Death of the Author and the web identity crisis
Zachary Colbert spins a story of power and deceit brought to you via your computer.
The “post-modern” persona is clearly all the rage in many parts of the globe. Capitalism has in fact hastened the disintegration of a world in which the social bonds revolving around a far more homogeneous community – the village – has given way to the “me, myself and I” mentality more in sync with a “lifestyle” than a communal ethos.
More to the point, capitalism has created a vast surplus labor pool that revolves around so many outlets not directly involved with subsistence itself. There are endless distractions to choose from. Sports, film, music, pop culture. The focus on consumption and acquiring all of the things that advertisers are able to convince “the masses” they cannot live without.
And along with a the increasingly decentralized social agenda comes a shallower and shallower sense of identity itself. There are simply less and less people intent on diving into the deep end of the pool — intellectually, politically, culturally. We have a large swath of citizens who are barely literate regarding any number of things that don’t pertain to their own small world.
It’s not for nothing that philosophy itself attracts fewer and fewer young people. And, for many who do pursue it, the philosophy itself becomes further and further removed from the lives that we actually live. A sterile technical approach that almost never comes down out of the analytic clouds. Technically as it were.
Who knows how close to or far away from the actual reality of the human condition [over the past 100 years] this intellectual assessment is. But it seems to be clearly the case that all of the factors that once did enable communities to sustain whatever actual existential consensus held them together politically, socially and culturally, is being frayed by all of the factors that reconfigured modernism into postmodernism. My own assessment is just one more attempt to make sense of it.
On the other hand, the objectivists among us, atop their very own soap boxes, will still insist that they and only they can slay the dragon that is “identity uncertainty” and tell us all who we “really” are.