The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism

Let me start with a brief quote, not from Dick Taverne's book, but from an essay unpromisingly titled “Constructivism in the works of Gibson” by (allegedly) Stephen McElwaine of Harvard and John Geoffrey of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A warning: you may find it hard going. But stay with me—it's only a paragraph.

Dick Taverne

Oxford University Press, £18.99, pp 310

ISBN 0 19 280485 5

Rating:

“If one examines precultural narrative, one is faced with a choice: either accept postmaterialist textual theory or conclude that sexual identity has intrinsic meaning. But a number of deappropriations concerning the difference between class and sexuality exist. Baudrillard uses the term ‘precultural narrative’ to denote not theory per se, but subtheory. Therefore, Sontag's model of the postconceptual paradigm of context implies that the raison d'être of the observer is deconstruction.”

Did you understand that? If you think you did, the understanding lies exclusively within your own brain because that passage—and the essay from which it came—was the 1 536 888th written by a computer. Each is unique and each was created, on demand …