> on the total system? Right. As if the kidz at Seattle and Prague were
> walking around with copies of _The Geopolitical Aesthetic_ in their
> backpacks.
If they're packing Gameboys or have ever played PS2s or Half Life, they're walking around with geopolitical maps, even if they don't know it. Multinational culture is haunted by a geopolitical unconscious, which the Left has to decode, and radicalize.
> jargon is the new jargon of authenticity: but Mom, I _have_ to sound urbane
> and tortured, else I won't get tenure!
Tenure? [Insert peals of laughter]. Sorry, but Fred got hired during the Long Boom of 1945-70. Us Marxist-Adornist radicals are mostly unhired or completely excluded from academe. Mike Hardt is very much the exception. I've written two state-of-the-art books, translated "Negative Dialectics" myself (think this is easy? try it sometime), and am finishing a third, taught hugely popular classes, garnered kickass evaluations, but I haven't even landed a goddamn *interview* yet (this, after two years on the market). Whatever window of opportunity was open to radical litcritters during the 1970s-1980s has closed right up, ever since the Left has started to win victories against the service-sector corporations we call universities.
But you're absolutely correct about many of the profs hired in the late 70s and 80s; they really are the worst kind of ratbastard sellouts, who have endless time for bullshit discussions on messianic tropes of the Derridean kerygmatics of the signifying trace, but can't spare a second of their oh-so-valuable time to sit down and form academic unions or protest against the screwing of their undergrads by the institutions they serve so well. Thank the Goddess that Hardt, Jameson and others managed to sneak behind enemy lines, as it were; if nothing else, they can provide invaluable target correction on our airstrikes. As for the rest, to quote Lou Reed, stick a fork in 'em, they're done.
-- Dennis