My First Critical Theory ABC (7)

By: Greg Rowland
September 15, 2012

Comrades! I present you with a radical counter-blast to the pervasive neo-fascism of the play group, a seven-day series of Critical Theory poems — radical quatrains that will enable children to challenge the dehumanising practices of the Kindergarten Konvention. Read this opus to your children, denounce parents who do not do so, and above all campaign, by any means necessary, for its print publication.

‘V’ is Virilio, a name hard to rhyme,
He has some ideas about thinking and time.
He says if The Think-Thoughts all run like a flash
The Slow Ones get squashed by some kind of Brain-Dash.

Wittgenstein here: all silence and writing
Our words are slip-fishy with rather bad lighting.
But talk tennis, or curtains, or teddies in herds,
Without all these words we’d just tweet like the birds.

‘X’ is for Baudrillard; and yes, I’m a liar,
But Jean-Paul’s not quite sure if the world is real either.
A copy of copies, alone and in pairs…
Enough with the copies, let’s leave it right there.

Yang Xiong our ‘Y’, wise, old and Chinese,
Said rightness and wrongness get mixed in your knees.
In English we’re simple — Good Me’s and Bad Me’s —
But the thinkers in China liked thoughts they could squeeze.

Žižek the ‘Z’, Super-Fast-Special Word-Bee!
He can talk to the trees about magic wee-wee
And stop people singing “Happy Dayz, Super-Glee”
’Cos if you want to feel sad then that’s how you should be.

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A series of seven posts, written by Greg Rowland and illustrated by Joe Alterio.

Joe Alterio is an illustrator, animator, comic creator, and artist interested in narrative structure, interactive creativity, and the physical manifestations of story-telling. See more at JoeAlterio.com.

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ALSO: Baudrillard as HiLo Hero | Wittgenstein as HiLo Hero | Žižek as HiLo Hero | Greg Rowland on Dr. Seuss as HiLo Hero | More theory on HiLobrow

Categories

Browbeating, Haw-Haw, Poetry