Writing as the Programming of Scenes: The Affordances of God
dennisbouvard.substack.com
I’ve come back on a few occasions to my critique of what I’ve called the “Big Scenic Imaginary”—that is, the representation of the world as a single scene on which unformalized agencies act directly upon each other. The Big Scenic Imaginary is what we are constructing when we speak about relations and interactions between ethnic, national or racial groups, between sexes, between sexual orientations, between classes, occupational groups and so on or, for that matter, “forces” like “technology” and “media.” I developed this concept originally as a way of critiquing Eric Gans’s political thinking, relying as it does upon the relationship between high achievers (bearers of “firstness,” in his understanding) and those who are, let’s say, somewhat less endowed, intellectually speaking—the resentment of the latter towards the former, and various attempts on the part of the former to fend off such resentment is, for Gans, a defining feature of contemporary liberal democracies. What I wanted to point out here is that these “demographics” are not agents to whom emotions like “resentment” can be attributed. Gans is obviously not the only person who sees things in such broadly characterized terms, filtered, as I see it, through media sensationalism (where the media sets itself up as prosecutor and judge on a simulated scene). In fact, I may be in a small minority here. My assumption is that the only real agencies are those constructed upon ritual, juridical or disciplinary scenes (I include the level of the state within the juridical, for reasons I’ve been giving in the last several posts)—any agencies not so constructed reside in a fantasy world, however widely shared.
Writing as the Programming of Scenes: The Affordances of God
Writing as the Programming of Scenes: The…
Writing as the Programming of Scenes: The Affordances of God
I’ve come back on a few occasions to my critique of what I’ve called the “Big Scenic Imaginary”—that is, the representation of the world as a single scene on which unformalized agencies act directly upon each other. The Big Scenic Imaginary is what we are constructing when we speak about relations and interactions between ethnic, national or racial groups, between sexes, between sexual orientations, between classes, occupational groups and so on or, for that matter, “forces” like “technology” and “media.” I developed this concept originally as a way of critiquing Eric Gans’s political thinking, relying as it does upon the relationship between high achievers (bearers of “firstness,” in his understanding) and those who are, let’s say, somewhat less endowed, intellectually speaking—the resentment of the latter towards the former, and various attempts on the part of the former to fend off such resentment is, for Gans, a defining feature of contemporary liberal democracies. What I wanted to point out here is that these “demographics” are not agents to whom emotions like “resentment” can be attributed. Gans is obviously not the only person who sees things in such broadly characterized terms, filtered, as I see it, through media sensationalism (where the media sets itself up as prosecutor and judge on a simulated scene). In fact, I may be in a small minority here. My assumption is that the only real agencies are those constructed upon ritual, juridical or disciplinary scenes (I include the level of the state within the juridical, for reasons I’ve been giving in the last several posts)—any agencies not so constructed reside in a fantasy world, however widely shared.