Brian Boyd's Hackery

Published Tuesday, March 13, 2007 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post

Brian Boyd has a piece on the death of Jean Baudrillard in today's Irish Times. To make a nice, if obvious, opening remark, he needed Captain America's passing to get more coverage than Baudrillard. And it did, if Google News is to be trusted. There was, however, no shortage of obituary on Baudrillard. Brian Boyd knows this, of that I'm positive. The New York Times, for instance, wrote the day following the philosopher's passing that:

Mr. Baudrillard was once considered a postmodern guru, but his analyses of modern life were too original and idiosyncratic to fit any partisan or theoretical category. [. . .] With a round face and big, thick glasses, Mr. Baudrillard was known for his witty aphorisms and black humor. He described the sensory flood of the modern media culture as “the ecstasy of communication.”

The paragraph is unremarkable given the volume of material available, but Boyd seems to have empathised disproportionately with its premises( if not its exact wording), for he appears to have subsequently taken his trusty thesaurus to it. Half-way in, writing of Baudrillard's relationship with the postmodernist movement, Boyd comments:

Such theories endeared him to postmodernists, but Baudrillard was far too idiosyncratic to belong to any theoretical category. What distinguished him from his contemporaries was his mordant sense of humour and his clever use of aphorisms. He once described the sensory flood of modern media culture as "the ecstasy of communication".

Oh, that similarity isn't normal, is it? No, one would hope not.

Still, Boyd's entire piece threads the lines between lazy research and outright plagiarism. He alludes to the Matrix at around the same point that in his piece as Cohen does in hers, using the same quotes, too; he discusses Baudrillard's essay the Gulf War Did Not Take Place when and as Cohen does; the intellectual's thoughts on 9/11 are referred to, again, when and as Cohen refers to them. Moreover, Boyd has the gall to end on the same point, with the almost exactly the same words, with the same quote, and hell, he even employs the same litotes.

Says Cohen: "Mr. Baudrillard was not unaware of the problem [his work's opacity]. “What I’m going to write will have less and less chance of being understood,” he said, “but that’s my problem.”"

Says Boyd: "Baudrillard himself was not unaware of how difficult his work was. “What I’m going to write will have less and less chance of being understood,” he said, “but that’s my problem.”"

When I worked, briefly, with a local newspaper as part of a work-experience programme, I was charged with editing press releases - changing the words around, but always maintain the message of the respective company, institute or political party. It was hackery, sure. But then, what's a 16 year old to do? The Irish Times is not the North County Leader; the New York Times is not a press release; Baudrillard is not a new local furniture company; and Brian Boyd certainly isn't 16 years old. Not that his article suggests otherwise; its forgery is so casual, the cover-up so lazy: it's exactly like those hackneyed book reviews (of unread books) we did as 16 year olds for English, with which the teacher was at first impressed, later suspicious, and soon outraged, and eventually disappointed.

How does Madam Editor feel?

Anyway, our sincerest apologies all for this blog's recent and relative sparsity of content. We have the time, and often the thoughts, but we've been struggling to throw more than two fluid sentences out together. Seems Boyd's not the only one...

Edit: In view of counter-claims of hackery in the comments, we give you Brian Boyd's response. That we were away when Boyd replied goes some way - all the way, actually - towards redressing such appellations. We highlight, too, that Boyd took at least a week to acknowledge our grievances. Anyway, expect our response sometime over the weekend.

Edit: Our response to the response, here.

Labels: brian boyd, irish times, plagiarism

Brian Boyd's Hackery

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