POSTMODERNISM IS A DEAD CANARD
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

 

Is Postmodernism Dead?

Postmodernism is definitely out of vogue and virtually dead, seldom mentioned but in passing reference to disheveled architecture and ramshackle anti-art installations. We may pause at such meaningless structures for a few moments to mourn its passing in the context of lost identities and purposeless lives. For we may be grateful that some of the best postmodern deconstruction untethered us from the geometrical tyranny of Space Age modernism and the classical moral and ethical values of our lost race, so that we, with conscience in absentia, found solace in hyperspace and became contemporary artists, creative accountants, habitual liars, political morons, perverse hedonists, and retro-activists, not to mention frustrated deconstructionists who unwittingly brought their marriages to ruin while sleeping: they dismembered their mates and fed their bawling babies to the dogs.

Politically correct and ethically relative ethnocentric multiculturalism gives us sufficient reason to refrain from naming members of the Democratic Fascist Party here. Suffice it to say that, given the current success of the anti-intellectual neoconservative administration, it appears that postmodernism’s foremost ideological allegation, that Western democracy is just another authoritarian ruse employed by fascists to exploit exploited people, was right on the dollar.  

Of course postmodernism’s purported demise is a crying shame for professional apologists whose fortune was being made trading commonplace commonsense for obscurantist nonsense. No doubt quite a few drunks wept incoherently with joy in contemporary confusionism’s wake. Nonetheless, since nobody really knows just what the dearly departed was except an indignant attack on received respectability, some confusion remains to be interred. And only then may the bereaved laugh out loud at postmodern foolhardiness. Wherefore I shall for their sake share my view of the decadent corpus with postmodernism’s mourners and perforce help bring the grave subject to closure in mortùs rigorànce, as neoteric neologians say.

In sum, postmodernism was not the quacking duck it seemed to be: it was a worthless canard, a downright swindle originally perpetrated by Nazi apologists. At least I, for one, was cheated out of my identity for the time being; and since I was no longer an I at the time, but rather a neobarbarian nihilist, I still have difficulty saying how I felt about that. Only a torturous textual recounting can recover me in context and reestablish my humanitarian ends.

Confusionism

I was so confused by postmodernism at the outset that I thought "postmodernism" was synonymous with "confusionism," yet I was confident that I could split its hairs into their respective colors and unravel the mutual encroachments of its eclectic opus. I thought I could eventually give myself a reasonable account of it so that I might make a rational either/or decision: to join or not to join - that was the usual question posed by lonesome me. As it turned out, either/or was beside the point: I was stripped of my belief in the existence of the good, true, and beautiful, and was sucked down the postmodern drain before I had a chance to leap one way or the other.

At first, reasoning about confusion as if it were understandable did little to dispel my confusion. As a matter of fact, my initial efforts to rationalize postmodernism with linear thinking plunged me deeper into its swirling, bewildering morass, wherein my original despondency sunk into utter despair. In retrospect, I suspect unclean spirits had crept in and infected my reason after I suspended judgment in order to listen to postmodernism's farraginous canon of discourse. It reminded me of the time I visited a paranoid schizophrenic friend at Bellevue Hospital: before long, thanks to the power of suggestions made by the inmates, I almost got myself committed by the mental hospital’s head discerner of unwholesome spirits.

No wonder postmodernists dwell on madness and imprisonment, and even allege that the brick-and-mortar penitentiaries are only there to distract outsiders from the realization that, in free production and consumption, they are enslaved by the introjected wardens of their own little virtual prisons, which are modeled after the gigantic Western panopticon – its form follows its function: the inspection principle allows Big Brother to inspect everyone equally. Every monad is in effect the same although their perceptions may differ slightly from one to the other as they gaze indecisively at their différances in the polished stainless steel mirrors over the mass-produced sinks. There are no windows to peer out of, but all within the cells may be remotely monitored; the possibility of being inspected at any time and punished for infractions keeps the prisoners in line. Given Augustine’s statement that free will can only sin against the law, only anarcho-Christian libertines and sociopathic criminals are truly free. Be that as it may, my investigation of postmodernism was making a postmodernist out of me.

