turistas go home!

[intertribal]

The title is my reaction to Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  The above is also my reaction to every Indiana Jones movie, so I guess if you like Indiana Jones, you'll like it.

Let me just say though, that as someone who watched 9 FUCKING seasons of the X-Files, this sanitized, Americanized, and abridged version in 2 1/2 hours and M&Ms packaging just feels like a smack in the fucking face.

+ : every time Indiana Jones fails at something. 
- : every time Indiana Jones succeeds at something.
best character: crazy professor man + mutt
worst character: marion ravenwood + indiana jones
best impossibility: Indiana Jones gets pulled out of a sand trap by holding onto a snake that is somehow able to hold his entire weight!
worst impossibility: Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a refrigerator and doesn't die of cancer in three weeks!

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I probably overreacted to this at first. I apologize for that. But if so, I feel like this just shows that we both feel condescended to when neither of us is being condescending (this has happened with me and Jason, for somewhat unrelated reasons). Because sometimes people have power over one another through friendship rather than one person having power over another through domination, and I care what you think of me.

This is bordering on the obvious, but I can only say that I'm not saying you're wrong because you're different, I do think it's possible to discuss race and wealth, though maybe not with you individually if that's how you want to see it. I am not for anyone not complaining. I want there to be critique. I just want that critique to be conscious of what it's critiquing, and what it aligns itself with. In other words, I'm not for people subordinating themselves to hegemony by accepting their role in it rather than critiquing the whole hegemony, including their own role if need be. There are no victims and villains here, though there are certainly oppression and oppressed people. Most of all, I don't want people to accept anything as part of a marginal identity that silences them, denies them agency, or denies them social power. I don't think that's healthy for anyone, but more likely to happen for groups that aren't dominant, and I don't mean to set out "rules for the marginal ones" by it (as if I'm at all in a position to do such a thing anyway--apparently I am in your mind, but I don't think what I say counts for much to anyone else). It's open to critique.

I've apologized for saying a number of things a number of times, and that's all I can do. For like the twentieth time, I don't think you're stupid or irrational. I won't apologize for considering you as an equal who I could discuss such things with, but if you don't want me to do mention it ever again, I suppose I can censor myself for you. But I will write what I will on my own journal. I can lock it for you, I suppose. Would you rather I do that?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I'm not for defining anyone else. I can say what I think is dangerous, but it would be damn hypocritical of me to try to tell anyone else who they are or ought to be. I am not trying to tell you who you ought to be either, and if you got that impression from this, I'm sorry. In terms of what's 'wrong', I try to be about actions and situations, not individuals, because everyone is wrong sometimes, everyone goes against their best interests sometimes, but that doesn't mean it's part of anyone's identity to be wrong, or inferior, or worthless.

It's not as foreign to me as you seem to think, even if my experience has a completely trivial power basis not grounded in a history of discrimination or social identities (although really, I subordinate myself to a lot of people, to my detriment). Not so long ago, I wrote:

"Also, why would you respond by telling me what's 'wrong' with me (i.e. 'you're too this, you're too that')? It gives me the impression that you think I am stupid and inferior to you, you think you understand me completely, and you don't care at all how I feel about anything. This isn't to say that there isn't anything wrong with me or that you don't understand, it just seems condescending.

"I mean, why do you have to belittle me to say this sort of thing? Why does it have to be a matter of how I'm wrong and what I ought to do? Why can't we just accept that I'm dissatisfied with it, you're dissatisfied with it, but I've learned one way or another to act this way and I need help learning not to rather than someone telling me exactly how dissatisfying it is?

I mean, it's no wonder, really, that I don't want to talk to you about my ideas, if you think i'm so completely shitty as a person."

Just sayin', it doesn't sound so different. And I feel much the same when you accuse me of being a hegemon, like my opinion doesn't count because somehow all I am is one of the hegemons--no individual choice, unalterably dominating and controlling, ultimately not so much worthless as wrong and evil and cruel. That's precisely what I mean about social identities trapping people. As I think you were getting at.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Okay, maybe "impossible" is the wrong word - but it has been extremely uncomfortable for me, and I thought for you, to discuss race and wealth with you. And I don't like that, I really don't, and I wish it weren't true, but I think it's not fair for your position to be the unbiased one and my position to represent minorities or whatever, because that's just another way to unmark and mark, respectively.

I don't disagree with anything in your paragraph "This is bordering on the obvious", which is sad if this is what we've been arguing about this entire time. I think it's the specifics that we disagree on, like the forms of critique.

