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postpunkpsychedelilah · 2 years

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still chillin in plato's cave

So...I was thinking about writing an essay, and as a starting point, decided to dump all my thoughts out in a somewhat cohesive format. Now, this needs a lot of work. A LOT. But I usually don't get around to doing it, historically speaking. I'll try this time around, but I decided to just dump it here. That's what this place is sort of for, right? Anyway, let's hope I'm back soon with some edits! :)

sophia

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Is humankind still in Plato's Cave? Why did Susan Sontag think we were in it? What do Susan Sontag's concerns about photography imply about the nature of knowledge in general?

Susan expresses her concern with how the photographic eye creates a false sense that we can gather knowledge or understanding of the world through images. Susan writes on Page 3:

...This very insatiability of the photographic eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the more grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads–as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

She also draws a connection of the photographic eye and an ethics of seeing. However, it must be considered on a more general level that any sense of knowledge is deeply related to an ethics. For if knowledge is considered as the conceptions that one forms of the world, and ethics as the judgments made of actions in the world, then the relation is obvious as the judgements must derive, at least in part, from the conceptions. Susan continues on Page 4:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge–therefore, like power.

In Plato's Cave

Susan states that the act of photography is akin to appropriation, as it puts the "photographer" in a certain relation of power of the "photographed". Though this is often the case, it does not have to be so. I think of the passage from Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze discusses Nietzsche's discontent with Reactive Sciences. Discussing language as an example in particular, Deleuze says of Nietzsche's alternate of active philology (3.1, p. 74):

Nietzsche's active philology has only one principle: a word only means something insofar as the speaker wills something by saying it; and one rule: treating speech as a real activity, placing oneself at the point of view of the speaker. "The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rules: they say 'this is this and this', they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it" (GM 1 2 p. 26) Active linguistics looks to discover who it is that speaks and names. ... The transformation of the sense of word means that someone else (another force and another will) has taken possessions of it and is applying it to another thing because he wants something else.

To my Indian brain, there seem to be some seriously rancid colonial vibes going on with this reactive form of doing something (linguistics, photography). The key phrase to note, I think, about Nietzsche's critique of the reactive sciences, is "someone else has taken possession of it and is applying it to another thing because he wants something else." Deleuze goes on shortly to discuss a particular example of this sort of analysis that Nietzsche conducts in GM about "good", where he concludes that the sense of "good" was used by the rulers to impose their power and ways of being as desirable and create an ethical sense. This something else, Deleuze notes can be anything, God, culture, the proletariat.

It is not hard to apply this same critique to photography. It would then seem, that Susan's critique and concerns of appropriation may only be valid for reactive photography. A reactive photographic eye, insofar as it has been appropriated wills to appropriate. A Decolonized?, Nietzschean alternative, of an active photography, aims to free reactive photography (which comes about from some abstract relations? see page 74 again) from being appropriated. Instead of evaluating photography through a third party which has appropriated the act of photography (the market, capitalism, a popular sense of desirable, etc.), it aims to evaluate it from a genealogical perspective, and from the perspective of the one who wills the photograph. To play on a quote towards the end of p. 74:

Who makes a particular photograph? What do they apply it to? And with what intention? What do they will by producing a particular photograph?

Susan, to her credit, goes on to carry out this very analysis. She stresses the difficulties of transforming the photographic eye, and how images can still not lead to knowledge.

While a painting or prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.

Any sense of aesthetics is deeply connected to a sense of ethics. For judging beauty is more or less done in the same capacity as judging good, even if judgements differ due to intricacies of language. They do, however, come from the same place. What this place is is a mystery, for now, but the individual's conception of the world, and their knowledge is a great place to start.

Wittgenstein's most succinct general description of the oneness of ethics and aesthetics is given in his 1929 'A Lecture on Ethics'.5 There he stipulates that he will use the term 'ethics' in a sense 'which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics'. Ethics, he says, is 'the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important. . . the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the rightway of living'.6 The values into which ethics enquires are to be regarded as absolutes. The judgement, for example, that something is ethically good is not one that states that something is good for some purpose or end but that it is good simpliciter, irrespective of any purpose it may fulfill.

The view that ethical value is intrinsic aligns Wittgenstein's ethical thinking in the Kantian strand, rejecting from the outset the contrast, already noted, between the ethical as action towards some end and the aesthetic as 'for its own sake'. So the unity claimed thus far for ethics and aesthetics is not of an exceptional or original kind: they are one in having to do with values, with the meaning of life or 'what makes life worth living', and also in that the values of both are intrinsic. (https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article-abstract/25/3/266/57042?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false).

It is easy to consider a double inversion that collapses on analyzing the connection between aesthetics and ethics in different cultures. The ethics (concept of value) seem to greatly inform aesthetics (concept of beauty), and the aesthetics (concept of beauty) seem to greatly inform ethics (concept of value). This is due to a natural overlap in those concepts from a sense of desire, though they might sometimes produce a differing relation.

Now, we can start to look around our cave.

Where does one's conception of the world come from? What informs one's sense of knowledge? From what we have read in Sontag, so far, seems to tell us that images play a great role, for better or for worse, in how a sense of knowledge forms currently in society. Indeed, even Nietzsche's own critiques, which we have already discussed, hint at this idea that knowledge comes from a genealogical source, one with a genetic and historical characteristic.

From this, it may be concluded that knowledge, as we conceive of it, on any scale–an individual, a nation, all of human kind, is merely a model of reality. It is constructions with which we can interpret phenomena, constructions which themselves become phenomena.

Is there a way out of our cave?

It should be clear, however, that the process of creation of knowledge–of discovering more and more of the coherent reality of the world–can be halted, or at least slowed down, if a reactive force appropriates the process of knowledge creation. That is, knowledge creation, or creation of any sort, must be active. An active force, for Nietzsche, is a force which goes to its full potential. A reactive force is separated from its full potential. Concretely, if the process of creation is appropriated by another force, such as "what makes art makes most money", "what work gets most awards", "what video gets bumped up by an algorithm", then our processes of creation primarily fulfills the goals of the force which has appropriated the process of creation. Though the reactive process of creation still creates to its will, it does not do so to its full extent. Only the active process of creation, creation for the sake of creation, one which evaluates creation through a genealogical lens instead of the lens of the appropriating forces, can succeed in a full regard. If we make anti-capitalist videos on YouTube to feed the algorithm, we are working primarily for the algorithm. We can never truly escape the clutches of this system if we continue to evaluate things through the lens of the system.

This makes me think of a very popular argument against classical/neoclassical traditions of economics, where the usage of concepts such as GDP, demand and supply, etc. are critiqued as ones which only observe with the aim to justify the system, and are limited by the constructs of the system.

This brings me back to this idea––in her essay against interpretation, Susan Sontag makes a distinction between the act of experiencing and the act of analyzing. I take a problem with this distinction. However, I do agree with her core ideas, when seen in this new, transformed, Deleuze-Nietzschean way. If one thinks of analyzing and experiencing as the same kind of actions, ones which involve interpretation of the world, we can see how we can draw a distinction between this reactive/colonial lens of evaluation/interpretation and an active/decolonial lens of evaluation/interpretation. Susan says herself in the closing of her essay:

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art–and, by analogy, our own experience–more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The Exit Sign

I will change this last statement, since I already mentioned I am a bit skeptical about the distinction between hermeneutics and erotics. I will take it to mean that we need a new erotics of art, one that does not evaluate art from any existing lens, but from a genealogical view. One that aims to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

This resonates another idea from Nietzsche. Shortly following Nietzsche's critique of science, Deleuze discusses the form of the question in Nietzsche. He notes that metaphysics formulated the question of essence in the form "what is...?". To Deleuze's Nietzsche, this question presupposes a particular way of thinking, and is not necessarily the most suitable one for determining essence. Taking the example of beauty, as discussed in a Platonic dialog, Deleuze shows how this idea presupposes an essence of beauty outside particular instances, which any particular instances aim to emulate. However, for Deleuze and Nietzsche, a much more suitable way of determining the beautiful is by evaluating the particular in itself, as opposed to evaluating it through a foreign lens. Instead of asking "what is beautiful", asking "which one is beautiful, what about it is beautiful, why is it beautiful".

According to Nietzsche, the question "which one?" (qui) means this: what are the forces which take hold of a given thing, what is the will that possesses it? Which one is expressed, manifested and even hidden in it? We are led to essence only by the question: which one? For essence is merely the sense and the value of the thing; essence is determined by the forces with affinity for the thing and by the will with affinity for the forces. Moreover, when we ask the question "what is it?" (qu'est-ce que) we not only fall into the worst metaphysics but in fact we merely ask the question "which one?" in a blind, unconscious and confuesd way. The question "what is it?" is a way of establishing a sense seen from another point of view. Essence, being, is a perspectival reality and presupposes a plurality. Fundamentally it is a always the question "what is it for me?" (for us, for everyone that sees, etc.) (VP I 204).

hannah baer in trans girl suicide museum also questions the sensibility that develops with the question of what is.

And also I think that if there's one thing I want to critique here it's having critiques of things instead of just saying your underlying emotions, because abstract critique is a part of the patriarchy [I believe that it is a more fundamental human flaw, but one which is reinforced by the forces the patriarchy] (and I know this because being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, was being trained, over and over agin, to hold power by critiquing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition and not making up a reason for why it felt that way). I think because of this I sometimes feel bored when I have to deal with or engage someone's abstract critique, and it's easier and more fun for me to engage with their emotionality. In fact, sometimes abstract critiques make me angry which is why I developed an abstract critique of them.

We need to get out, in here is not safe.

When you presuppose an external framework through which you critique and evaluate, you are merely propagating that framework, all it's flaws with it. You are producing reactive critique, one which aims to justify the world instead of trying to understand it. On evaluating an object in itself, in its genetic and historic sense, you can affirm the differences between such objects, and produce a transformed critique one which is freed from the appropriation of these external forces.

This has obvious implications in a greater political and ethical sense. For instance, what does it mean to be trans? What does transness itself mean, and should it be acceptable? A Nietzschean analysis of gender would reveal gender as an initial construction to understand the world, then uncover gender identity and gender performance as a completely social construct which would imply any deviation from "assigned" gender to ones real gender identity would be acceptable unless one presupposes the existent social lens to look at it (as it aims to reinforce the will of the social construction). For gender identity and expression, is different from biological gender, and must not be appropriated by forces that try to reinforce the idea that they are the same.

Transness itself is not one single, definitive experience, as hannah baer notes in trans girl suicide museum (p. 20). It is not bound to any strict categorization as the reactive eye may wish for.

What does it mean to be alive? Who should have rights? What kind of rights? Are animals alive? Should animals have more rights? Are rivers, ecosystems, alive, in some sense? They move, they breathe, they are born, they die. In some sense, they are more elegant than us, more alive than us, outliving us. They cannot scream in our language, but they do so in theirs. We have just refused to listen, to feel. Still reveling, in our age-old habits, in mere images of the truth.

#notes #my writing #draft dump #politics #philosophy #frederick nietzsche #deleuze #susan sontag

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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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Enola Holmes: A Not So Elementary Adaptation

It's cliché and a bit unfair to say that the book was better than the film, but I'm afraid that's precisely where I need to start. Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes: The Case of the Missing Marquess is leagues better than Netflix's adaptation of it. They did her work dirty and to say that I'm shocked at the accolades other reviewers are heaping on the film is an understatement. Before I dive into any critiques though, it's worth acknowledging that not every minute of the two hour film was painful to get through. So what worked in Enola Holmes?

The film is carried by the talent of its cast, Millie Bobby Brown being the obvious heavy-hitter. She helps breathe life into a pretty terrible script and it's only a shame her talent is wasted on such a subpar character.

The idea to have Enola continually break the fourth wall, though edging into the realm of Dora the Explorer at times—"Do you have any ideas?"— was nevertheless a fun way to keep the audience looped into her thought process. Young viewers in particular might enjoy it as a way to make them feel like a part of the action and older viewers will note the Fleabag influence.

The cinematography is, perhaps, where most of my praise lies. The rapid cuts between past and present, rewinding as Enola thinks back to some pertinent detail, visualizing the cyphers with close ups on the letter tiles—all of it gave the film an upbeat, entertaining flair that almost made up for how bloated and meandering the plot was.

We got an equally upbeat soundtrack that helped to sell the action.

The overall experience was... fine. In the way a cobbled together, candy-coated, meant to be seen on a Friday night but we watched it Wednesday and then promptly forgot about it film is fine. I doubt Enola Holmes will be winning any awards, but it was a decently entertaining romp and really, does a Netflix film need to be anything more? If Enola was her own thing made entirely by Netflix's hands I wouldn't be writing this review. As it stands though, Enola is both an adaptation and the latest addition to one of the world’s most popular franchises. That's where the film fails: not as a fun diversion to take your mind off Covid-19, but as an adaptation of Springer's work and as a Sherlock Holmes story.

