I'm glad that my notions of "practice museums" generated some interesting
thought and discussion. I think it is important for us to challenge our
stance on history (just as we challenge our stance to the social world.)
Angel's comments do capture some of my own emotional concerns, my own
sense of being obsolete in a world that devalues my way of
"being-in-the-world." However, I had a different agenda and set of
concerns in my posting.
The contradiction between living practice and "dead" history, is just one
aspect of a far more troubling contradiction: the simultaneous alive and
dead character which we attribute to history. In one sense we accept the
existential constraints of traveling through time in a fixed direction
and speed. Yet, we avail ourselves of the opportunity to "rewrite
history." Thus, history is anything but dead, it is a field of struggle
(in Bourdieu's sense.)
That contradiction threatens to undermine one of the chief approaches to
escape from the relativism that seems inherent in post-modernist
thinking. We point to history as an arbiter of conflicting world views,
but what if that arbiter is nothing more than an imprint of a particular
world view?
For example, we (western Intellectuals) take it for granted that
societies should not engage against oppressive practices. A popular
example is oppression of women. Yet, the West has never in its history
failed to oppress women. Moreover, all major cultures also oppress
women. History doesn't look like a promising example for resolving this case.
Of course we (again Western Intellectuals) point to other aspects of
western history, (e.g. democratic philosophy) and use that historical
precedent to overrule the lived practices of millennia . . . . . . Okay,
by what principle do we arbitrarily favor an abstract, ahistorical,
idealist, and unproven part of Western intellectual thought over the
practices of thousands of generations in many cultures . . . ??????
Moveover, oppression is very much in the eye of beholder. For example
Muslim fundamentalists make arguments of essentially the same structure
as feminists. However, the oppressor is the West, and the oppressed are
the children of Islam whose freedom to practice their religion and life
is being horribly subverted by Western Intellectuals (among others.)
So, who is the arbiter in this dispute? We have two histories, both
legitimated in cultural practice - which have contradictory notions of
the role of women in society. In the end is not women's liberation
simply another example of western cultural imperialism?
This is a bit of a digression. I notions of "practice preservation' grow
out of a desire to blur the present and the past. But, before delving
into those concerns, I wish to let the group chew on the problem that
motivated my concerns.
Edouard