commuting = thinking
I thought the other day that some measure of the postmodern condition today must be born from a growing inability to distinguish between reality and illusion. life became stranger than fiction when hiroshima vanished, almost absurdly, in that silent mushroom-shaped cloud; when the planes hurtled into those towers that stood as unassailable as empires. we watched moments like these over and over again, the images juddering off the eternally incredulous film reels; we saw them without being able to see what they meant, what they would mean. this is postmodernity as incredulity; here, surely, is the source of our obsession with signs, meaning and symbols. what did hiroshima mean? what did anything at all mean after such unutterable, untranslatable destruction? as if that isn't enough, photoshop and dreamworks have made mockeries of representation. cinema today invests our dreams and nightmares with a degree of verisimilitude unlike any we've ever known. 'photoshop' has become a verb, synonymous with 'doctor', 'tweak', 'embellish' or simply to change reality. what power we have now to represent our world exactly as we want to represent it. no wonder relativism exists.
and what I want to know is: was the incredulity born, or unearthed?
apologies for the long absence; I've been to london and back again, and city life is distracting like that.