(7:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Cliopatria Awards Cometh

One day I was sitting around the office with my friend (and fellow PhD candidate) Mike, and we were grousing about the theory flamewar currently going on. What we found especially annoying was that it was clear to anyone who had actually studied the theorists that the participants did not know what they were talking about, and were simply throwing around the names of the Theorists of the Week Club as buzzwords. That's when we came up with the idea for a prank.

We invented a fake theorist by the name of Pierre Mourier, and started a flamewar between the two of us regarding his work. We would make up fake texts and long quotes that he supposedly said, and argue aggressively about them. We thought that after a week or so, some enterprising MA student would try to look up Mourier and discover the joke.

But, no ... instead, they started arguing with us! People who were not in on the joke would write things like: "Well, my reading of Mourier is..." implying that they had read these non-existent texts. When the other PhD students saw what we were up to, they began to create (and quote extensively from) their own fake theorists, such as Gillaume de Slopard, Simone Mourier (his wife), and Jorge Jesus Castillo. The works by and about these theorists included "The Rational Irrational," "Language and Determined History: Some Thoughts on the Book of Job," "Baudelaire's Blue Lobster: The Genesis of the Psychocultural Image and the Return to Hermeticism," "The Syphlitic Eye," "Murmurs in the Cabaret: Finding Language through Noise," and "The Suffering of Memory" (which, in a brilliant post, one of my colleagues argued should be better translated as "The Ache of Memory").

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