On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Liza Featherstone wrote:
> Has this guy ever written anything worth reading?
25 or 30 years ago he wrote a bunch of stuff that wasn't dumb. It bore similarities to Veblen's _Leisure Class_, Barthes' _Mythologies_ and Bourdieu's _Distinction_, without being quite as good as any of those guys. There's no real reason to go back and read it because it was written back when some people thought semiology could become a science like linguistics, which makes it feel very dated. But in its day, when that jargon didn't seem as Rube Goldbergish as it does now, it wasn't bad. Unfortunately after that made his rep, and after he gave up that Cartesian dream of a science of signs (probably sooner than his contemporaries, to his credit) he took to writing what seems like the theoretical equivalent of tone poems and he's been doing it ever since. You ought to see him declaim them at a podium. He's like a beatific little Kerouac.
As a footnote, and an indication of the change, 30 years ago when he first used the word "simulacrum" he meant something very specific. He meant a style of home adornment favored by the petit bourgeoisie (and he's French, so he meant that term matter of factly). It was a style where everything was reproduced by a layer of protection, like posters mounted on matting and covered by glass, and couches covered by slipcovers, and floors thick with varnish and then covered by rugs. He interpreted this to mean something about how that class related to the world and their possession of things.
10 years later he expanded the term to mean something so big and significant I can't tell you what it is :o) And his writing's been like that every since, afaict.
Michael