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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: October 7, 2001
Latest Update: October 7, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

I'm Scared

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors: September 2001.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This file is based on FBI, CIA warn of more attacks: Retaliation feared if U.S. strikes Afghanistan By Susan Schmidt and Bob Woodward. Dang Cao, CSUDH, sent us this link. backup

On Saturday, October 6, 2001, Dang Cao, CSUDH, sent the MSNBC story on imminent attacks.

On Sunday, October 7, 2001, jeanne began this essay:

Dang, I had been avoiding facing the very real issue of fear. Wesley Hall made me aware of it yesterday, in a beautiful piece I'll put up shortly. Then your e-mail from MSNBC was waiting for me this morning. And suddenly I understood that we need to address the fact that "I'm scared. And so are you. So are all of us." We're not used to having that emotion so upfront and personal, and to seeing its tentacles creep into so many different parts of our lives.

My first instinct is to remind us all that "fight or flight" is a basic instinct. We're all feeling it. Even President Bush. Trust me. It's just that we've been taught in a culture of adversarialism that "flight" is cowardly. It is urgent that today we keep in mind Fellman's admonition that both "fight" and "flight" are appropriate at times. They are interdependent with the structural context. And we have a very complex structural context here. No one is quite sure how much of each we need. But everyone is sure we need to be measured in balancing the extremes.

I am reminded of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's comments on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's goals: first, to understand what happened. To get statements from those who had engaged in frightful acts that those acts had indeed taken place. We needed to pool and confirm our interdependent conceptions of reality out there. We needed some stable ground from which to begin to rebuild. The TRC served that end.

Forgiveness comes into the picture then, for if we follow simply vengeance, we are likely to be caught up in an endless loop (autopoietic - Luhmann) that pays little heed to the senselessness and the enormity of the violence itself. (nonlearning subsytem - Habermas)

These are themes that run through the theoretical approaches we have explored in all our classes: the complexity of the subject/object; the diversity of perspectives; alterity, recognition of the Other and all that implies.

Visual literacy as a tool for understanding enters here, for truth-telling, forgiveness, listening in good faith, and respect for the integrity of the Other challenge our resistance to self-reflective critical thought. We can often express feelings and pre-rational ideas visually before (if ever) we can articulate them. Visual literacy brings art out of the formality and institutionalization of museums and galleries and a hierarchically structured world into both public and private space. That's what conceptual art is all about: art as a semiotic tool, art as a means of thinking through social and philosophical issues that resist articularion and that need to reach out broadly to all of us, not just the "art crowd."

We have long been accustomed to art reacing out into our lives through advertising, polls, marketing of all types, our public sphere. But we have not been as alert to our own need to incorporate such tools into our private sphere. Alan Ryave's paper on the withholding of compliments reminds us that we are remiss in the paying of compliments. We have become unaccustomed as a social group to using the social glue that relieves some of the tension of individual/community tension, the tension of the corporate push towards acquistiveness as a corporate profit-making tool, the tension of adversarial "winning" and "success" as opposed to mutuality and community solidarity.

More soon . . . jeanne 10/7/01.

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