My least favourite course is probably Posthumanism – my first-semester honours seminar. It’s an important field, but it requires that one subscribe to Postmodernism, which, to the untrained eye, is an impenetrable fog of circular reasoning and Latinate / French rhetoric. However, after careful training, you will be able to penetrate said fog and re-disperse it as a protective shield around your own incomplete conceptions. It would be amusing to see such luminaries as Foucault and Baudrillard write with experts in the fields they casually gloss standing over their shoulders. That being said, we all do the same thing in everyday life (that is, coveting and utilizing a collection of popular (mis)conceptions), and perhaps folk like myself simply get pleasure from identifying possible instances of this in the great. Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will notice anyway, and not just because these fog banks make up a significant part of the economies of postgraduate Arts studies. It’s best to move on, smiling and nodding, waiting for the fad / fog to dissipate.
(A sample of what I’m talking about: “Dr. XYZ, what’s ABCD?” “Oh, well, it’s hard to put it as succinctly as I think you would like, but it’s, to be blunt, DCBA. Does that help you?”)
I’ll finish this snapshot of my life this evening, after I scout a new truck for my father and respond to Carla’s request for Stones experiences.