From: "Eric Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com> Subject: The Widening Gyre Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 22:36:46 -0600 Don & Ed, Do you see Lyotard himself as one of those who is full of passionate intensity, or simply as another rough beast slouching towards Academia? Personally, I find it hard to envision him as the Anti-Christ of the gyres who inaugurates the new historical cycle according to The Vision. It seems postmodernism breaks away from this idea of history entirely. We no longer can envision ourselves as star puppets governed by the phases of the moon, even though today perhaps the moon has become a better guide than the sun. (the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.) Flux is scarcely new with this generation either. As has been acknowledged, it goes all the back to Heraclitus and then some. The rate of change and the heterogeneity that results from this crazy whirling dervish called history is what is unprecedented. Is it really being full of passionate intensity for us to acknowledge that this is now the case? Or would it be better to retreat into some monolithic system that once served in another time and hold on to it no matter what. Neo-Thomism anyone? The Masque of Red Death? When Yeats said the center no longer holds, most readers of the poem envision a new center that will one day emerge to take its place. What if this is merely based on a strong mis-reading? Perhaps the real task today is not to discover a new center, but to invent new worlds that eliminate the need for only one. Is it really that hard for us to envision a multi-centric world? Or is God, like the CEO of a fifties General Motors corporation, an abiding metaphysical principle, rather than a historical condition that now appears to be in the midst of passing away because it no longer serves? If your concern is for a philosophy that stays malleable in the face of change, then isn't pragmatics and art, for that matter, more useful to us than Plato? Who can separate the dancer from the dance?
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