> FROM:  KGABBARD
> TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( [log in to unmask] )
>
> Subject: Re: Paris 1968
>
> Dear Screen-L Subscribers,
>
> OK, I'll be the goat.  Am I the only person who is following this thread with
 a
> sense of despair?  Or am I the only person willing to write in and _admit_ to
 a
> feeling of despair?  Here's the way I see it.  First, a subscriber uses the
> phrase "Paris in 1968" to discredit the hermeneutics of suspicion that
> generates most of film scholarhsip today.  Then, instead of watching film
> scholars weigh in with defenses of the intellectual revolutions born in the
> `60s, I have been reading naive questions about what happened in Paris in the
> 1960s.  I'm hoping that most of these questions were ironic.  If not, then
> there really is cause for despair.  What's happened to Screen-L?
 
 
I think your mistake is to assume that this list is made up only of
film scholars.  And while I would expect that most people trained in
graduate programs in english and film studies to have a sophisticated
understanding of (at least some) of the theoretical, critical, and
academic movements born of the '60s; people outside of academia
generally will not.
 
So while the questions about the history of theory may seem "naive"
to you; it's evidence of one of the most significant failings in the
humanities -- that we've done a very poor job of translating our
technologies (technologies of thought, or perception, or language)
oustide of our relatively narrowly defined disciplines. It's no
wonder that no one wants to fund us :)
 
For example, take Mike Frank's summarization:
 
>the french student revolution [of May, 1968]
>has come to be seen, if not as the actual source of many new
>directions in contemporary thought, at least as a convenient marker
>of the intellectual revolution in which the althusserian, derridian,
>lacanian, foucaludian, barthesian, de manian post struturalist,
>deconstrnctionist, semiotic armies stormed the barricades of
>conventional thought
 
Kinda alienating to a non-academically trained individual with an
interest in film, isn't it?  If you have no interest in speaking to
someone outside of critical theory, then it doesn't really matter
much.  If you do have in interest in having more than a few dozen
people read what you write, then it's a crucial issue.
 
 I wonder, often, what a discourse that is
truly inter-professional (between non-academics and academics),
inter-disciplinary, multi-cultural, etc., would look like.  There are
scholars striving to cross these boundaries in their work, and
artists doing the same from the other direction.  Which bring to mind
concerns about either the denigration of theory (selling out to pop
culture, corporate culture) or the colonizing movements of theory
(too many artists subjugating themselves to the authority of the
theoretical voice).
 
                        --Katie Hawks
 
 
 
 
 
The Rapture Page (under construction)
http://www.enteract.com/~khawks
 
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