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  he French
theoretician Jean Baudrillard has vaulted into the lead in the
unofficial competition for Most Despicable Quote in the Wake of
September 11th. Baudrillard, a revered figure among American
humanities professors over the last 25 years, recently asserted on
the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Monde that the
Judeo-Christian West, led by America, not only provoked the
terrorist attacks, it actually desired them; his remarks have
sailed beneath media radar in the United States only because they
were written in French and come cloaked in the usual
deconstructionist blather: "Because with its unbearable power, it
has fomented this violence pervading the world, along with the
terrorist imagination that inhabits all of us, without our knowing.
That we dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception
dreamed of it, because no one can fail to dream of the destruction
of any power become so hegemonic — that is unacceptable for the
Western moral conscience. And yet it's a fact, which can be measured
by the pathetic violence of all the discourses that want to cover it
up. To put it in the most extreme terms, they did it, but we wanted
it."
Baudrillard, it
should be noted, has long been an object of ridicule among trained
philosophers — a fact that has in no way undermined his widespread
influence within the cognitive Never-Never Land of literature, art
history, and sociology departments, where facts are never objective
(hence, Baudrillard's quick insistence that his nonsensical judgment
is "a fact") and where demands for verifiable evidence and logical
consistency are perceived as forms of intellectual
oppression.
It's tempting,
of course, to dismiss Baudrillard's statement as a moment of
isolated idiocy, yet he is actually saying nothing out of step with
his life's work. His ruminations in this instance are part and
parcel of the nihilistic celebration of paradox and fetish that
rides under the banner of postmodernism. Five years ago, for
example, he wrote a book called The Gulf War Did not Take
Place, wherein he argued that the violent ousting of Iraqi
troops from Kuwait was too one-sided to furnish images proper to
warfare; the coalition took so few casualties that the outcome must
have been certain in advance. Hence the entire conflict was "a
shameful and pointless hoax, a programmed and melodramatic version
of what was the drama of war." And since images, in the
through-the-looking-glass world of deconstructionist theory,
determine reality, Baudrillard concluded that the war never
happened.
Baudrillard, of
course, goes right on being cited by humanities professors. His
texts are regularly assigned in undergraduate and graduate courses.
Panel discussions are held on his writings at the annual conventions
of the Modern Language Association.
Indeed, if the
last quarter-century has taught us nothing else, it's that there is
simply no way to discredit anyone in the current humanities climate.
The fact that the deconstructionist critic Paul de Man turned out to
be a Nazi sympathizer did nothing to deter his admirers — although
the discovery of the dark side of his past made the front page of
the New York Times. His fellow literary theorist Jacques
Derrida even deconstructed de Man's wartime writings. To wit, in
1940, de Man had written for the pro-Nazi newspaper Le Soir:
"One can thus see that a solution to the Jewish problem that would
lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would
not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable
consequences." But Derrida interpreted de Man's words to show that
he wasn't really saying anything bad about Jews.
That little
performance, of course, did nothing to deter Derrida's own
admirers.
Then, too,
there is the more recent case of City University of New York
professor Stanley Aronowitz. It was Aronowitz, you may remember, who
was victimized by "Sokal's Hoax" back in 1995, when the left-wing
journal he'd founded, Social Text, published a paper by the
physicist Alan Sokal called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." The only problem
was that the paper turned out to be a parody of deconstructionist
double-speak. With mock-seriousness, Sokal claimed to show how "the
space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical
reality." In other words, he set out to prove that the world didn't
exist. Sokal's methodology was simply to string together "the
silliest quotes about mathematics and physics from the most
prominent academics" — including citations of Aronowitz himself. Six
editors at Social Text read the paper before it was accepted
for publication. Then Sokal told his story to the journal Lingua
Franca. When word of the hoax broke, it too made the front page
of the New York Times. Aronowitz and his cronies were
instantly transformed from obscure eggheads into tenured
laughingstocks — at least in the eyes of the general
public.
That should
have ended the story. Except that three years later, and
notwithstanding the whiff of national humiliation, Aronowitz was
promoted by City University from plain old professor to
distinguished professor of sociology.
Which raises
the question: If being a front-page laughingstock cannot derail the
career, or even dim the reputation, of an intellectual in the
humanities, what can? |
