I appreciate the initial reactions from a few friends here on xmca. I'll
respond pretty briefly.
Phil thought it might be unproductive to even look back at the grid 'from
underneath', and that would be true if it meant a return to the grid as it
looks to us normally, or if the grid looks the same from underneath. I
don't think it does, and I think re-appropriating "it" is productive
because the _combination_ of categorial and trans-categorial action and
meaning is far more powerful than either alone. Having found the baby,
there is still no reason to waste the bathwater.
I'm not sure if some of the exchanges about white-straight-male-academics
vs. Others were really meant as responses to my posting. Obviously views
that arise out of a narrow segment of the totality of possible and actual
human experience must span the gamut from A to B. Adding in history and
cross-cultural perspectives, usually still by and about dominant castes and
viewpoints, might get us to C. Anything else is a potential treasure. BUT,
too much of what is available from Others tries too hard to look enough
like dominant forms and models to get some recognition as of value, and in
the process reduces its potential value. BUT, if it doesn't somehow engage
with dominant discourses or forms, it may be of value to and for some few
like Others, but will remain opaque to both dominant group audiences AND
other Others. BUT, the medium is still a big part of the message (or a
constraint on the kinds of messages that can be meant in and through it),
and anything that looks like academic written discourse, about anything and
by anyone, isn't likely to be all that Other. The place to look for
insights from and about what is Other to us (and that includes what is
Other to each other Other) is in media and genres that are not native to
Us, or not traditionally dominated by Us.
Finally, Angel wondered if age made a difference between a spirit of direct
resistance and a preference for subtlety and indirection in undermining the
grid. I think it does. It takes a lot of frontal assaults that fail, or
that succeed only to bring one back full circle to the same grid in a new
guise, before one resolves that there must be another way. Youth has not
only optimism, but excesses of energy; past a certain time of life, as
optimism becomes hopeful bemusement, energy also needs to be husbanded
(interesting word, of course) ... we seek leverage, ways that lesser
efforts can produce greater results. Teenagers did not invent the martial
arts that rely on stillness and using an opponent's energies rather than
one's own.
If your aim is only to prevail within the grid and not change it, direct
resistance will serve very well, if you have the power to prevail. If you
wish rather to change the grid, or to escape it, or to burrow through it
into the larger spaces it conceals, or to participate more fully in the
dynamics of which it is but a luminous epiphenomenon ...
The grid has the last laugh ... until you eat it.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------