The Brunch Table

“The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all…’Deconstruction’ is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.”

I found this on one of our mailing lists at school…it’s an article written by an engineer (with the very Lucasesque name of “Chip Morningstar”) who takes us with him as he tries to read Derrida and Baudrillard.

What’s odd, though, is that after a lot of funny insights, he reaches the conclusion that communication in engineering is superior because “At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I’m doing is worth having them pay for it.”

Well, where were those communication skills when General Electric handed off toxic depleted-uranium artillery shells to the Pentagon, without telling the military that tank and air crews who handled them would need to wear protection? Mr. Morningstar may have a point that practical concerns tend to hold engineers to a higher degree of intellectual honesty, but this smells like the same old Reaganist argument about the sanctity of the market.