Almost Dinner With Foucault

Almost Dinner With Foucault:

A Rant on Deconstruction

I've had reason, recently, to ponder my intense dislike for deconstruction, and why I so easily snipe at Derrida. Not that anyone cares. At least, no one who is seriously into deconstruction cares what I have to say about it. Why then I do care at all about whether people read (or do not) Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, the rest? The truth is, I'd rather people be reading other things. There are so many other things that...well, yes, I discourage people from reading Derrida et al. If you want to know why, read on.

First of all, the deconstructionists are con men (and some women, although you'll be hard pressed, even after 25 years of feminist deconstruction to find a single woman's name that is as strongly associated with deconstruction as are:

Foucault

Derrida

Lacan

Riceour

Lyotard

DeMan

Ricouer

But wait!

Where did I get that list? Okay, for sure, Derrida is a deconstructionist. He says so AND

the Encyclopedia Brittanica says so. And so do a whole bunch of other folks. So far, so good.

But when did Foucault become a deconstructionist? Am I a deconstructionist? Did I get to be one without knowing, or did they make me into one without my consent? Isn't everyone a deconstructionist?

I don't know. But let me say this to those of you who think I'm a deconstructionist: I'm not. (Now, being deconstructionists, you will surely interpret me in any way you like, certainly my own intention will not be the first thing on your list in interpreting me. If you decided that I am a deconstructionist (anyway), then you are a deconstructionist. If you believe me, and think I am NOT a deconstructionist, then you're not a deconstructionist. Dig?

Anyway, you can probably see the main reason I go around deriding Derrida (not my pun, deconstructionists used it already - I may not like deconstructionists, but not liking someone never stopped me from stealing their jokes - if jokes can be stolen (aren't they meant to be retold?) - but that's another story)) is in order to make it plain, in every way possible that I am not a deconstructionist, and do not associate myself with deconstruction.

To the deconstructionists, I sound like a brat right about now (this was pointed out to me by an 18-year-old deconstructionist/skater in one of my classes). I'm just stamping my foot and saying, "I'm not, I'm not, I'm not."

I got the list from cracking open a few journals and books (published by major publishers and juried journals, etc.) and looking at who gets called a deconstructionist. You can regard the above list (with the exception of Derrida) as a bunch of potential deconstructionists. Foucault isn't alive to say whether he is or isn't, but I was almost certain that he wasn't, at least at one time.

Anyway, I greatly admired Foucault (and to some extent, still do) back when I was a girl. Back then, he was just Foucault: the postmodern historian.

My life as a deconstructionist

Most of my views on deconstruction come from being a pretty thorough student of Foucault, Althusser and Ricouer (at one time). At any rate, I got A's on all my papers on those folks, in graduate school. (The same university that still hosts major symposia on post-modernism and deconstruction, http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html). I was not the best of all the graduate students at this type of thing - but, I wasn't exactly the worst, either.

Indeed, the more I learned about Althusser, Foucault, Ricouer and Lyotard, the more my grades went up (in classes taught by admirers of those folks). On the other hand, I learned even more from people like Adrienne Rich (was she a deconstructionist? is she? isn't she a poet?), Victor Turner (a symbolic anthropologist), Clifford Geertz (especially Geertz, although I've heard him called a deconstructionist, too - but I think he calls himself a phenomenologist), Levi-Strauss (Derrida critized Levi-Strauss: therefore, not a deconstructionist, right?)

From Foucault I learned that knowledge is power. Later, folks will claim that Foucault is Heideggerian, Foucault will call himself explicit Nietzschean. Now, after reading Foucault's first three books, I learned about epistemes (a notion some claim is very close to Heidegger's notion of Being), but that's not what I liked about Foucault. Here's what I liked:

his scholarship into older sources, involving the dreding up of arcane anecdotes (truly dynamite!)

the way he'd make "lateral" connections between things (a lot like Geertz does in his "wink" article)

Is that enough to make me Foucaultian? Actually, no. Each time I was left to my own resorts in writing a paper (my undergraduate honors thesis, for example), I immediately deserted the terrain of Foucault and did something else. Much closer, it turns out, to the work of Franz Boas. Much closer to "pure anthropology."

