| "Here I want to show that the carnival is not a trivial cultural anomaly, and not simply a sideshow to 'more serious' cultural practices. First we need to rethink the idea of cultural 'importance.'
"Allon White has identified the misidentification of seriousness with importance as the most fundamental oppression practiced by modern cultural institutions. [...] Somehow, in the eighteenth-century divorce between mundane life and the carnival world, the former, which already had a monopoly on seriousness (something the carnival could care less about), was also given the custody of importance- as if seriousness implied the importance, while there is, in White's estimation, 'no intrinsic link at all' between them. The result is what White calls the 'social reproduction of seriousness.' This practice promotes the 'ruse of reason' that underlies the fiction that we cannot be in Oz and Kansas at the same time. This ruse is useful in creating a 'high culture' of arts and letters under the control of 'important' cultural institutions.( Read more... ) |
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carnivee's journal