Beyond the Framework

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william kent

Well-known member
People tend to have their favoured lenses and frameworks, but what lies outside them? What happens to academia, media criticism, and so on, if we hypothetically rule out mentioning capitalism, or race, or gender, or any of the other go-tos? What's discussed instead?

Wondered this after reading a bunch of people groaning about students in their classes and on their courses seemingly having little to say about things beyond focusing on representation in casting or something being a "critique" based on one of the above staples.

What, ideally, would they mention in lieu of them? Technique? Personal feelings and experience? How much room's there to manoeuvre when you try to stray from this stuff?
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I think a big realm of discourse that seems to be lacking in these theoretical circles is pragmatic or technical "solutions-oriented" discourse, i.e. discourse that concerns itself more with laying out useful conceptualizations of problems and actionable roadmaps for solutions. Kinda gets into business territory, in terms of bias for action and whatnot.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Well, the effects something might have and how it achieves them perhaps. The realms of affect it explores. The technical resources it uses. The moods it dwells in. The values it embodies what it prizes. The assumptions that undergird it etc. What it achieves or reaches towards? The secret at the heart of it etc
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Clinamenic said:
I think a big realm of discourse that seems to be lacking in these theoretical circles is pragmatic or technical "solutions-oriented" discourse, i.e. discourse that concerns itself more with laying out useful conceptualizations of problems and actionable roadmaps for solutions. Kinda gets into business territory, in terms of bias for action and whatnot.
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This resonates with the crossover between journalism and activism that you see so much of these days - mainly on the left (in the broadest sense of 'left'), although you could include right-wing voices too if you consider the culture war to be 'activism' of a sort.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
version said:
People tend to have their favoured lenses and frameworks, but what lies outside them? What happens to academia, media criticism, and so on, if we hypothetically rule out mentioning capitalism, or race, or gender, or any of the other go-tos? What's discussed instead?

Wondered this after reading a bunch of people groaning about students in their classes and on their courses seemingly having little to say about things beyond focusing on representation in casting or something being a "critique" based on one of the above staples.

What, ideally, would they mention in lieu of them? Technique? Personal feelings and experience? How much room's there to manoeuvre when you try to stray from this stuff?
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These things are only discussed because we've run out of things to say about the more important things. The current topics are the last dregs of takes.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
What meanings might be intended what unintended meanings have insinuated themselves into the work
 
HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

HMGovt’s Glorious Return!

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Peter Thiel In The Straussian Moment: "The singular example of bin Laden and his followers has rendered incomplete the economically motivated political thought that has dominated the modern West...From the Enlightenment on, modern political philosophy has been characterized by the abandonment of a set of questions that an earlier age had deemed central: What is a well-lived life? What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of the city and humanity? How does culture and religion fit into all of this?

For the modern world, the death of God was followed by the disappearance of the question of human nature.
 
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william kent

Well-known member
You could perhaps get around it whilst still talking about this stuff by just dropping the obvious jargon. Talk about it in your own words and a creative way rather than deploying Marxist terminology or talking about 'bodies' like Foucault.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
luka said:
Well, the effects something might have and how it achieves them perhaps. The realms of affect it explores. The technical resources it uses. The moods it dwells in. The values it embodies what it prizes. The assumptions that undergird it etc. What it achieves or reaches towards? The secret at the heart of it etc
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but this privileging of the supremacy of the text implicitly silences etc

i feel like this thread is just asking for trouble really
 
W

william kent

Well-known member
The issue, really, is lazy and unimaginative people picking up the tools. A strong, interesting argument will be great whatever it's about. The problem arises when it becomes a case of going through the motions, putting every scrap of culture through the same dreary process.

HMGovt’s Glorious Return! said:
But then people couldn't play and win the credential game as their only victory in life.
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Yeah, that's true. It's not entirely on the people coming up. The frameworks are imposed upon them and they're incentivised to uphold them.

version said:
The issue, really, is lazy and unimaginative people...
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With this in mind and not wanting the thread to become the same old unimaginative moaning about "identity politics", how would you approach discussing, say, a film, without mentioning any of the things we're talking about? Ideally a contemporary film, although that's particularly difficult as a lot of them are geared with precisely the sort of analysis we're discussing in mind, and made by people steeped in it.
 
W

william kent

Well-known member
Cheers to whoever provided the awful tags. Really elevates the thread.

tenor.gif
 
W

william kent

Well-known member
The sense one's doing something of political importance in critiquing pop culture's clearly another factor. Some feel more comfortable about spending their time writing about the arts if they can present it as a form of activism. They're not just watching anime or Marvel films. They're doing serious work, fighting the good fight.

The CCRU are a bit naff and played out nowadays, but they seemingly came out of a similar impatience with whatever was going on in academia in the '90s. Predictably, their thing's now a template itself and it's easy to go through the motions doing the Lovecraft/Cyberpunk thing.
 
R

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
version said:
People tend to have their favoured lenses and frameworks, but what lies outside them? What happens to academia, media criticism, and so on, if we hypothetically rule out mentioning capitalism, or race, or gender, or any of the other go-tos? What's discussed instead?

Wondered this after reading a bunch of people groaning about students in their classes and on their courses seemingly having little to say about things beyond focusing on representation in casting or something being a "critique" based on one of the above staples.

What, ideally, would they mention in lieu of them? Technique? Personal feelings and experience? How much room's there to manoeuvre when you try to stray from this stuff?
Click to expand...
surely these are recent hot button/trendy topics in film classes? dont think this was really that big of a thing when i had a film module as part of my degree in the late 90s. there was a module you could do IIRC, but it wouldnt have cropped up as often as i imagine it would do today. most older film nerds interested in film academia are more into the history, technique, get fixated on firsts, movements, the big auteurs and their signatures (which sometimes seems to me like a game of simply identifying what a director does repeatedly, as if that in itself is interesting or enough when surely that is unavoidable, but i get that identifying a directors preoccupations and tics can be interesting) that kind of thing.
 
W

william kent

Well-known member
rubberdingyrapids said:
surely these are recent hot button/trendy topics in film classes? dont think this was really that big of a thing when i had a film module as part of my degree in the late 90s. there was a module you could do IIRC, but it wouldnt have cropped up as often as i imagine it would do today. most older film nerds interested in film academia are more into the history, technique, get fixated on firsts, movements, the big auteurs and their signatures (which sometimes seems to me like a game of simply identifying what a director does repeatedly, as if that in itself is interesting or enough when surely that is unavoidable, but i get that identifying a directors preoccupations and tics can be interesting) that kind of thing.
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Yeah, it's a relatively recent development. The thread was prompted by reading some people grumbling about their peers being unable to think outside of the same handful of templates when asked to say something about a film. I suppose those people would have been doing the same re: history, technique, and so on, if they'd been around when that was the fashion though, so it's less about the particular lens and more about the reliance on lenses in general.

@Ian Scuffling might be able to shed some more light on it as he's currently involved in that world.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I find lensing kind of tedious and arbitrary: better to try to see things as a whole. McGilchrist would probably think it pathological left-brain dominance. All this slicing and dicing, dissection, microscope work, and concordance making.
 
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