Post Modernism

by Diallo McLinn

Now that society as a whole can reproduce anything, everything is being made for the purpose of the consumer market. Everything has become a commodity to be bought or sold. The personal meaning of events have become lost in the process of a buyer/seller type of society. Everything that is made or manufactured is sold. If we walk down most streets, we can find them jam packed with people buying gifts for friends, love ones, co-workers, and pets. Most people don’t even do it out of love. Or I should say that that fact has become secondary to the fact that we have been conditioned to buy simply for the fact that that is what we are suppose to do around this time of year. I make sure that every year around Christmas time that I say,"Happy Holidays," to as many people as possible. I have only heard that about four times this year. Twice the people who said it were trying to get change to eat with. Both people were trying to get money for so that they could make it through the holidays. I have though, seen so many ads advertising things to buy, things to say, and vacations to experience, if a person had the money or means. Now its not a bad thing that we have the ability to know what’s out there to buy for a loved one or whoever, but the things that are available to buy should in no way over-shadow the reason behind the holiday. We have lost the reason behind the holiday to the consumer.

"It is not just that the relationship to comodities is now plain to see-
commodities are now all there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commity...With the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, alienated consumption is added to aliened production as an inescapable duty
of the masses....A cycle is thus set in train that must be maintained at all cost:
the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a fragmentary individual completely cut off from the concerted action of the forces of production. pp111 reader

with the modern world here, the edges of a post-modern society begin to surface. We as a society are no longer blind. We have seen and have the ability to see all that any individual or organization can fathom. We are now in a time where images and experiences are everything; are bought and sold; are killed for in the outside world. Images are understood out of context and out of real events. The mystery is gone. The newness, and uniqueness of events can not be added into the matrix of experiences. The experiences are now weighted by other such experiences. The individual now lives in a world fragmented from everyday experiences. She or he is forced to look at their personal experiences in terms of their culture, and other such cultural experiences. Modern society has taken the individual out and away from the personal journey, separated the two, only to sell it back.

For, example, theirs the dead-head, drugged-out, hippie experience. In the past, a person would have to go live the dead-head life; have the dead-head beliefs and mentality. But now in a post-modern society, society knows and has rules to this identity. Everyone now knows what a dead-head is suppose to do, and think. This you can find by frequenting haight street. A person can buy shirts, and caps, and other odds and ends which are suppose to go with the identify of the dead-head experience; that go along with their preconceived idea of how such a experience is suppose to happen. Media has shown, or perhaps taught society how to view society. And yet media does not show us the dead-head, and say ‘this is a dead-head, look for the signs and remember.’ No, media shows us just the symbolic representations and characteristics that we know to be traits of dead-heads.
And then, media sells these ideas back to us, the consumer with the idea that we will transform ourselves into that idea. ‘I want that life I see. I want to have that experience, that knowledge, that whatever that goes with being a dead-head.’

Now if that’s not your thing. There are other things that society has made to sell back to you the consumer. There’s the pet rock, orange juice, apple juice, peach, pear, and banana juice too.’that cool refreshing taste. The taste of the next generation’ You can have a near-to-death experience by hand-gliding, rock climbing, swimming with sharks in Hawaii, buy a fire walk, or go on a Vision Quest with Outward Bound, or another group that does such a thing. Or if Travailing is not your thing, a person could sit at home and never leave. That person could simply ‘reach out and touch someone’ via the phone, fax, e-mail, regular postage mail, internet. We as single members of society can bring the words, images, objects, and ideas of all society to our doors instead of searching the world for such experiences.

Everything physical has been broken down. By this, I mean that modern day technologies can reproduce almost all images. Modern day society can reproduce almost all sounds that
are audible to the ear. Modern day society has put everything on a timeline. We wake up in the morning at 9:00 am. More precisely, the alarm that we bought at Cosco wakes us up
at nine-o’clock am. One hour til we have to be at work.( By we, I am referring to you the reader, and me the writer.) ‘let’s see,’ we say. ‘What can we do in the next hour before we have to jump in our car and make it to work?’ And yet, this is just an average scenario of an average person going to work In the morning. We know this routine. we know this routine through watch our parents, watching T.V., and Sunday morning cartoons such as the Flintstones or by reading Blondie. We too can see how the existence of white-collar working man, or blue-collar stone age man might live. We know because we see it, because we experience it.

And yet, are eyes truly windows into the soul? Can we trust what we see to be real, or at least any more real than a sound that comes from the closet of a melodramatic five year-old boy? Brian Swimme says in the forward to Thomas Berry’s THE DREAM or EARTH

"But Earth in an earlier time, some six hundred million years ago,
when the seas were rich with life, and the continents, after eons as storm
swept granite, now grew mossy and green.

