I love all my college library books with their obscure sounding titles and yellowed dog-eared pages.
But, I am feeling a little overwhelmed. After not exercising my critical muscles for a while it is amazing how easily ones brain can sink into a mode of comfortable fluff and superficiality.
I’m looking at my desk filled with books, academic journals and photocopies of materials for my four critical theory essays this term (I have two major photographic projects to complete with their own theory elements as well.) The sheer amount of reading is boggling; even though I am trying to be a ’smart-reader’.
“You did sign up for this so there is no room for complaining here Bobble.”
“I am complaint free! I’m just feel buried.” Runs the conversation with myself.
Flicking through the dog-eared pages produces a ’slurry’ of theory smooshing together into a paragraph like this:
“… such doctrines involve a peculiarly neopragmatic rhetoric of assent in the process creating a self-enclosed signifying system in that it creates an irreducible disequivalence of the symbolic and mortgaged penis as referent whereby the hermeneutic code morphemes is thermatization. Distended, the functional nuclei furnish intercalating spaces like the orders of simulacra and the analogue of Baudrillard’s metanarrative now fast approaching the stature of platitudes. A Weberian or a Durkheimian position has distinguished the para-Marxist tradition for understanding aesthetic modes of working différance but the historical and epochal unfolding of being proceeds from the psychical impotence of the anal fixation*…”
I shall go bald with hair gnawing I fear.
*I hate Freud already.
October 21st, 2006 at 6:23 am
Oh lord, how painful. I’d rather just take pictures. Never had much time for critical theory stuff.
October 21st, 2006 at 10:28 pm
You’ll get good at bullshitting that you’ve read it all. I just bought a couple of readers and I was away!
October 21st, 2006 at 11:37 pm
I think I understood 1% of that text. Dear Bobble. x
October 22nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Thanks peeps!
The text is actually about 20 bits of text from all the books I’ve got layign around… come to think of it it may make more sense than the actual books.
Good tip Gambs (how is Glasgow going?), I have a few Readers as core books and they are the most helpful. Although, I did read a Roland Barthes essay yesterday and it actually made sense - go me! I suspect I shall learn a lot about bullshitting but I still have a passionate distaste of Freud - no one can make me like him or how his theories are appplied to images.
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:14 am
I don’t like Freud much, but it is good to stick bits of him into your essays… I’m not in Glasgow yet, still waiting to sell my stupid blooming flat in London. Grrr. Although theoretically I have started my PhD already, so I joined Senate House again on Saturday so I could actually borrow some books.
I bet you’d like Barthes’ ‘Camera Lucida’. It has lots of pictures in it.
October 23rd, 2006 at 12:55 pm
I’m with frunt!!
Just take the freakin’ pictures. I always hated critical theory in English too. It’s just pants
October 24th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
I understood it perfectly clearly. It was about, like, not putting things off and stuff, procrasti-thingying, and looking before you leap, and thingy. (Sorry, I’m not good with big words).
Some of those words in there should never see the light of day, no matter how succinct they are in context. ‘Disequivalnce’, for example. Sometimes 2 words *is* better than 1.