Graham Gardner wrote:
> a diversity of epistemological, ontological and moral
> viewpoints
For the ICGG list I recommended this comment by Nancy Fraser from Dissent
magazine, Fall 1999 issue...
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/
...to indicate what some people understand by 'radical' or 'critical' or
'alternative' or 'left'.
"What remains far less comprehensible, however, and
therefore still bitterly disappointing, is the collapse of
the socialist project in the West. To be sure, that project
needed a thorough reformulation. It had long been clear
that socialism could only be conceived as a
radicalization, not a repudiation, of liberal democracy,
grounded on the priority of civil liberties, toleration,
and democratic forms of public culture. In addition,
socialism would have had to jettison longstanding habits
of class essentialism and economism so as to encompass
the breadth of postindustrial political life,
accommodating the full panoply of collective subjects
(not just "workers" but also women, gays and lesbians,
indigenous peoples, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious
minorities) and the rich plurality of political arenas (not
just labor but also ecology, sexuality, media, violence,
reproduction, multiculturalism). Finally, it would have
been necessary to overcome socialism's historic fixation
on the state, looking instead to non-state forms of
collective ownership and to the associative capacities of
civil society, while also responding to transnational
processes that are currently destabilizing the framework
of the nation-state."
This is, in effect, the mainstream 'critical geography'. (The mail was in
reply to comments by Donald Mitchell)
The important points are...
1. the 'radical / progressive / left' goal is seen as the perfection of
liberal democracy, not opposition to it.
2. the identification with social movements, as the agent of that transition
[...women, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, and ethnic, linguistic, and
religious minorities]
3. the specification of the political concerns [...ecology, sexuality, media,
violence, reproduction, multiculturalism]
4. the preference for civil society as the political arena.
If there is "a diversity of epistemological, ontological and moral viewpoints"
it is generally within these limits.
--
Paul Treanor
And here are the death camps...
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/2997/1.html
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/post-kfor.html
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