List

Fish out of water objects:

The mobile phone

The logo t-shirt

The ipod

The trainer

The 4×4.  The Mall.

The tv.  Advertising. 

The computer.  The supermarket.

The book - ? The washing machine.

The newspaper - ? The fridge.  The vacuum cleaner

The comic book hero.  The office block.

The science fiction novel.

Not all the things listed are necessarily postmodern.  Some are such by specific use.  Books for example.  A postmodern book would be a celebrity cookbook let’s say.  Or a sports or tv autobiography.  The signifying factor is the lack of context or place that the book has.  The way that it is the vehicle of a projected - and unreal - personality.  It is this unreality that is the key in so far as it more or less defines the book’s content; the writer and reader only exist in fantasy; neither is what they are presented as.  The reader is a ‘fan’ for example; in some measure congenitally delusional or they wouldn’t be a ‘fan’ to start with; so they both exist only through a delusional other, enabled to participate in a shared fantasy that yet seems wholly factual and real in being about ‘real things’ - tv life, life on tv, and life before and after tv (for example).   That is, the reader participates in a story that is not actually, really a story at all, but something like an advert, something wholly a construct that gives only the appearance of being a story.

Here the theme is: the destruction of human manners.

Tags: Postmodernism