ABSTRACT
These days-the days of Whoops! Apocalypse, nukespeak, deconstruction, Rajneeshis, homo ludens, Memphis design, Popemobiles, Foucault, Lindy Chamberlain, Wapping, semiotics, remote-control TV-these days it is necessary to start with incommensurables; with things that don’t fit. Perhaps it is appropriate in these days that high academic theories, like Popemobiles, scour the terrain of popular culture, searching for truths in the domain of the profane, the commonplace, the demotic. Kurt Vonnegut has coined the term blivit for his own incommensurable combination of fact and fiction: an ‘all-frequencies assault on the sensibilities’ made of ‘fiction, drama, history, biography and journalism’. A blivit, writes Vonnegut, can be defined as ‘two pounds of shit in a one pound bag’.1 Somewhere in the bag, Vonnegut records his own great-grandfather’s belief that truth ‘must always be recognized as the paramount requisite of human society’. Vonnegut comments: ‘As I myself said in another place, I began to have my doubts about truth after it was dropped on Hiroshima.’2
