<nettime> Revitalization

[{ brad brace } <bbrace@eskimo.com>]

A maintaining dynamic provides stability, while a
modernizing dynamic forces change. We tend to be satisfied
with a view of the world as a theatre of conflict between
stability and change. Collecting a congeries of phenomena
under the rubric of modernization, we project a future that
will be purified in a certain direction. With only the
craven desire for stability to overcome, the victory of
modernization seems assured, and the world must progress
toward the mechanized, the artificial, the commercial, the
secular, the individual, and the international. There is,
however, an oppositional force of self-conscious resistance
on behalf of the bodily, the natural, the creative, the
sacred, the collective, and the local. This countervailing
force is underestimated because we have not yet learned, as
we have with modernization, to gather its disparate signs
under one label. Oppositional actions do not connect
directly; they align independently in negative response to
modernization, the force also called, depending upon
context, progress, development, secularization,
industrialization, westernization, or colonialism. The goal
is not maintenance;  the orientation is progressive, but the
dynamic is recursive. The mind scans the past to imagine the
future.  Consider the popularity of hobbies involving
handicraft, the concern for environmental conservation and
historic preservation, the profusion of civic festivals, the
resurgence of ethnic identity, the escalation of nativism,
and nationalism, the institution of reactionary values in
politics and education, the convergence of alternative
ideology and spiritual yearning in religious revival, the
new age cults, in Christianity and Judaism, in Buddhism,
Hinduism, and Islam. In detail it is too much to encompass:
The Mahabharata in ninety-three installments on Indian
television, mosques destroyed in Bosnia and built in
Afghanistan, powpows in Oklahoma, martial arts in Japan, new
music in Colombia, glass painting in Poland and Romania,
rosemaling in Norway and Wisconsin, political order in Iran,
rebellion in Chechnya, separatism in Quebec, fundamentalism
in Christianity, the Mao cult in China, Kwanzaa in
Philadelphia, the Eid parade in Dhaka city, Saraswati Puja
at Jagannath Hall... But take it all together, name it
revitalization, and it is a power to balance modernization.


The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project       >>>> posted since 1994 <<<<

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