Dr. Obvious goes to Springfield H.S.

www.townhall.com ^ | February 24, 2005 | Mike S. Adams

[Millicent_Hornswaggle]

Dr. Mike is always good for a laugh.

[Millicent_Hornswaggle]

I checked out the link in the article. If I had come across those things in college, I would have died of embarrassment.

[Borges]

*If you ever hear the term “deconstruction,” it will be from someone interested in reconstruction. Specifically, they will be interested in reconstructing the Berlin Wall. This will not be true of all your professors. Some are not yet aware that the Berlin Wall has fallen.

Agree with everything but this. Author is misinformed about the practice.

[Phantom Lord]

Agree with everything but this. Author is misinformed about the practice.

Well, then educate us.

[Tribune7]

I'm a graduate of Springfield High School.

[Borges]

Deconstruction is a rhetorical tool used to deal with texts at the most basic elements of signification (looking at them as a series of binary oppositions...goes back to Aristotle really). Like taking a combustion engine apart to see what makes it tick and its worthwhile to keep it ticking that way. It's been said that deconstruction is a useful tool to oppose fascism or Newspeak if you will.

If used with intelligence and discretion it can be useful. However like any other practice (say Psychoanalysis) it has been subject to much vulgarization and inevitable abuse. That doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[Borges]

should be "if its worthwhile to keep it ticking that way"

[Al Gator]

I think this thread has already been posted with about 100 responses

[Borges]

You can say that about all forms of recondite literary criticism. You may not be interested in examining how Shakespeare or Donne sets up and uses liniguistic oppositions but many others are. Splitting the atom was also confined to a small group of 'academic elitists'.

[LexBaird]

Ward Churchill isn’t really an Indian.

...but he plays one on TV.

[Phantom Lord]

Agreed, but I think you will also have to agree that when liberal elite academics talk of deconstruction they are not talking about it in the sense you put forth. They are talking about the deconstruction of western civilization, capatalism, freedom, liberty, and individual rights as they might affect "minorities" and other "groups."

[Borges]

Well you can deconstruct anything. Including social hierachies. There's no question that's it has produced a lot of flatulent nonsense. But anytime something becomes that widespread it's bound to happen. Again it depends on who's using the tool. But we don't want to do away with the tool now do we? :-)

[Borges]

What they have is a new way of looking at language and how it affects the way people think and the idea that 'Meaning' is established by deference (the word 'Cat' means what it does not because the word has any intrinic Cat-ness about it but because it doesn't mean anything else) was a valueable insight in looking at how language works purely as a system. You may not like the implications but there it is. Good job shooting down that 'Shakespeare's homosexuality' straw man though. :-)

[RJL]

Bump

[Cold Heat]

He did not address "French Benefits".

[Borges]

The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric).

Exactly!

Just kidding. :-) But seriously, Language is a system of signfiers and signifieds. I'm sure you've heard all this before. If you look up a word in a dictionary you won't get Meaning with a capital M...you'l get other words. And if you have to look them up...youll eventually go through the whole dictionary....and you still won't have the Meaning. What Derrida called the 'infinite play of signification' (by quoting Derrida I've probably got you snickering already). It's a response to the work of Strcutalist Ferdinand De Sassure. I don't buy all of it but as a breakthrough it was instructive...something to consider and keep in mind when doing other things.

[Borges]

should be 'Structuralist' Ferdinand De Sassure.