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by John Shirley Have you ever noticed how, in elevating things to a higher level of discussion, many "Postmodernist" intellectuals are actually trying to bring us down to something baser: to their hollowness; to the convoluted jeer, the elaborate, polysyllabic smirk that underlies their most somber pronouncements? Show a PM intellectual a Fred Astaire musical and they'll chuckle and enjoy THE IRONY of it; the campiness of it, the cultural byway it represents to them. Me, I like to see the man dance, just the way my mom did. Godzilla is campy; Fred Astaire is art.
Or play a PM intellectual a tune by Robert Johnson or John Lee Hooker or even Johnny Cash and they'll nod, and distantly, marginally enjoy it, and then, chuckling, they'll talk about its sociological substance. Me, I hear those artists, they move me, that's all.
Read to a Postmodern Intellectual from a sacred book -- what, the Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, the Gospels -- and they'll see it in historical context, the sociological context, the mythological context. Read it to me and, if I'm paying attention enough, I'll see myself in the context of the cosmos and I'll find a lonely spot and go trembling to my knees. Postmodern intellectuals experience the world, life itself, through a filter of theory.
I mean, yo, Check this out: "As Hans Josais points out, the Gnostic individual internalizes eschatology, radically modifying subjectivity itself into an alien immediacy that creates a simulacrum of the final days." That polygibberish is from an essay by one Erik Davis in a book that came out a few years ago, edited by Mark Dery: Flame Wars - Discourse on Cyberculture. In his essay, the decidedly erudite Mr. Davis seems to be, in general, positing a correspondence between the mystical state and cyberspace. It probably seemed like a hot concept to use as a thesis; I mean, dude, spirituality is hot and so is cyberspace. So, one is the other -- if it's convenient for your thesis. Postmodern Theorists, Baudrillard, et cetera, et al, and so forth, that whole fucking scene: underlying it is the smirking observation that nothing means anything, everything is meaningless except for the opportune subjective and malleable interpretation you've erected for the sake of your master's thesis -- or your hopes of tenure. Read Davis' essay and you can almost see the cigarette held at a rakish angle between thumb and forefinger (Mike Myers as Dieter). Literature, postmodernists tell us, doesn't mean what it says: it means "I hated my mother, I want to oppress blacks, enslave women, act out neuroses". (C.S. Lewis saw this coming early in the century when he wrote The Abolition Of Man, a book that brilliantly flays nascent postmodern theory.)
Ok. So the guy is talking about Gnosticism, which some of you may know as a mystical variant of Christianity with elements that resemble Zen and a grim view of the material world. Gnosticism is about GNOSIS, knowledge, direct spiritual experience of God. It has a creation myth underlying it, which might not be myth (I dunno, I wasn't there when the universe was created...as far as I recollect), but the essence of the sect is gnosis and submission to the will of the Higher, the divine intelligence above and beyond the apparent. Something damnably real, so to speak, to the Gnostics. There is in some gnostic literature an apocalyptic element, (perhaps because Christian gnosticism is related to Judaism which is pretty consistently apocalyptic), though to the mystic these things probably don't mean the same as they do to the glib Mr. Davis. But the main thing is, the Gnostic individual internalizes eschatology, right? Eschatology is theological thought having to do with death and the afterlife. Davis seems to be saying that escha-fucking-tology is purely subjective, is a mental state, and one that exists so that Mr. Davis can thread it into his notion of mental simulacra, his idea that spirituality is psychological cyberspace. He'd probably deny that -- ask one of these postmodernists what he really means, he'll give you five answers.
Hey, Mr. Davis, I hope that there is truly Judgment in the afterlife, so that you have an interesting eschatological experience.
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