WHILE I AM WRITING, POSTMODERNISM IS HAPPENING

Abstract

Postmodernism can be conceived as a series of separate reflections by individual authors and thus accepted in the awareness that it is precisely in individualism that it is relevant and that generalities and universalities are of secondary importance to it. Serbian culture will find such freedom difficult to tolerate, since it has always regarded the so called epochal and universal values as the ones set high above all subjectivities; furthermore, the idea that the small and personal contain large and general is profoundly foreign to Serbian culture, as it accepts only explicit grandiosity, obvious syntheses, Meaning presenting itself precisely as such! The danger and apocryphalness of the experience expressed in the title of this paper is not in its ostensible self-confidence, but primarily in the awareness that each and every reading is legitimate and that different ways of reception (perception) are hence equally valid – fragmentary reading has now for long been more dominant than reading (and memorizing) the whole and continuity: therefore, given the ultimate instance – which becomes antiperiodizational from the 21st century on – there are only individual writing and individual perception of the written, whereas each collective aspect of art and spirituality articulates itself as fake and temporary.