So, what's "Mike Bursell - deconstructed by default" all about then? You may well ask. Or not. Well, the first bit, obviously, is my name. I thought it would be useful to include it. The second bit? "Self-indulgent twaddle" Catherine, my lovely wife, would call that. Did call that, when I told her. Well, actually, she didn't use the word "twaddle", but an equally British but rather more "Anglo-Saxon" term.
You see, I spent the first 2 years of my university career (rather a grand term, but let's agree to let it ride) studying English with an achingly right-on group of tutors who were generally battling against what they saw as the reactionary literary critical methodologies of a painfully out-of-touch department. Now, they may have been achingly right-on, and may have felt somewhat ostracised by the rest of their faculty, but they were also excellent and enthusiastic educators, and they taught me and my variously enthusiastic peers the joys (jouissances?) of Derrida, deconstructionism, post-structuralism and all the rest. And the thing is, it stuck. I can't pretend that I bring a deconstructionist critique or hermeneutic of suspicion to my every day-to-day encounters with each product manual, O'Reilly-published technical guide or online HOWTO or FAQ around me, and my initial thought on discovering a new author is not, if we are honest, "ah - this author is dead, and his/her intentions and biographical impact are zero", in a ho-ho-ho Barthes-ian way, but I did come away with a fairly postmodernist take on the world.
But let's at least agree to allow me to profess that I have "deconstructionist tendencies", and that, as a self-confessed "author", my first, and default position is to deconstruct myself and call, if you will, my own bluff.
Catherine will, at this point, turn her eyes to the heavens and require another glass of wine. And she's quite right - as always.
You see: self-indulgent twaddle.
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