| I think you'll appreciate Chip Morningstar's hilariously scathing satirical take on pomo litcrit! https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html >How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure >Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities >"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman >This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale. [...] >Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them. [...] https://www.wired.com/1993/01/hypelist-19/ >Wired Magazine: Jan, 1993: Hype List: 2. Po-Mo Gets Tek-No >Look out, the post-modern crowd is invading computer science, leaving jargon and dazed academics in their wake. The recession woke up the post-modernists to the fact that technology, not comparative lit, is where the money is. So now we have Marc Poster writing on "Lyotard and Computer Science," and Kathy Acker talking about "the author as hacker." Although the hypertext field has already succumbed, some neo-nerds are trying to keep the po-mo forces at bay. At the last Cyberspace conference, the tech heads in the audience refused to be intimidated by quotes from Frenchmen, and heckled the po-mo's off the stage. Personally, I'd much rather have Foucalt quoted at computer conferences than Dijkstra. And hey, computer scientists need new jargon - I'm still hearing "paradigm" used in the Kuhn-ian (non) sense. (Dig that hip po-mo parentheses trick!) |
A pity really - I still believe that actual, rigorous deconstruction of a text is technically feasible, and used to wonder why nobody is even trying.
Of course, a humanities scholar with the hacker rigor doesn't become a literary theorist or think tank talking head - they become a badass fiction writer that we probably haven't heard of.