you could give up all your worldly possessions

interlude -- aka that thing i do when i'm not directly talking about advertising/social media/marketing. instead, this post is dedicated to Blog Action Day, inspired when i read Advergirl's response. really, go read it. because she did it well and i'm not going to head in the same direction.

the theme this year is poverty. Advergirl gives examples of hands-on ways you can change poverty in the world around you. i think that's the point of the action, but i want to talk philosophically instead. i want to talk about the word possession. not its roots, but its context. because i think the root of poverty is our concept of possession. i'm not going to tell you to give up all your worldly possessions. we all need stuff. duh. that's kinda the point of poverty actions. to help people who don't have stuff get stuff. so yes, in essence, i'm pro-stuff.

but the concept of ownership--of possession--of items or of people has been tripping me up lately. i've been thinking a lot about infidelity, no small part in thanks to AV Flox [on the person-level] and on the corporate-level [that's just one link, hat tip to Gavin]. and also about ownership literally. like in the beginning of Fight Club where the narrator's apartment, his whole life basically right down to his treasured Ikea furniture, goes up in flames. and he has nothing.

"it's very easy to take more than nothing" -- Mad Hatter [Lewis Carroll]

if we think of ourselves as owning nothing, then everything we have is its own gift, come to us by way of the world, into our laps, and can go just as swiftly. letting go becomes easy. giving becomes easy. after all, what is it to you, who needs nothing, and can always have more than nothing? why do you not give? what are you saving for? what do you think you own? what do you fear to lose? what do you fear?

you get upset when someone leaves you because you thought you owned some part of them. that they for a moment might become a part of you. and that fear encroaches on many relationships. fear of cheating, fear of abandonment, fear of emotional distance, etc. you get upset when an object breaks, when you lose a stock, when hours are cut. i'm not saying any of those are unrealistic fears. i'm saying, comparatively, you would feel less stressed if you were less concerned with your territory, your ownership.

because right now, if you own up to the fact that you own nothing, you still "have stuff." you've changed your thought patterns but not your life, and that's alright. i'm not saying become a recluse and get out of every relationship because you can't have any true security in it. you don't have to go become a monk, but next time you can give, you might think of it as a little easier. easier to give more than nothing. and more thankful for those moments in which others give to you--a new sweater, an hour spent, a moment of intertwined fingers.

[disclosure: in my ugliest state, i am an intensely territorial creature. i am that jungle predator in my head, i like the idea of ownership and i can be incredibly defensive about it. a poem i wrote in college had the line "i would piss on tree bark just to prove it's not yours"; a paraphrase but still true. things belong to me because they have become a part of me. "you are not your fucking khakis" -- palahniuk. i am working through this. i am learning what it means not to own. i am good at giving. i am trying to be better.]

pseudomodernity and "hyperliteracy."

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
... Life is very long [Eliot]

a response to Gavin at servant of chaos. a long theoretical friday-candy post.

i do have to agree that while both modernism and postmodernism had a "burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance," that what Kirby calls pseudomodernism, i would argue, has this same sense of inheritance--in a different way. postmodernism worked to break up the linear. to think in circles. understands cycles, and also to step away from them. to know that A can link to F without any letters in between; that logic jumps are products of inflicted learning methods. which is also why i agree that the internet is the pinnacle of postmodern thought.

and yet, it is this internet-style pomo thought process which we have inherited, which produced the thought patterns necessary for this pseudomodernity. it is this which enabled classroom computers in which teachers are assigning Facebook profiles as homework to express Holden Caulfield. what Kirby, who feels that his "pseudo modernists are spookily devoid of agency, caught in the neverland between the capacity to effect change and the overwhelming minutiae digital interactions," did not anticipate is our capacity to navigate that space because of our inherited postmodern thought.

i agree with Gavin when he says that "production fails (and always will) in its effort to capture the live moment" because i have that postmodern schema. that is, with Magritte-like wonder, the video of the event will never be the event (for example): it is a representation of an event purchased and reproduced through angles, moments elongated or not long enough--editing, for lack of a better word, regardless of quality of craft. even if it is live-fed, those watching will not have the same experience as those experiencing firsthand. but the temptation to get it to that space has prompted movies like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield as well as a rise in mundane youtube videos, etc.

but because of my place as a gen-y "pseudomodernist" i cannot say this will always be the case, that we will never be able to access that. i think we have a genuine skepticism in these productions even as we participate in them. we know they consume our time and that it places a distance between ourselves and the experience, even if we are the ones experiencing. which is to say, if i'm having a friend video my morning routine, my morning routine will be different simply because of the presence of the video camera. and we know this, moreso than our parents' generation who believe youtube videos as true (generalization, but i've noticed a certain naiveté there).

Gavin points out social media as a possibility for the beginning of navigation between those spaces of experience and production because they result in real-life experiences (eg, tweetups). while i think this is an excellent start, i think it's only part of the picture. i think just as before us came oral tradition, we are hyperliterate; we are writing a hyperliteral tradition. this is not the same as books, which had too much 'production value' with editors and publishers. this is your point of view and my point of view on the same thing, both available, both time-transcendent and hyper-recorded on 18 different search engines.

it is this connectivity, like microblogging from a mobile device, which moves real-time information from people to the internet to records to the future. what youtube videos lack are the personalized element. and "me" in the youtube video is superseded by the "me" watching it. what film editors try to artfully capture: the thoughts, emotions, and feelings of an experience, expressed through only audio and visual. eventually, someone will sort out how to merge the recording with the experience seamlessly. you won't have to disrupt your experience to record it. there will be no "postmodern gap," the anxiety between the interactive and the action.

it will feel like freedom. and it will be scary. as this emerges, so too will those who search out total experiences, who reject the idea of this recording, i'm sure. i hope to be one of them. but maybe that's the postmodern, rather than the pseudomodern, in me.