[-empyre-] "kicking the corpse of critical theory..."

["Christiane Robbins @ Jetztzeit" <cpr@mindspring.com>]

Given this email stream I thought I would paste in the following as somewhat ( I know, I'm pushing these borders ) of a parallel track - albeit one with a bit of levity:


Mark Dery : On November 4, I was in the audience at the New School for "The Parallax of Evil: Domination and Hegemony," a lecture by Jean Baudrillard, followed by a conversation with his longtime publisher Sylvere Lotringer (whose Semiotext(e) books introduced the New York hipoisie to French postmodernism in the '80s), ably moderated by yourself. 

Didn't it all seem a bit retro '80s? The faculty, lining up to ask questions during the Q&A period with that unhappy mix of forelock-tugging servility and killing earnestness that recovering theory addicts reserve for the mandarins of French theory. The crowd, trampling itself in the soccer-mob stampede to be the first to prove their tragic hipness by laughing at JB's foot-draggingly ironic laugh lines. And J.B. himself, shamelessly recycling '80s chestnuts with eyebrow fully arched, pulling his best poker faceâ??de Tocqueville meets the Wachowski brothers. What a card! I sank into my seat, letting the billowing clouds of French fog roll over me, feeling as if I was trapped in the Seven Flags version of The Matrix ...without the irony, but with the smoke machines working overtime, to compensate. 

Apparently, I wasn't alone. Here's Rhonda Lieberman, from her Artforum.com review of another whistlestop on the JB tour of Manhattan: 

His call now for art to subvert "the banality of hyperreality" puzzled the room that evening, but he's always been a Situationistâ??very anti-"society of the spectacle"â??an intellectual black hole aspiring to implode the system from within. They would have known that if they had actually read him. But few people did. His discourse was a fetish; "Baudrillard," a brand name. That's what people came to see tonight, and that's what they got. Most couldn't follow what the heck he was sayingâ??and not for lack of trying. Some blamed themselves for it. He's the antifetish fetish, but his brand identity is "difficult," so...whatever!" .....

http://www.markdery.com/archives/blog/facetime/index.html#000057

                      JETZTZEIT 
" ... the space between zero and one ... "
                 Walter Benjamin






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