my motives

[joanna bujes]

I was in graduate school at UCB when the deconstructionist mafia came 
rolling through. I did a certain amount of reading...Derrida, DeMan, 
others, but the more I read the more I was conviced that this was basically 
a reactionary movement which came through at just about the time that 
students in the humanities began to  question very seriously (as a result 
of the Vietnam war and other international and social wars of liberation) 
the character of western culture, imperialism, the cannon, "reason," etc. 
In place of this real deconstruction, carried out in the vernacular, the 
intellectual elite (and those who aspired to join them) proposed another 
"deconstruction," a kind of denatured Marxism, full of dialectical moves 
and intellectual chicanery, but,  most importantly crucially dependent on a 
new lexicon of privileged terms without which this dicussion could not be 
carried out and which was accessible to maybe .1% of the population.

Since I had always thought that the point of the humanities was the 
examination and pursuit of social justice through an understanding of our 
own and other cultures, I was overcome by revulsion. BUT...I still had to 
make it through graduate school...without becoming a deconstructionist. So, 
I thought I'd take the scholarly path instead. I learned Latin and Greek 
and decided to present myself on the job market as a Renaissance scholar 
rather than a deconstructionist young turk. It didn't work so far as my 
academic "career" was concerned, but now, 15 years later, I have no regrets 
about the fact that instead of cramming my head full of  deconstructionist 
hocus pocus, I actually learned two languages and read some real and very 
beautiful poetry: Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Horace, Homer, etc.

Joanna Bujes

At 01:47 PM 06/04/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>.I probably had enough of the humanties theory binge of the eighties
>(early eighties in my case) when I went to school at the west coast
>headquarters of the deconstructionist mafia.  The Derrida worship was
>rank.  Paul DeMan came round to lecture on "Errinerung" and
>"Gedachnis" (sorry that English ASCII doesn't have the umlaut) in
>Hegel to reverent faculty and grad students.  "Theory" was to be the
>royal road to career advancement for young professors.  Whole lingos
>were a-brewing: differance (accent on the a), rhizome, pli (Deleuze),
>suture, slippage, abjection (Kristeva), postmodernism, episteme
>(Foucault), phallogocentrism (a feminist perversion, I think), in
>piles of books that no one (not even the professors who purported to
>know) could possibly read or adequately grasp in the time allowed by
>the syllabi, they were so "liberated" from "ordinary language."