So was I deconstructionist? I continued to get high grades in classes offered by those profs, I wanted to go to grad school, I took more classes on deconstruction. I specialized, in Marxist deconstruction (Althusser) and feminist deconstruction and Marxist-feminist deconstruction. My writing being naturally obscure, I had some talent in this direction. My writing became more obscure.

But I didn't admire my own writing. I admired other people's. I admired, not Foucault, but Paul Theroux. Not Lyotard but Tolstoi. And the up and coming anthropologists I liked were not deconstructionists.

So, if I found deconstruction relatively "easy going" (and a good ticket into graduate school at Big University), what did I find difficult? I was tolerable in math. I could pass a little logic. Where was I faltering?

History. Graduate seminars in history, while open to me if I begged, repeatedly resulted in less-than-desirable grades, like A minuses and even B pluses. Bart Bernstein, after listening to a bunch of my "anthropology" said, "You're not trying to be a historian, are you?" Actually, I was. I didn't see how I couldn't write about cultures of the past. Why did historians hate what the post-modernists and deconstructions spread throughout campus (but largely in departments of English, French, Classics and Anthropology) liked so much? I worked hard at history, and improved. My grades from my post-modern, Foucault-loving profs went down.

Science. Oh, boy. Post-modern deconstructionist, "there is no truth" kind of thinking doesn't fly with science. Prof. Pittendrigh would listen to certain kinds of questions in class (I never opened my mouth in that one) and say, slowly, "Yes, I suppose it's possible, by which I mean there is some small probability that this could be true. If there is a one in ten trillion chance of it being true, and we have ten trillion chances...I guess what you say might be true." And then he'd stare at the student. Sometimes, he'd ask, "What constitutes a "chance" in science? How many universes and events are there?" Pittendrigh was on "possible worlds" territory, the domain of analytic philosophy (although it was and is still somewhat controversial there). But he made it sound as if the "knowledge/truth is impossible" refrain from Derrida/Foucault had some fundamental flaw to it.

It turned out, I wanted to learn History and Science, and so I turned away from post-modernist studies. The prose of post-modernism is deliberately, sometimes hysterically obscure and labored. This is seen as a good thing within the field. It is a lot like the arcane symbolic studies that lie at the heart of many religions, and for which a leap of faith is required. If you "don't get it," you're told you're stupid. If you say you get it (you need not prove it, no one can), you're with the in crowd. The cult-like aspects of post-modernism are annoying, to say the least.

So is Foucault a deconstructionist? I don't believe he ever said he was. Derrida (who is King of Deconstruction) criticized Foucault. What would I have to do or read to be able to answer the question? The number of words is countably infinite. I read fairly quickly, but even so, it would take the entire rest of my life to read the ever-expanding body of literature on Derrida. Having spent a number of years on Foucault, only to more or less abandon himd, why would I want to start again with another member of that conversation?

Well, here's one way to decide.

Look At Who I Admire

Levy-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Renato Rosaldo, Michelle Rosaldo, Mircea Eliade, Roland Barthes, Eric Hobsbawm, Daniel Boorstin, Paul Johnson, Victor Turner, Franz Boas, Marshall Sahlins, Sigmund Freud, Colin Renfrew, Dan Sperber, Peter Bowen, Paul Theroux, Tim Dorsey, Paul Fussell, Kant, Plato, Dostoevsky...many more. Heck, I like Aleister Crowley (and find him far more interesting on many levels than Foucault). Martin Buber..Gandhi...

Who had I Read But Ultimately Didn't Like As Much?

Foucault, Marvin Harris, Althusser, Durkheim, Heidegger, Sartre.

The basic precepts of deconstruction (that truth and meaning are impossible) leave us adrift. Derrida, in 1994, called his own work a "failure," and said that, unless he could come to terms with his own death and death itself, he would consider his work a failure. I would, too. And here, it would seem, we have an indication from the man himself...not to read his work. When asked if deconstruction is dead (as many claim), Derrida said something like, "No, it lives, people are publishing all the time." But his own work has veered away from reading those people, and toward the issue of understanding death and loss: the death of good friends, his own impending death.

I too, want to come to terms with life and death. When I need assistance, I too, look to my friends. Derrida, whose work now emphasizes such values and processes as "true forgiveness," is lovely. But so are Hallmark greeting cards. Why would I want to read him? I already know about the value of forgiveness, it is readily apparent that forgiveness is needed to solve many pressing world problems. This is, hardly, new. And no one would have published it if Derrida hadn't already been...Derrida (or only his friends would have published it...and even now, only his friends read it).

