Metahedgics

While the hedgehog is not the cutest of creatures, being anti-social, ugly, thorny, and possessing an uncontrollable urge to shit on everything, and is in fact the worst sort of pet one could own outside of ferrets and lice, it may indeed lend us metahedgical insight. If this is so, however, it is not because the hedgehog justifies grandiloquent postmodern attacks on the Enlightenment (and everything associated with it by its critics). I submit instead that the hedgehog may serve as an analogy for incidental restrictions on our explanatory capabilities.

The hedgehog can be drawn out of its dark, smelly corner only by the most skilled hedgehog whisperers. Our poor understanding of its grotesque guttural communicative noises limits our capacity for interaction. And as most hedgehogs are mildly autistic, interaction among their own kind is itself uncommon. One is inclined to dismiss them as mistake of nature, an unfortunate assemblage of organic matter. By implication one might decide that indeed nothing of significance can be found within the hedgehog; any supposed meaning is merely constructed by those who fetishize the hog. However, we are justified in believing that beneath that repellent, spiny exterior lies some system of meaning. That the hog should act in any coherent way at all suggests an underlying intentional capacity.

The hog's tendency to remain in a dark smelly corner implies intentionality. Similarly, the extension of its scaly thorns around Jews and gays suggests that the hedgehog generally operates in a non-arbitrary manner. And while it does indiscriminately poop, this is better understood as a genetic inability to socialize. Our model of the hedgehog's internal semantic workings is no doubt incomplete, but this doesn't justify the inference that no such system exists.

The argument that hedgehogs present nothing more than a false appearance of meaning seems a poorly founded metahedgical claim. But there is a more serious charge that will be investigated later:


The hedgehog constitutes an oppressive regime.

Hedgehogs, Hedgemony, and Praxis

(Cross-posted at "Credge-thog", the Critical Theory blog.)

At first glance, the hedgehog may appear to be a simple holdover from a naive, pre-modern era, before Foucault and Derrida stormed in like angry echidnas to show us all what was what (if, indeed, what is ever what.) But nothing - except, maybe, for post-Enlightenment positivism - could be further from the truth. As I will demonstrate, the hedgehog is a living, breathing representation of the problems of grappling with signification after the destruction (one might even say 'deconstruction') of the false structuralist edifice. Like the 'completed' sign, which promises some inner core of meaning but frustrates all of our attempts to uncover it, the complete hedgehog offers a tantalizing glimpse of a small, cuddly creature, but any effort to penetrate its spiky shell proves irritatingly impossible and even quite painful. Furthermore, just as the objectively grounded, transcendent meaning that the sign implies cannot actually be coaxed from its linguistic form, a small hedgehog hiding in a long, dark plastic tunnel will not be persuaded to come out and reveal itself by anyone except for the very most dedicated amateur hedgehog enthusiasts.

Seriously, it won't, though. No matter how many mealworms you offer it. Even if you sit there for a whole hour, whispering sweet hedgehog nothings, just trying to draw the damn thing out into the daylight. It's enough to make you give up on hedgehogs altogether and go get a sledge-dog instead.

A new hedgeblog

Welcome to the Bledgehog