On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Brian Siano wrote:
> ...I tried to read Derrida, and thought it was word salad. Maybe, if
> I spent a few years reading him very, very carefully, I might get some
> interesting insight... but I couldn't imagine any insight being worth
> that degree of work. And I have bills to pay and projects to finish.
>
> As for Baudrillard, I read him about fifteen years ago at the
> insistence of some acquaintances. And I ws utterly shocked that these
> people would think that this derivative, empty _drivel_ could be
> considered profound. I had the feeling that his conception of America
> was an amalgam of 1950's era advertisement styles, at best-- it was
> like reading those dopey architectural manifestoes that pushed the
> reps of Le Corbusier and Mies Van der Rohe. As for his notions of
> simulacra, Philip K. Dick did it better decades before, and it's all
> just a riff on Plato's shadows on the walls of a cave. I finally
> realized that, while I'd been through this what-if-it's-
> all-an-illusion stuff when I was thirteen, and reading science fiction
> like a maniac, these acquaintances hadn't run into it until they read
> Baudrillard. So they thought he was utterly brilliant. Baudrillard's
> profundity is inversely proportional to the experience of the reader.