Gee, I must be WAY behind the curve with the paucity of my postings this
year ....
Is the way to get to the top of the standings by just assuming that you
must have something interesting to say about anything that comes up on the
list? :)
or that it's your DUTY to post on every possible topic, to maintain the
high calibre and lively exchange of the list?
From time to time I meditate on the classical virtues that no longer seem
to be held in much esteem. One of them is Humility. Maybe I think about it
because I'm rather lacking in it myself. Are there social conventions in
very many situations anymore that tell us how to display our humility? Is
putting your humility on display a contradiction? Is silence the only index
of humility? I think you can see this issue gets very tangled, very quickly.
On to Skateboarding! A very interesting tale about rules and freedom, a
perennial modernist dilemma, perhaps a defining one. Rules are features of
institutions; they change on slow timescales, not in time for 3pm today,
but after a lot of meetings and formalities, and notifications, and
postings. An exception occurs, it's surprising. I would say, off-hand, that
the exception was an intrusion of pre-modern forms of power: mayoral
discretion is an aristocratic privilege; mayoral decisions are often based
in personal-relationship politics, also a pre-modern form. Let's not
pointlessly mess-up the opening, or offend key players and their
constituencies; let's just waive the rules for a day, and then get back to
institutional forms which are the basis (in part) of my power/authority and
(in large part) of my practical-power-to-organize-the-labor-of-others.
So once again the contradictions of modernism are by-passed by informal, or
pre-modern, practices. We don't have to think too long or too hard about
why we have Institutions to regulate our Leisure! or why we have Leisure as
a category ... or for that matter why we have Freedom as a category.
Looking at the history and politics of this little case study, so far, the
Institutions were operated by those with more power (the adults who don't
like skateboarding) to regulate (a political compromise, first they just
wanted to forbid) those with less power (those whom our society refuses to
give adult rights to for its own not very inspectable reasons, another
contradiction). This feature is not particularly modernist as such: most
large-scale institutions in pre-modern societies as well were about
concentrating power in the hands of some social fraction. But traditional
institutions were less about regulation as such and more about the
organization of labor. Religious institutions in many ways seem to be the
precursors of modernist social technologies, though they had primary
labor-controlling functions historically, but evolved
symbolic-behavior-regulating functions that became somewhat autonomous from
the labor functions.
Modernist institutions of course are also primarily about the control of
labor, resources, etc., but they are also increasingly used to regulate
symbolic behavior. Skateboarding is not just a leisure activity, not just
pure play or pure physical action. It is also a symbolic activity, for the
skateboarders (freedom, rebellion, parasitization of institutional
structures -- or what deCerteau would call tactical resistance) AND for the
antagonistic adults, who clearly recognize the challenge to their values
and authority. Like rap music, hippie dress, rock-and-roll, sex and drugs
... arbitrary symbols of cultural conflict. A bit of class conflict, of
course; a lot of generational conflict, naturally. Most deeply however a
rejection of the dehumanizing impulse of modernism itself.
Jump higher, Skateboarders ... the Institutions are working to wall you in,
too!
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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