From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: john wesley hardin
Keywords: was a friend to the poor
Date: 14 Apr 92 13:29:01 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ

In article <1992Apr13.131025.7128@hemlock.cray.com>, n2412@cray.com (Joe Green) writes:
 > 
 > Some time left for lunch and so I will again try to make clear to
 > John Wesley just what I am talking about.  
 > 
 > The "transformation" that I can find again and again in literature
 > and the transformation I can see in action is this:
 > 
 > Wait!
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > First I will again refer the fellow to Rene Girard so that he will stop
 > asking about Derrida.
 > 
 > Now I refer him to Klaus Thewelit and the two volumes of his book
 > "Male Fantasies"
 > 
 > Now I ask him whether he has heard of the term "the Other" and
 > is aware of the uses made of this term.
 > 
 > Now since he is still lost I ask him whether he has read any
 > Feminist literary criticism.
 > 
 > Now I stoop so low as to ask him whether he has read Terry Eagleton
 > on Aesthetics and Ideology.
 > 
 > Now I refer him to Adorno, Horkheimer, shit -- to the entire Frankfurt
 > school and to Walter Benjamin for information about the commodity
 > and the objectification of persons.
 > 
 > Next I'll ask him wheter he has read Barthes on Sade -- especially
 > the Sadean principle of taking away the victim's language and
 > then blaming the victim for being without a language.
 > 
 > Next I'll ask him just what the hell he means be suggesting
 > that the idea that certain groups that are and have been
 > enslaved are colonized by the language of their masters or are
 > denied speech is wrong.  And what is meant by suggesting that the assertion
 > that this is true is some kind of ploy.
 > 
 > Then I will direct him to read what I have already written on the
 > subject and then to try to address what I say.  Perhaps he will
 > be courteous enough to do more than indulge whatever is being indulged.
 > 
 > Are you, John Wesley, denying that the speechlessness I have
 > described is real?  Does the fact that for centuries women
 > have had next to nothing to say about their situation as chattel
 > suggest that speechlessness is a fantasy?  Or is there some
 > esoteric way in which they have been heard and heeded?
 > 
 >    
 > -- 



Do you leave it open, perhaps as obvious, that women are also treated
otherwise, say by Hollywood cinema?  Or do you know in advance
that the glamorizing and repression of women is what Hollywood does?
So of course it has produced few, or no, films about that repression.

You might see and analyze exactly what the film you analyze itself
sees and analyzes.

What would happen then?

The distance between high and low culture in America is very different
from Europe, a fact ungraspable by, say, Adorno.

Here's the end of a Stanley Cavell piece on Allan Bloom:

   ``A parting word about Bloom's vision of the young with their Walkmans
   on, which he reads as deafening them to `what the great tradition has
   to say'.  It may be so.  But maybe it is to be read as their blocking
   out our opinions and explanations of what they listen to.  I do not,
   on the whole, share their pleasures here.  I take it that I am, on
   the whole, not meant to, meant not to.  The young, on this reading,
   feel that there are times and places in which, in their solitude,
   they are not answerable to others.  Just like us.''
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