"[though it's about the inescapability of that kind of cultural specificity
that we often call provincial it's limiting but it's true, and there's no
point in shooting the messenger
who points out the inescapability of certain features of our
"aesthetic" response..."

Well,

What of the features of "aesthetic" (your emphasis?) response.  Shall we
rehash Kant together, or are you planning on abandoning the 3rd critique for
some new fashioning of the desire to understand representation?

I don't see how the features of individual aesthetic responses have anything
to do with *how* students learn to become critical of the things they see or
hear.  Unless you're gonna be the hoot who quantifies yet another "human
response" in order to conduct some socio-psychological study that
re-typifies the norm for the purpose of finding another proper
response--i.e., yet another Style guide for speaking about film in the
classroom that does more to confuse the tongue than enhance the discourse.


Responses do not limit experience; Academia need not limit proper responses.
  This is an insidious problem: the attempt to make claims about proper
theoretical responses.  Nevermind issues of entitlement that students face,
they fear being proper and shouldn't.  They think in terms of what their
professors expect rather than in terms of what they want to know about the
material at hand...students ask us, "What do *you* mean?"  They aren't
comfortable asking, "What do I mean?"

Film almost requires a "What do I mean?" response...but one, a limit set,
isn't right...one response merely adds to the discussion and further
develops the vocabulary...and, after all, that's what academics argue about:
VOCABULARY  and  USAGE.

Each student offers us a plateau, some entry point into the discussion of
film theory/history--some point on which to look back.  Yeah, your upper
division students have some accountability for some quantity of a kind of
knowledge most likely--they should be reading...but, for example, younger
students should feel welcome to use film study as a way to individually and
critically think about popular culture, about events that are meaningful
to/for them, not things that are meaningful to academia...we are the
building itself not the act of building...

Film does not belong to the scholar.
Cinema is not a rite of passage.

Popular culture is not something new.
It is something fractal:
Something regenerated:
Some Thing over and over again.
It richly happens newly
         in the same way.

Whether we like it or not: pop culture means something different in a
limitless way to each individual within society because it is so subtly
based upon experience and the expectation that we need not think about what
we see and hear...in this way, pop culture stays the same but mutates at the
same time...it is too slippery to grasp...it is nothing at all really...just
a phantasm in passing...in each moment, hic et nunc...novum ordo
contemporaneorum  (hah!)

We say that _Pearl Harbor_ is not a good film, yet we watch it over and over
again.  The excuse:  there's something new in every thing.  The catch: they
have made the same film hundreds of times, at least, and not of us is ready
to put it back on the garbage heap.  We have seen it all.  We have students
of genre who will watch everything over and over merely to put it in its
proper place...oh response is limiting!...NO, it's blind...it does not limit
but is limited...



LIMIT...that's the word I don't like...there exists no limits for
interpretation, only contemporary interpretations...this (w)hole is wide
open...there also exists no limits for exploitation of the labor of the
student...using their eyes to see and justifying our own desires through
proper responses to their desires to know...those concentric cirles Emrson
spoke of, those recurring rings of circumference, have a line of linearity
splitting them into spheres that fold onto each other to prevent recognition
of the fact that we are merely anal reporters of capital fact...these richly
happening events and on and on and damn right limit but no need to notice my
provencialism how rude and on and on...

People fear/desire locality:  that's why so many americans are
federalists...rat bastards...


putrefaction of professorial flesh...the don't like to spread;
tenure and all super-glued to their concept of context;

academics fear inclusion...


I don't have to write to impress.  I don't have to know to see.  I don't
have to listen to hear.

XXOO
gary norris

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