Although much of post-modern discourse centers around the claim that nothing is authentic anymore, we believe that we have yet to truly see the "death of the authentic." However, perhaps it would be more accurate to say we have yet to see the death of the search for the authentic. Modernity and modernist ideology is predicated on forward motion, on progress and change, in which the past is useless and empty, except as memory. On the other hand, the post-modern era is characterized by new conceptualizations of time and space. Many post-modern theorists argue that we are now stuck in a period without a true sense of time, a junkyard of past, present and future. Celeste Olalquiaga writes:

In its desire to be rooted in the present, modernity despised everything that came before it as old-fashioned and obsolete. Yet, since modernity was in fact vulnerable to the passing of time, this denial could only backfire by leaving it no temporal respite . . . Incapable of being history, modernity could only be a ruin. It is in the paradoxes of a deteriorated future, of a belief born out of disappointment, of an emptiness satiated by icons, that the space age and postmodernity meet: one looking forward, the other backward; one living in fantasy, the other living in another's fantasy; one within the debris of wars, the other within the debris of dreams (1992: 35).

That is to say, postmodernism is comprised of signifiers and signifieds belonging to the past and/or future, but being used to serve the present -- the eternal now. Contemporary culture is a conglomerate of free floating signifiers which perpetuate a state of alienation and anomie. We become obsessed with 'authenticity' and 'the real' because we feel the emptiness of postmodern life. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Other has been recast as a vessel of meaning formulated by postmodern ideology. The Other, because it is located in spaces and times outside of our own, comes to represent the authenticity we have now lost. But in this process, the Other is also emptied of meaning; it becomes merely a signifier of what is absent in ourselves and we lose touch with the actual referent. The logic of postmodern culture resides in the constant appropriation and commodification of signs that perpetuate a capitalist ideology. Advertising corporations cleverly tap into the market of Otherness in an attempt to compete in the sign wars of today. While at the surface these advertisements appear harmless and shallow, we believe they also point to the hegemonic nature of commodity culture today. The ways in which Otherness is represented, appropriated and commodified are markers of the alienation of Self in a commodity and consumer based world.