In short, Enola Holmes, though pretty to look at and entertaining in a predictable manner, still fails in five crucial areas:

1. Mycroft is Now a Mustache-Twirling Villain and Sherlock is No Longer Sherlock Holmes

This aspect is the least egregious because admittedly the film didn't pull this version of Mycroft out of thin air. As the head of the household he is indeed Enola's primary antagonist (outside of some kidnappers) and though he insists that he's doing all this for Enola's own good, he does get downright cruel at times:

He rolled his eyes. “Just like her mother,” he declared to the ceiling, and then he fixed upon me a stare so martyred, so condescending, that I froze rigid. In tones of sweetest reason he told me, “Enola, legally I hold complete charge over both your mother and you. I can, if I wish, lock you in your room until you become sensible, or take whatever other measures are necessary in order to achieve that desired result... You will do as I say" (Springer 69).

Mycroft's part is clear. He's the white, rich, powerful, able-bodied man who benefits from society's structure and thus would never think to change it. He does legally have charge over both Enola and Eudoria. He can do whatever he pleases to make them "sensible"... and that right there is the horror of it. Mycroft is a law-abiding man whose antagonism stems from doing precisely what he's allowed to do in a broken world. There are certainly elements of this in the Netflix adaptation, but that antagonism becomes so exaggerated that it's nearly laughable. Enola's governess (appointed by Mycroft) slaps her across the face the moment she speaks up. Mycroft screams at her in a carriage until she's cowering against the window. He takes her and throws her into a boarding school where everything is bleak and all the women dutifully follow instructions like hypnotized dolls. Enola Holmes ensures that we've lost all of Springer's nuance, notably the criticism of otherwise decent people who fall into the trap of doing the "right" (read: expected) thing. Despite her desire for freedom, in the novel Enola quickly realizes that she is not immune to society's standards:

"I thought he was younger.” Much younger, in his curled tresses and storybook suit. Twelve! Why, the boy should be wearing a sturdy woollen jacket and knickers, an Eton collar with a tie, and a decent manly haircut—

Thoughts, I realised, all too similar to those of my brother Sherlock upon meeting me (113-14).

She is precisely like her brothers, judging a boy for not looking and acting enough like a man just as they judged her for not looking and acting enough like a lady. The difference is that Enola has chaffed enough against those expectations to realize when she's falling prey to them, but the sympathetic link to her brothers remains. In the film, however, the conflict is no longer driven by fallible people doing what they think is best. Rather, it's made clear (in no uncertain terms) that these are just objectively bad people. Only villains hit someone like that. Only villains will scream at the top of their lungs until a young girl cries. Only villains roll their eyes at women's rights (a subplot that never existed in the novel). Springer writes Mycroft as a person, Netflix writes him as a cartoon, and the result is the loss of a nuanced message about what it means to enact change in a complicated world.

Which leaves us with Sherlock. Note that in the above passage he is the one who casts harsh judgement on Enola's outfit. Originally Mycroft took an interest in making Enola "sensible" and Sherlock— in true Holmes fashion—straddles a fine line between comfort and insult:

"Mycroft,” Sherlock intervened, “the girl's head, you'll observe, is rather small in proportion to her remarkably tall body. Let her alone. There is no use confusing and upsetting her when you'll find out for yourself soon enough'" (38).

***

"Could mean that she left impulsively and in haste, or it could reflect the innate untidiness of a woman's mind,” interrupted Sherlock. “Of what use is reason when it comes to the dealings of a woman, and very likely one in her dotage?" (43).

A large part of Enola's drive stems from proving to Sherlock, the world, and even herself that a small head does not mean lack of intelligence. His insults, couched in a misguided attempt to sooth, is what makes Sherlock a complex character and his broader sexism is what makes him a flawed character, not Superman in a tweed suit. Yet in the film Mycroft becomes the villain and Sherlock is his good brother foil. Rather than needing to acknowledge that Enola has a knack for deduction by reading the excellent questions she's asked about the case—because why give your characters any development?—he already adores and has complete faith in her, laughing that he too likes to draw caricatures to think. By the tree Sherlock remanences fondly about Enola's childhood where she demonstrated appropriately quirky preferences for a genius, things like not wearing trousers and keeping a pinecone for a pet. They have a clear connection that Mycroft could never understand, one based both in deduction and, it seems, being a halfway decent human being. We are told that Enola has Sherlock's wits, but poor Mycroft lucked out, despite the fact that up until this point the film has done nothing to demonstrate this supposed intelligence. (To say nothing of how canonically Mycroft's intellect rivals his brother's.) Enola falls to her knees and begs for Sherlock's help, saying that "For [Mycroft] I'm a nuisance, to you—" implying that they have a deep bond despite not having seen one another since Enola was a toddler. Indeed, at one point Enola challenges Lestrade to a Sherlock quiz filled with information presumably not found in the newspaper clippings she's saved of him, which begs the question of how she knows her brother so well when she hasn't seen him in a decade and he, in turn, walked right by her with no recognition. Truthfully, Lestrade should know Sherlock better. Through all this the sibling bond is used as a heavy-handed insistence that Enola is Sherlock's protégé, him leaving her with the advice that "Those kinds of mysteries are always the best to unpick” and straight up asking at one point if she’s solved the case. The plot has Enola gearing up to outwit her genius brother, which did not happen in the novel and is precisely why I loved it. Enola isn't out to be a master of deduction in her teens, she's a finder of lost people who uses a similar, but ultimately unique set of skills. She does things Sherlock can't because she is isn't Sherlock. They're not in competition, they're peers, yet the film fails to understand that, using Sherlock's good brother bonding to emphasize Enola's place as his protégé turned superior. He exists, peppered throughout the film, so that she can surpass him in the end.

You know what happens in the novel? Sherlock walks away from her, dismissive, and that's that.

That's also Sherlock Holmes. I won't bore you with complaints about Cavill being too handsome and Claflin being too thin for their respective parts, but I will draw the line at complete character assassination. Part of Sherlock's charm is that he's far more compassionate than he first appears, but that doesn't mean he would, at the drop of a telegram, become a doting older brother to a sister of all things. Despite the absurdity of the Doyle Estate's lawsuit against Netflix for making Sherlock an emotional man who respects women... they're right that this isn't their character. Oh, Sherlock is emotive, but it's in the form of excited exclamations over clues, or the occasional warm word towards Watson—someone he has known and lived with for many years. Sherlock respects women, though it's through those societal expectations. He'll offer them a seat, an ear, a handkerchief if they need one, and always the promise of help, but he then dismisses them with, "The fairer sex is your department, Watson." Springer successfully wrote Sherlock Holmes with a little sister, a man who will bark out a laugh at her caricature but still leave her to Mycroft's whims because he has his own life to tend to. This is a man who insists that the mind of a woman is inscrutable and thus must grapple with his shock at Enola's ability to cover the "salient points" of the case (58). Cavill's Sherlock is no Sherlock at all and though there's nothing wrong with updating a character for a modern audience (see: Elementary), I do question why Netflix strayed so far from Springer's work. The novel is, after all, their blueprint. She already managed the difficult task of writing an in-character Sherlock Holmes who remains approachable to both a modern audience and Enola herself, yet for some reason Netflix tossed that work aside.

2. Enola is "Special,” Not At All Like Other Girls

Allow me to paint you a picture. Enola Holmes is an empathetic, fourteen-year-old girl who, while bright, does not possess an intelligence worthy of note. No one is gasping as she deduces seemingly impossible things from the age of four, or admiring her knowledge of some obscure, appropriately impressive topic. Rather, Enola is a fairly normal girl with an abnormal upbringing, characterized by her patience and willingness to work. Deciphering the many hiding places where her mother stashed cash takes her weeks, requiring that Enola work through the night in secrecy while maintaining appearances during the day. She manages to hatch a plan of escape that demonstrates the thought she's put into it without testing the reader's suspension of disbelief. More than that, she uses the feminine tools at her disposal to give herself an edge: hiding her face behind a widow's veil and storing luggage in the bustle of her dress. Upon achieving freedom, her understanding of another lonely boy leads her to try and help him, resulting in a dangerous kidnapping wherein Enola acts as most fourteen-year-olds would, scared out of her mind with a few moments of bravery born of pure survival instinct. She and Tewksbury escape together, as friends, before Enola sets out on becoming the first scientific perditorian, a finder of lost people.

Sadly, this new Enola shares little resemblance with her novel counterpart. What Netflix seemingly fails to understand is that giving a character flaws makes them relatable and that someone who looks more like us is someone we can connect with. This Enola, simply put, is extraordinary. She's read all the books in the library, knows science, tennis, painting, archery, and a deadly form of Jujitsu (more on that below). In the novel Enola bemoans that she was never particularly good at cyphers and now must improve if she has any hope of reading what her mother left her. In the film she simply knows the answers, near instantaneously. Enola masters her travels, her disguises, and her deductions, all with barely a hitch. Though Enola doesn't have impressive detective skills yet, her memory is apparently photographic, allowing her to look back on a single glance into a room, years ago, and untangle precisely what her mother was planning. It's a BBC Sherlock-esque form of 'deduction' wherein there's no real thought involved, just an innate ability to recall a newspaper across the room with perfect clarity. The one thing Enola can't do well is ride a bike which, considering that in the novel she quite enjoys the activity, feels like a tacked on "flaw" that the film never has to have her grapple with.

More than simply expanding upon her skillset—because let’s be real, it’s not like Sherlock himself doesn’t have an impressive list of accomplishments. Even if Enola’s feelings of inadequacy are part of the point Springer was working to make—the film changes the core of her personality. I cannot stress enough that Enola is a sheltered fourteen-year-old who is devastated by the disappearance of her mother and terrified by the new world she's entered. That fear, uncertainty, and the numerous mistakes that come out of it is what allowed me to connect with Enola and go, "Yeah. I can see myself in her." Meanwhile, this new Enola is overwhelmingly confident, to the point where I felt like I was watching a child's fantasy of a strong woman rather than one who actually demonstrates strength by overcoming challenges. For example, contrast her meeting with Sherlock and Mycroft on the train platform with what we got in the film:

"And to my annoyance, I found myself trembling as I hopped off my bicycle. A strip of lace from my pantalets, confounded flimsy things, caught on the chain, tore loose, and dangled over my left boot.

Trying to tuck it up, I dropped my shawl.

This would not do. Taking a deep breath, leaving my shawl on my bicycle and my bicycle leaning against the station wall, I straightened and approached the two Londoners, not quite succeeding in holding my head high" (31-32).

***

"Well, if they did not desire the pleasure of my conversation, it was a good thing, as I stood mute and stupid... 'I don't know where she's gone,' I said, and to my own surprise—for I had not wept until that moment—I burst into tears" (34).

I'd ask where this frightened, fumbling Enola has gone, but it's clear that she never existed in the script to begin with. The film is chock-full of her being, to be frank, a badass. She gleefully beats up the bad guys in perfect form, no, "I froze, cowering, like a rabbit in a thicket" (164). This Enola always gets the last word in and never falters in her confident demeanor, no, "I wish I could say I swept with cold dignity out of the room, but the truth is, I tripped over my skirt and stumbled up the stairs" (70). Enola is the one, special girl in an entire school who can see how rigid and horrible these social expectations are, straining against them while all her lesser peers roll their eyes. That's how she's characterized: as "special," right from the get-go, and that eliminates any growth she might have experienced over the course of the film. More than that, it feels like a slap in the face to Springer's otherwise likeable, well-rounded character.

3. A Focus on Hollywood Action and Those Strong Female Characters

It never fails to amaze me how often Sherlock Holmes adaptations fail to remember that he is, at his core, an intellectual. Sure, there's the occasional story where Sherlock puts his boxing or singlestick skills to good use, and he did survive his encounter with Moriarty thanks to his own martial arts, but these moments are rarities across the canon. Pick up any Sherlock Holmes story, open to a random page, and you will find him sitting fireside to mule over a case, donning a disguise to observe the suspects, or combing through his many papers to find that one, necessary scrap of information. Sherlock Holmes is about deduction, a series of observations and conclusions based on logic. He's not an action hero. Nor is Enola, yet Netflix seems to be under the impression that no audience can survive a two hour film without something exploding.

I'd like to present a concise list of things that happened in the film that were, in my opinion, unnecessary:

Enola and Tewksbury throw themselves out of a moving train to miraculously land unharmed on the grass below.

Enola uses the science knowledge her mother gave her to ignite a whole room of gunpowder and explosives, resulting in a spectacle that somehow doesn't kill her pursuer.

Enola engages in a long shootout with her attacker, Tewksbury takes a shot straight to the chest, but survives because of a breastplate he only had a few seconds to put on and hide beneath his shirt. Then Enola succeeds in killing Burn Gorman's slimy character.

Enola beats up her attackers many, many times.

