In 2003, we put Thomas de Zengotita in our Super 8 column. (Full disclosure: de Zengotita was one of my high-school professors. Thanks to him, my school offered anthropology (Monod, Malinowsky) and philosophy (Plato) electives to seniors. He was also one of those teachers who could probably run the table on you in a pool game while offering his opinion on why you shouldn't get a girl's name tattoed on your chest.)
For the past few years de Zengotita's influence has begun to spread, thanks to a series of fantastic lead articles in
Harper's magazine, where he's a contributing editor. In the coming months his impact as a cultural critic should expand even more, thanks to the publication of his book,
Mediated (Bloomsbury, $21.95). An anthropologist by training (he's a former protege of Margaret Meade), de Zanegotita articulates an expansive theory that encompasses, hipsterism, politics, the Internet, and cable TV. It's a devastating, and completely entertaining exploration of a post-9/11 culture in which authenticity is paramount, yet rarely achieved. (For those of you who cringed in fear at theory-based "performance studies" courses in college, fear not:
Mediated is rigorous, but not inaccessible.)
De Zengotita has picked up a fan in Norman Mailer, who blurbs the book with the following quote: "
Mediated has the same liveliness and intense intellectuality as Marshall McLuhan's
Understanding Media which is a way of saying there are anywhere from three to ten stimulating ideas on every page. As McLuhan presented us with the realization that modernism was coming to an end, so de Zengotita has a great deal to say about the saturation of post-modernism in our existence today. Let me offer my salute to Thomas de Zengotita."
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posted by Matthew Ross @ 3/06/2005 02:59:00 PM
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