perfidy

Not everything is worthy of deconstruction.

Or, as some Austrian is reputed to have once said: "Sometimes, a banana is just a banana".

Of course, most of us never make claims to be serving the public good, as do journalists. This is a critical difference, and perhaps excuses us from some of our deconstructive excesses. I think that our purpose, to the extent that we have one, is becoming a check on the journalists. Collectively, bloggers can give more context and additional information to the minimal, limited and unstated biases of the mainstream journalistic narratives.

Bloggers are not getting to "the truth" any better than journalists. Inded, they are deconstructors as well, taking one or two words out of a speech, a paragraph, a sentence, isolating them from the entire context, and spinning a new narrative around them. It is the height of despiration : not only is it divorced from the realm of social practices, it does not even deal with the inner word game. Bloggers are as complicit, if not more, than the journalists.

This is a pretty good discussion for a post I really meant as half-a-goof.

Buckethead, I agree with the first half of whatchou said for sure. But I disagree that deconstruction is always a hindrance to understanding. Instead, it's just another tool for poking at a story, event, or object. If you fall in love with it so much that you use it to the exclusion of everything else... well, you know what all things look like to a man with a hammer.

I would argue that those journalists of old who banged out copy on a rackety typewriter, then went to consume vast quantities of liquor were more useful to the commonwealth than a bunch of over educated, j-school bozos who think that they have achieved a higher awareness than the rude plebes that surround them, and press there noses against the starbuck's window.

An old school journalist had a balance between a belief that there is a reality, and intimate knowledge of the deceptions, petty and otherwise, that create (and lubricate) human soceity. Literary deconstruction gets in the way of this understanding.

Nietzsche: G-d is Dead
G-d: Nietzsche is Dead
Derrida: G-d, Nietzsche, Dead, and Derrida are all constructs. Johno is a football. Hello

J,
Well, your question feeds into mine because I had the Internet in mind.

We all write anonymously in this medium. Do we then exist, in the sense of real persons who could become immortal? Maybe I have an imagined sense of what the label "Geeklethal" means, but should I assume that anyone else does? Without a shared perception of what that label means, how can others understand it, or perpetuate it to immortality? Is "Geeklethal" even a person? An egg? Does it matter?

Does anything posted on a website exist beyond as a graphical abstraction of the underlying math?

I ask these questions quite...ahem...vertantly.

GL, that's where the "publicly imagined self" comes into play. Take Shakespeare fore example. You can't find a better example of someone who wrote for money and who also is not verifiably the writer of his works, and hence in a sense anonymous. And yet, he's not only immortal but ubiquitous.

I don't mean to suggest that all writing is a conscious quest for immortality-- that's fatuous. but whether inadvertant or, erm, vertant, a piece of writing exists independently of the author even as it advances their stamp (personality, voice, intention, etc) across time and space.

I'm told that in Greece you can find statues and monuments that contain thousand-year-old graffitti. That anonymous jerko who wrote "Koikeides humps sheep" on a statue of Winged Victory has achieved a small measure of immortality, as has that intrepid soul or souls who keep changing the "Reverse Curve" sign on Storrow Drive here in Boston to read "Reverse ^the^ CurSe."

I'm a cafeteria philospher who mainly enjoys slinging around jargon and highly qualified clauses for fun, to see if anything comes out of it-- I'm afraid I'm not up to parsing the subtil difference between intentional and incidental bids for immortality.

That raises the next question-- do writers who never publish, or who burn their work, still engaging in that same so-called (non)quest?

GL-- yes, but what do you mean by that?

by the way, the answer is "I'm just shining y'all on."

J,
I like this question: "Is writing in itself a narcissistic bid for immortality, a process of tethering oneself to history, to attempt to endow oneself (or, at least, one's publicly imagined self) with historiocity?"

But people who write anonymously, for example, can't be too self-absorbed or seeking to link themselves to history. In a sense they don't even exist.

Others, or sometimes the same people, write purely for money. How would a mercenary drive fit into the quest for immortality?

I like eggs.

You should take a look at Matt Yglesias' comments. He points out that the current problems in journalism might be connected to the teaching of deconstructionist literary theory in which documents are treated only as language games, not as references to social practice.

Thanks for the pointer. That's an interesting idea, and one that has some currency. If lazy journalists of a past generation were prone to bang out two pages of copy and then go out drinking, lazy journalists today probably are prone to spend an hour ripping at the seams of some statement before hitting the espresso bar. It's their training, for sure, and sub-intelligent deconstruction is as easy as falling off a bike once you get the hang of it. Derrida would be PISSED. If he was actually dead, he'd be rolling even before they got him in the ground.