>I thought the current attitude in academia was not to make value judgments.
Academia here, speaking through sleeves before resuming its snooze.
What's been devalued in academia is not "value judgment" per se--as the pun
pixeled just now implies-- but aesthetic value judgments grounded in
Kantian "disinterested contemplation"--"a non-concept and a nonsense,"
Nietzsche said long ago. And beyond that there's the possibility that
contingencies of value--to use Barbara H. Smith's title--in some of these
academic sites are now often such that the aesthetic disappears as if its
constructedness as a category made it an irrelevance or necessarily
pernicious. In my experience anyway, lately, power hardly wants to play
with poetry, even the poetry of power. Residual fiefdoms are tolerated as
game preserves. Beyond them where the money's at a reign of therapeutic
pedagogies taking their (mis)cue from cultural studies regimes purportedly
about the transvaluation of values but all thumbs when they (rarely) deal
with poetry. Perhaps this is an American story.
cris cheek's rhetoric of ephemerality might find its sharper blade not
against an absolute no longer credible beyond the boorish or the insane but
rather against the self-certainties of disciplines asserting local power.
Crowd the aesthetic and other fields a little, accelerate the judgments
required as a way of staving off the judgments imposed. The death of poetry
made to explode poetry in all directions. Such a program might find some
allies in cultural studies but in academia too often the field is dispersed
or inverted only to be regathered for the new regime. Thus the Spice
Girls, god bless them, dressed in a million-dollar prose the Spice Girls
won't/can't read. Disperse thyself would be an ambitious command if
increasingly an unnecessary one.
Despite all of this and somehow canons continue to exist in all their
mutant glory. In his book From Outlaw to Classic Alan Golding is good at
complicating and extending distinctions between accessible, selective, and
potential canons. Cary Nelson's effort to deny "the paradoxical notion that
multiple alternative canons can coexist as options in the culture--a
liberal fantasy that disguises the actual struggle for dominance" is
perhaps limited by a primary focus on one site for struggle, literary
historiography.
Pretty puffy, these robes. Is it likely, though, that you/we can wish them
away? The ephemeral solidifies in discourse concerning the ephemeral.
Beyond Miles' horn passing the cusp of a note he's talking and wants to
say: "When anything goes, nothing happens."
That's the (foggy) weather from here, far as i can tell.
Keith
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|