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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