I was asked backstage to give some substance to the claims of how destabilizing
events are the surfacing of deep internal contradictions. As I look for a
"smoking gun" in yrjö's work, i don't easily come across one. Rather, I find
that since i have been trying to master his approach, i have been making
inferences based upon his writing and can't really tell without some lengthy
self-reflection how to separate my interpretion from his work. Yet this is not
a cop-out (no pun intended). First, there is this quote in chapter 3 of LBE:
"The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow
from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to end
intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended.
Historical events thus appear on the whole to be (...) governed by chance. But
where on the surface accident holds sway, there actually it is always governed
by inner, hidden laws and it is only a matter of discovering these laws."
(Engels 1976, 366.)
I find some remarkable parallels reading into yrjö's analysis of huck finn and
our present situation -- first there is the primary contradictions of
maintaining a heterogeneous membership and its divergent subjectivity within
the activity of a mailing list that thrusts everyone together with the common
interest in distributed mind. Like xmca, the Huck Finn story suffers from
movement of people and things from one place to another where expectations are
different, (A joke that is shared within a marriage flies like a lead balloon
on xmca) and from the changes in membership comprising the collective subject
of activity. The joke posting "disturbs the old activity and aggravates its
latent inner contradiction." How the surfacing of these inner tensions (having
a slave in a place where slaves are free vs. the differences in what is
considered acceptable between xmca'ers concerning genders) lead to Huck's
trembling, and in parallel Mary "couldn't sleep for hours", Eric wishes to
unsubsribe, and many of the rest of us find ourselves spending more time
thinking about xmca than other constraints would allow us.
But i won't follow any more through an analysis. Most likely there are some
significant difference between xmca and Huck Finn, and i'll leave it to others
to find them -- i've already invested more time than i have in reading,
thinking, and writing about it.
=====
Bill Barowy
"Everything is a becoming, without beginning or end"
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