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one problem that i was tinkering with as i wrote the earlier rambling post as whether you know about the world from the viewpoint of a spectator.
i mean, you know certain things about it from a spectator's viewpoint: how events seem to interact, which leads you to a particular, mechanical view of causality--but it is not a terribly useful or interesting understanding of causality you get that way.
why do people believe as they do? what processes explain belief and how does belief get tangled up with other types of information? if you watch a film, you cant really even pose those questions coherently, simply because the way in which people are represented--as a particular, curious type of thing---erases the space for thinking in more complex terms about the psyche.
but if you start thinking in these more complex terms, you soon find that you can't represent "reality" in a naive way and be internally consistent--so ou have a choice: you can explore other ways of representing the world and in so doing find yourself not really talking to anyone any more or you can make soem kind of compromise and work with the media/forms of expression that exist.
so you also find that film stages the world much as language does, and you have to be able to communicate--and so these patterns of representation, which you can know are particular and in many ways problematic, are unavoidable: you have to use them--so what do you know? but that in itself means that you are placing arbitrary frames around what you understand and how you understand it.
so it turns out that if you remain in a naive relationship with the medium of representation that shapes your understanding, you know what the medium lets you know to a certain extent. you can pile up factoids, know a bunch of information: but what that information means, how it functions, what implications it may have, all are limited by your relationship to the media you rely on.
so you have to think about mediations and not just about outputs.
so there is even more stuff to think about.
and there are limitations on your time, on your capacities.
none of this is easy to navigate.
neither is choosing to not know at least something about the world around you, particularly if you are making an explicit choice to not know---checking out because it is too much work doesnt really seem an alternative.
i dont know what i learned from hotel rwanda.
i learned quite a lot from the documentary that came with the dvd, however: and most of that was about the extent to which what was in some ways the core of the horror cannot in any meaningful way be represented.
mostly, it came down to political stuff for me: once again realizing that people can all too easily be convinced--convince themselves--that the barrier that separates them from whatever they want requires only the elimination of a social contaminant, so that the implementation of this removal is not even killing of human beings, but the removal of something less than human. that ideologies are often dangerous. that bureaucratic systems are ideologically driven. that existing international capitalist order squanders an unbelievable amount of human life and potential and is so constructed that most who live within that system do not or cannot see that. that people are most cruel when they are unintentionally so. that maybe trying to know what the consequences of that system are can prompt people to change that system...just as trying to know these consequences can help you become really interested in sports again, or in drinking, or in forgetting.
it is hard to know atrocity.
i am not sure what knowing it means.
it is good to know how easy it can be for folk to inflict atrocity on each other.
but it does make it harder to have a light fun time of it in the world.
i dont know which is preferable.
i dont see it as a meaningful choice.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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