I haven't been to Amritas in a bit. Miyake's talking a lot about comic books right now, which doesn't interest me nearly as much as it would have ten years ago. But if you scroll down, there's a short addendum of his re: the sorry state of humanities academe that sums things up quite cleverly:
04.5.10.22:49: UPDATE: DC's post title "Celebrate Diversity (Just Watch What You Think)" made me realize what the PhDemons want: physical diversity* coupled with mental unity. It's their version of the mind/body dichotomy.
*Yet race doesn't exist, right? And isn't gender just a social construct? So why all the emphasis on race and gender? It takes an in-duh-lectual to answer such questions. They're too deeeep for mere humyns like you and me.
I have my own issues with the PC agenda, and a lot of this revolves around the pernicious influence of postmodernist thought in academe, a source from which much PC-ness springs. It suffices to mention Jacques Derrida (a member of Camille Paglia's Unholy Trinity, consisting of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault) in connection with this. Derrida brought a lot of (cough) interesting terms and concepts to the table, but among them is the idea of favoring the marginalized interpretation in the course of deconstructive analysis. I've never been clear on why this favoring is so important, except in the PC sense that it rights certain wrongs by chopping away at the predominance of a Dead White Male metanarrative. But an overemphasis on marginality is just as big a mistake as an overemphasis on what is mainstream.
PoMo sucks donkey balls. But it's caught on in Korean academe. God help us.
_
No comments:
Post a Comment