Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 12:02:46 -0500
Subject: Re: SERIOUS SOKAL/Ross, Aronowitz, and postmarxism...


At 5:39 PM 5/28/96, Keith Alan Sprouse wrote:

>why everyone seems to take Ross and Aronowitz as being so
>representative of postmodern/postmarxist theory?  What about all of the
>others, from Jameson to Baudrillard?

Jameson: interesting guy, terrible writer. Baudrillard: charlatan.*
Lyotard: ditto. Anyone else you want me to dismiss in a formulated phrase?

At the Rethinking Marxism conference in 1989, Gayatri Spivak opened her
talk by saying "I am not a post-Marxist." Unfortunately, those were the
last words she spoke that I understood.

_________

*The Lingua Franca with Sokal's article also contains Scott McLemee's
review of Baudrillard's book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 100,000 dead
Iraqis to the contrary. As I said the other day on the list that dare not
speak its name, the pomos take capital's self-representations seriously,
and then do a quasi-radical dance around them. In that instance, I was
referring to the rentier mentality, in which production (and the relations
of production) disappear from view. Here, it seems, B took seriously the
Pentagon-CNN video game image of the war, apparently forgetting all the
corpses. Of course, B's problem was that two weeks before the war began, he
had published a piece in Liberation saying the Gulf War would not happen;
the very preparation for war assured its impossibility: "We are no longer
in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual, but in a hyperrealist
logic of the deterrence of the realy by the virtual." Damage control was
necessary, thus the retrospective "proof" that it was all too televised to
be really real, whatever that is.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
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