Bruce Ingraham in the ICE Conference blog has every reason to mistrust the demos when all/most nations appear to be nations of fools. As a scion of the country that elected both George Bushes and a long-time resident of first Thatcher's and now Blair's Britain, I can only come to the (tentative) conclusion that the fact that only a minority of those eligible to vote actually do vote is a good thing, not the bad thing that I had always thought it was. The ways in which those who do not engage in electoral processes, or indeed other state-sanctioned political acts, are becoming increasingly interesting to me. But, I have always been interested in polity - how the institutions of society are ordered - and politics, which for me has more to do with how power is applied to polity.
Macroeconomics would categorise the institutions of society into the productive, that is: agriculture and industry, and the reproductive: religion, education and the family. The history of modernism can be read as the process of inverting an old order which subordinated the productive function to the reproductive function (e.g. enterprise for the Glory of God), and bringing forth a new order in which reproduction is subordinated to production. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the contemporary politics of education, where the employers' skills "needs" are the dominant policy motivator.
We have been asked to say one thing in three minutes that we would want you to take away from this session.
I do not have time to name each of the presenters, let alone to draw out the threads of the many excellent papers we have discussed - and have had discussed. I have to accept that much that much of the dialogue has been dialogic: inherent in the texts and their contexts more than in the often worthily truncated discussions.
We are lurking on the threshold of a cracked earth: critical partisans negotiating our genCX cyborg subjectivity, disoriented but flattering ourselves, maybe, as holy fools (the pun works orally), competent for C, creating and resolving difference as we reflect and confront the inscribing Antidialogic: the faux constructivist, the logos of the narcissistic, even necrophiliac, colonising self that demands its own reflection from the colonised, ludic, minoritarian, transgressive, feeling, cosmopolitan worker/(demonic) other.
Can we be the ambivalence? Can we - whoever we are - be the doubly-inscribed parent/oppressor at the heart of authority where the divides: digital, economic, social, are written on the axis of identity and where identity, location, and culture are co-constituted and inter-scribed on our learning technology?
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