further reading...

[kaigou]

Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity — Lawrence Lessig

Find Lessig's book and READ IT. If you have even the remotest interest in intellectual property rights, are an artist, musician, or author, or just want to understand what property rights mean (and what they've become) in our internet age... READ THIS BOOK.

also reread (while checking on specific arguments in each) The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of a Religion — Paul M. van Buren; Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich; The Third Peacock: The Problem of God and Evil by Robert Farrar Capon. (If you are xtian & curious about theology and its linguistics and arguments, I cannot recommend Capon enough. Like, triple quadruple recommend. He is the least stuffy theologian, like, EVER. A sharp wit and an affectionately deft touch for the subject matter, and somehow educational all at the same time.)

Irony & Crisis — Stuart Sim

Every now and then, Sim lets slip the snark. No wonder about 90% of the book is quotes from other peoples' texts and so very little actual analysis or synthesis. When he can't even make it more than a paragraph between four-plus paragraph quotes (fair use limits? we don't need no stinking limits!) and he's already into the subtle snark... maybe it's time to find someone else to write the book. Or tell Sim to get over the stage fright and go ahead and snark. Dude, it's postmodernism. It's the damn heart of snarkness.

Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary — Steven Connor

...to pin one's faith ... upon the subversive sublime enacted in critical language requires crucially the privileging of language as the arena of all power. Many claims about the subversive power of critical style depend upon the barely legitimate intensification of the view that lanaguage is an embodiment or enactment of forms of power to the point at which language is seen as the secret vibrating heart of all power whatsoever -- as though all that were really objectionable about, say, US imperialism, were it syntactic habits and choice of metaphor. This absolute collapse of language and power leads to (or allows) the grandiose, usually self-mortifying claim that the most radical form of politics consists of turning languages of authority (criticism, for example) against themselves. The difference between the renunciatory and the sublime odes of postmodern criticism is in this sense only one of degree; where renunciation tries to give away authority, the subile mode authoritatively evict authority from its own language. Both modes involve the implicit claim that everything may be done in terms of language itself, and may be regulated by an intention which is actualized in and through the language alone.

It is either wrong of me or simply postmodern, but for some reason this passage makes me think of both the tension between postmodernism and feminism, and at the same time reminding me of thefourthvine's brilliance:

It used to be that the Anointed Few stood at the front of the room - sometimes a tiny classroom, sometimes a giant lecture hall with video cameras catching each golden word for those not lucky enough to hear it in person - and spoke. And everyone else was just audience: the listeners, the readers, the passively entertained. Fandom has turned your lectures into seminars. We keep speaking up. We keep having our own ideas. We don't even have the courtesy to raise our hands and ask to speak. And sometimes we lock you out of the room altogether.

Yes, the implications are working on more than one level, and yes, there's a reason I didn't remove the reference to US imperialism. I think the connotation is an important aspect of the critique of, well, the critique.