USSF one

In the run up to the US Social Forum, I’ve been reading some bell hooks to help ground how I prepare for the event (mentally at least). I’ve been thinking about how participation in political movements occurs and sometimes fails. I think there needs to be a new way of describing political participation to initiate a third ‘wave’ of feminist activism. The metaphor for blame and agency became a stumbling point for a critique of patriarchy and people’s participation in it. Notions of legalistic blame that locates harms solely in the mind of an autonomous individual, and describes complicity solely in terms of guilt and innocence determines the reception many people (men in particular?) have for a critique of patriarchal thinking. The assumption that a criticism of someone’s action meant an accusation of conscious malice creates the idea that feminists irrationally hate men and blame men for their problems. The stumbling block comes at the association between action and people, hinging on the model of agency that locates the genesis for actions solely in the mind of an actor.

This problem also works in the other direction, in determining people’s willingness to participate in politics. Many people identify with feminist ideals or even identify as feminists but don’t act like feminists, sometimes in active contradiction with the label. The role and status of ideas and malice seems to play a role in this: ideas (as a concept, a notion) are divorced from action, and that good intentions forgive bad actions. These are undergirded by the notion that ‘freedom’ means the ability, as an individual, to have maximum leeway in making the available choices presented to you (on the individual scale). I think two things are necessary: one, a new way of describing participation and support for feminism, that goes beyond mental disposition. The most effective democratic exercises in America are aesthetic and commercial – American Idol anyone? Participation isn’t dead, but the foundations for motivating it have changed. The second is a conception of freedom that exists in multiple. Freedom requires an interest in the needs and choices of other people. We are mutually interconnected, by means of communication and common space, and freedom for ourselves and others requires attending to those connections. Choice for one cannot be the standard against which progress is judged, because that choice, within a mutual environment, impacts the needs and desires of others. Ultimately, there are limits to freedom, circumscribed by our participation in social spaces with others: someone may always intervene upon us. Freedom involves dealing with those limits: finding and negotiating them.

Duncan

Time and tone

In the past few years I’ve developed a strenuous mistrust of the institution of marriage. This skepticism I feel has a healthy justification in a variety of reasons that I often have difficulty articulating, and whenever I discuss the issue with anyone else, I’m usually met with a negative response. This is most likely the result of my tendencies towards hyperbole, and I’m usually forced to retreat to the fundamentals of how I feel about the world and its operation in terms of relationships: the acceptance of impermanence and the fleeting character of existence. I wrote before about the association between meaning and death, and I feel like this plays out in interesting ways in my relationships. One, they cannot outlast themselves; each relationship I have with another person necessarily dissolves along with us, or with the dissolution of particular needs and desires. Also, relationships can easily become crimes of convenience, topical anesthetic to painful situations that perhaps need confrontation or deeper resolutions. This is a function of their situatedness: as with all forms of thought and experience, physical relationships and structural inequalities often determine our approach to what we may consider more cerebral or abstract relationships. Prioritizing the cerebral experience of relationships in shifting physical and experiential situations sometimes means an inability to confront forms of experience which may need changing. The commitment of relationships to legal contracts, in a permanent, written sense, writes off (pun) the forms of experience which we may find in indescribable, unspeakable, and fleeting emotions, such as that of intimate, quiet moments in love. This is the peril I feel in writing letters of love, and the skepticism I feel towards human relationships played out in a legalistic tone.

Duncan

RE: The time is...

I think that context in which we have numerically based cycles needs to be flushed out more to understand why:

1) everyday is given the same importance as every other day
and 2) time projects the illusion of permanence.

The concept of cyclical time is not new. It is a cornerstone for the ways that most civilization conceptualize time. Just look at ancient Mayan, Native American, Chinese, and Asian Indian cultures conceptualize time. If anything, the West is marked by a break from cyclical time, conceptualizing it as a linear progression: the march of time.

Therefore the context of time in which you are writing reveal some thing else about our Western perception of time. We live in a society so large just in sheer numbers the important events in individual lives are statistically insignificant to be considered special because there are multiple someones somewhere elses having the exact same experience, whether it be giving birth, getting married, or passing away.
But more importantly we live in a society that breaks social relationships that would provide counter evidence to the regularity of day to day experience. We no longer live in a society where children are being raised in loving daily relationship with their grandparents. Cross generational relationships position us to question the effects of time. They allow for the recognition that we may have youth now but it might be fleeting. It allows for the elderly and experienced to directly relate their successes and failures within the context of being in the twilight of their lives. Finally, it forces us to address mortality, intellectually, emotionally, morally, and culturally, rather than shipping our old off to nursing homes to die in quiet disgrace so they don't mar our mistaken beliefs that we are immortal.

Another social relationship that we break (and Duncan you should have seen this coming) is our relationship with the land, with the real cyclical progressions of the seasons, and with farmers and farms who manifest the relationship between time (in season) and the land (in what is grown). Every day we can go to the grocery store and buy anything regardless of the season. By doing this we have no commitment to living in a temporal world. If we eat locally and by the seasons, we use another sense, taste, to perceive the passing of time that allows us to mark more occasions as special for everyone living in that region. Unlike birth or death that is happening all around us at all times, the first strawberries, blackberries and tomatoes of a season mark for all of us committed to eating locally a special time, an occasion worth remembering and marking as special. Harvest time is another such time, especially in smaller rural communities where harvest is an event that calls on everyone to participate and situates them in time and place.

Sorry this is so rambling. This was just going to be a response till I realized I wrote this much.

Craig

The time is...

How would we experience time without numbers or cycles? I feel like there should be a way to connect the idea of repetition and the idea of progression without a series of numbered cycles, conceived of as mapped days on a calender. In pretending that we repeat, or mapping our desires against a repeating schedule, it is possible to think of a limited life as an unlimited, repeated occurance. Not just think, I suppose: the workweek, the day schedule, regularity are demands placed on the body that manifest themselves in a calender with days and times. Consistent, regular output requires a workforce subjecting itself to regularity. Cyclical time projects an illusion of permanence and stability onto the future, a flattening that equates one day with one day, one year with any other year. The numbering of days/months/years bind them as equal signs, demonstrate their fungibility and similarities. I want to discover a way to experience time that gives voice to the urgency of our limitations as human beings, and to embrace the inexorable march towards nowhere in particular that would allow people to embrace the timliness of any effort to overthrow whatever mode of being which oppresses us.

Duncan