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Chapter 14 | Donna Cardinal (continued) However connected they are to a larger reality, the starting place of the work of citizens in these communities is primarily local — what will we do here to address this issue about which we are concerned. A premise is that it is possible to take action locally. If it were not, action to address an issue would not make sense. One scholar who views the municipal or regional as promising political space for action taking is Warren Magnusson. Cities, according to Magnusson in The search for political space. Globalization, social movements, and the urban political experience (1996), are the nexus where global social movements and locality intersect and interact, where the benefits and stresses of globalization are experienced. It is where people move outside their everyday activities to see themselves not as passive subjects but as citizens making wider political claims. In so doing so, they “lay claim to a political space that may or may not conform to the spaces allowed by the existing systems of government” (p. 10). Another of Mr Baillargeon intriguing questions, concerning our capacities for creative expression and for handing down culture in the face of globalization, was: [C]an we not still find open spaces yet to be overrun by [...] homogenizing multinationals? And within these spaces, is it not still possible to encourage originality [...]? Is it not fertile ground for the encouragement of diversity in the midst of uniformity? I understand the concept of open spaces to be both within the mind and within the public sphere, the collective mind. We might have concern for the openness of both. For surely what we have in the public sphere is colonized space, space occupied and defined by stock images pressed upon us for decades by the behemoths of both advertising and entertainment until they have now merged into the global lifestyle branding operation described so thoroughly and chillingly by Naomi Klein in her recent book entitled No Logo (2000). Looking outward, we can feel as though the public space of the imagination is completely colonized, completely sealed, without points of entry for new ideas and without much capacity for idea generators to engage in creative dialogue with one another to shape new possibilities. Perhaps an even bigger concern is whether our imaginations have not themselves become so determined by stock images that we merely recycle these, while thinking that we are generating original images from within. From my experience with thousands of imagers over the past 15 years, I can report that, when invited, when hope and trust are present, and when the status quo will no longer do, people generate new, sometimes even remarkable, alternative visions of the future individually and collectively. What is the nature of the inner space in which new images are generated, and of the shared public space of the imagination in which to conceive the outer action that flows form the inner action of imaging new possibilities? The space created in an envisioning project is already a newly configured political and cultural space. In that space, imagers listen to one another in new ways, and these ways of listening are often designed into the future that persons envision together. In that space, protocols are introduced and used for the inner search for images, for discerning their soundness, for the outer search for collective vision and for discerning the soundness of those visions. Just as the visions entertained in the present are a foretaste of the futures people seek to invent, so is the space for imaging in some senses a foretaste of the kinds of new political/cultural space needed for enacting those futures. Just as it is possible for people to generate new images in the face of crowded imaginal space, so it seems possible for people to open new spaces for their work despite crowded public space. And these spaces have particular qualities. Returning to Magnusson, we are invited to consider that cities embody the contingent, limited, fragile and dependent qualities of political space in which citizens can make wider political claims. He reminds us that “we cannot locate ourselves in relation to just one world and just one history; instead we have to come to terms with the multiplicity of worlds and histories — spaces and times — that make up the political conditions we face... (1996: 7). For it is considering claims in relation to one another that we begin to see the connections between problems, the commonalities in the solutions (idem: 114). Perhaps it is these qualities of the political space locally that have led me to work most often with groups whose focus is the local level of political action. Into just such contingent political space can the new offerings of citizens be made, responded to, discerned, judged and potentially enacted. |
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