A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (review)

The Reader was first published in 1992. It contains sections on Semiology, Ideology, Subjectivity, Difference, Gender and Race, and Postmodernism. In general, the selection is representative of the 'classics', including selections from Saussure, Barthes, Althusser, Said, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and Žižek.

This is essentially a stock cultural studies anthology with accompanying radical Left political slant. A decade or so on, the collection seems dated. It reinforces the sense of declining relevance of cultural studies — or, in its own terms, its going out of fashion. The editors provide ad hominen political rants of their own — inappropriate in a Reader.

One of the new additions highlights an 'out-of-touch-with-reality' feel. A Baudrillard essay on The Spirit of Terrorism, written soon after September 11, froths away abstractly about the collapse of the Twin Towers being a fiction — 'reality is a principle'. Tell that to the relatives of the three thousand who died!

One would have thought that the immorality of such frivolous thinking had ended with Stockhausen's comment on planes hitting the WTC being 'the ultimate work of art'.

One last comment: A piece from Roland Barthes on The Pleasure of the Text stands up very well.