Background
Knabb was born in Louisiana in 1945 and raised in Missouri.
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Ken Knabb
Edit ProfileEducation
He attended Shimer College from 1961 to 1965, then moved to Berkeley, California, where he took part in the countercultural and radical adventures of the 1960s.
Career
His own English-language writings, many of which were anthologized in Public Secrets (1997), have been translated into over a dozen additional languages. He is also a respected authority on the political significance of Kenneth Rexroth. In 1969, having become disillusioned with the increasingly authoritarian tendencies in the New Left movement, he became an anarchist.
Over the next few years, he taught himself French in order to read the original situationist writings (most of which were then unavailable in English) and made several extended visits to France to meet various situationist groups and individuals, as well as shorter trips to meet contacts in other European countries and in Japan and Hong Kong.
In a 1977 pamphlet, for example, he critiqued what he saw as the situationists" blindspot regarding religion. Another of his recurring themes is the importance of paying attention to the psychological or "subjective" aspect of radical activities.
Politics
Later that same year, he discovered some pamphlets by the Situationist International and was so struck by them that he began experimenting with critiques and interventions in a style similar to that of the situationists.
