Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 14:41:42 -0500 (EST)
From: Joshua LaBare <joshbear-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: Play


Dear All,
	I've only just caught up on a month and a half's exchange on this 
list, and while I find it all very exciting and interesting on one hand, 
I am very disappointed on the other.  I must admit that I read 
Baudrillard because he is fun to read.  While the tone of the debates on 
this list is very scholarly, they fail, I think, to engage in the kind of 
hyperbolic, "nonsense", science-fictional play that Baudrillard himself 
engages in.  When I read the exchanges on this list, I am reminded of 
what I like least about academia.  For me, Baudrillard is an "original" 
(a bad word to use, of course) thinker because he is a fun thinker.  He 
has a sense of play.  As Foucault says thinking of Nietzsche and as 
Baudrillard might be said to think of Foucault, we need to grab his ideas 
and warp them, forget them, destroy them, remember them, reject them, but 
most of all, PLAY with them.  Perhaps I come at Baudrillard from this 
angle because I, unlike most on this list, imagine myself more as an 
artist than as a scholar.  But I think that Baudrillard is one of those 
thinkers who lends himself well to this approach.  He is himself playful: 
ironic, cynical, but playful.  In addition, unlike many thinkers, he 
writes well.  His works are a joy to read (in the french, that is: most 
translations into english make it a lot harder to enjoy him).  I suppose 
that in the end my remarks will be useless, especially since at the 
moment I have nothing to offer to set the tone I am searching for.  But 
if there are some who agree with me, then I hope we can engage in some 
fruitful exchanges that lie perhaps outside of the more serious scholarly 
tone which has so far dominated on this list.

ciao,
joshua labare