Saturday, May 12, 2007

I did wonder ...

... if this site was a joke. It seemed too much like a parody of what a Cultural Studies lecturer should sound like. It appears to be only too true though.
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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"white marxists" would be a better tag. I wonder what happens to his students who don't toe the 'party line'?

9:02 am
Anonymous said...

The existence of this sort of people is what makes me believe the West truly is lost.

3:52 pm
Fulham Reactionary said...

Anon @ 9.02:

Given that Hutnyk appears primarily to supervise students undertaking PhDs in "Cultural Studies", I doubt that the problem ever arises. After all, I cannot see how anyone who was not already a committed far-leftist would choose to study such a ridiculous subject, under the guidance of such a ridiculous man.

5:14 pm
Anonymous said...

From Amazon:

"Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies (Paperback)
by John Hutnyk (Author)

Synopsis
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. Cultural theorists love to toy with Marx, but critical thinking seems to fall into obvious traps. After an introduction which explains why the 'Marxism' of the academy is unrecognisable and largely unrecognised in anti-capitalist struggles, Bad Marxism provides detailed analyses of Cultural Studies' cherished moves by holding fieldwork, archives, empires, hybrids and exchange up against the practical criticism of anti-capitalism. Engaging with the work of key thinkers: Jacques Derrida, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Hutnyk concludes by advocating an open Marxism that is both pro-party and pro-critique, while being neither dogmatic, nor dull."

Truly an Onanist of the first water.

7:34 pm
AntiCitizenOne said...

Like I keep saying over and over again...

When we make Adult Students pay for their education in full (as they are receiving the benefit) then, and only then will these types disappear.

Only the extortion of the state keeps these people paid.

8:26 pm
Anonymous said...

Well I followed this bloke Hutnyk's links and blimey, WHAT a tosser. His simple-minded pride at being a REAL LIVE ACADEMIC drips from every sentence of his self-laudatory writings. This makes me want to confront him and say "Well, what do you REALLY know about? What can you actually teach? I don't really want to know about the phenomological aspect of Asian punk music, although I can imagine that it probably "both confirms and subverts , in a very real sense, the Althusserian perpective by which a sense of the other is radically reified by means of a pseudo-oppositional tension between varying aspects of identificatory ideologies, notably that post-Lesbian celebratory neo-colonialist aspect of archetypical formations that's so meaningfully articulated within a Marxian framework..." (etc etc etc but you can pick up more of this sort of thing by spending 10 minutes among the subliterate Postgrad dissertations in the library of Muddlesex University...) and the answer would probably be that he's not there to teach (well you can't pass on what you haven't got, can you) but to help you on the voyage to self-discovery and lots of grants...
What put me off Maoism for good is this: in about 1967-1971 I worked just round the corner from the Chinese Embassy off Portland Place and one day we got a message that strange things were happening there, and on going down the road to look, we saw one member of their staff run amuck with an axe, and then the others came out and harangued the crowd incomprehensibly from the Little Red Book... this showed that it wasn't the Yanks but the Reds who had established a highly effective strategy for mind control....and then a few years back there came out Sokal & Bricmont's book "Intellectual Impostures" which is a simply brilliant demolition of most modernist philosophical theories, clearly demonstrating the sheer charlatanry of Lacan and Baudrillard and all their meningless discourses, paradigms and topologies*)...and when you've finished reading it donate it one of to Hutnyk's poor benighted students, in the hopes that he/she might be able to understand what their supervisor can't...

*) like most people, I thought this was something to do with clipping hedges...

9:52 pm

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