Scrawled in Wax

As I walked home this evening, the winter sun disappearing behind rows of identical houses, I found myself listening to LCD Soundsystem’s “All of My Friends”. It is that rare, dying breed of a song that sometimes feels as if speaks directly to a generation, to a moment in history. What is most stark about the song - indeed, the reason it felt like a revelation to me when I heard it - is that it describes the thing that postmodernity was supposed to have rendered impossible: shared experience. But when LCD’s James Murphy sings of the drunken late-night adventures of twenty- and thirty-somethings, there was an instant connection for me. The bittersweet tale of finding peace in a future one never envisioned is something that I and many others have found themselves ruefully mulling as, at three in the morning, we realise our buzz is wearing off.

I was thinking all this, walking down a suburban street just north of Toronto. What is the shared experience of pop culture now that everything has become so fragmented, shattered into a million pieces? Even if one considers oneself ‘a media person’, simply checking out random Muxtapes will remind you that millions of people - people just like you - are listening to music you have never even heard of, let alone heard. When pushed, I have to admit: the common experience of “All of My Friends” is a chimera, a localised example, privy to a scattered set of disillusioned, educated child-adults like, well, me and ‘all of my friends’. The ‘meaning’ of the song (as if one could ever speak of such a thing) reveals itself in the random subjectivity of one’s reaction. Like the specificity at the core of “Stuff White People Like“, ‘common experience’ in the postmodern reveals itself to be only a comforting fiction, a way of feeling connected with something that, as it turns out, isn’t as ‘larger than us’ as we hoped.

It all seemed a rather fitting line of thought for the evening. As I returned home, a family member had lit candles in the kitchen. Through the windows that were, for once, naked and uncovered, we could see all the houses around stay dark as the sky became darker. And, like those who lived near us, we sat in the gloom, chatting, inevitably remembering the great blackout of 2003, quietly happy in the thought that we were part of something that millions of others were participating in too.

I was wary of the symbolic core of Earth Hour. I wondered whether it wouldn’t simply speak to those already concerned with sustainability, while it might simply pass by those who consider the problem an issue of marketing or hype rather than science or policy. But, to put the environmental issues aside for a moment, let me consider: what does it mean to feel connected in 2008? If the postmodern fracturing of popular culture has left commonality tattered and torn, then where is the immense power of the shared experience to be found? After all, there’s something in this feeling, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Whatever it is though, I can’t help but feel it’s important. But where it will come from next?

The answers are, I think, too long - and too complex - for even very clever individuals to answer. The common will be found in the collective, in, to deliberately take up a Web phrase, the wisdom of crowds. Earth Hour is only one example of this, and a tiny one at that too: when there are 6.5 billion people in the world, 30 million is only a spark - but perhaps it will be one that will lead to a larger flame. I think the internet will have something to do with it. I, despite my curmudgeonly ramblings, still believe this thing I spend so much time connected to will bear fruit that, to the current world, will seem gloriously utopian. I also think it’s possible that it is only catastrophe that now has the capacity to bring people together on the macro level. I guess I don’t know. All I’m really saying at the end of this is, in 2008, it’s hard to find what you and your neighbour have in common, as what we used to call culture has fragmented into innumerable pieces that cannot be put back together.

But tonight, as we sat in the pale yellow flicker of candelight, a simple idea pushed its way through the murky, postmodern mass. I think it would be regressive and dangerous to talk of a common humanity, of some universal core that we all share. We’ve heard those phrases before and we’ve seen how they went wrong. Still, something was there. Something besides the glow flickered. I suppose I don’t really have a name for it. But, if you’re reading this, then I will take on faith that you too have some sense of what I am gesturing towards. And that right there - that ineffable, nameless thing that we both point to - is, one hopes, a place to start.