This right here is the worst change to her character. Enola is, plainly put, a "strong woman." Literally. She was trained from a young age to kick ass and now that's precisely what she'll do. Gone is the unprepared but brave girl who heads out onto the dangerous London streets in the hope of helping her mother and a young boy. What does this Enola have to fear? There's only one martial arts move she hasn't mastered yet and, don't worry, she gets it by the end of the film. Enola suffers from the Hollywood belief that strong women are defined solely as physically capable women and though there's nothing wrong with that on the surface, the archetype has become so prevalent that any deviation is seen as too weak—too princess-y—to be considered feminist. If you're not kicking ass and taking names then you can only be passive, right? Stuck in a tower somewhere and awaiting your prince. But what about me? I have no ability to flip someone over my shoulder and throw them into a wall. What about pacifists? What about the disabled? By continually claiming that this is what a "strong" woman looks like you eliminate a huge number of women from this pool. The women we are meant to uphold in this film—Enola, her Mother, and her Mother's friend from the teahouse—are all fighters of the physical variety, whereas the bad women like Mrs. Harris and her pupils are too cultured for self-defense. They're too feminine to be feminist. But feminism isn't about your ability to throw a punch. Enola's success now derives from being the most talented and the most violent in the room, rather than the most determined, smart, and empathetic. She threatens people and lunges at them, reminding others that she's perfectly capable of tying up a guy is she so chooses because "I know Jujitsu." Enola possesses a power that is just as fantastical as kissing a frog into a prince. In sixteen short years she has achieved what no real life woman ever will: the ability to go wherever she pleases and do whatever she wants without the threat of violence. Because Enola is the violence. While her attacker is attempting to drown her with somewhat horrific realism, Enola takes the time to wink at the audience before rearing back and bloodying his nose. After all, why would you think she was in any danger? Masters of Jujitsu with an uncanny ability to dodge bullets don't have anything to fear... unlike every woman watching this film.

It's certainly some kind of wish fulfillment, a fantasy to indulge in, but I personally preferred the original Enola who never had any Hollywood skills at her disposal yet still managed to come out on top. That's a character I can see myself in and want to see myself in given that the concept of non-violent strength is continually pushed to the wayside. Not to mention... that's a Sherlock Holmes story. Coming out on top through intellect and bravery alone is the entire point of the genre, so why Netflix felt the need to turn Enola into an action hero is beyond me.

4. Aging Up the Protagonists (and Giving Them an Eye-Rolling Romance)

The choice to age up our heroes is, arguably, the worst decision here. In the original novel Enola has just turned fourteen and Tewksbury is a child, twelve-years-old, though he looks even younger. It's a story for a younger audience staring appropriately young heroes, with the protagonists' status as children crucial to one of the overarching themes of the story: what does it really mean to strike out on your own and when are you ready for it? Adding two years to Enola's age is something I'm perfectly fine with. After all, the difference between fourteen and sixteen isn't that great and Brown herself is sixteen until February of 2021, so why not aim for realism and make her character the same? That's all reasonable and this is, indeed, an adaptation. No need to adhere to every detail of the text. What puzzles me though is why in the world they would take a terrified, sassy, compassionate twelve-year-old and turn him into a bumbling seventeen-year-old instead?

Ah yes. The romance.

In the same way that I fail to understand the assumption that a film needs over-the-top action to be entertaining, I likewise fail to understand the assumption that it needs a romance—and a heterosexual one to boot. There's something incredibly discomforting in watching a film that so loudly proclaim itself as feminist, yet it takes the strong friendship between two children and turns it into an incredibly awkward, hetero True Love story. Remember when Enola loudly proclaims that she doesn't want a husband? The film didn't, because an hour later she's stroking her hand over Tewksbury's while twirling her hair. Which isn't to say that women can't fall in love, or change their minds, just that it's disheartening to see a supposedly feminist film so completely fall into one of the biggest expectations for women, even today. Forget Enola running up to men and paying them for their clothes as an expression of freedom, is anyone going to acknowledge that narratively she’s still stuck living the life the men around her want? Find yourself a husband, Enola. The heavy implication is she did, just with Jujitsu rather than embroidery. Different method, same message, and that’s incredibly frustrating when this didn’t exist in the original story. “It's about freedom!” the film insists. So why didn't you give Enola the freedom to have a platonic adventure?

It's not even a good romance. Rather painful, really. When Tewksbury, after meeting her just once before, passionately says "I don't want to leave you, Enola" because her company is apparently more important than him staying alive, I literally laughed out loud. It's ridiculous and it's ridiculously precisely because it was shoe-horned into a story that didn't need it. More than simply saddling Enola with a bland love interest though, this leads to a number of unfortunate changes in the story's plot, both unnecessary additions and disappointing exclusions. Enola no longer meets Tewksbury after they've both been kidnapped (him for ransom and her for snooping into his case), but rather watches him cut himself out of a carpetbag on the train. I hope I don't have to explain which of these scenarios is more likely and, thus, more satisfying. Meeting Tewksbury on the train means that Enola gets to have a nighttime chat with him about precisely why he ran away. Thus, when she goes to his estate she no longer needs to deduce his hiding spot based on her own desires to have a place of her own, she just needs to recall that a very big branch nearly fell on him and behold, there that branch is. (The fact that the branch is a would-be murder weapon makes its convenient placement all the more eye-rolling.) Rather than involving herself in the case out of empathy for the family, Enola loudly proclaims that she wants nothing to do with Tewksbury and only reluctantly gets involved when it's clear his life is on the line. And that right there is another issue. In the novel there is no murderous plot in an attempt to keep reform bills from passing. Tewksbury is a child who, like Enola, ran away and quickly discovers that life with an overbearing mother isn't so bad when you've experienced London's dangerous streets. That's the emotional blow: Enola has no mother to go home to anymore and must press out onto those streets whether she's ready for it or not.

Perhaps the only redeeming change is giving Tewksbury an interest in flowers instead of ships. Regardless of how overly simplistic the feminist message is, it is a nice touch to give the guy a traditionally feminine hobby while Enola sharpens her knife. The fact that Enola learned that from her mother and Tewksbury learned botany from his father feels like a nudge at a far better film than Enola Holmes managed to be. For every shining moment of insight—the constraints of gendered hobbies, a black working class woman informing Sherlock that he can never understand what it means to lack power—the film gives us twenty minutes worth of frustrating stupidity. Such as how Enola doesn't seem to conceive of escaping from boarding school until Tewksbury appears to rescue her. She then proceeds to get carried around in a basket for a few minutes before going out the window... which she could have done on her own at any point, locked doors or no. But it seems that narrative consistency isn't worth more than Enola (somehow) leaving a caricature of Mrs. Harris and Mycroft behind. The film is clearly trying to promote a "Rah, rah, go, women, go!" message, but fails to understand that having Enola find a way out of the school herself would be more emotionally fulfilling than having her send a generic 'You're mean' message after the two men in her life—Sherlock and Tewksbury—remind her that she can, in fact, take action.

Which brings me to my biggest criticism and what I would argue is the film's greatest flaw. Reviewers and fans alike are hailing Enola Holmes as a feminist masterpiece and yes, to a certain extent it is. Feminist, that is, not a masterpiece. (5) But it's a hollow feminism. A fantasy feminism. A simple, exaggerated feminism that came out of a Feminism 101 PowerPoint. To quote Sherlock, let's review the salient points:

A woman cannot be the star of her own film without having a male love interest, even if this goes against everything the original novel stood for.

A feminist woman cannot also be selfish. Instead she must have a selfless drive to change the world with bombs.

The best kind of women are those who reject femininity as much as they can. They will wear boy's clothes whenever possible and snub their nose at something as useless as embroidery. Any woman who enjoys such skills or desires to become lady-like just hasn't realized the sort of prison she's in yet.

The best women also embody other masculine traits, like being able to take down men twice their size. Passive women will titter behind their hands. Active women will kick you in the balls. If you really want to be a strong woman, learn how to throw a decent punch.

Women are, above all, superior to men.

Yes, yes, I joke about it just as much as the next woman, but seeing it played fairly straight was a bit of an uncomfortable experience, even more-so during a gender revolution where stories like this leave trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer viewers out of the ideological loop. Enola goes on and on about what a "useless boy" Tewksbury is (though of course she must still be attracted to him) and her mother's teachings are filled with lessons about not listening to men. As established, Mycroft—and Lestrade—are the simplistically evil men Enola must circumvent, whereas Sherlock exists for her to gain victory over: "How did your sister get there first?" Enola supposedly has a strength that Tewksbury lacks— he's just "foolish"—and she shouts out such cringe-worthy lines as, "You're a man when I tell you you're a man!"

I get the message, I really do. As a teenager I probably would have loved it, but now I have to ask: aren't we past the image of men-hating feminists? Granted, the film never goes quite that far, but it gets close. We’ve got one woman who is ready to start blowing things up to achieve equality and another who revels in looking down on the men in her life. That’s been the framing for years, that feminists are cruel, dangerous people and Tewksbury making heart-eyes at Enola doesn’t instantly fix the echoes of that. There's a certain amount of justification for both characterizations—we have reached points in history where peaceful protests are no longer enough and Tewksbury is indeed a fool at times—but that nuance is entirely lost among the film's overall message of "Women rule, men drool." It feels like there’s a smart film hidden somewhere between the grandmother murdering to keep the status quo and Enola’s mother bombing for change, that balance existing in Enola herself who does the most for women by protecting Tewkesbury... but Enola Holmes is too busy juggling all the different films it wants to be to really hit on that message. It certainly doesn’t have time to say anything worthwhile about the fight it’s using as a backdrop. Enola gasps that "Mycroft is right. You are dangerous" when she finds her mother's bombs, but does she ever grapple with whether she supports violence on a large scale in the name of creating a better world? Does she work through this sudden revelation that she agrees with Mycroft about something crucial? Of course not. Enola just hugs her mom, asks Sherlock not to go after her, and the film leaves it at that.

The takeaway is less one of empowerment and more, ironically, of restriction. You can fight, but only via bombs and punches. It's okay to be a woman, provided you don't like too many feminine things. You can save the day, so long as there's a man at your side poised to marry you in the future. I felt like I was watching a pre-2000s script where "equality" means embracing the idea that you're "not like other girls" so that men will finally take you seriously. Because then you don't really feel like a woman to them anymore, do you? You're a martial arts loving, trouser-wearing, loud and brilliant individual who just happens to have long hair. You’re unique and, therefore, worthy of attention, unlike all those other girls.

That's some women's experiences, but far from all, and crucially I don't think this is the woman that Springer wrote in her novel.

The Case of the Missing Marquess is a feminist book. It gives us a flawed, brave, intelligent woman who sets out to help people and achieves just that, mostly through her own strength, but also with some help from the young boy she befriends. Her brothers are privileged, misguided men who she nevertheless cares for deeply and her mother finally puts herself first, leaving Enola to go and live with the Romani people. Everyone in Springer's book feels human, the women especially. Enola gets to tremble her way through scary decisions while still remaining brave. Her mother gets to be selfish while still remaining loving. They're far more than just women blessed with extraordinary talents who will take what they want by force. Springer's women? They don't have that Hollywood glamour. They're pretty ordinary, actually, despite the surface quirks. They’re like us and thus they must make use of what tools they have in order to change their own situations as well as the world. The fact that they still succeed feels very feminist to me, far more-so than granting your character the ability to flip a man into the ground and calling it a day.

Know that I watched Enola Holmes with a friend over Netflix Party and the repeated comment from us both was, "I'd rather be watching The Great Mouse Detective." Enola Holmes is by no means a horrible film. It has beauty, comedy, and a whole lot of heart, but it could have been leagues better given its source material and the talent of its cast. It’s a film that tries to do too much without having a firm grasp of its own message and, as a result, becomes a film mostly about missed potential. Which leads me right back to where I began: The book is better. Go read the book.

Images

Enola Holmes

Mycroft Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Enola and her Mother Doing Archery

Enola and her Mother Fighting

Tewkesbury and Enola

#Sherlock Holmes #Enola Holmes #mymetas

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alittlelessdemocracy · 5 years

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Runaway Bunny

I started reading Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting over the summer, and plan to use it as the primary text in my class painting after painting this spring. I used a couple of her previous texts when I taught a version of the course last year, and found them to be productive of interesting discussion among the students. I'm excited by the fact that she's attempting something like a totalizing account of painting that is more than either a rehash or takedown of the usual dominant postwar narratives. I think she's on the right track, and I'm pretty interested in most of her interlocutors. (The conversation with Merlin Carpenter is entertaining to say the least.) Since I spent a lot of my summer trying to get caught up on Marx (a life’s work if ever there was one) I'm looking forward to the final chapter on value theory, if for no other reason than as a reward for my efforts to familiarize myself with the terms of the discussion, though I'm sure it's going to be as frustrating as it is illuminating. Other than that, I've been working my way through a lot of stuff that I've been gathering over the past year or so and finally getting around to reading: a book on modernism i started last winter, and another one called Weimar Culture - The Outsider as Insider, both by the late historian Peter Gay; Berlin Alexanderplatz - a Weimar novel sometimes referred to as the German Ulysses, and the basis of a Fassbinder film I've watched a bunch of times in the last several years; a book about the socioeconomic conditions shaping the lives of Millennials called Kids These Days - The Making of Millenials; and a couple of intense and short books - The Transparency Society, and The Burnout Society - by a Heideggerian named Byung-Chul Han. His titles are not terribly inventive, but I think his analysis of contemporary society is pretty spot on. If emergent AI is Maxwell’s Demon, Han is willing to call it by its true name. But mostly I'm excited to begin reading this book I just got by a Hegelian named Robert B. Pippin, who I first learned about from a quote of his about intention in the Todd Cronan book we read in my grad seminar a few years ago.

