jaketwilson wrote:

> I buy all this completely. Part of my point was that the physical
> experience has to precede the intellectual one. Can I add that while
> we can't do without analysis, it's necessarily reductive in that
> it `notices' some aspects of experience ahead of others? In a
> way `editing' is as much an abstraction as `genre.'
>

I don't see why it's necessarily reductive. Music is not reductive,
even though it based entirely on physcial sensation and intellectual
analysis of relationships between events (e.g., following a tune).
There is an almost ontological relationship between a perception and
our conceptualization of that perception even extended in time (the
tune). The point is to open ourselves to our sensations. To often
theory aborts us ("fucks" us, said Lang). One of the many pernicious
qualities of genre criticism is that it avoids entirely the individual.
Genre criticism is like an orphan asylum which classifies orphans by
age, sex, weight, etc., and never relates to any of them as an
individual. Genre criticism is an academic conspiracy to run away from
experiencing art. Art is something individual. Unique. It is not a
nexus of conventions and anti-conventions.

>