young late or old early?

And once again, the greatest quarrel I have with postmodernism as a methodology is that it doesn't touch on anything that I can personally experience. Those who profess postmodernism are generally, so far as I can tell about their character structures, old early. They are the products of a late capitalist -- and perhaps departing -- civilisation. Reality, for them, has taken on an all too definite aura -- and they are sick of it. Reality, for them, is too firmly outlined, too rigid and too inevitable in all of its appearances. They want something new, something that takes them away from the definiteness and fixedness of all social forms.

Deconstruction is an invaluable tool for those who want to escape from the rigidity and stark definition of social relations formed under late industrialism. (Even their appropriation of the term "post-industrialist" gives them a sign of freedom and consolidates the hope of making an escape.) Postmodernists may want to escape the Oedipal nature of social relations, with well-regulated hierarchies, by pronouncing themselves anti-Oedipal or "schizo-affective". (see Deleuze.)

The rigidity of the character structure of those caught in this mesh produces a craving from deconstruction and signs of disintegration of an all too certain social construction of identity (and all too well-defined identities). Breaking down the rigidity is a release from some of its binds -- the character structure on the rack of civilisation finds some release in this.

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Postmodernism, therefore, suits and appeals to a certain type of character structure produced by stark late industrial social relations. Such a character structure is often "old early" -- since even undergraduates may have the feeling that deconstruction and disintegration of the salient social forms are their best options for freedom.

The reason I cannot relate to this appeal at all is that I am approaching the issue from the opposite direction -- namely, I am "young late".

I come from a society that for all intents and purposes basically precedes industrialisation and its values of mechanistic regulation of social values. If postmodernism is anti-Oedipal in its predilections, I am culturally pre-oedipal. To me, that is to say, reality is not yet fixed or defined in any firm or enduring way. Identities, also, are potentially fluid and mutable. (Whereas I realise that this is not the case for others, I still have a lot of volcanic energy that could potentially move parts of my own character structure around quite easily.)

To me, the imperative is not to disintegrate or to fragment in order to release the pressure on my psyche -- for my psyche is still fluid and responds to pressure really easily with an almost infinite number of adaptations and reformulations of selfhood. Rather, my imperative is to identify social structure and to locate myself in relation to it. Thus, the direction of my development is towards greater solidity and certainty of my self and my world, rather than in the opposite direction.

For me, "old early" recipes for escaping the pressures of a far too definite and prematurely crystalised selfhood are precisely the opposite to what a "young late" mind requires.

This explains a lot of my previous gut-level antagonism towards the movement of postmodernism.