An except from an LA Times Magazine article on theory & its dominance in undergraduate film studies:
On the exam, I found the following, from an essay by film theorist Kristin Thompson:
“Neoformalism posits that viewers are active—that they perform operations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film viewing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity . . . According to Bordwell, ‘The organism constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.’ “
Then came the question itself:
“What kind of pressure would Metz’s description of ‘the imaginary signifier’ or Baudry’s account of the subject in the apparatus put on the ontology and epistemology of film implicit in the above two statements?”
Posted by razib at July 13, 2003 12:36 AM| TrackBack | Email this article
Comments
Quite impenetrable.
Btw Razib, the all-seeing Jason sees all. I take it you haven’t seen this feature from The Modern Humorist. Be sure and catch the one between ‘America’s Sweethearts’ and ‘Tomb Raider’. 😉
Posted by: Jason Malloy at July 13, 2003 03:53 AM
Wasn’t there a link to VNN posted?
Posted by: Kaliegh at July 13, 2003 04:07 AM
Kaliegh,
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/3178/neutral.gif
Say ‘Cheese’.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at July 13, 2003 05:08 AM
Razib linked to it as a joke (i.e. “damn these fools are crazy”), but we decided to take it down because the place is truly execrable.
Posted by: godlesscapitalist at July 13, 2003 05:56 AM
I think that the reason for the dominance of absurdity in the humanities and social “sciences” is really quite simple. People who do real science produce actual results: chemists and physicists produce many of the accoutrements that make our daily lives so easy, and within a generation, geneticists are going to be producing genuine uebermenschen. Moreover, real scienctists are unquestionably smart, as they have to have the raw cognitive ability to master the copious amounts of mathematics that the natural sciences involve.
Now then, imagine that you are studying, f’rex, Literature. Even if you make straight A’s (with the exception of that B you got in Intro to Mathematics), you are still going to feel inadequate next to such people. Even when you head on to grad school, that feeling of “science envy” will persist, and you somehow have to prove that you, too, are smart. The best way to do this, then, is to write impenetrable nonsensical theory that can never be proven. It is for such reasons, then, that I have strong hopes that neurology will, in another generation or so, knock the foundations out from under such nonsense.
Then again, these people still quote Lacan with a straight face and write about chaos theory as if they understood it, so maybe not.
Posted by: Andrew Reeves at July 13, 2003 08:05 AM