Posties

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com
Wed Jan 9 17:04:09 PST 2002


At 07:25 PM 01/09/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>By "Posties" I guess you mean "postmodernists"..so you
>are discounting a rather broad category of people.
>Does this mean you think this about Derrida,
>Baudrillard, Foucault and others unnamed? Or is it
>that you have not read them at all and just want
>to categorically dismiss them ALL and EVERYTHING they
>say?

I have read Baudrillard, Foucault, and Derrida, and in the original. And yes, I think this about them. Do I dismiss EVERYTHING they say? No. I remember there was some stuff in Baudrillard's critique of Marx's concept of use value that was interesting. Derrida never struck me as anything other than a very long-winded belle-lettrist with just a little frisson of Marxist analysis. I was impressed by "Discipline and Punish" when I was 23. I re-read it about ten years ago and was struck mostly by its very sloppy thinking. The thing is, there is such a thing as good scholarship and such a thing as creative intelligence and I don't think these men have either....though I admit they were wildly successful intellectual poseurs.

This xmas a friend gave me a video of Stevie Ray Vaughn and told me to watch it cause Vaughn was much better than Hendrix. Ha! Ha! Ha! Hendrix was a live, creative, explosive musical intelligence; Vaughn, though perfectly good technically (better than Clapton for example), is a completely derivative musician. Same analogy holds for Marx and the post toasties.

Joanna B.



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