What's amazing about this conversation is what's lacking. This is to say that many scholars respect others' work sufficiently enough to want to join as equals--hence, to gain status as equals. Now perhaps for the sake of argument, this desire is far more prevalent in the sciences than in the arts. Therefore, I'd suggest that you alter your mental context to more of one of Einstein's liking than that of say, Picasso when discussing the subject at hand: a certain Levi-Strauss, by name. To reiterate, only when he was not given good peer review did he seek recognition as a philosophe; and when that, too, collapsed he became an "interesting" public figure.
 
What is likewise assumed, yet is totally incorrect, is that the peerage of which I speak somehow has something to do with tenure. But since I'm not in academia, why should I care? My more general point is that nearly everyone seeks recognition from some organized group or another, and wants to have their work accepted on those terms. If not within an academic department, there's always the profession at large, interdisciplinary work...yet someone is always being addressed.
 
Now to answer Indra: no, knowledge and understanding aren't "personal". Even when one is sharing intuitive insights one is discussing within a particular group that values insightfulness. Besides, Socratic dialogue was fairly hardball, and involved eclencus, or on the spot refutation. Moreover, as everyone sought Socrates ' approval (remember, his name means "master of life!"), peerage was based on contribution within his symposium.
 
Indian philosophy is fife with master-pupil relations which have formed  schools of thought for over two thousand years. For example, all of these yoga schools that plague our shopping malls are named after various gurus who insist that so-called spiritual energy works in such- and- such a fashion. A simple inquiry as to whether this "energy" is reductable to discreet quanta will get one the peergroup heave-ho; which is to say nothing more, I suppose, that while Planck had his standards, the local bagwan has his, too. Unless one hails from Texas--where creationism and evolution exist, incommensurately, side by side-- choice in life involves a selection of peerage.
 
Bill Harris
 
 
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: rajaindrakaran edla
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 2:21 PM
Subject: Re: FILM-PHILOSOPHY Digest - 4 Jun 2008 to 5 Jun 2008 (#2008-210)

Don,

As one can see, the peer group review is more like Box office review,a kind of glossy exchange of academic compliments.

All pursuits of knowledge and understanding  is of personal nature. In engaging and sharing of these intuitive insights, as in THE INDIAN BHAKTI TRADETION is called SATSANG( In the company of wise),which are Conducted more so in the fashion of Socretian Dialog, where celebration of like minds is more of a feast to be cherished.

regards,

Indrakaran. 



-----Inline Message Follows-----


Don Handelman writes:


    I think on and off on how valuable it would be to have a journal 
publishing articles in which the author does his or her analysis until 
it falls apart, and then tries to analyze why it falls apart, and, so, 
what the analysis is good for and what it isn't. Not a post-modern 
deconstruction, but rather a construction leading to self-destruction 
which leads to re-organization. Thereby, getting away from the 
beautifully polished papers that thoroughly and neatly self-enclose 
themselves, the loose ends neatly sliced away.

This is sort of the opposite from the intellectual lebensraum scenario that Bill Harris described.
In the mid sixties I started making films as a way of producing "language experiments" that would give me parallax on the kinds of questions Witt was asking in the PI.  They were experiments and almost all of them were the kinds of failures from which I learned a lot, and from which others could also learn, so I showed them to colleagues - but never really "released" them. So this would be the equivalent of Don's idea.  It worked just fine because then the world was very very small.  There was no Film-Philo and there were only a couple of other people that I considered to be doing something like what I was doing...Hollis Frampton, Peter Greenaway,  Michael Snow, AK Dewdney, Saul Levine.  but in order for the works to have any impact I had to achieve a level of success in my own eyes that justified "releasing" the films and having them shown to a wider audience.

The world has evolved to where visual language experiments can easily be floated in a public space. Unjuried like Utoob, but within a corral like this salon.

My own predisposition is toward the unjuried, but I can see the other point of view. However, while I usually at least breeze through the posts on this salon, and curse the out of office bots and undeleated antecedents, looking for live meat. I pay far less attention to the journal, in which the writing is much more considered, dense and often obtuse.

My own lightheadedness I suppose...I'm often looking for environments in which prose can live and breathe, and in the jostle of academic jurymandering, a kind of self-censorship seems to stifle.

dan




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