ARTelevision

This story, from the LA Times, got me thinking of the need for new ways to grasp what the world needs now:

Brazil president: New president of Brazil sworn in - latimes.com

The gist of it revolves around the background and context of the new President of Brazil:

"Dilma Rousseff is Brazil's first female president, taking over from the immensely popular Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The new president hopes to keep the country's booming economy on track while advancing her Workers Party social agenda."

As I completed reading the piece, I had thoughts very similar to those of the commenter below. I was pleased to see them so well stated. Here's the comment:

"dbtkgrace at 10:46 AM January 01, 2011
The newly elected president who was a former Marxist is not a reflection on Brazil but a profound reflection on how backward a country US has become as the Right will denounce the election as a step toward communism and dictatorship.

The right appears unable to grasp the situation that the only military might in the world is us. The only country who has the might and the dangerous support from mostly the Republican side to invade any country in the world at any cost to the people of their own.

To put things in perspective, the tragedy of 9/11 horrible as it may seem, was just a slap in the face by an ignorant little group of thugs who in order to gain the most attention "bothers" the biggest guy in the neighborhood.....perspectively speaking in historical war atrocity terms of course. And indeed in order to get out of the mess we're in in the Middle East, we have to accept the 9/11 in historical context. Otherwise, we'll continue to live in fear and put our own citizens in dire economic conditions that we find ourselves in.

Brazil an economically troubled country "not so long ago" decides to elect a former Marxist as a president. I don't think this happens if the people of Brazil were fearful as we are of the past as we continue to be. Living in fear in the US. Not the US that I imagined in year 2011."

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It's true. We must begin to embrace new paradigms that are able to come to terms with the fact that the world from which we are emerging is not the world we are living in, and it is not the world of the future.

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For me, it is all about compassion. I need to see a politics and an economics of empathy and compassion supplant the old hyper-competitive notions that got us here.

How do you see the new world order shaping up? Are you able to get beyond the old labels to see global realities in new, more constructive ways?

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roachboy

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.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

Yes, that's in the spirit of my post, thanks, rb. From the ways in which we categorize knowledge (see Morin's, On Complexity) to the ways in which we frame experience, we're evolving novel paradigms, ineluctably...I suppose, because the old ones are failing daily.

And, as my own contributions are aesthetic ones, for me this is an essentially creative process - as you indicate above (nice words on art, btw), it's a politics as art/art as politics question, as well.

This discussion might also function well in the Philosophy Forum...but, again, our categorizations are an essential part of the problem.

So yes, matters of the heart - empathy and compassion. Either we come to these as the purpose and meaning of our existence or we lose our humanity and everything else in the process - for we have demonstrated the capacity to destroy everything along with ourselves...

New labels, then...new paradigms...new ways of thinking. Let's get to it. This is the time. What are you doing to create the new world view?

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Baraka_Guru

I've been thinking about this off and on for a bit. The issue, I think, is that we've moved from a past filled with imperialism, conquest, and opposition and into a period of interconnectedness and co-dependence. Where once it was the norm to be destructive, oppressive, and competitive, it is now becoming important to be generative, cooperative, and compassionate on a global scale.

The best way to "fight" things these days is not through military might or political wrangling or sanctions, or what have you. The best way to "fight" things is by being supportive of societies and their cultures. While this isn't universally so on the ideological level (i.e. it doesn't help to support oppressive regimes), it generally is on the social level (e.g. we solve the problem of poverty by supporting women economically and educationally).

Alleviating or eradicating social problems on a global scale has global benefits. You address the issue of terrorism and new forms of fascism by reducing the appeal. How do we bring young men into the fold of social integration and economic stability and out of the clutches of terrorist recruitment? That is the question, and only one of many.

There is too much to think about regarding this topic. It's broad. But those are my initial thoughts. I should explore some of the specifics more.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ASU2003

I wonder if Marxist or far left-wing socialist economic policies would work without a military competitor or war. Add in having a democratic elections (within supporters of the same left-wing theories), freedom of religion (but separate from the state), and freedom to move around the state, and I think it would be a very effective, healthy, and happy country.