These new non-noise locutions are the words of post-modernism and political correctness, and they no longer distort, mislead and generally obfuscate the truth and the quest for victimhood in the world. They are not like buzz words, such as individualism or liberty, filling up space where collective thought ought to be; they are replacements for traditional values by screaming ideology and dogmatic assertions about the need to be reasonable, to find out what you are talking about, and respect other people's views. What follows is a brief (swift) guide for the uninitiated into post-modernism and political-correctness.
Narrative
Once many years ago in the past century the post-modernists and the post-structuralists talked about there no longer being a need for a single Big Narrative, a monolithic explanation for everything, usually meaning a Eurocentric, colonialist, imperialist, Orientalist, Judeo-Christian or female-hating male or homophobic discourse. Everyone else had their own positions, or positionalities, and everyone else had the right to their own opinions, except, of course, white, male, Jews, middle-class, Christian, Europeans, straight people and so forth. Now, however, everyone has their own narratives, and everything in life is a journey that one takes on their own-since we cannot say his or her, but only some de-sexed pronoun in the soul-less pseudo-plural of them and their-and in a quest for the supreme happiness of all existence, chosen victimhood. Once they have achieved this coveted position in the world of politically-correct values where everything is determined by gender, race and ideology, they can claim their entitlements. That goal recognized as the ultimate in human rights, then all means are permissible through acts of mass terrorism, glorious suicide-murders and sustained street-rage. The narrative is perfected and completed once it is on U-tube.
Conversation
With this word, instead of debate, dialogue, argument or negotiation, the selected and completed victims can approach the politically incorrect remnants of civilization and tell them they are wrong, superseded, and about to be exterminated. The ideal form of conversation in this sense occurs when one person talks to themselves, that is, when they are absorbed into their own identity, and thus what once distinguished each individual from all others now becomes the collective self of a deterministic unintelligent biological or socially-constructed self (or selfish gene). All differences of opinion also disappear because, since there is no single truth-the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth-there is only the voice of victimhood crying out from the wilderness of what used to be history. The present is the ever-renewed and repeated instant of opinion, attitude and positionality. The conversation is also the explosive moment of mass destruction when he and she, they and us, now and forever more meet in one big bang of purification and martyrdom. After that, only the vast nothingness of reality television.
Project
Where ever you look in academia and the media, everything that people do is a project, on the surface of thing, merely an organized programme or undertaking, but in many, and soon perhaps most instances, it means an ideologically-driven attempt to occupy the space in which the last remnants of civilization can be found. The project is the projection into areas of scholarly debate and scientific inquiry the essential truisms of post-modernist practice (another word to examine soon), these dogmatic, unquestioned and authoritative statements include the plurality and fissuring of truth, the rejection of rational paradigms for measuring the truth-content of archival documents and public monuments, the standards by which artistic merit can be assessed (not accessed, another buzz word), and the role of individual responsibility in the application of truth and justice in the world. The projectile is a weapon of mass destruction, a radioactive time bomb set to destroy all concepts of time and space by scattering coherent thoughts into a chaos of incoherent instants of feeling and attitude. Political rhetoric at the Untied Nations Genial Assembly now consists mainly of projectile vomiting.
Practice
This seems to be the post-modern dumbed-down version of Marxist praxis. While a musician used to prepare his or her performance piece through repeated playing or a dentist carry out his or her technical treatments, it is now possible for each artist, in whatever medium chosen, to speak of what they do as a practice, and for scholars to carry out their projects with the ideological tools of their practice. There is no sense left in the word of repetition for improvement and refinement of skills and understanding, no qualitative demonstration of art and intuition, only a mechanical performance (which by the way is also a buzz word). No one need do anything to be recognized as an artist or a human rights lawyer or a civil servant: just say you are practicing.
