I've spent the morning reviewing web pages dedicated to answering the question,"What is postmodernism?" While a complete understanding of post-modernism continues to elude, my research this morning has at least justified its elusivity.

I found this web page by Dr. Mary Klages at the University of Colorado, Boulder, most interesting and most helpful. According to Klages, postmodernism embraces fragmentation, multiplicity, and instability. It is also concerned with the organization of knowledge. Klages writes, "In postmodern societies, anything which is not able to be translated into a form recognizable and storable by a computer--i.e. anything that's not digitizable--will cease to be knowledge. In this paradigm, the opposite of "knowledge" is not "ignorance," as it is the modern/humanist paradigm, but rather "noise." Anything that doesn't qualify as a kind of knowledge is "noise:" something that is not recognizable as anything within this system."

The very defintion of postmodernism, in all its unstable and fragmented multiplicity, becomes "noise" and is unknowable in a postmodern society. Maybe that's part of intellectualy draw? Maybe I'm just playing silly word games.

More than anything my postmodern ponderings have brought under a new and harsh light my complete lack of knowledge regarding the progression of literary thought. I don't know the key writers, the crucial works, who reacted against who, who was influence by who, etc., etc., etc. It's overwhelming. Because of this lack of knowledge I have little to judge my own ideas against. I've recently been concerned with my excessive dependence on reason, and from what I've read today that places me somewhere in the European period of enlightenment.

I'm thinking biological analogy and Ernst Haeckel: I'm the gill slitted human embryo that eventually developes into a human child. Will my intellectual ontogeny recapitulate literary phylogeny, such that eventually I will reach an ultra-cool state of postmodern awareness and thought and be able to rub shoulders with the geniuses who now post-date me by 250 years?