I had given existentialism the old college try before my encounter with postmodernism, Although I could not quite put my finger on existence in itself, at least with existentialism I was left with faith in Nothing, which I assumed was naked Being; that is, beingness stripped of every sensible quality that could be said about it. But with postmodernism, I doubted the existence of my first person, my very I, hence my unity of perception soon became a discordant scattering of bits and pieces, a random, jumbled ramble. My self was a sort of trash-art personality or gallimaufry incarnate in dishabille; I ventured into art morgues, where I looked down my nose over neon-orange-framed glasses and declared traditionally fine art to be much too graphic and skilled and humanistic for popular taste. An anti-artist must make certain “adjustments” to win the popularity contest: he must compromise integrity and defame classical beauty, truth, and goodness with so much trash and junk marketed with incoherent concepts couched in shabby grammar. Anyone who objects must be denounced by postmodern authoritarian anarchists as a cultural fascist – it is always best to blame the victims, for without victims there would be no perpetrators.  

Despite the non-existence of the I that thinks and therefore is, postmodernism allowed me to keep my precious "conflict with authority.” Indeed, I, if I may say so, was encouraged to resent any encroachment on whatever culture I might want my fictitious I to conform to someday, namely someone else's culture, the more exotic the better. Fortunately, doubt set in before I completely lost my head. I began to suspect that postmodernism was nothing but a sophisticated temper tantrum mixed up with tantric practices and pagan whatnot. Yet I must confess that I was taken in by it, whatever it was or was not, and I wanted to do something about it.

Travel Fantasies

I seriously considered moving to Mongolia. I would buy a used yurt, round up some stray livestock, and become a nomad. I would naturally give up lactose-free vegetarianism and take up eating meat, drinking mare's milk, and collecting manure for the fire. I would learn to love horse racing and cheap Russian vodka. But then I learned a money economy had been introduced by some yuppies with a laptop. Bankers were stealing the money. Nomads were exchanging their herds for money, which is absurd: a nomad's real wealth is measured by number of head and not by number of exchange units or the Western junk that can be purchased with them! To make matters worse with the virtue of a free-market economy, the Russians were no longer putting out fodder for the winter. Survival of the fittest is not my cup of tea. So much for my postmodern Mongolia plan.

Then my mind wandered to Myanmar for awhile; I could not drag my body over there to be shot or hung: I just hate juntas. I was disappointed to learn that the Myanmar junta wanted to build scarce Western houses for everyone who approved of the junta’s dictatorial concept of democracy. But I would prefer to build my traditional Burmese house with plentiful bamboo, or rather let the cheroot-smoking wives build it while my pals and I gamble the day away. I know, fire insurance is not available, but so what if the bamboo house burns down? Happy-go-lucky villagers just throw up another house after celebrating the good life again – what a way to live! As for the contents of the bamboo shelter, who needs more possessions than can be carried on one's back?

Indeed, I speculated, property is theft, the cause of most of the violence. Evil is of our own making! But alas, the globe is overrun with property and its attendant evils including monogamy and juntas who hate multiculturalism - ironically, in its love for denigrated Others, am amoral postmodernism includes juntas on its protected species list.

Suffice it to say that, after a great deal of mental globetrotting, I finally gave up on finding a postmodern Arcadia. There are no pockets of paradise left on this planet, unless one is fond of narco-terrorists, so I decided to stay put in the despicable West.

Talk About Talk

Postmodernists seemed to think language is everything, so I took up talk about talk, and I did my best to fight talk with talk and deconstruct every text to prove that life is really an incongruous whorl of contradictions. Perhaps when the text is deconstructed, I thought, we might drop off the edge of the page, and get on with our real lives instead of trying to figure everything out. But no, that was not the postmodern objective; for signs refer to nothing real, therefore the only thing to be done is to stay on the page and manipulate and reorganize the signs ad infinitum to prove that life as we know it is meaningless but somehow worth living for the hell of it. Furthermore, the theory of meaningless must be obscured with jargon to conceal its meaninglessness. Once the classical syntax is dispensed with, the absurd postmodern blah blah blah is virtually inexhaustible. After all, the structure of talk is the model for everything, especially the despised high culture of liberalism, which must be deconstructed along with its totalizing egos lest a total state arise, the very sort of state the charismatic postmodernist would have if the liberal selves were annihilated at the postmodern camp along with the subjects and objects of liberal grammar.

Humankind is nothing but a tall tale; one tale is as good as another, provided it is not the Western tale. The universe is really a lot of cosmic yackety-yak, the elements of the universe as we understand them are all talking systematically, so let us have at it. Each element is determined by its hated system, its little white lie, hence each individual is fictitiously specified by its complex relationship with other elements. World civilization is a big lie, and must be reduced to its pagan components. And so on.

