For those of you who thought the credibility of our nation's English departments had already hit rock bottom, je vous présente Animal Studies, the latest craze in critical theory. It combines poststructuralist jargon and a militant ELF-style sentimentalization of nature into a pseudo-academic hash that is to real zoology what Lacanian psychoanalysis is to real psychology. You can pretty much get the gist of it by rereading Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" and replacing every instance of the word cyborg with manimal. Or you could do something more productive, like sit on the couch and light your farts.RATING: 2%
(Image from www.theonion.com.)
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7 comments:
English departments can't recover until THEY have realized they have hit rock bottom. I think it is written in the rules somewhere that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks.
I dunno. I studied sociology, which is not nearly creative or challenging enough for the animal studies label.
Certainly not. And biology is far too prosaic. Nope, the real action, predictably, may be found in the more obscure later writings of Martini Heidegger and Jackass Derrida.
i saw a couple of turtles doing it at the zoo one time it was p. boring
Turtle sex rulez (repost)
Your first problem is that you're reading the Chronicle of Higher Education. Also, that's probably your second through eighth problems as well.
The cover story caught my eye in the UTD mailroom so I stole it out of some girl's mailbox and read it. I thought briefly that the bold print's suggestion that people are actually animals and products of biological evolution might represent some sort of positive statement about human nature, but it's actually just a pompous and convoluted exercise in saying that the conventional distinction between human and animal is metaphysical and ultimately untenable. Which Darwin--who isn't mentioned once in the article--actually said 131 years ago:
"He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." --Charles Darwin, Notebook M, 1838.
Fucking morons.
I've never heard of Animal Studies, but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, I was the one saying in the 1950s that if we start Feminist Studies, well, where will it end?
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