Troll ate my supper

Company Involved in Clinical EBOLA Trial GSK Vaccine Has History of Corruption

With no surprise as the Ebola psyop continues in the mainstream news, a company involved in clinical Ebola trial GSK vaccine has a history of corruption.

Sources:

Exclusive: GlaxoSmithKline faces fresh drug bribery claims in Syria

Clinical trial to start soon on GSK Ebola vaccine

Defined simply, postmodernism is “incredulity toward the metanarratives.” This means that postmodernist works often call to attention, in ways which critique and disrupt, that which is seen as “natural,” “traditional,” or “essential.”

I would recommend reading two essays which are not by definition “postmodern,” but, I think, lay the bedrock for what it becomes: Nietzsche’s very short essay “On Truth and Lies" (which is linked) and Roland Barthes’ "From Work to Text" (also linked) give a good introduction to this kind of incredulity, and Barthes’ essay is an introduction to what he calls the writerly text (writing which rebels against metanarratives, as opposed to readerly texts which serve only to naturalize and reinforce tradition). 

Similarly, the concept of anti-essentialism is fundamental to poststructural discourse. Essentialism is a privileging of “essences.” An essence would be something like a Platonic Form – a definition, a formula, a set of characteristics that stabilizes objects in the world (the essence of a triangle is that which all triangles have in common, ‘triangularity.” The essence of humans is that which they all have in common, “humanity”). Most of what we experience socially is presented to us through essentialist rhetoric, whereby a quality is presupposed to be essential to a being or thing (“the sky is blue,” “I am a woman,” “I am American”). Anti-essentialism questions these presuppositions, showing how the very language used to identify and describe a thing alters it beyond recognition. I cannot identify as a woman or human without the concept first existing, i.e. being “made” by “humanity.” I am American only because the concept of a nation or state existed in language, prior to me. In this sense, to name a thing is to create it — to give it life. When we only conceive of gender as a binary (male/female) we most often identify with the selective choices presented to us.

Which leads us to another important aspect of postmodernism: the focus on signifiers and what Derrida calls “slippery signifiers.” Language never allows us to formulate anything but that which has five, ten, infinite meaning(s). Language is not transparent; the signifier is always ambiguous. What it means to be “woman” or “man” is not a fixed or natural concept but something mutable, changed entirely by language and context.

Postmodernism and poststructuralism are inextricably linked, and very similar. Poststructuralism as a term was only codified after Derrida (and deconstruction) in response to his relationship with the structuralists. Both aim to deconstruct every substantial identity, to show how identities, concepts, and ideas are themselves overdetermined socially, semantically, and culturally. To say something seemingly simple as “the sky is blue” is to disrupt signification, is not to say “the sky is not green,” (even the slightest difference in language has infinite connotations) and moreover, is to ignore how the conception of the colour blue (and the word for blue) is itself first a cultural and linguistic phenomena.

I hope this helps and isn’t too much to take in all at once.

Mira Schendel 

"While we ourselves are living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal condition on this earth?"