Off --the tip of your tongue tenses without touching anything. You’re just about to bite your lower lip and suppress idle talk. But then reluctantly you let the sound go through. “Off” comes out almost as a sigh of relief.
“Off” is colloquial and particular--not abstract and equalizing the way “post” was. It is somewhat untranslatable. Let each language find its own version of being “off” and being modern at the same time.
To a non-native English speaker, “off” sounds like child’s talk, somewhere between a game and language: if you didn’t know what “off” meant you could almost guess it. Sometimes there is more mouth than meaning there (so Nabokov characterized the kiss of one of his refugee-lovers.) If immigrants talk between themselves in their native language, the twittering pidgeon mother tongue that through years of exile becomes a hybrid and hyphenated American, “off” would be one word they would use in English: “Sabes, el tipo es un poco “off”; nu ona nemnogo “off.” Off is odd.
Off is the little gift of a preposition co-created by users of language in the past two centuries. I hear in it the traces of foreign accents--of ouch, ouff, bo, oi, ay.
“Off” suggests a dimension of time and human action that is unusual or potentially off-putting and embarrassing. It either describes something too spontaneous (off-the cuff, off-handed, off the record) or too edgy (off the wall), verging on the obscene (off color) or not in synch with the pace (off beat). “Off” is about life caught unawares. It is extemporaneous and humane. (Off-modern should not become ouch-modern or okh-modern, but neither is it quite an ommm-modern, for the modern subject thrives in a certain amount of incurable anxiety.)
We are warned that word play is bad for Internet searches. It requires constant disambiguation. Word play disorients the cookies installed in your hardware that collect information about you and send it to advertisers for niche marketing. So, off-moderns, beware, everything off-the market price will be advertised to you. But you have the option to turn your computer off and think off-line.
And yet, being off is not to be out or anti. Being off is a balancing act and a form of virtuosity. You are never completely off the hook. You have to exercise a special attentiveness, the vigilance of sense, the virtuality of imagination and engagement in worldly practice, not to be confused with the virtual interfacing in which the main physical relationship is between you and the tender buttons of your powerbook.
Off-modern acknowledges the synchopes and the off-beat movements of history that were written out from its dominant versions edited by the victors, who cared little about the dignity of the defeated.
Off-modern does not suggest a continuous history from antiquity to modernity to postmodernity, and so on. Instead it confronts the breaks in tradition, the gaps of forgetting, loss of common yardsticks, and disorientations that occur in almost every generation. Off-modern reflection does not try to cure longing with belonging and a remake of traditional yardsticks. Rather it produces offspring of thought out of those gaps and crossroads, opening up an alternative way to the intellectual history of modernity. It invites us to explore the garden of forking paths that hides behind the faÇade of our urban nature, to tell unpredictable stories of contacts and disconnects, to play with fictional illusions and masks, to be honest with ourselves and our ghosts.
To be continued...