Accidental Blogger

Having read (just) a few of her reviews over the years, I don't believe Michiko Kakutani knows much about books or literature. But I am quite confident that she knows even less about network technologies and even less than that about literary theory. Look at this rambling mess. On second thought, skip directly to the article's third "page" as formatted for the Web, where this appears:

As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became
fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual
readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby
suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original
intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged
arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article
for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when
books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and
digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled
into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which
readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and
remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.

Sheer nonsense. Not a word of it corresponds to the faintest semblance of reality. The easy targets: Deconstruction is not textual analysis. It became fashionable in the '70s. It had nothing to do with subjective responses to texts. The death of the author was most famously proclaimed by Barthes and Foucault, neither of whom was aligned with deconstruction. Many of the important texts associated with deconstruction focused obsessively on certain authors qua authors. Kevin Kelly did write that piece of drivel for the Times magazine. I'll give her that.

The article worries about reading and writing in the age of the Internet, about how "social networking and popular software designs are changing the way
people think and process information." In order to change the way people think, people first must think. When you've encountered a thought, Ms. Kakutani, drop me a post card, please.