>> A concern about `the right' is the obsession of lazy leftist. (CC)
>
> Yawn. Doug
Anybody out there working on The Rise and Fall of LboTalk?
Dennis Claxton
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Hmm. I learned a tremendous amount by studying Strauss and meditating on the neocons and their US historical origins. The work forced me to study the history of western ideas, political history of Europe, social history, and review most of the art history cannon. All of this blended together to form something like a grand cinema, something worthy of Bach's Orchestral Suites.
I had to buy and read 36 books just to get him centered in his milieu. It turned out that everybody, except Strauss was a far more interesting read. I can't remember all the keys that turned to unlock all the questions that seemed locked before. One example. Why was US art history so damned reactionary? As a field it was reacting to the Hegelian dominanted cultural studies (cultural `sciences') of the German, French, and Italian schools. Probably the most preimenant philosopher of cultural sciences in the 20thC was Ernst Cassirer, a long time hero of mine, because reading him opened the world of the arts to the world of ideas, the world of life, histories, works, personalities, the whole cinemagraphic realm of the mind, the creative imaginary. It had turned out the most radical view of the arts, came from dissonant anthropology
The US academics took their queue from the highly class conscious English and English historians.
My only regret is these studies were so rarefied that they were impossible to share or engage because there were so few people, around here anyway, who have done the work. It can't be homework. It has to be the free engagement with the intangible life which is the history. Books and history. There is simply nothing like it.
Well, nevermind all that. The rise of LBO came as a consequence of the bitter flame wars of Bad Subjects where many of the writers, and writers wannabe got their chops duking it out around a central personality cult of the unlikely Annalee Newitz---a sexual deviant from Orange County, Jewish White Trash and conflicted suburban struggles with identity, sexuality, and politics. Most (all?) had gone to UCB at the height of the French Theory influence and didn't like the taste, or maybe sort of liked the taste. They were deeply suspicious of my generation who grew up in the existentialist movements encapsulated in Malraux, Camus, and Sartre---a violent reaction to British Empiricism and the analytic Austrian school of Carnap et al.
Anyway Annalee was always fun to read, not matter how wacky some of it was. It is a shared taste from the absolute alienation of the disjoint sets of the suburban mind where monsters crawl next to systems theory. Yeah, I date from Bad Subjects, the Gopher version on dial up. The title appeared on the main opening text menu.
Well there was where Feyerabend got his cutlass. I sat spell bound through out the fall of 1967 in Feyerabend's lectures. There was nothing like them at least for me...
All that and more was revivified in the late days of Bad Subjects and early days of LBO where I used to post long rants... My favorite memory was some wild trip on Topology and Anti-Oedipus, where I saw the tangent plane of vector space as equivalent to the flight of the creative imaginary. This was real nut case stuff, but vastly fun. It catered to my love of geometry and imagination---straight out of David Hilbert, another wild ride I can share with no one.
Well just substitute Lucky's Soliloquy here. The real problem with this passage in the play, is it does sort of make sense, just at the borders of intelligibility. That's the whole point, the loss of the 19thC rational thread that dies in the hyper rational of the modern where the poetry is losted, the lyric imagination is lost, the narrative is lost. The coherent story dies.
Then there was Davos... Cassirer, Heidegger, and Carnap. Heidegger's Being, Carnap's analytic rational, and Cassirer's transformational operation space where equivalence could be found at the cost of both being and reason.
Too far gone.
CG