Concaf.

A term used most commonly in English-speaking countries since the early 1970's to draw a line of affinity around several French theorists who may themselves (have) reject(ed) the designation; this group includes Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Kristeva. Post-structuralists draw on and extend important insights of structuralism, especially (a) Saussurian linguistics and (b) Althusser's critique of the humanist subject.

(a) Language is seen as the medium for defining and contesting social organization and subjectivity. (Lulu here-- what about performance? action?) Saussure is credited with the understanding that meaning is produced within rather than reflected through language; language is therefore constitutive rather than reflective of social reality. He argued that there is no necessary fixed relation between signifier (sound or written image) and signified (the concept it serves to evoke). The meaning of a signifier is derived from its difference from and relation to other signifiers; identity is created through difference.

(b) Post-structuralists also helped to formulate and absorb an anti-humanist critique of a unifed, knowing, and rational subject, instead interpreting subjectivity as continually in process, as a site of disunity, conflict, and contradictions, and hence potential political change. They diverge from Althusser in seeing the production of subjectivity as a discursive rather than ideological effect. The distinction is an important one: while Althusser represented his critique of the subject as a scientific expose (and thus never broke fully with the humanist knowing subject), post-structuralist writers maintain that there is no 'real' outside of cultural systems.

In different ways, post-structural thinkers opened up to contingency and indeterminacy what had been conceived as relatively closed (although not static) linguistic, economic, and social systems.

A second characteristic of post-structuralist theorizing is anti-foundationalism; theories of language and subject were turned onto the production of truth and knowledge itself.

This forces self-contextualization and reflexivity onto the post-structural theorist, in an effort to understand the will to power behind and within his or her own truth claims. Truth, as a thoroughly social process, as a medium and effect of a truth/power regime, loses its foundational status and its capacity to ground politics. The challenge for the theorist is to generate a discourse whose power effects are limited as much as possible to the subversion of power.

"Truth, as a thoroughly social process, as a medium and effect of a truth/power regime..."

I wonder how much of this infiltration of instability and relativity is influenced by industrialization and advancement of information technology. Things used to be more concrete for humanity: we were tied to the earth and tied to place, in agriculture and constructing our own homes, and if we wanted to travel somewhere it was a very slow, arduous journey, in physical contact with either land or sea.

Now, we have telephones, computers, airplanes... we pay for all services and products with capital... we are removed in many ways from tangible life experiences, and from the earth. We kind of hover around in a money-information-theoretical cosmos, if we are "lucky" enough to be born middle class in a developed country.

So maybe this has influenced the rise of relativism and postmodernism.

Anyway, I think it is a really powerful statement to say that "there is no 'real' outside of cultural systems" and then that stuff up there about truth being a thoroughly social process. Of course, there are truth/power regimes and physical, legal, economic structures that make up I guess the contexts of our lives...

Anyway, I just get excited thinking about what to do with this stuff, and how to use it to probe the ranges of human experience.

Note to blogger: if you use the phrase "probe the ranges of human experience" in a sexual context, I will hunt you down and stick a tootsie pop up your behind. Unless, of course, that's what you want. In which case, forget it, I'm just ignoring you.

Do you think it is possible to maintain that "perpetual state of uneasiness, of continual questioning"? To continually usurp authority or convention-- Is it a worthwhile attempt? I think some people are just drawn to do it naturally, because otherwise they get bored. Does that questioning become a place or an authority in itself?

I would like to think that place of uncertainty could be called Andy Kaufman Lives dot com.

One of these interests is the process of historification by which fabrications and rumours become printed facts and enter history as truth.


Consider Andy Kaufman lives a fabrication or a rumour?

Perhaps "Andy Kaufman Lives" is the fabrication of a rumor, or the rumorfication of a fabric. How much? The whole nine yards, please....

I'm surprised you didn't say something about the ramification

As an Aries, I am a ram, so that would be redundant. That's what happens after something is dundant. But you are more than welcome to begin the deramification!

I'm getting a headache from all this. If I take some aspirin, would that be considered deheadaheification? Or did I just miss the whole point all together?

Researchers gained permission to enter Beethoven's tomb to take DNA samples. On the scheduled date, they arrived at the sealed crypt and the scientists carefully broke open the door. Dust scattered around them as they walked slowly into the dark tomb. They listened to an eerie, frenzied scratching sound. Then one of them turned on the flashlight.

To their surprise, there sat Beethoven, fit as a fiddle, sitting at a desk and furiously rubbing away with an eraser at a pile of musical sheets. The scientists stared in disbelief, until Beethoven finally raised his head and cried out, "Go away, you idiots! Can't you see I'm decomposing?!"

OK, regurgitate. Shouldn't it be degurgitate? And then after degurgitating you could regurgitate, you know, if you wanted to.

(or anyone else to whom I ought apologize for talking so much lately)

I once read an article about ...what I would think of as meaning in life. The article compared a virgin standing on a volcano rim, about to be sacrificed, to a woman shopping for an important event dress at Bloomingdale's. The author said that the thoughts running through the heads of the two women amounted to the same thing.

Academic writing can be dense, obfuscatory, frustrating. Comparable even to some of the tomes Raaawb spits out. But I think GOOD writing is weighty for a reason: each word is carefully selected, and carries with it complex, yet artful meaning. It's someone's life and thoughts in there.

I realize that the stuff I posted has all been done and discussed many times over in the forums on Andy Kaufman. I just thought those were cool ways of saying it.

Ok, that was my break from writing my research paper that's due next week. Sorry guys, I'll be back to normal soon.

Raaawb, I totally can't believe how that just came out. I just meant to gently kid you about your loquaciouness, which I am rivalling and have perhaps surpassed! Anyway, I apologize, that did not come out the way I meant it!

Hey, I wasn't complaining. I find the stuff both of you write completely fascinating. My mind just gets boggled sometimes. But don't stop, please.

Peace

Mind boggled here too. But boggle away.

I think boggling is a good thing. I wonder what the process would be for deboggling.

The attack of the boggoblin?

Well, the reference seemed to start of as "academic writings" with the comparison made connected to that... give or take a couple adjectives, seemed okay to me!

tome... don't you like the word tome?

It is a fabulous word.

Marisa?

Who's Marisa?

Marisa Tomei, actress?

So that would be Tomei-riffic.

Andy liked TM... some of us like M.T.! Rrrowr... whatta Tomei-to!

hot cocoa