To those who have doubts over the guilt of Megrahi, I can say only that I know nothing more about that than is public knowledge, so I do not make up stories about it.

I agree that American senators would want to know the truth about the Lockerie bomber. That, however, does not give them any right to demand that our Prime Minister, who is responsible only to us, should dance to their tune. I will at some time see if their president will come to be grilled about the support given by American politicans to the IRA. I suspect the answer will be the same as I got from President Bush when I wrote to warn him that being photographed shaking hands with McGuinness was not compatible with a “war on terror”. I can assure you President Reagan did ensure that America helped us in the Falklands War. I do not think the State Department was happy about that, but then I do not think the Foreign Office was happy about the rescue of the Falklanders either.
Norman Tebbit

‘Dreams are what you wake up from’ (Raymond Carver).

This critique of the “commodification” of American life is evident throughout the novel, epitomised by the figure of ‘T.J. Eckleberg’ gazing over the ruins of “early twentieth-century commercialism”. In addition there is a veiled attack on how this commercialism ends up mechanising and undermining human life, highlighting the link between “capitalism and superficiality”. The fateful car is described in detail loaded with the sense of Gatsby’s extravagant wealth, as is the description of the dead Myrtle Wilson, body parts flapping and “swinging loose”, the futility of checking the “heart beat”. The human empathy is completely absent as she is delineated as a mechanised object. Simmel explores this notion of social deterioration in the context of free market capitalist societies, positing “the modern metropolis… is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness… and need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships”.

In Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ we see the Franklinesque dream and protestant work-ethic embodied in the context of an expanding consumerist culture and a time when “entrepreneurship became the primary model of American identity”. The broken refrigerator is one of several symbols of wealth and consumption with inherent flaws. By obscuring exactly what it is that Willie sells, Miller universalises the ‘salesman’ as a discreet entity, one which is caught between a dialectic of empiricism, and spirituality through personal achievement and self-fulfillment. Willie’s aspirations to fulfill his abstract conception of the post-war American dream have to be constantly reconciled with the material statistics of sales and profit margins. The marginalisation of the female presence and the collective narcissism of Biff and Happy are indications of the domestic and social implications of the American Dream.

Incredulity towards meta-narratives

Heavily influenced by Edward Said, Bhabha identifies as problematic the relationship between two totalising concepts of “culture” and the “state”, and this association, “often aggressive”, engendering a “degree of xenophobia” - He affirms that cultures are tolerated but within a kind of Althusserian ideological “grid” which effectively marginalises minorities by never ceasing to define them in terms of some dominant order.

In Deconstruction however this dominant order is illusory. Taking the Male/Female opposition in D.H Lawrence’s Son’s and Lovers as an example, where Mrs Morel plays a fully domesticated role in contrast to Walter Morels aggressively masculine working class depiction. For Derrida these “dichotomous categories” are intertwined because nothing can be purely distinct. It follows therefore that the male identity is inextricably bound up with the female identity. What Deconstruction is directly challenging is the Saussaurian idea of “difference” which assumes that one signifier is clearly distinct from the other.

This “theoretically innovative” approach in both feminist and postcolonial theory includes refusing to accept the “dialectical structure of European ideological confrontations”, (and in the case of postcolonialism) “borrowed from the very components of its racist syllogism” and represents a profound shift. For theorists to develop a more effective understanding of systems of patriarchy and imperialism, Bhabha proposes going beyond narratives of “orginary and initial subjectivities” and explore “cultural hybridities” and “new signs of identity” in society. Where theorists like Edward Said employed underlying binaries of East/West which are difficult to go beyond, Bhabha attempts to dismantle this and form an understanding of human culture as fluid and constantly being influenced by mutual “collaboration” and “contestation”. In this sense Bhabha demonstrates “incredulity toward metanarratives” a typical trend in poststructuralist thought.

Since it imports ideas of philosophy, psychology and history in order to understand literature, poststructuralism engages texts at different levels. Bhabha locates culture in a history of the world based on cosmopolitanism and continuous migration influencing all societies. This idea of culture being “hybrid” and multi-dimensional can be captured by the status of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The fact that the text has little or no engagement with Heathcliff’s origins despite his background displays a tacit acceptance that “hybridity” is a part of culture.

It is here where Bhabha seems to depart from Edward Said. Where Said tends to focus on the mechanics of power in imperialism and the imposed stereotypes of the Orient, depicted by the West as ancient, mysterious and despotic; Bhabha, recalling Derridean deconstruction, both co-operates and contaminates these ideological binaries by showing how, through writers like Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, increasingly “‘national’” cultures are “being produced from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities”.

Uprisings against colonialism are not necessarily a result of, as Said would put it, the “grand-narratives of Emancipation and Enlightenment”, but represent instead the disassociation or deterioration of the “narrative function” and the empowerment of the “beyond” or ‘present’, “that moment blasted out of the continuum of history”. Frantz Fanon, a champion of the Algerian revolution, echoes this disillusionment with the humanist grand narratives of Europe, a Europe for Fanon that is “never done talking of Man, yet murders men everywhere they find them”. The sentiment captures one aspect of the “crisis” of grand narratives which poststructuralism tends to address and solidify.


The paradoxical nature of post-structuralism might be its own undoing. It will inevitably undermine itself by claiming no inherent privilege or validity even as it simultaneously undermines all other belief systems which do claim essential validity. As such we see this break down of moral and authorial absolutism the implications of which are vast and varying. It may be more effective to subvert meta-narratives of Capitalism for instance which is currently under profound pressure, by uncovering the contradictions in the overall structure and undermining it from within. Alternatively a rejection of any totalising belief system, by placing meaning in a “mobile, decentred location”, a kind of atopia, may stifle any endeavour to propose serious alternatives to our understanding of the world, of literature and notions of history and ‘truth’. What is apparent is that through poststructuralism, ‘theory’, “having deconstructed just about everything else”, had “finally succeeded in deconstructing itself”.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable."
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language

One of the funniest things about the internet is that no matter how much better it gets, how much more intellectual or culturally valuable, its primary use will always be pornography. I think of the web as an encyclopedia with a dirty magazine shoved inside.

I worked in a fish packing plant in Massachusetts, on the line with a sincere Jewish poet from Harvard and three lesbians; one was beautiful, one grim; both loved the other, who was intelligent. I loved her, too. I dreamed of violating her purity. They taked among themselves, in creepy whispers, always about Jung. In a dark corner, away from our line, old Portuguese men slit fish into open flaps, flicking out the bones. I could only see their eyes and knives. I’d arrive early every morning to dash in and out until the stench became bearable. After work I’d go to bed and pluck fish scales out of my skin.

PURISTS are already up in arms about the title of Harald Zwart’s remake of John G. Avildsen’s 1984 crowd-pleaser, which did much to popularise martial arts among children in the West. Strictly speaking, this new film has nothing to do with karate, so it should really be called The Kung Fu Kid. Or we could just bite the bullet and call it Will Smith’s Son Goes to China.

Yes, it was low budget. Yes, it was promoting China as a tourist destination!
A black kid - there has been skin-colour based racism in China for a long time. As a brown-skinned girl, I've seen it. But the Chinese know it's wrong, and what better way for the government to correct their ways than to make a movie promoting friendship between different skin colours.
Second of all, where did karate come from, I wonder? From whom did the Japanese inherit their martial arts? Could one argue that the original Karate Kid movies were little more than "Americans can indeed learn something from the people they obliterated in WWII? Peace, man!" propaganda?