[Air-L] the case for critical commons

jeremy hunsinger jhuns at vt.edu
Sat Jan 23 10:31:37 PST 2010


The same way people ignore the 40 million people going hungry in the united states each day?  I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure I saw people not get up and throw up during Avatar 3d, when there was a genocide perpetrated on screen.  As I indicated, some people might not be ideal for this meme, audiences differ.   However, if you are going to read the meme, you should try to do it justice within its own genre, that is my basic argument.  If you take it out of that genre and read it as hitler and evil, that's your choice, but I think you have to agree that it is not the only choice in reading it, and given that, and over 100 other examples of the same meme that are available, i think I've clearly argued that you shouldn't read it as such.  That won't prevent you from doing so, but then i'd just say.. you aren't doing justice to the current text, you are trying to make a new text, which is fine, you can do that, but if you critique the old text based on your new text, it would be sort of like critiquing the Papa Smurf based on Joseph Stalin.  Also note, my prior statement about nihilism in regard to the appreciation of this.  

On Jan 23, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Steve Eskow wrote:

> Jeremy, when one sees a picture of Hitler, or a body hanging from a rope, or bodies in a pile in Haiti, what is the "right emotional arc"? And if someone overlays such pictures with humorous commentary, how does one learn to suspend that initial nausea?
> 
> Perhaps your memetic analysis fails to ground itself in a distinction between the workings of logic and the impact and evocations of image.
> 
> One obvious difference, of course, is in the  history of the relationship between image and viewer. One young viewer sees in the picture of Hitler a figure from his history book. An older viewer sees in Hitler the image of his mother dead in Buchenwald, and this second viewer has much difficulty in approaching the "right emotional arc."
> 
> Steve E.
> 
> > That is: for some of us a picture of Hitler or of a lynching or a rape cannot be transformed by memetics into humor.
> >
> > Steve Eskow
> 
> 




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