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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>My friend Paul Ford, who has a brilliant
website (Ftrain.com</FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>), just published this
piece on a certain culture studies dept...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The piece is here:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><A
href="http://ftrain.com/mckee_recursion.html">http://ftrain.com/mckee_recursion.html</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But here is a bi of a clip from the
article:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial
size=2>---------------------------------------------------------------------</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“That's, well. It's hard to define,” said my guide.
He thought for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Geoff McKee?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“No.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“He's a cultural theorist.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Ah.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I nodded.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“His department. The Department of
Sotsotsots.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Sots sots?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Yeah.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I risked it. “What does that mean?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I waited. My host continued to speak in near
paragraphs.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Why did he do this?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Find it sort of lying there on the
ground.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Yes.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Or like those Russian guys who built a
supercomputer to get to the four billionth digit of pi, looking for
patterns.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“And McKee is?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“What did they suggest?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“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.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Astronaut Anti-Hermeneutics.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“Wasn't she arrested?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“At an anti-colonization protest.”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I asked, “So what happens in SOTSOTSOT
now?”</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>“We don't know. There's a protective barrier placed
by the administration to keep students out...." </FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>