> "Artificially maintained controversies are not the
> only worrying sign. What has critique become when
> Jean Baudrillard argues that the twin towers destroyed
> themselves under their own weight, undermined by the
> nihilism inherent in capitalism itself, that the
> terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the
> attraction of this black hole of nothingness? What
> has become of critique when a bestseller can claim
> that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon?
> Remember the good old days when revisionism arrived
> after the facts had been thoroughly established? Now
> we have the benefit of what could be called instant
> revisionism. The smoke of the event has not yet
> finished rising before dozens of conspiracy theories
> begin revising the official account, adding even more
> ruins to the ruins. What has become of critique when
> my neighbor in my little Bourbonnais village looks
> down on me as hopelessly naive, because I believe that
> the United States was attacked by terrorists?
> Remember the good old days when university professors
> could look down on unsophisticated folks, because they
> naively believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie?
> Things have changed, at least in my village. I am now
> the one who naively believes in some simple facts,
> while the other guys are too sophisticated to be
> gullible. What has become of critique when there is a
> whole industry denying that Apollo landed on the moon?
> What has become of critique when the Total Information
> Awareness project uses the Baconian slogan Scientia
> est potentia? Didn't I read that somewhere in Michel
> Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted by
> the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and
> Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?"
Critical philosophy (most of philosophy, really) grows out of the distancing of common sense, building upon it and deconstructing it at the same time, yet nowadays common sense is a game of lights in the mass media, constructed, privatized, governmentalized: information (Bacon's _potentia_: "Superimposing a new form on a given body")
It may well be that the more conservative minded (Arendt, McLuhan) have grasped that transition better -- with the notable exception of the much vilified Jean Baudrillard, of course.
cheers AN