Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 18:59:19 -0400
From: Brad4d6-AT-aol.com
Subject: Re: HAB: patheticism conference


>
>>Um, this is a joke, right?
>
>>     Landis Duffett

>The (patheticism) conference is for real - 
>which is not to say that no humor can inform
>its announcement or responses thereto....
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Edward Lorsbach

My only "disagreement" with Duffett is that it seems to me that some of the
stuff that gets funded in the academic world these days is so despicable (and
other kindred adjectives) that I failed to guess this conference might be a
hoax.  I thought it was the next step forward in the progress of mankind!  

The "post-modernist" celebration of moral impotence can be traced at least to
Arthur Drexler's introduction to "Five Architects" (1972).  Or Robert
Venturi's celebration of the plastic flowers in the windows of elderly
people's apartments, to which he contributed a gold-anodized non-functioning
TV antenna atop an old-age home *he* designed, as a "symbol for the elderly"
(see his "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture", and "Learning from
Las Vegas").

Remember Nietzsche's "last man"? (excuse my quoting from imperfect memory):
"The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything
small.  'What is love?  What is longing?  What is a star?', the last men ask,
and they blink.  'We have invented happiness....'  The last man has sunk so
low that he no longer knows how to despise himself....  The last man lasts
longest."

One of the reasons I'm drawn to Habermas is that he tries to make sense
rather than getting off on performative contradictions like "unapologetic
occupancy of a position which is from the outset acknowledged to be
untenable" -- the reason such a position is seemingly occupyable at all is
due to "splitting" (<-- that's a psychopathological term) between the
occupier's purse and his logorrhea.

Brad McCormick