[Xmca-l] Hope and Despair as a "blues Hope In Morten Nissen's Ethical Prototype

[Larry Purss]

For those engaged with Morten Nissen's collective project I would like to
invite a close reading the concluding section [pages A36 to A39] in his
article "Meeting Youth in Movement" [I have reattached for ease of access]

Morten frames his "approach" as an approach of "hope". He writes,

"what I am doing here, then, is articulating the hope, the possibility, the
deeply historical emergent narrative, still very much unfinished - and
perhaps temporarily halted - of a trans-pedagological tinkering of
collectives, as part of an expanding and responsive welfare state. ....
makes this a 'blues hope' in Cheryl Mattingly's sense of the term (2010)
the kind of hope that remains close to its dialectical counterpart despair
[LP and dread].  It shares with certain religious utopia a counterintuitive
radicalism that calls forth doubt.  But contrary to religious versions of
blues hope, this is written as inherently contestable, in the way that it
still claims to present a real possibility, a concrete utopia in Bloch's
sense."

I would add that some prototypical versions with an ethics based in a
religious ground could also include a hope that is inherently contestable
open possibility that "could be". The term "religious" has multiple
meanings and sense and some protypes enact concrete utopia in Bloch's sense.

I also want to bring in Morten's understanding of "met-phor". On page A38
that a version such as Morten's brings in a spatial or geographical
instantiation. He says,

"Although 'movement' and 'neutral ground' like Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal
> development' [and many other theoretical constructs], addresses space
> metaphorically, it is at the same time quite *corporeal. [LP-
> incorporated, embodied, incarnated]*. "


The section following elaborates on Morten's notion of "spaces"  Morten
makes a case that how our understanding can become prototypical [as
concrete universals] is through the development of "models" [prototypes
carry models and possibly metaphors or figural worlds]  Models AS methods.
The concluding section of this article is titled "Theory: as Prototypical
Narrative" Theory enacting hope and despair, hope and dread, and
collectives [third spaces] being/becoming embodied places of meaning and
relevance *AS ETHICAL AND POLITICAL places of empowerment*.
Morten's concluding comment references Derrida as projecting hope endlessly
postponed as the "places" of collective enactments, the places of "could
be", and "yet to come" within a transformational participatory stance.

I continue to search for ways to expand the understanding of "metaphor"
beyond "mere" meataphor to indicate that metaphor is deeply "real" enacting
and embodying collectives.  In other words "real" metaphor contrasted with
"ornamental" metaphor which embellishes the literal.

Larry
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