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November 1993

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Subject:
From:
douglas edward johnson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 20 Nov 1993 14:45:17 -0600
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If I keep sending personal apologies to people I will wear down my fingers
to bloody nubs and be unable to type again (great idea, some of you say),
so I'd like to make a public apology/clarification.
 
First, I am sincerely sorry if anyone has been insulted by my
intervention.  I meant nothing personal in my remarks.  That, alas, is the
problem.  One of the hazards of this medium is that the stupidest among us
are liable to forget that we are communicating with actual human beings
and not a bunch of algorithms.  I forgot.  I apologize.
 
Second, some have suggested that I have been trying to limit discourse.
On the contrary, I would like to see it expanded.  So often, we degenerate
into throwing titles and names at each other, as though that makes an
argument or proves a point.We might all benefit if
those textual references came surrounded by thoughts, some sort of fairly
cogent ideas about a particular text's/figure's importance to the
topic at hand.  That is what I meant by the "demonstrating a lack of
thought" comment.  I, and I think others, would like to see everybody's ideas
more than our bibli- and film- ographies.  To pick an example, I think it
helpsvery little simply to offer "Liqid Sky" to someone interested in women
protagonists in science fiction film (I was the one to offer that nugget,
by the way).  I should have, I think, offered some thoughts about the
film's very willful and strange reconfigurations of gender.  That would
have served at least two functions: 1. Providing more information to the
initial inquirer and 2. Potentially beginning a whole new topic of
discussion for the group, one not necessarily willed by anyone (I do not
want to get into a discussion of Liquid Sky) but arising through something
of an organic process.
 
As has been noted, Mr. Ulin initially requested that responses be sent to
him personally, rather than to the entire group.  Given the breadth of
his request, that seems like a good idea.  Perhaps more general interest
is achieved through greater specificity like, say, "Hitchcock's Women
Artists."  That may sound contradictory, but I think it's probably true.
Greater focus provides more information to the group about the inquirer's
project and makes it easier for those definitely not interested in a
topic to skip responses to it.  (By the way, Mr Ulin, I already asked your
friend to pass on my apologies because I don't have your address.  But if
you see this befoore you see her, please be assured that my remarks were
in no way directed towards you or your scholarship.)
 
Finally, the cultural studies crack.  That was sort of a joke.  I mean, I
do cultural studies myself.  But I fear sometimes that its ascent has
robbed us of a common theoretical language or concern.  We have become, as
film scholars, so concerned with the apparently concrete that the concrete
threatens to turn into an abstraction (I'm stealing this from Hegel).
Cultural studies comes with very important concerns, and I'm not
suggesting chucking it.  Just, like I said, an expansion of discourse, in
which we can reassert the legitimacy of theory and provide ourselves with
a subject rather than an array of objects.  Perhaps a collective mourning
for Metz would allow us to delve into our theoretical past, strip it of
its elements of faddism, and renew its power and relevance.
 
Oh, I almost forgot, the Al Franken Decade.  Al Franken noticed that
toward the end of the eighties, people began predicting what the nineties
would be like.  So you'd get, say, an environmentalist claiming that while
the Me Decade is over, the Environmental Decade has begun.  That is, the
eighties were the Me Decade but the nineties are going to be about what
I'm interested in.  Thus the birth of the Al Franken Decade.
 
Thanks to all who sent public and personal responses to last night's rant.
 I hope those who were/are angry accept my attempt to make up.  I'm pretty
much a jerk, but not as big a jerk as you might think.  Especially not
after a night's sleep and an awakening into a crisp and sunny Iowa day.

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