Mad Pursuits

It is natural that the burgeoning twenty-first century have some questions for the remnants of the twentieth. To re-interrogate Deconstructionism, its aims and ethos: would it be transgressive to inquire whether certain Deconstructionist formulations employ roughly the same imperative spread-sheet employed by post-modernists and post-modernism? If Deconstructionism and post-modernism do share a number of imperatives, will that create a conception of Deconstructionism acceptable to us in the humanities now? These questions would not arise in my consciousness unless I harbored suspicions that The Death Of The Author, the dissolution of the constitutive subject, and there is nothing outside the text might have been meant perhaps more literally then some have supposed. As in, the Deconstructionist game consisted, at least partly, of wiping out the potentialities of individuals and individual authorship, and obliterating (as post-modernism did, in destroying both aesthetic formality and metaphysical inquiry) any sense for the potentialities of being an individual against conglomerate interests at all. These are dark surmises, and may end as nothing more, just as looking for depth consonance beneath the surface of Deconstructionist textuality may or may not find anything jeweled, behind the veneer of crabbed hermeticism which constitutes most Deconstructionist texts. They may be games against metaphysical inquiry or not, and indicate whether Deconstructionism amounts, at least in part, to a disguised, baroque-seeming enforcement of post-modern rigor against aesthetic formality, metaphysical inquiry, and the potentialities of the individual against society.

I am thinking of these things as I continue my own inquiry into values around aesthetic formality, via examination of Keats' Odal Cycle. Keats has his own, individual manner of enforcing the form of his forms; how he makes the Odes preen (and I do not wish to use "preen" pejoratively, though it may seem so) and pirouette in advertising their own sumptuous gorgeousness, and every form becomes meta-formal in advertising itself. The liberation possible in this century, expedited through myself, Abby, and PFS in general, has so much to do with the potentialities of individuals, both in alignments and against conglomerates and conglomerate interests, that I cannot help but laugh at the post-modern illness, which blusters boldly forward, proud never to seem to be retreating, from nothingness into greater nothingness, while poor Abby and I are forced to blaze a trail that, where formality is concerned, must begin from nineteenth century models (Keats, Shelley, Ingres, David): shame on us! Metaphysics, formality, individuals! The dark supposition of a secret alignment between Deconstructionism and post-modernism is just one vista issuing out of what we have accomplished in the last ten years of Philadelphia, and it remains just that for me: a supposition. It will take a few decades for Deconstructionism to demonstrate just how much was (and is) actually there beneath the surface of its dictates, and for what manifests around PFS to respond adequately.