Re: A Sensibility of Worth

See, I think the toolbox/language model already worked, because you're
asking if we should choose between Sade and Celine or Keats and Shelley,
and not between any of them and a television ad. I don't need to
quantify "how many tools" are available in Godard's "Lear" vs.
Shakespeare's -- I already know that either of them are better than most
any TV ad. I know where to look, that's all. And yes, this does leave
things out. We Have To. We can't read and view and evaluate
everything. Everyone who teaches leaves things out. Everyone who tries
to learn leaves things out. We may as well tell ourselves from the
beginning what we're going to leave out and why.

Yeah, "Duck Soup" made Woody Allen's character feel better at the
moment. Not denying that. I think most of us have had similar
experiences. I remember some years ago having a particularly intense
feeling from watching a series of music videos that I would have thought
were pretty banal at any other time in my life. They were really stupid
videos, but at the moment they filled me. I'm not denying the value of
studying television ads either -- but -for the purpose of learning what
langauge can do-, I'm much better off studying Shakespeare than TV ads,
that's all. I've defined my purpose so I know where to look.

I can also suggest different purposes that may tell me to study TV ads
rather than Shakespeare -- for example, if I were to ask, "What's the
rhetoric of sales in US mass culture," the best place to go is any major
network and its television programs. I could probably even identify the
targeted demographic for any given show by the nature of the ads. There
are more beer and car commercials than there are tampon commercials
during the superbowl. You know I could get even more detailed than this
-- just compare female oriented car commericials to male oriented car
commercials, or car commercials targeted at the 18-24 year old age group
vs. car commercials target toward the 30-45 year old age group. All
this could tell us a lot about the perceived desires of this group.
Heck...sociological study in the US started out serving advertising
purposes -- Adorno had a heck of a time with that when he was over here,
Princeton Radio Project and all.

So I think it makes more sense to talk about worth relative to context,
than to either talk about worth globally, or to deny any estimation of
worth at all. Next time I find I'm taking things too seriously, I'll
probably watch Duck Soup too. May not have the same effect on me, but
I'll know my purpose so I'll know where to look.

Jim

Omlor@aol.com wrote:

> Sure, Jim,
>
> You can offer up yet another limited and specific stipulative context,
> and we can go 'round and 'round again asking whether this or that text
> is worth more than the other within the new one on the list. (Are
> Sade and Celine worth more than Keats or Shelley, to offer random
> examples, in terms of how they display ranges and depths of feeling
> through facility with language?) And we'll get more unanswerable
> questions that to me still seem pointless to ask. And we'll have to
> follow each attempt at an answer with "To whom?" -- because that
> question won't go away.
>
> And the toolbox model once again asks us to quantify an
> unquantifiable. (How many tools are in Godard's Lear versus
> Shakespeare's, for instance?)
>
> Why bother?
>
> And, besides, it all leaves out so much.

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Received on Mon Dec 15 12:28:33 2003