The piece is here: http://ftrain.com/mckee_recursion.html
But here is a bi of a clip from the article: --------------------------------------------------------------------- My host, a tall, thin, stooped man of 40, led me from the administration, past the library, quoting the number of volumes with pride, and then past the humanities building. Looking up, I noticed a black-tinted window on the top floor. Strange lights pulsed out of the window.
“That's, well. It's hard to define,” said my guide. He thought for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Geoff McKee?”
“No.”
“He's a cultural theorist.”
“Ah.”
“He did a good deal of work on the history of sweaters. But he was best known as a specialist in post-structuralist interpretation of academic discourse.”
I nodded.
“He had a book, it's a study analyzing cultural theory as a practice through a cultural theory framework. It's called Re/Curse, with a slash between the are-ee and the curse.”
“That's the place for it,” I said. We were continuing on to the famous fountain made of heaped skulls, funded by the Defense Department, called “Defense Department Grant.” “So that's his office?”
“His department. The Department of Sotsotsots.”
“Sots sots?”
“Yeah.”
I risked it. “What does that mean?”
“Well, Geoff could never have actually founded a discipline because he felt that would exercise undue influence over discourse, and to do that would invalidate the discipline from the beginning. But he felt the need to create a radical break with what he called an 'ugly latent linearity' in modern praxis. So, what he did, he decided to study the origin of the discipline he wasn't founding.”
I waited. My host continued to speak in near paragraphs.
“And the problem was, how do you study the origins of a discipline without creating it? You can't actually create a means for studying it, so you must study the way you might study it. But then you have to study the way you study the way you might study it. You can never actually define how you'll study it because to do so would point the way to an original framework.”
“Why did he do this?”
“Eventually Geoff thought he would hit a point where this process would accumulate into a set of findings which would point to a framework for an entire discipline which was based on absolutely no cultural assumptions.”
“Find it sort of lying there on the ground.”
“Yes.”
“Or like those Russian guys who built a supercomputer to get to the four billionth digit of pi, looking for patterns.”
“The Chudnovsky brothers. Other people made that comparison. So the program was registered under SOT. Since it was the Study of the Study of the Study of the Study of the and so on. They put a line over the SOT in the course schedule to show it was a repeating sequence. SOT SOT SOT SOT SOT forever.”
“And McKee is?”
“He's there, in the office. They had an opening with the president of the university. The next day McKee came in with a crate of books he planned not to read, a pen with no ink, and a pad of black construction paper for a notebook. He was trying to pioneer a theory of non-discourse. Something, we have no idea what it could have been because he couldn't have actually done anything according to his own process, um, anti-process, but something made things go wrong with time. The reason the room is dark is that light is slow inside. We had Physics over, they measured. But they were too solution-driven. That was 15 years ago.”
“What did they suggest?”
“They have this thing called a light accelerator, very new, and they said they could solve the problem, but one of our professors argued that in this context light was socially constructed, and if we manipulated it, we were encouraging photocentric culture and violating McKee's right to free inquiry. Cynthia Corley.”
“Wait.” I did a little jump to jog my memory. “This is the woman who did the book on the interspecies relationships advocating we destroy the Earth rather than travel into space, as a gift to the universe.”
“Astronaut Anti-Hermeneutics.”
“Wasn't she arrested?”
“At an anti-colonization protest.”
I nodded, remembering the televised image of a broad-faced angry woman biting her tongue and spitting blood into the Senator's face, screaming “that's for the blood of the aliens you may some day shed if there are aliens.” She had a sign in green block letters that read “THE ALIEN IS NOT THE OTHER.” The clip had found its way into a Windowsill video called “Sasquatch,” and was now a classic “text” demonstrating the appropriation by popular culture of political and academic thought, with various conclusions drawn thereof.
I asked, “So what happens in SOTSOTSOT now?”
“We don't know. There's a protective barrier placed by the administration to keep students out...." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030116/c5850e45/attachment.htm>