Hey, pwers! A couple things you may not have known. First:
In the final analysis, the leftist use of words arises from the need to achieve a position of mastery or domination. But it is subject to a destructive irony, for the world it wishes to control, erected on deception and irreality, as well as on overweening arrogance, inevitably collapses like the Tower of Babel and concludes only in the loss of hope and the decay of culture. A world built on desire at the expense of fact relies on words severed from their proper function of clarification as opposed to dissimulation.
And second:
I have always been an admirer of David Axelrod — since I found out who he was. His creation of the Obama myth is one of the most impressive marketing and propaganda feats in history, carefully crafted from a simple set of rules and masterfully applied to challenging, shifting circumstances.
Axelrod knew just what he was doing. He created an African American candidate without the ghetto rap. He created an ultimate urban intellectual alternative to George W. Bush — a veritable anti-Bush. He created a pseudo-legend based upon a semi-fictional autobiography.
So there you go.
These are important lessons: language divorced from its anchor (intent) and set to semiotic drift results, predictably, in cynical, self-serving, largely recursive narrative enclosures, with desire — a will to power — coming to stand in for meaning, creating illusory “truths” out of self-interested consensus. That is, mob rule. An intellectual tyranny of the perceived majority, itself signaled by whose narrative gains ascendancy. Thus, “Barack Obama” becomes Barack Obama.
Now you know. I’m just glad those on the right with the proper credentials finally got around to reading the rest of us in.
I can go back to bed now.
In fairness Jeff, Orwell identified the problem before the Frankfurt School went about “de-problematizing” it.
Unless I have my chronology wrong.
Yes. But he didn’t blog about it, Ernst.
Somebody’s bound to draw the wrong conclusions.
(Somebody else is bound to have their wrong conclusions confirmed.)
And I don’t believe Orwell ever tore a phone book in half with his bare hands, so there is that.
On to the post. Please don’t go back to bed, now. These late bloomers need you now, more than ever. These are just baby steps.
Maybe not, OI
But he survived being shot through the throat by a sniper in Catalonia, and then he got out of there half a step ahead of the communist assassins when the partisans he was fighting with were deemed insufficiently Stalinist.
And he died of the romantic “wasting disease.”
So, tell me, who’s cooler?
And before you answer,
He balled one of Tolkien’s very few grad students.
The voice of the “rational moderate” appears in the comments and demolishes the entire argument.
I think Andrew Zimmern should try killing and eating a “rational moderate.” I bet it tastes just like chicken.
Like chicken, but with some tinniness, and a gamy taste you associate with scavengers. And a hint of patchouli.
Well, hell Ernst. I take it back. The balling of one of Tolkien’s grad students was the clincher. Now, can Jeff tear a copy of Lord of the Rings in half with is bare hands? The leather bound edition? It may swing that pendulum back in Jeff’s favor.
Why did people want “Barack Obama”? That’s what’s got me sadmad.
My fellow Americans…. are not smart.
I can tear it in half, eat it, and shit out a bound copy Gravity’s Rainbow my bowels made simply by rearranging the signs.
So.
Smart ass.
bound copy Gravity’s Rainbow my bowels made simply by rearranging the signs.
I’m attempting to read that. Again. I think this is attempt #4.
WISH ME LUCK.
Geeze, don’t read that po-mo crap. It’ll turn your brains to mush.
So, if only your ass could crap out something that would in turn make Solaris comprehensible. Then you’d really have something!
An intellectual tyranny of the perceived majority
Or of those we perceive will take out our kneecaps if we don’t conform.
Either way.
make Solaris comprehensible
Dude. Incomprehensibility is the core thesis of Solaris.
The Post-Modern English Title Generator — now powered by Jeff Goldstein’s ass!
Dude.
Dudette. Adjust the gain on your irony disgronificator. [wink]
John Bradley, I used that website, with a nod to our host.