Dinner with Foucault:

Postmodernists are Charismatic

Regular scholars are...boring

Sometime around 1981-2, my orals exam committee chair invited Foucault to America. When Foucault came, he gave a series of standing room only lectures on campus. On one night, my professor invited several graduate students to dinner with Foucault, at a Chinese restaurant, if I recall correctly. I had gone to each night's lectures, which Foucault delivered in English. He was handsome, especially for an "old guy," as we young folks said. I didn't know then that he was gay, or that he was ill. I thought he was quite attractive, as did many other girl graduate students. (I was in my mid-twenties, but having been a complete, bookish nerd until then and, like many other female graduate students, going through a delayed adolescence). I don't recall that I was specifically invited to go to dinner, but that I eagerly joined other grad students who certainly were invited.

I didn't sit near Foucault, and didn't speak directly to him. I admired him from afar. Surprisingly, even though he was speaking French some of the time, something magical happened and I was able, for moments, to understand him (I had been brushing up, I'd had two years of university French - but in general, I can only read the language slowly). I've found since then that on such occasions, when certain kinds of folks are around, such translatability between languages does occur.

I remember very little that's salient from that evening. Much of the conversation revolved around Foucault's notion of the episteme and whether the episteme of the West had reached the highlands of the Philippines. Two of the anthropologists present had done extensive study among Ilongot headhunters, in the Philippines, whose traditional way of life had not undergone disruption until the mid-70's. While the Ilongot might (as we were speaking) be roped into the episteme that Foucault characterized as western, what would the effect on the episteme be? We all knew you couldn't break out of it, see beyond it, but how did it change? I remember Shelley Rosaldo asking something like that.

At one point, the conversation turned to meaning and my professor said something like, "Isn't it very likely that the world is completely meaningless, and that humans frantically engage in constructing meaning, because they have a horror of meaninglessness?" Foucault agreed that such was the case, and said something about it being the domain of anthropology to discover why humans, of all animals, took this quest for meaning so compulsively. Meaning-creation activity.

I thought at the time, was this really so new? Weren't we discussing the same things in Bill Skinner's seminars, but without reference to French philosophy and deconstruction? And, in other classes, Immanuel Wallerstein's work seemed to bring up the same questions - but no one considered Wallerstein a deconstructionist, at least not back then.

Today, several of the people who were at that dinner are dead. I have turned to the human process of constructing meaning for myself. I like nature, and I have no desire to fight against it: constructing meaning is the human game. Since two of the people there that night died early, much earlier than I hope to, I have often thought about their deaths (Foucault's and Shelley's). Were they happy? Foucault seemed happy, incandescent. I don't know if Shelley was as happy, but she too emitted some kind of light. But now, I think about my own death, the death of my parents and elder friends, and I am wonder if the people I know and love are happy.

Derrida is far better-looking and more charming (by all accounts) than Foucault. Arguments amongst Chomsky, Foucault and Derrida about who is the most politically correct are off to the side, as is the issue of their attractiveness. Still, I mention this because - well, in academia, it counts. Academics are real people, with sex drives and other drives, and their lives are often spent in dull offices. People who have charisma go further, and Foucault had charisma. Derrida's pictures show him to be a far more handsome chap than Foucault. His accent, it is said, is wonderful. People line up to see him, these days, as if he were a rock star.

Americans, in particular, are susceptible to this continental charm. Would Derrida ever have gotten as far without that charisma? If he had been Mexican or from New Zealand, could he have been Derrida? Is what he's saying really that different from the much less well-known and much less-read Octavio Paz? He is often described as the "quintessential French philosopher." To me, that includes a measure of sex appeal, suaveness, and charm - qualities that Foucault certainly displayed, and which were a part of his reception in academia (and the desire of folks to be near him) as his work itself. It implies the same process by which relegate ordinary English words (like cow) to denoting unattractive things, while preferring to consume "beef," which came in from the French.

I don't know what part the Francophilia played, but it was a part. University students of my day turned out in enormous numbers to hear French intellectuals. Poor Habermas, with his speech defect and funny hair, barely drew a roomful.

