diane,
I really like your line of reasoning although I'm afraid that the unity
expressed in the phrase "no ambiguity about what had to be done" might not
be true in all the cases you mention. What is interesting to me concerns
the way in which "meanings" emerge out of these events. Meanings as well as
all kinds of styles, symbols, etc. Here Carl's references to Durkheim are
relevant I think, insofar as the symbolization of collective solidarities
that transcend the individuals becomes the basis for further creations of
meanings.
I think I've mentioned it before on this list but I've always been impressed
by Sartre's phenomenology of such processes in "Critique of Dialectical
Reason", a work that appears to have been consigned to the dust bin of
social/philosophical literature. Another person who was deeply concerned
about collective processes and their relationship to the creation of meaning
was the anthropologist Victor Turner who has a lot of interesting things to
say about "liminality" that might be of interest to you. Turner was also one
of the first (at least that I know about) who talked about Bakhtin in
social/anthropological literature and used a lot of the ideas from "Rabelais
and His World" in his analyses of the collective movements, processes that
he referred to as "anti-structure" as well as liminality. Inversion of
fixed identities, dissolution of concepts of individuality to give way to
new individualities (subjectivities) born out of the very collective process
in which "what had to be done" was simply recognized and the collectivity
emerged out of individual seriality (to use Sartre's term) in the
self-recognition of the collectivity defined by that recognition of what had
to be done..
Paul H. Dillon
> does that make sense? what kinds of collective actions are you thinking
> of, ? like, how to oust George Bush Jr. ? :)
How about cutting him off from chili dogs? but in any even, write to John
McCain and encourage him to not allow any bills to go through the Senate
until a strong, full campaign finance and electoral reform law is passed
with no grandfathering-in clauses.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 01 2001 - 14:24:56 PST