Hello, people.
I have not participated for a long time. I've been reading, though. Most
of the time I've felt a longing for the way we used to talk with each
other; maybe I was imagining it, but it seemed as if there was a rich
combination of deep courtesy, an avoidance of personal attacks, and a
continual awareness that we were trying to clarify some analytic
concepts that would hold true across national/cultural boundaries,
across linguistic barriers (sometimes improved becauase of those
barriers!) -- that is, never losing sight that we were people whose
minds are shaped by our experience and especially our disciplines and
that we are making an experience in common, hoping that there is a
common space located where our disciplines intersect (and that by
proceding carefully, we'll be able to find it) but also aware that we
are living in different political and linguistic worlds and therefore
have to try to make those worlds visible to each other and to ourselves
as we speak.
Over the last week or so, as the blowback from the reaction to Eric's
joke has settled and some other voices have come forward expressing
exasperation and despair, an idea slowly floated to the top of my mind
-- namely, that it's not just that our discourse has changed. THe world
around us has changed, too. Maybe we should stop and acknowledge that a
discussion involving people from multiple countries (I should go to the
picture message and count the countries -- it used to be Canada, US,
Brazil, Russia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden -- what
else?) will sound different given what has happened in the world in the
last 2 years. Let me say what I think has happened: others can
disagree, or just ignore this message if you like: the US has a
president that was not elected; the EU has continued to rise in power
and in some ways is now acting as a single country; there's a political
and military collaboration between the US and Russia; the threat created
by the market in arms and dislocated populations and global warming
(drought in many areas) has emerged in the persons of well-equipped
international terrorism; the US has announced a brutal, apparently
endless war against poor countries in which terrorists might take
refuge; there's now a world recession; there is no longer any opposing
force in the world (as the USSR used to be) that could counterbalance US
behavior -- Europe seems to be trying, but is not really ready -- ... in
other words, the world looks pretty different now than it did a year
ago, and much different than it did when xmca began as an attempt to
connect voices across two giant but apparently stable (compared to now!)
states, the US and the Soviet Union.
Now, if we look for a common space where our disciplines intersect and
attempt to make the worlds from which we are speaking palpable to our
counterparts in other countries and cultures, who speak from worlds that
are not the same as ours, isn't there a whole lot that needs to be made
explicit?
It seems to me that one of the axioms of AT is that we keep in mind the
history and the context of everything we are looking at. When we try to
understand whta has happened to the discourse on xmca, we need to link
to history and context too.
Helena Worthen
U of Illinois
Chicago Labor Education Program
312-996-2623
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:22:34 PST