blogomatic

Postwhatever Bullshit

Having read Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Blanchot, and a host of other philosophers sometimes grouped together as "postmodern" or "poststructuralist," I have a pretty good sense of when the writer is bullshitting me and when they're actually saying something of substance (which is about 90-95% of the time, so you can go shove it Alan Sokal). I recently picked up the notebooks of Paul Klee, and the preface (not written by Klee) is pretty bad. Granted, it's not "postmodern," but it shares several similarities with the crap that's cranked out as "deconstruction" by droves of graduate students and a small, but still unfortunate, number of professors - namely long, meandering sentences and terrible prose. A short passage:

Of all the artists of this century, Klee is perhaps the one who has most purposefully penetrated into the enchanted realm of fantasy. It is as if he were seeking, whilst exploring the unconscious, the manifestation of an absolutely authentic and unique experience in which he would find himself alone in the suffering of the lonely ego, even reaching out to that ultimate and finally truthful manifestation of the ego which only comes to us at the moment of death.

Puh-lease.