So, Mark, where do you place you and me in this?

[koganbot]

dubdobdee over on the poptimists answer record/fanfic thread:

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very hierarchical and reverential (and frankly religious) attitude towards the "texts" you are using to interpret, at the expense of the texts you being "critically" interpeting... it's all so relentlessly one-way

i once said to one of the dullards-in-question that i was frankly more interested in interpreting kierkegaard in the light of crazy frog than vice versa: result = a nervous larf, and mark's "joke" filed under "contrarian anti-intellectual populism" i expect

*of course within "theory" you get to cast your chosen anti-gurus as strawmen-to-pitch-into, which is then confused with being "critical" of theory -- but the relationship of desire and fascination among thinkers really can be explored by treating it as a (very unself-aware) species of fanboyism, in which ilxish laundrylists of facts are wheeled out to smother unbeleivers in jargonised scorn...

Comments

[koganbot]

In the one minute I have before having to go meet some friends:

My complaint about the hallway-classroom split is that it is mutually impoverishing, that it truncates both conversations terribly and makes each dishonest. So if you're hallway and I'm classroom, we're in trouble.

The classroom relies a lot on authority: of a teacher (do it my way or you will get a poor grade) and of the subject matter (we will claim that the subject matter organizes the discussion for us and decides what is relevant and irrelevant. The two "authorities" reinforce each other. There's nothing inherently bad about this. Sometimes challenging authority is just another filibuster, other times it's genuinely questioning what needs to be questioned (are we doing this out of mere habit and deference, or is there good reason for having this discussion in this way?).