I need to clarify something. > Edward R. O'Neill wrote: > > > In other words, it's a question of paradigms, not of which > > argument is better. Yes, you can insist that Bergson would > > make a better basis for talking about spectatorship, but > > people aren't going to turn around and do it because there's > > something larger than an argument: that's a paradigm, and a > > paradigm decides what arguments are relevant. Ed Owens wrote: > All that said, is this necessarily the best approach to take to something like > film criticism or film theory? To blindly attach ourselves to the "dominant > paradigm" regardless of what better tools may be available to us? I think > not. I was not suggesting that paradigms should be adhered to without questioning them. The original question was about why phenomenological and other approaches had been less dominant. In the passage above, I was trying to explain why the phenomenological approaches had not gained the upper hand; I was not urging 'blind' adherence. In other words, I was urging a certain view of intellectual history, not making a case for one argument over the other. Indeed, one way of stating my point is that it is *never* a question of simply deciding which theory is better, because this has already to some extent been pre-decided. I hope this helps. Sincerely, Edward R. O'Neill UCLA Sociology/General Education ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.