> lib obscurantism. Here's an old Paglia comment from Salon:
>
> priori thesis. For those in the humanities, where anti-aesthetic British
> cultural studies (shaped by the out-of-date Frankfurt School) has become
> entrenched, I recommend "The Social History of Art" (translated into English
> in 1951), an epic work by the Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser that influenced
> me in graduate school. No one in British or American cultural studies has
> Hauser's erudition, precision and connoisseurship.
Hilarious. The Frankfurt School was the eternal ghost at the neolib/neocon feast; always at the margins, so frightening you couldn't dare to do more than mention the thing -- like the glimpse one gets of monsters in nightmares, you never actually see The Beast. Hauser's stuff is, well, cheaper than Nyquil, I suppose -- sociological description, not aesthetic analysis.
It's always interesting how allegedly subversive and radical neocons, who denounce the PC orthodoxy of the Left, are themselves unable to tolerate true intellectual or aesthetic diversity.
-- Dennis