Jökull Solberg

My mind is blown. I've been wrestling with post-modernism ever since college where y'know you can't read 19th century English novels without also reading Foucault, obviously. It's always been a very slippery concept. And then in recent years, it became a big boogyman. Which didn't seem right either. Finally I finally got it with the help of academic and poetry analyst Adam Walker. He describes post-modernism not in theoretical but psychological terms as a trauma response to a series of collapse in shared meta-narratives resulting in catastrophe in our physical world. Obviously the last one, and the one that killed modernity, was World War II. I'm thinking that the first collapse might have been caused by the invention of the printing press. OK...going very eurocentric here but it is a Eurocentric story. For a thousand years Europe (western europe anyhow) operated under a single unifying meta-narrative of Christendom. The Catholic church had a monopoly on truth. @tracewoodgrains was talking about this. When the Gutenburg press arrived, people were worried that if the bible gets translated into vernacular languages and people didn't need priests to interpret the world for them anymore, it would cause great disruption. Kind of sounds silly right? why would more people having books be bad? Well, the thing they worried about actually completely came to pass. With the protestant reformation, the grand narrative shattered into all those little pieces and before you know it neighbors were dragging neighbors into the streets, killing each other over their version of the absolute truth in theology. People forget these days...thirty years war wiped out a third of the population in parts of europe. That was when the meta-narrative of modernity got built. Disagreeing over invisible metaphysics was obviously bad news. But we can agree on what's rational and measurable and scientific right? Let's just be secular and enlightened we can live happily ever after. Nope. The world wars wasn't over religion, but completely secular ideas. Highly rational and supposedly modern countries that had globalized trade with each other went to war over nationalism in WWI. The killing was worse than ever because it was so industrialized. Then came World War II which brought the idea of killing on a massive scale over supposedly scientific and logical ideas of racial superiority. You can understand, can't you, that maybe it just seem like believing in any grand narrative is just too dangerous. Instead of being the bloodless, cerebral sophistry post-modernism is usually caricatured as, we can understand it better when we see it as the almost instinctive reaction of an animal that has gotten badly burned and now seek refuge in the shadows out of sheer terror. Anogsonosia is a condition that affects some stroke patients that lost movement in one side of their body but is in denial. If you asked them to lift their left hand or otherwise do something they can't because they're paralyzed, they'll make up increasingly elaborate excuses for why they can't do it that might be elaborate or bizarre. They are not lying. They have a blind spot about their deficit that is grounded in lack of awareness. The damage is to their right parietial lobe. Their arm "feels" fine, so naturally when they try to move it and it doesn't move, the patient experiences tremendous cognitive dissonance, which they then resolve with confabulation. "I'm just tired." "And why should I take your orders?" "You injected me with something to paralyze my arm!" What if post-modernism is just philosophical anosognosia? There has been a trauma that destroyed the part of our culture that processed shared meaning. But instead of acknowledging how broken we are, we've pivoted to intellectualizing why it is we can't function. We deconstruct. We deploy irony. We justify the lack of a story that binds us together, one that humans always had as a group since the dawn of time, as a good thing really. But that's not how rehabilitation happens. Rehabilitation is not smug, it's humbling. It's wiggling your big toe. It's plunging your useless arm again and again through a bucket of beans until you feel that little bit of contraction at the tip of your fingers again. But if it was a technical leap that caused our first trauma, we must acknowledge that before we could even properly heal, another big event that might overwhelm the neurological center of the human species is coming our way again.