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August 2002, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Jeremy Butler <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 17 Aug 2002 09:44:32 -0500
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Humorous "fiction" from TheOnion.com:

Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu

CAMBRIDGE, MA-Jon Rosenblatt, 27, a Harvard University English graduate
student specializing in modem and post-modem critical theory, deconstructed
the take-out menu of a local Mexican restaurant "out of sheer force of
habit" Monday.

"What's wrong with me?" Rosenblatt asked fellow graduate student Amanda
Kiefer following the incident. "Am I completely losing my mind? I just
wanted to order some food from Burrito Bandito. Next thing I know, I'm
analyzing the menu's content as a text, or 'text,' subjecting it to a
rigorous critical reevaluation informed by Derrida, De Man, etc., as a
construct, or 'construct,' made up of multi-varied and, in fact, often
self-contradictory messages, or 'meanings,' derived from the cultural
signifiers evoked by the menu, or 'menu,' and the resultant assumptions
within not only the mind of the menu's 'authors' and 'readers,' but also
within the larger context of our current postmodern media environment. Man,
I've got to finish my dissertation before I end up in a rubber room."

At approximately 2 a.m., Rosenblatt was finishing a particularly difficult
course-pack reading on the impact of feminism, post-feminism, and current
'queer' theory on received notions of gender and sexual
preference/identity. Realizing he hadn't eaten since lunch, the Ph.D
candidate picked up the Burrito Bandito menu. Before he could decide on an
order, he instinctively reduced the flyer to a set of shifting, mutable
interpretations informed by the set of ideological biases-cultural, racial,
economic, and political-that infect all ethnographic and commercial
"histories."

"Seeing this long list of traditional Mexican foods-burritos, tacos,
tamales-with a price attached to each caused me to reflect on the means by
which capitalist society consumes and subsumes ethnicity, turning tradition
into mass-marketable 'product' bleached of its original 'authentic'
identity," Rosenblatt said. "And yet, it is still marketed and sold by the
dominant power structure in society as 'authentic' experience, informed by
racist myths and projections of 'otherness' onto the blank canvas of the
alien culture."

Added Rosenblatt: "Then, of course, I realized that this statement was
problematically narrow, since I was assigning an inherent 'actual' meaning
to the Ethnicity Content of the take-out menu. Which was, in itself,
contradictory to one of the primary theses of deconstruction, i.e., that
it's impossible for an 'impartially' observing arbiter to establish any
ultimate or secure meaning in a text. I'd just begun to make a mental note
of the cartoon anthropomorphic burrito on the front of the menu as a
signifier of such arbitrary 'otherness' when I yelled, 'What the hell am I
doing?'"

Rosenblatt's inadvertent outburst nearly led to an altercation.

"I totally woke up my neighbor in the room across the hall," Rosenblatt
said. "He looked like he might hit me, so I tried reasoning with him, but
it came out all wrong. Instead, I found myself saying that the
multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily pose a
threat to the tendency of any arbitrary power or 'authority' to dictate
oppressive hierarchical social structures or centralize power. Ergo, any
attempt to establish hierarchies and centralized power according to
arbitrary dichotomies of 'right' and 'wrong' behaviors was therefore not
only morally and philosophically, but also politically problematic, and, in
fact, oppressive. Man, did that ever not work."

According to friends, Rosenblatt has been under a great deal of stress in
recent months due to the financial strain of student-loan debts, his
part-time tutoring job,and a heavy academic courseload.

"Lacking proper sleep and struggling to keep up in the intensely
competitive crucible that is Harvard grad school, Jon is starting to lose
it," said roommate Rob Carroll, 26. "He has become so steeped in the
complex jargon of critical theory that he's unable to resist the urge to
deconstruct even the most mundane things."

This is not his first time Rosenblatt has deconstructed a random item out
of habit.

"The other day, we passed a bus stop with a poster for Disney's The Country
Bears" said friend Karen Pilson, 26. "I heard him mumble something about
the incorporation of previously received notions concerning wildlife and
our ecological environment into a reassuring, behavior-validating consumer
commodity in the form of aggressively infantilized computer-animated
pseudohumans that talk and play country music. Before I even had a chance
to react, he went off the deep end and started throwing out terms like
'prenotional,' 'prolegomena' 'gynocritical,' and 'logocentrism.' I was just
stunned."

Added Pilson: "I told him he was worrying me and recommended a good
psychiatrist. Bad move, because that prompted him to launch into a whole
discussion of Foucault's 'Male Gaze' as it applies to mother/child
pair-bonding in Lacanian psychoanalysis."

In spite of his friends' concern, Rosenblatt seems unable to restrain his
reflexive impulse to deconstruct.

"I can't help it," Rosenblatt said. "Even when I close my eyes at night, I
feel myself deconstructing things in my dreams-random stuff like that
two-hour Dukes Of Hazzard reunion special or the Andy Warhol postage stamp
or commercials for that new squeezable gel deodorant. I'd say I'm going
crazy, but that presupposes an artificial barrier between societally
preexisting concepts of 'sanity' and 'insanity' which themselves represent
another false dichotomy maintained for the preservation of certain
entrenched elements of the status quo and... Oh, God. I'm doing it again."

Rosenblatt is considering taking a leave of absence from his graduate
studies to spend several months living in his mother's basement in Elmira, NY.

Asked for comment, Professor Derek Nystrom of Skidmore College, an expert
on deconstructivist thought, said that the Burrito Bandito take-out menu is
open to many interpretations.

"The menu can be viewed an infinite number of ways, depending on viewer
perspective," Nystrom said. "None of these differing views would be any
more or less 'correct.' However, the menu's Pancho Villa-style burrito
caricature, complete with bandoliers, six-guns, gaucho moustache, and
sombrero, would be considered problematic by most scholars."

Added Nystrom: "To paraphrase: 'What is a take-out menu not, anyway?
Everything, of course. What is a take-out menu? Nothing, of course."

----
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