Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 00:30:30 -0700
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: DECONSTRUCTING MARILYN MONROE, again


You know, this passage really hits me where I live:

>Such 'readings' of Monroe completely ignore the reality of her
>life and art, never mind such unfashionable, humanistic concepts
>as emotions.  Indeed, Ms. Baty has succeeded through this book
>in furthering the 'commodification' of Marilyn Monroe. By using
>the latest tools of deconstruction and gender studies, she has
>done her best to turn a human being into a bloodless text, an
>object, a toy for pompous academics."

I came to this conclusion myself just in the past week.  Not that
I already didn't despise these people.  But "bloodless" hits the
mark.  These academic assholes are completely indifferent to the
content or personality of anything concrete; for them works of art
are so much indifferent raw material to be ground up in the
charnel house of Theory.  That parts of this processing plant
involve the machinery of race-class-gender means nothing in the
end; the process only reflects the increasingly self-conscious
preciosity of liberal cynicism.  In fact, what English depts. do
to cultural capital is a perfect replica of what capitalism
materially does to its raw materials in the process of production
and accumulation.  All qualitative differences, all personality
and concreteness don't matter at all to these academic charlatans.
To keep themselves in business they have to revolutionize the
instruments of cultural production, which means an ever greater
concentration of deadly abstraction.

This hit home for me when reading two horrible books this past
week: THEORY / PEDAGOGY / POLITICS edited by Morton & Zavarzadeh,
and INTELLECTUALS: AESTHETICS, POLITICS, ACADEMICS edited by Bruce
Robbins.  What a useless lot of pompous gasbags!  The ones who
pretend to be the most radical are the worst.

The pure activists on this list won't care because they are not
into this highfalutin theory to begin with.  But those out there
who double as intellectuals, or those who are purely intellectuals
-- I'm very disappointed.  I received not one response to that
uploaded quote by C.L.R. James on the division of labor and the
bankruptcy of intellectuals.  Why is that?  Because it didn't
register?  Or because the shoe fits?


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