[FRA:] From Hegel to Madonna

[James Rovira]

You see it in the Russian formalists too, though, each one trying to take
the next step.  Necessary product of a Hegelian model, or any kind of
evolutionary model -- I think it's been around academia a long time too.  It
just struck me that this author was "drawing on Marx and Freud" and then
claimed to be saying something "new."  I think that would be very difficult,
and in most cases involves repeating ideas already expressed elsewhere in
slightly different language.

What's more interesting to me is whether or not the fetish of the new in
academia is now, essentially, the same phenom. as the fetish of the new in
popular culture.

Jim R

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org
> wrote:

> That's old news, as far as popular culture goes.  Maybe it's
> relatively new with respect to the academic wing of the knowledge
> industry, in search of the latest intellectual fad while torturing
> students and wasting people's time.
>
> At 02:18 PM 1/22/2009, James Rovira wrote:
> >I beginning to think our real fetish is the fetish of the new.  The new
> >insight, the new critique, the new development, the new concept.
> >
> >Jim R
> >
>