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Created: October 12, 2002
Latest Update: October 12, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Empowerment with Theory: Hermeneutics and Law Enforcement

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

On Saturday, October 12, 2002, Dante McGalen wrote:

Subject: empowerment with theory

I can't help myself but question. I can't but help ask one so knowledgeable of the backstage and theory of great intensity.

Why is it we speak of public discourse, but the very ones we speak of, blue collar indeed, those of whom should rightly be equipped, are not in resource of possibilities between the hermeneutics critical and social theory and the police departments? Law, biblical.....all have a certain applicable reference to hermeneutics, yet, do a search, intensive, and find this reference coincide with any police department? Give me a public forum perfectly lacking qualifying titles that are speaking this. I want to find this and can't.....assuredly my error? This is where a generation unbeget 20 years experience on the force, can still equip the department, the people they protect, with a powerful tool. "Community policing" has even slowly run from their mouths because it lacked the public discourse of those so much benefiting from its promises. We understand that without communication, it runs amuck. Unfortunately, the social and critical theories of the sorts may quickly be spewed from the very people it aids, nevermind the words hiding behind the eyes of more privilege. Keeping such thinning within the confines of the elite or more educated, is simply questionable. Those holding the degree at universities can speak so highly of the negativity the faculty may impose, but those seeing these confines, should appreciate the same confines and lack of public discourse in locking hermeneutics into a simply stated, "graduate theory" or topic. Empowerment? Why wait for it to maybe trickle down? Please Professor, is there an article that empowers those in need of this public discourse outside the academy? Can we get one to translate to the public with discourse, unashamed of speaking incomparable to their colleagues, yet, without insulting or leaving others in the dust? What do you get when you put three men in the same suit? You get three perspectives, despite one a police officer, Professor at UIC, and former UWP student! What perspective is narrowed to the students, if this be argued, of those confined within the limits of one perspective? THIS is what we so graciously confine to the "graduate" students process. Beg for one or the other, but not either. Thank you for hearing my foolishness.

On Saturday, October 12, 2002, jeanne replied:

Dante, dear Dante,

My kids will have fits if I go off on a tangent with Ricoeur and hermeneutics, and I will probably die of exhaustion. But that isn't really what you're asking for, is it, my young poet? You're asking, I fear, the same question as Ms. or Mr. Webb of Tulane University, for my "take" on "our" (the Academy, in this case) responsibility for empowering our students, all of them, with the skills of illocutionary discussion, of learning to listen in good faith to the Other (incarcerated or in trouble or in violation of some rule, in this case).

Good question, Dante. And as a radical left scholar, albeit one in a small school, overworked and running late as usual, I think I owe you as honest an answer as I can muster. To me the primary meaning of being a left radical today is to want, sincerely want, and in all the self-reflexivity I can manage social justice for all. That doesn't mean that we have to each control the means of production because the very nature of production has changed so, or that we need some specific central governmental control, or that we have to undo the excess of late capitalism. It means that we have to get in touch with ourselves, our authentic subjectivities, find a little silence away from being told what we want and how we're supposed to feel, and elect not to exploit and dominate others who are less powerful or smart or pretty or a different color or whatever.

Because we have spent so little time in our schools and our homes and our neighborhoods doing that, getting in touch with our subjectivity and authenticiy, it may take us a while to evoke the courage to look full face into the eyes of greed and uncaring. It takes a while to admit that even though we "didn't know" that anyone was harmed by immigration policies, that we have looked the other way and remained silent in the face of terrible oppression and so we did know and we ARE complicit. One of my students said recently "But why should I be responsible for something I didn't do?" And the answer to that is "because you benefited from it. The privilege you enjoy today was born of that injustice. No it isn't the same responsibility as the one who actively participated in the harm. But it isn't innocence, either.

