ARE WELFARE SCROUNGERS HAVING SEX WITH SWANSEA'S BRITONS? OR, THE MEANING OF MYERS, by Garvan Tiddley.
Sigh. Or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it in his recent book on the dialectical discursivity of self-actualising practices within late-capitalist faux-communitarian formations, 'Sigh'.
When Kevin Myers, himself a kind of pre-Saussurean signifier for the kind of interpellative mauvaise foi so redolent of what Habermas so pointedly thematises in his recent paper on the surreptitious structuration of autologically self-codifying media genres in 1970s West Germany, opens a recent article with the words: “We all know that the remarks in the garda car about rape were unacceptable”, we all know that he cannot possibly mean what he says. For it would surely be taking the intentional fallacy to a ludicrous – and ludic? – extreme to ascribe monological 'meaning' to the 'word' “unacceptable”.
Inscribed in that word is the very masculinist category of 'acceptability' which so patently serves as a kind of significatory Trojan horse for Myers' rightist ideologemes to disseminate beyond the matrix of his soi-disant textual ejaculations. He, in short, says X in order to insinuate, sous rature, not-X. A green sheep, anyone? Kind of like the guy at the football match (or should that - in a kind of subaltern gesturing to the primacy of the yankoid hegemony – read: soccer?) who insists on cheering for his favourite team.
We've all met him. The Bud-swigging, Springsteen-loving dude who cannot quite bring himself to admit that his real allegiance is channelized not to 'this particular team' but to the authoritarian notion of 'teamhood' itself.
It is both symptomatic, telling and revealing that Myers follows up his innoculative disclaimer about the “unacceptable” “remarks” (Myers' rhetorical disinflation of the state-sponsored Garda speech acts duly noted) “about” rape with a methinks-the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much clincher: “That much is obvious.” For is there not a covert ideological complicity between the notion of obviousness and the concept of rape? Do not both partake of a certain phallogocentric unicity? Did I not recently co-write a book? Did we not set out to reality-test our belief that there is a great deal of social injustice in Europe? Did we not, to our surprise, find this hypothesis confirmed at every turn?
Do you, Kevin, still dare to eat that peach?
