If Derrida could Tweet

Britney is fun, but Jacques Derrida is really cool and SOOOOO funny!

By Steve Clifford

April 20, 2009.

Why do intellectuals attack every breakthrough in communications? The telephone was inane; TV a vast wasteland; the Internet is killing newspapers. Now the intelligentsia is disparaging Twitter.

Twitter is the wonderful new technology that allows one instantly to know what important people are thinking and doing. Using Twitter, leading thinkers periodically send 144 character “Tweets” to one’s iPhone, Blackberry or cell phone.

I use Twitter to follow Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. In the last few days I received the following Tweets:

Britney

• Just got some new costumes made! R U Ready Los Angeles???
• Playing Slip N’ Slide with the boys. SOOO CUTE!!!!
• Great show tonight! The crowd was amazing!
• Back in LA spending the day with the boys before Vancouver tomorrow. Is it cold up there?
• Went to the movies with the dancers tonight. We saw I Love You, Man. S0000 funny!
• Went shopping, bought some purses and sunglasses!

Miley

• Just got home from pilates and am inspired to open my own studio. what do you think?
• eating yummy panda express
• hangin wiff friends then off to beddy bye! miley is tireddd zzz
• back to hm set! yayy! so happy to be "home"about
• if you cant say something nice dont say anything at all
• recording wiff friends is fun!

It is a shame that the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida died in 2004, before the age of Twitter. Otherwise we might receive the following Tweets:

• It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are as old as the episteme — that is to say, as old as western science and
• Excusez moi. It is difficult to express my thoughts in 144 characters. Where was I? Western philosophy — and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language,
• Désolé!. Perhaps I am too prolix. …ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in
• Mon Dieu!…part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the
• Sacre Bleu! …the structurality of structure, — although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or
• Je commence encore: referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot
• Incroyable! in fact conceive of an unorganized structure — but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay
• C’est tres frustrant…freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements
• Pardon…inside the total form

You now can use Twitter to keep up with me. I intersperse comments of what I am currently doing with obnoxious and despicable slurs on the various peoples of Transcaucasia:

• My wife! She forgot to clean the gutters again
• You know who really pisses me off? The Abkhazians. The Chechens and the Balkars also piss me off
• I haven’t yet decided what to eat for lunch.
• The Ossetians suck. The Nalkars suck. The Karakalpaks suck.
• Traffic is light on I-90.
• Some SOB just cut in front of me. I flipped him the bird.
• The Karachays are out to lunch. The only peoples more out to lunch than the Karachays are the Kalmyks, Dagestanis, and Dungans.
• My gas tank is three-quarters full.
• Talk about a bunch of clowns. How about the Ossetians, Kabardians, and Crimean Tatars? Bozos, every one of them.
• It is hard to drive, Twitter, and give the finger at the same time. Oops. My cell phone is ringing.
• Is anyone lamer than the Abkhazians? Maybe the Azerbaijanis, Ingush and Cherkess. These peoples are totally clueless.
• Maybe I should slow down to 75.

If you would like to receive all my Tweets, simply register at: http://twitter.com/nutcase/Clifford

View this story online at: http://crosscut.com/2009/04/20/humor/18963/If-Derrida-could-Tweet/

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