File spoon-archives/seminar-13.archive/postco-virtuality_1997/97-04-23.111, message 18


Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 09:22:18 -0800
From: dwalter-AT-ucla.edu (don walter)
Subject: Re: heloo?:-)


Stimulating new list.  Bruce (and Adele??) raise some good topics; I respond
to his (/her) latest, with some wandering of my own:

>
>I distrust unpacking too much, language can take you any place you want to
>take it, it will always prove that one plus one is five, six, whatever.
>Let me stick to the concrete. [Call this conrete theory, sub-empirical if
>you wish]. 
Since I am highly invested (as they say in capitalist psychoanalysis and
capitalist capitalism) in numbers, I wonder what Bruce means about "five,
six, whatever," as contrasted with 'the concrete.'  Perhaps he is agreeing
with me in distrusting "language" (a la the English Department at British
and American and other colonial colleges), just because of this flexibility,
which doesn't fit well with counting how many bags of concrete it will take
to build my house...


>Three trips to India and 18 months in India doing research and
>touring resulted in some close friendships which continued for some years,
>but afterwards mostly dried up as such things do. 
I've never been to India, and probably would not like it; a passing
friendship arose for me when a biostatistician from Sri Lanka spent a year
hereabouts.  We had friendly arguments over whether "science works" or not--
his counter-example being that Western public-health authorities (and
Western-influenced ones at WHO) declared, in the 1960's, that malaria was
conquered (colonially, of course). More recently, they have been forced to
reorganize their ideas, in view not only of malaria's resurgence, but the
emergence of a string of "new" diseases.  My friend's further expression
about his counter-example was that in earlier times in Sri Lanka, villages
had been arranged so that natural barriers grew up, reducing (though not
eliminating) the prevalence of malarial mosquitoes.  He (and some feminist
anti-colonials hereabouts) took that to indicate the general thesis that
"traditional is gooder" [my language]; I take it to indicate that one can
sometimes identify aspects of traditional practices which turn out to be
good adaptations (as well as other aspects which are not good ones), and
that applied scientists can become arrogant (perhaps _are_ arrogant, but I
think that that, too, is an anti-colonialist exaggeration).


>The possibility that
>some of the people will be on e-mail suddenly makes contact possible
>again, the kind of contact based on continual communication with a person,
>shared interests, getting involved in the lives of others. 
>
But I will be unable to contact my friend in Sri Lanka through e-mail,
because connection to the Net costs too much--- the whole island is not
connected (or at least, was not when he left here).  Economic discrimination
strikes the Net, too.

>So communications really is part of what reshapes the world. But yes, the
>system of communications also partly determines what results. An African
>musical group recording for a French label will find it is changing, the
>rhythm and instrumentation will become more like a Francophone world beat
>usable in discos. To use e-mail seems American. In France the national
>system is very administrative, rational, great in theory, seldom
>functions. Like dealing with a functionaire and is expensive as the
>government is taking a cut, again a difference in economic ideology. In
>Goa I remember hearing from other houses 1940 style American radio shows
>in Indian languages. This structure had been imitated, so forms move
>across cultures. But I also remember hearing tunes of the period so
>Indianized that I weren't someone with strong musical interests I would
>have never recognized them. They had been absorbed into popular Indian
>musical languges and transformed. I think this is the point of A K
>Ramanujan's poem about an Indian great house, nothing that comes in is
>ever really lost, but becomes so changed that it leaves different. There
>has been an unwillingness to accept this in Poco theory which has
>inscribed victim-master, and this is why the theory is so often at odds
>with the better artists. 
Yes, very insightful: Poco folk deny growth and change.

Don Walter



   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005