A frightening vision of the future

As I'm gearing up to draft part 5 of Caveman, the final section on postmodernism, I begin to realize anew what a lot of hooey much writing about pomo really is (including mine). I've got one line throughout caveman detailing a narrative flow of art culminating in modernism, followed by a reaction to modernism known as postmodernism. I've also got another line detailing the state of "thought" in the world of absolute relativism (that's a joke, I think — as my friend McGrath always says, if you were smarter, I'd be funnier). The two lines are connected only insofar as a lot of the critical analysis of the first line derives from the the premises of the second line. I think I do a better job explaining the art side of things than the philosophical side of things. Anyhow, I looked up ten different websites for definitions of postmodernism yesterday, just a random google search. I am not being facetious when I report that the ten websites gave me about twenty definitions. It's not so much that people don't know what pomo is, as they're all addressing different aspects of it. Of course, half of the writers are themselves so steeped in pomo analysis that they are unintelligible; those are the ones who refer to Derrida's unintelligibility as genius. What a bunch of poopie heads, as they say in France. One idea that I read that did intrigue me is that the Modern is the apotheosis of the individual, followed by the Postmodern as the reassertion of the collective. Personally I see the Modern as the breakdown of the romantic individualist, but I like the argument anyhow. It certainly applies in some places. In any case, putting part 5 up will be truly making a commitment to various lines of thought, few of which I understand all that well. My problem is, I have no trouble speaking my mind, but I don't always know what's in it.

I guess I could get my mind off of this by, say, downloading videos of Noah. Apparently his smut peddler job lured him into buying a webcam. Because he is now out the fifty bucks or so, he says videomessaging is the wave of the future, and he'll be adding video blogs to his written blogs, apparently so his friends who are illiterate can still keep in touch with him. I remember back to the 1964 World's Fair, when AT&T was promising that videophones were the wave of the future. Noah may be right—more right than Ma Bell was—but that still doesn't mean I want to sit here watching videos of Noah. As a matter of fact, for me the idea that the future holds lots of videos of Noah may be the key reason I'm sort of hoping he's wrong.