re-writing of academic bookstore
through the stacks in a vast Victorian ction of catalog as logy. Like these
, the ically-driven about the ade ything is written, elling ory of his Holocaust
and On face, the temporal arms at fact contains h, of vigor, the ace. morphic
mice a other in yet strate and about t-acting Memory, landscape he vividly
written the y/tomb onsof ons of the animals will those llectual and physical
to editary Genius: lly, supply lasses . to lowered in a that sting of tested,
voluminous amounts the refugees who visas were Aschafenburg, of elderly,
the alcoholics, the Jewish brings up average assumptions behind Mein phrase,
" the body of his n if rs was Dr. nburg is to ask how people who on
as the s images of
always 20/20. the story of Maus into murder,
slavery. than the t to documents, itself at wn methods us rise of ey allow
been so ed they have naturalization.
of an unknown point (as in navigation or surveying) by the formation of
a triangle comprised of the unknown point and two known points.
In taking the integration of text and image back to the
mindset that creates it, then, note the impossibility at this late date
of the 20th century of the naive reading: "In Fourteen hundred and
ninety-two, Columbus sailed the Ocean blue." But he doesn't discover
America anymore. Or rather, that isn't all he does. He invades, he exterminates,
he trespasses, he appropriates (or do you say enslaves?) a space and the
indigenous people(s) (I won't say natives) who lived where ever it was that
they lived before Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci did whatever it was that
You see, words and images signs are permeated by their
own histories. Not just the emotionally
charged ones, like this ancient religious symbol of good luck. Roll over the following and try to rewrite
"Mary Had a Little Lamb" without using the letter 's' as A. Ross
Ideas are no more easily separated from their forms than
denotation can be cleaved from connotation (or as William Gass asks, Is
it possible to write tragedy in limerick?). If for lack of an 's' school
becomes academe, then Arcadian high-mindedness replaces rules and Mary's
now contraband lamb makes her a criminal in an associative world of court
systems and prisons.
And we are all too aware of this. Ask, 'What are the politics
of this ad?'
and even Mary's lamb
could slog out a rhetorical reading. We can no more live in a non-deconstructive
world, than our parents could live in a non-Freudian world. Whether or not
they had ever heard of Freud. Whether or not we have ever heard of Derrida
and the other French designer-label, lit-crit names. Today, the narrative
drive of even Beavis and Butthead is deconstructive: it operates by pointing
out, and thereby undermining the rhetoric, the artifice, of the videos that
make up the show that they themselves are part of.
That is, contentious reading practices have trickled down
into the lowest crannies of our culture, unlike the mindset of Othello,
a structuralist in search of The Meaning while the clowns remain in the
margins, confusing words:
Clown: Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
Musician: Ay, marry, are they sir.
Clown: O, thereby hangs a tail.
Musician: Whereby hangs a tale, sir.
Clown: Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know.
Complicating an issue, or problemtizing it, as academics
like to say, moves by opening discourse to the free play of language, an
epistemology that has become as common as well, comedy, in Dante's sense
of the word common, i.e., vernacular. Us. We The People.
The Bloody Glove
The Ugly Shoe
Prosecutor (a structuralist): Fact A: Only 300 pairs of mens, extra large, Aris Isotoner Light leather gloves exist. Fact B: The defendant owned several pairs. Fact C: One of these gloves was found at the murder scene soaked in blood containing DNA common to the defendant and one out of 57 billion people. Fact D: Footprints were left in the blood by a killer wearing rare Bruno Magli shoes
O-Jello: I would never wear an ugly ass shoe like that!
Clown: There something strange going on here when racists bring in photos of a man wearing shoes that he doesn wear a conspiracy of images, lab results, words and other mediated languages with false referents. Why? Because they think he is guilty and want to frame him.
Prosecutor: Hey, the guilty is an oxymoron!
of center of a spatially ordered perspective
drawn in; diagrammed-see
if can well as
all of transmitted
is largely (what is looked for is what
is found), is
and together t
hey move and
by reading the amplified). Is communicate, commerce?
Our values? relationship
as to be
of the culture
began to lose
linked to mental activity: a
unseen. Word embedded
mind could be mapped.
indicative of Religious told
As he put
expect to see
And to this
the father Nature/Culture dialectic
mold of the
Venus, a by
reading anatomy. member of the
race not a
and cutting-edge technologies
of the day,
electricity the photography,
which composite photos, such
the faces of