Post-modernism: From surfing cows to Gollum as a lifestyle choice, pt. 1

So what exactly is post-modern theory? Is it the characteristic of cattle fence-posts being connected with Ethernet cables so that the cows can go online? As cool as bovine surfing would be (in water or digitally), the term has a more mundane meaning. It simply means “after” modernism. 

Well, what was modernism? It’s what came after Romanticism (with all those capital R Romantics). In the end, the modernists were people like T.S. Elliot, William Golding, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 

T.S. Elliot

William Golding (a late modernist), 

D. H. Lawrence

Virginia Woolf

In the end, their big thing was that modern society had estranged itself from “real” reality and “the truth”. You see this nicely with Golding’s Nobel acceptance speech, where he talks of living in two worlds, the material and the spiritual and that that is what “living is really like”. 

The modernists were aware that society was based on conventional codes, such as gender. (Before all my Mormon friends run amok, note the difference between sex “the fun bits on your physical body” and gender “the role assigned to you by society based on said bits”, thus we could potentially call them “sad bits”.)

(Grr...Sara infecting me with her style of writing…I am less worried about the change in looks due to marriage, more about the merging of intellect. In 20 years’ time we will be able to be one another’s ghost writers, and no one will be able to notice…anyways…where were we…a right, fun/sad bits)

For an interesting take on gender, by way of sex, try (at your own peril) Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 

Orlando

Appropriately, the modernists had ‘special’ ideas about where to find truth and true experience. I think it was D.H. Lawrence for whom sex was a special type of revelatory experience. I don’t know what type of drugs he was on, but while sex is fun, revelatory…not really. 

But the theme running through their work was an attempt to get out of the conventions of society to truth, reality, being, essence, or some other big sounding word that some new-age, bored hipster will claim is the “real” answer. But there is still this element that one can somehow get at the "real" and somehow express it, thus bringing it back to experience where it can be used for, essentially, revolutionary purposes. 

As you can tell, this is just the beginning. Stay tuned!

Click HERE for part 2