vimothy
yurp
Too bad about them Injuns, eh?
It's not the same issue, mate.
Too bad about them Injuns, eh?
Sorry, what was the original question again?
I'm sure the last time I looked at this thread your reponse was "something about Banksy, AFAIR". What's happened there?
Yes, them Injuns is a different issue, but it's a bit of a big one to gloss over.
Actually, I thought you were the statist and I was in favour of minimal government and private property. Maybe I was wrong.
The original question had to do with the function of humor, especially in the media: whether it serves as an effective critique of power or whether it simply serves the status quo. It's located where these things usually are, in the first post of the thread.
I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I was a statist. And I wasn't criticizing homeownership, just pointing out that ruling class methods of pacification adjusted to new situations, the welfare state being among them. Obviously the ruling class sees little need for it any more, although some token rhetoric about universal health care coverage will apparently loom large in the 2008 election.
The original question had to do with the function of humor, especially in the media: whether it serves as an effective critique of power or whether it simply serves the status quo.
I wasn't glossing over it - I wasn't mentioning it at all because it's not relevant to what I was saying.
Yeah, fair enough, I was just being a bit arsey.
Scafe
This really comes out when you get a 'scandal' like Abu Ghraib and pretty much everyone (not just the hawks) runs around wringing their hands and saying of course we've got to root out these bad apples so that the next time we send a bunch of underprepared squaddies to try to control a hostile country in the face of sustained and ruthlessly violent resistance everything will be absolutely peachy.This kind of thing got played endlessly here in debates over "strategy" and "mismanagement," instead of people pointing out that a) occupations always involve violence, death, and atrocities which those crowing for invasion should have accounted for if they are the least bit responsible for their views;
I do think that there is a lot of truth in this ("nothing is true and everything is permitted") but I also think that Vimothy has correctly identified a paradox in that art in a dictatorship is art against that dictatorship and towards a society in which when achieved art will ultimately have less power.
I think Vimothy’s argument is tenuous, though. First of all, often what a revolutionary group is fighting for is not democracy but power (think of the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq). Moreover, art need not be less powerful because it’s sanctioned, as it were, by the state. The works of Bach, Giotto, and thousands of others are a testimony to this.
If there is a lowest common denominator linking most great artists it seems to be some kind of zeal: spiritual zeal, political zeal (which could be said to be the same thing), madness (also kind of zeal inducing, arguably), or zeal for something else (money/fame/glamour/whathaveyou). Tentatively, one could presuppose that different kinds of zeal create different kinds of art, and that what some people in the West are bemoaning is actually the loss of a specific kind of art (and thus the zeal that engenders it). What I’m getting at, once again, is that I think the argument over democracy vs [other political system] is slightly off target. More important is to look at which societal conditions/attitudes/currents create ‘fine art’. I actually happen to think that all-out permissiveness (I was close to writing excessive) is detrimental to the creation of ‘fine art’, but then again, its a salubrious principle in pretty much all other spheres of society, so I’m hardly against it on a fundemantal level. Still, it has its downsides.
Bohemia could not survive the passing of its polar opposite and precondition, middle-class morality. Free love and all-night drinking and art for art's sake were consequences of a single stern imperative: thou shalt not be bourgeois. But once the bourgeoisie itself became decadent—once businessmen started hanging nonobjective art in the boardroom—Bohemia was deprived of the stifling atmosphere without which it could not breathe.
Well, in fairness Vimothy said that it was a struggle towards either a different dictatorship or a democracy. The problem is that a different dictatorship is not normally any better than the previous one and a democracy (going by what Gavin said) reduces the power of art. You still have the paradox of art that is in favour of an improvement (whatever that means) working towards its own powerlessness."I think Vimothy’s argument is tenuous, though. First of all, often what a revolutionary group is fighting for is not democracy but power (think of the Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq). Moreover, art need not be less powerful because it’s sanctioned, as it were, by the state. The works of Bach, Giotto, and thousands of others are a testimony to this."
I broadly agree with that (with a number of caveats of course as usual), in fact I started writing something similar earlier but it got deleted and I never re-typed it because it was a bit confused or lacking in focus or maybe I just wasn't sure it was right."If there is a lowest common denominator linking most great artists it seems to be some kind of zeal: spiritual zeal, political zeal (which could be said to be the same thing), madness (also kind of zeal inducing, arguably), or zeal for something else (money/fame/glamour/whathaveyou)."
Well if K-Punk wrote about it it must be true (see also a million other sources of name-dropped obedient Big Other pseudo-philosophy).
Aye, it's all true.
Who is 'k-punk' and what would k-punk know? Even if s/he did have some experience of either university, how can s/he generalise about the tens of thousands of people who pass through them? Has s/he not heard about colleges like Wadham (Oxford) or King's (Cambridge)? They're absolutely packed with name-dropping, left-leaning wannabe intellos (one of my friends is at King's).
Even if your thesis were true (that ppl at Oxbridge pretend to be anti-intellectual), it is still the case that most students there actually are more intellectual than at any of the other universities in the UK, in that they have read more (see performances on University Challenge), are generally more intelligent (some greatly so), are competitive and goal-centred and are given more work to do than anywhere else (Oxf: 12 essays in 8 weeks to defend 1-1 or 2-1 vs world-leading experts).
Re debating styles, what might be believed by many Oxbridge students is that less intelligent people name-drop more in debate than the more intelligent as doing so gives their arguments a ready-made structure and weight - which is easier than fashioning persuasive points on the fly (which skills the Oxbridge tutorial system attempts to develop). I don't remember Union debates involving much name-dropping either.
Many Oxbridge students might well be averse to heavy name-dropping (as I obv am) as it betrays preparation and admits an intellectual debt to others, preferring the implied self-sufficiency of improvised argument (the narcissism of 'effortless superiority'). On a more prosaic note, name-dropping and other excesses of referencing disrupt the flow of an argument, as your interlocutor wastes time vainly trying to retrieve information about GodknowswhatobscureFrenchthinker from memory rather than following your logic.
So, to some extent, I agree with k-punk, but with important reservations: some Oxbridge students are closetly intellectual anti-'intello's (which stance is itself an attentuation of the wider British mistrust of 'intellectuals') while others would fit right in with the handful of Essex students who were set on assuming an 'intellectual' persona.
PS 'Gym class hero'? Is s/he thinking of the right side of the Atlantic?
Obviously, that's not what I meant--I was simply posing the question, since I've read K-punks blog posts about this alleged anti-intellectual pose amongst some of the most highly educated people in the world, and I wondered if other British people could confirm or deny this claim.
OK, fair enough, it was the mention of the article to dismiss what Mixed_Biscuits said that I objected to, not the article itself."Obviously, that's not what I meant--I was simply posing the question, since I've read K-punks blog posts about this alleged anti-intellectual pose amongst some of the most highly educated people in the world, and I wondered if other British people could confirm or deny this claim."