The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty six: 20^th May 2013

Deconstruction

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

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary Nexus, 20^th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking Liberties, 16^th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or Less, 20^th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under Control, 20^th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting, 20^th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose Without Trace, 20^th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20^th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 – Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18^th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially Mediated, 19^th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20^th September 2014