It really is hard to escape it. Where once it may have filled a void in a culture that was too afraid or too repressed to look at itself critically, it has now transcended utility and become an end in of itself.
The postmodern lifestyle is what evolves when the counterculture becomes the mainstream, and when a teenage elitism extends into adult years. The chronic postmodernist lives "beyond," "outside," or "above" his culture. This exhibits itself in perpetual irony
(fig. A, left) and dismissive criticism
(fig. B, below). This is inherently unoriginal. Or maybe not unoriginal, but one begins to live his life reactively. Thoughts and creations are exclusively in response to something, and the act of creating a truly original product has no room in this framework. It's important to note that while such a person usually intends to divorce himself from his culture, he, in truth, relies on it completely, for without other people's creations against which he plays the enlightened omnipotent, his utterances and presentations
would reveal themselves as empty and meaningless. While such reactions, especially jokes and subculture fashion, are generally well-received, they have little independent value. Now by this definition, the same could be said for any socially-influenced act or creation (i.e., that it has no independent value because it's not "truly" single-origin), but of course most, if not all, of humanity's products have both social roots and value, so where's the harm in maintaining this kind of ironic distance? Like any aberrant behavior classified as "disease," this is harmful in excess: when it moves from a conscious cultural critique to a total confusion of one's identity. If we assume that identity is comprised of what one thinks and does, and one "thinks and does" purely in relation to a societal aggregate, then one's own identity becomes hopelessly embedded in that of other people. This person has disappeared. And without identity, what separates one person from another? What makes him special? Or desirable? Or unlikeable?
Those who lead postmodern lifestyles can never be truly real. They play off of others, and add nothing of themselves. They may offer a "real" analysis, in that they've filtered information themselves rather than regurgitate someone else's take on a situation, life, et al., but they subordinate their social decisions to their desire for pure opposition and communion, and they never simply "are."
Who knows what the root of this is? Is it a desire to be liked? A fear of oneself being socially unacceptable? An all-encompassing need to carve a personal niche in a larger society?
The internet may offer a clue to that last hypothesis. There are so many more connections than there are nodes, that sometimes it's hard to believe there's anything original at all out there. Seen as a model for more conventional interaction, whereby communication is made up of both relaying other people's information and adding or generating one's own synthesis, the internet is full of reactionary fervor. Many blogs and forums are nothing more than simple rehashes of someone else's product, and news aggregators are just soulless, programmatic distributors, adding nothing of their own to the sea of online information. I believe this trend online comes from a desperate need to be noticed. There's no other social space where so many people are instantly accessible. It's as if everyone in the world is in the same room, and all our eyes are closed. We have no choice but to make as much noise as possible just to be acknowledged, and piggybacking on proven attention-getters is one way of doing that. I realize that this phenomenon on the internet is a bit different from real-life "hyper-postmodernism" in that the elitism or cynicism isn't really present. It simply illustrates the tendency to be reactive and derivative as a way to establish oneself, as with subculture fashion.
This may be reaching. This may be me attributing my own distinct self-analysis to the general population and as such is likely an oversimplification. But there are fake, ironic people out there that need to snap out of it and start creating something. If you think you might be one of them you need to start contributing to your culture instead of bitching about how much you despise it. Have opinions instead of counter-opinions, and don't be afraid to put your real self on the line.
Let me know if this makes sense. It may not.
