> in philosophy and a reasonably sympathetic effort. I concluded that--with the
> exception of the early Derrida, who is respected by some people I
> respect--there';s nothing _to_ understand. I think the writings of the French
> poststructuralists are obscurantist fraud, sound and fury signifying nothing.
> What little that makes sense in this mass off clotted prose isn't new or deep;
> what's new is rubbish.
Oh, delving into po-struc isn't any worse than, say, sifting through the IMF's neoliberal rhetoric, or spending a couple hours in an average mall, or watching the Sunday football ads, their plebian social equivalents. Po-struc had its moment in the Seventies and has said nothing new since then -- it's kind of the disco of the global theory-scene. Po-struc ended around 1973, basically, and then po-mo had its creative run from 1982-84. Since then, mainstream theory has pretty much whored itself on the marketplace of Bubble-culture -- lots of media-friendly noises about bytes, bodies, megahertz and the dissemination of the panopticon of the signifier/signified deconstructive un(re(para))doing of whatever images are being retailed on our corporate-run mass media.
-- Dennis