Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 18:38:40 -0400
Subject: Re: Avant-Garde ???



>
>
>A revolutionary elitism!
>
>Like other structuralists, you perhaps, never accept that ordinary people
>could make their own history without leadership from the intellectual
>vanguard.
>

As a Leninist  all that I can believe is that ordinary people as you call
them (what a derrogatory term)  are quite capable of forming an
intelligensia and  supplying leading to and for  themselves given that is
what they do daily along with making history.  but I do ask you to  think
for a moment as to what your statement means in the absence of any real
model of a people without a sector of society designated with the tasks of
in some manner or other reflecting on the nature of that societies world.
Do you mean to imply as your statemnt does that ordinary people are not
capable of forming an intellectual vanguard because they are incapable of
rcognizing its usefulness or that because without such a group they are
better off and therefor if they persist they should  be executed as they
were in Cambodia.  as you can se anti- intellectualism is an ugly thing, an
infantile fear of either authority or that which you do not wish to
understand, anyway it is not dissimilar to racism, sexism, classism, etc.
for it implies that there is something inherently wrong in self-reflexive
thought.


The process of discerning  the  nature of a cultural practice (process/
structure) begins with  vague empirically derived ideas as to what its
parameters  are, then by testing these  hypothesis against the histoically
determined record of their objectification.  It is through this process new
specific and general statements can be formulated.   It is through this
analytic process  that  the  artist, historian and and viewer is thought to
become self reflecxively aware of the  rules that guide art  as well as
defining its capacity within a given epoch or in a specific culture.  To
this end  a work of art's  formal (rhetorical) qualities must be viewed
from a  historical - materialist perspective rather than merely a social or
empirical.  The  result is  not a  rational  model unless it can  account
for itself.




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