For me, this whole exchange turned long ago into a matter of the way both of us were saying things, and the insults/condescension, than the actual thing we were discussing, but then it was tying into the thing we were discussing. I know I've said things I shouldn't have, but I will also not apologize for pointing out something that I feel is a bias we both have. I won't. I'm not saying that that bias is the end-all and be-all, and I apologize for ever implying that that's all there is to it. I don't believe in determinism either. But see, where you emphasize people not subordinating themselves to hegemony by accepting thier role in it rather than critiquing the whole hegemony, I don't think that's possible until people acknowledge the hegemony. And that may be a fundamental disagreement between us. I don't think we have different end goals. It's pretty clear that we don't. But I think we really disagree about the way to get to the end goal.

I don't want you to censor yourself, and I don't want you to lock your journal for me.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I agree. It has been uncomfortable. I didn't think my position was the unbiased one...still don't. I also don't think you represent minorities, even if you feel put in that position.

Yeah, I do think that we agree for the most part, and I probably did the whole argument a disservice by overstating my position in the beginning.

I know it became that for you, and I'm sorry it has, because it distorts a lot of things, it seems to me (our positions, our respect for one another, etc.). I don't expect you to apologize for pointing out what you feel is bias. I'm really sorry if you think I see you as less able to think about this because of being 'subaltern' or whatever, and that's what hurt me about your pointing this out. I don't think of you that way, but I'm not sure how I can make that clear to you, except by saying that I wouldn't bother talking to you about it if I didn't value your thoughts on it, and apologizing for anything I did that gave offense, though I really never had any intention of doing so.

"But see, where you emphasize people not subordinating themselves to hegemony by accepting their role in it rather than critiquing the whole hegemony, I don't think that's possible until people acknowledge the hegemony. And that may be a fundamental disagreement between us."

Depending on what you mean here, I'm not sure I actually disagree. I'm also willing to consider other ways of 'getting to the end goal', because I don't think it's an easy thing to get to.

Good. I won't, then.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

"I'm really sorry if you think I see you as less able to think about this because of being 'subaltern' or whatever, and that's what hurt me about your pointing this out."

No, no, no. I honestly never thought that you thought that about me, and I shouldn't have ever made it look like I did. That's what I was trying to correct.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

i'm glad

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

One thing that's funny about this argument is that I actually don't think rationality and emotion are opposed. I think what you can rationalize depends on your assumptions, and in a lot of ways, what people are criticizing when then criticize "emotion" is actually those sort of assumptions....and emotion can guide rationality, make people rationalize things they wouldn't otherwise. All of our experience is partly emotional, even our rational experience. But assumptions about power and status can create emotions and attitudes that are only the outward signs of those assumptions.

Objectivity is more rightly (than rationality) opposed to a subjective point of view (rather than "emotion") that is grounded in certain assumptions about the world, and no one can be entirely objective. I suppose postmodernist thinkers would say that that's all there really is, you can't get at objective truth, so you have to just accept all the subjective ones on an equal basis. I think it is possible to be right or wrong in those assumptions, but most people don't reflect on their situation to see where they come from...there's a tendency to "reduce the search for causes to a search for responsibilities" (that much Bourdieu takes from Nietzsche, and I think it's a quote, but I've started packing my books). Which is why it also annoys me when white people accept that responsibility--which carries both agency and power, as well as blame and 'white guilt'--instead of actually 'objectively' looking at the conditions of their existence (and not just theirs, either).

Then you get people who think they're postmodern thinkers who are really doing just that, especially in academic fields, and god, I just had to write a discourse paper about these two camps of discourse analysis who are doing much the same thing, and they piss me off so much, and actually, writing this is making it more clear to me why than writing the paper did. It blinds them to the fact that those conditions carry an influence even when they think their assumptions are all against "oppression", and that's all they have to admit, or that if they say that they're "white middle-class North American men" that a) it means they can't have an objective opinion, and b) it doesn't mean that their saying that, their own postmodernism, their own guilt, is a part of the assumptions of that class/status/group--in other words, that they have the power to say that and have it not matter, that their rendering their own position entirely pointless by saying that they don't have any right to objective truth, is only possible for them, because it doesn't damage their economic or academic position one bit, and they themselves wouldn't expect any other group to do so.

Sigh.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Really, if that's all they're going to do, say "This is our opinion of how this is oppressive but our opinion doesn't count because we're part of an oppressive class," they might as well spend their time studying something else. Maybe they'd have something more insightful to offer to that, because they really didn't add much to either understanding oppression or understanding discourse.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

not to mention that the whole "subjective truth is the only truth there is" smacks of "if we can't be right, then no one can"...but then we can all agree in our false moral position against oppression, and then it's like the actual conditions that support it don't exist! Okay, maybe that last is a little extreme, but seriously, that sounds like where their argument is going, to me.

Everyone's experience is, yes, subjective, but truth...not so much. And that's the problem of reaching objective truth, not its nonexistence. In my opinion.