On Oct 20, 2011, at 1:36 AM, Mike Beggs wrote:
>> Regardless, Natasha's is a thoroughly materialist vision of social
>> change as political practice. Ideas change in the process of putting
>> your ass on the line trying to change the society you live in. The
>> idealism problem rests with the rest of the folks in the room,
>> unfortunately.
>
> See, I just don't think this version of 'materialism' is useful - the
> idea that there is some social domain that can be abstracted from
> ideas, which is prior to ideas, and which determines ideas.
Yeah. The park is a totally artificial space - completely temporary with a constantly changing population and under constant threat of forcible eviction. That doesn't have much to do with the world where people live, work, and yes Natasha, fuck. (My brilliant sister-in-law observed that Natasha failed to interrogate her own patriarchal assumptions in the way she, an attractive woman, could use the word "fuck" so cavalierly - coming from a man, it would have been entirely different.) How it could prefigure any change in the quotidian world is beyond me.
Doug