Hi, Hugh--here's a little something to be going on with (y nought?),
from "The Antinomies of Postmodernity" in _The Seeds of Time_ (1994),
one of my favorite Fredlies, not least because his ref. to predicting
the future from an "imperfect deck" came in real handy when I "tripped"
and went right through the screen (which already had a hole in it,
believe me!) on his back deck: "Oh, so _that's_ what you meant in
_The Seeds of Time_!"
Here, referring to "Rorty's attempt to distance himself from the
philosophical institution altogether, ...which can be read in social
terms as a movement toward the ever greater individuations of a new
decentered individual subject in postmodernity," Fred has recourse to
"efforts at freeing thought from its 'content'" in such prior periods
as the Victorian or that of the Third Republic--efforts that he
identifies with "Yeats's 'balloon of the mind' straining for release
and to cut its moorings with what grounds it has." In that case, the
goal was "the elimination of the vestigial content of an older
prebourgeois life mode," a goal "at one with the 'modernizations'
of the Englightenment program to dismantle the priests' schools in
the countryside" so as to "retrain the stubborn mentalities of the
peasants."
Does this resonate with your anti-longlegged fly-ing?
Candice
>And I think it would be terrific to read Fred Jameson on Yeats via
>poetryetc. By which time searches of various shelves and piles
>might turn up my copy of The Political Unconscious.
>
>Maybe I'll skip the Finneran's Yeats thread till then because neither
>Alison or myself has our hands on the appropriate edition, and I had
>this odd feeling that the argument was going - if Hugh thinks (a), he must
>therefore think (b).
>
>Fred Jameson on Yeats would probably make most of us think (y),
>don't you think?
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