It occurs to me that the post-modernist critics, with their obsession with text, are in fact profoundly modern. Treating words as objects, rather than events, analysing language as if it had some meaning in-itself, rather than as a dynamic relation to the world. Just like the literalists, the fundamentalists and their holy texts, the unreformed scientists and their static truths.
And before you say it, the more I hear the insistence that words are multiplicitious, the more i hear the binaries deconstructed, the more hollow it sounds. Such ardent disbelief in words feels too utterly entangled in the world of written words to escape – back to or onward to – the world of words as voiced actions.
One reply on “post-text is pre-modern”
why text?
Tom S commenting post-modern critics: It occurs to me that the post-modernist critics, with their obsession with text, are in fact profoundly modern. Treating words as objects, rather than events, analysing language as if it had some meaning in-itself,…