My Brother, the American Idol

Since this is a somewhat open week, I’m going to start this post off with a conversation I had tonight with my brother (who graduated from Yale and who I consider to be generally smart).

Me: You know anything about post-structuralism?
Him: Um, no. Do you?
Me: No, it’s quite the problem
Him: Not much of a problem for me, really.
Me: Hey, my problems are your problems; you’re my blood. (I heard some guy say that on TV once, then his brother laughed at him and called him a dumb-ass).
Him: Haha. I've read some poststructuralist works I think. If they're the ones I'm thinking of they're really confusing. Barthes is a nightmare. I never really had to read any of them for classes
Me: That’s horseshit.
Him: Guess you should have majored in music!
Me: So what are you doing?
Him: Watching TV. Damn it, I hate American Idol. It's bad enough on its own but also no other channel ever puts anything good on against it so there's just nothing on TV.
Me: It was on last night too. They canceled House for it.
Him: I swear it's on every fucking night just to ruin my life.
Me: Well, as you said earlier, that’s really not my problem.

I exited this conversation feeling that I’d ended up the winner. However, I quickly realized that his problem of having nothing to watch on TV was nowhere near my problem of having no concept of post-structuralism and having to now dissect Derrida (or is it?). The one thing that I took out of this conversation was that yes, post-structuralism is in fact a nightmare. Turning back to my book, a sentence caught my eye.

“The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure – one cannot 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 play of the structure” (196).

When I was looking for structure in my life, I contemplated joining the Army. I see the Army as the ultimate symbol of structure and discipline in our country. However, at this moment in time, if you ask any U.S. citizen if they think our Army is organized, they will most likely laugh in your face. This made me think that you could conceive of an unorganized structure, but after a moment of contemplation, I finally figured out that this is merely one extreme of what Derrida would call the play of the structure. We are only able to see that the Army isn’t organized because its center (normal organization) roots it in the definition of structure. The fact that this central organization is being pulled so far just means that at this point, there is a great deal of play involved. This all brought me back to our class conversation when we talked about the idea of a system being a rubber-band which can stretch one direction or the other. For a second I almost felt like I was beginning to understand, but then I realized that I was completely off my rocker, and that there was more of a chance of me finding something good on TV than ever internalizing Derrida. And so, I traded in one problem for another.