Hi Folks: While I love Sociology, I must also recognize that my discipline is sometimes full of bs. So I thought I’d illustrate - as a joke - the style of some of my "post-modern" colleagues. For this, I use the current post-mortem cult and economic exploitation of the late great Michael Jackson. Be aware: the paragraph is basically meaningless verbiage (= bs), not unlike some of the things which some sociologists write. At the end, I try to help you with an interpretation of this spoof:
The subtext of the narrative which celebrates Michael Jackson as perhaps our greatest cultural icon is a social construction as well as an intersubjective symbolic reproduction. The bureaucratization (or even bureaucretinization) of our post-modern culture must be deconstructed along gender, ethnic and other diversity motives rather than through a totalizing and essentializing Weberian, Parsonian or even Perrowian perspective. A corporate culture grounded in post-modern chaos theory reveals that both the performative and the totalizing narratives are sublimating gender-specific and race-specific heterosexist motives into the larger text of a constructivist throwback to value rationality. Kohlberg's moral stages drive the social reproduction of interpretive schemes used as moral categories denoting or even connoting a Eurocentric labeling process. Thus, sociologists' interpretations are not, as Irving Louis Horowitz recently argued, in a state of decomposition but they represent, rather, a fertile and aromatic compost
Interpretation:
1st sentence: This says nothing; just that there is a lot of talk about Michael Jackson...
2nd sentence: This says nothing; it just drops some sociological words and names.
3rd sentence: same.
4th sentence: same
last sentence: an inside joke - Horowitz was unhappy with the way Sociology was going.
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4 comments:
you have my head spinning - time to listen to "man in the mirror" :)
How funny. If you hadn't explained it all at the end it would have been a typical case of something I would read that would make me feel really stupid.
Permit me to herewith express my inmense gratitude for your analytical endeavours in exponencially de-trivialising the complex, yet empirical facets of this multidisciplinary repoise to the debate of the said argument.
In other words:
Thank you Tom, because now I shall feel more confident when I think something written with big words can be, an and often is total and utter BS.
So it says....
Society creates, tears down and manipulates its popular icons in a completely random manner?
....and something about MJ being the first metrosexual....
I have no idea who any of the names he threw out like gang signs are, but I don't think they're relevant to the argument.
Thanks for your responses, you all.
My essay about Michael Jackson was an attempt at writing something meaningless. But when it elicited responses, it became meaningful. (Of course, you understood).
Plus, I like American Warmonger’s interpretation. Maybe I DID intend to say that the process was random...
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