Spaceball (Or, Not Everything That's Left is Postmodern)
2001; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0042-2533
Autores Tópico(s)Legal Systems and Judicial Processes
ResumoGiven law-school postmodernism's epistemo/ontology of juvenile anti-realist agnosticism, its commitment to Gadamerian and/or Derridean notions of linguistic indeterminacy, its monomaniacal dedication to centrifugal end-justifies-the-means Lefty politics, its abhorrence of commonly recognized conceptions of neutral principle, its concomitant disrespect for very notion of truth, and its inextricably intertwined obsession with names and propensity for linguistic doublespeak, Professor Arrow confesses to initially wondering what it might mean to take anything uttered by a postmodernist `literally, or at `face value. But undaunted by that paradox, Professor Arrow not only takes up Feldman's challenge to critique postmodernism on its own terms (by playing a pantomime Spaceball game with Feldman), but also critiques it logically-and (gasp!) pragmatically (not pragmatically). Maintaining tonal and stylistic `playfulness to which law-school pomoers profess to aspire (but in no known instance have achieved), Professor Arrow assures reader that there will be numerous interesting (not Interesting) plot twists along way. In process, Professor Arrow also offers speculation about way in which postmodernists' ultimate contribution to American law schools is likely to be assessed-but cautions (as is appropriate under circumstances) that you'll have to find it in a footnote. JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today! Recently, . . . Richard Rorty made stunning declaration that nobody has the foggiest idea what postmodernism means. ... Today we have with us ... a recovering postmodernist . .. who believes that his ... career and personal life have been irreparably damaged by theory, and who feels defrauded by academics who promulgated it. He wishes to remain anonymous, so we'll call him Alex. Alex, as an adolescent, before you began experimenting with postmodernism, you considered yourself-what? Close shot of ALEX. An electronic blob obscures his face .... ALEX (his voice electronically altered): A high modernist. Y'know, Pound, Eliot, Georges Braque .... I had all of Schonberg's 78's. JENNY JONES: And then you started reading people like Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard-how did that change your feelings about your modernist heroes? ALEX I suddenly felt that they were, like, stifling and canonical. JENNY JONES: We have some pictures of young Alex.... We see snapshots of 14-year-old ALEX reading Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [ ] .... The AUDIENCE oohs and ahs. ALEX: We used to go to a friend's house after school ... and we'd read, like, Paul Virilio and Julia Kristeva. ... JENNY JONES Why? ALEX: I guess-to be cool. ... JENNY JONES: And do you remember how you felt very first time you entertained notion that you and your universe are constituted language-that reality is a cultural construct, a text whose meaning is determined by infinite associations with other texts? ALEX. Uh, it felt, like, good. I wanted to do it again. -MARK LEYNER1 I have a problem, explained, and it turned out to be a moral problem. Was Conception REALLY best we could do? Yes, she was Chicana. Yes, she was lesbian. Yes, she knew her Barthes. But Barthes? Really? Wasn't he getting just a little passe? Wasn't there some danger that in life and pursuit of theory,2 Roland Barthes-and with him, poor Conception, for whom she felt deep concern-was about to be left behind? Part of fascination of literary discourse today, Maddy explained-turning toward fools, who could not be expected to know this-was short-lived nature of theory itself. Styles in theory were changing faster than IMAGE FORMULA12 styles in clothing. That's what made theory so exciting, as Eleanora Tuke herself so often said. …
Referência(s)