AD603 Critical Theory

I think I understand the issue of struggling as a marginal group, I just don’t see how that is relevant today: to keep addressing the subject and making it a confrontation of “me against you”, to keep feeding an argument that, for me, it has to be destroyed and danced upon. The first problem with multiculturalism (and cultural studies) is that the voice that announces it comes from the same place: First World Academia. The designation of labels like “poor/rich”, “black/white”, “north/south” is a product of rhetoric of the self that dominates every aspect of our everyday politics and, with deadliest results, international politics as well. The construction of the “south” as en exclusive front has paid well to the ones who make a living out of macroeconomics and corporate management all over the world. This micro-elite of intellectuals, book editors and corporate managers have created a constrained language of exclusion that enhances the divisions of the world to the point that they become simple marketing segmentations, easy targets. Divide and conquer.

Artists, almost more than anybody else, fell into this linguistic trap, mainly because it makes them part of a certain market, appeal to a garantized segment of the public and be protected of any criticism under the umbrella of the “difference”. This exploitation of the difference as an aesthetic subject has helped to build a new state of pop-humanitarism where Hollywood actors and pop singers sell themselves not as performers but as saviors of humanity, which can only be seen as a commercial move, since their extravagant salaries have been going down due to the digitalization/disappearance of their formats and online trafficking (at list that’s what their bosses say, which is ironic since they are part of the same companies who provide everything that is necessary to download, store or copy digital files). The industry has created a momentum where if you copy a U2 record you are basically stealing from an African child, where if you don’t like Bono’s songs, that has nothing to do with your musical taste, it has to do with your humanity.

While the corporation and the marginal gains from this game, one being the big compassionate father and the other the lazy dumb son, it’s yet to be seen if almost 30 years of “marginal art” are doing something in breaking the differences down (if they were any in the first place). In my opinion they only enhanced them, categorized them, and put them on a plate for white corporate America to come and explode them creating comedic monstrosities as Will and Grace.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Juan Obando, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.