CiG
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I hope it's understood that the clip is from before the elections (not that I disagree with what you're both saying).
If Mort Divine ruled the world
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Einherjar86
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rms
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It's obvious it was before, because if trump loses its because of fraud. If he wins it's because he's the greatest president. Tired of these vote conspiracies
Einherjar86
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That's accurate. In the minds of his most committed supporters, it's impossible that he could actually lose the election.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
So many right-wing pundits love to pull out the "when we lose we don't throw a tantrum" card and point out the videos of people screaming when Hillary lost, then Trump loses and they storm the fucking Capitol.
rms
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And they're already trying to see their antifa agitators posing as trumpers. And that idiot Gaetz senator/rep already got busted for pulling a story out of his ass about antifa face recognition demonstrating this.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Yeah I'm seeing these conspiracies rolling in myself.
On the topic of AntiFa though, where were they when a bunch of fashies stormed the Capitol to overturn a democratic election? Fucking LARPers on all sides.
On the topic of AntiFa though, where were they when a bunch of fashies stormed the Capitol to overturn a democratic election? Fucking LARPers on all sides.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
If Biden makes it to the end of his first term, Dave Rubin says he will delete all his social media and retire.
Sirjack
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SentinelSlain
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rms
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SentinelSlain
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To be fair, sometimes it's the other way around, some right wingers use some other example of slavery from history, barbary pirates, early white slaves in America, or whatever, to argue against leftists somehow. I don't particularly think it makes any sense when they do it, but they do.
I suppose it's a bit like this, if you are white, you should still be 'woke' to the fact that you can be in effective slavery quite easily and that is how most of your fellow white people probably lived at some point, as peasants in some lord's estate or worse.
Does that mean you should be against coloured people? Not really.
I suppose it's a bit like this, if you are white, you should still be 'woke' to the fact that you can be in effective slavery quite easily and that is how most of your fellow white people probably lived at some point, as peasants in some lord's estate or worse.
Does that mean you should be against coloured people? Not really.
Oblivious Maximus
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zabu of nΩd
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I'm not sure exactly what Padilla's goal is without looking into this more closely, but if he's just trying to carve out a "critical theory" branch within classics academia then whatever, fuck it. There's merit to studying history from either the antiquarian perspective or the critical perspective, and I can see how classics departments might be one of those enclaves where antiquarianism has held out longer than elsewhere.
My bigger concern is that academia as a whole may be going all-in on critical theory, and in the resulting moralistic fervor abandoning an appreciation for the aesthetic value of things like classic literature (but I'm not in that world, so I wouldn't know).
Einherjar86
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Definitely not "as a whole," since critical theory is virtually absent in the corridors of STEM. The humanities often push variations of critical theory, but even then it's not a universal or homogeneous trend. Departments such as classics, philosophy, and history still hold fast to more traditional approaches to their disciplines that eschew critical theory.
And for what it's worth, "critical theory" has grown into an unclear and inconsistent chimera in popular media discourse, primarily as a tool to level accusations at "left-wing academia" (i.e. the humanities writ large). It's an unfair characterization since plenty of humanities scholars don't import critical theory into their classrooms; and for those that do, good! It should be taught to students so they have the capacity to reflect on their "appreciation" for canonical texts/works.
If we admit that all artists are conditioned in some way by their cultural milieu, then there's no way to fully separate aesthetics from politics. Maybe it's a bummer, but it's an indissoluble tension. That doesn't mean certain works aren't worth studying for what they can tell us about our culture, its history, and for the ways that art pushes back against the cultural milieu (even if conditioned by it, art often achieves subversive ends, even without doing so).
I read the NYT piece and find the professor's ideas compelling, albeit radical. But classics needs these kinds of thinkers in its midst. It needs people upsetting the order of things. It might be true that ancient Roman and Greek culture are foundations for Western thought and society, but the reasons for that aren't apolitical. There are distinct historical circumstances that led to Rome and Greece being seen as the West's cultural roots. It wasn't an organic evolution (by which I mean, it wasn't an undisturbed, seamless flow of influence).
Finally, non-Western cultures have also informed crucial institutions and cornerstones of our modern way of thinking. Hell, if it weren't for Ibn Rushd, Western Europe might never have imagined itself as a descendent of ancient Greece. I don't think it's ridiculous to redefine "classics" as a discipline that includes non-Western texts and thinkers--and maybe even centers them.
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SentinelSlain
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But outside of the ivory tower, what effects do these changes in approach actually have on the wider world? Does it change politics in West? How so?
zabu of nΩd
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Good clarifications. I agree that critical theory should be taught in the humanities, though I wonder about the extent to which it's presented as "the truth" rather than as one perspective among several. How often do professors address the objections to critical theory, and which do they address? Without that kind of even-handedness, I see it serving as an intellectual justification for things like "cancel culture" and the various censorship efforts pointed out in "The Coddling of the American Mind".
The other big issue I have with viewing aesthetics and politics as inseparable is that it stifles artists' creativity. I totally get them being inseparable in an academic context (and maybe that's the only context you were applying the statement to), but my sense is that Marxist aesthetics and related views are pretty popular outside of academia as well, and serve as a justification for a broad "policing" of creativity throughout society. I'm not sure I could find a good example of what I mean, but I'd suggest that some of the themes that come up in metal (i.e. misanthropy and glorification of violence) are indications that a lot of great art arises from a headspace where the artist is detached from concerns about the political implications of what he's creating.
I think it does. See above re: the possible link between critical theory and cancel culture / censorship.
Einherjar86
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I don't see anything wrong with trigger warnings personally, as no material is being censored.
I have a lot of thoughts on this, but don't want to ramble endlessly.
To be brief, I would say that aesthetic efforts absent any political or social considerations whatsoever don't qualify as art. Art connotes something more than mastery of craft/technique. Someone can paint an immaculate landscape piece that looks like a photograph, but that technical proficiency alone doesn't make it art.
That being said, I don't think there's any such thing as a piece of aesthetic craft that you can't historicize (i.e. read culturally/politically). That doesn't mean that artists are inhibited by culture or politics. In fact, I'd say that those works we look back on as foundational pieces of art usually push against and exceed what are often seen as the limits of their craft. There was a time when painting a near-photographic rendering of the landscape was really something special. Today, not so much. It might look pretty, but it's not doing anything interesting.
CiG
Approximately Infinite Universe
Critical theory is self-fulfilling/circular, because if your method seeks to politicize everything ("there's no way to fully separate aesthetics from politics") than nothing can be apolitical in the first place.
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