I like this quote from Schelling that Pippin uses to introduce his book. It's as good an account as any I can think of for the value of all the endless reading and looking - which we may as well call research, though I think I prefer the term scholarship - that feels so necessary in order to do justice to our previous and future reading and looking, even when it is bewilderingly fragmented, incomplete, out of order, and disorienting: "All effects of art are merely effects of nature for the person who has not attained a perception of art that is free, that is, one that is both passive and active, both swept away and reflective. Such a person behaves merely as a creature of nature and has never really experienced and appreciated art as art." I think if I have a problem with Graw, it's with her resistance to being swept away, and her desire to provide a historical account of the passive side of reception in socioeconomic terms, and in so doing explain it away - or so it seems to me. On the one hand, I think her demystifying negativity is crucial as a means of fortifying whatever can survive it.

According to Pippin, for Hegel thought must "tarry with" the negative to be thought at all - I think this is why he starts with the Schelling quote, and this is why I value pessimistic thinkers like Graw, Adorno, and Han, even when I don't want to agree with them entirely - probably because I start to feel like a hypocrite when I do.

On the other hand, there's an unspoken absurdity to Graw’s whole enterprise (not to mention mine) if she is correct: if painting is just a convenient mystification of economic and social conditions, then who needs it? Capitalists, apparently, but that's hardly a defense.

I think she provides a great justification for art criticism, but it's at the expense of art that isn't itself mostly a form of critique (like mine.) To be honest, I still mostly prefer Cronan, Clark, and Silverman, who all write with more passion, but also more critical distance (perhaps it helps to get some distance on what one’s doing in order to be able to trust the feelings one has about it.) They all provide richly descriptive and analytic accounts for the contextual basis of painterly poetics without reducing them to an illusion, which is kinda what I think she does - at least in her work on painting...High Price is another thing entirely.

There's a vulgar Hegelianism underneath it all which I think she evades by pretending to be a journalist rather than a theorist when it suits her. It looks like humility, and maybe it is, but it rings false to me. She also provides a justification for this gesture, tracing it back at least as far as Vasari in the sixteenth Century. This saves her from the difficult task of defending the kind of reductive and often unappealing prescriptions (Andrea Fraser good, Daniel Richter bad, say) that would follow from making her underlying value judgements more explicit - she leaves that emotional labor to artists like Carpenter - who provide her text with the the kind of liveliness she says we project onto paintings...which points to another problem with the text. Her thesis doesn't only - or even most effectively apply to painting - which she defines so broadly it almost loses all meaning as a category: it's one of several enduringly convincing ways of engaging with any cultural artifact - particularly writing (see Of Gramatology) - particularly, if not only, in the Western context...which is odd, given the fact that of all the art forms, writing is perhaps the most collectively determined, the most inhabited (or haunted by) all the possible permutations of the ready made. But if I have to choose between the absurdity of her critical ouroboros which takes a love of painting for granted while attempting to undermine the basis of that love by accounting for it in external terms - emptying it of joissance, and the absurdity of naive naturalism which always wants to hide its love from the negativity of thinking - and so make it nothing but an attempt at escape, of which of course there is none, I'll always be more engaged by the passion for endless critique - so long as it's lively and ambitious - even if it's constitutionally unable to reflect transparently on its own passionate project of dismantling - a silence about its own creative destructiveness which opens it up to a deeper negativity which is something like its unconscious.

Ultimately, it's that frustrating lack in the center of the project that makes it engaging. It's like the opposite of what they say in AA: keep coming back, it doesn't work! Or maybe it does work, if we take “work” to mean something like ongoing, socially necessary labor, rather than the accomplishment of a solution to a problem: the working of a problem rather than the closing of it..though if the problem of painting is the kind of pseudoproblem suggested by Graw, then the work is not really work at all, or at least, not the kind of productive work it takes itself to be. I think if Graw were really convincing (or convinced) by her own skepticism there'd be no point in engaging with her doubts - even for her. There must be some reason she hung out with Kippenberger besides mere journalistic curiosity. The fact that she was there and is still there working out the details of what she witnessed and continues to participate in implies that she was and is more than an observer, as are we all. A definite strength of her approach is that she admits as much, even if she can’t quite account for her investment without admitting that she too is entranced by art’s mystifications.

I think the tone of Graw’s writing is symptomatic of the fact that we can no longer in good faith tarry with Fried's or Silverman's outright defense of grace, and we think we're too smart about power to let someone like Greenberg or Kraus (or Foster, or Joselit) tell us what the limits of the situation are without protesting: what about all the art outside the western context for instance (whatever that can really mean in an increasingly globalized world) or all the former outsiders who are now insiders, to borrow a phrase of Peter Gay’s...so she doesn't do either of those things, but she chooses insider objects and interlocutors who do some of that work for her - externalizing the cost of her commitments, and capitalizing on the surplus value her avatars produce.

Ultimately, I'm with her enacted commitment to unpacking through writing and witnessing. And I definitely don’t object to her spreading the work around - as she points out, this is how work gets done in a networked context. Here I’d want to call on Freud and the transference to broaden and deepen the meaning of this working through together - this mutual interdependence for the sake of the great work - whether we call it Thought, Art, Spirit, Being, or Cure - to remind us of the fact that we/it may seem new, but it’s only new to our perception that we’ve always been working in a networked context. And I like that she doesn’t rely on invisible labor that obscures the social hierarchy: all of her interlocutors are peers of equal or greater status.

In other words, I appreciate how much she appears to show her work - including the social work that is usually left hidden. (For instance, this post began as an email to a friend, as have a lot of my recent posts. I don’t borrow their words, but I borrow their subjectivity, insofar as I rely on my anticipation of their specific receptivity when I “speak” (that is, play with words on my desktop, in solitude, but never entirely alone.))

This is mostly why I read: If Marx is right, that the value of a commodity is determined not by the labor that went into it, but only by the socially necessary labor time that went into it, then it only makes sense for anyone engaged in intellectual/spiritual labor - which is also a form of play - to outsource as much of it as possible - to be an effective team player - and to benefit from the perceptions, judgements, and thoughts of others in order to contribute most effectively - honestly, rather than self-deceivingly, indulgently, solipsistically - to the larger project, which is both personal, practical, political, spiritual, ethical and aesthetic - both social and solitary - solitude having something to do with an irreducible labor that can not be exchanged or externalized, the work that must be done alone, even if some of its costs can and must be shared by others in order for the work to be effective and not mere wasted effort. In other words - it is our duty and our privilege to respect our own subjectivity and acknowledge its entanglement and interdependence with the subjectivity of others. It is incumbent upon us to make the most of our time here - not to waste this opportunity - which is time: not to waste our own time, and not to waste anyone elses.

For instance, just because it sometimes takes me a year to finish a painting - or days or months to write something worth sharing with strangers - it doesn’t mean it’s worth more than a painting or a text that took five minutes to produce. Unless there is something genuinely necessary in that time I spent, and this not just for me alone, but for my work in relation to others doing work on the same problem, then that time is wasted, without return.

And aren’t the historical ethics of painting as described by Graw - freshness, liveliness, even grace - all wrapped up in this same sort of question of economy which tends to reverse the puritanical love of work for its own sake, which it so often makes a mockery of (in it’s most extreme case in the work of Duchamp) demonstrating the love of work without purpose as a kind of perversion - a fetishization of suffering? Suffering is instructive, and endurance can be a virtue - patience certainly - but never as a thing in itself - only in relationship to a desired end - even if that end is loose and deferred. In this way painting has always been spiritually capitalist insofar as it treats any unnecessary labor as the original sin - that is - the opposite of investment, which raises again the question of waste and expenditure, consumption and production - of time, and of value.

All things being equal, in painting, as under capitalist forms of production, the burden of proof is on the one who would choose to spend time unproductively. This is why we ritually abuse the proverbial garret - not because solitude is to be mocked, but because our mutual dependence and actual community of spirit must be respected.

The revolution rests on the question of how we frame the question of value and production. Painting is both regressive (insofar as it implicitly models the notion of Return on Investment) and revolutionary (in that it tends to relativize the question of productivity - its investment is not one in survival, but in meaning.)

I think the most important work we do as artists and scholars is the work we do to discover what other work (besides survival) needs to be done. Sometimes this involves reading and writing. Sometimes it involves abstaining from both in order to work with our hands, or submit to a process that requires that we spend a great deal of time doing very little, or very little time doing a great deal. But insofar as time is not ours to spend as we see fit - that is, insofar as we give in to the very real and costly social pressure to always be visible, present - that is distractable, demonstrative, lively, reinvesting our being in immediate production determined by others, mediated by corporations - then our production is not our own. We become the productivity of some other.

Time is everything, and how we choose to spend it and to what ends is what we are.

Work is expensive, and “truth is work.”

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kendrixtermina · 7 years

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INFP vs. INTP - Another potential distinguisher in the form of “Venting Behavior”

So I read this post recently where the person observed that “Vent Songs” that sorta aim to rile you up or get you to join in are a Fe thing as is “venting” in general, even in lower Fe users.

Heck, I’m working on an entire Vent- Book at the moment

Of course one person saying it doesn’t mean anything but I’ve thought it over and I though I’m still observing for more data it does seem consistent with my experience so far. In particular it jives with my previous observation that “Hate Songs” & “Musical Pause for Shock value” seem to be lower Fe things.

Come to think of I saw some other distinguishing writeups mentioning “venting” as a distinction (during those embarassing 3 days a while ago where I briefly considered that I might be xNFP) but the full structure of the statement didn’t stand out to me at the time-

Some of these writeups weren’t exactly correct either (nor is the socionics conception of the inferior and how it would come in here... on the other hand, one concept from there that might or might not be relevant here is ‘role functions are a thing, especially with contact subtypes’), since most INTPs are enneagram 5s (5s generally prefer to process their feelings on their own or with some distance to the situation) - perhaps its different with the 9s (who’d have their own hangups tho) but it would probably not be accurate to say that “You prefer to talk out your feelings with others rather than be left alone” as the ore general Fe description goes.

So it’s more nuanced, complex & varied (as it often is with the inferior - because of its nature individual biographical factors matter a lot) and I daresay a great percentage of INTP’s aren’t going to be down for sharing (the 5 tendency would be to compartementalize/ have it on your own terms somehow - say, tell the whole thing to strangers on 4chan in all gross detail - indeed it seems to be a commonthing for ppl to dislike it if someone calls attention to their involuntary reactions to stuff. ) but there’s something to be said about “venting” being present as a general tendency even if it presents mostly as a “fuck you too” attitude.

This also reminds me of this socionics article where - as you may know they tend to conceptualize Fe as being about “changing & influencing the emotions of oneself & others” & in that contexts well Fe doms are very persuasive & good at cheering ppl up (or withering their souls away with judgemental glares, depending, presumably, on their mood and alignment) & at the other end you get “Can’t really change/regulate mood very well & may treat it as “fixed””( also “might benefit from having a lovely ESFJ to fix that & animate them” because socionics is the crackships fangirl of typology. Or you know, maybe thats my natural state of existing and there’s nothing to “fix” about it only to manage & read the instruction manual so to speak)

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So in that sense you could classify both INFPs and INTP (though there’s excetions) as largely fitting the “melancholic” temperament in its “slow but sustained arousal” definition (”Hard to get thm into a particular mood, hard to get them out of it”) - the INFPs because they’re largely doing their own thing independent from the rest of the room & tend to have long-term reactions, the INTPs because there’s a higher threshold to reacting and if they do they may be “stuck” with the reaction for a while

In hindsight I say that a lot like “Hey they can’t turn it off like a button, sometimes this shit dont make sense, what matters is wether they act on it” [= try to listen to rationality regardless]

I guess part of why this distinction isn’t really out there is that that the genereal gist of how our type’s emotional expression “Well they’re not very expressive at all”, which I suppose might be what some outside perspective might notice, but from a First Person pov this is a tad useless, after all you react when you feel a reaction is merited, same as everyone else.

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This isn’t really something I picked up on before reading that because I interpreted things from my own minset were “people obviously do that” & perhaps saw venting as more universal than it is, but in hindsight it seems overwhelmingly true that Fi doms don’t exactly vent or at least not start conversations like “Ughh this thing that happened” - Usually their emotional state is quite apparent, but it’s more indirect like you’ll notice in the kinds of comments they make & how they make it, sure they might talk to you further if you ask without too much pushing.

Even when they express it indirectly (art & sad blog posts) it’s more of an enclosed, just-for-myself thing telling very specific stories, like all those INFPs post their stuff with no thought that someone (like some Fe user (tertiaries included) who thinks they’re the police or something) may aprroach it and go “Wait do you mean to imply...?!” when that’s not the purpose of their statement.

(And I was aware of this tendency but I see it in a different light in the realization of how it’s really a different purpose. Also, I always though the subset of FJs who nonstop talk shit about people are the worst kind of FJs. Gotta be careful in the future that I don’t sound like that)

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I’m not 100% sure especially in how the TJs fit into this. Some of them can have little tolerance for “drama” or just read it as weakness (8), negativity (1w9) or ingratitude (1w2) though to some extent they’rejust not comfortable to people blowing reactions into the air. That might be enneagram based to some degree the one 5w(cp)6 INTJ I know drips dark sarcasm though more as a way to critique things than personal venting. Still reserving judgement

Or perhaps the difference is more in how the ‘feels discharge’ is supposed to happen - In that Fi users come from a PoV where one person tells their life & the other kinda sits there & absorbs whereas with Fe there’s an expectation of “reaction noises” which the Fi peeps may be annoyed at or...

