Abstract

Critical signifiers have a short shelf life. French Impressionist paintings that once constituted a radical critique of perception are now sold as wallpaper. Viva Guevara: Che Guevara lives – as a T-shirt icon, $21.95 plus shipping. The complex contributions of a half-century of Continental critical theorizing are today being methodologically lobotomized into mere narrative analysis pretentiously rechristened “discourse analysis” (cf. Grant, Hardy, Oswick & Putnam, 2004; Fairclough, 1995). With Procrustean dependability, genuine radicals are systematically replaced by “tempered radicals” (Meyerson, 2001), upholding the status quo from their positions of privilege while providing just enough faux challenge to the powers that be to drive out any substantive one.