We live in a rainbow of Chaos.
Paul Cezanne
Viola: Thy reason, man?
Feste: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words; and
words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 3, scene 1
I exist in a postmodern universe. It does not matter that most of my life is in a world of modernity; I exist in the post-modern. Even if in All That is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Breman claims that the post-modern is just another manifestation of the modern, which is repeatedly building up a world only to tear it down again; the post-modern exists in reaction to the modern. When I was working on my Master’s degree in English literature in the early 90s, the best definition of the difference between the modern and the postmodern that I came across was that both recognized the chaos of the universe, yet modernism tried to impose an order on the chaos, whereas the postmodern accepts and revels in the chaos. Although I would like the world to be a predictable normal place, thus the attraction of positivism, the randomness of my experience belies that possibility. And as Nietzsche wrote, “In the end one only experiences oneself.”
I am also attracted to the postmodern paradigm because of the importance that language plays in the unfolding of thought. “One must be ready to hold word and concept in precarious tension. What this means, above all else, is that in every sign there remains the trace of ‘the other’ that eludes our grasp.” (Crotty 2003, p. 206) When I was in third grade I became enthralled by my first encounter with the paradoxical nature of language when I thought: “Nothing has to be something, or it wouldn’t have a name.” I realize now that there is more to ontology than the words we use to negotiate our encounters with the world, but language, or some other sign system of similar nature, is also the only tool we have in which to hold the conversation we have, even if the conversation is only with ourselves. I listen to my students as they struggle with giving meaning to their lives, most often the discourses they employ to this end are choked with clichés and pat phrases inherited from the dominant culture At best words allow us a way to control how we grapple with the world “always already here,” while at the same time language controls how and what we are able to say. “As Lyotard insists, there is no metanarrative that can bring things together for us. There is no language and our language games are thoroughly fragmented.” (Crotty 2003, p. 212) The ineffable is that which is on the tip of our tongues.
(from an essay I wrote for a doctoral class in 2006)
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