Balibar again. 
He’s both totally depressing and marvelously inspirational:
“But when, by a structural necessity, the criteria of distinction and triage become violently discriminatory
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Balibar: “a wider framework of rights of representation and participation in public life acquired by birth or by naturalization: that of a
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(Switching back and forth between Balibar and mullets has complicated my intellectual experience this afternoon.)
Labeled one of the “extremes,” Balibar marks the boundaries of possible identity- construction:
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Welcome to democracy 101! I finally get it. Ok, yes, I feel a little bit like, duh. How many times has Stephen gone over this? Balibar, however, makes it plain enough even for me, or perhaps its simply a matter of receptivity and timing. Maybe this time it will stick:
“two notions of the people: that which the Greek language and following it all political philosophy calls ethnos, the
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by Steph on November 20th, 2004 at 12:27 pm
Tags: addressing inequity, Democracy, Rhetoric and Performance, Transnationalism
I’ve been getting clearer about some of the academic impulses (indoctrination?) that I’ve been resisting. This, from Paul Claudel on Bourdieu’s principle of aesthetic distance, sums it up:
“This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.”
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by Steph on October 30th, 2004 at 11:17 am
Tags: Democracy, Rhetoric and Performance, Lisa's Class, phenomenology, Transnationalism
This is my required question for Lisa’s course on Class Cultures.
Where my head is with all of the above is the convergence among curriculum in all my classes and in my head around the mediated construction of subjectivity.
My question is influenced by the lecture given by historian Dipesh Chakrabartty at Mt. Holyoke on Thursday, 10/28. He talked about two impulses informing historical work that parallel our discussions about embodiment. One impulse is disembodied and leans toward rational, objectivizing distance – essentially (it seems to me) a variant of Bourdieu’s principle of aesthetic distance. The other impulse is embodied – the desire to “inhabit” the past one is exploring, to engage the senses. His argument was that historians need to be more self-reflexive about protecting some of the necessary distance in order to employ a degree of rationality while being responsive to the embodied forms of mass media and certain forms of democracy that have produce different, non-Habermasian publics.
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Stephen said something provocative last night about a realization he and Leda had come to about some tensions between their respective trainings….I’ve come to question most of what I learned in my formal social justice education training (I think it tended to paradoxically play into the reification of isms rather than their dissolution), yet I’m wary of more deeply-embedded biases that seem, from the non-domestic point-of-view, to characterize U.S. perceptions of how to solve/resolve questions of difference. For instance, Aihwa Ong, in the introduction to Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, argues that
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by Steph on October 28th, 2004 at 10:10 am
Tags: Democracy, Rhetoric and Performance, Transnationalism
This article in The Nation, by William Greider, looks provocative. It takes on the “values” of capitalistic endeavor (or the lack thereof) and provides examples of people/firms doing it differently. It’s grounded in labor politics in the US, so not suitable for my current project, but I wonder if one of the places I’ll “end up” is being about to say something about “macro-values” (?) and real-life effects….
~ Mike, from the English Dept (Rhet/Comp) shared this with me awhile back but I hadn’t followed up until now.
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Class is gonna go to a lecture by him this Thursday – yeah! Field Trip!
I’m checking out his recent book, wonder if it will be useful in my lit review…
Hmmm. Probably not this time around, since it is focused on India, and I’m constrained to do this project within the EU. I *am* thinking, though, that one of my sites could be Turkey, since they are in queue for membership. The difficulty I may run into though, i snot knowing enough about other examples and analyses to a) know what to look for, and b) know what lenses to apply.
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The cab driver who took me to the airport yesterday, Mr. Hailey, has driven a cab in DC for 46 years! What stories he could tell, eh? I asked him what had changed the most, and he said concerns for his own safety. That’s sad, eh? He used to go to all places in the city, even those with a reputation for being dangerous. Now, he steers clear of them, concentrating on the airports because the folks flying in/out are usually (95% of the time, in his estimation) engaged in some kind of business, trying to get to a meeting or get home from one.
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