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*the Comparative Literature drop-out Witch pulls up a chair*
Here's my favorite definition of postmodernism as of today, which comes to us from The American Bible Society:
Postmodernism has emerged as many-headed, multi-armed, waving in different incompatible directions, at once old and new. It represents a mix of new ways of thinking and reactions to Modernism, but it also returns to the old and pre-modern for its inspiration and models. Postmodernism criticism spans the accumulated experience of Western civilization, industrialization, urbanization, advanced technology, the national state, and life in the "fast lane," among others. And, it challenges modern priorities such as career, office, individual responsibility, bureaucracy, liberal democracy, tolerance,humanism, egalitarianism, detached experiment, evaluative criteria, neutral procedures, impersonal rules and rationality.
Unlike Modernism, which gloried in the new, Postmodernism believes that there is nothing new to discover. It prefers to look with nostalgia to a pre-modern popular culture that was self-managing and self-reproducing.
Pastiche is a good example. This approach draws from many different and already existing forms, divorces them from their original meaning, and brings them together, giving them new meaning. Already existing boundaries between issues and diverse fields of endeavor are beginning to blur, change or disappear and changes or shifts taking place in the field of the arts (aesthetics) are influencing, affecting and/or creating changes across fields of endeavor not normally influenced by the arts.
My understanding of postmodern magic draws more from witchcraft than from Ceremonial Magic, in the sense of that yearning towards the pre-modern world and its paradigms, which are unknowable for certain, but provide useful maps, at the very least. Witchcraft posits itself as ancient and modern, with my tradition, Feri, being one of the few that is shamelessly honest about being about 100 years old, though informed by much older technology. The values it rests upon point back to the (supposed) pre-modern, pre-Christian worldview, whereas the tools and techniques are allowed to evolve into the future along with the practitioners.
(Again, this isn't really the case for a lot of other traditions of the Craft, but there are Feri teachers and covens out there that pratice chaos magic right alongside Feri magic.)
This business of aiming back towards an essential truth feels markedly modern to me. What postmodernism revels in is the orgasmic plurality; that is, if we collage and gel and read along one another enough different traditions, we may soon, in a gestalt and not merely in analytic observation, identify their common seed -- however, as in magic and Feri, this experience must be felt and simply cannot be described. You have to be there, right?
My concern is that post/modern magic has become entirely too academic -- and this is coming from an academic -- and that in simply observing or studying, one is not a magician. Not only that, but most postmodern theorists work in a postcolonial framework, so this business of "reduc[ing] the Magickal Ceremonies of the world's various religions and occult orders to their quintessential essence," if not done with an understanding of the cultural context in which such traditions arise and their "reduction" occurs, such as the ongoing legacy of Western dominance, pitting Eurocentric "science" against "primitive superstition" (a racist agenda at its core), CM's & PM's risk repeating said conquests anew.
Sure, there may be a "quintessential essence" in the human desire to do magic, or even in the ritual forms of people through time and space that make us feel connected to some larger pattern, but what interests me about magic is the modifications magicians and artists make to the technology through the ages. It's not always an upgrade. Viewed from that context, what is being bandied about as postmodern magic right now doesn't feel very postmodern at all.
Which is a pity, because the cultural inquiry being produced with postmodern theory is one of the things that holds my magic together. Maybe the right people haven't come along yet to make them sing together just right. (Barring a few voices, GM's among them, right?) |
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