The -ism Chasm
The –Ism chasm:
It caught me completely by surprise. There I was, an innocent, naïve girl, looking at the world in blacks and whites with the odd shade of grey just to add that little bit of variety, there I was, happily hiding behind the assumption that the world was exactly how it looked when it crept up to me, caught me by the throat, and shook me till my teeth rattled and my eyes rolled into the back of my head. My mind was torn in a million opposite directions, my thoughts were a confusing concoction of, well, thoughts and I didn't know where my thoughts began and where they were being led to.
I am talking about, well, the confusing world of the –isms. In less than three months I've suddenly been rudely dropped into the world of where a chair is not a chair but it becomes a chair when I see it as a chair. I've suddenly been caught up in the throes of arguments against presence and being and phenomenon and origin. I've been introduced to phrases like Constitutive Otherness, I now know of people like the all knowing, all seeing Derrida and Michel Foucault and Baudrillard. My eyes have been opened.
What has actually happened is that I am now drowning in a world of post-somethingisms. Post-modernism, Post-colonialism, Post-industrialism, Post-structuralism. And that's not all. For it to be a post-something, there had to be a something before that. And more often than not, I have to look at that something before I make any sense of the post-something. So there is now pre-colonialism, colonialism, postcolonialism and that's not all. There is now something called neo colonialism!
Is there any end to this, I wonder. Will we ever stop analysing and over analysing the world we live in, the world which seems so simple on the outset but so complex later on. But which movement to follow, which theory to follow? And where is all this taking me? Is it going to bring me enlightenment of some sort? Is it going to make my life easier to handle?
Suffixes and prefixes, the murky, miry deeps of abstraction. Identity, information, transgression, construction. And then deconstruction. What is really the point of it all, anyway? Sometimes I would really like to proclaim that I GIVE UP! I'm an existentialist and life is futile and everything else has no meaning except for the fact that they exist.
Simply excuse maadi. I think I need to go and collect my thoughts.
posted by Books inc @ 8:33 AM
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