Good postmodernists, I was reminded again and again by a mystical postmodernist, must remember that signs do not refer to the real world but are merely reflexes of the flexible system. In fact, there is no real world, he claimed, for there is no reality. And, without reality for statements to correspond to, there is no such thing as truth. Truth, like Auschwitz, is just a lie used by the liberal power elite to accumulate and hog wealth. Since language itself is a lie, one must blame the language when caught in a lie, and not the liar.

The Universe is not a unity or singular entity with its own independent essence, my mystic postmodern guide insisted, but is a discombobulated multiversity of various canons or systems of "discourse" constituting specious “paradigms.” Strictly speaking, the universe is just a fictitious speech of speeches without a Speaker. Anyone besides a postmodernist who dares to speak the universe is a damned fool. Nonetheless, if he is a bigot with a system, anti-system postmodernists cannot but admire him as an Other who has a canon of discourse, for they love the authority they hate, and are hence their own worst enemy.

Again, and this is the most important postmodernist truth, there is no such thing as truth. Moreover, words like "Truth", "Nature", "Reality", are merely names, at best lying weasel words implying that transcendental values exist. Only the particulars or elements of systems exist.

Welcome back to the temporal and spatial finitude modern people fought so long and hard to transcend. So long to Liberty at the end of the historical road; so long to Oz at the end of the yellow brick one. Welcome to Anarchy, an irrational system without an authority – Hail to the Anarch! Say hello to the postmodern idol and good-bye to idle discourses or systemic linguistic practices, which are not just our everyday verbalizations, but everything we do. By analogy, everything of human value is a sign of a discursive system and must go. Finally, I thought, we can get on with it. But no, more must be said about the fact that everything is talk, talk, talk, and everything is connected.

For example, as we constantly chatter into our cellular phones in order to groom one another like apes, the constituent elements of Chicago are carrying on a robust but ultimately meaningless Midwestern conversation with one another. A cathedral chimes in with an ode to god’s great story, which Lake Michigan drowns out. Within the urban complex, professors of sociology at the University of Chicago are polishing their canons of discourse, which are somehow related to the reproductive canon of discourse in rural Illinois, where milk talks to udders and alfalfa begs to be eaten. And so on.

Initially taken in by postmodernism, I tried to be cool. I practiced putting down the supposedly Western way of thinking, which is, of course, the hard way, the rigid phallic way, backed up by big long cannons. However, when doing just that, I erected my thinking above thinking itself in the same old despised way, and proceeded to assert liberalism’s horrid holy values: the sanctity of human life; human love and respect; human dignity; justice for all; and the like. As I did so, I grew increasingly cynical about postmodernism’s backfiring canon of discourse - it seemed to be shooting its mouth off to get a reaction - it seemed to be making trouble just to blame it on its neoteric forefathers, biting every hand that fed it. Ultimately it appeared to be insane hence totally destructive; once the arrogant values of high culture were incinerated in the ovens, including the difference between subject and object, nothing remained to do but to run amok at the whim of the Supreme Anarch.

I found very little original thinking in the postmodern camp populated by interpretations of interpretations of interpretations instead of human beings, unless the term original be construed as something remotely vague or unknown, such as the origin of the universe. Postmodernists believe man is dead, buried in structural systems to which he constantly adjusts – he would be better off as a pagan in the wild, or in a city with no planning department and building codes. The postmodern structures, if they can be called structures, are inane conceits. There is nothing new in any of this. Early postmodern theorists, despite their good intentions and skillful prevarications about their roles during the war, left their disciples with a pseudo-science too arid to be ugly. Everything talked about had been talked about before so many times that it seemed like the graves had been picked clean of everything including the bones, and that we were just talking about some crazy talking technique neither we nor its inventor understood because it is actually an anti-technique.

I Loved Aardvarks and Slime Mold

By the way, I also took up the passionate study of slime mold and aardvarks – I became the founder and first president of A.S.S., the Aardvarkian Secret Society, and recommended the importation of aardvarks into Hawaii to solve its termite problem. I also wrote haikus about obscure herbal medicines. I was infuriated by a Western zoologist's rude remark that aardvarks are ugly, so I imbibed a prodigious quantity of marijuana tea to calm my nerves. Duly intoxicated, I surmised that, with the advent of the Internet, mankind will soon fulfill its destiny by becoming a Global Glob, analogous to a gigantic slime mold covering the globe, living off of decaying matter while leaving the thriving vegetation unharmed. I composed a haiku on the subject - sonnets had been rendered uncool because an idolized professor of postmodern literature said the sonnet form is really that of a syllogism, and as such it had served more to stifle erotic romance with patriarchal formalism than to promote sexual intercourse. My haiku created quite a stir, especially the reference to billions of cells becoming a single yellow construct having the appearance of a cosmic cur's vomit. I was immensely amused by the feedback.

