The Intelligent Deserve to Die
We really do. We're not doing much good because we're too busy trying to figure out who's smarter.
I've accepted that I'm never going to be able to fully apreciate a lot of the movies that are out there because I'll never again be able to experience a film from the perspective of the common movie-goer. I'll never be able to see film for it's pure spectacle. I understand film on a level that makes the understanding of the commoner inaccessable to me. I was thinking about hte failing of Marxism and a lot of different theories and criticism. My problem with critics is that they often take an exclusive ownership of media, that because they can criticise it on a level of ideology that is invisible to the common viewer, their understanding is greater. The problem here is simply that that's not true. Critics seek to define culture, analyse what it is, and classify it. But they simply cannot define culture, because the very act of defineing it instead creates a sub-culture that is accessable only to those who have been initiated into the vocabulary of the sub-culture. Back to Marxism: the failure of Marxism lies in it's exclusive vocabulary and sub-culture. In order for the revolts to happen, people would have to be initiated into the vocabulary and ideas, but teh very process of initiating people into the sub-culture destroys the environment required for the revolt to take place. The problem I have with critics and acadamia in general is that there is this assumption that what they are doing is in some way definative, or even truly descriptive. Acadamia is incapable of truly describing culture because the very act of beig initiated into the vocabulary of critique incapacitates their ability to truly understand the culture. Second thing is that they rarely turn around and ask themselves "are we actually contributing?" The few that do ask that either become revolutionary geniuses or naysaying pariahs, or both.
The additional problem is that there is an entire branch of art that does the same thing with essentially the same assumptions.
1 Observations:
See, I do understand where you're coming from with that, but the problem withthe relation between art and critic is ownership. You've got a prime perspective on that as you're a self-admitted elitist audiophile.I would be hard pressed to believe you if you said that you don't feel as though your opinion about music ought to have a greater weight than the commoners on the merits of your taste and critical understanding.
Yes, I realize no one is Marxist anymore, that's why we have all these post-Marxists running around trying to figure out why Marxism didn't work. this is my personal concept of why the revolution was not televised. It's perhaps somewhat compatable with Gramsci's theories, but that's making unintended connections.
As far as the capacity of theories to comprehend the world, we don't seem to be catching on to the fact that none of these theories are a perfect fit, or even a most-of-the-time fit, and ought to spend some time examining the body of theory as a whole to figure out where the holes lie. It's my personal opinion that the holes are in our heads. As I stated before, the very act of reaching an understanding limits a certain capacity to understand prior mentalities. I find it difficult to comprehend a time when I didn't know what I know (and that is waht I actually KNOW and not just bytes that I've crammed into my skull) and I would wager that the act of understanding a theory about the workings of society makes it impossible to actually Understand™ the workings of society, because you're now thinking in a different culture than the body of society, whic is by conclusion really just an amalgamation of similar bubbles. teh process og thought and action is like breathing, if you think about it, and are conscious of it, it's ruined.
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