[message]...Hey Foucault scholars...any writings on what many have termed
"post-modern vertigo" - the state of disorientation that may result after
reading a lot of PoMo.
Thanks :) Nate Goralnik
Postmodern vertigo is not a virus or contaminant caught from subversive
texts, it is the crisis that emerges when the believer recognises that
their faith in modernity is a failure, the realisation that the tenets of
modernity* - continuity, progress, order, control - are really only
systems of faith that are imposed from outside on a world of disruption,
divergence, competition and conflict. A realisation that shatters the
believer who suddenly recognises themselves as a subversive text.
As this crisis of modernity errupts, the believer - including the closet
believer who so easily sheds their postmodern guise - is consumed by a
state of accelerating panic, so they turn back and reach for all that they
know to be stable and pure, for only this certainty they <desire> can bring
hope into their world, but at the same time they know too well that the
faith they are grasping now <hopelessly> for, is no longer there, and never
was.
And in this state of pure panic, the believer stands mute, arms
outstretched towards this illusion that now betrays them, a vertigo
overwhelms them, terror tears at their vision, and crying "oh god" they
fall backwards into this thing they call the void, into this thing they
call nihilism, and experience postmodern vertigo, or the crisis of
modernity, this vertigo that only infects true believers - the socialist,
capitalist and the devout, who face the world (the postmodern), who witness
the failure (of modernity), and who regardlessly adhere to their faith**.
* the tenets are preferred and proffered by the pious, the orthodox, the
traders (the economie), and the radicals (the academie) alike.
** a faith so strong that in exposing modernity it can only use words like
disintegration, disillusion and chaos, and phrases like the collapse of
reason and the decent into barbarism.
Maybe "Panic Encyclopaedia" Arthur and Marilouise Kroker or some of their
other works
or "Death at the Parasite Cafe" Stephen Pfohl
Tony