From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Responses to a very short question on the lyotard list...
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 08:53:26 -0600


Steve wrote:

Eric - does the act of speaking on the net consititute a political 
response - personally only those things which can be public pass across 
the techological realm. Anthing that cannot be public, the private, 
sometimes the political  cannot be discussed over the  phone, internet 
etc...  This is not to say that the net doesn't function well in forms 
of mobilization for of course it does... but still... dep commitment may

require direct contact (just been thinking about that recently)

Steve, 

I think the internet can certainly be put to political uses, as the
recent Howard Dean campaign and the activities of moveon.org have shown,
but I don't think the kind of speaking on the net we are doing here is
necessarily political, unless you mean in the broad sense that
everything we do is political in one way or another. At best, to the
extent that conversations here are political, it is simply a way of
clarifying one's thought by thrashing them out with others.  In short, a
"slow-burning inter-human conversation" or to use another image, the
internet as crockpot (not, I hope, one filled with crackpots!)

I guess I am feeling melancholy today about humanity's prospects for
enlightenment. Wasn't it once considered the height of fashion for the
pomo crowd to contest enlightenment as just another form of ideology.
Now it seems we are realizing the consequences of this as there seems to
be a movement towards regression in the public sphere, a kind of
retribalization towards religion as the best means of coping with a
world gone strange.  I certainly feel like an outsider these days since
politics seems about all about finding ways to keep what we already had
before it finally slips away - a strategy of protracted defense and
resistance, one that is conservative in the best possible sense.

I recognize this situation may change abruptly and am certainly
encouraged by some of the new momentum I see around me, but still feel
ours is a regressive age and rather than celebrate the end of
enlightenment, I would like to move towards rewriting enlightenment,
transcribing the myth for a future age that has no longer forgotten what
it means to be human. Ultimately, our politics must consist of putting
an end to this administrated world of domination and coercion, but first
we must find a way to simply manage to survive in this new century.

eric