Still, I could not stand postmodernism's supercilious talk-about-talk vocabulary. People really thought they knew it all when they learned how to say "paradigm" over and over. That I did not mind so much. But I thought that if I heard "discourse" or "episteme", “hermeneutics”, or even worse, "canon of discourse", one more time, I would redundantly retch – there would be no end to my barfing as long as I had a lifetime supply of double cheeseburgers.

The hypocrisy of the postmodernist pseudo-scientists - frustrated Nazis in red dresses, fascists trained by deviating Marxists - is appalling to any Westerner in his right mind. The very idea of it - to use the supreme canon of "Western" thinking to blast the West! And to think one might get away with it by peppering his manifestos with some such obscure weasel word as "topos". Please, I do not want to go to that confusing place! To hell with the "topoi"! I quit! Take me back to the Enlightenment!

El Cogito Factor

One thing postmodernism is dead set against is the Enlightenment, especially the Enlightenment's favorite induction, the El Cogito Factor, which makes all brilliant deductions from a broad generalization possible. The amazing Rene Descartes discovered the world-shaking factor for himself, stating it in the elegant a< b (a implies b, or a therefore b) propositional form, "Cogito ergo sum", or, "I think therefore I am". And if one thinks long enough, one arrives at the conclusion that the "I" doing the thinking thinks about many things yet is still the "I", hence consciousness is a unity apposite an infinite plurality of possible objects. In other words the "I" is a broad generalization, a self-consciousness induced from the awareness of multiple objects. On the inductive side, the "I" or subject, when absolutely universalized, magically becomes the Subject-of-subjects or "God." And from that universal, almighty-I, all things are deduced. Meditate on the "Star of David" and you will know what I mean.

Of course any reasonable Western person knows the universe of discourse is essentially ONE! The ONE is the Unity-of-unities such as the unity of history, the unity of the self or 'I", the unity of the objective world and so on, unitary beings in their selves. Absent the unities, or absolute common denominators, we would quickly devolve to insanity and to the nihilistic end of history extolled by many postmodernists

[Please excuse this philosophical nonsense about common sense. But it leaves me, myself and I with due cause to wonder how people got so confused as to forget who they were anyway. So I shall continue apace]:

I am glad postmodernism is dead. Postmodernism was morbidly reactionary in the first place, and it would have returned us to the despairing confusionism that existed before the hero Descartes elevated the subjective -I to its noble status, an elevated status which asserted the erect individuality of the will, hence individual freedom - Descartes was a philosophical Protestant in the sense that, when seeking to know himself, he took no catholic authority for granted, but resorted to his ability to think for himself, therefore he was somebody important, although he arrived at the same conclusion, the existence of the I-god projected.

Nevertheless, postmodernists abhorred the very unity of consciousness we take for granted even more than they detested neoliberal globalism. And despite their pluralistic professions, they would make us and our groups into the elements of systems and into cogs in machines, slaves to the finite discursive systems, the fantastic monstrosities they concoct for us to constantly adjust to: As if the world were better run by “Contemporary” artists! They resented the authority of reason, confusing it with the arbitrary authority of the old patriarchs, whose irrational might made right and served the centralization of power in their royal "I"s on their thrones. Indeed, the careening postmodern machine has no driver; rather, the driver is a psychopath.

Postmodern confusionism betrayed them all, for they would have regressed to the primitive forms of arbitration. In their self-contradiction, in their absurd denial of the Cogito Factor, they assumed that the organization of intelligence, which is the natural process of evolution, was a Western conspiracy that had to be thwarted. And they would have unwittingly outwitted it by means of its own method. But of course! That is the only method we know of, the Method of methods gleaned from the universal science of methodology, the study of methods, which depends on the Cogito Factor, on the identity of the "I" as a unity of consciousness capable of generalizing its objects.

Yes, true ladies and gentlemen, the contradiction of self-contradictory postmodernism is obvious: the rebellious child becomes its own father, the very father it hates. But what it deplores it really adores. I am somewhat ashamed I fell in love with my obvious enemy.

