koganbot: (Default)
Frank Kogan ([personal profile] koganbot) wrote 2008-06-24 05:47 pm (UTC)

the social issue of what can be taken to be known, and what is still being debated

Agree, is important social issue, but wonder how it intersects with "relativism," given that what is taken as known is just as contextual, discourse-dependent etc. as what is still being debated. Cf. what I wrote in chapter 25: "that windows function as windows depends on their being distinguishable from walls and ceilings, after all." Yet "window" is a nonproblematic term, and there are no great debates about our knowledge of windows.

Don't see any particular new fight in relation to teenpop. The basic principle is that Ashlee Simpson and John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi - as a class - are as real as other musicians and therefore their musical choices count as choices for better or worse in the same way that real people's choices count. No different in principal from Otis Ferguson deciding way back when that Howard Hawks' and Carole Lombard's and Cary Grant's aesthetic choices counted. What's shocking is how many people still don't get this, but it doesn't require a new kind of politics.

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