Peter_jordanson [doe/deer,any]

  • 8 Posts
  • 221 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: August 17th, 2020
  • Peter_jordanson [doe/deer,any]toaskchapo•What were you taught about communism in school?
    ·
    4 years ago

    I studied an art history career in a state funded University; An interline between traditional academic art and "contemporary arts"It was a free college. I just had to pass a very difficult entry test and everything except art materials was provided for. My week was divided between theoretical fundamentals (philosophy, art history, visual education) and practical elective workshops: (Academic painting, printmaking, sculpture.) I really wasn't aware of politics at that time, i just loved art and wanted to learn as much as i could. My regular school day was 12 hours. I practically lived on campus.

    My university had a broad socialist background so people tended to be very pro-communist and most of the theory was openly leftist. Funny how naive i was as college student. i would read something like Marx, Baudrillard, Guattari, or susan Sontag ando go: "maaan why don't Americans read any of this shit?" My first encounter with an American exchange student from a Liberal Arts University it was painfully obvious they just don't. They have a lot of gaps in their reading materials, and it's incredibly weird that some Liberal Arts Universities in the US have very little material analysis.

    When 2016 came and American politics became a mainstream spectacle with all of the breatubers and podcasts. I got this odd feeling that there is some sort of theoretical jingoism going on? Like American schools openly demean humanistic theory that has any link to communism , anarchism, or in some cases anything that sounds vaguely postmodern. Hell i feel most americans with a college degree in humanities don't really understand what "postmodern" means. This is weird for me. It's like western canon omits some parts of itself to achieve a certain desired ideology and that for many years, these ideologies just coexisted parallel to each other like uncomfortable roommates.

    What i see today is the natural result: Those roomates became aware their worldviews are confronted and have decided to fight it out in what the market of ideas really is: Disqualification, misrepresentation and revisionism. I don't mean this to sound like all sides of the argument are equal; But it needs to be noted that these discordant world views or opposing theories are not really engaging in any meaningful way. They are fighting a dirty zero sum game.

    I have never seen an American college campus, but i have the suspicion, this is the reason why chuds tend to choose them as battlegrounds. It's not that colleges are particularly leftists. But radical right wing mindsets have nothing to replace the theory existent in college campuses across America. So instead of making anything new, they have to further suppress. Remove more books, authors, substantial theory.

    Literally "make everyone as dumb as me"