As an academic, you are sort of trained (some might call it: forced) to read (and ultimately even understand) texts such as Jacques Derrida's Différance, or Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Luce Irigaray's Speculum, or Michel Foucault's The order of things, and thus decipher complex train of thoughts (I once saw Foucault's and Derrida's work classified as "mytho-crypticism"), which are burdened with references to all sorts of other complex concepts you might not have even heard about, let alone read.
This does not, however, enable you to understand and choose between an almost utterly ridiculous variety of cell phone rates. As easy as such an enterprise might seem, there are all sorts of complications arising, caused mainly by the minute degree of differenciation between the different providers (for reasons of simplicity, I list them in the binary order of things that is so typical for occidental logocentrism and tends to emphasize the difference between entities rather than the differenciation within entities themselves and to themselves):
prepaid rate vs. contract,
online registration vs. local shops,
mailbox deactivation vs. mailbox activation,
keeping your old cell phone vs. getting a new one*
flat rate vs. basic package
...
Conclusion 1: If you need a new cell phone rate, you enter a kafkaesque universe that you won't - no matter how much Kafka you've read - ever be able to understand.
This does not, however, enable you to understand and choose between an almost utterly ridiculous variety of cell phone rates. As easy as such an enterprise might seem, there are all sorts of complications arising, caused mainly by the minute degree of differenciation between the different providers (for reasons of simplicity, I list them in the binary order of things that is so typical for occidental logocentrism and tends to emphasize the difference between entities rather than the differenciation within entities themselves and to themselves):
prepaid rate vs. contract,
online registration vs. local shops,
mailbox deactivation vs. mailbox activation,
keeping your old cell phone vs. getting a new one*
flat rate vs. basic package
...
Conclusion 1: If you need a new cell phone rate, you enter a kafkaesque universe that you won't - no matter how much Kafka you've read - ever be able to understand.
Conclusion 2: I think Derrida was right about the movement of différance.
* Note: If you choose to get a contract that includes a new cell phone, you decide to stay with the same provider for more or less half of your life; you're sort of getting married, and in case you do separate, you have to go through a ridiculous amount of papers justifying why you want to leave (which might include an excerpt from a foreign country's registration office that prooves you've really moved abroad) and despite all that still pay a monthly rate for the rest of your life.

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