"Around this time, the eyes come into earth’s life. Up until then life had developed, even over billions of years, without eyesight. We contemporary
humans identify so strongly with our visual elements of consciousness that we have some initial difficulty conceiving of a time when life proceeded without any eyes, but so it did...And nowhere was there a vision of waterfalls, nowhere the experience of the blue sky , or the desert colors awakening in their first rain." ppvii

Image is now everything. T.V. is everything too, right? I mean that if it can happen on T.V. it can also happen in real life? Now let us not look at the extreme situation, but one that could happen, but just never did. John doe walks to the corner store and sees a
beautiful all white poodle sitting in the entry way of the store. In T.V. land, John doe reaches down to pet the dog. The dog loves it. His tail wags to and fro and he barks out of enjoyment. The dogs owner ( ? ) hears and... the ending does not matter. What matters is that little Amber watching T.V. sees this to be true. She believes that what she has just witnessed on T.V. has actually happened when in reality that incident never existed except in T.V. land, a land full of words and images put together to communicate.

Since this incident has never happened, but still could, lets say it did. And let us say that it happened to little Amber who walked to the corner store for an afternoon snack. Now her conscious knowledge of what is happening has been drastically changed by the fact that she has seen what she is doing. Little Amber now has a choice of what do;Number one, go about her way and not enact this day as she saw it on T.V.. Choice Number two, pet the dog, and meet the owner. Though little Amber might be fully aware that T.V. is not real life, and that things do not happen in the same way as they do in T.V. land, many things do. Art mimics life, and life mimics art. Yet, in this case, art mimicked little Amber’s future experience. The walk to the store is no longer new, or unique. The incident is no longer sacred to the individual.

And what of sounds? What of the sound of the faint breeze rustling though an autumn morning in Portland Oregon? well, that can be recorded and played back faster than it would take to drive up there from San Francisco. Hey, and if its digitally mastered, the quality will even hold up forever; This is, if technology holds up.

Sounds are everywhere. From the time we are born- or even up to seven or eight months prior- we hear. For some reason we latch on, and begin to trust that first voice we hear while in mommies belly. We can sense that this voice is on our side, or at infant level, is us. Until the age of around one years old, babies consider everything self. They have no distinction between the Id and the everything else. Everything to them is the is the Id.
‘I’m hungry, where is my dinner "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"I’m hungry.’ Sounds help us locate ourselves and everything else; to everything else. sounds help use determine if what we see is true. They help us communicate with all that is not us. We can buy audio instruction tapes, and learn to knit, fix a car, learn a new language, or get rocked to sleep by a trance mix, put together to relax our minds, or bodies, or even shakra’s, so we’re told.

Groups like the Orb play with sounds which relate to the inner structures of the body, not necessarily the ear or ear drum. Base and drum beats are used to soothe the body, and the physical parts there of. Like the drum or heartbeat, people are moved and gain a yearning to move. Most Latin dances like salsa use drums and other base sounds to inspire dancers to move. Treble moves the mind and tends to take us into our heads. The tones tend to resonate with our minds, and not so much with our bodies.

When I was in Hawaii, my friend and I would play a little game. It was called." shall we stay or shall we go." When we wanted to leave the place that we were in, we would add more base to whatever music was playing. This tended to make people antsy and what to move about. If we were comfortable, we would put more treble in the music that was playing. This tended to relax the listeners who would usually get in a talking mood.

Smells are stored and sold too. Incense can be bought almost at any store a person might look. Perfume, deodorant, rose water, condoms, (some are now scented), and scratch and sniff stickers and just a few examples of smells.

Nothing is original. Fredric Jameson states:

There is another sense in which the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds-they’ve already
been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible.

There still exist some places in the world where commodity is not everything, like parts of Hawaii and Australia, but those places are commodities themselves. People buy their plane tickets hoping to find rest from this buyer/seller world that they helped create.
Places like Hawaii help people realize that there still exist a place untouched and unchanged by the human hand, but these places are numbered. Soon though with over-population and the fact the pollution will soon destroy what little nature we still have left, man and women must look elsewhere to find a little rest and recuperation from all that we cal civilization. So the question is raised;" where do we turn to now?" Maybe the answer lays in the technology that we have created to take the human condition to a brand new level. Enter the computer. And with the computer comes a new kind of reality, a cyber-reality in which everything that can be imagined can be created in this reality we call the computer.

