modern textual studies

A game for critically deconstructed theorists:

1. take your favorite modern text;
2. xerox it on poster board;
3. cut the poster board into playing cards;
4. commodify the cards and throw away the signifieds;
5. shuffle and deal;
6. marginalize the center and center the periphery;
7. read the text;
8. write your reading of the text in an appropriately scholarly fashion;
9. publish on University of Minnesota Press or Routledge.

Notes:
Remember that everything is a text, or rather, there is nothing outside the text.
Advanced players may xerox a xerox of a xerox without an orginal, if desired.

Although the ideas that percolated out of this morass were created in ignorance of the actual age of written language (in other words, they didn't know back then that writing was around a lot earlier than they thought: archeology was not as advanced as it is now), their ideas have not undergone the drastic re-evaluation they so richly deserve, except in rare instances, viz., the work of Milman Parry.

Work by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell spurred on by problems set by David Hilbert proved that there is always something outside text a non-empty text. Kurt Goedel/Gödel later proved this true used completely different means.

These analogies should be considered an attempt to gain respectability from Mathematics and Logic without making the effort to present a respectable case.