this blog is my attempt to map the always changing and wildly complex world i inhabit. why map? its part of a quest to better carve out a space of beauty, autonomy, and the rest of what i think of as the good stuff. it says 'you are here' and might help point to where i want to be and how to get there.
due to the radically unjust distribution of risks and rewards, benefits and burdens that accompany contemporary living, i feel personally and ethically responsible to shape my daily work so that it might help others to collectively experience the good stuff too. liberal, privileged guilt? maybe. but so it goes.
luckily, this is not an individual project. i draw on the maps that others have created and highlight moments of desire-inducing poetic brilliance, acts of embodied and collective exuberance, and my own occasional questions and moments of partial insight.
question to get started: how can negative and affirmative, positive, inventive, creative cultural critique best be negotiated? which approach has the greatest 'value' in the current historical moment? [[[underlying question = 'critique.' looks a lot like 'intervention,' and i hate that term. it implies that the one who intervenes has the answers, and isn't changed in the process. critique is also often a kind of one-way translation apparatus. what might an anti-critique look like? dialogical? collaborative? accountable?]]]
on the surface it seems that negative critique runs the risk of reinscribing existing and dominating power structures. so if this route is taken, that risk needs to be dealt with sufficiently. at the same time, 'the enemy' often maintains hegemony by a politics of invisibility. mapping and making visible the ways in which dominant social relations operate, then, becomes essential. this kind of information might also be quite useful for social movements to pick up and use. [[[the very notion of 'power structures' is absurdly abstract... maybe it can do some good work, but it too often remains disconnected from how people, especially 'marginalized groups' actually conceive of their everyday lived experience.]]]
as for creative critique, it can often be very easily absorbed by society and lose its original force. but without the articulation of what we each think 'the good stuff' consists of, it sure as hell ain't gonna spontaneously materialize... perhaps our own politics of escape can be much more effective than direct confrontation with power? this doesn't necessarily mean running off to an communal organic farm in Italy for a life of hedonistic nihilism (mmm. that does sound nice though...) and giving up on 'the struggle.' but relying only on direct conflict and refusing to be free until 'everyone is,' as bey writes, is also a kind of martyrdom that is essentially throwing in the towel... we need to keep thinking about what it would mean to orchestrate ever evolving uprisings and giving up on 'the' revolution. [[[creative critique is also far more difficult... the academy treats people to critique, but doesn't give much practice with creativity.]]]
this was a little heavy today.. thanks for humoring my first sketch of mapping the big-picture, abstract problems and potentials i've had on my mind.
