Nihilsm, Narcissism, Nostalgia, Curiosity, Contemplation, Creativity

A man said to the universe, "Sir, I exist."

"However," the universe replied. "The fact has not inspired in me a sense of obligation."

-Stephan Crane

When writing first emerged, Socrates voiced concerns that this new way of cataloguing thoughts was “taking the soul out of an exchange." Likewise, media critics today argue that Google (as emblematic of the Internet) is killing memory. The present resonates with the past no matter how badly postmodernism tries to transcend its claims to absolute Truths and grand meta-narratives about culture and society like history has routinely done. Because “truth” has been proven to be contextual and impermanent, a key lesson that postmodernity has learned from history's fluctuations is discontinuity. Postmodernity, in its suspicious approach to virtually all forms and practices, has taken to constructing the progression of human existence as a series of discontinuous events in order to justify its lack of allegiance to any one paradigm. What does this mean for the way we approach the past, the present, and the future? According to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the paradigms that both shape our world and allow us to acquire knowledge about and within it fluctuate according to their capacity to meet our needs at any given point in historical time. Each new idea, both scientific and cultural, must be looked at in light of its location in historical time rather than for its ability to explain the world we live in today. “What must the world be like in order that man may know it?" is the question that not only drives scientific truth, but also sociocultural reality. Postmodernism must then be situated and sought to be understood in relation to the paradigms that have preceded it both historically and adjacently along the line of historical time. The paradox of postmodernism lies in the juxtaposition between its desire to transcend this outmoded reliance on a grand meta-narrative or underlying condition in order that we might “know” our world and the reality that it does, in fact, rely on an underlying condition, namely the “continuity of the condition of fragmentation, ephemerality, discontinuity, and chaotic change."

Progress, it seems, has been fetishized. Because we have been endowed with brains that can think, hands that can labor, and souls that can feel, we must, as we’ve been taught, harness complete control of and seek to constantly ‘better’ our faculties. Because we’ve seen the evolution from cave painting to the Internet, we are inspired to invent ever further, despite the ramifications this has on things like the environment and human rights. Human beings are notorious for discontentment and, thus, because we can, we usually always do simply because we feel we need to do something. Our fetishization of progress has inspired postmodernism to not only reject modernism’s forms, but also to reject that it is a mere historical moment in the grand spectrum of time. Because it is pretentious, we are pretentious. Because it has annihilated history, we are nihilistic. Because it assumes its own prestige, we are narcissistic. And because it selectively uses the past (ie. art, music, performance, principles, practices, stories) to produce the present, because “it is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours… The desert of the real itself," we become nostalgic for reality itself and look to the past, to the same place that the simulacrum has looked in forming itself as the lining of our lived existence, in hopes of finding it. These are the lessons that postmodernity has taught us. How, then, can we help but literally personify these very lessons in our own lives?

If the symptoms of postmodernism are narcissism, nihilism, and nostalgia, then I’d like to pose what I'll call a “Three C” approach as a remedy. This is a three step approach to making like meaningful or, at the very least, bearable, that many of us, especially academics who thrive off of inquiry, already use sporadically. Yet here it is; consolidated, alliterated, and spelled out in the very words it seeks to overcome. Curiosity, contemplation, creativity. It is being offered as a proactive way to approach the “problem” of postmodernism, as it has been fashionably construed through the simply act of living consciously instead of blinding accepting the forms, principles, and practices that the world throws our way. Above all, these three steps involve consciousness or a heightened awareness and healthy skepticism about the world around us. Curiosity tame the wiles of egotism because, in approaching our new postmodern world through the eyes of a child, we are already assuming that we have something to learn. Contemplation involves taking what our senses have allowed us to be curious about and engage in the all-important acts of thinking, questioning, and inquiring. Creativity is the natural spring of both of these things. It will allow us to fashion a way of being that is not prescribed to us by any institution or historical conceptualization of how we should act.

