That Darn Tutor… In the

That Darn Tutor…

In the post I’ve linked above the Happy Tutor links to some promotional material for the Jake Derrida Show.  Upon reading, it seemed obvious to me that Jake was deep in some heavy schtick that probably should have died when John Barth went on the road with a reel to reel tape recorder in the sixties.  In this presentation we have poor interlocutor Anne Dufourmantelle in the role of tape recorder, and Barth is played by Jake, the goat boy himself.

Well, I intuit a lot… saves reading time really.  But in this case, before I wound up and said something nasty about those pathetic wretches, the postmoderns, I thought it best to shake the tree of memory to see if this shit is as derivative and trivial as it seems.

In 1996, when J.D. was on the road preparing young people for their eventual roles in the hospitality industry, Dirk Vanderbeke presented a paper at a conference in Greifswald.  The paper is precious, a wonderful piece, well worth reading and studying.  

Dirk was in his mid-thirties when he prepared the paper.  He’d barely finished his dissertation.  He can certainly be forgiven this little bit of chrono-synclastic inversion:

In fact, it seems as if John Barth in his novel had anticipated Foucault’s diagnosis of the selves as the difference of masks (cf. Foucault 1974, 131).

Barth anticipating Foucault…  our more conventional critical expression has always been to credit the introduction and understand the derivative nature of the imitation.  The art, the artist, these provide the context for criticism.  Without them, there can be no critics.  “Postmodern theory,” job security for a generation of academic intellectuals, still must be held to a few simple principles.  Does St. Michel credit Barth for his selves/masks epiphany?  Does Jake credit Barth for his hospitality performance schtick?In the brevity of this blog posting I put it to you Mr. and Ms. Western Culture… is it not as likely that here again we have a postmodern playing fast and loose with attribution and that indeed Foucault and his sidekick probably ripped off some of their best stuff from the artists who surrounded them?  And should they not be locked in the stocks and pelted with overripe fruit and vegetables for their usurpations?  Just a thought…