Inchoate Thought

ripening without ripeness
movement without arrival
becoming without being

Growing Up

Some days, the collective weight of all the stupid banalities of life is almost enough to break the surface of one's worthless day-to-day existence and force a transformative change, a leap into the abyss, which one knows is filled with hope because one knows nothing about its contents.

But only almost.

Going Camping

Consider for a moment the tragic arrangement of life: the necessity of working away one's youth in order to secure one's survival in old age. Surely the progress accomplished over thousands of years could do something to liberate human beings from the tyranny of nature, and allow them to do what they want - that dream of emancipation, whose continued failure to materialize constitutes the ultimate, unjustifiable failure of capitalism.

Now consider the possibility that people have contrived a partial remedy for this disappointment. They invented the modern university so that young people on the threshold of adulthood would be permitted four years of nearly unstructured enjoyment before relinquishing their agency and submitting themselves to the economy. College as vacation from the outside world, paid for with a lifetime of work. Each generation saves for a lifetime to give their progeny this gift. And the children, having enjoyed the fruits of their parents' labor must repay it for the next generation. Asking for more than this when your parents have given so much so that you could have your four years of idle fun - that is the height of immodesty. Small wonder that those who try to evade entry into the workforce by extending their tenure as students earn the contempt of others. Rather than celebrating the success of the few, the many condemn them for emphasizing the non-necessity of the majority's sacrifice.

The most satisfying part of this model is that it explains why college is so easy - why no one seems to mind (or admit) that even in the allegedly rigorous universities, dedicated students find ample time for enjoyment - far more than in the 'real world' of forty-hour work weeks. Everyone knows, and yet no one acknowledges, that college is one part work and three parts fun. It is a time for acceptable transgressions - even expected ones, in the manner of the Spartan youths.

There is the other side, of course - that by the arbitrary demands of its bureaucratic systems, the caprices of professors, the student learns to jump through hoops like a good white-collar worker. The college years are not a total loss for society.

Methodology

In Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes of the inevitable incompleteness of any theory of the postmodern. Postmodernism, whether characterized, as with Lyotard, by the end of "master narratives," or, with Jameson, by the disappearance of the historicity of the modern age, is still described by those experiencing and observing it in narrative or historical terms (pp. xi-xii). But this seems unavoidable. For how else to conceptualize postmodernity (I struggle against the desire to write 'postmodern age'), except as a distinct period, differentiated from those that came before it by whatever peculiarities may be most relevant, but above all, perhaps, by its currentness. It seems that our ordinary conception of time inevitably connects the postmodern to the past as the latest in a series of discrete steps. However diffuse it is, by calling it postmodernism - by imagining it at all - we give it coherence, for we cannot imagine what has no form and no discernable characteristics.

The theoretical approaches characteristic of postmodernity call into question such concepts as narrative and truth. The questioning of truth, in turn, inevitably pulls logic from its pedestal. Given that the persuasiveness of an argument is based largely upon the audience's evaluation of the truth of its premises and the cogency of its logical progression, as well as the centrality of argument in theory, the questions raised by postmodern theory deprive it of its own justification. What is the value of theory in a world of multiplicities, or of argument in the absence of truth?

This contradiction does not, however, lead to a facile dismissal of postmodern theory. I am struck and disturbed by the facility with which my fellow university students dismiss wholesale such modes thought as philosophy or postmodernism. Such contempt reveals complete disbelief in the legitimacy of academic study in these areas and raises a variety of questions both about those responsible for such statements and regarding the place of non-empirical thought in this society. But that is matter for another discussion. In terms of the issue at hand, the contradiction at the heart of postmodern theory establishes at the very beginning that the belief in logic is both untenable and necessary. Logic seems to hold an innate attraction for people, and it is difficult, if not impossible to conceive or persuasive communication without it. If there is a way to articulate the postmodern condition without logic, and without immediately imposing the necessity of silence, then such a way has not yet been found. What remains, then, is that postmodern theory can only be communicated through logical argumentation, but the jarring incongruousness of form and content remind all involved that logic and argument themselves are under scrutiny. The related problem of objectivity - that such an idea can no longer seriously be entertained, although a theory that attempts to describe the experience of multiple people or the characteristics of a society inevitably assumes a perspective above the subjectivity of those it describes - is also only an issue of form. Nothing expressed by postmodern theory can be said to hold for all conditions, or even, perhaps, for all the individuals, or for all the states of a given individual, within the society that it describes. The method is sub-optimal, of course, but this is not indicative of a problem with the questions being asked. It is, rather, a problem with the established methods for answering them.

These are, admittedly, very loosely structured thoughts, and it is already evident to me that they contain major problems. Let this stand as a promise that I will return to the question of methodology in postmodern theory soon.

Words

The terror of the blank page is like the terror of ephemeral youth. Its purity, unmarred by words, is existence outside of time. The potential resides in eternity and every choice starts one on the road to death.

As I stood on the little observation platform with fireworks in front of me and a gathering storm to the side, I felt both terribly exposed and infinitely small. These irreconcilable feelings worked to annihilate each other while the container ships off the coast lit their lamps against the darkening sky and a wind stirred the long grass covering the sand dunes.

In the desire to capture experience through reflection, the end falls victim to the means, and the obligation to form memories results only in a vague sense of absence. One experiences most strongly when the boundary between subject and object fades. To live most fully, one must forgo the immediate consciousness of experience. Youth is used best when it is squandered. Does the same hold true for the blank page?