And I quote:
A portable device like the Walkman not only plays music events that are “unique, mobile, and singular” (Hosokawa 1984:169) but also allows its user to experience a “singularity” that interlaces with other singularities to form what there is of the “self.” Rather than a whole of parts that unifies such a self, there are just “emissions of singularities” that proliferate into “nomadic multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Shaviro 2003).
My first thought when I read that: What?
My second thought: Please don’t use the Postmodernism Generator to write books.
That extract is from page 24 of Millennial Monsters, a study of how Japanese toys and Japanese pop culture is conquering the US. To be fair, the author was merely quoting someone in the above extract but the first chapter is filled with similarly dense professor-ese.
Thankfully, the book improves in readability and quickly becomes engrossing. I’m only in the second chapter but I’ve read some amazing anecdotes and historical notes about the Japanese toy industry in the years preceding and following the Second World War.
A review will be forthcoming.
(Unless this “self” encounters more prose of a singularly dense nature in which case emissions of expletives will be produced by said self and the tome shall find itself on a nomadic journey possibly ending in the nearest dustbin.)
