Leonardo

This is a collection of essays by 13 academics working in Britain and writing, mostly, for themselves. It is a good window into what passes for academic discourse on modernity, aesthetics, the human and the transhuman, which is to say, pretty much anything. Most of the essays are exegesis, quote fests using citations to a wide variety of other exegeses. The recipe: commence with the Masters: Nietzsche, Kant, Heiddeger, Marx, Freud; explore the riffs on those made by Baudrillard, Jean Francois Lyotard, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault; then sprinkle heavily with further variations by more obscure academics. So, this book is the fourth level down, and here the brew is very, very thick, an imitation of the best of the Obscure Greats, with long, highly convoluted sentences in which many of the words are actually made up. We excuse this sort of thing, sometimes, if we're translating from the German or Sanskrit (just kidding), or there is poetry in an odd juxtaposition, or the power of the new thought explodes through the language; but not here. English, the richest language in the history of the world, has words to clarify, if only these British academics would use it. The introduction suspects the truth, and tries to deflect it by calling it out in advance: "Maybe in this sense the volume is merely its own opportunistic brand of hybrid. We hope not. Arguably the novelty of these and other like alliances is dubious at best and too readily accedes to the spurious sense of culture on the brink." I almost never quote from books I review, but this was too good, too accurate, to pass up.

The essays provide a high gloss on the supposed artifacts and conditions of postmodernism—on William Gibson, on-line sex, drugs and hypnotism, Blade Runner, capitalism, NASA, photography and so on. Already the citations and subjects seem dated, old expressions of what we once thought the future would be like. These remind me of the Jetsons cartoon show, orange Tang drink, the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York, purple lipstick—how the future was supposed to be. These could have been marvelous essays, historical markers of our fascination with the imaged and imagined future, explorations of the mutating or evaporating self in the midst of a modern discourse. But instead they are written in the old language of a secret cabal, a fake Derrida/Baudrillard/Foucault tempo so as to claim the proper academic allegiance? One only hears the contributors themselves whispering to each other, a funny sort of self-fulfilling post-structuralist loop. It is only justice to comment on their language, ignoring most of the content.