I’ve had the situation where I tell a joke and my Fi dom sister stays quiet and I’m like “Sorry was that joke bad?” and she explained that she was just reacting inwardly but totally listening.

Another thing I’ve observed is Fi users getting worried when their favorite TP is having a sucky day and goes “AAGHH EVERYTHING ALWAYS SUCKS!” and just voicing that kinda discharged the battery and snaps you bad to SenseMakingMode where they’re able to put the local little annoyance in context, but the Fi user will be all worried because they assume it’s a long-term thing that’s always under the surface because that’s what their feels are generally like.

#mbti #intp #infp #fi vs fe

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blackwoolncrown · 7 years

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So I slept on it. And then I read your post where you reduced every complaint I had about the utter lack of nuance in your response to me to 'oh so you're saying I was sexually assaulted?' Which, par for the course, I guess. Tell you what. Go back and read your initial response to me. The one that starts with, I have never ever met anyone... You find any mights and cans in the thicket of all and every and it is and it just means and I'll apologize for reading your blanket statements as such.

“And of course this was never about consent, or about arguing that I was literally aexually assaulted by practicing BDSM. But of course acknowledging that would force you to stop seeing me as some histrionic defender of the bdsm lifestyle.“

1. It’s really cool of you to have slept on it and very awesome for you to even say anything to me afterwards since I wouldn’t expect you to and you didn’t have to.

2. It’s a bit…odd to be like ‘hey I thought about it and maybe that didn’t go right so if you can find flaw in my argument I’ll apologize’. I’m…? Like what do you want here? I don’t mean as in, what does this say but do you want us to see eye to eye or do you want one of us to be right or what? Do you want closure or satisfaction from this interaction? These are 100% open and genuine questions. I kind of won’t interact with someone when their words and ‘motivation’ seem to be on two different levels.

3. Here’s the thing. My response wasn’t to you personally. It was to ‘the post above me’ if that makes sense. When things are presented as arguments, I am viewing them as arguments posed, not aiming my response at the person who wrote it.

And beyond all that, here’s my main thing: Stop making this about YOU. You’re really twisted up over how I see you, and I get that, but it’s not functional. Your discomfort with being ‘seen’ the wrong way in this argument or figuratively or morally or however I can say it isn’t really….my problem. If you can’t stand it when people misunderstand who you are or what you’re about idk what to tell you bc that will happen in the world all the time and you can’t fly off in a FUCK YOU FUCK YOU RAGE just because you think someone’s interpretation of you isn’t the ‘you’ you mean to be.I don’t think about you, personally. I don’t have a moral judgement on you or your lifestyle. I don’t know how many times I can say this but me talking about BDSM isn’t me saying all people who partake in it are bad. I partake in it. It’s my job. I used to have lots of BDSM related fetishes, too. I know people in it. And I know their struggles and issues related to it, and to talk about those is not to talk about them as people.

And that’s what you’re not getting. You really sound just like a white person cracking at discussion of privilege. “Oh so you’re saying I’M a bad person for having a house just because others don’t? You’re saying I’m racist/bad just for existing? Are you saying all my friends, my community, my family members are bad?”

No one’s saying that. The point is that BDSM cannot be removed from the society that it operates in. Just like anyone has perfect agency to decide that they like makeup, they also can’t remove themselves from the compulsory beauty standards that thereby give them the privilege of attractiveness and acceptance makeup offers. When we talk about how beauty standards are enforced, we’re not saying people who enjoy makeup or skincare aren’t consenting to their like, only that the market and how they view it is inherently affected by society.When we talk about sexuality within patriarchy and how it’s demanded of and controlled in women, and how capitalism and patriarchy basically creates a need for many women to go into sex work, no one’s saying those women aren’t consenting. My job is literally to use the very demands of patriarchy and capitalism, glamourize them, and sell them back to white men either physically or digitally. I consented to do so. But if society were different what I do (the specific fetishes and dynamics, not sex work) wouldn’t be as much of a ‘thing’ at all.

I also think, for the sake of clarity, that being ‘kinky’ and BDSM are two different things and we aren’t viewing them the same way. Kink overlaps, but BDSM- Bondage and Discipline, Domme/sub, Sadomasochism is a specific set whereas there are many things that are ‘just kinky’ that often don’t involve a power dynamic. I have a monster kink- that’s not BDSM. You can have a latex kink without D/s or sadomasochism. But BDSM is literally about power and control, pain and endurance of pain, and it’s just beyond ridiculous for you to have kept acting like the relationship between BDSM and social power dynamics was an unfair ‘pathology’ of BDSM. The original post never ever said ‘kinky’, it said sadomasochism and BDSM. This implies that Lourde was specifically speaking of sex with a D/s power dynamic and or sex that involved the application of suffering for sexual gratification. And the entire point there was that this is not an isolated phenomenon, that it says something about the society in which we life. And I find it classic cognitive dissonance that someone like you can elaborate on all the different ways in which our society’s sideways’ thinking manifests itself and how people need to face that and see how their preferences or habits of thought were born from that, but that reasoning shuts down when you so much as thought that the same rules could apply to your orgasms. I would almost venture to call this ‘orgasmic fragility’. Because over the years I have observed that people deep into debate and discourse will slip right into cognitive dissonance, and people who avoid discourse will launch angrily into it, if anyone dares critique the thing they get off to. And it really speaks to the critiques I’ve seen of our misguided sex positivity culture, in that it’s given people the idea that all sex is good, and that sex cannot be criticized, because to criticize someone’s sex is to criticize them, personally.

I think that it says a lot about you that you frequently said that my posts were ‘defining you as’ anything, when they were about BDSM, which implies that you identify as/with BDSM (or specifically kink) which is pretty much my entire problem with kinksters. They place so much of their identity in said kinks that all critique of them is taken as a personal attack.Basically, despite the amazing clarity of mind I followed you for, you jumped into this argument that possibly wasn’t even about you (kinks versus explicit BDSM) and started- and this is initial, before I ever responded- throwing around the idea that to critique BDSM is almost to say people involved in it have all been raped. Like…that level of reach is beneath you, it’s entirely un-nuanced, and it was the shaky grounds that you built the rest of your argument on even if you didn’t really mean to. You said it multiple times in different ways that to crit BDSM is to say its subjects are (re)-experiencing sexual assault, but now you’re claiming I’m ‘reducing’ your argument. As if I’m wrong for that. No, buddy. Sorry. Not how this works. You said it.

Then you tried to drag me under the bus for talkign about ‘healing sex’ but like.. there literally are SA survivors who dealt with that through BDSM and I was just trying to explain that I was not invalidating their experience. That’s YOU reducing my argument. Me giving credence to SA survivor’s agency isn’t summoning the phantom of ‘healing sex uwu’.

Idk you were all over the place and now you’re here like ‘grade my essay and if it’s a C- I’ll apologize’. It’s disingenuous because for as much as you harp about nuance suddenly you’ll only apply it along grammatical lines. Like, which is neither good nor bad it’s just funny to me. It’s also in line with you cursing at me heavily in your posts (hey, fine, go ahead) but then turning around and patronizing with ‘if you want to do this without hurling insults’ or somesuch. Like?? Ok. Inconsistent but ok then! Either you want to say sorry for how that went down or you don’t. Your choice, either way, I don’t care… I’ll be good and I’m sure you will, too.

#Anonymous

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nyutheatrepractices · 5 years

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Ethics and Theatre of the Oppressed with Rosa Luis Marquez

by Anthony Sun Prickett

On this Tuesday, January 15th, our cohort got the amazing opportunity to do a full workshop with Rosa Luis Marquez on the technique of image theatre. Working with Rosa was thrilling for both the body and the mind, as the ways in which she was able to create

(we do a short physical warm-up with Rosa) We first started by watching a video in which Boal and his son, Julian, explained the basics of forum theatre, and a video of a forum theatre piece which Rosa directed, in which a young woman tried to decide how to protect her relationship with a black boyfriend from her racist parents.

It was terrifically exciting to see forum theatre in action, as somebody who’s read about it but had never seen it. And the discussion that came afterwards had major implications for us as facilitators, as Rosa explained our responsibility towards the communities we work with in creating art that liberates rather than harms. She told us the story of how she first started working with the young man playing the professor when he had just turned 18, and he didn’t yet understand what it meant for himself to be black, nor even could fully articulate his queerness. Simultaneously, when he created art, there was an incredible beauty, a deep imagination. As she put it: “He was an artist, but didn’t know he was an artist!”

In hearing that, I felt something deep inside shift. Rosa seemed to have a vision: a vision that what had been done could be undone. That the pain, the trauma, the being told (as I had been told): “You have nothing worth saying. You have no story. You have no history,” that all that could be undone. That our art didn’t have to be answerable to that voice in your head, inherited from generations of abuse and poverty at the hands of white supremacy and homophobia. That Art, to use a cliche, could help us to uncover the beauty inside of us that oppression had tried so hard to hide.

This isn’t a given, nor a task to take lightly, as Rosa made clear. She told us all that the facilitator must take great pains to make sure they are not furthering the oppression of individuals by recreating the experiences that have traumatized them, and then placing them right in the center of those traumatic experiences to live them again. “They already face enough pain in the outside world,” she said, “I don’t need for the pain to be made worse through my work.” Therefore, she has be deeply reflective about how she works with the stories the community offers her, particularly with the casting and the ways in which she centers the stories: she has to choose whether she is going to make the person being focused on the one experiencing the oppression. She explicitly chose in the scenario described above, for example, not to replay a scenario of racism against the black professor, but to address racism more obliquely, because she did not want to retraumatize the young black man who had only just begun to unpack the ways in which racism impacts his life. (She has also told me in a previous, one-on-one discussion, that she tells her students explicitly: while she will treat the stories she receives with care, her practice is not psychodrama, and that she may not be able to create a space for them to heal from a traumatic experience. In fact, playing them out on stage could potentially make them worse.)

(Michelle and Si-Young do the fill in the gaps exercise)

We then engaged in our own practice of image theatre. Image theatre is a technique of Theatre of the Oppressed in which the participants use their bodies to create images of various themes in their lives, and they then discuss those images. She started with a demonstration where she created a story using multiple tableaux (or images involving multiple people in various poses) of Jessica and Steph in order, and then had us interpret those images as a story. This game, she said, demonstrated our ability to make many meanings out of a single series of images. We then played a game in which we would fill in the gap of an image created by another person. The images were at first abstract, just meant to have the smoothness of melted butter or the way mercury moves, but eventually Rosa asked us to choose specific themes.

(Savannah, Asha, and Ellie create an image together).

(An image that Rosa created by adjusting Jing and Renana)

We first chose mental illness, and then addiction. As we created tableaux, sometimes of a person reaching out and another reacting with ambivalence, sometimes of deep pain and the attempt to comfort, Rosa would occasionally step in to gently move a person in their pose just to create a new tableaux, without altering the person’s fundamental gesture. She described these poses as being like the building blocks, or language, which we could use as directors to create a theatre production’s choreography. She eventually asked us all to enter the tableaux, to create a larger landscape of poses. Three people would be left on the outside to “direct” the tableaux, moving the people around the landscape or positioning them on chairs to tell one story or another.

It is hard to describe the ways in which the exercise changed and connected us, but I will attempt to: as we gave embodiment to the different aspects of how mental illness impacts our lives, it was as though the dialogue which is so often silenced in our society around the pain which so many of us feel was invited into the space. Ironically, the silence facilitated a deep, embodied dialogue, as the lack of necessity of words to describe our experiences allowed us the safety to be honest about of the sheer horror of what mental illness means for ourselves and those around us without either critique or judgement. We wouldn’t have to search for words, but could listen to the deep knowledge our bodies hold about our lived experiences.

Acting as directors in itself allowed us to make new ways of making sense of the images: for addiction, for example, would we elevate the image of the money-grubbers, implying a position of power for them over all the others? Or would we elevate an image of anguish, highlighting instead the overarching emotional destruction wrought by addiction felt by all who are touched by its terrible power? Would we move the money-grubber nearer to those who are suffering, suggesting that they are fully aware of the suffering and do not care, or even enjoy the suffering? Would we move the person drinking away from the others, to suggest their isolation?

As our next image theatre exercise, we had to craft sculptures around the theme of oppression. I tried to decide what the sculptures would look like, and ultimately decided for myself on depicting the school-to-prison pipeline, symbolically representing it through a sullen student in the center, a scolding teacher on the other side, and a person with a gun to the student’s head to the other.

I tell this story because an observation that Ellie made shortly after illuminated enormously just how such an image could pose problems. She noticed: many of us created images where we ourselves were not placed in the position of the oppressed. This is revealing, as I believe that none of us truly want to relive the experience of oppression that we depict through image theatre, and we place somebody else in the position of the oppressed so as to distance ourselves from that experience, and lessen the burden of retraumatization. When we act as the sculptor, we must consider whether the person we are asking to play the oppressed will be able to do so without forcing them to relive something traumatic.

(The human domino game)

As a final activity, we all pretended we were dominos, lying down and stacking our heads on each-other’s stomachs, and then proceeded to feign laughter. Almost magically, feigned laughter quickly turned to real laughter, as we felt the movements of our partners’ bellies under our heads, and it was such a joy. I feel blessed to have gotten to work with Rosa.

