"For me its not a question of fragmentation versus synthesis, but rather, of how one understands what happens within the notion of fragmentation itself. If one sees the fragment as being the opposite of a how, then I have no affinities with the term, since it carries with it the compartmentalized worldview I questioned earlier. But if the fragment stands on its own and cannot be recuperated by the notion of totalizing whole, then fragmentation is a way of living with differences without turning them into oppisites., nor trying to assimilate them out of insecurity. Fragmentation is here a useful term because it always points to one's limits. Since the self, like the work you produce, is not so much a core as a process, one finds oneself, in the context of cultural hybridity, always pushing one's questioning of oneself to the limit of what one is and what one is not." Minh-ha, T. T. (1992). ''Between Theory and Poetry, an interview of Trinh T. Minh-ha with Pratibha Parmar.'' In "Framer Framed," Routledge, London, p. 156.

So My Dear Trinny has unpeeled another layer of Post Modernism for me, and since my frist reaction was smack tgo the forehead 'duh,' I have to think this is one of those rare, true realizations. Like when I would personally experience something I had learned about and gotten an 'A' on in Philosophy class while still managing to not really understand what the hell it was about in any real, contextualized sense.

As I have mentioned a few times, Carmen taught me that I am a Modernist this winter. And when I read that above passage from my dear Trinh T. Minh-ha, I saw myself in all those ''totalizing tendencies.'' Rolling over in bed to think, I thought, "Trinh in talking about modernism in all this totalizaing stuff. And then, without realizing I was parroting the term (it was 7am and I was reading in the half-sleep of the recently awake and not yet peed) I thought, "she is pushing for a post-modernism!"

Then the penny dropped and I realized this is part of what Post Modernism is - a move away from totalizing black and white towards ever-changing ephemera. I mean, I already knew this. I had read about it and even repeated it. But this was the moment when I feel I understood it.