Art work by R. Michael Fisher (c) 2003.
This is an image from p. 359 of my dissertation (Fisher, 2003) [1]. I wanted to show that I was into doing digital graphics for the first time that year and exploring what I could do with it... though, this is a b/w version of the color plate in my original dissertation.
As for the real reason I want to share this political blog, it is because I found a very humorous (and serious) excerpt from pp. 18-19 of my dissertation. This excerpt below picks-up on a dialogue of a real historical political-activist figure, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a youth leader of the May Revolution of students in 1968 in French universities--the dialogue is a fictional one but based on my study of Cohn-Bendit's theories and philosophy of revolution. So, below, he is the D and I am the M.
M: So, Daniel let's get back to the May Revolution. How are things different now, as you see them?
D: I won't talk about me. I want to talk about the liberalism that has infected so many old and new activists, intellectuals, and just about everybody else under capitalism's insurgence into every fabric of our lives today.
M: You sound like Mao.
D: One doesn't have to be a Maoist or Marxist, to see the opportunism and individualism that goes with liberalism--that is, the cracked-out addiction to safety and security, greed and waste, that drives this fearism, hey Michael? Henri Lefebvre called it the "terror of everyday life." It is the pernicious creeping passivity that throttles our liberal 'souls' and leaves us 'sitting ducks' or TV-couch potatoes, computer-chair potatoes, fragmented cyborgs....
M: That's my experience in most North Americans, and certainly of most youth today in Canada, where I live. Sure, I'm generalizing... but god just look at the young people going to The University of British Columbia. My six years of graduate school here have left me pretty depressed--especially, when I look at most graduate students, preservice teachers, their professors, the courses offered, the regulation of campus life and rigid bureaucratic protocols--and worst of all, a collection of "managers" posing as administrative "leaders" in the Faculty of Education and the entire university system. I don't think UBC is unique in its pathology--culture of fear. Wilber really goes after the postmodern university and cites Kors and Silvergate's study in their book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses--the administrators are becoming Grand Inquisitors, they argue. Boomeritis [a la Wilber], in leftist garb, assaults liberty in trying to defend it (narcissistically)--and a pathetic neo-liberalism results in some cases and a facist liberalism in others.
I too am 'bit' by the deadly liberalism 'bug' and the green meme psychologism of the 'new age' human potential movement that has been the hegemonic matrix of our W. society since WWII. I have long been searching for a political social movement to create, to belong to, to imagine...something Melucci (1989) describes the essence of what I am looking for in a social movement and transdisciplinary inquiry (outside of the 'Fear' Matrix):
"The submerged networks of social movements are laboratories of experience. New problems and questions are posed. New answers are invented and tested, and reality is perceived and named in different ways."
****
Note:
1. Fisher, R. M. (2003). Fearless leadership in and out of the 'Fear' Matrix. Unpubl. dissert. Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia, pp. 18-19.