Authority is a Big Problem

I must admit that my inner child was rebellious when I first embraced postmodernism. The movement was automatically impertinent, disruptive, and critical of authority. Good! I was born with a conflict with authority. But I was unable to discern the difference between postmodernism and philosophical anarchy or dogmatic skepticism. I wanted to join a postmodern protest march but I could not find a postmodern flag to march behind. I found out later there was no such flag or march. I also discovered that, for all their love of concrete systems, the postmodernists were unable to propose any such system or institution to replace the Western hegemonic system they hated so much. When caught with their pants down in that respect, they resort to the very sort of vague generalities and weasel-word vocabulary they accuse modern thinkers of.

Seeing that they had no solutions to the problem of injustice being done to others by the insiders of the predominant power-culture, postmodernists resorted to ineffable solutions instead of the ones already being employed. We heard about "another law...lying beyond the totality of the present" and a "new form of right", of faith in an "imaginary community not really present but in relation", of "agnostic respect" - respecting the other's system while not knowing that one's own system is the best - and of the "radical democracy of the people" in whom there is a "uniformity". But that uniformity would belie postmodernism's beloved systemic differences as well as its principle of difference – the principle of indecisive deferral of judgment - and affirm the existence of the absolute common denominator abhorred by postmodernism, the subjective-I.

The purported object of postmodernism's ethical relativity is not mere toleration of others, but the active celebration of the others as Other, hence we have a specious politics of Otherness. And what happens to the "we" who is celebrating its "others"? What if the others are Nazis who want to kill Jews and we are the Jews? The solution is obvious given the arbitrary terms: we can become the “Nazis” and celebrate the “Jews” in ancient Semitic fashion, set them aside for a good old herem or holocaust.

We are advised to remember that what we are depends on what we are not, therefore we are to have respect for the not that makes us what we are. This advice has it merits, but we should also remember that our love of the common good hates evil forms contrary to that good, and vicious systems of annihilation might have to be annihilated to get a positive product. Furthermore, what we are depends more on what we want to be than what we are not. Yes, God must have Satan and Satan loves God, but let us place our love rightly.

The more I found out about the postmodern religion, the more useless the same seemed. While religion worships absolute power and assures us that the Almighty is Right, politics distributes power according to a sense of justice. Thus the true politic eschews the unprincipled “might is right” faith and takes up the authority of morality and ethics instead of capitulating to the authority of the Almighty Terrorist. Since postmodernism espoused ethical relativity, there really was no such politics as postmodern politics – which made it easier to deny collaboration with right-wing authoritarians. In any event, I concluded that we and our others have plenty of political, religious, and ethical tools already at our disposal, dialectical and critical tools forged by millennia of practical experience, wherefore I and my others would be better off if the postmodern retrogrades dug their graves.

The Talking Cure

I am still slightly confused by postmodernism, yet I am getting on with the detoxification program - I must talk my way out of this mess. As you may surmise from the foregoing, I did my best to forsake my study of postmodernism before I had completely lost my mind to the demons whirling about the maelstrom. You see, behind the postmodernist mask is the mechanical madness of a plurality of selves. That is to say once again that there presumably is no patriarchal phallic "I" that postmodernism absurdly identifies with an abhorred "subjectivism" as it confuses objects with the subject and pleads for the very objectiveness it lacks in its own narcissistic subjectivity. Yes, the plurality is a system, but so is the multiple personality. Without a unifying soul, the plural system is possessed by devils or demons, so to speak. If a man became a constantly adjusting adjustment to a complex system, he would be mad, a despairing grind of Hamlet’s (Amleth = stupid) Mill – the Mill mechanically grinds the structures of the world into particles.

The Authoritarian WE

That I am able to employ my I in this tract is evidence of my recovery and the death of postmodernism. At least I am no longer a postmodern thinker! I must reiterate to reinforce myself in contrast: The postmodern thinker, to be consistent, should not use the erect "I", the nominative singular pronoun, when referring to himself in his tracts. Rather, since he has repudiated the Cogito Factor, he should always employ "we", the nominative plural of "I", because he really means to refer to the systemic collection of selves, the multiple personality that he, in his delusion, thinks he is. In doing so, he will be not only consistently confused but ideologically correct, since his "we" would be a feminist commune juxtaposed to a male chauvinist "I", with transgender connotations.

In any case, the author who resorts to the WE appears to have more authority when he denounces the authorities. Hypocrisy of hypocrisies! Although we find the postmodern intellectual employing the "we", he does not mean it in the postmodernist sense but rather in the usual authoritarian sense, that of "Western" science applied to the social quasi-sciences. While writing alone in his study, he uses the authoritarian, third person, WE to cloak his uncertainty with a semblance of social authority, as if the whole intellectual community were behind him, or in his anus, speaking through him. That is to say, in his subjectivity he pretends to be objective. His 'we' does not really mean an actual plurality of subjective selves that are in turn plural in themselves, but alludes to a foil for the collective, a fictional unity postmodern theosophists sometimes call "god."