And, no, you aren't expected to feel tremendous guilt and try to undo all the wrongs of the past. As a person who shares my horror at social injustice all I would ask is that you no longer be complicit. That you educate yourself in reading, in hearing in good faith, in telling to your friends and family the stories we are gathering that help us understand the harm that we have done through empire-building, through colonization, through gender, race, and religious discrimination and hostility. No, we are certainly not the only ones to do such things. We may or may not be responsible somewhere sometime for what our government does in our name without our knowledge and approval. I leave that for future generations and God to judge.

But we are responsible. We are responsible for learning to recognize the harm we have caused the Other. If Bechtel was in fact permitted to use our government and/or its connections in Bolivia to gain control of Bolivia's water rights, and if in fact we did then construct immense water plants to produce clean water, and then charged more than most of the Bolivians could pay for water, and demanded our rights even to the wells the poor tried to dig to get clean water, and then permitted Bechtel to sue Bolivia for millions because of the water system it had built, but which did not serve all the people, after the people reclaimed the right to their water, but with no money from the World Bank to make the water clean and accessible, then we are responsible for saying no to our government in its support of Bechtel. We are responsible for listening to this information and for checking out its accuracy and for demanding that humanity precede profits.

Is this what you're telling me we have failed to do in our schools, to teach you this kind of responsibility? Then, I plead guilty. But it's been very hard for me and Susan to teach the number of classes we do and try to teach illocutionary discussion before we even found Maria Pia Lara's book to teach with and before we had time to put up all of Habermas' ideas in plain English and before we found any support to help create and maintain the site. Yep. Even radical left persons have limits. And even radical left persons have families whom they love, and crises and cats and dogs and all the other things that make up the roses of life. We need to keep living in joy, if we are to go on raising our voices high and clear against social injustice.

Yes, Susan and I know how to teach it. Just hear Susan's YIKES! on this week's issue. Me, too. We're both so excited we're having a hard time saying NO to what we know we shouldn't take time out for. We know so well, even though the universities never gave us enough support to make it easy. It was still fun. And the site is almost indexed. And two weeks ago I promised to go to one of our local cities and begin teaching at a church in the local community ILLOCUTIONARY DISCOURSE. And I can, Dante. I know now that I can. And the site will work, and the community is welcome to go on and learn more.

So there's the first part of your answer. Through the long suffering of all of our students at CSUDH and at UWP we have learned how. Modules and essays, and practice modules, and I took partial retirement to make the time to do the site so we could do it. Now, the first of next year, we'll test it here in California. And if you have a group you want to use the basic program of how to go about illocutionary discussion leading into public discourse on governance and or social and criminal justice, we've got the program. I'll teach you how to do it. But not till this semester is OVER.

Now, knowing how fast you can read and that January is a long long way off, here's what a quick search of YAHOO under hermeneutics AND enforcement AND police yielded:

• Addictions 1999: An International Research Journal Review: Karim Murji, Policing Drugs, Ashgate Publishing (Aldershot: 1998), 196 pp hard cover . Reviewed by L. A. Visano, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology, York University. Backup.

• A Re-interpretation of Social Theory from the Perspective of Hermeneutics Susan R. Takata, University of Wisconsin, Parkside. Jeanne Curran, California State Univ. - Dominguez Hill. American Society of Criminology in November 2002. Link added October 12, 2002.

  "Interdependence between theoretical understanding and praxis is addressed as an issue over which the citizen should have agency in public discourse. Criminologists have a particularly important role in reinterpreting plausible theoretical approaches in language accesible to the local community, and in conceptually relating the theory to permutations of political solutions open to address the issues. This is crucial to the field of criminology, for the very nature of the concept of crime is dependent upon the interpretations and reinterpretations to which we subject both our theoretical approach and the underlying assumptions on which it is founded. Our conclusion that the ordinary citizen must be prepared to accept responsibility and to engage in effective public discourse on the basic issues of how crime shall be defined and how we will deal with control locally, nationally, and in a global context, is based on an experimental community forum drawn from our college students in a Los Angeles community. They were persuaded to explore with us just how such public discourse might effectively take place through actually engaging in the forum."

  OK, so it's our paper. Just shows we've been writing about it for a while.

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