The Truth is a Cut on the Bias (Mission Statement) - Reconstructionism

Beyond travel and experience and language immersion and story telling and a general opening of the eyes, I must admit, I have here a further mission for this journey. It is a literary-philosophical mission rooted in my academic studies of the past semesters at NYU (where I am currently an undergraduate) and cultural-intuitive, that is - found somewhere in my personal curiosities.

It has something to do with the postmodern view of Truth and the impossibility of interpersonal communication. This trip for me, shall (hopefully) be an active effort to stitch back together the disparities of perspective and the beginning of a literary aesthetic ideology that is by no means original to me, but is something that I think is more important than just about anything at this moment in the political history of mankind. It is not about reconciling differences or some sort of convergence towards universalism. It is not about searching for Truth amidst the lies that we tell ourselves in order to live. It is something more akin to an investigation into the nature of conditions. What I mean is, there is a tendency among people to look at the factors that contributed to a person's upbringing (ie: her father died in a car crash when she was 8, he was raised by hippies in the desert, etc) and then jump to the conclusions of "so that's why he/she does what he/she does!" 

My view draws on the two basic axioms such as worldview/values/conception of Reality is an entirely personal, subjective perspective, and we all inhabit the same physical world. I know both of these axioms are heavily debated by modern thinkers, but in order to follow my intentions, you must please bear with me on these two beliefs. 

So what? You may ask. Well, simply put, I think the best approach to bridge the postmodern assumptions that reality is created by an individual's politics which are socio-economic, psycho-sexual, environmental, etc. factors and that language is inherently insufficient to communicate the self, the view, the feelings, the personal beingness of any individual, is to study conditions. But the conditions worth studying I think are between the facts and output. (Between "his father was an alcoholic" and "so that's why he does that") And it concerns first and foremost the view of that single world we all inhabit.

How does someone internalize their experience of the world, process it, and then act accordingly? It's the process I'm interested in. 

This isn't reconciling different views, but more so investigating the formation of views. There is no right and wrong, good and evil, truth or inaccuracy, only how did the individual come to believe that and why? What next because of it? They say you can't hate someone after you know their story...well, this is really about collecting stories not so much to get to the truth, but to establish breadth. How do we create culture and use it as justification for the Us v. Them mentality? With a hundred million narratives of perspective, the myth of Truth that humanity has constantly fought for control over must melt away in the face of a deep breath that ends with a powerful exhalation followed by the calm warmth of an appreciation of diversity and a deeper understanding of how exactly it got that way. 

Clearly this is very difficult to put into words. My own inability to explain the more academic purpose of this trip in a way supports the theory behind that very pursuit! Please don't be put off by the jargon of this entry - I promise to keep the abstractions to a minimum when at all possible. 

But there's a further purpose to it all in my mind...

The idea, once again inspired by every book I've read, conversation I've had, modern theory I've studied and by no means my own, is something I'm calling with a tongue-in-cheek grin Reconstructionism! 

The idea is to turn our attention to the formation of identities and differences, and more importantly how they have been sculpted by the postmodern globalized, Internet-dominated world, how they are criss-crossing and converging. Where there are the most swollen knots and what they really mean...And writing about it, doing contemporary art about it (like my Mom, Gayle Crites www.gaylecrites.com ), thinking about it, engaging with it, and mostly accommodating our own worldviews to no longer need to stretch to encompass the Other, but instead to begin with the basic assumption of the different mind of the Other, and Reconstruct how we operate internationally within this paradigm.

So here, now is my call!

Link your blogs to mine. Follow your hearts and work on your projects so we can separately yet unifiedly work to make Reconstructionism a common aesthetic in the 21st Century. It can only work in dialogue, through cooperation and integration. A friend of mine, James Collector (hostbodies.blogspot.com) just finished binding a book of congregated thoughts from 15 people on a single typewriter - and that's what I'm looking towards. I hope everyone who reads this blog will write as many comments after my entries as they can with shared thoughts, debates, and links to other views and other projects. 

I wish you all the best and I send my love from (for now) Boulder, Colorado.

-tcm