Original Post and its Follow-Up
In 2004, I was steeped in French post-structuralism. Like all young people steeped in French post-structuralism, I didn't use it as an attempt to communicate. Rather, it was an attempt to alienate. I wanted to alienate myself from a certain public that I had grown weary of communicating with. I wanted to find a new community.
In fact, I was obsessed with finding a new community at the time. I thought if I got into the right PhD program or found the right friends, the anxiety would go away. At the time, I felt that the world was headed off in the wrong direction. Time was running out -- we needed to figure out what had miscarried. The anxiety came from a feeling that no one took this seriously.
In 2004, this insight was very new to me. I think all young people who read lots of books go through this phase. But often there is a great transformation. The line that progress is inevitable and that democracy and science are its security gets exposed as a fraud. When one matures, the notion of the fraud gets exposed as a fraud. There has been progress for some people. Science and democracy have been its security. The mature mind discovers that the notion of universal or automated progress is the problem. There is still so much work to do.
There are four communicating and mis-communicating cultures here: 1) those who I was trying to alienate myself from, who have lost the ability to distinguish news from entertainment, who have no desire to work on problems, 2) those who haven't gone through this transition yet, 3) those who have gone through the transition but have lost faith in projects, 4) and those who have gone through the transition and still have the energy to write and think, to do the work.
I was writing from the perspective of the second public. Without the transition, one is left in the solipsistic nihilism that (bad readings of) post-structuralism offers. Ironically, what also accompanies this transition is also a more sophisticated reading of what was at stake in the post-structuralist project.
