What is an "unreflective bias"? I use to hate the violin sound, but that
was reflective bias, until years later. Now I'm bias to it's reflection.
mando
On Sep 18, 2009, at 8:11 AM, imago Asthetik wrote:
Yes, I am aware *that* you think this Mr Miller. My question,
however, was,
*Why do you think this*? How is it possible for everyone to claim
an outside
(if everyone claims an outside, is there really an outside?)?
Now, I flatly disagree with your claim that one can only examine
something
from the outside. At best, this leads to an unreflective bias. At
worst,
such an examination misses the point entirely. How could I
examine, for
instance, an architectural drawing if I am 'outside' architecture?
the
drawing would simply not make sense to me in the first place. And
to say
something like, I do not like all the complicated lines (which,
unbenkownst
to me, indicate where various electrical and plumbing materials
need to be
placed), and therefore the drawing is not as good as something else
utterly
misses the point. Ultimately, there is no outside to be claimed Mr
Miller.
There are just varying degrees of background knowledge.
Finally, I have no idea what you mean by American academics
claiming an
outside for pop culture. It strikes me that, if anything Warhol
claimed pop
culture as high art, rather than academics. Or, to reach back a
little
further, one might say that the birth of cultural studies in Britain
introduced pop culture as an object of study, and is aligned with a
marxist
understanding of class struggle. It is not very American. You can
see for
yourself here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies>.
On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Chris Miller
<[email protected]>wrote:
I think everyone should "claim an outside", regardless of the
culture,
sub-culture, or institution to which they are committed. That's
the only
point-of-view from which shared assumptions can be examined,
regardless of
how
complex and variegated they may be.
Academics are justly proud for having "claimed an outside" from
American
popular culture -- but they also need to claim an outside from the
canons
of
their own institutions, and pay attention to critical outside
voices, like
Ayn
Rand's, without comfortably dismissing her as a Fascist kook..
Despite all your huffing and puffing, Mr Miller, I am still quite
comfortable in my academic home. What, exactly, is your point
here? Let
us
forget Rand for the moment, and ask a substantive question: Why do
you
insist on claiming an outside? And why is it so difficult for you
to see
that 'the canon' is an internally complex, variegated notion? How
does
claiming multiple canons relieve the problems you see with 'the
canon'?
Why
does it not simply multiply the same problem?
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