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The Virtual Rambler
Number thirty six: 20th May 2013
Deconstruction
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With a “sustainable and historically-sensitive approach” , the construction industry took over sectors of numerous UK cities like an occupying army. Their disruptive “redevelopment”
sites , swinging cranes and fluorescent-vested , hard-hatted code of illusory progress , were the visible manifestations of an expansionist bubble that settled over the new millennium.
Traces of a fusty old Britain were to be erased and a vibrant , modern townscape erected in its place. When its former warehouses had been removed from the sides of the old canal ,
upmarket apartment blocks replaced them. Where ranks of terraced housing had once stood nearby , supermarkets , artisan bakeries , wine bars and pizzerias sprang up to serve the needs
of downtown studio-apartment dwellers. These were the people who fuelled the new service economy by night , after they had worked the treadmill of the new financial economy by day. The
encouraging hand of business-friendly New Labour would guide us towards the sunny uplands of a go-ahead New Century’s steady growth in GNP. Going out was the new staying in. Liveware was
the new software. Those in their sixties were the new forty-year-olds.
One small but increasingly influential group relinquished utopian projects of new world building in favour of the rhetoric of subversion , estrangement , and critique. Unlike the mere
reader of books , certain literary critics approach texts with wariness, vigilance, and distrust , for manifest content can shroud darker , more unpalatable truths. The Hermeneutics of
Suspicion assign a unique depth of understanding to the trained reader or theorist , equipped to see through the illusions in which others are immersed. Swapping fluorescent vests
for the complete works of Karl Marx , squads of literary navvies appeared on the scene. A succession of academic Gallic nabobs had been burrowing into literary texts to uncover the
pervading historical ideologies that had informed them. Ideology with them was a hidden system of determinations and a lived medium of delusions from which there was no escape for authors
either past or present. Ideologies change. Yesterday’s “bourgeois humanism” becomes today’s “racist imperialism”. Rattling good yarns like the Sherlock Holmes stories are full of covert
“patriarchal hegemony”. Filtered through a mesh of current do’s and don’ts , history becomes an endless sequence of “undesirable behaviours”. Get your red pen out and let the inappropriate
be banished. The published “divagations” of the Semiologists challenged any casual reader’s expectation of understanding , for common sense had likewise been banished. The
deconstruction brigade decreed that ‘understanding’ was an illusion of mastery to be outlawed , along with those other hirelings of the ruling order , ‘clarity and intelligibility’. “what
is deconstruction all about ?” , you may well ask. Their answer would be , to rid us of the mistaken prejudice that books should be about anything at all.
Moving Forward with Originality became all the rage in business too , particularly in sectors that entertained talk of ‘weightless new paradigms’. Nowhere was modernisation more rampant
than in the crumbling citadels of healthcare and education for an increasingly bamboozled population. Temporary became the new permanent. Like some cultural contagion , innovation-for-its-own-
sake swept through every aspect of what was called the Postmodern World , including its Universities. The deconstruction bandwagon rolled through their re-branded 'Cultural Studies'
departments , once concerned with Art and Literature , and woe betide the fuddy-duddies who refused to jump on it. Prior to the formulation of what became known as ‘Theory’ , a study of literature
or art had never seemed difficult enough (compared to Astrophysics or Ancient Sanskrit , say) and was just too accessible to the lay person. After the introduction of ‘Theory’ as the primary
intellectual activity in all the ex-faculties of ‘humanities’ , students were invited to negotiate an obstacle-strewn course of semiotic niches , valencies , valorisations and liminal spaces
that would make Einstein’s General Relativity seem (comparatively) like a junior school topic.
While ordinary readers , like the hapless Watson , are easily deceived by the evidence of their eyes , the detective reader , whether Roland Barthes or Sherlock Holmes , dives below distracting surfaces to the deeper meanings of signs. Such a reader is one whose expert knowledge allows him to penetrate
obfuscations and see through false rationalizations. This may engender a mode of interpretation that is essentially paranoid in tone. Its theme song is Suspicious Minds. The danger that shadows
mistrustful interpretation is the threat of banality. For several decades now it has served as the default option , the taken-for-granted methodological norm in literary studies. Its gestures of
demystification and exposure are no longer oppositional , but obligatory. For younger scholars , especially , deconstruction is the major paradigm in which they have been trained.
Even as it continues to present itself as a challenge to the intellectual mainstream , it now is that mainstream.
Wig
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Archive
Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan & Charles Dickens, 8th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21st April 2013
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