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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Meta trumps trans

So my ability to see all these hybrid, nomad, trans-, and post- phenomena as part of the same metadiscursive formation allows me stand above them, in a way, seeing what they all have in common and what those strategies entail. Without taking away the value these concepts have for pragmatic interventions within intellectual discourse. In other words, I don't want to simply disqualify discourses based on that rhetorical strategy. It is too easy to make fun of it because it becomes a bit predictable.

The authority of the legitimizing discourse is what gives it its hermeneutic power, rather than vice-versa.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is interesting, expand. ;-)

Jonathan said...

Which part? The end or the whole thing?

Anonymous said...

What, in your view, do they all have in common and what, in your view, do those strategies entail?

The end is the most interesting, of course, but I understand it. I am curious as to what someone besides me would say about trans, which is, me tiene harta, I think it has lost meaning.

Jonathan said...

I will give it a try.

All the strategies are a means of going "beyond" previous formulations of compound or complex identities. They all promise to transgress traditional boundaries and thus place things in contact with one another so that greater understanding can occur, as in the "interdisciplinary." But the problem is not overcoming some artificial wall between subject (or the Atlantic in "transatlantic," but understanding what is really going on in the encounter. If you see the same trope over and over again, it starts to lose its novel value, its efficacy. So the 'meta' analysis goes beyond all those tropes to show how they are all tropes amounting to the same rhetorical move.

Anonymous said...

I see!

Here is my problem with trans and with compound/complex: how many aren't (or am I just too cosmopolitan)?