Piers Watch

Deconstructing Piers

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida was in town this week. If the cheese-cloth brigade who fawned over the pop-star of the Academy had given the Big D time to scratch himself, I wonder what he would have made of our Piers.

For a thinker dedicated to the meanings underlying the text, Piers would be an intriguing challenge for Jacques. The texts (if you can give his columns this high-brow term) are laden with clues of how to get behind the mean-spirited product to understand its source.

Workers Online offers up Pier's dissertation on the Republic this week- "Republicans becalmed in a Sea of Yawns" for a bit of dissembling.

Like everything he writes, Piers starts with his conclusion - that the Republicans are a bunch of self-interested elitists pushing a cause that is totally devoid of meaning.

He then structures his supporting evidence by analysing (if that's not too grand a term) two articles written by Republican supporters printed in the press the previous week. Derrida would like this technique: the media using the media to justify itself.

Piers takes these articles and attempts to do some heavy-handed dissembling of his own - reducing one piece to a vehicle for an attack on the "celebrity trash brigade", while dismissing the other with a healthy piece of historical revisionism.

The celebrity attack seems incongruous, given Piers vehicle - the Daily Telegraph - is one of the main purveyors of this trash - fusing its editorial and marketing strategies around the exploitation of public personas.

His rewriting of history is more interesting to the deconstructionist. "Keating's republicanism owes more to his desire to be seen as anti-British than anything else." This ignores the fundamental tenat of Keating's republic push - a desire to create an open-looking independent country ready to embrace the global economy. It's fine to argue the sentiments, but to deny this was the motivation raises more questions than it answers.

At the end, his text is as defined by its omissions as its substance. By denying the importance of national symbolism, Piers can conclude the only argument in favour of a Republic as a "mysterious benefit to us all".

No notion of heart or soul or pride or feeling, fits into Piers analysis because these are not things he sees. How, after all, can you quantify the benefits from a nation taking an independent stance in an increasingly changing world.

Derrida might look at Piers and apply his critique of the visual's wrongful position at the apex of the senses, the proposition that "seeing is believing". As the Big D argues, it is, in fact, touching and feeling that are the most real of the senses: you can feel yourself feeling, but you can never see yourself seeing.

Piers' work is a case study in the false hopes that lie at the heart of the media as all-seeing eye, a medium devoid of feeling, reliant on the written word and the vehicle for establishing truths that exist only in their presentation.

And, as Derrida went on to say in his Sydney lecture this week: the false reign of the visual is most pronounced in the mass media, where the need to reduce complexity to simplicity has created an "inevitability of distortion".

So where does this leave Piers? Radical conservative? Conservative Radical? Or are we underestimating him? Perhaps we are misinterpreting Piers' genius, could it really be that he himself is a master dissembler who can take any reactionary position and build a line of reason around it. Is he really a great thinker who can draw strands of commonsense to arrive at the non-sensical, turning the text in on itself until it swallows itself whole?

Probably not, but its a delicious thought - , an undergraduate course in Cultural Studies is just around the corner: "Piers, the Quest for Truth and Other Contradictions."

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  Issue 26 contents

»	Workers to Star in Second Wave Rally
»	Oakdale Injustice: Six Weeks Is All It Takes
»	Chook War Widens - Woman Who Walked Wants Job Back
»	Rural Council Workers Push to Quit ALP
»	Push for Action on Millennium Leave Bug
»	Pay Equity Inquiry Sidelined
»	NRMA Candidates Address Union Concerns
»	Ceiling Dust a Deadly Cocktail
»	Sex Discrimination Head Warns Against Complacency
»	DIR Launches Indigenous Employment Unit
»	"Big Drum Up" For East Timor
»	Eric Lee Public Forum
»	STOP PRESS: Fire Bans Lifted But Dispute Not Over

»	Guest Report
»	Sport
»	Trades Hall
»	Piers Watch

»	Piers Fans Fires
»	Some Views Of Einstein
»	Group Homes Sell-Off Fears
»	Privatisation Of Prince Of Wales Hospital Maintenance Department
»	Call for Wage Freeze Action

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