,,, we present, courtesy of Dave Lull (a.k.a., OWL), Keith DeRose's Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it?
Here's a gem:
"In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable’, endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed… In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. "
This monstrosity is not Keith's. He writes quite lucidly.
Pomo is pretty much dead-oh, except for all the students of my generation (Ph.D., Columbia, '92), who had to study it with its progenitors and are therefore themselves now teaching it all over the U.S. of A. Back in grad school, my profs included Stanley Fish, Jonathan Arac, and Michel Riffaterre -- who brought in Jacques Derrida for one interesting lecture...talk about fog. His accent was beautiful, his lecture didn't quite make sense -- just like most of the literary theory of the benighted '80s. (Still, I really liked J.D.'s Colombo coat; perfect for those opaque days.)
ReplyDeleteI think a younger generation of scholars is well into overthrowing the older theroids. After all, the Sokal Hoax (brilliant, I agree, and much praise to the physicist) was *ten years ago*. Scholarship marches on.....