So, what do you think about Baudrillards discussion of the hyper-real? Don't you think that may have some impact on class struggle? In a related case, what do you think of Guy De Bord? Or is he just another person uninterested in class struggle" Dont you think Derrida had some influence on undercutting "White Mythologies"...or is that an insignificant achievement in your eyes?
Anyway, each person chooses his/her own tools. These thinkers help me understand the world and class struggle better. Now on to the Paglia quote:
>
> lib obscurantism. Here's an old Paglia comment from
> Salon:
>
It is
> simply untrue that Foucault was learned: He was at a
> loss with any period or
> culture outside of post-Enlightenment France
Oh really...I happen to have his "Surveiller et Punir" right beside of me here at work...It begins with an execution that takes place in 1757 and that is just the first page. I dont know what Paglie considers "Post-Enlightenment" but I hardly consider 1757 post-enlightenment. Anyway, disagree with Foucault if you please, but to accuse him of not being learned is ridiculous. Paglia resorts to hyperbole hoping that someone will think she is so far-out that she must be right....I dont.
The supposedly
> innovative ideas for which
> his gullible acolytes feverishly hail him were in
> fact borrowed from a
> variety of familiar sources, from Friedrich
> Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim and
> Martin Heidegger to Americans such as sociologist
> Erving Goffman.
No doubt, Foucault was especially indebted to
Nietzche...so was Freud...does that mean that Freud
also made no original contributions? Paglia also has
a precursor...Rona Barret, the Hollywood gossip Queen!
>
> Foucault's analysis of "power" is foggy and paranoid
> and simply does not
> work when applied to the actual evidence of the
> birth, growth and complex
> development of governments in ancient and modern
> societies.
How kind of Paglia to point that out without substantiating her assertion!
Nor is
> Foucault's analysis of the classification of
> knowledge particularly
> original -- except in his bitter animus against the
> Enlightenment, which he
> failed to realize had already been systematically
> countered by Romanticism.
Oh right, I am sure Foucault was not aware of the "Romantic" movement. And I am sure that those engaged in World War I had not understood the message of the Romantics as well!
> What most American students don't know is that
> Foucault's commentary is
> painfully crimped by the limited assumptions of
> Saussurean linguistics
> (which I reject).
Again...what is it she rejects about it. Are we supposed to reject semiotics just because Paglia says so?
>And the
> pioneers of social psychology and behaviorism --
> Havelock Ellis, Alfred
> Adler, John B. Watson and many others -- were
> eloquent apostles of social
> constructionism when Foucault was still in the
> cradle.
Adler is about simplistic enough for even Paglia to understand...now was she the oldest child, middle child or youngest child? From an adlerian point of view, I suspect that she felt little self-esteem as a child and had to resort to tattle-telling and making up wild stories about other children in order to get attention. Maybe my analysis is wrong about her childhood but it certainly reflects something of her adulthood.
For those in the humanities, where
> anti-aesthetic British
> cultural studies (shaped by the out-of-date
> Frankfurt School) has become
> entrenched, I recommend "The Social History of Art"
> (translated into English
> in 1951), an epic work by the Marxist scholar Arnold
> Hauser that influenced
> me in graduate school.
NOW we know the level of Paglia's erudition! For God's sake, Hauser's "Social History of Art" is a fucking survey...I read it in undergraduate school and I was a math major!!!! It's good as a survey of Art History from a (rather orthodox) marxist point of view but that's about it.
American
> students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded
> of a genuine education
> in intellectual history and political analysis
I suppose they would be better off reading Paglia and learning from her that rape isn't that traumatic after all.
Thomas
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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