This is readable stuff. Shaviro writes with a sharp edge. The extremes of expression in the foundational postmodernists--Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Lacan, and the like--in his paraphrasing become engagingly domesticated. Here are a couple of examples:
ON REPRESENTATION VS. SIMULATION: "A representation comes after the object it imitates or signifies. That's why 'the symbol is the murder of the thing,' as Lacan put it: every representation implies, to some measure, the 'lack'--the replacement, the death or the absence--of the thing it is supposed to represent. A simulation, on the contrary, precedes its object: it doesn't imitate or stand in for a given thing, but provides a program for generating it. The simulacrum is the birth of the thing, rather than its death." [Chapter 12, Bill Gates, pp. 11-12]
ON GOD AS BILL GATES: "The postmodern God, it would seem, resembles Bill Gates far more than he does Leibniz's all-wise Designer. God, like Gates, has exactly the aggressiveness, the competitive drive, and the sense of entitlement you'd expect in a talented straight boy from a privileged WASP background....You might not like this universe, just as you might not like Microsoft's clunky programs; but pragmatically speaking, where else do you have to go?" [Chapter 12, Bill Gates, p. 18]
ON THE LIBERAL HUMANIST SELF: CHAPTER 6, CLIFF STEELE.
In Table Talk Five we wonder whether Shaviro delivers his portrait of the life in the strip with bitterness, or with some other attitude.
Shaviro recently published a new book, Stranded in the Jungle. The link below goes to his home page, which links both to Doom Patrols and to the new book.
DOOM PATROLS, by Steve Shaviro