But, given the fact that most folks who read Foucault think he's spouting nonsense (due to his prose style, mainly) and Derrida is even more (deliberately?) inpenetrable - and the fact that a Derrida-server was able to emulate Derrida fairly well at Stanford, which caused computer scientists to mock us social scientists no end - how can I recommend reading Derrida? Should I recommend him for the reasons I returned (after that dinner) to three more years of serious Foucault-study? (Because he's cute? Because he's French? Because he's so hard to understand, it will be proof of my genius if I can?)

Or maybe I should recommend him because I find his literary performance occasionally interesting? If he called himself an "author" instead of a "philosopher" (or at least tried to inhibit others from calling him a philosopher), I might be able to recommend him with a bit lighter heart.

Today, I prefer prose that is comprehensible. Reading the deconstructionists gained me one thing: I learned to read better. When I returned to ordinary philosophy (like Descartes or Kant), it was much easier to read than before. Sort of like doing mountain-training at the gym. If you're looking for an intellectual sprint-exercise, read Derrida. If his style appeals to you, read Derrida. (Quotes from Derrida, illustrating style).

As it stands, my own experience of postmodernism and deconstruction (if Foucault is a deconstructionist) is that exploring it is like falling into a bog, with most of the spectators/participants pleased that you have fallen in and all too delighted (just waiting, really) to cry out "You're in over your head! You're drowning!" They feel no obligation to help out. And the ones who first made their home in the bog (tenured professors, mainly in Modern Thought or French or English or Comparative Literature - not, interestingly, folks from the sciences or social sciences or philosophy and nearly all of them, these days, feminists) will welcome you if you bring tribute, or tear you pieces if you don't. Again, sort of like high school cheer-leading, a social dynamic I never much liked.

Foucault himself was not nearly as meanspirited, that evening, as most of his followers at the Big University.

On the other hand, several years later, I discovered my other idol (Althusser) was in fact, one mean dude. For example, he murdered his wife. Some (fellow deconstructionists and friends of Althusser) hint she had it coming, but still, it was a bad thing to do. A very thoughtful woman (not a deconstructionist) wrote a book entitled, Why Althusser Killed His Wife, because the feminist-deconstructionists just weren't getting around to talking about it.

My one big criticism of "western thought" is that, as it has been taught in major universities for at least a century, thought is considered to be somehow divorced from action, from ethics, from life itself. You can then have a "system of thought" that both encourages and discourages Nazism or apartheid (at the same time!) Marx, who was no deconstructionist, tells us to judge thought by its praxis (the way it gets put into action). Derrida turns out to be a "good guy" in so far as he sticks by his friends, and rails against racism. But what of the others (his close intellectual compatriots)? We have to conclude that Derrida is a good guy, not because of his thought, but for some other reason.

So I am not attracted to deconstructionists for their thought, because of their mixed praxis. Instead, I am attracted to analysis that provides conclusions, and is based on some notion of Truth (Truth may be unknowable, but to paraphrase Woody Allen, we have to model ourselves on something). The people I really admired seldom or never mention deconstructionists in their work. Indeed, many of these folks seem to have discovered "the method" on their own (without reading any deconstruction), but do not view the method in itself as the end.

Today, those many of those same deconstructionists professors, who once used Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Althusser and so on in their graduate seminars are teaching (you guessed it)

Malinowski

Gregory Bateson

Franz Boas

Levy-Strauss

Margaret Mead (!)

Mauss (heavily deconstructed by Derrida, early on, poor man)

Of course, they're criticizing them, but that's a form of teaching them. ("Criticism" and "analysis" were the words in use for this kind of activity before "deconstruction" came along).

The word "deconstruction"

Okay, they could have chosen a better word. While people were certainly using the word back in 1981 or 82 (when I almost had dinner with Foucault), people spoke about the "Frankfurt School" and "neo-Freudian psychoanalytic theory" and Foucault introduced himself as an historian. The word Dekonstruction was coined by Nazi physician Hermann Goring, in 19__ while he was working at Nazi psychiatric hospital. Now, I haven't read Goring, but I'm not sure the early deconstructionists had, either. They maybe should have. I've never invented a school of thought, but if I did, I'd research the name of it first and make damn sure it didn't have unpleasant aesthetic, moral or political associations (from my own point of view, of course).

