File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1996/f_Jan19.96, message 2


From: Colin Dey <C.R.DEY-AT-dundee.ac.uk>
Date:          Fri, 19 Jan 1996 12:26:49 GMT
Subject:       cyberbabble


Having followed some of the current debate on "post-structuralism", I 
am inclined to offer you the following quote. It comes from an 
article on the Situationists, by Luther Blisset, from "Here and Now" 
magazine.

"The advent of information technology within the groves of academia 
has accelerated the decomposition of academic research. 
Post-modernist 'critiques' are wedded to cyberbabble, and the poor 
darlings hope to cloak their wretchedness with a veneer of radicality 
by dropping in a quote from Debord. The situation has been 
exacerbated by the fall of the 'Soviet' Union. Marxism is no longer 
trendy, not because these creeps suddenly came to understand how 
repressive the 'Soviet' regime was, but because its failure as a 
repressive state sapped its charismatic power in validating the lefty 
academics existence.

"This de-politicising of situationist thought has left on the one hand 
outmoded pro-situs who absorbed situationist ideas as part of a 
radical activist politics in the seventies, but have failed to 
develop them; and on the other pseudo-radical academics who are 
trying to use situationist ideas to prop up their careers in an 
increasingly meaningless post-modern academic environment."


Mike Peters, in the same magazine, writes:

"Debord's writing will nevertheless endure, since it is beyond both 
modernity and post-modernity: it is classical. Every sentence Debord 
produced was dedicated to making history possible again. One thing is 
for sure, every word uttered by every single academic expert on any 
subject whatever during the present age is nothing more than a lie 
paid by a publisher, policed by professors, and fortunately not even 
read by anybody with any other expectations... it is no accident that 
today's fashionable anti-rational post-structuralism and post-Marxism 
descend directly from a scientistic phobia for the Hegelian 
dialectic."

cheers everyone, (except the post humanists)

Colin.


----------------------------------------------------
Colin Dey
Centre for Social & Environmental Accounting Research
University of Dundee, Scotland
crdey-AT-its.dundee.ac.uk
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~crdey/

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