October 2004 Archives
Yesterday, an email from the eng-grads mailing list at the University of Virginia (I’m still on the graduate student mailing list through the calendar year) came to me about a response to the NY Times’ anti-intellectual obituary of Jacques Derrida.
What an utterly impossible moment. Derrida died today at the age of 74. I found out after returning from dinner with KK and loading up this New York Times article . KK and I had gone to dinner at Star of India in celebration of my passing my defense. We talked quickly and non-stop about her boyfriend, D, relationships, manuscripts out of dissertations, love as action taken to advance the spiritual growth of another being, crotchetiness, detailed letters of resignation, being mistaken for a bimbo, and just which gestures can communicate the notion of an all-consuming feeling.
We also talked about Derrida. D uses the metaphor of a house to explain subjectivity as described by structuralism and poststructuralism. Structuralism is like a house because the people inside it are limited by the structure of the house whereas in poststructuralism the house takes its meaning from the activities of the people inside the house. I’m pretty sure I botched the example. What I do remember clearly is that I suggested he try “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human and Sciences” which lays out the end of structuralism in topological terms.
I’m trying to think about what happens now that one of the most recognizable and important thinkers of the twentieth century has passed. Along with postmodernism, deconstruction is one of the most widely recognized but poorly misunderstood piece of specialist language to be produced by twentieth century philosophy.
But this is not an elegy about Derrida’s passing. It’s not really much of anything, just details about what I did around the time I learned he had died.
It’s later than I wanted it to be. I was on the road back from Charlottesville yesterday. I watched Disco Pig tonight (last night). I liked it though it’s closer to a bed-time story than a full-fledged movie. The characters aren’t fully developed nor is the world in which they live.
I wanted to say something about what I have in store for “Recombinant Media,” post-dissertation, but I’m tired enough to call it a night. I do want at least to say that I can already see how different the book will from the dissertation. Where I saw the dissertation articulating a relationship between the substantial and incorporeal especially insofar as I’m dissatisfied with the interconnection of what Lacan terms the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic Order, I think the book will be less concerned with the interconnection between the real and the symbolic.
Johanna put it nicely when she said there is a difference between the production of a different medium and the representation of such. It’s the fundamental difference between “multimedia” (God save us) and a book about multimedai. Didn’t someone once say, “You can’t get the sound from a story in a magazine?” (BH would kill me for that.)
It doesn’t make sense to hallucinate one’s media.
