Re: tremors, internalism

From: Molly Freeman (mollyfreeman@telis.org)
Date: Mon Jan 28 2002 - 21:39:59 PST


I am not sure this is the "critical perspective on CHAT" you have in
mind, Jay, but your remarks sent me to Martin Buber, (The Way of
Response, Schoken Books, New York, 1972). I think Buber captures the
yearnings behind/within much of the discourse in this xmca space

> Transformation
>
> Toward the end of the first third of that century in which those
> apocalypses were produced that spoke of the aged world and announced
> the approaching rupture of history, John the Baptist had again taken
> up the cry of the prophets. "Return!"; and, in complete accord with
> their belief in real alternatives, he had joined to the imperative the
> warning that the axe had already been laid to the roots of the tree.
> He trusted his hearers to trust themselves as capable of the turning
> that was demanded, and he trusted the human world of his hour to be
> capable of just this turning, or risk, of giving oneself, of inner
> transformation. After Jesus and in like manner his emissaries had
> sounded the call afresh, the apocalyptics and their associates
> proceeded to disclose that there is no turning and no new direction in
> the destiny of the world that can issue from the turning. But the
> depths of history, which are continually at work to rejuvenate
> creation, are in league with the prophets.(p.172)
>
> Socialism
>
> Socialism can never be anything absolute. It is the continual becoming
> of human community in mankind, adapted and proportioned to whatever
> can be willed and done in the conditions given. Rigidity threatens all
> realizations, what lives and glows today may be crusted over tomorrow
> and, become all-powerful, suppress the strivings of the day after. (p.160)

Molly

Jay Lemke wrote:

>
> 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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