Audio IV

[Robin Landseadel]

On Jul 27, 2009, at 8:32 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:
>
> Those who Know, Know ...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Holloway
> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001359/

And those who know Pooh know Postmodern Pooh, by Fredrick Crews:

		An interval must separate the present from what it is not in
		order for the present to be itself, but this interval that
		constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the
		present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the
		present, everything that is thought on the basis of the
		present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being,
		and singularly substance or the subject. 5

	Some auditors, I know, will consider this line of inquiry a bit too
	theoretical for their taste. That's a pity, but Hillis Miller and the
	late Paul de Man proved long ago that Deconstruction, reading,
	and theory are all exactly the same thing. If you attempt to
	reject that conclusion, you will only be generating more theory
	and thus illustrating Paul's law. Hillis put it succinctly in his
	famous, feisty presidential address to the MLA: "If the resistance
	to theory is the resistance to reading, theory is itself the
	resistance to theory, therefore a resistance to the reading it
	advocates."

	Although all literary works, when rigorously analyzed, yield
	what Paul de Man called "allegories of the impossibility
	of reading," the ethics of Deconstruction require that we favor
	the "strong misreading" instead of the "weak misreading." We
	 wouldn't want to claim, for example, that Winniethe-Pooh is
	really about the U.S. Patent Office, America Online, or Fermat's
	last theorem. Instead, we must first establish what the text is
	"trying to say," so that we can then go about discovering its
	antiphonal, antipodal antiself. In Pooh's case, that manifest
	theme is the need to practice tolerant sociability-a virtue that
	supposedly redeems the protagonist's near absence of gray
	matter. But is that fixed intention of "A. A. Milne's" realized
	without breaching, effraction, or polylogue? Deconstructors,
	start your engines!

	Attend to Pooh without sentimentality and ask yourself what
	positive social traits he can plausibly be taken to represent. He
	is a freeloader whose affability extends no further than his next
	honey fix. Deconstructed, he is just a mouth and a digestive
	tract in charge of some rudimentary powers of rationalization.
	And when he is confronted with a different genus (the apian)
	pursuing its own programmed livelihood, he shows himself
	utterly incapable of acknowledging the Other. "The only reason
	for making honey," he deduces with infantile self-in-FAT-uation,
	"is so as I can eat it." Community values? One for all and all for
	 one?

	5. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
	(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 13.