Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 07:38:54 -0800 (PST) From: Tony Roberts <fdrtikol-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: commentary is a minstral show Commentary works to drain the shared life of some community of meaning and reality. This community is defined by shared beliefs which are deeper than assumptions in that they "go without saying" for everyone in the community. To doubt this belief is precisely to become alienated from this community, is to stop constructing ones immediate lived experience exclusivly within the limits of this communitys perspective. Alienation from a community is finally an ability to see the limits of that communitys' perspective. These beliefs which go without saying are grammar rules which structure a shared space of experience where many important meanings are fixed and stabilized. Commentary works to unfix and destabilize this common sense or conventional wisdom which "everybody knows" in the community by bringing these contexting beliefs into question ,by telling an alternative story about what's going on. This story claims to be the "real truth" behind the delusion the poor benighted souls of the community live, in their ignorance, as truth. Imagine a modern day minstral show put on by David Duke and Company. Imagine it filmed and distributed through Dukes' website. This minstral show would bring into question everything that must go without saying if being black means what most black people feel the need to think it means in order to feel comfortable in their skins. To the extent that it succeeded in doing so, it would drain the black experience of all meaning and reality. It would define the point of view of the black community as delusion. Part of the neccessary ideological arsenal of any community, Jesse Jackson's or David Duke's, consists in commentaries which convincingly define the perspective of the other as pathological delusion. Power is finally the power to make ones' commentaries true for the people they are about. Resistence is finally resistence to the commentary of the other. In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten. In the human world, the rule is define or be defined. Power is the power to define, to make knowledge a dispersion of what goes without saying from ones' own perspective and, at the same time, a commentary defining the alterity of the other as delusion and deviance. Any Comments, Tony Michael Roberts ="I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." Michel Foucault _________________________________________________________ DO YOU YAHOO!? Get your free -AT-yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
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