(from http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/20/university-experience-changes-students)
There have been other changes, too. ...
"Politics has expanded enormously in the past 30 years. Where you had only a limited choice of modules, students today have a wide variety to choose from – particularly in the sphere of international relations. Equally, large parts of the old course have disappeared. Marxism-Leninism is no longer taught as a viable political model and the study of European politics is no longer done primarily on a country by country basis but as the EU as a whole."
"And what about the post-structuralists, such as Althusser?"
"Oh nobody bothers about them any more. By the time we worked out what they were actually saying we realised they didn't actually have anything to say."
Great. The impenetrable philosopher on whom my own academic career came to grief through my inability to make head or tail of him has finally been exposed as a pointless dead-end.
On 10/31/09, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Tilottima Rajan makes an effort to trace the usage of these terms
> (post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism) and identify the
> features that each might be seen to name. Her books were rough going for
> me, but if my eyes hadn't crashed I think two more rereadings would have
> done it.
>
> Incidentally, every time anyone uses a punctuation mark or an uppercase
> letter, or every time they space their text on the page in a way that
> makes a difference, they are illustrating one of Derrida's points of
> departure (to which both Joyce & Pound contributed). But consider
> Herbert's "Easter Wings," or this wonderful couplet of Pope's:
>
> To sound or sink in cano, o or a, Or give up Cicero to C or K.
>
> That couplet exists only in print; it is inconceivable in a totally oral
> culture.
>
> I never got far enough to grasp the further implications of this, but
> many have pursued it, and it also has as background Voloshinov's Marxism
> and Linguistics. (I'm quoting names & titles from memory and may have
> them goofed up.)
>
> Poststructuralism or whatever you want to call it has indeed
> disappeared, in the same wy DesCartes geometry has, by being absorbed
> and informing a great deal of work that no one would thik of labelling
> "post-anything."
>
> Carrol
>
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