The authoritarian WE is a screen standing for the fear of being exposed as a naked-I. That is why many academics fall prone to postmodernism. But the king really is nude, and he should not be ashamed of his sovereignty. The academic 'we' used as a cloak of authority may be worn as a proud badge of ability or of feigned humility, but under its skirts we discover genuine self-loathing and hatred of society. For the fearful postmodern individual has subjected himself to the curse of credentials under the terrible 'we' of "Western" science that he says he deplores. The postmodernist would rather have appropriated that 'we' internally, not in the unity he subjectively made of the external, objective 'we' that he hated for its restrictions, but as a plurality, a plurality he then demanded, without, but did not really want because he did not really want it, within. What he wanted within was what he defied, the absolute unity of consciousness in the Subject-of-subjects, the Almighty-I. But to have that, his self must be the very naked-I he fears.

Yes, the postmodernist was ashamed of his nudity. He loved his linguistic textiles, he loved his distorted and fragmented reflection in the pool. He refused to face the self being reflected by the mirror. He refused to confess his fear and love for that "I", the particular "I" that is a unique coincidence of universals and at the same time is in itself quite real although ineffable. That unique subjective self is indeed mad or crazy like a fox about its confinement, not as a systemic plurality, but in its real, divine unity struggling for authority over the multiplicity of objective restraints.

Clarification

Now then, I believe I have cleared up my own confusion concerning postmodernism by making the foregoing perfectly clear to myself. But I proceeded with this address for altruistic reasons. I wanted to enlighten the confused persons who might be weeping with joy or grief over the demise of postmodernism, yet did not know exactly what had died. Therefore I have just a few more remarks to make before we adjourn. I will be brief since almost everyone fled for the exits some time ago. Please bear with me, especially if you doubt me, for my conclusion includes a resume of my confessional qualifications.

Be not ashamed if you are still somewhat confused despite my clarification. Many ordinary persons remain confused, disturbed, and deceived by the great canard that was called postmodernism. Since its decline beneath the inevitable historical progress of human enlightenment, the advancing Wheel of Light that is nothing but the remembrance of Truth, confused people are being gradually restored to common sense.

Take me for example. To return to the "I", common sense dictates that I am thinking by virtue of my free will to think what I want to think, therefore "I" exists as a thinking-I that is essentially prior to its thoughts, or is, as subject, independent of its objects. In other words, I am free-will prior to my thinking. However, the abstraction does not end there, for absent my objects of resistance (inertia), there can be no identified will set against objects, no "I" as free-will. Nevertheless, there is "I" as freedom-from-nothing - mind you, nothing exists. Then I am everything. I am the ONE, the Naked-I, the Unity of "the" void analogous to absolute space or total absence. And, from ONE, the All is posited. I mean, I am, so to speak, the universal universal.

As I appear in this particular human form within my Universe of intercourse, I am the particular concrete universal, the unique coincidence or unity of my adjectival universals (universal predicates). I am the creative unity in diversity of this my natural person (the fusion of individuality-society) in reciprocal correspondence with my diverse other "I"'s in my I-ness.

Furthermore, I am deliberately self-limited by my possession of this human form. Nonetheless, from transcendence I am self-created and self-moved. The universe is my gift to myself: the universe is FOR my I-ness to exist in my various modes in relation to my objections raised. However, the only way I can be known to myself as a particular human being partially limited by myself, is in my individual human form. From that perspective there is no other universal-I besides the human-I. All other absolute universals are projections of the human-I, and they fall short of the absolute humanist truth, towards which there is, however, historical progress - history is a human agency.

I, as a human being in this particular freedom incarnate, am a test of truth available to all human beings. Our criterion, our unity of conscious experience, is in our freedom as individuals. The postmodernists were not all wrong. True, there is no certain common structure of consciousness governing our being with a permanent rule of law. Yet we are I-Being, and our being is life demanding freedom from all restraints upon its will to live eternally as "I". In this I-will-love, this love of life, our lives are one. All structures and systems that fail to serve this purpose will eventually be dismantled. Other systems will serve us as machines for the time being - systems and structures are our agents, not our masters.

I exist.

Rest in Peace

Now that I have made myself perfectly clear, may postmodernism rest in peace. After all has been said by way of definition, postmodernism is a dead canard, therefore this discourse is adjourned until further notice.