The Last Straw

Here are four ways to start an article. One is to take a keyword and look it up in a dictionary. By engaging its meaning, especially its denotative meaning, the critic can pinpoint a moment and a nexus within a system. Scrutinizing its connotations, its changes over time, or its multiple, if not contradictory meanings, the critic can begin to destabilize that point, not necessarily to deconstruct it, as things would have been said in the seventies, but to problematize it. Thus, to paraphrase Lacan, language is structured like a language, which one might understand (following Derrida’s critique of structuralism in “Structure, Sign, and Play”), as meaning that language is unstructured like a language. It is a system that has its quirks, its differences, its nexuses, loci, or points de capiton that shift, shake, rattle, and roll, and despite the best sewing or suturing in the world, unravel.

Another way to start an article is with reference to a specific problematic.¹ Define the contours of a specific situation and begin to see what happens next. Conversely, one could start an article with a global hypothesis and see the necessary matters that may be deduced logically from it; then, engaging possible antitheses, one might construct a more complicated synthesis that reconfirms and surpasses the initial paragraph. And, to be ultra-chic and postmodern, one might start an article by doing a web-based search, using a search engine like Google, which gives more hits than one could ever have imagined.