"I'm no longer responsible for what I say or do." - David Weinberger.
I'm taking a leaf from AKMA, who reserves space on his blog for things he intends to come back to. I hereby reserve this ''space'' for a response to his call, or serve, of yesterday. It is not possible to read this man's words without feeling less alone; serenity, love, sensibility and much more that informs an intelligence of a very rare order is there.
I'm reserving the space because I haven't yet received his book, and it seems unreasonable to take up his or Steve Himmer's or David Weinberger's takes on post modernism without having read it, since DW's questioning of the book started this.
(Despite his announcement posted above, Weinberger is responsible for this thread, and he will be held accountable to standards that would cause better firms than Arthur Anderson to implode. May regiments of frozen Chinese faces stonily meet his every joke until he re-joins.)
Also, AKMA's blog is, at the moment, inaccessible. I read it late last night, but as is often the case, something or other is causing a "page cannot be displayed" message.
Here's one thing, though: We seem to have two related but, to my mind, distinct (and very large) issues here: deconstruction and post-modernism - which aren't simply conflatable, so far as I know. One has to do with reading and texts, the other (POMO) has often seemed to me more like (bias incoming!) a modishly escapist form of middle-class-intellectual Belmondoism.
Which is why AKMA's embrace of the POMO label intrigues me: A man of Christian faith proudly calls himself (I'm probably misremembering his phrase) a ''card-carrying member of Post Modernism.'' Since I've more or less assumed that the emptying out of the divine from human reality was constitutive of the POMO view of things, this is already interesting.
So let me expose one further prejudice in hopes of having it exploded before going further: My basic instinct has been to discount professions of disbelief in divinity - all except one. The sole human being who convinces me he had some insight into the death of god is the man whose eyes testified to its impact by forfeiting their inner light.
But Nietzsche also said, ''I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.''
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