James G. Poulos: “Smithereens (this is aphorizing a book-length subject) encompasses the various communities of identity constantly clogging our social discourse; it encompasses the networked, blurred, disaggregate and deconstructed families that have decisively outweighed the nuclear and extended families of the past; it encompasses the niche groups and genre clubs that have swarmed the internet and define identities that become inseparable from trends ("Goth," "swinger," "fetish," even "ghetto": it is now possible to be ghetto without living, or ever having lived, in one). Smithereens, centrally, also defines postmodern society at the individual level: within a particular smithereen, individual participants live in a perpetually negotiable state of transhood, existing as an indefinite, open set of tradable, manipulable identities subject to a total freedom in which decisions made for glib or solemn reasons maintain an equal legitimacy and operate equally as rights.”