer. There need not be an answer. A reply is not an answer. An answer is not a solution. Postmodernism's answer is to question our questioning. The questions themselves and the reason for asking questions. We want answers for closure for category for over and done with so we can go on. Must go on. I can go on because there are Always more questions. Therefore, answers are enemies. Or co-conspirators. The only enemy is the final answer. Final solution. The answer to all questions. Why do so many seek what amounts to their end, their destruction? Built-in function of language? We are all having a different experience, yet we postulate a reality and agree with that idea of reality and see the world in a certain way and say that is "reality;" but there is no reality outside of what we experience, which is largely what we project. We can envision and materialize our vision of reality however we choose given the proper tools, including the manipulation of reality via language and symbol, which is this and that person's idea. More concepts of reality. More theories. We need new and improved ideas and concepts and ways to use language to live a healthy, symbiotic relationship with language for we are language. Language shapes utself. Itself. Us. Ustself. Very sexy and messy. We need to cease abusing language and allowing language to consume, especially our minds--if we can still believe in these concepts of "mind" and "consciousness." Depending on who I am talking to it may be spirits, souls, empathic ability, our very lives, our health, and existence on this planet.

We can choose, at least, between tunnels. We may design similar tunnels to those that seem to have been successful for others in leading to health, intelligence, peace, love and all those other trampled concepts and wrungwrenched words. Or, gradually, shift through each view and dispose of it, as the view with the longest and widest gaze opens up and you begin to see and experience, rather than think about and debate. If the view be adequate enough, one may end up seeing oneself at the end of the tunnel. Change self and the water changes. Even if self is illusion. Even if there is no self. Create a self and have that experience and discard and move on. More models, new models, new and exciting models!

The multi-theory approach (or as it is called in physics, the multi-model approach) is the only way to deal adequately with all the facts. Any single theory approach is premature and causes a truncation of our intelligence; it forces us to ignore or belittle parts of the data that might be crucial...The multi-model approach began in sub-atomic physics and is chiefly due to Nobel laureate Niels Bohr...As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, in The Mechanical Bride and other works, the multi-model approach has now influenced all the sciences and even appears in modern art...Korzybski said that it marked the transition from Aristotelian civilization (dogmatic, monistic, authoritarian) to non-Aristotelian civilization (relativistic, pluralistic, libertarian) (Wilson, 16).

If we are, indeed, to assume that we are creating this Other to change the water in our tank, let us create one that will not be easily angered and will do its best to care for us by first changing the current language we use to one that will allow us to break free from the paradigms and traps that this demiurgic language has introduced. A “language older than words” as Derrick Jensen might put it: one that allows us to communicate not only with each other (humans) but animal, plant life, and the planet itself. Only our imaginations may save us, and make, "by analogy, our own experience...more, rather than less, real to us" (Sontag, 10). Stanley Fish's thesis: "that whatever seems to you to be obvious and inescapable is only so within some institutional or conventional structure, [which] means that you can never operate outside some such structure" (Knapp and Michaels, 737) holds no water in that it assumes the structure to be outside of what we are creating ourselves. It pessimistically rules out imagination. Not only would Fish have us stuck in the tank but also it is half full and pointless to even think about the fact that we are running out of oxygen! But all of these structures are malleable, for our very beliefs are malleable and, I would argue, in constant flux. The possibilities, monstrous or not, are there. The theorists will just have to sit back and watch while the artists do their magic.

Postmodernism is:

1.Recognizing the blank medium (for a more concrete metaphor, see: canvas, page, tape, CD, etc.) that "reality" is projected onto, offering new ways to look at and participate in what appears on canvas, but not any solid ideas about how to manipulate the very medium (which would be magic), let alone detach from (see: rise above, transcend) the medium.

2. The West catching up with the East in a strange, choking, mad, perverted way. The damaged Buddha. We are making ourselves disappear via concepts such as there only being thought and time, the intersection at which we attach personality, matter, events, history, and call that reality: the best approximation of it at the moment.

3. Drowning itself in multiple lakes bearing the reflections of its narcissistic self.

4. Offers only multiple-choice questions. You may have a very large amount of choices, but that is still a restriction

5. Tearing up paper to make pulp to make paper.

6. Taking a stand by claming all is relative and refusing to budge from that position.

7. Ending on an optimistic note despite the challenge it imposes upon itself. Listen, whether or not everything has been done before does not matter, because there is forgetting. There will probably be forgetting for quite some time, unless we undergo a Funes-like bump on the head, which will ironically spell the death of writing (no way to utilize overwhelming memory bank for concrete pinning downness). The only writing will be done by the Other, the reading being done by us, constantly new and different, always extraordinary, teaching us to become It. Until then, we must continually remind each other of past ideas, concepts, myths, stories, etc. by reintroducing them in an updated contemporary model, "or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable" (If on a, 152). Unrepeatable, unrepeatable...

                                          Works Cited

Calvino, Italo. If on a winter's night a traveler. New York: Everyman's Library, 1993

Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature. Orlando, FL: Harvest Books, 1987.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Great Britain: Blackwell Publishers

    Ltd, 1983.

Knapp, Steven and Michaels, Walter Benn. "Against Theory." Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8,

No. 4 (Summer, 1982)

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. 1964

White, Curtis. Monstrous Possibility. Illinois State University: Dalkey Archive Press,

1998.

Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger, Volume 1: Final Secret of the Illuminati. Tempe Arizona:

New Falcon, 1977.