The condition of modern expression has always seemed to me to be one of intensity over variety. Thusly, the feeling of feeling is now regarded in and of itself as a feeling when, in fact, it should be considered semiotically as the framework, the meta-syntax, within which feelings themselves can be constructed and then explored without the condition of emotion being perverted by a kind of postmodern detachment. The total failure of such a paradigm has created a connection between the self and emotion along which anyone can become disconnected from what they are feeling simply by using the all-pervasive culture around them as a reference point which - in a world defined by information and its transfer - is necessarily necessary.
Since the advent of irony as the primary medium of emotional transfer, helped overwhelmingly by the the paradox of information - phenomenological ephemerality versus potential permanence - in the internet age, and the devaluation of sincerity, the panicked reaction of the general person seems to have been to create this double-layered simulacrum both as a mechanism of defence and as a sociological indicator of cultural viability: the deep-seated want to belong.
Thus, we find a million restless souls cast adrift without a reference point in the interior of their selves - id est, what is the value of my values when the meta-nature of value itself is deconstructed by the insincerity of my feeling? - or in the culture within which they have to evolve and construct themselves - id est, it is now dangerous for my own wellbeing to assume that culture means what it says and can back that up with an emotional truth?
This, I posit, is the true danger of a postmodern condition, a caustically selfish condition: to force continual self-reference and raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-evaluation upon tortured minds predicated upon nothing more than a disjunct created by a society that fears the true sincerity that emotion brings upon a person in crashing, crushing waves of personal exposition and realisation.
After this ironic and attempted deconstruction of deconstruction the only remaining question is one of action, of what to do. There is nothing I can see outside of the self in this respect, the nature of change is a selfish one; but, if there was one glimmer, if there was one faint light, it would be the sudden and total realisation that every person you love and hate and deplore and revere has a skeleton within them.
