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Bruh 15 year olds smoke a gram of ditch weed and all of a sudden they're Plato.
Here's some lines of thinking that were created by theorists who aren't 15. And because even I find some of them to be boring, I've re-framed them to be applied to skiing so they're more applicable to our lived experiences.
1) Constructivism: Has there ever been an original creation ever? Human knowledge, literature, and culture, are all built off of pre-existing works: music builds off of past genres and works, literature takes inspiration from past books, and even skiing itself builds off of past trends. Look for something you like, a song, movie, book, or anything, and try to see what went into it's creation. Has there ever been an original author, song writer, editor, or skier? I studied this aspect through literature, and you can go as far back as you want, but still find that every creative work builds itself off past work. The bible was created from a collection of oral poems and stories, many of those are based on even older myths. Don't believe me? Look up old myths from the Mesopotamian region and look at how similar many of them are to the bible- the great flood is literally a story that was told thousands of years before the bible was written. With that said, if you do chose to believe in constructivism, then the big question is where did it all come from? What are the "original works"? Surely there has to be some kind of beginning? Or is human creativity a thing that has always existed in some shape or another?
2) Identity: When we think of identity most people assume it is something innate that every person is born with. But typically we break down identity into two categories: personal identity, and cultural identity. Personal identity is the things that make you who you are: the things you enjoy, the values you hold, and the things you believe in. Cultural identity is a step above that, and refers to the shared values, ideas, and beliefs of a certain culture. The question here is: to what extent is our identity formed by society around us rather than our own conscious? When you ski you may often find yourself modeling your skiing off a pro, or other skier that you admire. So would that mean you ski that way because of the culture that influenced you, or rather your own personal preferences as a skier? To what extent are your own personal preferences shaped by the culture around you? Many thus break identity down into these two categories instead: a product shaped by the people, and a product that shapes people. Likewise, when we ski, are we shaping the culture around us, or do we allow ourselves to be shaped by it? Many would just say "it's both", but then that just leads us to the question of "how?". How can we shape something that simultaneously shapes us? Who does this shaping? To what extent is your own identity as a skier actually "you"?
3) How to identify a swerve skier when you see one: This has always been one of my favorite things to study in literature. It's based on a study by Stanley Fish "how to spot a poem when you see one" which deconstructs the idea's of genre. Though the study mainly applies to literature, I often think about it in skiing as well. Essentially the idea is built off of poetry: Wtf even is a poem? Easy question at first, until you realize there is not a single agreed upon universal definition of poetry. Poems can rhyme or not, they can have form and structure or not, they can be about anything or nothing, they can be a couple words or an entire book. We don't have a universal definition of poetry because poetry means something different to different people. So how do we know something is a poem or not? We simply say it is, a piece of text is just that- until we begin to study it using poetic elements and themes. Fish demonstrated this by assigning his poetry class to analyze a list of names he had made from an old email. The students spent hours analyzing it as a poem, and in the end had a functioning analysis of what it meant when studied through a poetic analysis. Their analysis of the list therefore made it a poem, once they began to look for poetic elements within the list, they had made it a poem. So do poems hold innate poetic qualities, or is it the reader themselves that creates those qualities and thus the poem itself? Essentially, we know something is a poem because we say it is, and we study it using poetic elements. When we think of a swerve skier, how do we know someone is a swerve skier? There is no universal definition, and no agreed upon framework that definitively maps out what that even is. So to reframe Fish: do we know someone is a swerve skier because of the qualities they display, or does someone become a swerve skier because we say they are? Fish summarized his thinking in that article by saying "interpretation is not the art of construing, but the art of construction. Interpreters do not decode poems, they make them". Likewise, is swerve skiing an actual genre that exists naturally in skiing, or is it something we created? Do we create swerve skiing in the same sense that we create poetry? There isn't a universal definition: different swerve skiers will naturally have different tricks, outfits, and styles varying from skier to skier. Is a swerve skier actually a swerve skier, or do they simply exhibit traits that we identify as "swerve"?
Anyways, I just woke up so sorry if my writing flow and organization kinda suck. If you want to actually explore some real deep thinking check out:
"A Small Place" by Jamaica Kincaid- studies colonialism, identity, and what it means to be a tourist.
"The Death of the Author" T.S. Elliot- studies whether or not authors play any significant role in creating a text, or if the genres and pre-existing thinking surrounding the text are what create it.
"How to know a poem when you see one" Stanley Fish- this deconstructs what genre even is, and how we create it as a collective.
