the theory thing, or, perform or else!
Music: Fischerspooner: #1 I'm flying high above some place south of Boston on my way to Dallas. It's a long flight, and eventually I'll end up porting a DVD (it's a choice between Spirited Away or Wild at Heart, but now that I think about it, this screen is huge and the Lynch film has some naughty bits; on my last flight from Atlanta I was watching the original Amityville Horror and my neighbor got nervous during the gratuitous sex scene, you know, the clichéd fucking that starts the fucking . . . though my neighbor didn't flinch when the blood starting gushing from the stairwell, because she was down with those evangelical Christian family values). Ruth is in my row to my right, Michael is two rows back, and Trish is right behind me, but we've adopted the proper in-flight etiquette by isolating ourselves in self-absorbed bubbles of post-convention weariness.
While I loathe traveling, once I saw my friends I forgot about undisciplined toddlers and airplanes. I have never laughed harder at a NCA convention; apparently I've never appeared so relaxed. It was busy as hell and I had more meetings and panels than I could truly handle, but afternoons and evenings with friends in the bars were good for the soul.
The preconference was good but loooooooooooooong. If I had the time to do my reading I'd have had an easier time understanding what was at stake in some of the discussions; regardless, I did learn a lot. Parties were big and tiring after anything more than 20 minutes (and as the conservative "economic stimulus" packages continue to produce constipation, the number of parties with free booze continues to dwindle). As far as paneling goes, I have discovered how to make NCA tolerable, and its name is "performance studies."
Speaking of performance, or better, Jon McKenzie's invective and demand, "perform or else!--Trish passed up an interview with Jean Baudrillard in The New York Times Magazine. I read it to the sound of the filtersweeps of Fischerspooner's "L.A. Song," which I would recommend for reading any of Baudrillard's more recent writings. The philosopher appears smirking, standing in un-pressed pants and a sport coat, looking at the camera with his eyes yet with is face coyly cocked to the left, his left hand lifted to the back of his neck. He is cute. In what is apparently an email exchange, the author function asks questions in boldface, and the responses are overly and obviously intended as predictable:
Baudrillard is deserving of the size of his name. (Ok, so, now the guy in front of me decides to recline his chair--as if two f%$#ing inches makes any discernable difference, asshole--and now my computer is closing, so I'll have to resume this in Dallas or Austin).There are no more French intellectuals. What you are calling French intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television. They talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.
Were you a friend of Susan Sontag? We saw each other from time to time, but the last time, it was terrible. She came to a conference in Toronto and blasted me for having denied that reality exists.
Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories. That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.
Where was I? Oh yes, Baudrillard gave 'em what they wanted--he gave them much more, too. He is a good role model of how to fund your thinking for a living via branding. Of course, it's important to underscore you don't always have to be the brightest (there's room for everybody, even people who study--how did that student put it who approached me at the Georgia State party--"weird stuff, like S&M, you know"), nor need you ever be clever when the institution that funds you is only interested in your brand. So smoke me, and I'll dance a little, but I'll only think aloud and laugh with friends at the bar or over dinner (or at a French café). As Sam Cooke would say, "that's where it's at": no posturing, no too-hard-to-really-think-about-in-ten-minutes papers, no theory territory police with their pomo/post-o-meters, no realty-denier bashing. Nope, at the convention bar or in a taxi or at the airport Burger King it's just, "Have you read that interview with Baudrillard in The New York Times Magazine?" How many times can you parody yourself parodying yourself before it stops being true?