Speaking Ill of the Dead with Style
The declining influence of hard-core French post-modernism has led to the unfortunate decline of a wonderful genre: the punchy, anti-post-modernist screed, an art perfected by Alan D. Sokal and his acolytes. The death of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, however, has given Carlin Romano a vehicle for the outraged academic masses to once more express their contempt for Gallic jargon and obscurantism. His anti-eulogy in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education is worth a read by anyone who enjoys the odd dose of finely delivered invective. For example:
Like a French Ann Coulter with stumpy legs and nicotine-ruined lungs, but sans Coulter’s gift for punchy images, Baudrillard stalked fame by making outrageous declarations he knew to be false. In Fragments and other collections of interviews, he brayed egotistically about his brilliance while admitting he made up quotations in his scholarly work.
Or consider this attack on academic fads:
All veteran humanities people know the reasons: Intentionally obscure French philosophy is an established performance art; there’s money to be made, appointments to be secured, prestige to be garnered. Just as rich, white American pop-music execs grasp that giving a tyro singer one name automatically wins teenage fans, operators in the “master of thought” biz know that positioning a properly hieratic obscurantist correctly can lead scholarly publishers to issue any dreck the thinker produces and eventually trigger secondary trots on the “masters” by the same acolytes driving the whole process. Once a French thinker hits the mark, of course, no one dares shut him or her up, or suggests such plebeian activities as editing or rewriting.
Baudrillard, though, may be the screw-up who endangered the brand. His published writings were so bad, and his publicity-hound manner so obvious, that the image of incomprehensibility and clownishness attached itself to the “respectful” profile drawn by his advocates and they couldn’t rub it off.
In addition Romano informs us that, “No one will read Jean Baudrillard in 50 years, once those who made money off his antics fade. As in show business, so in academe. No fraud survives his enablers.” Elsewhere he discusses “Baudrillard’s blithe idiocies.”
The traditionalist in me balks a bit at excoriating the dead in the shadow of the funeral. The meanie in me, however, can’t help but enjoying Romano’s style.