Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Kid Rock and Postmodernism
In my quest to become a grad student, I'm sending a paper to a student conference. Here's the link:
http://graduatestudies.concordia.ca/programs/Interdisciplinarity/humanities/specialevents/revolution4.shtml
This is a postmodern conference. Besides inserting punctuation inside perfectly good words, they call technology 'teckne' without sayingwhy, they talk about activism "both inside and outside the Academy" as if academic activism came first (who's privileging discourses now?), and then list paper categories so broad & wide they don't delineate anything at all.
In a strange way, I'm reminded of Kid Rock's 2000 opus "Keep on rollin", where he gives shout-outs to "all the players, and mack daddies, to all the pimps, and high-rollers, and everybody all around the world". The point of a shout-out is to define who your friends are; if you call on 6 billion people to be your friends, that's saying you can't define your friends, and probably don't have any to begin with. (Given it's Kid Rock, that wouldn't surprise me.) Though I imagine, if I stood up at this conference and said that, I might not have too many either.
I think post-modernism is dying, along with the wan liberal sentiments that underlie it, to be replaced by much harder & meaner things: facism & manifest destiny. Those things should be the targets of the left, not a mushy bid for inclusivity that soothes the consciences of guilty white people, and which only further implicates them as helpless intellectuals in a world under constant assault from imperialism.
http://graduatestudies.concordia.ca/programs/Interdisciplinarity/humanities/specialevents/revolution4.shtml
This is a postmodern conference. Besides inserting punctuation inside perfectly good words, they call technology 'teckne' without sayingwhy, they talk about activism "both inside and outside the Academy" as if academic activism came first (who's privileging discourses now?), and then list paper categories so broad & wide they don't delineate anything at all.
In a strange way, I'm reminded of Kid Rock's 2000 opus "Keep on rollin", where he gives shout-outs to "all the players, and mack daddies, to all the pimps, and high-rollers, and everybody all around the world". The point of a shout-out is to define who your friends are; if you call on 6 billion people to be your friends, that's saying you can't define your friends, and probably don't have any to begin with. (Given it's Kid Rock, that wouldn't surprise me.) Though I imagine, if I stood up at this conference and said that, I might not have too many either.
I think post-modernism is dying, along with the wan liberal sentiments that underlie it, to be replaced by much harder & meaner things: facism & manifest destiny. Those things should be the targets of the left, not a mushy bid for inclusivity that soothes the consciences of guilty white people, and which only further implicates them as helpless intellectuals in a world under constant assault from imperialism.
