Some CoPs do often get over their potentially 'destabilizing'
(schismogenetic?) events (episodes?), presumably because something does
bind their members together over timescales long compared to the episodes.
This would appear to be one of the criteria for sustainability of a CoP.
We've heard the view that just thinking in these terms may ignore the
deeper inner contradictions that give rise to periodic rupture-prone
episodes ..... and I think it's very reasonable to assume that all
communities embody a measure of injustice, hegemony, unrecognized
hypocrisies, etc., which are kept to very low or no visibility most of the
time as a condition of business-as-usual, where that business seems to be
in the interests of most members most of the time (however much its
conditions of possibility may include what's not in the interest of some of
us any of the time).
So, are the tremors, the episodes of potential rupture, mere accidents to
be got past, or are they somehow part of the normal functional dynamics of
the system? .... opportunities for improvement? symptoms of inevitable
fission to come? moments in which the balance of power is contested and
re-established? dress-rehearsals testing the survivability of the community
in the face of potential external challenges? or other sorts of internal ones?
And can we understand what happens in these episodes solely in relation to
_internal_ contradictions, tensions, injustices? however deeply buried ...
Don't we also need to understand them in relation to the fact that no CoP
is an island unto itself? that every CoP is embedded in the tensions,
contradictions, and injustices of larger social communities of which it is
a part, and which it cannot escape, however much it tries to create a
utopia in isolation? We can hide, but we cannot run from the injustices of
gender, sexuality, age, class, language, culture, etc. privileges,
hegemonies, and the ideologies that support them, including the most basic
common sense of the community (i.e. that there _are_ men/women,
straights/gays, children/adults, workers/bosses, English/Spanish, etc.
etc.). These "inner" contradictions in xmca were not created by xmca. And I
don't say this with exculpatory force, for we inevitably do maintain and
reproduce them to the extent that we continue to behave ALSO as members of
the larger communities from which we come, and which DID produce them, DO
need them to go on being as they are.
I agree; I also tune in to xmca to hear something DIFFERENT. Something that
tests the cohesion of our community inevitably because it would be even
more threatening outside our community, because it tweaks something that
came into our community along with us, but which does not have to be
business-as-usual here. Something that helps me see better what is also
going on outside xmca, and which I can choose to export from the safer
territory here to the more dangerous worlds I also participate in. It may
be risky to xmca to use it as a testbed for ideas that might disturb the
smooth flow of life outside. But we are not lucky enough for that to happen
often enough, I think, to worry about it too much.
So how about rocking our own boat a little ? Anyone up for a round of
critical perspectives on CHAT that ask what it's missed from the insights
of gender theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory ... or how the approach
itself is limited in relation to the dominant gender-, sexuality-, age
group-, class-, language/culture- specific viewpoints it must, as a
historically specific formation, embody? The historical specificity of
tomorrow is, after all, supposed to be different from today's -- or what's
our agency for?
A not-quite-white, only-occasionally-straight, middle-age-resisting,
marginally-upper-middle-class, polyglot-English-writing,
unhappily-culturally-American, irreligiously-spiritualizing,
sexuality-traversing, there's-really-no-such-thing-as-"male", 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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