Sreela posted this but the comment function is screwed up. 🙁 She wrote:
I am thinking of the relationship between micro and macro seen through the metaphor of the body politic. The phrase “the king is dead, long live the king” suggests that a larger organic whole (monarchy)goes on despite the the component(king)missing/dead. Yet the king/micro is what the macro (kingdom) derives its value from. I am not sure that made sense! But microcosms have always been celebrated, I guess, like the Romantic poets who visualized a unity in the micro scenery representing the universe.
I like the idea of postmodernism as a “preoccupation.” Interesting choice of words, implying a tendency toward obsession?
I respond:
I took “preoccupation” to be a state of attention or focus. I looked it up to see if it’s semantically related to “obsession.” Which does use “preoccupation” in its definition! (Of course, the preoccupation definition uses preoccupied, which goes against all sense and convention!)
What draws my attention (!) in your example is the notion of value. Because what makes the king valuable to the notion of monarchy is the ATTENTION the king gets, which is an ongoing interpellative interaction between the (now already established) notion of monarchy and the body of the person bethroned. “Originally” (Briankle might take issue with this concept, smile), a person became king because of both the attention demanded and the attention given.
If such is true, then the current scientific preoccupation with postmodernism is likely (?) possibly (?) co-generating a world in which postmodernism gets institutionalized in a similar fashion as monarchy.
(And I realize that you may have just been teasing me about being obsessed. Grin.)