Re(2): Re(2): question

From: Diane Hodges (dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 24 2001 - 05:55:54 PST


xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>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.

"Totalitarianism has no spatial topology: it is like an iron band,
compressing people increasingly together until they are formed into one."
Seyla Benhabib, _Situating the self: Gender, community and postmodernism
in contemporary ethics_, 1992, p. 93, referring to Hannah Arendt's
_Origins of Totalitarianism_)

there is, i think, a point where this compression effect produces a
collective coherence, i'm not sure there is ever anything ambiguous about
totalitarianism. the difference may lie in which collective acts out -
reflecting a different investment in the outcome. i.e., the military,
which replaces one regime with another, (an investment in assuming a
dominant role as 'ruler' )
or the 'masses', with their investment in ending a particular reign of
terror, the explicit oppressions of autocracy;
but of course this doesn't help me understand what is happening in Central
Africa, or South Africa, or Indonesia, or Tibet, or other areas where
collective actions seem to have no effect and seem to produce no
progressive change in the regimes...)

>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.

how? what new meanings emerged from the Bolshevik revolution? or the
ultimately failed resistance in Hungary? Romania? China? the crueler truth
is that these actions, while collective, seem to fall short of producing
any change.
diane
   **********************************************************************
                                        :point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.

(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************

diane celia hodges

 university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
 university of colorado, denver, school of education

Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu



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