Ask DB1: Britbags and Jacques Derrida
Reader Elizabeth Darling writes in from England:
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Dear DB1-
Sitting in a pub in Camden the other day across from my leather-jacket-clad, quiff-sculpting, indoor-glasses-wearing friend, I realised two things.
The first was akin to Darwin as he tracked the evolutional progress of primordial slime into swamp creatures; there exists in England a phenomenon which I am certain has been repeated the world over in the many variations of douchal hybrids.
The specimen I observed that sunny morning in London was of the mod-punk-rock-douche variety. The self-assurance, eyeliner and ego of the douche coupled with the “‘tude” of an ageing Sex Pistol made him utterly punchable, and it suddenly dawned upon me: my college friend is a douchebag.
The second, and more significant realisation, was that the reason why i was friends with him was his acceptance of self. He was fully aware of the metaphorical choad protruding from his forehead, getting choadier and choadier every day as he contrived a new ‘accidental’ rip in his T-shirt or purposefully sprayed a little Stella Artois down his front to give the illusion of a ‘don’t-give-a-f&ck’ alcoholic nihilist. He knew of the soft, nougaty, malodorous core of ‘bag that lay thinly concealed beneath half-formed pretensions of psuedo-intellectual philosophical rambling. And yet, using the poor bullet-riddled corpse of Irony as a shield from ‘bag-haters, he continues in this ridiculous fashion.
The crux of the matter, the great question I pose to the Oracle of all that is Hot and Douchey, is: Is the self-aware douchebag really such a douchebag after all? Like Derrida’s binary position of phenomonological meaning, does the self-declaration of douchebaggery actually nullify, or indeed counter-act it? If one proclaims “I am a douchebag”, does this in fact mean that one is… not?
My theory is that self-deprecation and consciousness of the inner choad may ameliorate, however slightly, the catastrophical social canker of douchebaggery that threatens to infect England with increasing fatality since Jack Wills launched their latest crusade. But alas, this theory is nothing without your confirmation or rejection; pray continue to lead us through the complexities of douche-kind as Virgil once led Dante through the Inferno.
England needs you, DB1.
God Speed,
Elizabeth Darling
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It is interesting you engage Derrida, E.D. as he may posit the key to understanding why the ironodouche does not gain an exemption for authentobaggery.
In his seminal text Scroters of Marx, Derrida examined the notion of the spectral haunting of past texts upon present thought, signified at the moment of both recognition and simultaneous negation. This entanglement with the past and present suggests a shifting signifier operating complexly. We can neither negate the originary meaning of the sign, nor repurpose it as douche.
As such, Derrida’s “differance” within post-structuralist understandings of subjectivity does not mean an inversion of douchological signification through the rupture of self-awareness. It simply means that the act of realization, conversion from phantasm into the realm of the linguistic or corporeal, summons the real as it destroys the spectral.
In short, boobies are bouncy.
