In her new book Dekonstructing the Kardashians, MJ Corey has achieved what decades of critical theory could not, permanently entwining the structuralist anxieties of Roland Barthes with a meticulously organized array of glass apothecary jars.
In her exhaustive new volume, Dekonstructing the Kardashians, independent scholar MJ Corey has achieved what generations of institutional academics could not, permanently entwining the post-structuralist anxieties of Roland Barthes with a meticulously organized array of glass apothecary jars in a Calabasas mansion. It is a staggering intellectual feat; one that demands we reconsider the televised machinations of Kris Jenner not merely as the crass engine of an American reality franchise, but as the inevitable culmination of dialectical materialism.
Corey’s exegesis of the family’s spatial dynamics—particularly her devastating forty-page analysis of Khloe Kardashian's walk-in pantry—owes as much to the subterranean cartography of Athanasius Kircher’s 1665 treatise Mundus Subterraneus as it does to the temporal expanses of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, while inexplicably borrowing its central taxonomic framework from the 1993 Prima Games strategy guide for Super Mario All-Stars. The lay reader will undoubtedly struggle with Corey's central thesis that Kim's seventy-two-day marriage to Kris Humphries represents a deliberate triumph of the Situationist International; one must pity the audience that approaches this text without a working knowledge of Guy Debord, to say nothing of their tragic ignorance regarding the specific matte finish of a 2017 Kylie Cosmetics lip kit.
The application of concealer is never a neutral act, but rather a violent reassertion of the self against the crushing void of modernity, a concept Corey illustrates beautifully by comparing the Poosh lifestyle brand to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
To read Corey is to witness the final exhaustion of the critical enterprise, a spectacular implosion wherein the highest tools of humanistic inquiry are deployed to decode the semiotics of a Skims shaping bodysuit. We are left with the unsettling realization that the Western intellectual tradition did not culminate in a grand unified theory of human consciousness, but rather in a three-hundred-page monograph explaining why Kendall Jenner's Pepsi commercial was actually a profound meditation on the impossibility of ethical consumption under late capitalism.