Here are 5 means by which you might destabilize, decenter, deconstruct, or otherwise devalue that book:
1. Performing, Mapping, Coding: Tolerance in H. A. Rey and the Proletarian Promiscuities of Symbol in Curious George
2. H. A. Rey Telling Disguise: Curious George and the Fragments of Withdrawal
3. The Boundaried Representing The Other: H. A. Rey, Curious George and Deviance
4. Exploiting the Native Textuality in H. A. Rey: Curious George and Initiation
5. Producing the Sexist Homophobia in H. A. Rey: Curious George and Autobiography
I’m almost certainly the only one who cares. Nonetheless, I’m going to point out that it’s fortunate for Mr. Solway that he cited the Annales Alamannici instead of the Annales Regni Francorum, because had he chosen the latter as his exemple of a “document [that] does not seek to transform or hide events but to record them[,]” he’d have really fucked himself over.
He’s describing a kind of genealogical account of recording history, which of course itself falls victim to what selection and recording biases, etc.
Oh, look. I used Jameson too!
To say nothing about the re-writing (or recording if you prefer) of reality that he’s complaining about.
My point (such as it is) being that it all boils down to a form of the hypocrisy argument: because standards are hard, it’s better to have no standards at all.
If one wants to try to live their life that way, okay. But that’s no way to organize a community. And sooner or later, reality insists upon itself.
I have always been an admirer of David Axelrod — since I found out who he was.
And only three years too late to make a difference. WINNING!
Jeff — now that your gospel is being incorporated into socially acceptable conversation, where do you go next? YouTube videos of you assembling 1,000 pages of leftist horseshit and then tearing it in half rhetorically while simultaneously tearing it in half with your bare hands?
We’ll all know it’s time for us to hit our respective bolt holes and endeavor to ride out the fully immanetized eschaton when so-called “thoughtful” or “serious” thinkers on the Right start talking about the “conservative” or (more likely) “Republican” Obama; just as their counterparts on the
Leftself-described middle now talk about the liberal or Democrat incarnation of Reagan.Heh, from the post modern title generator:
Perfect.
For whatever reason, Squid, I see Jeff G., as Richard Halley, looking on in puzzlement while his work is finally appreciated. At that point, Jeff grabs his oar and heads inland.
The Dualism of Deviance and the Encoded in Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom
White Alienation and the Periphery of Homosocial Subject in Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom
Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom, and The Lesbian: Permeating Deviant Deviance
Speaking Outrage: Colonialist Homotextuality in Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom
The Objectified Processing The Disenfranchised: Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom and Response
The Historicism of Rage and the Peripheral in Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom
Mediating Ethnicity: Absent Intercourse in Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom
The Deviant Re-visioning The Alien: Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom and Dialectic
The Problematic Reclaiming The Abject: Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom and Pathology
Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom, and The Abject: Refuting Postmodern Bodies
It can go on forever, maybe.
“permeating deviant deviance”. I rather like the sound of that.
Dudette. Adjust the gain on your irony disgronificator. [wink]
I should wait until my brain is fully booted before posting. But it takes longer than Windows 2000.
Windows 2000 boots quickly on a new and powerful computer…(ducks and runs for cover)
Well, Win2K does boot slightly faster than my TiVo.
[…] addthis_config={"data_track_clickback":true,"ui_language":"en"};by SmittySophistry:. . .language divorced from its anchor (intent) and set to semiotic drift results, predictably, in cynical, self-serving, […]
“I can go back to bed now.:
Request denied Mr!
We have a battlefield to (re)shape.
As for the rest of you:
I have no idea what the hell you people are talking about, so all leaves are cancelled until I get my *CCIR
brief.
*Commanders Critical Intelligence Requirements ;-)
Change the name to make the thing better, leftist magic, now coming to a Med school near you.
Perhaps this is how Obama is going to “bend the curve” and fulfill this promise.
“Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom, and The Abject: Refuting Postmodern Bodies”
Maybe that one would work best…. Jeff could demonstrate various catch-wrestling holds and moves on some pomo pseudo-intellectual wanker, all the while tearing their arguments to pieces with well placed intentionalism.
Or he could just rip a pomo thesis apart, literally and figuratively at the same time.