Michael Kimaid. Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide

History is a wonderful discipline. It can cover everything in time and space from myriad points of view with myriad modes of meaning. It can also cover everything imaginable, and historical imagining is a central part of historical reading. Reviewing Michael Kimaid’s Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide: From Mythos to Techne is an intriguing exercise, and requires a lot of imagining. Throughout it is written in semi-allegorical terms, using powerful images drawing on Hesiod and referring to Kronos’s failed attempt to protect his Golden Age from the hardship and peril of his son Zeus’s mastery of power. This mode of meaning will, for some readers, thoroughly obscure what Kimaid is trying to say, while others might think that perhaps there was no other way of saying it. But it does not obscure a central implication: that we are being posed a binary problem of light versus dark, good versus evil. The book becomes, via a somewhat chaotic route, an ideological tract against “power, oppression, injustice, and resistance” (xi).

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Ideology · Injustice · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Modernity · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies