Deconstructing Deference
I'm fascinated by the word "divisive" and this post will be about working through some of what I think it means. If you believe in meaning. I'm house-sitting for a professor today who when I was an undergraduate, taught me some critical theory which was really, you know, critical. *giggles at own pun* This is going to be seriously reductive, but unless you go online and watch a Harvard professor explain it in detail for several hours (still not doing it justice), there's no way to not be reductive about critical theory. I am at heart a structuralist. I like to look at frames and systems in the abstract and compare them to other frames and systems. I see the shape of things underneath. But at some point, the structuralist project became reduced to a series of binary distinctions, like 1:1 antonyms, which then became food for deconstruction. Derrida in an interview explained that anytime you put words to a distinction between concepts it is in the nature...