The Things They're Talking about

The Things they carried is, for lack of a better designation, is a war story. Not the traditional kind where every brave loyalist is a hero and every cowardly foreigner is a bloodthirsty enemy just waiting to be vanquished by the Patriotic and Just warrior. “On occasion the war is like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.” (pg. 32)No, these soldiers are human. And because they are human and this story is portrayed as a true war story, any story told will have a lack of the warm fuzzy morals that we have come to expect from war stories. "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." Chapter 6, pg. 68. Ultimately we are not supposed to gleam any sort of meaning from Tim O’Brien’s stories, but we are supposed to find the lack of meaning in them. The collections of stories seem more like an episodic, fractured, diary. There is no continuous plots or consistent timeline (like when they talk about who will die later). "It's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true." Chapter 7, pg. 82. The truth is found in the emotions, not in the accuracy of the facts. There is no way for anyone who has not been in a war situation to understand the plain facts, when what truly happens is so far out of our normal reality. So, in order to complete our understanding, the reality needs to be augmented in a way that it is exempt from the influences of all those Heroic war stories and history books to broken down to the pure emotions.

Postmodernism

Here's what Postmodernism reminds me of: Big Daddy Modernism established all the rules, stereotypes, and facts and now sulky teenager Postmodernism refuses to conform to this standard. Everyone is an individual, forming their own perceptions that shape their personal reality. Postmodernism lashes out at the idea that any one ideal, or metanarrative, can define the infinite numbers of realities or truths. Therefore, by labeling people according to any sort of metanarative, you are marginalizing the many intricate narratives that actually compose that person. Basically, it is impossible to define anything by one truth because everyone has a different definition. There can be no absolute truths because there is no possible way to account for the different perceptions. Metanarratives like religion, stereotyping, and science, suffer in the Postmodern world. The only reality we have access to is our own, and we should not in any way try and impose our reality on anyone else. These Metanarratives try to establish a center in society, a uniform ideal to which all can conform, but Postmodernism claims we live in a centerless society where all the different narratives coexist as all the cultures mingle. Trying to find a single center is futile in our current society because everyone is influenced in radically different ways. As one quote I found said, "There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything," (Twyla Tharp). Postmodernism negates the central structure of the modern world, reducing its certralistic ideals into a mere fallacy. There are too many variables to be accounted for, and a society with a center means a society without individuals. As long as there are independant minds, there is no chance for a center to dominate nor is there any need for one to.

Maus

Hmmm... what to write about Maus? There is so much to be considered, even more so than a regular essay. Instead of trying to divine the purpose of comma placement, we all must try to gleam meaning from the art that make up the work. To focus on the word and quotes alone would be impractical since so much of the meaning lies in the comic itself. How am I going to quote a picture, though? a scanning printer may be required for this essay...
I find the pictures to be the most engaging point of this text. I will probably try to discern the true meaning in the symbolic nature of the novel , or whatnot. What part does nationality play in relation to religion, and even to identity? I'm not sure yet but I'm quite certain that it will come to me at 11:00 the eve before the essay is due. I also want to delve into the point of view of the storytelling in Maus. Because he cannot rely on any interpretation but his own, I think the author tried to emphasize that. It is not the be all and end all of Holocaust stories- just a single account retold again. The self aware nature of the novel also intrigued me. Why would you write a comic book about writing a comic book on the subject of the Holocaust? Of course, that round about reasoning seems to be a favorite of Post Modernism. I think that the visual aspect of the novel, like the architecture we looked at brings a new dimension to everything. You can look at one thing, see it the same way as everybody else, and still impose unique meaning on it. Words are a little more abstract- an apple can be imagined to look a thousand different ways- especially if it is left out for a while. When you see a picture, that's all there is to it. I will have to think on this some more.

