Chan'ad Bahraini

Sex with you is really a Kafka-esque experience

That's one of my favourite lines from one of my favourite movies by one of my favourite directors. It is of course from Woody Allen's Annie Hall. The way Shelley Duvall drops this completely ridiculous line in her deadpan manner, you just can't help but laugh. But through this, Woody Allen is making an obvious (and vicious) critique on the direction that popular postmodernism has taken recently. It's so easy to make a BS statement, but retain your intellectual facade by wrapping it in some postmodernist vocabulary. And it's so much fun because post-modernism allows you take any subject and turn it into something that sounds smart.I'll be the first to admit that I frequently make use of pomo constructs to express my ideas... sometimes I'm being genuine and sometimes I'm not.

I was reminded of the Annie Hall line by a great website that makes the same critique of the dumbing down of recent postmodernist inquiry. The Postmodernism Generator will, at the click of a button, create a brand new postmodernist-sounding essay. The only catch is that the essay will makes absolutely no sense. But it's absolutely great! Try it for yourself by clicking here. Here's one of the funniest texts that it's generated for me:

Tarantino and the subcapitalist paradigm of reality

"Sexual identity is part of the genre of culture," says Sartre. Therefore, many discourses concerning postcapitalist dialectic theory exist. Foucault uses the term 'precapitalist construction' to denote a semanticist paradox.

Thus, the subject is contextualised into a Sartreist absurdity that includes truth as a whole. Marx promotes the use of postcapitalist dialectic theory to analyse narrativity.

Therefore, Foucault uses the term 'precapitalist construction' to denote the difference between class and language. If the subcapitalist paradigm of reality holds, the works of Tarantino are reminiscent of Stone.

However, precapitalist construction holds that the significance of the artist is deconstruction, given that truth is interchangeable with consciousness. The subject is interpolated into a postcapitalist dialectic theory that includes reality as a reality.

It is complete rubbish, but I bet it would be able to slip past one or two of your college professors. Actually, you might recall a few years back when Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University wrote a similar spoof BS postmodernism paper and managed to get it printed in a journal about cultural criticism. The paper was hilarious and Sokal made his point about the dumbing down and lack of editorial scrutiny in these types of publications. Read all of the articles associated with the Sokal affair here.

Anyways, interesting stuff, and definitely a reminder for the next time I try to make myself sound intellectual.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 at 10/08/2004 11:07:00 pm. Permalink