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Wednesday, December 08, 2004

# Posted 5:13 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

DEAD HORSE BEATEN: I may not be the first person to complain about the jargon-laden surrealism of "post-modern" scholars, but complain I will because I have spent far too many hours over the past couple weeks grappling with such patent absurdity. Here's a sample of it for you, from Imperial Encounters by Prof. R.L. Doty:
When US troops march into Grenada, this is certainly "real", though the march of troops across a piece of geographic space is in itself singularly uninteresting and socially irrelevant outside of the representations that produce that meaning. It is only when "American" is attached to the troops and "Grenada" to the geographic space that meaning is created. (Page 5)
I will hazard a guess that such events, in and of themselves, were neither uninteresting nor irrelevant from the perspective of the "American", "Cuban" and "Grenadian" soldiers who were "shot" and "killed" during the "battle". Alas, they might have been saved if only Foucault had been on the scene to inform them that "death" is a social construction and a product of false consciousness!
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