A Blurp on Context

I apologize, my spell check isn’t working properly and it’s very frustrating.

Contemporary society is a disjunction juxtaposing the absurdity it is and the rational way it should be.

Following from my last post, we touched on the issues of the postmodern actor feeling unable to affect his situation. Is it their inability to place context – or find that place “where all these images converge” – to the simulacrum that surrounds that renders them apathetic. What is context? How do we find context? Arguably a great deal of the past fifty years of social theory – post-structuralism, decunstrcution – has been along these lines. I read somewhere that when Derrida says “there is nothing outside the text, (this may or may not be the exact quote – I can’t for the life of me remember – but it grasps the general idea.”) he is actually trying to imply that there is nothing outside of context; the text for Derrida is very broad and includes all cultural symbols (means of communication [poorly worded]); we come to understand them and thus ourselves by understanding their contexts. He calls this process deconstruction (overly simplified). Thus this ongoing ‘deconstruction’ of this and that is more a search for and a greater undertsanding of contexts rather than an attempt at overturning establishments. Ironically it seems that the more intouch we become with certain texts and their contexts, we realize just how absurd they actually are. For example the context within which a WASP sociobiologist of the turn of the last century might argue that blacks are an inferior race. Or in a more specifically related example to Derrida and his ‘suplements’: what is in the text and what isn’t in the text? Thus pushing the boundaries of where the text even begins. Where does the American Declaration of Independence begin and end?

So we began by saying that what is wrong with society today is we lack the ability to put context to our day to day lives. Apparently, trying to understand context isn’t the right way of producing it, since it would seem the more we come to understand it the more alienated we become. This places us in a strange perdicament: either we need to go back to the board and really question just what our version of context really is, or we must conclude that the problem with contemporary society has more to do with a disjunction juxtaposing the absurdity it is and the rational way it should be, that the more we come to understand it the more we feel alieanted because it just plane doesn’t make any sense. I suppose that if we asume the later this might imply that we adopt the normative view that we should work at making it more rational.

Digressing from this point onward…

This does not mean that I am pro-fascist or for any other extreme macro rationalizing mechanisms. I think the earlier post commenting on the modern man did a good job of pointing out the absurdity in such approaches. I would be more inclined to question the context within which we view ‘rationality’ – perhaps the current interpretation is actually is absurd. See for example an earlier post of mine: Jumping Off Bridges and Playing Chicken and the Global Free Market.