Kirby and the Crystal Shards, or, The Silently Autistic Generation

Hello everyone, glad to be able to join a stimulating discussion addressing serious questions. On to the debate. While I appreciate the force of Mr. Princen’s critiques of Kirby, I have an intuition that Mr. Princen is not quite receiving the full thrust of Kirby’s massive assertion.

Let us firstly soak in Kirby’s writing, his method, his empirical insight. Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, he says, embody pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states of ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety. Yes! Kirby’s prose uncovers the hidden connections between the three most important world leaders of 2009-2010, and his dry yet sensuous lyricism transcends any quibbles we might have about post hoc hypothesizing.

But now to the heart of Kirby. “To a degree, pseudo modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has already existed.” When people text message vacuous stupidities like, “I’m on the bus,” they don’t realize that people have always communicated things like “I’m on the bus,” they just didn’t have mobile phones, so they did it with letters and telegraphs, which were better because, they were already shifting in the general direction of the cultural centre of something, or something like that.

Even if we are unable to keep up with the soaring abstractions of Kirby’s logic, we surely must concede him his point - if only for the manically generous mass of words he a gives us at the end of each sentence. It is not Kirby’s intention to choose words with care and accuracy, to point us exactly towards anything like a cognizable, or even coherent, idea. No. This is too narrow a vision of truth. To adapt Kirby’s method and see through his eyes is to become the eyes of the world-spirit.

Take these marvels of adjectivizing: free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, unique, raised, heard, elitist, dull, distant, droning. Did I mention all 14 of those were in one sentence? Has anything ever been clearer than whatever Kirby just described 14 times? One hesitates to describe the exhilaration felt upon reading Kirby’s text as anything other than the discovery of a new, radically original, radically anti-intellectual, radically thesaurus dependent, doctrine of truth.

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Here comes that old bus, it reminds me of the historical social hegemony. Its dilapidation is the objectification of something in the centre of the pseudo modern world. I wish I could convey the depth of my thought; here are 11 adjectives: violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless, brainless, overpowering, and monopolistic. Look at that girl sitting there texting, she looks like such a mute retard[1]. I take a seat in the middle of the bus, and look out the window. I’m so old, and so sad. – A. Kirby

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[1] Kirby, Death of Postmodernism and Beyond. Last paragraph, “pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism.”