Subjectivism

By now you should be familiar with all my different modernisms: postmodernism, post postmodernism, metamodernism, etc. And while these all have bearing upon my work, I think it's most important to articulate that my work is about one person. Hot Love on the Wing explores one subjectivity.

Whereas modernism was about exploring different subjectivities objectively, and postmodernism was all about rejecting the possibility of such a thing, this new movement is all about the individual.

Why do we all Tweet whatever we're doing, update our Facebook status, let our friends know where we are on Foursquare, blog on Blogspot? To get noticed. To be understood and accepted.

We're all curating our online experience to each other. Whoever is most popular, has the most friends, followers, is the coolest. Even capitalism is in on it when businesses are vying for Twitter followers. But ultimately it's about you.

The number of memoirs published has blown up thanks to e-publishing. Why? Because everyone who has a story is now able to share it.

This technology is so new that the repercussions of this are difficult to fathom. But you can bet your bippy they're going to start showing over this decade. Don't believe me? In Egypt they joke that “Nasser was killed by poison, Sadat by a bullet and Mubarak by Facebook.” Just wait.

Thomas Wolfe's Modernism

Thomas Wolfe is a badass writer. Although he wrote Look Homeward, Angel at the height of the modernist movement, in 1928, he employs various postmodern techniques. For example, upon his birth he manages to remove some of the self-indulgence of writing a bildungsroman by asking the reader if you are familiar with what had happened during the course of history up until that moment.

He goes on to list a number of current, as well as ancient, events in order to both minimize the effect of his birth as another common circumstance, while aggrandizing it in a list of notable historical occurrences. In this series of postmodern paragraphs, he moves from second person to first and eventually back to third. The modernist techniques are most apparent when he attempts to probe different consciousnesses. He soon thereafter describes how he, as a little baby, thought:

"He had not even names for the objects around him: he probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come through language."

So now I plan my own escape, again, through language.

Christmas in Post Postmodernism

For Christmas this year, I received an e-mail from a company offering a $40 gift certificate and the chance for you to have a tv stand, if I blogged about it on my site.

During the process of my decision, I vacillated between the notion of selling out, and remaining true to my cause. Maybe my followers will scorn me for a truer blogger, more dedicated? But this is also a sign of how big your blog has become in the course of a year – that this post which took ten minutes to write, is itself worth $40.

 I decided that the mention of the decision I had to make would be an excellent example of postmodernism (due to the self-consciousness of this post), and that the sentiments of guilt and resultant intrigue in being able to choose a material item from the site, which I have no doubt I will not need – although an attractive pair of boat shoes caught my eye – will be a good example of modernism and will ultimately be overshadowed by my greed and covetousness.

In any event, this is my Santa tracker. And I hope the expression of my fears and ideas about the process provides a good example of postmodernism; my attempt at relaying said feelings has succeeded, and that the vacillation between these two styles is a good example of post postmodernism.

Merry Christmas!