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[BRIEF NOTE] Aesthetics and Politics
Mar. 28th, 2004 04:33 pmRight now, I'm at MacDonald-Corrie, taking a break from officework. I'm currently in the process of checking papers for English 269, listening to music (Tatu, Lost in Translation, Yoko Ono, Luba, Tatu again), and waiting for the sun to go down so that I can use my laptop to work on an essay for a bisexuality anthology edited by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trapezebear and other sorts of materials.
Earlier today, I was reading a book summarizing cultural developments in 18th century England, the better to get a sense of the cultural surrounding of Laurence Sterne for my upcoming paper in that class. There was a very interesting chapter on aesthetics, as this category was constructed in retrospect by 20th and 21st century observers. A serious concern for proportionality inherited from the Greeks and the Romans seems to have been a predominant theme in Georgian England.
Surprisingly enough, as I read the book's summary on Georgian English aesthetic thought I found that it connected with my non-course-related readings of late in the field of the Kennedy assassination, as inspired bydublingal_ny's former link to John MacAdam's site. It seems that the major conspiracy theories of Kennedy's death--summed up in Oliver Stone's profoundly flawed 1991 film JFK--require the presence of conspiracies at some emotional level, the more all-encompassing the theory the better. If Kennedy was a man of unmatched historical importance, then his end should likewise be caused by some event of equal import. His death at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald seems, in the minds of the majority of Americans who apparently believe that a conspiracy exists, to be disproportionate. That acts can have consequences out of all proportion to their origins--or conversely, that the consequences of some actions can be rather less significant than their origins--is something that just doesn't click.
The idea of proportionality appeals to me in many ways. The certainty that seems to attach itself to this proportionality, though, isn't credible to me. Criticisms of proportionality--chaos theory, for instance--work too well for me to accept it wholeheartedly, though, or maybe even half-heartedly. Instability's our lot in life; the major related issue is how to manage it.
trapezebear and other sorts of materials.Earlier today, I was reading a book summarizing cultural developments in 18th century England, the better to get a sense of the cultural surrounding of Laurence Sterne for my upcoming paper in that class. There was a very interesting chapter on aesthetics, as this category was constructed in retrospect by 20th and 21st century observers. A serious concern for proportionality inherited from the Greeks and the Romans seems to have been a predominant theme in Georgian England.
Surprisingly enough, as I read the book's summary on Georgian English aesthetic thought I found that it connected with my non-course-related readings of late in the field of the Kennedy assassination, as inspired by
dublingal_ny's former link to John MacAdam's site. It seems that the major conspiracy theories of Kennedy's death--summed up in Oliver Stone's profoundly flawed 1991 film JFK--require the presence of conspiracies at some emotional level, the more all-encompassing the theory the better. If Kennedy was a man of unmatched historical importance, then his end should likewise be caused by some event of equal import. His death at the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald seems, in the minds of the majority of Americans who apparently believe that a conspiracy exists, to be disproportionate. That acts can have consequences out of all proportion to their origins--or conversely, that the consequences of some actions can be rather less significant than their origins--is something that just doesn't click.The idea of proportionality appeals to me in many ways. The certainty that seems to attach itself to this proportionality, though, isn't credible to me. Criticisms of proportionality--chaos theory, for instance--work too well for me to accept it wholeheartedly, though, or maybe even half-heartedly. Instability's our lot in life; the major related issue is how to manage it.
