Wednesday, February 20, 2008

revisiting and revisiting the work-training, and then exiting

i know what it is- it's all summed up in this movie entitled "Leben BRD" or "Living in the Bundesrepublic of Deutschland". So this film is a documentary about the banal torture of instruction, and it goes from classes that pregnant couples attend to learn about the birthing process, to this amazing scene where this guy is describing the correct way to escape a vehicle which has turned on its side, to a man teaching a woman how to strip the correct way, interspersed with shots of various commodities being tested by pneumatic machines that drop weights onto chairs or apply forces over and over again. I guess that's a good way to describe this situation of cultural training- that it is a thing that one must train oneself for, and that it can be repeated, and that there is a right way to understand this here culture. We nestle in a sort of distance of consciousness that is nurtured by this type of training- the notion that there's a way to learn about everything, that there's a teacher that can be found, that nobody will be expected to spearhead their own experiences and derive their own fascination (because it could be wrong!). Without an authority, there can be no training, the distribution of knowledge cannot saturate and hypnotize an audience- there's always the (terrifying) possibility that the book you're reading has old dates- you know, all these books these days with all their knowledge that you just don't give a fuck about- come on books, knock it off!

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