The color of structuralism

Barn

A good year for end of times yellow. Don't kid yourself about all this cowardice stuff, that all stemmed from the Spanish Inquisition when heretics where marked as yellow, same with Jews, traitors and anyone else who despite being frail and weak and usually a minority, didn't buckle under. When you think structure, think yellow and the way meaning slides through language.

Our word yellow comes from the Indo European, and in my view more civilized, side of our language where it meant to shine or gleam. My own preference is gleam and I'll tell you why. There's a flycatcher round here called a Phoebe. But there's no way a Phoebe's chest is allowed to be called white, because as a devil who has chased out generations of barn swallows, The Phoebe is both still and she gleams in dark places. There's Femme Fatale green to a Phoebe's white. Not to mention the associations between white, devil, Zanzibar and aimless wandering.

Anyway, Structuralism was fond in its belief that language had created a universal and stable structure of meaning, and would have described a Phoebe as a flycatcher with a white chest

The Story of Action: Many Beginnings but No End.

Late Yellows

Causally and logically linked in a sequence of unfolding, is a predetermined telos that offers the stability so many demand of history. Such an unfolding offered a trusted and reliable stability, but Isadora Wing in her individual life wanted a more liberating experience.

Arendt's contribution to stability was more like a ruptured, eventual, contingency driven by the unpredictable freedom of human beings. In Arendt's view the end of human history would be the disappearance of us people. In no way, shape or form is freedom stable.

Isadora Wing was the heroine mighty bored with Mr. Wing in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Mr. Wing was a Freudian. The boyfriend, called Adrian Goodlove, was bathed in the establishment of mid twentieth century British Psychoanalytical Society, his Mrs. Wing gave him an opportunity to both explore and engage in the Freudian stables of libido, repressed desire and transference. But Adrian had an interest in the insights of the Frenchman Jacques Lacan who was promoting the idea of desire, lust, boinking, and the ancillary details, as structures in a psyche maintained by language and narrative, a story. Desire, as tied to language rather than mechanics of baby making, easily slid into a desire for recognition. Mrs Wing was a neurotic and a Published Poet who taught creative stuff, it was hard work being an authentic voice in an inauthentic world dominated by well paid shrinks, one of them dastardly in his lack of professionalism.

Tempting to believe that Isadora would be as putty in the hands of an English fiend called Adrian. But no. He turned out needy, domineering, he'd taken the connection Jacques Lacan had made between physical desire in a psyche that was both shaped and structured by language as a desire for recognition by the other a little too literally. It made Adrian dull as nails. Isadora's passion to slide into  wordless and mindless exchanges of bodily fluids on a psychiatrist couch or anywhere else got lost to a clever translation and went unrequited.

History and freedom are messy

The Disciple in All of Us

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker

Metamodern Oscillation, feelings, truth, freedom and lies.

There's a lot of words here, so let's talk about Preppers, Survivalists, and just accept that in the good old Postmodern World of ten years ago, when we were all Ironic, cigarette smoking and proud of our morpheme laden Metaphysical Attitude, we were content to define preppers as not only weird, heavily armed, underground dwelling and scary, but as Woke Postmodernists in Good Standing we were also obliged to think of these fellow citizens as engaged in a doomed reaction to a Melancholy Critique of our society.

These days of course we're allowed to use words like dim-witted or moronic, even autistic as long as we place the blame on the medical profession, but we are learning to accept our status as an underclass in an oscillation that's placed an A for Effort as the only viable grading of opinion. Which is the cynical way of suggesting that Metamodern Structure of Feelings that promote a regular oscillation between naughty and nice would have found a home in Goebbels' back office behind the door which reads "Moving On." And why?

In a Society, the Self is not the Project, Society is the project, which if true, does rather suggest that orientating the self toward society is the project. Hence Freedom, Truth, Feelings, a mix of realities that can only be brought into a unison through a series of lies, or if you prefer myths that work to create belief through the feelings of faith. It's just a sad fact God doesn't work so well anymore.

How lucky Can-Bobby is. He doesn't feel. No wonder Schlegel became a religious nut. I prefer Ironic Seriousness as the coverall for the Metamodernist Mind.

Is Freedom an Oscillation Beyond Irony?

Step Out

Let's reassure ourselves of a definition and then ask a question. The reassurance : What does Postmodernism mean? The Question : What's irony got to do with a definition of Postmodernism? The simple answer is in this question: What is Knowingness when meaning is unstable? Then when all that's sorted out there's a judgement to be made on the value or otherwise of stability's relationship with freedom. And out of that judgement honest lies and deceit are born. 

Let's get posh and posit a Metaphysical Attitude by pottering on back to another German Idealist, he was a well fed man who was 56 when he died in 1829, he went by the wonderful name of Friedrich Schlegel. In his youth he was a big fan of Kant's Transcendental Idealism and the excitement of the Enlightenment, as he aged the poor chap became a Christian Nationalist. Schlegel, despite his frailties, in his exploration of language discovered morphemes - snippets of meaning - in the German word Ironie (which is the English word Irony).These morphemes suggested that irony should be thought of as a Metaphysical Attitude. In other words, irony reflected a deep down understanding that there were areas of thinking that no human being was really capable of capturing. Such areas included ultimate truth.  "Ultimate Truth" when used ironically, spoken with a tone of Irony, according to Schlegel was self-referential. It was bathos, it was the one little remark that turned a reach for truth, a great work of literature, a lifetime's achievement into an amusing nonsense.  But Schlegel was a tad pompous and suggested Irony placed the Artist above the work, a false modesty, rather than a "don't believe a word of it." Which for Schlegel became a faith in the form of his belief in the Roman Church. 

The refreshingly slender Jean-François Leotard in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), introduced a definition of Postmodernism that described it as "an incredulity toward metanarrative." Pretty damn spiffy and very La Belle Dame Sans Merci of him to come up with something so sprightly and Gallic. We Anglo Saxons with our stubby fingers, promptly contributed wide-eyed disbelief, incredulity, to the morphemes in the usage of the word irony. It was attached to our idea of wit, our grasp of charades.

Soon enough we sulked, we'd already stolen the word pastiche from the Italians and produced the accusation that Irony in Postmodernism has suborned the youth and while psychologists welcomed the business there was nothing they could do about it when the patient started throwing coffee tables at their girlfriends. Naturally political interests saw a future in a realignment of reality that suited the emotionally hungry.

Wordsmiths struggled on through the happy days of the new perspectives they'd found in the controversies of Postmodernism before being persuaded to employ their imaginations to produce the beautiful notion Can-Bobby calls The Oscillation Beyond Irony. He introduces Metamodernism or Post Irony through the work of two cultural theorists, as Postmodernist sociologists have come to be called. Two men, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who describe a "structure of feeling" characterized by a constant oscillation between two opposite poles. 

These opposite poles are the distance between the enthusiasm, sincerity and doubts of Modernism - which followed the convictions of the Enlightenment - and at the other pole of this structure of feeling there's the irony, skepticism and doubts of Postmodernism. This new view of the world the Ancient Greeks would have continued to call skepticism is placed in Schlegel's morphemes of this word Metamodernism or Post Irony and will one day receive a chapter in the Book of Irony