Man and women can now weave their existences in and out of this virtual cyber world. She or he can communicate with people that are half way across the world. She or he can exist in this world and network out to thousands of people without leaving the comfortability of their homes. He or she can even talk to non real people if they like, or act out someone that they are not. My friend was on her computer and was talking to someone through her computer; she made a date with the person on the other end, and even found out about that persons life, if that person on the other end of the computer was telling the truth. what if that person never really existed? What if that person never really existed but in the mind of the person that created the persona?

Post modernism has fragmented the individual into pieces of that individual, into pieces of the id. Each aspect of a person can now be seen separate from the whole of that persons life. "This is Mike. Hear Mike’s voice on audio tape. the voice you hear is Mike’s right? See Mike on video tape. Looks like Mike. Must be Mike. Feel Mike’s pain through his poetry. Now you too can know what is going on in Mike’s head. Mike now exists even if the real Mike does not, or so a person might argue. In a way if that person thought that this was actually Mike, that person would not be entireally wrong, or right.

But what about the real person? What of the flesh and the blood which pump through Mike’s veins? What of the spontaneity and randomness, the uniqueness of Mike’s life which make his existence his and his alone? This is both good and bad. The good is that we can now trade facts and ideas without having to be present. The good is that we ‘can’ know Mike without ever having to cross paths with him. We as members of society can learn through watching and communicating with the ideas that he once put out.
But the individual is lost. The individual has surrendered himself to society, a society which wants to have and learn, but which has separated itself from nature.

We no longer live in nature. Man and women now cross the line, leaving the body behind, to pursue the mind, the id. We urn for the owning of and the knowledge of, but we have pasted the steps to truly understand that which we have obtained. Only a few of us have put ourselves on the path to understand how commodity relates to life inside and outside of this digital cyber-reality that is now present in almost all of our existence. And what of Mike?

Mike now is a representation of himself. His true existence has been broken apart, torn apart at the edges of his existence. Each instance and aspects of his life have been dissected and looked at not in the entirety of his life, but looked at in how it relates to a society which tries to categorize and understand. Mike as an individual has been fragmented from the unity which ties the existence of his life together.

Mike is not unique even in his fragmentation. All of us who choose to live in this Modern Society have been fragmented by our culture. We now live in and out of this Cyber-reality. Society and how it exists not takes it’s turn with the new cyber generation.
Each member of society weighs it’s existence against the existence of a virtual world that would and could not exist without technology. We have all been fragmented through this Cyber-reality.

What is Cyber-reality? Cyber-reality is a reality that tries to document and/or reproduce life, or aspects of it. Phones, fax machines, photographs, advertisements, postcards, computers, and maybe even fast food and proscription drugs can be put into this category. Cyber-reality is a reality which number one places human existence and consciousness on a linear plane. It places that fragmented parts of are lives and judges them not on the merit of the individual, but in relationship with the whole. The experience is now weighted against the other experiences. The maps have all been laid out. The instances and events have already happened. There is nothing new about what Mike or Ill Amber can do except experience the things themselves or not.

If in modern society all the scenarios have been played out and/or fabricated, the only option left is to play the scenarios over again, but this time as a different character. And why not? There is no reason that I can think of. Cyber-reality has given us the tool and the map to dictate where we go, and what ending our paths will carry us. We can go anywhere, do anything, and create it if we can imagine it. And yet with all of this, the only thing we cannot do is understand it.

What does all of this mean? Why would a person what to go through the motions? And can a person really understand something if that person does not actually experience it for real, in real life, not simulated or stimulated?

Enter the Creation generation. After post modernism, and after the wave of consumerism dies down; when all that can be bought and sold, are bought and sold; and everyone has as much as they can handle, people will begin to question the importance of what they have acquired. Man and women will begin to ponder the purpose these things create in their lives. Experiences will be weighted by their personal importance. for you see the majority of what we buy is not sold by the thing itself, but by the lifestyle that accompanies that object. Joe Smo who thought that he could become a hippie by buying the hype that was sold to him by advertisements, must realize the truth behind the image. He must realize the reality behind the myth that was sold to him by a society that buys, sells, and trades dreams as if they could be bought or sold. But something is missing. And that something is belief. That something is relationship to life. That something is the reality which exists even when the power has gone out because of a cold, stormy winters night.
Joe Smo must now give meaning and purpose to all that he has obtain. Joe Smo must now believe in all the things which occupy his humdrum life full of dreams and images of how he would truly like to live. It now becomes apparent that just having the objects and the knowledge are not enough. They are not enough unless they been something to the person who has obtained them.

Thus, at the end of this cycle of consumerism that the world now inhabits and embodies, comes a need to give "rhyme to reason." There will come a time in the near, or distant future to give purpose back to the things that we have.

Post Modernism is allowing us to fragment our identities.