>for example, if we cannot transcend the historical consciousness, how can
>we possibly bring about progressive change? Are we not trapped in an
>inescapable con/text of our own historical limitations?
>this is not to suggest it not worthwhile (essential) to pursue the
questions,
Diane,
Asking this question begins to answer it, as I think this sort of pessimism
is itself the product of the historical period we're living through where
there superficially appear to be no social forces in motion which can
transcend the dominant ideologies and provide the experience through which
consciousness can change radically. In other words, it would have been less
easy to think as you do, say, 30 years ago - a period where everything was
open to challenge and there was, if anything, an excess of naive optimism.
As things will continue to change, new possibilities will emerge, because
none of the fundamental social contradictions that have caused radical
change in the past have been resolved - in fact, many are more acute than
they have been for a long time. I don't look to automatic historic processes
to do my work for me nor underestimate how far things have regressed, but a
lot of the pessimism today is, as Phil hinted, based on pretty superficial
analysis of what's going on.
I said 'superficially appear' at the start because I think you might view it
differently if you lived in, say, South Korea, Indonesia, or South Africa
and even Canada is hardly a bastion of social peace. Another answer comes
from history, of course. By coincidence, the current special issue of
'Science and Society' on dialectics arrived yesterday and there is an
article by Bertell Ollman entitled 'Why Dialectics? Why Now?', which is
remarkably appropriate, so I quote:
'Investigating potential is taking the longer view, not only forward to what
something can develop into but also backward to how it has developed up to
now. This longer view, however, must be preceded by taking a broader view,
since nothing and no one changes on its or his own but only in close
relationship with other people and things,
that is, as part of an interactive system. Hence, however limited the
immediate object of interest, investigating its potential requires that we
project the evolution of the complex and integrated whole to which it
belongs. The notion of potential is mystified whenever it is applied to a
part that is separated from its encompassing system or
that system is separated from its origins. When that happens, "potential"
can only refer to possibility in the sense of chance, for all the necessity
derived from the relational and processual character of reality has been
removed, and there is no more reason to expect one outcome rather than
another.
'The crux of the problem most people have in seeing evidence for socialism
inside capitalism, then, is that they operate with a conception of the
present that is effectively sealed off from the future, at least any notion
of the future that grows organically out of the present. There is no sense
of the present as a moment through which life, and
the rest of reality as the conditions of life, passes from somewhere on its
way to somewhere. When someone is completely lost in the past or the future,
we have little difficulty recognizing this as a mental illness. Yet, the
present completely walled off from either the past or the future (or both)
can also serve as a prison for thinking, though
"alienation" is a more accurate label for this condition than "neurosis."
Here, people simply take how something appears now for what it really is,
what it is in full, and what it could only be. '
(I might add that this eternal present (with a past reconstructed in its own
Disneyland terms - cf Anastasia, 'heritage' and historical theme parks) is
increasingly central to the mechanisms by which capitalism perpetuates
itself.)
Cheer up!
Bruce Robinson (despite what I've written a natural pessimist)