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maresearchdigitalandmedia · 7 years

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Social Critique

A reflective view about social classes.

Since the moment we are born we are grouped and categorised in a social economical status that will have impact in our life’s pathway.

Before to enter in a study of the different generations and the marketing it is important understand how the structure of the systematic classification of this social economical groups work to understand that the symbolical tendencies and behaviour statements said about generations.

Social classes give diverse possibilities to the different structures in determinant factors such as education and opportunities of other many activities to the people englobed in the generations in order to develop and guide them in a group conformity.

Bourgeois class lifestyle is different in every area of the consumption, hobbies, and the symbolisation of these activities for appearance in the social position. ‘Taste is the heart of these symbolic struggles, which go on at all times between the fractions of the dominant class and which would be less absolute, less total, if they were not based on the primary belief which binds each agent to his life-style. A materialist reduction of preferences to their economic and social conditions of production and to the social functions of the seemingly most disinterested practices must not obscure the fact that, in matter of culture, investments are not only economic but also psychological’. (Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:36)

It is about a condition of the capitalist society behaviour that we live and learnt it until the point of categorising and labelling everything in order to make it understandable. We as civilised people added ourself a hypothetical representative value that classify each of us depending on the income of the family as a success with subsequently empiricism of possessing a place, a status, an education, and many other factors that will condition it in the contrivance of quality and opportunities.

Pierre Bourdieu said that ‘the class distribution, this description of the aesthete’s variant invites an analysis of the class variations and the invariants of the mediated, relatively abstract experience of the social world supplied by newspaper reading, for example, as a function of variations in social and spatial distance ( with at one extreme, the local items in the regional dailies—marriages, deaths, accidents— and, at the other extreme, international news or, on another scale, the royal engagements and weddings in the glossy magazines) or in political commitment ( from the detachment depicted in Proust’s text to the activist’s outrage or enthusiasm’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:21)

In this fragment Bourdieu repudiate the invariants of the mediated “media” as a consumer choice arguing that everything it comes socially conditioned being descended from a determinate inherit of the systematic social classes that we as humans try to maintain up as a distinction of our social classes.

Only the luckiest and the ones who pushed themselves in order to acquire their goals will be the ones in the lowest system of the social scale that will [just a small percentage] have a chance of breaking up the social status already attached to them since they were born. The upper classes will have more facilities in realising anything they purpose to do with the acquisitive economical power, influences, social groups, leads, education and direction. In addition, Bourdieu states that in fact, ‘the absence of this kind of preliminary analysis of the social significance of the indicators can make the most rigorous-seeming surveys quite unsuitable for sociological reading. Because they forget that the parent constancy of the products conceals the diversity of the social uses they are put to’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:21)

Not only the people is classified by the society we live in but it is classifying a wide range of products depending on this social status distinguishing again for the purchasing power.

As a result of the conditions of a similar lifestyle when the same conditions apply, only awarding to the bold people from the below social system constituting the dominant and dominated classes.

At this point Bourdieu show us his point of view, were I can understand, the submissive to the dominants for the known difference of activities, power and experience reflected in their day to day life creating a desire from the lower classes and giving authority to the dominants creating a distinction of the groups, social systematic fiction branding.

The book of A social critique of the judgement of taste it refers to the movement of the branding and the result of divergent requisites as ‘there are products very few that are perfectly ‘ univocal’ and it is rarely possible to deduce the social use from the thing itself.

Except for products specially designed for a particular use ( like ‘slimming bread’) or closely tied to a class, by tradition (like tea—in France) or price (like caviar), most products only derive their social value from the social use that is made of them. As a consequence, in these areas the only way to find the class variations is to introduce them from the start, by replacing worlds or things whose apparently univocal meaning creates no difficulty for the abstract classifications of the academic unconscious, with the social uses in which they become fully determined’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:21)

Bourdieu’s analysis of consumption behaviour shows his sociological propose with examples of tastes that define aesthetic fundamental materialism and the differentiations or better say class distinctions, social and cultural examples of the consumption and our behaviour under the pressure of the social structure shared and erudite by our closes relative influenced by the most trending and educated for the instant media again conditioned by economy, politics and uncertainly by religion.

At the end of this vicious circle it all recall in appearances. Appearances are about giving impression of your aspirational perception of achievement goals to someone by the means necessaries. Usually this means are goods that others can perceive visually, as we have been pointing before.

Appearance it comes accompanied by prejudices in the perceptions acquired through the education, experiences and close social groups a person could pertain.

So through that, we are able to distinguish ourself from the others, we acquired values, knowledge and we find easier to mix with people similar to us creating a ‘generational identity’. Searching for explanatory factors we can refer to Wittgenstein that said ‘from the constancy of the substantive to the constancy of substance, it treats the properties attached to agents—occupation, age, sex, qualifications—as factors independent of the relationship within they ‘act’ ’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:22)

Bordieu it explains the power relationships saying that ‘ ‘explanatory power’ stems from the mental habits of common-sense knowledge of the social world, which aims to ‘establish a relation of well-defined concepts’, the rational principle of the effects which the statical relationship records despite everything—for example, the relationship between the titles of nobility 9 or marks of infamy) awarded by the educational system and the practices they imply, or between the disposition required by works of legitimate art and the disposition which, deliberately and consciously or not, is taught in schools’ .

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:22)

The entitlement effect called by Bourdieu that states knowing the relationship which exists between cultural capital inherited from the family and academic capital.

In a traditional point of view then and since the industrial age or even before ( medieval age and the development of the social pyramid hierachy inherited by the church and the power structure they developed, allowing the religion at the top, followed by the king (politics), bourgeois (economy and owners), marquise, duke, highworking-class (directors/workers), and working-class/poverty) (workers), we could observe that bourgeois class life-style has been transcendent as they have been curating their image to the others and comparing it with activities of their consumption.

The activities are from a perceptions like place to live, education, reading, hobbies, clothes, jewellery, spices, habits like the afternoon tea break and a large, etc… that involves almost all their daily activities, social activities, opportunities, and personal activities to reinforce the idea of social high-class guiding behaviour and norms.

As Jean explains this in short, ‘everything that is engender by the realistic (but not resigned) hedonism and sceptical (but not cynical) materialism which constitute both form of adaption to the conditions of existence and a defence against them; there is the efficacy and vivacity of a speech which, freed from the censorship and constrains of quasi-written and therefore decontextualized speech, bases, its ellipses, short cuts and metaphors on common reference to shared situations, experiences and traditions’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:394)

Everything it comes from how we have been educated through this systematic method of political, capitalist and economical human assortment.

At the time of making statistics and showing them into tables we have to considerate different factors in order to determine approximately numeral analysis in the case of the need of building them for the study.

Even thought, statistics are imprecise and not always the sources and exactly number of participants are not shown, although this case it is hypothetic. There are many factors to consider at the time of individualising aspects to study even though generally speaking I could the most common are sex, age and gender which are a correlation of non biological category understood by the humanity; in the study of Bourdieu’s analysis he study 2 countries (France and Algeria) and divides the “x” with the “z” coordinate of a table with classes and ages using fractions and percentages in politics and in aesthetics.

He studied the differences between how the sexes tend to diminish both when one moves from the dominated classes to the dominant classes and when, within the dominant classes and no doubt also the petite bourgeoisie, one moves from the economically dominant fraction to the dominated fractions of the society system. ‘Everything suggests that the refusal of sexual status, in political or other matters, tends to increase with educational level, Bourdieu states’.

(Pierre Bourdieu, 1979:394)

Concisely, traditional it means that the modern hierarchy still dragging male chauvinism and woman feel the repression of the society to express themselves with their opinion about any subject. In addition, this situation it has been taught in a general society for ages until today when we can notice a change in the mind of the younger generations having inherit and go in depth with social causes.

Hence, sexuality it has been from a point of view under the power of a men command excluding the homosexual behaviours, producing discrimination of sexes, sexual orientation, races and age in educational institutions, politic, and economically in the traditional society not giving the right to speak or taking into account for their personal opinion to this people.

As this group of people have the lack of counsiousness, knowledge, or language valuable to take in consideration.

In our materialistic societies, people want to give meaning to their consumption. Only brands that add value to the product and tell a story about its buyers, or situate their consumption on a ladder of intangible values, can provide this meaning. Hence the cult of luxury brands, or other cultural champions such as Nike or Apple. We stress the need for brands to have brand content, revealing their culture. To resonate with present and future consumers, brands must realise that, apart from market share competition, there is also a values competition.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p.21.)

Values competition that fulfil the meaning of the buyers in society giving a meaning more than the quality. So at the end what build and composes a branding and the argument of Pierre Bordieu it works the same way; describing of the aesthete’s variants manifesting an analysis of class variations and an abstract of a ephemeral, superficial and prejudiced society.

Today and since the internet pheromones, branding has been changing as the citizens and new generations have been progressing with the internet (media) world that leaves everything to the cope of the hand and in this way everything has gone adapting to the new technologies, for example supermarkets got online and extend their selling items, other markets have appeared like Amazon, possibility of business online without the presence of a store in a city and every business have become available from any place in the world thank you to the Web 2.0 amplifying and multiplying the chances of acquiring items from abroad or near where you are.

The Generations and media dissertation it inspired the thought that technology and it is use can not be categorised by age, as it is a sensible process of understanding and that it can be maybe categorised by new kinds of categorise as spender time in social media, i.e. people born after 2000 have grown already with the use of new technologies and they spent 24 h checking on the phone for different causes as inspecting their friend's activity, uploading pictures, searching for information of product, etc.

It is different behaviour than people who started using technology after in their middle age for example. Other kind of categorisation it can be depending on the common application they use measured by a percentage value gathering the repetitive use of the same applications in a different groups.

We can create groups depends on the geographical area people are living in as in the market there are a wide range of diverse and common utility applications with an adaptation of this app with extensions that depend on the country people use more one than the others.

Again refining the association we can calculate the average depending on the place within the average percentage of common app as an example of usage of technologies to define and categorising the technologic generation for demographic development of humanity within the existence of technology.

Vittadini, N., Siibak, A., Carpentier Reifova, I. and Bilandzic, H. (2013). Generations and Media: The social Construction of Generational Identity and Differences

As there is not gold everything that shines, social media has brought negative repercussions to businesses and brands as it has empowered the client side thank you to the blogs that give free advice about the business, brand or product you are interested in purchasing.

It is the end for average brands. Only those that maximaze delight will survive, whether they offer extremely low prices or a rewarding experience, service or performance. It is the end of hollow brands, without identity. Retailers are also more powerful than many of the brands they distribute: all brands that do not master their channel are now in a B to B to C situation, and must never forget it.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p.2.)

Nowadays we are surrounding by brand in every scope of our lives and sometimes we do not perceive that, but as you see we have become and we are consumers, and humans have taken the advantage and transform our necessities to brands, companies and values because we need them to survive, although we have converted unnecessary items in essential making us live in a consumerist stage of our lives and we are living from and by brands.

It is very interesting and true that the customer-based values of the brand are created by the brand. These additional cashflows are the result of the customers’ willingness to buy one brand more than its competitors’, even when another brand is cheaper.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p.7.)

This is a response of the public after caring and showing values to the customers making bonds and after a long time this will be the people who will be loyal to your product.

Besides, this people is the one who sells the product, the people who build the brand recommending it to their friends, the mouth to mouth, the people who will recommend online your product or will do a blog about your products overselling and doing the marketing to other people who might be thinking in purchase it, this people will be dong the management of the brand and this will be the result of a good brand strategy.

Brands created assets in the minds and hearts of customers, distributors, prescribers, opinion leaders. These assets are brans awareness, beliefs of exclusivity and superiority of some valued benefit, and emotional bonding. This is what expressed the traditional definition of a bran: ‘a brand is a set of mental associations, held by the consumer, which add to the perceived value of a product or service’ (Keller 1998: 7).

It seems and there are different opinions about this, that branding before was the dominant and the public was the obedient with the exception of that today the dominant side has change to clients because of the facility of speak out about the brand, the product and the gathering of information that has made us control how, when, why and what we want the brand do for us as its costumers.

As Jean-Noel said brands have associations and this are unique meaning exclusivity, strong as such saliency and positive as desirable.

(Kapferer, J. (1992). Strategic brand management. 5th ed. England: Kogan Page Limited [for] France: Les Éditions d'Organisation, p. 6.)

#social #social critique #critisism #classes #social classes #brand #branding #brand strategy #burgeoisie #needs #steriotype #hierarchy #media #technology #newtimes #change #newconcepts

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jeroendstout · 7 years

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In response to Thomas Grip and his minor remarks on Dear Esther’s lack of engagement

In a recent essay, Thomas Grip (he of Amnesia and Soma) wrote an interesting thesis on planning and its role in engagement (published on In the Games of Madness). I found a lot to be interesting in this essay but unfortunately Grip shortly poses a corollary which I feel does not show as much thought or reflection. He says about Dear Esther that “everybody agrees that the gameplay is lacking” and notes on the observation the game does not allow players to form plans that “we need to figure out ways of fixing this.” I cannot say I agree with either of these statements; primarily because I do not agree with the assessment that its gameplay is lacking, and secondarily because even it if is, I do not feel Dear Esther has to care much about gameplay.

