j
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Certainly my pleasure. Good, bad or otherwise, you have to become part of a society in actual concrete terms, face to face. And that is something that via Dabashi you get through his interpretations of events. One of my real enjoyments was to at least watch Egyptians packed into cafes, streets, places, homes.
In another video he explains where the idea of a turning a Mosque into a public place came from. He was in Tehran during the first phase of the revolution and the students at the university had a big mass meeting in the soccer stadium. The Iranian cops came and busted it up and drove everybody out and next declared the stadium a Mosque, turning a public space into a private place. Dabashi adds voluntary associations: unions, women's groups, students to the mix.
This gets into Harvey's urban geography ideas and is obviously a problem in some cities where there is little public space. This links up with Arendt's concept of public space as discourse, which in turn goes back to Kant the ideals of the enlightenment.
Sooner or later we are going to need these ideas running around in our brains. It should be dawning on people they have no state. It's been reduced to just cops and whatever the very rich want this week. They have the attention span of a fruit fly, follow the sweet smell of money and that's about it. That isn't even a politics.
CG