tangential

sometimes indulging tangents during the writing process is exactly what brings me back to the center of everything I’m trying to accomplish, without headway, through more conventional routes. This little passage below came out while free-writing in response to what I thought was a self-destructive reluctance to get into the “real work” of my thesis, one that I was willing to indulge. It helped me begin to see the whole arc of my project more clearly, why I’ve focused in some of the ways I’ve focused, and to let go of some negative judgment around my (sometimes glacial) writing process in general. The revolution happens quietly, easily: one person, one choice, one word, one work at a time.

“In a sense you could call deconstructive monologism* a symptom of a larger cultural issue–one that can help break through the simulations of progress. How safe is it, how lucrative is it, to really see the whole of any person, text, rhetorical situation, theory, or any other form of perspective and expression? Or are academics (in the English-speaking world, at least) still largely being asked to operate as if part of a pirate crew—one eye patched, ever-ready for a below-decks knife-fight in semi-darkness?”

*Deconstructive monologism is a convoluted term I invented in part as a joke about the kind of convoluted terms that rise out of a lot of postmodern discourse that pose as the something new people expect to find when they engage in deconstruction, but don’t actually get because they don’t go all the way. They only go halfway. So, much like modern capitalism’s model of mass-production, it’s an endless proliferation of more of the same monology that the majority of those who employ deconstruction are, fundamentally, trying to escape.

In the end, I removed the term, and the joke along with it, from my thesis. Good riddance.