A Text Without Content (Dean)

Having read (just) a few of her reviews over the years, I don't believe Michiko Kakutani knows much about books or literature. But I am quite confident that she knows even less about network technologies and even less than that about literary theory. Look at this rambling mess. On second thought, skip directly to the article's third "page" as formatted for the Web, where this appears:

As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.

Sheer nonsense. Not a word of it corresponds to the faintest semblance of reality. The easy targets: Deconstruction is not textual analysis. It became fashionable in the '70s. It had nothing to do with subjective responses to texts. The death of the author was most famously proclaimed by Barthes and Foucault, neither of whom was aligned with deconstruction. Many of the important texts associated with deconstruction focused obsessively on certain authors qua authors. Kevin Kelly did write that piece of drivel for the Times magazine. I'll give her that.

The article worries about reading and writing in the age of the Internet, about how "social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information." In order to change the way people think, people first must think. When you've encountered a thought, Ms. Kakutani, drop me a post card, please.

Comments

[Sujatha]

3 pages of rambling is too much. She lost me at paragraph 3, when she switched from the critique of Shields' cut-and-pastism to Web 2.0 and miscellaneous mumbo-jumbo about digitization. Too much Facebook and Twitter can addle your brain, I suppose.