The Three C approach may help thwart the magnetic gravitations towards nihilism, narcissism and nostalgia that are the natural outgrowths of a society that is going through massive changes. Individualism, nationalism, totalizing grand narratives, religious fundamentalism, the family as the locus of society, confidence in the nation-state, the dominion of the signified over the signifier, our capacity to distinguish the simulacrum from reality, our ability to distinguish between high and pop culture, mass culture/marketing, one-way communication, dichotomies, boundaries (ie. in art, technology, music), social hierarchies, clear sexual categories; these are all quickly becoming the residues of modernity, artifacts of an age that is quickly being superseded by an erosion of these constructs into hybridized, intertextual, boundary-less, cyborgian-like versions of each of them. The postmodern condition is characterized by a marked ambivalence about the world we live in. It is not merely an outgrowth of modernism, although its emergence and defining moments do rely on the extinction of modernism’s forms. “Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of as if that is all there is." Postmodernism is a period that has tried to negate its ties to history because it has come to determine that the construction of history and the forms, technologies, theories, and knowledge bases that have historically resonated within the chambers of each other’s are only valid according to how far, or rather, in what direction, society, globalization, gendered/sexual identities, political regimes, social structures, religious thought and scientific recapitulations have come. Depending on where the sociocultural pendulum is located, so the “revolutions” that have historically allowed us to weigh the constructs that appear to us against a larger ‘condition' come to be. Such cultural constructs are now weighted against that enigmatic construct known as postmodernism which

sees itself... as a willful and rather chaotic movement to overcome all the supposed ills of modernism. But in this regard postmodernists [may] exaggerate when they depict the modern as grossly as they do... There were, after all, many cross-currents within modernism, and postmodernists echo some of them quite explicitly."

Again, we catch passing traces of the past in the present. Although it advocates change and discontinuity as emblematic of an ahistorical periodization of time-space, these characteristics come to be the very underlying condition that enables historical “moments” to be rendered comparable.

It goes without saying that the value of trends lies in their capacity to point to reoccurring instances of conscious and subconscious articulation. Along with every new technology or paradigm shifting ‘revolution’ comes a fear about it. What we fear appears to be not so much the new, but the renunciation of the old. The pervasiveness of nostalgia films and other cultural products that invoke imaginings of a distant past when ‘times where better’ clearly point to this. According to Buck-Morse’s description of wish-images, “the old never sets itself off sharply from the new; rather, the latter, striving to set itself apart from the recently outmoded, renews archaic, ur-temporal elements." How is that young adults born in the 1980s can long for the lifestyle of the 1950s? The 1960s? The Middle Ages? What we long for is the real. What we have is a world filled with pastiches. The old thus get constructed as the archetypical golden past simply because it supposedly embodied originality instead of hybridized products, principles, and people. What we long for is the authentic and we are willing to even go so far as to construct an imaginary "golden past" in order to legitimate our longings. Should we use the Three C's, we might begin to see that the present can be just as authentic as the imaginary golden pasts that we construct.

"Miscommunication is the scandal that motivates the concept of communication." The eerily reminiscent resonance that this postmodern moment has points to a Nietzschian positioning of disillusionment as the backdrop against which the frightening realization that “we can never grasp the true meaning of things – the uncanniness of the things we take for granted” took form. The 1920s birthed cultural artifacts like Munch’s “Scream,” Eliot’s “Wasteland,” Schoenberg’s chaotic musical scores, and Picasso’s 4D art. These were all responses to telepathy's failure, to a mass realization that one consciousness could not be transmitted intact to another, that you can never wholly understand me. Today, we see a frighteningly similar trend occurring with the rise of the Internet. We have birthed a medium and imbued it with all of the capabilities that we think should warrant its hoped for telepathic capacity. This affinity with the past suggests that maybe we are not as far removed from history as we’d like to imagine ourselves as being. “To the degree that it does not try to legitimate itself by reference to the past…postmodernism typically harks back to that wing of thought, Nietzsche in particular, that emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought." In the 1920s solipsism-inspired artistic expressions of man’s realization that the mind is a private space, the artists dealt with the impossibility of communication through abstract expressionism that acknowledged the chaotic space of the impenetrable mental divide. Today, we are alleviating a recognition of this reality by consuming, entertaining, and literally seeking salvation in the very world that has failed us.

