#postmodern thought

[maddyaddy]

Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment.

Donna Haraway, "The Cyborg Manifesto"

[whatsmccracken-blog]

By, perhaps, returning to "God as the poet of the world", that metaphor of Whitehead's, we come into a zone of metaphors, tropes, figures of the God-world relationship that call on us, first of all, to rethink all of our relations. No longer to think that we can have our abstract me-and-my-God relation. But only a relation to the ultimate which we might continue to call "God", or which we might not be able to through significant stretches of our life. That is, we might go really apophatic. That apophatic negation might restore God language, poetically. It might bring about other language, hopefully with its own poesis - let's keep this open - but that what we are dealing with, in language, is the radical relationally of our poetry, together, that we make in our chaosmos.

Catherine Keller, Whitehead and Postmodern Thought - Lecture 1

[narcissime]

Brandon Scott Gorrell, Thought Catalog, Nov. 17, 2011

" It is thought that having an awareness of self at the level of consciously knowing you’re Trying To Be [Identity] brings with it a level of self-doubt and self-monitoring that will, ironically, indefinitely, prevent you from earnestly ever becoming [Identity].

What’s really bothering me is this pervasive feeling of not giving a sh-t in combination with the pressure to actually give a sh-t. The modern Intelligent Person or the Person Who’s Trying To Be Intelligent sees that there’s a ceiling of meaning to everything, and by that I mean that I’m presented with way too much choice. That was actually sort of rhetorical — what I mean to say is that it’s hard for me not to eventually experience everything I dedicate time to as essentially futile; that it’s hard for me not to eventually experience the meaning I posit everything I dedicate my time to as a construct of the pressure to feel positive, to feel significant in some way. Such feelings make it easy to be juvenile and find the one inevitable thing that’s stupid about everything."

I wrote up a proposal about a year ago for a senior project that attempted to argue the affective nature of social networking media and technology, contending that the criticism coming from older, counterculture intellectuals concerning the younger generation's obsession with internet and media is a collapse of identity and authenticity is pretty much flat out wrong. And, in fact, the ways in which our generation has interacted with the larger social network has given way to a new series of issues concerning identity politics and self-consciousness, which can be seen as a parallel fight for self-actualization (the sixties being more blunt and revolutionary, while the latter, us, more understated and covert). Ultimately, we as youths are attempting to reveal some element of a self to the world.

I think I may be wrong after reading this.

Er. Well not wrong as un-thorough. Identity is a tricky subject to be interested in. But this is some food for thought on the balancing act (that arguably seems to be weighing in too much on one side) of actualizing an authentic identity and falling into a postmodern, self-conscious/critiquing cliche of a individual, considerably more cool, accepted, and relevant.

All I know is that it's nice to know that others like Gorrell here can similarly see and realize the 'ceiling of meaning' in daily events, happenings, and peoples. It's a 19th-century symbolist, metaphorical tradition that, though I'm glad is not the prevailing intellectual trend, is not entirely lost. I guess the real trick is to carry on one's own initial sentiments and feelings and push them to actual belief and pursuit (and not degrade into thinking such dedicated thoughts are fodder for ironic hipsters and faux intellectuals to tease).

Not sure what I may be saying anymore. But it's late and I needed to ramble after reading this.