Results tagged “post-modern” from NoMuse

Without any great conscious effort, I've reduced the boundaries of my world fairly significantly over the past year. Unlike some folk I know, I have never possessed the comfort of knowing what I would be when I grew up. My uncle, for instance, always knew that he wanted to be a ranger for the U.S. Park Service. I, on the other hand, have floated, drifted, occasionally flitted, and have otherwise been fairly indecisive. What I lacked in a sense of vocation, I've made up for with trying various and sundry methods for burning time.

At some point, I realized that I was avoiding my life. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing at the university so as to avoid having to decide what I'd do once I was done. After I graduated with my super useful art degree, I dilly-dallied for a year before deciding to pursue graduate work. Because the art degree is a "professional" degree, and because I spent so much time taking classes that were more play than school, I worked for two and a half years laying the groundwork necessary to establish that I was capable of successfully completing academic graduate studies.

I loved my exposure to new ideas, modern and postmodern art and literature, and critical theory. I think that I was reasonably good -- not amazing or a wunderkind, but sufficiently interested and motivated to be worth a professor's time.

With Mr. Tate's arrival, my outlook shifted. Of course, it took me another half semester to acknowledge that as much as I enjoyed the mental masturbation of my course work, I was avoiding getting on with a number of other areas in my world. Between this and that, my life became so complicated trying to tread water at my job, school, home, and other activities that I left school. The decision to leave was incredibly difficult. I'd gone from sliding through my education to caring deeply about how I was modifying my thought processes. And I'd managed to pull a 4.0 GPA right up to the moment that I turned my back.

As difficult as the decision to quit school had been for me, I found that I was suddenly free to burn my daily allotment of minutes differently. I had time to consider what was important and what I wanted. And, I began to jettison some of the now frivolous aspects of my world. I am a long, long way from decluttered, but I'm making steady progress. Am I growing up?

Mark C. Taylor's (1945) essay "Interfacing" (a chapter in "Hiding")(1997) argues that existing analytical tools are grossly insufficient in the networked or webbed existence of the postmodern world. Like a mirage retreating into the haze of desert heat as one approaches, the network/web structure resists absolute classification. Taylor posits ten characteristic rules of operation for a web or network. Though each of the rules of operation manifests within the text of Chuck Palahniuk's (1962) novel "Fight Club" (1996), the Rule of Allelomimesis is perhaps best illustrated in the narrative's cycle.

The Rule of Allelomimesis suggests the possibility of cooperation without the necessity of proximity. The network/web itself maintains both the closeness and the separation that allow mingling without unification, presence and simultaneous absence. Open source software is often developed using this model. Developers scattered around the globe collaborate to produce a functional product without the need to assemble in a single location. They work together while they work apart. Instant messaging, chatting, texting, and email are also prime examples of allelomimesis wherein those involved may or may not be physically proximal, but communication is facilitated.

In the beginning, the fight club is just the narrator and Tyler Durden (46). They/he devise rules of operation and expand. As the weeks pass, attendance skyrockets and the number of local clubs increases, eventually assimilating the cancer support groups at which the narrator previously found refuge. Only Big Bob remains behind to inform late comers of absence and the presence of the replacement group. Eventually, Tyler establishes clubs in each of the cities the narrator visits. Each club is connected by the set of rules and by Tyler Durden.

Tyler's control is maintained by his present absence. The unnamed narrator is often searching for the absent Tyler. They communicate via written messages most often. Tyler scrawls out instructions or messages and the narrator types, copies, and distributes Tyler's will. In this way, Tyler is both kept at a distance and kept very close to increasing members of the fight clubs and to the space monkeys. When Big Bob dies, a significant change occurs in the operation of the fight clubs (178). In the beginning, the manager of the club would stand beneath the single source of light and announce the rules. The manager assumes a Tyler-like role of present absence in circling the ring of attendees in the darkness of the outer circle. When the narrator attempts to shut down the clubs and Project Mayhem, his present presence is rapidly and forcibly corrected. His breach of the critical distance of allelomimesis results in his eviction from the club and with the threat of emasculation from Tyler's space monkeys.

Even the stolen moments when the narrator and Tyler interact with one another are absences of conscious control. Only while the narrator is sleeping, while he is unconscious, can interaction occur. This necessary distance is the trick of the story. Neither the narrator nor Tyler can physically exist without the absent presence of the other.

In his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," Stuart Hall (1932) presents a number of tools one may use in the examination of popular culture. Perhaps most significantly is Hall's emphasis on popular culture as a malleable process rather than a fixed state. In Hall's view, popular culture is not confused with mass culture, the culture of dominant groups within society, or the culture of the working class. Popular culture exists on a continuum at the intersection of resistance to and containment by the dominant groups. The evolution of popular culture is a melee fought through the incorporation and commoditization of resistance ideology and signs into the dominant culture and the expropriation, modification, repurposing, recycling, and re-presentation of ideas and symbols out of the dominant culture.

Because the study of popular culture requires simultaneous application of etic and emic approaches, periodization is a vital concept in Hall's analysis. Simply stated, an etic approach to the study of popular culture requires the acquisition of fact and truth through observation, while the emic approach requires an insider's participation and understanding. One must both observe the flow of popular culture in relation to the culture of the dominant groups as well as in relation to society at large, and participate within the specific context of the resistance. The use of periodization provides a control perspective to both one's participation and observation. Hall specifies the period of 1880-1920 as a key segment of our history to serve as the control. The selection of this period is prescient.

1880-1920 was the pivotal time of transfer from an agrarian to an industrialized society. Innovations in technology increased the pace of life, necessitated broader education, restratified and blurred social classes, and created a new middle class with both leisure time and disposable income. One notes the same pattern of change as the world in which we live transitions from an industrialized base to an information base. The power bloc requires a working class both sufficiently educated to manipulate data and adequately mollified so as to facilitate the limitation of resistance to the ideals of the dominant groups. Drawing correlations between the present and a previous period allows one to ground observation and experience together.

In Stephen Crane's (1871-1900) novel, "Maggie, A Girl of the Streets" (1893), the protagonist, Maggie, exemplifies the interplay on the battlefield between incorporation and resistance. Foremost, Maggie, who works as a seamstress in a factory, observes the "well-dressed women" and, rather than acknowledge a rift in classes, desires matter-of-factly to possess the same refinements. In the previous era of agrarian society, such thoughts would most likely not occur. Maggie, however, has been educated to use industrialized technology and time tables at a cost to the power bloc of Maggie using her refined mental capacity for purposes outside of factory work.

Curiously, Maggie seems preoccupied with the appearance of people rather than who the people really are. She is not concerned with the process of becoming something more. Rather, she is focused on the outward appearance and wanting more. She seems to be the model of consumer capitalism. In addition to seeing clothing and social acceptance as simple commodities, Maggie sees herself, and her youth particularly, "the bloom on her cheeks," as a commodity to be invested, traded, and sold. This self commoditization mirrors the power bloc's drive to market everything possible to the working class.