Extraordinary Discourse 046

Furthermore!



Anyone familiar with my work knows that I support the historical fall of the job system in an age of cornucopia. Someone has to stand up to the absurd rhetoric of "jobs!" and its obsolete propaganda, the work ethic as we have known it, branded violently into impressionable children for centuries. Someone must speak for a new step into liberty that has been technically possible for decades, and thwarted from above by the institutionalized abuses of the 1%, and from below by mass blind adherence/obedience to that destructive "ethic."
Jack Saturday


Here, the rhetorical/acoustic redundancy corresponds to the semantic one - a case of Roland Barthes' "plurality of stereophonic voices," (Barthes 159f) or maybe Mikhail Bakhtin's "polyphony" and "heteroglossia" (Bakhtin 368-69): connecting common knowledge, transmogrified Shakespeare quotes and popular myths, already the first ten lines of Mailer's novel establish the kind of kaleidoscopic indeterminacy that characterizes the whole text, a discourse which constantly changes the frequency of its quasi-electronic stream-of-consciousness and thus, ultimately, creates strings of meanings that compete with each other for validity.
Peter A. Corning, Ph.D