commentary is a minstral show

Commentary works to drain the shared life of some community of meaning
and reality. This community is defined by shared beliefs which are
deeper than assumptions in that they "go without saying" for everyone
in the community. To doubt this belief is precisely to become
alienated from this community, is to stop constructing ones immediate
lived experience exclusivly within the limits of this communitys
perspective. Alienation from a community is finally an ability to see
the limits of that communitys' perspective. These beliefs which go
without saying are grammar rules which structure a shared space of
experience where many important meanings are fixed and stabilized.
Commentary works to unfix and destabilize this common sense or
conventional wisdom which "everybody knows" in the community by
bringing these contexting beliefs into question ,by telling an
alternative story about what's going on. This story claims to be the
"real truth" behind the delusion the poor benighted souls of the
community live, in their ignorance, as truth. Imagine a modern day
minstral show put on by David Duke and Company. Imagine it filmed and
distributed through Dukes' website. This minstral show would bring
into question everything that must go without saying if being black
means what most black people feel the need to think it means in order
to feel comfortable in their skins. To the extent that it succeeded in
doing so, it would drain the black experience of all meaning and
reality. It would define the point of view of the black community as
delusion. Part of the neccessary ideological arsenal of any community,
Jesse Jackson's or David Duke's, consists in commentaries which
convincingly define the perspective of the other as pathological
delusion. Power is finally the power to make ones' commentaries true
for the people they are about. Resistence is finally resistence to the
commentary of the other. In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be
eaten. In the human world, the rule is define or be defined. Power is
the power to define, to make knowledge a dispersion of what goes
without saying from ones' own perspective and, at the same time, a
commentary defining the alterity of the other as delusion and deviance.
Any Comments,
Tony Michael Roberts




==
"I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." Michel Foucault

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