High Postmodernism

As the clock by which they all set their watches grew worn and began to drift farther and farther from the twenty four hour cycle, the colonists were thrown into terror. All their scientific and philosophical projects, all the objectivity with which they were taming the savage Earth was falling into disarray, the central axis torn away from them. Distracted forever, they spin their wheels to the end, chasing futile attempts to reconstruct the center, without having any center to guide their reconstruction. All rational discourses work in this way, requiring the primordial clockmaker by which they yoke their language to. At the core of all investigation is an unspoken purpose, the axial center of the discourse which the discourse is attempting to move towards. Rational investigation continues in this autistic fashion. A structuralist author reads reality as an incomplete map to the platonic realm of Marx, Freud, Darwin, etc.

This is not unique. All writing needs a source in order to orient its meaning. What is occuring with the rationals is a reimagination of the source as being based in direct texts, on the same realm as the one they produce. Sources do not traditionally take this form, with the source-text of traditional texts being the local context from which they emerge. Such is the genesis of the Epic poem, forming a summary and interpretation of the original culture from which it emerges. When texts are created with other texts as their source documents, the intelligentsia emerges with their Floating World (Ukiyo-e), the cultured realm mutating in conversation with itself. The rational spirit rises from this in hatred of it. Desiring to rediscover the community, they work backwards, finding the source-text they believe to be fitting of a reality they never encountered, and work tirelessly to apply the new discourses upon it. When European Man outsourced his manual labor to the colonies he saw the Real in those colonies, forming a racial ideology of physical reality only truly existing in the hands of the black and brown subjects of his machinations. Journeying far afield, he sought them out, to unify himself with them who supposedly held the key to his sources.

That writing in reference to other writing creates a Floating World was recognized by the post-modernist generation after the complete collapse of all meta-narratives in a smoldering rubble at the bottom of 1945. Producing texts in conversation with an infinite variety of sources from all facets of culture, the post-modernists produced truly decadent poetics. These intellectuals, consciously or not, brought back the spirit of creativity in language, which can only be found by abandoning the real, as the real had always been abandoned by the intelligent poets and philosophers. Language returns to poetics, in dialogue with itself and for itself, after the long sordid dream of the enlightenment.