Wo die Zukunft liegt

Dieser Tage gehen sehr viele junge (deutsche) Menschen hinaus ins Leben. Ich hatte das Vergnügen einige von ihnen vor, während und nach den Abiturprüfungen zu sehen und zu sprechen. Dabei ist mir ungewöhnlich deutlich klar geworden, wie lange es her ist, dass ich dieses Gefühl hatte, die Welt läge vor mir, offen, um sie zu entdecken. Ein Satz aus der großartigen Stieg Larsson-Trilogie stieß mich noch zusätzlich darauf:

"In drei Monaten wurde sie 45, und die viel diskutierte >Zukunft< lag immer mehr hinter ihr" (Stieg Larsson, Verdammnis, Heyne, 157).

Nicht, dass ich schon ganz so alt wäre oder dass ich nicht mehr nachvollziehen könnte, wie sich die Bald-nicht-mehr-Schüler fühlen. Zudem habe ich nicht unbedingt alle Türen chronologisch geöffnet und hinter mir sorgfältig wieder geschlossen. Trotzdem wird es immer mehr zur Anstrengung, wieder nicht genau zu wissen, welche Klinke ich herunterdrücken sollte. Es wird andererseits auch immer mehr zur Genugtuung, zu wissen, dass viele Flure, die ich bereits entlang gelaufen bin, zu ähnlichen Zimmern führen.

Ich habe sozusagen bereits das richtige Gebäude und immerhin das richtige Stockwerk für mich erreicht, während die Abiturienten sich größtenteils noch auf dem Hof herumbalgen. Aber ich hatte ganz vergessen, wie leicht und frei und aufregend es war, dort zu stehen und mich umzusehen, nicht sicher, ob ich überhaupt in eines der Gebäude gehen würde. Allein das Zusehen hat schon Spaß gemacht und mir vor Augen geführt, wie wichtig es ist, gelegentlich einen Blick aus dem Fenster zu werfen.

Feline Meditation

Looking at these cats on the threshold of a temple I suddenly realized that religion can be integrated into everyday life without causing conflicts and disputes or even the slightest oppression. It is only a question of how serious one takes these issues. I guess that in addition to this, a religion that offers advice in a more general way - for example on the topic of how one can gather knowledge through meditation - without really organizing the answers in specific ways is easy to integrate into one's personal way of living. If religion is available at home and at every street corner and everybody is somehow involved, then a dogma is difficult to uphold.

Maybe it would be better - since religion is not in the process of vanishing from the postmodern world, but on the contrary thriving anew - for everybody to get religiously involved simply to introduce more democracy into religious practices. Religious contemplation or meditation would certainly become the object of public discussion and public interpretation if everybody actively participated. And if the Lord's houses were simply part of town - where cats could dose off in the sun - they would certainly be more accessible in every way. It would be easier to want to contemplate the questions of how to live one's life if this could be done in an everyday and not a sacred atmosphere, wouldn't it? Seeing cats meditate can take the pressure and seriousness out of such issues.

The Arbitrariness of Postmodern Theory Is Reminiscent of Religious Concepts

A certain postmodernist fragmentation of narrators is often assessed with regard to novels written in the second half of the twentieth century (cf. Busch, 2007). Postmodernist narrational style is usually conceived as “steeped in relativism: plurality, an awareness of the ‘constructedness’ of truth, the multiplying interpretations that emerge from a single set of facts” (Smith, 2005, 3). Narrators are interpreted as having no coherent narrative point of view and as questioning the production and the narration of meta-histories (cf. ibid. 13,f).

Yet, by employing techniques of postmodern theory, the very relativization inherent in them can be disclosed as relative to the points of view of the interpreters. It makes no sense to talk as a literary critic or to talk about narrators in a novel if no coherent idea of an individual exists in order to evaluate the interpreter or character. Postmodern critique thus often reveals to be even more traditional than the realist philosophy it opposes. If the individual is simply taken as something that is worthy respectively important in itself (without a relation to some kind of universal standard), this reminds us of spiritual or religious understandings of a soul.

And without such a pre-condition, the whole discourse of postmodern theory (apart from the simple critique of existing concepts) would make no sense at all. If everything can be deconstructed, nothing seems more important than anything else. Why talk about postmodernist literature? Why talk at all? Without a standard to guide the scholar to an assessment of the individual as central to the human world, this centrality is necessarily arbitrary. Any idea rests arbitrary and thus reminds us of an almighty entity arbitrarily creating the world.

Sources

Busch, Hans Joachim, ed. Spuren des Subjekts – Positionen psychoanalytischer Sozialpsychologie. Psychoanalytische Sozialpsychologie 3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007).

Smith, Shawn. Pynchon and History – Metahistorical Rhetoric and Postmodern Narrative Form in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).