[Xmca-l] Re: As of 2020, the American Century is Over

[White, Phillip]

first, i'm hoping that here in the reciprocal world of CulturalHistoricalActivityTheory, that we can bring up a greater focus on History than we have of late.

second, your second example, here, Helena, of the breaking the Voting Rights Act of '65 is a better example than the music school's failure to pay into unemployment insurance.  another example i can think of was the attack on the MUNI labor union in San Francisco, in blaming the labor union drivers' efficiency for transit problems, rather than for the poor physical and work conditions within the transit agency.

however, rather than the reason for these breaks in systems of relationships, i think it's important to look at other systems of relationships, and of course power relationships, found within neoliberalism.  if you remember Dorothy Holland's et al, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds, there is a focus in on how individual negotiate "figured worlds".

so, to go back to the Supreme Court's decision to erase the Voting Rights law, there has to be an understanding of the particular acts and beliefs are valued over others.

i thinking you are writing here about the repercussions found in the prevalence of neoliberalism, and in particular how it fits within larger american figured worlds and myths.

it can be thought that neoliberalism as an acceptable figured world began with Jimmy Carter and the deregulations of trucking and transportation.  of course Reaganism and Thatcherism accelerated this acceptance - and if you look back to the novels Dickens or Wm Blake, and then farther back into Calvinism you can begin to see that neoliberalism has deep deep cultural roots  -  especially within the English speaking world.

and, a final assertion, to connect to the more prevalent figured worlds of americans, we are going to have to use a vocabulary different from that used by, say, Hegel or Marx, precisely because these words have little emotional or intellectual currency (and i use the word currency deliberately) within the activities and values prized by the popular myths of most americans.

phillip

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