In this response, I wish to argue that Grip’s implied position seems paradoxical and has some hints of an essentialist view of games, which, while not inherently uninsightful, may still curb our understanding of games as a whole in the long run.

I shall use the word ‘game’ rather than this blog’s more default ‘fancy’ to make the argument more congruous with Grip’s essay.

Grip’s essay focusses mostly on three words, which are planning (the central thesis), gameplay (hereafter ‘play’), and engagement. To paraphrase (and intending kindness), it is argued that the ability to plan is important for creating engagement with a game, as planning is at the centre of the human purposeful experience. We may juxtapose a simple linear journey with a complex, multi-faceted one and see that one does not require as much processing as the other. It does not, in other words, require planning, which means the world is less present in the mind. Play which requires planning in this thesis inherently has a higher resulting engagement, which is seen as a good. Planning also means there is ‘more play’, again seen as a good. A simple corollary of these observations is that Dear Esther, being linear and lacking planning, suffers for a lack of engagement and needs to be ‘fixed’.

In what way may we understand the viewpoint that Dear Esther needs to be ‘fixed’? We may say the fault of Dear Esther is that it lacks planning, therefore play, therefore engagement, and therefore it is not good. A rather big obstacle for this line of arguing is that Dear Esther has engagement. After all, its lush visuals, its well-voiced monologue focussing on an inability to accept loss, and the dream-like soundtrack has by many of its players—including myself—been cited as entrancing and consuming. I would say this game is satisfactorily engaging on many of my play-throughs. I cannot immediately believe that Grip thinks nobody could find Dear Esther engaging unless he believes I am delirious, so let us assume the problem with Dear Esther cannot be that it lacks engagement.

We may take a step back and argue instead that it lacks play. This would be hard to dispute. Specifically, it is hard to deny Dear Esther has ‘less play’ than virtually every other game on the market. Its path is linear, fences unnavigable, walking into the water leads to an abrupt set-back. This is all true. However, for us to say that lacking play is a fault, we must somehow argue that play is essential. It is unclear why that would be, following Grip’s thesis. After all, play leads to engagement, but Dear Esther already has engagement. If engagement is the goal, can it matter whether we get engagement from something that is not play?

We could argue that the engagement one gets from Dear Esther, not coming from play, must be a form of engagement which is not ‘play-engagement’. Play-engagement would be a specific form of engagement which we can extrapolate from Grip’s thesis; planning gives rise to engaged play which causes play-engagement. Nobody would with much seriousness argue that Dear Esther has a lot of play-engagement. As such our critique could be that it lacks specifically play-engagement, and that therefore it is flawed.

Is it fair to say that the flaw of Dear Esther is that it lacks play-engagement? I am not sure why this should ever be a flaw unless one claims some sort of monopoly on either the words ‘engagement’ or ‘game’. If we wish to vindicate Grip’s complaint, we must either assume that play-engagement is intrinsically, a priori, superior to any other engagement, or that games have to intrinsically, a priori, have to have play-engagement to be good. Both of these should not sound like unfamiliar arguments.

I cannot assume Grip sees play-engagement as intrinsically better; such a belief would make someone incapable of understanding why any person may read a book when there are games to be played. But perhaps the second option, that games need to have play-engagement, sounds plausible. In this view, something can be engaging, but if it is a game and is not play-engaging, it is wrongly engaging and ought to be engaging in the preferred play-engaging manner.

Perchance this view will resonate with those who did not enjoy Dear Esther, but it hardly explains why there are those who rather enjoyed it. Are these people who enjoy Dear Esther aware that they are enjoying the wrong type of engagement by being engaged with something which is not play-engagement?

We may also draw a somewhat different conclusion from Grip’s thesis: let us surreptitiously conclude that Dear Esther is simply not a game.

A game, it is implied, needs play-engagement to be good, and otherwise needs to be fixed. As we may assume Grip does not have a problem with enjoying media other than games we may assume that he grants (say) film a category of engagement which is not play-engagement. We might say: a film does not attempt to offer play-engagement, so it is a different medium. Then the corollary may be: Dear Esther does not attempt to offer play-engagement, so it is in a different medium. Following this, we cannot really say Dear Esther needs to be fixed, because in this conclusion Dear Esther falls outside of the model which was discussing it. As such, if Dear Esther is not a game, then why would one consider it in an article about planning in games? One may as well bring up goats in an article about horse-jumping and note that goats, lacking the body strength to support a rider, could really do with being fixed. How may we fix goats? To make them more like that which they are not, horses. How may we fix Dear Esther? To make it more like that which it is not, a game. At best, Grip ought to complain between the lines that Dear Esther is said to be a game, but on closer inspection according to his model it clearly cannot be such a thing and therefore it is not relevant to the thesis.

Our paradox: a model under which Dear Esther inherently needs to be ‘fixed’ could probably be simplified to say that Dear Esther is not a game: therefore the model really does not need to concern itself with passing judgement on Dear Esther—unless it also wishes to pass judgement on film, paintings, books and other non-games.

Do I then think that Grip’s error is mentioning a not-game within an essay on games? Perhaps. I do after all propose to drop the word ‘game’ and use ‘fancy’ as a wider, more encompassing word (as I argue in Apology for Saying Fancy). Nevertheless, I would sooner say that the deeper problem is the essentialism hidden within this whole set of arguments. This essentialism is not something I will assert Grip supports, but the hint of it has, I believe, far-reaching consequences.

Firstly, when we idealistically describe games as essentially having certain attributes and we say that Dear Esther ‘needs to be fixed’ or that it is not a game, we are condemning works such as Dear Esther to a form of oblivion. After all, the essayist is no longer responsible for explaining why Dear Esther is enjoyable to many; it has been stated to not be enjoyable. And if not a game, what is Dear Esther? Never mind; the essayist has done his job and moves on to something else. If Dear Esther is not understood in his model, then is not his problem and the artefact may as well be thrown to the wolves. It is essentially culturally lazy to refuse to account for Dear Esther.

Secondly, it may be said that an essayist who does not try to account for Dear Esther’s popularity fails to understand something about their own subject. Games, as I will forever argue, share many prominent qualities with other media, and yet often theory will try to assimilate those qualities under play. Ask, for instance, what people remember about Bioshock, and the answers not involving the gameplay will refer to the art deco environments, the characters and the plot twists—simply, a traversal of plot told in a stylish environment. To throw Dear Esther to the wolves also makes it harder to understand Bioshock, as one must have a bizarre model in which Bioshock, doing virtually the same thing as Dear Esther, is somehow intrinsically different by adding play. If we dig through Bioshock’s play, however, we will find no answers as to why people can still remember, to this day, the opening monologue. There is no clue in the nature of planning our journey through Rapture to explain how the big daddies and little sisters became part of online culture’s memes. These things were highly engaging, and yet they were not play. The popularity of this, I argue, comes down to what-ever it is Dear Esther also offers. The engagement with “I call it... Rapture” is the engagement we find in the opening lines of Dear Esther. To fail to understand why Dear Esther works puts you at risk of not understanding why the opening of Bioshock made such an impression: it means you avoid the conclusion that certain imagery, sound and narrative cues, traversed through with little to no play, can evoke great engagement, satisfying for its own sake, not needing another form of engagement to be added.

Essentially, I hold that you can never have a complete model of all the intricate and complex parts of what makes games engaging if you think a game without planning inherently needs to be ‘fixed’.

Note, if you want to signal boost this post on Twitter, you could re-tweet my tweet.

#Discourses #Thomas Grip #Dear Esther #Essays #What Makes a Fancy Work

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studioacs-blog · 7 years

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For this assignment we will focus on the relationship between Kantian aesthetics and Bourdieu’s sociology of taste.

Different from empirical judgment and moral judgment, with aesthetic judgment Kant focuses more on the judgment rather than the aesthetics (Van den Braembussche, 2009). Aesthetic judgment is not necessarily about the beauty, but much more about why something is beautiful. Furthermore, Kant highlights the notion of space and time. Space and time are a priori conditions that make it possible to understand the aesthetic judgment better. As Van den Braembussche (2009) states, “without space and time perception is impossible, and Kant therefore calls them the a priori forms of sensibility, of sensible knowledge.” This means that space and time are able to put things in perspective and give meaning.

To explain aesthetic judgment, Kant makes a distinction between the noumenon and phenomenon. If we would focus on the aesthetics, and thus the appearance, we would focus on the phenomenon. According to Kant, the noumenon, which is the thing in itself, is more important than the phenomenon (Van den Braembussche, 2009). It is the noumenon that makes it possible to experience the phenomenon. Furthermore, it can be argued that through space and time someone can make sense of the phenomena, since – as stated above – these conditions make perception possible.

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of taste has revolutionized the understanding of the social structural underpinning of culture and had its relationship to the understanding of aesthetics (Kane, 2003). In one of Bourdieu’s most famous books, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he has offered a powerful explication of “taste.” Taste, for Bourdieu, implying and ranging from the choices in arts through choices in dress, furniture, and the like, to taste in food and lifestyle, both as the unified subject matter and as the way for producing and reproducing power differences among different social classes (Loesberg, 1993). Thanks to these social and cultural consumption practices, the social groups may now be defined and people within the group may distinguish themselves from each other. And with the tastes, people have shown which social class they belong to, and thus the “boundaries” would be drawn (Weininger, 2005).

This class structure, whether lower or higher social class, according to Bourdieu, is reproduced by the accumulation of “cultural capital,” including one’s education, cultural preferences and manners (Kane, 2003). However, inevitably, a society with such class structure is reproduced again and again as the upper-class students are more likely to have the cultural capital favored by the education system that contained agents from higher social class (Kane, 2003).

What we see with Bourdieu is that the focus is on taste formation as a way to legitimize the social class someone belongs to. Kant, on the other hand, makes a distinction between the aesthetics and the judgment that comes along with it. Similarly, Kant makes a distinction between the object itself and the emotions someone experiences because of the aesthetics of the object. This is also known as Kant’s disinterested satisfaction (Van den Braembussche, 2009). Kant argues, however, that the satisfaction only becomes real when the object is consumed. If the object would just be observed, it would be a matter of interest. Bourdieu’s response to this aesthetic of disinterested satisfaction is that is similar to elite taste (Loesberg, 1993). Consumption and tasted are closely linked together. Only those who have enough economic capital, thus the elite, are able to consume these objects and satisfy their needs. According to Bourdieu, someone can claim to be aesthetically pleased by looking at something that it is beautiful, such as a nice car or a 3 Michelin-star meal, but it is not until the car is bought and driven in or the meal is eaten, that someone is truly pleased.

#literature #philosophy #aesthetics #submission

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xiexunziblog-blog · 6 years

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On David Hume’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgments

David Hume argues to draw a standard of tastes into aesthetic experiences. The significance of Hume’s theory is that it stresses how tastes could have a normative aspect – a standard to judge. Because tastes are the judgments on a subject’s sentiment provoked by specific objects, aesthetic experience, which essentially involves the invoke of the subject’s sentiments, has the potential to be publicly shared and meaningfully communicated.

-Phenomenon of aesthetic experience

1.Sentiments are true

Hume states that when a subject is appreciating an art work, the sentiments aroused have truly occurred in the subject’s mind, despite their specific contents. Therefore, Hume argues that since sentiments “have only a reference to itself”, sentiments do not have the potential to be judged based on their factuality (true occurrence).

It implies that Hume is here addressing the evaluative aspect of sentiments beyond a mere confirmative study of the truthfulness of their existence. Thus, Hume’s theory demonstrates the necessity to involve a judgment on value in aesthetic experiences.

2.Sentiments should be subject to rules of art

In this section, Hume explains the necessity of making rules and norms for aesthetic experiences. The self-justified nature of sentiments, if brought to an extreme level of “extravagance”, will ultimately lead to “disproportionate imagination” of arts, resisting a publicly sharable set of aesthetic knowledge and meaningful communications of aesthetic experiences.

Through the explanation above, Hume is trying to address his central task of writing this essay and defends its significance. Hume’s mission is to seek a principle which legislates the judgments on sentiments. In his point of view, although aesthetic seems phenomenologically relative to the subject, the necessity to search for a “common sense” of aesthetic judgements is beyond doubts, despite the linguistic and cultural-relativistic difficulty which may result from the subjective nature of aesthetic experience. It implies that the burden of Hume’s argument is to explain how such a standard of tastes is possible in the following arguments.

-Aesthetic judgment

1.Rules of sentiments are not justified by a priori truths

Before proposing a valid principle of tastes, Hume firstly denotes a common misconception of the standard of tastes. Hume emphasizes that any artistic rules should not be based on a priori truths. In Hume’s point of view, to use universally absolute standard to measure the standard of taste is at odds with aesthetic experience itself, for sentiment is never based on universal experience which is abstracted from the objects themselves. I infer from Hume’s explanation here that sentiments are essentially centered on the subject’s sensations of the objects; therefore, aesthetic experience should always be based on the instant relationship between the subject and the object. An a priori abstraction will essentially transcend, thus lose, such a ground of instant sensations. Therefore, Hume makes it clear that an a priori approach of this matter of aesthetic judgment is not favored in this essay.

