Deep Thunder, Jameson

“concepts such as anxiety and alienation (and the experiences to which they correspond, as in The Scream) are no longer appropriate in the world of the post modern...in which the alienation of the subject is replaced by the fragmentation of the subject.” Frederic Jameson

The shift from modern to postmodern, through the eyes of the postmodernist Jameson can be viewed as a shift in maturity in addition to one of pathology. In fact, it would seem from his description of the Modern period, with its alienation and desperateness, its angst, that it is the pimple-faced teenager of recent history. It would seem that we can now sit back and relax, knowing that all is good in the world now that she has grown up enough to take the good with the bad, the high with the low, the ugly with the beautiful, now that she has learned to accept the way things really are, if she only had time to. That does seem to be a step in psychological development within our culture, that awful teenage stint where we feel like you have suffered more than anyone else in the world. That everything old is just plain inferior and must be stood up against, demolished, erased and replaced because it all just sucks. And then we mature a bit, we don’t feel so alone; we have shared enough and read enough to realize this happens to everyone, and we begin to accept incongruity as beauty and to find humor in irony. With all of the passion and fervor from our angrier days, we can now focus on integrating into the current movement that is humanity and do everything we can within its system to further our visions. This new sate, this post pubescent stage, is a relief not only to the person experiencing the changes, but also to those experiencing this experience of change and changing with it. Unfortunately, we have allowed ourselves to be multi talkers, to be trained by Nokia to listen restlessly for our ring tones, and Pavlov's dogs for the latest reality shows. We are all grown up now, were just too tied up to do anything about it.