Freedom of Thought

This society is pumping out more and more information to be consumed by the general population. Search engines make all answers a click away; even the deepest philosophical questions are addressed. Now, whenever any sort of information is needed, people can follow the discoveries of others to get their answers. This is a wonderful advancement for society, but it does have some minor side-effects. It’s amazing that there is so much access to the world around us. Societal bonds are broken down by the streams of internet processing, and people are more connected than ever before. It really is a virtual world within our own, destroying boundaries with the comfort of complete anonymity. However, this ease has the tendency to make people lazy or even lethargic in their thought processes. When all the answers are there waiting for you, why think about it for yourself? Instead of trying to explore and discover, Google it for fast and easy answers. What we have learned from Postmodernism, though, is that all retellings of a story are biased through the person telling it. So, when we rely on other’s accounts we are accepting their personal reality as a substitute for our own intuition. Our own thought process has been undermined by unconditionally accepting the biased truth of another. Perhaps Carr is right, “The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as ‘knowledge work’.” It may be streamlining the thought process, but it requires the internet surfer to abdicate any and all personal truths in favor of the truths accepted by strangers. In the future our thought process may be limited to only what we can find on Google.

What does it all mean?

So What Does It All Mean? This question was asked by the video we saw in class after it bombarded us with a slew of statistics meant to astonish us with our insignificance in this rapidly growing world. So much of the world is digitalized and the exponential population growth is contributing to the future users of technology. Our world today barely resembles that of any of the past societies, but is that really a bad thing. The technologies that we marvel at today are no more astonishing to us as electricity and paper was to past generations. We marvel at these technological strides because they are so much more advanced, but we forget to put earlier inventions into context. What we are doing is not at all fundamentally different than what our predecessors were achieving. We are just pushing the boundaries of known science in the same way that Thomas Edison was, and we will continue to do so. The mass of knowledge that is being generated by these technological advances are on the same exponential growth curve that they began with. Sure, The New York Times may give us more information in a day than early man every got in a life time- but the information has just become more accessible. The questions and answers were all there before, but not easy to get too or rely on. Besides, it seems half of the information is tabloid dribble anyway. Yes, there are more people, but we aren’t really doing anything new. We are all just living, reproducing, inventing, and dying. This is nothing new to the human race, although we are doing it on a larger scale. We are just doing the usual, even if the society seems to have ‘evolved’. So, what does it all mean? Nothing much.

Cat's Cradle

There has always been an attempt to make understanding out of the world, to give meanings to things which may or may not in fact have meaning. In science, this has evolved into an ‘art’ called reductionism. Reductionism comes from breaking down things into smaller and smaller parts in order to find something that gives sense to everything that has been broken down. However, this is a never-ending process, because there is always more and more and more to be broken down into. This is the metaphor provided by cat’s cradle as well. No matter how many steps you take in order to break something down, there is always more. The same repetitive motions are taken over and over again, with no outcome at all. The only way to ‘win’ the game is to never start playing it. Postmodernism identifies the lack of meaning in these repetitive motions because all they do is set up the next stage of repetitive motions. The questions asked are meaningless if there are no answers, and as the book said, “such investigations are bound to be incomplete,” (4). Although there is no meaning in the answer, there is meaning in the process. By going through these repetitive motions, happiness can be achieved. The problems arise when people are more focused on the answer than the process of going towards it. Vonnegut states that, “Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either,” (6). Again, the process of belief gives happiness and comfort to whomever it involves whether it is true or not. Postmodernism suggests that we can never know any absolute truths for certain, if there are any absolute truths at all. But, simple belief is not a bad thing if it gives vindications to its believers.

An attempt at free writing

There is just sooooo much to talk about in Brave New World, that I don’t even know where to start- but I will try anyway. There are three major themes that I would love to explore about this novel: the definition of humanity versus the definition of a machine, the concept of happiness (whether it is its own emotion or just the lack of unhappiness), and the comparison between 1984 and Brave New World’s attempt to control the population by omitting certain emotions (one omits happiness and one omits unhappiness- is either better than the other). Taking a hint from the ‘Coming up with your topic’ section, I realize that these might be too broad for a single paper unless I am extremely careful about the structure of the essay. Dang, I just thought of another topic- the idea of science as a religion. Well, this will be difficult. I want to use the postmodernism text as a resource for any of my scientific discussions, I especially want to add the idea of, “the role of the state will weaken,” due to the scientific search for knowledge, (23). I also want to use the criticisms of David Pearce who wrote an article about engineering paradise and the moral implications of it. I now realize that to get this into a single thesis sentence may be impossible, but the article on the website said that it could be a few different sentences that all tie together.
Perhaps something like this:
Where is the line between humanity and machines? When the human emotions get watered down and the apathy consumes an entire society, new dogmas can arise to worship efficiency and perfection- two things that do not define humanity.
Or maybe not, I will have to mull over this for a while.