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interesting. this seems to me a kind of meta-question that requires moving back a few steps from the run-of-the-mill politics discussions. for what it's worth, it gets to some of what i actually think about (as over against the chess playing that happens in the forum and in discussions like these)...
ideologically, left/right: it's all over. the politics of nation-states, of forms of capitalism that coincide with nation-states. in the states, the level of ideological control is a basic problem--people in the main haven't caught up with this most basic of problems and because that's the case, it seems to me, the dominant language of politics here is out of phase with the realities it is supposed to frame. politically, the united states is passing through a phase that's like a privatized late stalinism.
sometimes i think that neo-liberal marketeer ideology was structured by a sense that it was heading toward a wall, and being an identity-based form enables those who invest in the world through it to not see an ideology heading for a Problem, but only the end of everything. so plunder while you can get it; soon the pickings won't be so good.
there are consequences to intellectual paralysis and i expect that they'll reveal themselves even more than they alreay have in due course.
but to get to the more interesting stuff...
it seems to me that folk are stumbling their way into some new things at different levels of activity, in terms of thinking about the world and connecting that to ways of considering social organization and/or questions.
a lot of folk seem to have moved into one or another form of conceptual art practice as a way to explore new ways to put media into motion, to generate phenomena rather than represent them. in my little corner of this world, i like to talk about triggering stories rather than telling them.
it seems that this direction opens onto possibilities for thinking about emergence and collapse as a fundamental dynamic in the bio-world...which lets you move away from subject-object relations and the whole representational schtick that's been built on that assumption and into other spaces. the problem with those other spaces, i think anyway, is that they're elusive. difficult to express. a lot of newer work, even in static media, are closer to conceptual art than anything else because the reader/viewer has to stage the piece, which is often like a set of directions or parameters/boundaries---so the representation is collapsed onto the sentences themselves which are understood to combine with a reader's experiences in order to generate a situation or scene---the words are stripped out, abstracted so that what is generated is particular to the imagination of each person, but is nonetheless transcendent to the extent that the constraints give particular repeatable characteristics to each experience (without that, one story is any story and no story at all...there has to be a better way to say this).
another problem is that this whole set of relations uses (in the case of writing anyway) conventional grammar to get sentences based on it to do things that the grammar isn't usually called upon to do. it's like an extension of the adage "show don't tell."
this at the level of individual pieces and the process of making them, i think---there's already a problem of saying what it is that the pieces are doing. so there's a problem with the registers of emergence that repeats it.
how one goes from these sorts of exploration to political statements is not obvious. but it's interesting.
at the social level, it's pretty clear (to me anyway) that a politics of compassion is also a politics of scale. in the various cultural spaces that address questions of food production and it's ethics, this is already pretty well articulated. and it think it's an interesting place to start from, one that could address the underlying tension created by this "globalizing capitalism"/universal neo-colonialism thing we live with these days.
still thinking.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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