Unbeknownst Postmodern
I'm not smart enough to really understand what the term Postmodernity means1; I first heard it in use frequently by graduate philosophy students. They used it to as an all encompassing term to dismiss things with statements like "sort of Postmodern, don't you think?" No one really bothered to define it for me and I always wondered what it meant.
After hearing me rave about a book I enjoyed a while back, a friend took me up on reading it - one of the graduate philosophy students - and after finishing she cornered me on why I liked it so much. "Sort of Postmodern, isn't it?" she asked and suggested at the same time. A one word bludgeon to dismiss a book that had, to be honest, changed me as a person.
What I have figured about the Postmodern is that the things which fall under its umbrella don't focus on meaning. Some people may say that it's more about experience or process, rather than "meaning." Of course, some might define experience and process as meaning, but this is the confusion of trying to define the term. Philosophically some find Postmodern frightening - what frame of reference can we have if meaning is either pointless or cannot be known?
I think I was conditioned towards a Postmodern sensibility by music. Perhaps it was the Cocteau Twins music that made me look at an album in terms of sound and experience; a melodic stream of consciousness, instead of a song by song statement of "meaning."
"A lot of the stuff I was singing about [in the early 1980's] was all metaphorical. I wasn't talking like I am now. I guess it's back to how much personal power you feel that you have. Like, if I'm 17 and I don't even know when I'm hungry, am I tired, have I had any sleep - if you don't even know that, then how can you talk about lyrics that come from such an unconscious place? I always said 'I dont' know', and I didn't." [Liz Fraser quoted by Alternative Press, 1995].
Although music was the gateway, books have become the ultimate pleasure for that sneaky Postmodernism that we all feel in a world that is confused with itself: information overload, mass culture, uncertainty, and consumption.
When I read The Last Samurai, I was seeing a way of life, not reading a story with a beginning and an end. It was about the aerodynamics of insects, the intricacies of language, film connecting with reality, defining a real education, the struggle of an autodidact, a mother and son, and all at the same time. I wasn't reading, I was getting to know people, and finding my meaning in this intimacy. I didn't remember to look for a "Plot Point", or an "Overall Theme."
After watching Hero, friends of mine and I spoke at length about the it but never in terms of the neo-totalitarian vibes that spooked its western distributor into shelving it for a few years before releasing it. We were talking about cinematography. We were awed by a scene with flying leaves. There was the first "fight" scene, shot in the form of a thought, a mental exercise, that made us giddy to watch the film over and over again. I couldn't get over how the entirety of the film was shot in symmetry.
I can't conclude on Postmodernism since I can't really say I know what it is, but I can admit to being influenced by what I read as its description. I'm in my car with the Bebel Gilberto turned way up and I have no idea what she's singing. It just sounds good.
1All the authorities seem to define and use it in different ways. Every time I look for a simple definition, I wind up with noncommital essays, like this one.
9:11:47 PM 
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