>If you could have your way, what would you be reading here instead of the,
>as you wrote, "pap"?
>.d.
At 12:53 PM 12/11/2005, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>If you could have your way, what would you be reading here instead of the,
>as you wrote, "pap"?
>.d.
This desire to see blogs (or discussion lists) as a special new medium which will usher forth a new social movement is part of a search for what Amy Gutman calls a politics of conscious social reproduction. People want a politics where we ask one another if what we do every day reproduces the worlds we imagine when we think about justice, progress, and the good society.
Accordingly, there is no 'outside' to politics. The is no choice to political participation. Everything we do is always already political. Political participation is a fact of life because we live in and through political institutions and practices.
On such a view, participation in the social world, when justified by 'private' reasons such as "just earning a living" or "just having a fun," is not good enough. And, any form of conventional political participation that is disciplined by ideological social control or constrained by a technocratic ethos is found wanting.
Our democratic dignity, it is said, can only be served by a politics of "responsible world construction' or "conscious social reproduction."
Blogs have been heralded as a mechanism that can enhance the politics of conscious social reproduction. Blogs are seen as a way for us to collectively define substantively good reasons for life's concrete and situated practices. From this standpoint, blogs are a way to save democratic politics from technicism, bureaucratization, expertism, formalization.
...
What Tutor and Manwich want is to conform to the first ideal of a politics of conscious social reproduction: asking not just that we create free, public, explicitly,political spaces. Rather, that we also examine our motivations for our participation in life itself. For, after all, on the view of an advocate of a politics of conscious social reproduction, everything is political.
Thus, on this view, justifying one's participation as "just making a living" or "just having fun" is an uninterrogated claim. One must consciously, purposefully interrogate what one is actually doing. How is one's behavior helping to create a world, the world one imagines when one thinks of things such as justice, progress, and the good society?
It is both exhilarating and agonizing to consider how, in the name of democracy, a social order might seek to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness. But perhaps such a politics of conscious social reproduction, when taken to an extreme, is just another name for the presumptuous intellectualism which the Scottish Moralists criticized? Perhaps the human spirit needs a space for play, a space free from the ambiguities of perpetually informed consent and perpetually interrogated socio-political praxis.
Perhaps social life is held together by a 'sort of center of opacity'a non-rational, non-contractural solidarity, the very solidarity that grows out of the chit chatty bullshit that most serious political people abhor. Perhaps good outcomes as well as bad are possible precisely because so much of social life is left unspoken, left unsaid. It is what we take for granted, what enables us to enjoy the chit chatty bullshit. Perhaps the linearity of spoken accountability favored by such a politics subverts the poetic simultaneities of practice. Perhaps the good that is served by practical judgment is subverted by having to defend it, always, on principle.
The beer cup is empty.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/30/the-beer-cup-is-empty/
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