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Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human
Edited by S. Brewster et al.
Manchester University Press, Manchester U.K. 2000.
229 pp. and index. U.S. $74.95 (cloth)
ISBN 0-7190-5337-4
Reviewed by Curtis E.A. Karnow
This is a collection of essays by thirteen academics working in Britain
writing, mostly, for themselves. It is a good window into what passes for
academic discourse on modernity, aesthetics, human and 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, long
highly convoluted sentences where many of the words are actually made up.
We excuse this sort of thing, sometimes, because 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 much
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
post modernism- 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 though 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's only justice to comment on their language,
ignoring most of the content.
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