If you watch the video of my presentation in Leipzig on “The Library of the Future,” you can hear at the end a statement made by Thomas König (in English) during the question-and-answer session.
“Thinking on my feet,” in the video, I already made a reply to König. I said that I am in total disagreement with him. Now I would like to add two more aspects to that reply.
In a nutshell, König, who is a sociologist, said two things (1) He doesn’t like so-called “French postmodernism,” which he called “wobbly.” (2) He thinks that popular TV shows and films have nothing to do with human emancipation, and the people who watch these TV shows and films are not interested in human emanicipation (i.e., they are idiots).
Two points:
1 – Why does Thomas König not like French postmodernism and I like French postmodernism?
I don’t know him, but my hypothesis is that he got his impression of what “French postmodernism” is from the second-hand accounts promulgated by the army of university professors who championed the “postmodern turn” in academia during the last 35 years.
I studied European Intellectual History at Cornell University (focus on France and Germany), so I read the great post-World War II French thinkers intensively and first-hand.
This explanation is just a guess, but I believe in it enough that I’d bet money on it.
Here’s a list of the Top 20 greatest postwar French thinkers, in my estimation:
(in honour of Charles Bukowski, whom I am at the moment intensively reading, everyone on this list is male)
(REVISION 31.10.2010: NCAA style, I’ve expanded the list to 25. Three women have now made the list.)
1 – Albert Camus
2 – Jean-Paul Sartre
3 – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
4 – Claude Lefort
5 – Jean Baudrillard
6 – Gilles Deleuze
7 – Michel Foucault
8 – Jacques Derrida
9 – Jacques Lacan
10 – Claude Lévi-Strauss
11 – Roland Barthes
12 – Jean-Luc Nancy
13 – Félix Guattari
14 – Pierre Bourdieu
15 – Alain Badiou
16 – Paul Ricoeur
17 – Guy Debord
18 – Paul Virilio
19 – Pierre Clastres
20 – Cornelius Castoriadis
21 – Henri Lefebvre
22 – Michel de Certeau
23 – Simone de Beauvoir
24 – Julia Kristeva
25 – Luce Irigaray
26 – Monique Wittig
I was gonna follow up this list with my all-time Kansas City Royals starting lineup, plus 5 starting pitchers, but I’ll save that for another time.
Georges Bataille is so great and so sacred that it would be too banal to even put him on the list. It would have to be a zero-based list to get him on. I think of Alexandre Kojève as a prewar thinker, and, anyway, I’m not gonna bump the “anarchists” Clastres and Castoriadis from the list.
Seduction, the singularity, the sublime — it all comes from Bataille. Baudrillard and Derrida – this is one side of things – are just Bataille commentators.
(31.10.2010: Since I’ve got Bataille as #0, I’ve put in Monique Wittig as #26.)
Albert Camus is the greatest thinker because he thought the most deeply about life. His approach to writing transcended the binary opposition or dualism between intellectuals and ordinary people. He was an existentialist, and nothing beats that. He was the heart and soul of the French resistance against the Nazis. He suffered the War, the Stalinization of the French Left, the hell of French colonialism in Algeria.
Camus even went through long periods of NOT WRITING. This makes him greater than the compulsive writers. This separates him from the pack.
True, The Rebel (L’homme révolté) is not a very good book. But Camus’ greatness even overcomes that.
Camus is the Muhammed Ali of 20th-century French history.
2 – This afternoon, while thinking about Thomas König’s statement that popular culture has nothing to do with human emancipation, I wandered into a branch of Saturn Hansa, a big consumer electronics chain store in Germany. There’s an entire wall there, about 20 meters long, of boxed DVD sets of TV shows from the last 35 years.
All those TV shows are just sitting there, waiting to be analyzed. And the films too. It’s called media studies.
Media studies has operated with a binary opposition or dualism between deep thinkers like Innis, McLuhan and Baudrillard who disparaged content and believed that “the medium is the message” and ordinary practitioners who wrote about content but in a way rather uninformed by theory. A second major binary opposition is that between the study of the “entertainment” media (like film and TV shows) and the “news” media (politics and current events). What new conceptions of how the media really work do we need to get beyond these two dualisms and set the field of media studies on a new footing?
I have demonstrated, with some examples, how to write about TV shows and films (both critically and as an enthusiastic fan) in my writings on Star Trek, Lost, Twelve Monkeys, Groundhog Day, etc…
If German or British “critical theorists” don’t want to analyze these TV shows and films because they believe that the shows and films are being produced and watched by “idiots,” then it seems to me that would make the “critical theorists” who believe in such a dogma not so very smart, not the people who produce and watch the shows.
These TV shows are just sitting there waiting to be analyzed, and we sociologists should get to work doing that. No one has really done it yet, and this is one of the main things that Enlightened sociologists should be doing.
