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Your Mom Knows How to Spell "Odyssey."
Oct. 5th, 2007 08:46 amThursday saw another feisty Methodology seminar session. This one was particularly draining, however, as we were working on Sigfried Kracauer's "On Photography" and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (often translated and referred to as "The Work of Age in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). Both of these texts are difficult, and the cohort spent a good portion of the session furrowing its collective brow and saying, "Okay, wait... wait... so. This is saying this?!"
Good times.
At one point I broke the Kracauer argument down into the idea that the need to escape the narrow, bourgeois tendency of individual systems of discrimination (evinced by memory-images) would push society into a state of meaningless crisis (heralded by the photograph which does not discriminate at all, in Kracauer's view) that must be embraced to create the circumstances for a new individual system of discrimination to be laid. The professor contradicted me, pointing out that it would not be an individual system - because that was bourgeois. "Okay, then," I countered. "A new system of discrimination determined by me and my commie pinko posse."
With a snigger, the prof said that was roughly correct.
(And I now want a T-shirt that says, "Commie Pinko Posse." Because life's too short not to have one, ne?)
I got another laugh out of him when the topic of the nearby sandwich shop came under discussion during the break. The professor likes to order their "Greek Odyssey" sandwich, but he's continually irritated by the fact that they spell Odyssey incorrectly. My good friend, S., suggested that we start a guerrilla campaign of putting up stickers with the correct spelling over the glass cases and counters, until they get the message. I said that if we did that we had to make at least one that said, "Your mom knows how to spell 'odyssey,'" and the laughter began in earnest. I also got one of those classic, "what's is wrong with you" looks from him, though.
So it goes.
Good times.
At one point I broke the Kracauer argument down into the idea that the need to escape the narrow, bourgeois tendency of individual systems of discrimination (evinced by memory-images) would push society into a state of meaningless crisis (heralded by the photograph which does not discriminate at all, in Kracauer's view) that must be embraced to create the circumstances for a new individual system of discrimination to be laid. The professor contradicted me, pointing out that it would not be an individual system - because that was bourgeois. "Okay, then," I countered. "A new system of discrimination determined by me and my commie pinko posse."
With a snigger, the prof said that was roughly correct.
(And I now want a T-shirt that says, "Commie Pinko Posse." Because life's too short not to have one, ne?)
I got another laugh out of him when the topic of the nearby sandwich shop came under discussion during the break. The professor likes to order their "Greek Odyssey" sandwich, but he's continually irritated by the fact that they spell Odyssey incorrectly. My good friend, S., suggested that we start a guerrilla campaign of putting up stickers with the correct spelling over the glass cases and counters, until they get the message. I said that if we did that we had to make at least one that said, "Your mom knows how to spell 'odyssey,'" and the laughter began in earnest. I also got one of those classic, "what's is wrong with you" looks from him, though.
So it goes.
