Hei Brian --
While the discussion is interesting, I think for me, the crux of what you have
written here is the subject line, which I am sure you chose with that in mind.
It is our daily moment-to-moment practices (praxis!) that most affect the nature
of reality and how the world goes. How we *live*: where we 'work', what we are
working on, who we work for, how we treat the proximal Others who circulate
around us, what we consume, how we consume, how we move around, how we treat our
embodied selves,
As I look around to friends, colleagues, and the various Others I run into, I
often see a deep dissonance between the models they have in mind and how they
actually live. The same pertains to the Self. Very few people go beyond dominant
paradigms as it is locally understood to live a life that goes beyond lip-service.
I have in mind a friend here in this small town at the end of the road in rural
Arizona -- his daily practice is (literally) built around "DWAM", that is,
"Doing With Available Materials" as a former urban planner, and now an
alternative home designer/builder, (water harvesting) landscape architect, and
all 'round handyman. Given local conditions, he implements his alternative
biilding work through (many times) innovative techniques in the DWAM way. It's
inspiring to work with him precisely because he has taken a wide range of ideas
and brought them into a consequent lived praxis. I love the fact, for example,
that he keeps a hard pressure up on the local building inspection regime,
pushing them to accept alternative techniques (that they are blissfully ignorant
of in the best case) and that are 'no-brainers' for this desertified region.
Pressuring the dominant is best accomplished when the model is fully aligned
with praxis, and vice-versa.
Of last import is how we speak, what we say -- as the symbolic, while it may be
the social source of profound actions and practices -- remains symbolic and is
in constant need of being transformed into embodied action, us giving our
energies back to reality in more-than-symbolic ways.
Cheers,
John
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
