Dennis Redmond wrote:
>Not that I would change a word of what I've written or a single concept
>which I've formulated. On the contrary, it's pushed me to work that much
>harder on my geopolitics/theory/texts, messages in informatic bottles for
>more fortunate galaxies, to paraphrase Heiner Mueller. But the US Left
>lacks even the most basic support structures, spaces and places -- a
>political commons, if you will -- where long-term conversations can happen
>between identity-movements, artists, interested laypeople, union
>activists, NGOs and political parties.
>
No. You're right. The guy who described this really well was Russell
Jacoby in "The Last Intellectuals."
The internet is a new space that could be used in this way. I suppose the question is, is the internet enough?
To my mind the situation is similar to what was happening in the high middle ages. A certain, enduring, fragmented vernacular culture slowly coalescing from within/without the hollow shell of high scholasiticism, which eventually sloughed off like so much dead skin. Right now, it seems like listservs like this one and the whole virtual public space of the internet is articulating the forms that will serve as the seedbeds for what emerges next. It seems that inevitably it needs to be played out /articulated in physical space as well. But for right now there is a certain ferment, communication, articulation happening in the virtual universe of the net -- and though it is not expressed in monumental forms -- it takes a certain amount of time for thought/expression/language/forms to work themselves out before those forms emerge. There were a lot of "romans" before the novel emerged. There were a lot of broadsides before the newspapers emerged. There were a lot of travelling minstrels, before theater emerged. And so on.
Acadmia is dead. And the more it is privatized and coerced by private interests, the deader it will become. It will be a skin that will be sloughed off, because it will not longer be needed in a world in search of integration, in a world in which fragmentation and terror are not nourished in order to feed power.
We are carrying on a polyglotic conversation here -- something materially impossible twenty years ago. The fact that we can do it and that we are doing it is having an actual impact on how we think of democracy and what we think the possibilities of communication are.
This may not be THE political commons, but it is the seed of one.
I think.
Joanna