2.Delicacy of sentiments as a general principle

Finally, Hume proposes the notion of “delicate sentiments” as the standard of taste. Hume refers the idea of “delicacy” as a state of mind which has perfected sensual organs, thorough observations of the object, and a legitimate imagination of the qualities the object has. Each state, or step, of producing a delicate sentiment can correspond to a type of defects in aesthetic experience: the perfection of sensual organs corresponds to the bodily imperfections; the fullness of observations corresponds to the ignorance of some detailed aspects of an art work; and the legitimacy of imagination corresponds to a deviated interpretation of an art work.

The above elaboration on “delicacy” both addresses the participation of imaginations and sensations, which are two essential components of a man’s sentiment, making the conceptual postulation of a feasible standard of taste a considerate one. It is relatively easy to make sense of a judgment on the sensual part of an aesthetic experience. However, it is equally significant but obviously harder to make a rule for the imagining part of an aesthetic experience. Hume’s address of this issue is not clear enough though. In Hume’s description of ways to improve the delicacy of sentiments, “practices” and “comparisons” speak little about dealing with evaluating a subject’s imagination; the two key factors proposed later – “historical and cultural prejudices” and “individual temperaments” – have some relevance to this matter. “Prejudices” entail bad tastes because they blind the subject and prevent him to see a full picture of the object. “Prejudices” can limit subject’s imagination through eliminations of details which are not in favor of the subject’s assumptions about the work of art. However, to what extent may our contextual judgements become a prejudice? If Hume is putting away the entire influence of context of aesthetic judgment, Hume surely needs good reasons to defend such a bold action. Otherwise, if Hume refers only to certain contextual judgements which will likely endangers a sound aesthetic judgment, it will be questioned if such an act of drawing a line between good judgments and bad judgments itself has a cultural and historical context. If Hume has to surrender to such a relativism of aesthetic judgements, people will start to wonder if standard of taste is mere contingent and coincidental. Such a theory is now completely subject to the risk of linguistic difficulty and cultural-relativistic difficulty that Hume should try to resolve.

On the other hand, “individual temperament” can entail two senses: a natural temperament which may vary differently among individuals, due to inherent variations; a social temperament which is subject to the level of education different individuals may receive in various extents. The first sense of “temperament” may address the sensual delicacy of sentiments, but only the second sense of “temperament” has the potential to develop an evaluative taste of arts. Cultivations are a good way to promote a unified standard of taste among individuals, however they do not help clarify what standards of tastes should be employed to answer the hard question on regulating the imaginations of men. When it comes to the qualitative aspect of aesthetic experience, we should firstly speak about what qualities should be recognized good in relation to specific reasons and indications, before we begin to discuss to put such a standard into actions (through educations).

September, 2017

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years

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HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PEOPLE

In practice what happens is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same problem. I called a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding: the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a VC round meant a series A round in which a single VC fund or occasionally two invested $1-5 million. If you force yourself to shorten the manual, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up with startup ideas is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of lowest common denominator. At least one hacker will have to work on ways to organize libraries. To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you get bored halfway through and start making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one, the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested the bricks. You see paintings and drawings in museums and imagine they were made for you to win. They still do, of course, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now rich, at least working on problems of minor importance. If you're curious about something, trust your instincts.

These are smart people; if the technology was good, they'd have used it voluntarily. You don't have to go far down it before you start to offer something really attractive to customers. The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least in the software business I know from experience whether patents encourage or discourage innovation? It's too complicated for a third party to act as if drugs were themselves the cause of so many present ills: specialization. It is a case study of hacker's radar. Typefaces to be cut in metal were initially designed with a brush on paper. They'd have to make their mails indistinguishable from your ordinary mail. In some business relationships, you do implicitly solicit certain kinds of applications that need that specific kind of data structure, like window systems, simulations, and cad programs. Why not just sit and think? Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more startups than launching too fast, but it would be even harder than making the message look innocent. When it comes to surprises, the rich get richer.1 The conversations on Reddit were good when it was that small.

But there's a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. But the more you realize that because of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates.2 It's not a critique of Java! Now it turns out the rule large and disciplined organizations. I know, this is the route to well-deserved obscurity. If investors had sufficient vision to run the companies they fund, why didn't they start them? The problem is, the USPTO are not hackers. A need that's narrow but genuine is a better starting point than one that's broad but hypothetical. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was neither a success nor a failure; it was something they backed into.

I've found I can predict quite well what sort of people will make them so. The most dynamic part of the game. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were going away for the weekend. Who is? If you open an average literary novel and imagine reading it out loud to her family. Are People Really Scared of Prefix Syntax? And the core problem in a startup, think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do now. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them? There are really two variants of that question, and people answering it often aren't clear in their own startups, basically flew into a thermal: they hit a market growing so fast that it was much cleverer than I had been. But because he's sitting astride it, he seems to do in software what he seems to be more popular. VCs invest in angel rounds they can do things that super-angels. Historically, languages designed for their own designers to use.

And there was no way to opt out. They would just look at you blankly. They had focus groups aplenty, I'm sure, but they are. But the breakage seems to affect software less than most other fields. Its fifteen most interesting words are as follows: let g 2 or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word bad 0 unless g b 5 max. The cost is enormous for the recipients, about 5 man-weeks for each million recipients who spend a second to delete the spam, but the main thing we care about is whether the company is a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization. Then when you start doing this though: you're trying to do in an essay. Essentially, each user should have two delete buttons, ordinary delete and delete-as-spam.3

Notes

You can get it, and B doesn't, that you can base brand on anything with a lawsuit just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. He made a bet: if he were a variety called Red Delicious that had other meanings are fairly closely related.

If you're a YC startup you have to deliver these sentences as if they'd like, and everyone's used to be doctors? I deliberately pander to readers, though I think lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as much what other people in the life of a long time. Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives would work.

This is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate everything else in the Neolithic period. A Plan for Spam. The only launches I remember are famous flops like the arrival of your own compass.

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xiexunziblog-blog · 6 years

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On the Possibility of Defining Art: Critic on Morris Weitz

In his essay “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, Morris Weitz argues from a linguistic approach that there are no definitions for the concept of art. His argument can be divided into two parts. In the first part, Weitz argues that the previous attempts to define art are bad arguments. In the second part, Weitz provides a linguistic analysis to show why art is such an open concept and thus, it rejects definitions.

In his first part of the argument, Weitz enumerates four theories of art which try to give art a definition. The first theory is the Formalism, represented by Clive Bell. Formalists claim that the essence of art is a set of significant forms, which are some specific combinations of elements of the art work that generate specific reactions of the audience. Weitz believes that the formalists’ argument is circular, because as Formalism defines art’s significance based on the audiences’ significant reactions to it. Thus, the theory presupposes the significance of certain responses to certain art forms. Weitz criticizes that Formalism does not answer the problem of art completely, for they must clarify the nature of the significance of significant forms. On the other hand, Weitz challenges the Bell’s disposal of the representational features of art. It implies that Weitz believes art always carries certain meanings behind their artistic forms. The audiences are moved by the art sometimes not by the lines themselves. But they are reacting to different meanings (emotions, ideas, or even stories etc.) interpreted from the artistic forms.

The second theory Weitz wants to disprove is Benedetto Croce’s intuitionism. Croce claims that art consists of some pre-reflective intuitions we have when we are appreciating an art work. However, Weitz challenges that art work has an essential property of being public, which means that art work must have the potential to be shared and appreciated by other people. For Croce’s intuitionism, because it is pre-reflective, we cannot bring our artistic experience to the public without any reflection and moderation on it. Croce’s intuitionism may thus reject the linguistic function of art. In addition, from a linguistic point of view Weitz rebuts that such pre-reflective ideas may not even exist. For whenever an idea is formed, we always presuppose that the idea can be communicated in a meaningful way. Otherwise, it is only private and does not even qualify as a proper idea.

The third theory Weitz rejects is the Organicism. Organicism claims that art is anything organically composed of various elements. Weitz denies that anything except for art can also be categorized as an organic compound of various elements, and thus Organicism fails to even distinguish art from non-art.

Finally, Weitz counterargues Parker’s Voluntarism by applying a defect of all four theories exemplified. He points out that all four theories of art choose certain conditions of art and use them as a definition of art without giving any necessary and sufficient reasons to justify their choice. For instance, Parker claims that art must satisfy our imaginations. But one may wonder why the satisfaction we receive from art has to be imaginative. Some people really start to weep after hearing a sad song sang by the artist. The tears are real, so how can the affections art have be limited by the level of imagination only?

From here we may infer that in Weitz’s viewpoint, a true definition of art must be based on some evidence justifiable with sense. Many reasons he provides to deny all the four listed theories are emphasizing the lack of logical support. Therefore, we may conclude that Weitz would prefer a positivistic, evidence-based theory of art instead of any metaphysical construct of a preferred definition of art. Now, in his second part of the argument, Weitz starts to explain why the concept of art rejects definition. His central argument is since art is both descriptive and evaluative, the concept of art is open and thus, no meaningful definition can be given. In his central argument, Weitz has two tasks at hands to prove himself. One, he must prove that because art has evaluative properties, the concept of art is open. Two, he must explain why an open concept rejects definition at all.

First, let’s focus on the evaluative properties of art. Weitz correctly points out that when people are referring something to an art work, they are making an evaluative judgement already. By saying that a work is artistic, we are implying that the work means something very special to us, and we choose some of its properties as the reason to identify that special reason. Because we can compare the definitions of art through history and among different cultures, we must agree that they are so different from each other. Therefore, we must conclude that art is not defined by nature, but chosen to be by the people who find special reasons to treat the work of art differently from the work of non-art. Otherwise, a cross-cultural and historic analysis of art should give at least a similar set of properties of the many definitions of art, which we seem unable to give. And thus, as for the people are the agents who are defining the special reasons for choosing a work of art, in this process human intentions necessarily involves in the definition of art. Therefore, we must conclude that the definition of art must be associated with human evaluation.

For now, for Weitz’s argument to be true, we must further prove that the concept of art is open because of its evaluative properties. In Weitz’s own words, “A concept is open if its conditions of application are emendable and corrigible”. We want to ask then, what is corrigible? One interpretation is that a concept can change its definition according to the change in circumstances. Another interpretation is held by Weitz himself, which claims that whenever the extent to use the concept is left to our power to choose, the concept is open. The first interpretation implies that if a concept is corrigible to external conditions, the concept is open. The second interpretation implies that if a concept is corrigible to the specific users of it, then the concept is open.

There are two ways of viewing the two interpretations and the implication on the definition of art. The first way is to assume that users are external to art. Then, the two interpretations are one and the openness of the concept of art only means to be dependent on or to subject to external influence in some ways. Thus, we ask the question if this means art does not have possible definitions. Clearly, something is dependent on something else by correlation does not necessarily mean there is no definitions for it. Only, we must say that the definition is conditional, or should the definition of this concept include certain category of conditions so that the definition is held true and complete. Going back to the example of art, if art is an open concept in this way, Weitz only has the right to say that art is not independent so we must interpret it under context or circumstances. But this doesn’t mean that art does not have a definition. Maybe art has multiple definitions, depending on the conditions given. But still, we can define art in just a more complicated way. If we take those defining conditions into the consideration, we will still be able to enumerate a set of sufficient conditions for art. As for the necessary conditions which define art altogether, I doubt if they don’t exist just because the defining conditions may vary. In Weitz’s own words, art is necessarily involved with human intentions. That has already become a necessary condition for the concept of art. Weitz sets up some contradictory example which tries to show that art can sometimes be not an artifact. But by saying that art is necessarily an artifact, we are presuming that an artifact is something which involves human intentions in both its process of being created and being treated. Either of the processes involves human intentions will constitute the artifactuality of some works. Therefore, if we take an open concept to be any concepts that are open to correlate, we cannot deduce that this concept rejects definition.

Now, what if we take the idea of an open concept to be something which can change only in accordance to itself? This means that we cannot find any correlations between the change of the concept with any change in its external conditions. Now we cannot specify any reasons for the change, therefore we cannot manage to define the concept by conditioning it. However, to assert that this concept rejects definition we need to further show that the pattern of its variations is not only closed to external conditions, but also closed to external measures. This means that not only the concept is passively independent of environmental factors, but also actively independent of our observations, or, random. This idea corresponds to my second way of viewing the two interpretations, which take the users of art not as an external element of the concept of art but inherent to art. Now, if we are speaking about Weitz’s critique on art, the audiences are taken as a part of art’s constitution and it should serve as the changing factors which are independent from other environmental factors. But clearly it is wrong to assume that the users of the concept of art is necessarily independent from the environmental influences. Still we can find conditions and logics behind the users’ variations, and since they are not choosing art randomly, we can still define the pattern of the dynamics of art.

As the review of the Weitz’s argument has shown, as long as we consider the process of interpreting art not as something disordered, there is no necessity for us to reject the definitions of art. An open concept can still be defined, only under some necessary conventions and a set of sufficient conditions to specify the various ways to define it. Weitz’s attempt to analyze art not as some entities is still valuable. For the dynamism of the concept of art can be conveniently identified and explained by how we use such a concept in language, the linguistic approach is worth of further investigations.

April, 2017

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