Well, it took me a week, but I got to the end of the whole podcast 😅 a piece that probably deserves about 10 separate comments, but I’ll just relate to the last bit: fetish of the indigenous (as a white modernity reaction)
I’ve been super-slowly reading Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira and having all sorts of responses to that work, which picks up on deep-Left doom-feelings and fuels my imaginings of a spacious birth after the death, of modernity. Maybe a little bit of sci-fi fantasy is going on for me too (Octavia Butler Xenogenesis) I think the meanings of words between this discussion and her work may lie in the detail, but all I can really do is consider where things land in me with the guidance of these excellent thinkers (yourselves and Machado de Oliveira)
In me I find a fine-tuning or calibrating may be happening. What are all these other modernities, and have I ever even experienced them? This is happening while noticing (finally) the ubiquitous power- triad exports of the West: prisons, hospitals, schools (Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich)
What about the modernities that never invented schools, prisons and hospitals?
Modernities without the militaristic ideals of Nursing, Pedagogy, so many others.
Modernities of the Other..
Anyway as I said it’s a calibration. A chance to move off a binary node of response. A chance to accidentally nurse further fetishes that will need excavating at a later date…maybe? Better mistakes?
I love the idea of better mistakes. mistake, mistake again, mistake better.
Illich’s Deschooling Society is such a fascinating entry point. It makes me wonder, whatever the system, Indigenous or otherwise, that we must learn the ways to question how we learn and unlearn. Lest we risk circling back into the traps of nostalgic fetishism.
I’m really looking forward to reading Machado de Oliveira, thank you for bringing that into focus.
Well, it took me a week, but I got to the end of the whole podcast 😅 a piece that probably deserves about 10 separate comments, but I’ll just relate to the last bit: fetish of the indigenous (as a white modernity reaction)
I’ve been super-slowly reading Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira and having all sorts of responses to that work, which picks up on deep-Left doom-feelings and fuels my imaginings of a spacious birth after the death, of modernity. Maybe a little bit of sci-fi fantasy is going on for me too (Octavia Butler Xenogenesis) I think the meanings of words between this discussion and her work may lie in the detail, but all I can really do is consider where things land in me with the guidance of these excellent thinkers (yourselves and Machado de Oliveira)
In me I find a fine-tuning or calibrating may be happening. What are all these other modernities, and have I ever even experienced them? This is happening while noticing (finally) the ubiquitous power- triad exports of the West: prisons, hospitals, schools (Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich)
What about the modernities that never invented schools, prisons and hospitals?
Modernities without the militaristic ideals of Nursing, Pedagogy, so many others.
Modernities of the Other..
Anyway as I said it’s a calibration. A chance to move off a binary node of response. A chance to accidentally nurse further fetishes that will need excavating at a later date…maybe? Better mistakes?
I love the idea of better mistakes. mistake, mistake again, mistake better.
Illich’s Deschooling Society is such a fascinating entry point. It makes me wonder, whatever the system, Indigenous or otherwise, that we must learn the ways to question how we learn and unlearn. Lest we risk circling back into the traps of nostalgic fetishism.
I’m really looking forward to reading Machado de Oliveira, thank you for bringing that into focus.