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Among the arguments in support of deconstructionist thought, for example, we can discern one that conceives of an abyssal undecidability at the core of all ‘literary’ language (de Man); another putting forward the possibility, and indeed the urgency, of an anti-rationalist writing in the context of philosophy and philosophical discourse (Derrida); and others finding there the potential for a constructive critical practice in the context of social and political life (Norris, Spivak); and so forth.

Thus as Gates says, aided by information technology “You might watch Gone With the Wind with your own face and voice replacing Vivien Leigh’s (or Clark Gable’s). Or see yourself walking down a runway wearing the latest Paris fashions adjusted to fit your own body or the one you wish you had” (: ). There’s much that’s familiar here. We easily recognize now the emphasis on surface, and on simulation and the artificial production of self-contained ‘worlds’; the cultivation of pastiche; the unconstrained recombination and collage of sensations, and the active scattering and dispersal of categories, of material and cultural constraints conventionally placed on sensation itself.

Now, it does not requiring shifting to a ‘merely realistic’ or ‘commonsense’ frame to determine this; the whole thing can be said to ‘happen within language’ if we wish. But to say so fails to vitiate the effect that certain very large clusters of things said – such as those referring to ‘what we call’ material events – have, consistently and in many contexts, a stability about them that neither qualitatively nor quantitatively fits snugly into the accounts of language characteristically given by Unqle Sims.