22nd March 2005

Dammit!

Get it straight folks.  The post-postmodern religious frenzy has fed our frenzied flight from reality, encouraged lame dishonesty and the growth of single superpower situational imperialism.  Pomo was dead-dead-dead by the time in 1986 when the New York Times Sunday Magazine was featuring its incomprehensible write-up of deconstructionism at Yale.  Since then, the thing has been all Popo… post-postmodern.  So kill your pomo bullshit before it kills you.  Get a grip on all that is Po-po and let that shit go-go too.  Our only hope is to catch up intellectually and transcend the stunted philosophies that have emerged since the carrying capacity of the planet’s human population was exceeded around 1966.  We have to get in touch with what is happening right now… then… I mean now… at this-that moment.  Slippery little suckers, moments.

By the late 1980s many of those involved with deconstruction could recall having read a few articles in mass-circulation publications that grappled with their work, but they were the same few articles: a feature in Newsweek in 1981, a book review in The New Republic in 1983, and a profile of the "Yale School" of literary criticism in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. Seventeen, then twenty years after it first landed on these shores, The New Republic and the Times Magazine pieces earned "Deconstruction" its first two references in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (between "Decomposition" and "Decorated eggs").

The word "deconstruction" has received considerably more play recently. Indeed, it has managed to follow "existentialism" as one of the few terms to escape the terra incognita of the graduate schools and become a fairly regular visitor to the pages of newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, for example, recently referred, twice in a few days, to the "deconstruction" of the boxer Mike Tyson. But such references don’t do much to increase readers’ understanding.

from:
Deconstruction and the get-real press. (literary theory)
by Stephens, Mitchell

source: Columbia Journalism Review, September 1, 1991.

via: HighBeam Research

COPYRIGHT 1991 Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism

 
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2024 at 8:36 and is filed under Anti-intellectual Thuggery, Irascible Nonsense, Philosophistry and Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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