Solipsism and telepathy are two sides of the same coin. When we realize that our dreams of telepathy cannot possibly come true, nihilism, narcissism, and nostalgia set in. This may birth a nation or, worse yet, a world, of apathetic individuals who retreat inside their own self-absorbed minds and inhibit their ability to live meaningful lives. This is dangerous – for politics, for law, for culture, for the climate, for our sanity, for human rights, and for love. If “anything goes” and “nobody cares” then what stops another human being from turning to his left and shooting his neighbor? If we live in fear then we cannot possibly live in love – the one thing to which we all must strive if we seek things like equality and the innate value of a human life. Life then becomes a mere game of survival wherein we turn to drugs or sex or consumerism and a million other “therapeutic” ways to try and derive some pleasure out of it. And then, before we know it, we are, as the founder of NYU Steinhardt warned, “amusing ourselves to death.”

Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment.

When we realize that all of these things are finite, that we cant take drugs or have sex or buy products forever, then we ironically become numb because we seek so strongly to feel. We turn to anti-depressants or other self-depreciating behaviors because we long so deeply for something that has been promised to us by mass society, yet, in reality, is no where to be found there. Horkeheimer and Adorno spoke warned us about the pervasive ‘culture industry.’ Walter Benjamin was worried about mechanical reproduction and its effects on society. Humdog wrote about the commodification of human beings on the web. These pessimistic notions of media/cultural theorists who assume little to no human agency in their qualms about the media’s effects on society are true to the degree that we blindly accept the world as it is offered to us and allow sanctioned ignorance and apathy to undermine our capacity to act proactively.

The nature of communication is constantly changing. The radio rendered communication one-way and enabled mass messages to be dispersed without any feedback. The telephone birthed two-way communication, a built in response system that allowed messages to be sent back and forth. The Internet has reinvented the way communication works, yet again. It has compressed time/space and, in many ways, has made our lives easier. But in many other ways, it has started us on the same downward spiral that Plato philosophized about when he spoke of the value of dialectics and the debasement of writing; nihilism, narcissism, and nostalgia. Social networking has globalized the public sphere and made audible all sorts of different voices. There are an innumerable amount of communicative devices with which we can send messages, get quick responses, read news, create virtual identities, share information, respond to information, learn about the world at large, and enter into new worlds at the click of a mouse or the touch of a screen. With so many different ways to communicate with each other and shape ourselves digitally, we seem to be becoming ever more removed from each other. We become nihilistic about life and view life as meaningless because all the promises of technology and the digital world have done exactly the opposite of what they claimed they would; they have turned our worlds upside down and enabled us to be in the same physical space, yet enter into completely different virtual worlds. Or we become narcissistic because our worlds have been rendered subjective by virtue of the sheer amount of information that the virtual world enables to circulate. And then we become nostalgic about the days when life seemed more authentic and less mediated, our thoughts communicable, our worlds more intimate. This is solipsism magnified. In Charlemagne's court, music was sentenced to written notation so that cacophony might be reduced and voices standardized. Ironically, this enabled music to be manipulated because it had been ‘made to matter.’ This same phenomenon has occurred with the rise of Internet and our obsession with commodifing our thoughts - and it is slowly driving us further and further apart. Marx talked about the “mystical quality of commodities,” or the nature of commodities to act as if they had magically appeared for consumers who pay no attention to the human labor that went into their creation. Ironically, this is the same phenomenon tha happens when thoughts are ‘made to matter.’ When we type out a thought and send it out into the virtual world via one online stream or another, the thought takes on a life of its own, a mystical quality wherein in stands for something greater than itself. It becomes lost in a sea of thoughts. It not only says “this is what my creator is thinking,” but also “this is how my creator views technology,” “this is what my creator’s relationship with technology is like,” and “this is how technology is being used.” In essence, our thoughts have taken on the same mystical quality that Marx attributed to commodities, which doesn’t seem so farfetched in light of the fact that thoughts rendered digital become commodities.

