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]

So note that Bob Dylan is seen as similar to the Voice music section, and vice versa.

I wouldn't say that Tarantino and Foucault are seen as on different levels; they are assigned different roles; we see Tarantino through the lens of Foucault but not vice versa, supposedly - whereas rockwrite refuses that assumption, that only Foucault types can be lenses while Tarantino or Elvis or Crazy Frog, etc. cannot. And I would say that Dylan consciously, and Jagger sort of by being Jagger, refused that assumption as well; they were Foucault types who became rock 'n' rollers, maybe, and were willing to use Elvis and Chuck as their intellectual predecessors, even though they wouldn't have expressed it to themselves like that.

So I don't get where you are "interweaving levels... of 'types of engagement,'" given that you don't buy into Foucault/Crazy Frog being two separate types of engagement. You may interweave different styles and tendencies, but not levels.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

except it gains some of its energy -- when it works, when it has any -- from apparent incongruity: ie depends on the level-think of others, to be funny or pertinent or whatever... the fact that i don't believe in something doesn't mean i don't co-opt the forcefield of the beliefs of others to gin up surprises or slippy turns or just gags

(this is generally an interesting territory, with pointed comedy: does satire attack the foibles of society in such a way as to remove them? or does it actually excuse and buttress them? if you constantly make jokes about all politicians being corrupt, do you challenge the corruption or enable it?)