Making It Clear

"Of course, the whole house of cards would have come falling to the ground if Derrida had just come out with it plainly in the first place, and the rest of the money could have been spent on something worthwhile like bread and circuses."
---Johnny Deadman

Date: Mon, 05 Feb 2001 10:56:22 -0500
To:
From: Johnny Deadman
Subject: Re: [SP] umberto eco et al

[...]

I do think that deconstruction is a phenomenally powerful tool for understanding how works of communication achieve their effects but unfortunately its proponents tend to obfuscate it. Also it gets mired in with stuff like Derrida. I remember poring over OF GRAMMATOLOGY for weeks (it was the trendiest book you could own for about five minutes in 1983) before I put it down with the same sense of wonder with which I put down GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, realising in the case of both that under the mesmerising web of words were a set of banal and half-baked concepts, and that the astonishingly audacious author had got away with it!

I do think that deconstruction is a phenomenally powerful tool for understanding how works of communication achieve their effects but unfortunately its proponents tend to obfuscate it. Also it gets mired in with stuff like Derrida. I remember poring over OF GRAMMATOLOGY for weeks (it was the trendiest book you could own for about five minutes in 1983) before I put it down with the same sense of wonder with which I put down GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, realising in the case of both that under the mesmerising web of words were a set of banal and half-baked concepts, and that the astonishingly audacious author had got away with it!

The best metaphor I ever happened upon for this stuff is from (someone will correct me no doubt) Adam Smith, who suggested that the problem of unemployment could be solved if half the unemployed miners were set to work burying bottles deep underground and the other half digging them up again. In the case of the post-structuralists, it seemed that they had gone one better because otherwise unemployable men like Derrida got paid very well for burying and entangling nuggets of theory in mountains of verbiage, and otherwise unemployable students like me were via by the taxpayer to laboriously unearth them, smelt, reduce, alchemise and restate.

Of course, the whole house of cards would have come falling to the ground if Derrida had just come out with it plainly in the first place, and the rest of the money could have been spent on something worthwhile like bread and circuses.

No wonder at the end of their college years my fellow students bought suits and went into accountancy and advertising. I went to America.

--
Johnny Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com