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65. Thomas’ the Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Parshall, Peter F. |
| Copyright Year | 1971 |
| Abstract | The great thing about Duncan’s work is the presence behind it. Yes there is the brilliant dismantling of the various rational schemes designed to legitimize a less-thanhumane world (liberal constitutionalism, law-and-economics, legal reasoning in general when presented as a self-contained method for arriving at outcomes or truths), but the social change dimension of this critique is the force behind it, the exertion against the system of the loving, egalitarian presence that Duncan actually is. That’s why we all feel a loss at the idea of him “retiring”...it seems to deprive us of our right arm in the struggle to bring into the world a human reality that he himself embodies and that has always backed up his critique and supported our own. Fortunately, he won’t actually retire; it’s till death do us part; so we can celebrate the occasion rather than feel sad or bereft about it. But how does Duncan’s own work incorporate “the presence behind it” into it? The answer that he might give is, “not at all.” In response to one early effort on my part to get him to actually say it, to spit out the relationship between who he is and what he is for, he responded warmly, “You are betraying our program by conceptualizing it.”1 He has always rejected the attempt to name what the good is that is being allowed to emerge into public space by the work of demolishing what obscures it. How then does “the presence behind it” improve the world? Here is Duncan: “Modernism/postmodernism (mpm [or Duncan’s own project])...is a project with the goal of achieving transcendent aesthetic/emotional/intellectual experiences at the margins of or in the interstices of a disrupted rational grid. The practical activity of mpm centers on the artifact, something made or performed (could be high art, could be the most mundane object, could be the deconstruction of a text, could be the orchestration of a dinner).”2 And if I were to say in response to this formulation that what is “transcendent” about such experiences is that when successful they create a new encounter with the other manifesting authentic mutual recognition and prefiguring a loving and egalitarian world, Duncan might respond, as he once did, “That does not sound to me like an evocation which can fulfill the legitimate functions of communication, of language and knowledge, because it’s abstract bullshit, whereas what we need is small-scale, microphenomenological evocation of real experiences in complex contextualized ways in which one makes it into doing it.”3 |
| Starting Page | 125 |
| Ending Page | 128 |
| Page Count | 4 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1080/00144940.1971.11483009 |
| Volume Number | 29 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://legalleft.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Gabel-The-force.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1971.11483009 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
