We've had this conversation before.
No.
Remember way back when we started talking about belief in provisional
realities? We started out on a discussion of Aesthetics, which Wade has
reintroduced with his discussion of propaganda.
A provisional reality (which in it's simplest form is a "what if?"
statement) is (IMHO) a statement of faith (small 'f').
This started to branch off into discussion of narrative which petered
out. I'd like to drag the cat out and kick it around again for a while.
Provisional realities occupy the memespace that Tim identified in his
last post-- a safe zone.
Wade:
I was arguing, sometimes too stridently perhaps, for a 'pure' form, an
individual form, something unique, unfettered, but with a smile this
clever tool of the state would say-' Ah, and where is this vacuum from
which this art has risen?' I would, in my best
free-state-land-of-the-brave-john-wayne voice reply- 'from no vacuum,
kremlin-kisser (we were well into goodnatured insults by the seventh
shot), but from the verdant fields of freedom, from the untrammeled mind
of the freeman!'
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Yours does not stike me as an untrammeled mind. I am assuming that you
have posted this to the virus list topped with heaping scoops of irony.
(A McGoo voice is very apropriate!)
Wade:
There is no catharsis in propaganda. There is submission. (When it's
done
its job, that is.)
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Good point, but any good propaganda is constructed well, that is,
following the Aristotelean rules, so there actually is a catharsis, but
in the end, when the will of the gods in made manifest in the world and
the old world is scorched away for the new-- the new world supports the
ideologies of the sponsoring entity.
Wade:
But that is Aesthetics.... Ain't it? That's what it was called when I
studied it....
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Yup. But I still hold that there is a place for it on this list....
Memesthetics? Aesthmemics?
-- Regards +------------------------------------------------------------------+ Ken Pantheists http://www.lurchinvault.com/ken Lurch In Vault Web Services http://www.lurchinvault.com +------------------------------------------------------------------+"If everything you know is wrong, then so are the scary parts, so relax." -Spider Robinson