The Three Cs may help to halt our gradual cyborgic circumscription by these increasingly anthropomorphized machines. It is the construction of technology as an instrumental object to be imbued by us as subject instead of its status as an “articulation of us that provides an understanding of being and shapes the way we come to perceive the world” (Heiddeger) that makes it enfeebling rather than enabling. If we look at technology curiously rather than as a taken-for-granted part of society as we know it, then what we see is a vastly different animal. We might see technology as a product of mankind, made of parts that are collected in uncolonized nations by migrant workers who have no clue as to why they are collecting shards of glass or metal from the Earth. We might then be inspired to contemplate issues such as human rights and the digital divide and question the taken-for-grantedness of the technoscape and its impact on our lives and the lives around us. Lastly, in light of these contemplations, we might then be driven to create; to create ways to use technology without allowing ourselves to be consumed by it, to create new constructs and paradigms that proactively inform the way we think instead of incarcerating our psyches in technological prisons that limit our capacity to act authentically, uniquely, and in ways that inspire us to resituate ourselves as active agents who are consciously aware of how the world is affecting us and how we are affecting it.

The irony behind the internet’s aspirations towards a Platonic model of communication (my ideas transmit to your consciousness) via social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Wave that collect and disperse thoughts is that we have become more disillusioned and mediated than ever before. Our thoughts are now made to matter, in both senses of the term. Consolidating our identities online has enabled the very environment that Manovich cited as being constitutive of a society undergoing computerization; numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding which means that we are in danger of becoming what humdog identified as “a community of signs, nicely boxed, categorized and inventoried, ready for consumption” instead of real human beings revealing real uncommodified memoirs of the mind. The lively world of Facebook birthed Twitter, which extracted status updates and harnessed our obsession with materializing our private deliberations. Recently, Google Wave has consolidated virtually every aspect of our virtual existences into one format, much like the IPhone enables us to carry music, the Internet, gaming, and telephonic capabilities in one tiny plastic box that fits right into the palm of our hands. The irony of it all is that while we have reimagined technology to be the world so that we might imagine ourselves as holding it in the palm of our hands, what we’ve really done is become so accustomed to technology that we are threatened to be consumed by and subservient to it. We’ve become so accustomed to technology as “standing in reserve," as available at the snap of our fingers, that the miracle of technology itself has been effaced. "Technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." It is this essence that we must discover and to which we must defer our awe if we are to begin to understand the power of and effects that technology has on our very being.

"They were the best of times, they were the worst of times" (A Tale of Two Cities). This quote, though written in regard to the French Revolution, can be applied to any historical moment. Today is both a horribly frightening moment of economic instability, cultural/moral relativism, environmental decay, information overload, and overall uncertainty coupled with the exciting revelation that life is one glorious adventure, a hotbed of experiences, events, and people that we can use to create, interpret, and imagine a life that is ours for the making. Postmodernism has negated the grand narratives that have characterized

each of the generations that have preceded us. It has reimagined the way we write history and the way we tell the stories of yesteryear. What effects will this have on the value that has been traditionally placed on antiquity? Will great minds of bygone times like Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Nietzsche continue to inform the way we think? Will the Schoenburgs, Eliots, and Picassos of old be held in such high regard? Should Beethoven and Jay-Z be comparable? Or are all these figures and their creations only valuable if they can be rendered into some sort of postmodern pastiche? Will the lessons of the past be eclipsed by the novel, by subjectivity-obsessed netizens who claim transcendence via wormholes through the now? If Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revelations is correct, than this current postmodern moment is merely a phase in the great story of mankind’s existence as a thinking, feeling, being subject on this planet. What lies ahead is yet to be

told. By approaching postmodernism itself with an air of marked curiosity, we can contemplate its existence and situatedness in historical time and develop ways to create the next great historical movement. While we

think ourselves unique and nonconformist when we adopt paradigms like nihilism and narcissism or become nostalgic about an imaginary golden past, what we are really displaying is the archetypical postmodern mass subject rendered in a pseudo-differentiated manner by individuals the world over who have taken to imagining that the world owes them a favor. And who can blame us? This is what digital technology has taught us. Nihilism, narcissism, and nostalgia are trendy. Curiosity, contemplation, and creativity are not. The former three will lead us to apathy, the latter three to one more C; consciousness. "Two paths diverged in the forest, I took the one less traveled and it made all the difference" (Frost).