``..that we redefine the relationship between theoretical and empirical work. What is required is a redefinition of the relationship between science and the public, political sphere....'' shag
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Thanks for going back and digging this up. But I can't remember what I was thinking back then, so I really can't pick it up again.
I'll skip all the intermediate stuff...
I can thank my first anthropology professor, mostly a gadfly and excentric as all the best seemed to have been, Edmund Carpenter for his lectures on Cassirer in cultural anthropology and on Levi-Strauss, Jean Piaget and Marshall McLuhan. This was in spring 1963 when nobody had ever heard of this stuff.
The plunge into McLuchan's mass media envelop, Levi-Strauss's structural world of language, myth, social order, and kinship, Piaget's developmental epistemology, and Cassirer's magisterial relativity of the theory of knowledge that traversed science, language, myth and art, was...
...well there really wasn't much left of my student universe of the certainty of western thought and the supremacy of its cultural, social and psychological normative orders. Just fucking kiss that shit goodbye.
As Morpheus said to Neo:
``Welcome to the universe of the real.''
The scene in the matrix when Neo's self-image deconstructs by involution from the simulacrum of the matrix was just about the best image-metaphor of the effect of taking this course from Carpenter as I have ever seen.
Let me put it this way. Reading Butler in my fifties was not like taking the Red Pill from Edmund Carpenter when I was twenty.
CG