Research
As a noun, research is what one uses to discover facts and test them against contexts of viability. The search is carried out in the field-or the wild nature of unexplored space-or in the laboratory where clinical controls and measurements can be repeated by objective means, or even in archives, libraries and private collections of written and orally recorded data can be read, analysed and interpreted. However, to research, as a verb in itself without a subject or an object, but merely a free-standing and yet ideologically determined event, means to be thrust into a swirl of on-going projects and practices merely to confirm and valorize what is already known. That is why on research grant forms the applicant is asked to state the expected results and social benefits of the pre-ordained results: the value of curiosity to know, the possibility of negative findings, and the excitement of entering the unknown are dismissed from serious attention.
Construction
Now that truth and identity have been relegated to the category of social-constructs, the term construct no longer means something built by deliberate plans, executed by skilful hands according to previous directions, or held in memory as a model of excellence and imitation. Just as the normative structure of sentences has become an incomplete passive voice or the replacement of active persons by vague feelings and attitudes floating in the middle of empty space, the active intellect disappears from time and place, its milieu, and is silent in the mental arena of thought and passion, its mentality, so the world is filled up with indeterminate, amorphous and ephemeral constructions.
Reference
Long, long ago, when scholarship was taught and composition was a course in universities, students learned how to make footnotes, construct bibliographies, and tell the difference between hints, allusions, references and citations in direct and indirect discourse. Today there is only a blur called referencing, which can mean anything from to point towards something out beyond the immediate range of sight or the page one is examining to listing sources or indicating a particular passage cited. Footnotes-so much better than end notes-served several purposes, the primary one being the description of the precise text cited in the body of an essay or book, so that a reader could go to that same article or book, open to such a page, and find the point indicated; therefore the annotation gives all the information needed to find the original text-the author, editor, translator; as well as the edition, printing, and first publication date. Today, since we have obliterated the past and denied the relevance of contexts, it is important to find, stuck in the middle of a sentence, a parenthetical name of an author and a date, but the name is incomplete, the date only signalling the edition or translation cited, so that superficial readers will think that Freud wrote in 1962 or Shakespeare lived in 2007, and chronological order, comparison of different schools of interpretation are elided. Allusion by part of a sentence or a single word becomes confounded with distant echoes of ideas and concepts, while parodies, pastiches and burlesques cease to exist as distinct modes of responding to other times and places. Hints, clues and oblique traces lose their specificity, and all intellectual subtlety and nuance sinks into a slough of despond.
Icon
For those who have studied the history of religions and are familiar with various Eastern Churches, there is no difficulty in understanding the term icon from ikonia, a religious image that focuses attention on and can act as a transmission point of spiritual things. Then along comes the home computer and people start to see icons on their screens, so much so that every image is or picture is an icon. But then there is a leakage between these two uses of the term, and an icon becomes the most important, the most illuminating and the most identifying of pictures possible, a sign, emblem or signature image of whatever it is you wish to celebrate. It has come to be a synonym or a substitute for brand, symbol, and trademark. As so often, then, when a word can mean anything and everything, it soon means nothing; and when that happens, there are no longer other words available to use for the subtle shadings of meaning you wish to have, for the different kinds of experiences in life one passes through on the long journey from birth to death and beyond. Notice that I do not reference any particular person who is researching this topic.
Performance
In ordinary parlance, a performance is an enactment, a spectacle, a show, a dramatic or musical performance. Yes, but now, alas, nothing is what it seems, and the performative means something that through its embodiment in action and its recognisability as image, undercuts its own reality. The sense of a practiced, perfected public showing of what was created in private and honed into shape by the individual human mind or a small group of experts, now has become everything that everybody does at any time.
Access
Libraries used to have accession departments that searched about, found books, purchased them, and then sent them on to the cataloguing department. One could also gain access to someone or something that was difficult to find and approach. Access, in those far off days of civilization, connoted a process and a deliberate attempt to come into contact with something or someone through the use of skills, knowledge and influence. Now in a world of computer models for everything, everything is accessed because it only means to have, to hold and to use. Moreover, people no longer use the word for a process or a thing but for an abstract or ephemeral quality, as when you access health care (whereas you used to visit the doctor) or access information (where once you looked information up in a book) or access your identity (meaning somehow that you look in the mirror of your chosen ideology and recognize the socially-constructed self you lost because of your victim status).
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