I'd research it in two ways, by the way. I'd want to know where the word had been used before, and I'd want to know how the "common man" saw the term. Too many times, intellectual movements are derailed or coopted due to silly mistakes like calling yourself something that a Nazi called himself.

I know, I know. The "swastika" can be deconstructed - and it is truly not a Nazi symbol. It has many other meanings, both within the cultures from which it sprung, and from the points of view of those who see it de novo. But, if you put a swastika tatoo on your arm (or a decal on your car), I'm not going to look to be your buddy. That's just me. But there are a lot of folks like me. So, it's sort of like wearing cheerleading insignia: you either want that "look" or you don't. Am I an old poop? Should I try to get to know you first? Maybe. But in my family, we lost two grandfathers to the Nazis, my dad goes psycho at the sign of the swastika (or anything else Nazi) and I won't bring that stuff into my home. I work at home, a lot, and I don't see what I do at home as distinct from my academic work.

You can see the "swastika" as standing in relation to some "social facts": (people get really annoyed when they see it - to me, that's a fact. The resulting punch-in-the-nose you might get from some people from displaying it, also a fact). But deconstructionists say there are no facts. Hmmm. And, of course, they do get "punched in the nose" quite a bit (academically speaking). In reminds me, a lot, of the Jerry Springer show, when some guest says, "I didn't realize that you'd get so upset if I slept with your teenage sister!" Where are the facts? In one's own mind? That's where the deconstructionists say they are (and Foucault does, too).

This means, of course, that there is no certain program of research. Since there are no facts (only what people hold in their minds), there is no need to search for them. Foucault, on the other hand, searched for historical facts (which is probably why Derrida had a quarrel with him). Lacan actually used the "facts" of his psychoanalytic practice (his experience inside the very clinic Foucault was deconstructing) in his work. And, really, there is plenty of evidence that deconstructionists do use facts.

Many deconstructionists (I don't know about Derrida) go to doctors when they are sick. They, as much as any of us, prefer scientifically demonstrated treatments. A person who prefers aromatherapy for their cancer treatment is, in my opinion, ignoring certain facts (and may be called, properly, in some sense, a deconstructionist). I wouldn't want to stand in their way. But if the person were my loved one and familiar, I would urge them to try more proven treatment. I believe there is a world of matter, that facts about matter (and other things) exist outside of the human mind. People as disparate as Einstein and Marx agree with me, by the way. And so do many deconstructionists who, when they get sick, seek "material" treatments. I look forward to reading Norris's biography of Derrida, to see if Derrida ever went to the doctor. And, I'm sure, someone (friend or foe) will mention the facts of Derrida's ultimate death, in light of his deconstructionism (will he seek material treatment or not?)

Gravity works, regardless of the episteme.

And they didn't invent anything anyway

Aside from inventing a new school of prose, self-conscious and muddy, the deconstructionists aren't doing anything so unique or special. You won't be able to get one of them to say what is unique or special about their work, either (they don't go there). You will see frequent attacks (by deconstructionists) on others (like John Updike) whose prose is crystal clear and elegant. You can submit your own prose to a woman (a graduate student at Harvard) who will assist you in "translating" your words into the proper deconstructionist speech. There are some computer programs that do the same thing.

Deconstructionists sometimes invent new words for old concepts, sometimes they take old words and change the meaning. This isn't new.

Being obscurantist isn't new, either. If you like that kind of thing, go for it.

But what irks me is the claim that they somehow invented something. Derrida skirts around this claim, to give him credit, but doesn't oppose all the people who write about him saying "deconstruction is new, it's different."

And it may be dead. There is more talk about its death and about "postdeconstruction" these days than about deconstruction. Since deconstruction opened up every single text to deconstruction (and deconstruction varies indefinitely according to the ethnicity, politics, gender, class, nationality, language, etc. of the deconstructor - a Bantu would deconstruct Updike differently than Derrida), it created a minor industry in academia. Further, it taught people to treat everything as a text (trees, boats, camels, music, history, science). The infinite number of texts and the infinite number of deconstructions (new deconstructors are born all the time) would make for a very large deconstruction industry, wouldn't you think?

But in fact, if you weren't a tenured deconstructionist by 1995, you're unlikely to get a job as one: everybody who wants one has already got one, and Paul deMan screwed things, for everyone. You can google Paul deMan and read that story elsewhere. So the creation of a vast deconstruction industry is stalled out. If it's so important, how can that be?

