[iDC] What is Left? / What Does a Distributed Politics Look Like?

[John Hopkins]

>Well OK.

good place to start, Abe...

Musing on this question: What is Left?  I have to ask first, what is 
it to position or locate the self in the fabric of the social system 
one is embedded in?  Is it for the Self?  Is it to appease, satisfy 
others?  Does it provide a sense of belonging, or of being Outside? 
Is it a statistical averaging that arises from the obsession with 
polls and numbers?  If it is numeric, what does it MEAN?  It clearly 
is a linguistic issue, about defining, refining meanings of 
collective etymological spaces.  As a result, it is reductive of the 
broad swath of chaotic & moving energy that the Self is.  It is 
labeling.  Sticking pins through the abdomen and on through a 
poster-board, dried out husk, carapace place-holder.  Reading the 
label, you will end up placed in a certain drawer by that social 
system, that collector of typologies.  Resistance is futile when 
these reductive parameters are accepted by the individual and/or 
imposed on the individual.

What about the process of letting the Other discover your position 
through a dynamic process of dialogue and engagement? Of discovering 
the Other from a position of open-ness to the unknown.  If the label 
is procured in the first moments, then one allows the social system 
to pre-determine the relative juxtapositions between the Self and the 
Other -- this seems counter-productive to open exchange and creative 
engagement.

I think a distributed politics looks like ... nothing in particular 
... except a dynamic community that values difference, promotes 
idiosyncrasy, and allows an open flux of be-ing.

In the extreme, maybe the social system labels this as anarchy, 
though I would not call it that.   I wouldn't call it anything.  It's 
best to simply circumscribe it with a vital praxis...

cheers,
John