Subject: Re: the word-producing industry
To: baudrillard-AT-world.std.com
Date: Mon, 23 May 94 18:27:31 PDT


Baldwin writes:


Stephen Crook in "Radicalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism" 
maintains that postmodern nihilism exhibits itself in two
symptoms: "an inability to specify possible mechanisms of
change, and an inability to state why change is better than
no change."  I think this nihilism could be disasterous for
the academy, teachers as well as students.  If not for "change",
what purpose do we serve.  I can't believe (as an intellect
hungry for meaning) that we serve no (at least practical)
purpose.

     Oh no, not symptoms!  "Postmodern nihilism" sounds as though 
     it is now entering the lexicon of *illness*--perhaps
     if we put the right medical researchers to work on it,
     we can discover a cure, some surgical procedure for
     preventing the catastrophic ramifications of this dread
     disease (concerning which we've actually got precious
     little in the way of verification of *existence* or
     even of its clinical differences from the affliction
     I've recently 'discovered' in my own medico-academic
     research which I call "praxisitis", an increasingly 
     common affliction of intellectuals which brings on an
     unhealthy degree of certainty as to what needs to be changed,
     interpreted, and 'emancipated' and a significant inflammation
     of the politicus dogmaticus).
 

     Of course Althusser, Bourdieu, Paul Willis and a host of others
     have not a little to say about the claim that the academy is
     (or has *ever* been) about "change" in the sense Baldwin 
     vaguely seems to indicate.

Tristan