I Like Trees

My little sister came to me with a complaint about post-modernism, which she was being taught about in high school.

“It hurts,” she said.

I couldn’t agree more. She talked about how the breaking down of boundaries leaves very little to work with, and how it failed to replace them with anything that she could use. Since utility is a cornerstone of humanism, my attention was immediately piqued.

I went and reread a bit, and thought about this a lot. What I ended up telling her was that post-modernism serves a purpose, avery real purpose, and should not be mistaken for anything beyond that purpose. Post-modernism is about breaking down barriers, which were artificial in the first place. It’s all about breaking down, and it’s painful because we were using those bundaries.

Yes, the boundaries are imaginary. The lines we draw which separate trees from shrubs, men from women, and matter from energy- these are all fake. But we never create anything except what we use, so the question becomes, “What were we using these fake lines for?”

Buckets.

I’m not kidding. We live in a world where chopping wood and carrying water are essential parts of life. To get by in an ordinary world, we require systems of classification that let us organise and interact with the world. We’re creatures of order, and we classify. Ultimately, we’re faced with the recognition that the universe classifies only by action and not by type, so we’re awkwardly fumbling to protect our own minds when our typologies get rendered useless.

That’s not a bad thing. That’s what leads to the repeal of Jim Crow laws and the discovery of special relativity. It’s really, really important. Postmodernism at its height (for those who do not believe that we are at its height again) was a movement of broken sentences and jagged views, a movement of realising that we are the lenses and the film, and it’s up to us to include that in our reports of what we see.

http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html

But it doesn’t replace what has to happen next- the reorganisation of thought. Post-modernism does for philosophy what post-rock does for music. IT breaks down the existing rules, allowing the development of new, richer use of the medium. Post-rock’s breakout with Sigur Ros and Explosions in the sky has blossomed, turned into a rich garden of structures. We’re now faced with the abundance of fugues and fascinations, music with movements but modern sounds. Musicians, under the umbrella of sweeping melodic rock, have rediscovered what they liked about old school orchestra and kept it, throwing the rest of the limitations it described away.

The result is Caspian, and Hammock, nd Sky Flying Bye. I’ll wait while you Google them, that’s fine. Start with Caspian’s, “Ghosts of the Garden City,” and Sky Flying Bye’s “Tomorrow Morning’s Tide.”

The point is, the rules of the medium were changed just enough to let those musicians decide on rules that worked better for them. Destroying and deconstruction are only part of the puzzle. The important part, the harder part, is included in the “What now?” side of the equation- finding new ways of thinking and using the ideas, ways that work.

In psychology, we’re throwing away the parts of Freud’s ideas that were nonsense, and keeping the idea of things like the unconscious. Yes, we’re finding out that large parts of that unconscious are biological, and some are predetermined genetic trends (like developing language. Humans are great at language!) We’re keeping the parts that turned out to be true. Throwing ideas away was great, but only because we were ready with other truths that work.

In daily life, we have water to carry, so we need buckets. We have to have ideas. We will always need the compass correction movements, telling us that our ideas are artificial. We need those reminders. Now that we are reminded, what do we do about it?

We choose better buckets, and go back to carrying water. It’s what we do. The buckets are useful, but they aren’t the water, and ultimately, we classify by use for lack of any better method. The emperor may not be wearing clothing, and post-modernism is the child pointing this out on a regular basis. Whether we cancel the parade based on this information is up to us, but we must do something, and that’s where the pain of re-examination resolves into ordinary life again.