West on Bradley's gravitas

Daniel F. Vukovich vukovich at uiuc.edu
Sat Jan 15 14:53:02 PST 2000


At 04:33 PM 1/15/00 -0500, you wrote:
>[Was West ever not a self-parodic joke?]

Yeah, I'd say so, but I think he went round the bend with Clinton, and hasnt come back. (See his Am Evasion of Philosophy, his stuff on socialist theory and race, and his earlier pop stuff) I still like the guy and think he's done good work in the past, but somewhere he lost the difference b/w going public and going absolutely mainstream in political terms. (But there *is* a real tension/difficulty there, no? I mean how far can Revolutionary Posing take one in the so-called public sphere. Politics is the art of the possible, after all. In other words, there is more to this than just treason of the jerks, though maybe less and less so.) Anyway, my other Q is, When was Gates ever not a running dog of every institution under socialized capital?

This one is esp rich:

Dr. West, said Dr. Gates, "articulates ideals to which every society should aspire, and I admire that; I, on the other hand, am much more pragmatic. I see my job as trying to implement what is practical in that idealistic program, and in a way, that's one of the differences between Bradley and Gore."

May the 7 mad gods spare us such differences.

------------------------------------------------------ Daniel F. Vukovich Dept. of English; The Unit for Criticism University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 ------------------------------------------------------



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