Deconstruction: Going to the circus

For me, personally, watching/reading deconstruction is a lot like going to the circus: it's a particular form of entertainment, it hangs together because it's all Under the Big Top (there's no necessary relationship among its part), it's eclectic, it's unnecessary and I have to be in the right mood for it. Derrida is the ringmaster (and, at real circuses, I always think there's too much ringmaster and not enough prancing horses and roaring tigers; of clowns: most circuses have just the right number). Lately, I'm not much into circuses (for lots of reasons, although the Cirque du Soleil is really cool, still I wouldn't want to see it every night).

And try as I might to read or listen to Derrida (he gives interviews, lectures, talks a lot), he manages to annoy me within the first few minutes or paragraphs. For example, at a conference (transcript on the web) in 1994, Derrida addresses first whether the paper he submitted (eventually published in Surfaces) should have been written in English. He goes on about how the Anglo-American paradigm is undoubtely the mainstream paradigm ot the "work we're doing" and then ponders how this English-dominance came about? He says, "I wonder how that happened?" Does he really not know anything about the subject? How can he not know? There are volumes and volumes written about how English came to be dominant within academia, and quite a bit about how it dominates deconstruction. He says it as if the question is new, as if there's very little known about it, and offers absolutely no indication that he knows that dozens of other fine academics have asked (and actually answered) the same question. He certainly can't criticze their answers (which would be interesting) because, apparently, he doesn't know they exist! I find myself wondering how someone so smart can permit himself to sound so stupid.

But, that's not what he's doing. He's pretending or perhaps he believes...that no one knows the answer, that the answer will have to wait, that someday he will provide the answer. What a bunch of BS. (I'm sorry, see, he gets to me).

Yes, he's cute and French. At seventy, he still has his hair (and it's quite attractive). And he's very, very smart. And a good student of Heidegger, and his heart is in the right place (by my view) on apartheid. But the man bugs. He's someone who achieved celebrity status for the kinds of reasons that Timothy Leary or Ken Kesey did (which is not a bad thing, it's just not an intellectual credential). But he's not a good performer, in my view, even of his own work. (Which he admits, by the way, in the same 1994 dialogue). So maybe, he should sit down and quit performing. (Like Barbra Streisand should - Funny Girl was great, but enough already!)

P.S. on Lyotard

Lyotard, well-known for dissing and abandoning his own theories (for him, they seem to be made up in order to be abandoned, something I actually admire) is, apparently, a deconstructionist (given what I just said, I'm not sure how you can call him anything at all). Lately, he's started this dialogue on how we use "war metaphors" all the time, in academia and elsewhere, and this agonistic mentality pervades human discourse. Many folks who read Lyotard say they don't like war, and wish this agonistic paradigm would go away.

The word, of course, comes from primatology. (Yay!) Better choice of word origin, I think, than deconstruction (so Lyotard gets one brownie point from me).

I like Lyotard because, when I departed deconstruction, it was to ponder whether nature existed (it does) and whether we would be so bad off simply "following" our natures (I still haven't decided). Lyotard, off on something of the same trajectory, finds that there is one area of human nature that remains truly problematic: agonistic behavior.

And, I believe, he's right. So, since Lyotard agrees with me, I like him. (Again, are you sensing how this is like a popularity contest?)

Some folks think that by studying agonistic behavior, we'll create more it (huh? but yes, some deconstructionists take this view...see..._____________) Others think this is the way to stop the behavior (like a medical paradigm). Some think merely talking about it makes it worse, others think you can talk about it as long as you don't use the "language of conflict" paradigm.

None of this is new, folks. Konrad Lorenz got into this stuff a long time ago. Desmond Morris, even, gets into it. The philosophical aspects of it have been spoken of before, too. It's good stuff, but it's not new. By posing it in deconstructionist language (and in deconstructionist circles), it appears new (to them). But I've been reading Lyotard because I'm interested in agonism. He's keeping the issue wide open, as it should be, lending his considerable popularity (he's not as big as Derrida, but still, he's big) to an issue that is of interest to anthropology.

So, if you must read a deconstructionist (and you're an anthropology student), you might want to start with Lyotard.