[Xmca-l] Re: Unreading Althusser

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Hello esteemed xmcars, 

I have done a quick reading of Morten Nissen's chapter and I would like to proffer that what he describes with the video production as a form of therapy for the drug addict (as sponsored by state programs), does resemble to me the very kind of interactions that happened to create the Kitsch in Art and how it came to be that Kitsch is the favorite art of dictators (see my previous post in this thread, in particularly I suggest in this context the essay by Greenberg as well as the WSJ article).

It is as if what is considered hopeful (helpful), what is considered therapeutic(empowering), which is done to transcend the past and the future by being in the present, all that is erased by collapsing what is meaningful into a formula of the unique or of sentiment (in this case, hope), a kind of Möbius strip of experience as possibility, which ends up becoming meaningless. Is the glass half full or half empty?

I'm being a more than a little intuitive here, knowing that I may not be walking on terra firma, which may not be very smart as I risk the concrete blocks of "dogma" crashing around my head: It is easy to label the original as dogma if one has adopted the stance of kitsch, I am realizing. 

Despite that risk, I sense similar patterns to Nissen's paper and notions of kitsch (and how kitsch is created), and while I'm unsure at this point of time if this observation has merit, I offer it for discussion with the best of intentions. 

Kind regards,

Annalisa