Dear Colleagues;
I just listened to an argument about modern art on an NPR interview.
The jist of it was that there is no more avant garde. Nobody is really
outside the system, because the second someone offers a really interesting
critique or counter-movement they are immediately 'signed, packaged, and
marketed'. Hence nothing remains truly critical. Should we allow a link
with Amazon.com on JWSR? If we were pure, then no. But we are not pure.
Many of us work for universities that have or continue to accept money
from dubious sources, put it into dubious programs and research, and turn
out students with dubious ideas. At this very moment you are reading a
message from someone employed by the same univeristy where the government
created LSD in the hope of finding a cold war espionage weapon, on a
communications medium created and perhaps sustained to facilitate military
interaction and defense research. Is that suffienct grounds to reject
what I might say? I'm not all that happy about a commercial link for
JWSR, but if we judge this based not on its parentage but on possible
impact, then it is not so sacrilegous. High-quality (fast and relatively
low-priced) access to the full range of publications in our world would
seem a progressive, not a regressive, thing. Nor can I imagine a set of
circumstances where JWSR would alter anything in order to either keep
Amazon happy or gain additionally at our expense as a result of such a
link. I trust Chris to cut a good deal (regarding size of the link, etc.)
and will treat it as but one more indication of the complexity of the
world system and the way struggles against its inequalities unfold -- not
as a sell-out.
Best, Bob Denemark