I’m God or No One At All

I am so bitter toward my generation, but I am also aware that I would rather be Lermontov than Pechorin.

Prophet

Since that time when the highest court
Had given me the prophet's vision,
In eyes of men I always caught
The images of sin and treason.

Then I began to promulgate
The clear love's and truth's commandment:
At me all humans threw for that
Hard sticks and stones, like the madmen.

I put sackcloth and ashes on,
And ran -- a beggar -- from the town,
And there I live in desert lone,
Like birds, on food that God sends down;

Here earthly creatures serve me right,
The laws of the Lord obeying;
And stars here hear me in night,
With their rays, like babies, playing.

And when to towns' walls, by chance,
I hurry through the noisy places,
The old men say to younger ones,
With selfish smiles on their faces,

"Look, there is an example for us!
He was expelled from life, like ours:
The fool was forcing us to trust
That God is speaking through his mouth!

So, see, my children: how grim,
Thin, pale he is -- with shaggy hair!
Look, how poor he is and bare,
How despise all people him!"
-----------------------

Contemplating the internet blogs hipsters etc.

I have to admit that occasionally my internet-induced boredom and insecurity lead me to sites such as lookbook.nu or lookatthisfuckinghipster or whatever. Sometimes I feel really awful about being a twenty-something college student that didn’t receive financial aid - that’s a coded reference to class by the way - reads blogs, and talks about differance (not a spelling error, you close minded website) and the constitution of the self as other. I think I tend to dress more like a yuppie than most people my age, but I am not certain that there is a substantial difference between the 30 year old white collar workers who buy workwear and the 20 year old college students who buy (dirt?wear. My blog-tone bears the same sort of detachment and everything-is-so-banal-including-me sentiment common to my age group. I have resisted going on chatroulette, but I did watch Jersey Shore and I do watch gossip girl (by the way, I think the ironized relation of young men, chatroulette’s predominant user group, to its ostensible purpose, seeing other young men masturbate, suggests something about phallic desire in relation to irony and mediation, specifically that of the internet…something about a necessity of distance from object of desire…).

All of those examples are meant to suggest how it is hard to escape the homogeneity of culture in 2010. I think the internet was initially praised for its fissiparity, its capacity to produce spaces for every sort of cultural interest to thrive. I get the sense that all of these cultural niches have kind of collided and exploded upon one another with the advent of blog culture. Ultimately, it seems like it is really easy to be the same as all of your peers; even the really, really smart people seem to be trapped in this sort of business.

But, I guess my question is whether it really makes sense for me to blame all of this on the internet and blogs. Did earlier generations manifest a similar homogeneity? I don’t think this all that unlikely, at least not retrospectively. Hofmaansthal and Schnitzler reacted against the “value vacuum” of their bourgeois Jewish fathers, right? I couldn’t begin to offer an explanation as to how historically-specific cultural formations come into being; nonetheless, it is probably evident that individuals from a specific era shared common concerns and interacted with the world in a common way. I guess the question then, is whether this has been heightened by the internet, and as my title suggests, I am not sure that I feel comfortable to provide any definitive answer, to move beyond the progressive tense.

I wonder if the internet has brought about an increasing awareness of the commonalities of the concerns and contingencies of whatever this era might be. The collisions of culture, their mergers and breaking apart are immensely accessible, and it is hard for me not to see vice, pitchfork, hipsterrunoff, a continuous lean, lookbooknu, twitter, and whatever else as demarcating the interest-category for profile for the Facebook page of the year 2010 (Actually, the weird thing is how interested actual grown-ups are in things like twitter- maybe the internet is promoting homogeneity by collapsing generational distinctions?). Ultimately, however, self-awareness, self-reflexivity or meta-whatever are not important in themselves; everything, ever, really ever, shakespeare plato, whatever, is self-reflexive, and this cannot be a defining feature of this era (this is perhaps the source of my frustrations with Gaga-love; I don’t think her ironic, self-aware pose as a “postmodern” diva is particularly outre or noteworthy (man, I should write an essay about how all the praise lavished on Gaga could probably be applied to Backstreet boys or B. Spears)).

I don’t think that this display of intra-cultural commonality, this manifestation of the discourse-as-constitutive-of-culture of Foucalut need be viewed in a negative light. Afterall, it seems to perhaps more than ever before open up the possibility of an intervention. This intervention would lie in the ability to view this cultural expanse from afar, step back, and resist, with the recognition that no matter how far one steps back, he or she will never step out of the expanse. It is a question of exposing the expanse from within, particularly in those areas in which it is most destructive.

As I have largely suggested a sort of political action along the lines of Linda Hutcheon’s understanding of postmodernism, I want to bring up-and then set aside-a question I have been having for a little while now. Is this still the postmodern era? Is this still the postmodern era, when popular culture, from Nicki Minaj to Rihanna to Lady Gaga draws on the tropes of dystopia common to postmodernism in more “authentically” postmodern works such as Videodrome or Blade Runner? Is it still postmodernism when postmodernism, post-everything is itself both cited ironically and incorporated into mass culture and consumption? Or, is it something else? I reaaaaaaaaally don’t know, but man, Baudrillard! I can’t keep stressing to “you” enough what a prophet Baudrillard was.

Taboo…

is a great board game! On the other hand, the designers lose points for not calling it “Metonymy: The Game.” Idiots.