Left Curve No.19 Editorial

"The time is out of joint... The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time,
seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it
grows." - Derrida, Specters of Marx

The more time has lapsed since the collapse of the post-WWII bi-polar world system
(Capitalism vs. Socialism, Worker vs. Bourgeois, West vs. East, First World vs. Third
World, Market vs. State planning, individualism vs. collectivism, and a myriad of
variations on that theme) the more uncertain things seem to have become. The absence of
sense has settled into a bewildering confusion that curiously evokes stasis, suspended
animation on a groundless plateau on which float isolated monads gasping for sustenance
- some of the forms of which have been: an uncritical re-hashing of worn-out metaphors of
blame and victimization (all too often falling prey to self-aggrandizement while the
problems remain unsolved or get worse); the expeditious acceptance of an(y) identity based
on the needs of the moment; passive resignation, excuses for stimulating "pleasure
receptors" in a detached body; or a mindless celebration of a vague mythified new reality
somewhere in outer, hyper or cyber space. Everything is tentative, provisional, expedient,
dependent, controlled, determined. Universal and particular are torn asunder: globalization
and identity, where 'ner the twain can meet. A pale blue dot adrift in an empty cosmos,
isolated individuals searching for a home.

And yet, paradoxically, the human world today is an ever-closer, tighter-nit and
interwoven process than it had ever been in recorded history. The globalization process is
most obvious in the global commodity market which has colonized all observable and
conceivable space. (Unfortunately, the "positive in the negative" hasn't emerged) It is also
obvious in the rapid development of communication/information media, as well as in
science. Concerning the latter, most recent developments in science have revealed the
underlying (bio)chemical unity of all life, not to mention matter itself throughout the known
universe; paleontology and molecular biology increasingly point to our species' having
originated in one time and place; linguistics has begun to reveal the fundamental unifying
structure of language, if not a root "mother tongue." In other words, the rapid
diversification of cultures is a very recent phenomenon on the scale of human evolutionary
history. Yet, paradoxically, the more it becomes known that we as a species are
truly "one", bound together on a planet of finite resources, the more it appears that social
and personal identity has fractured, fragmented, atomized into self-enclosed bubbles of
exclusivity, jealously, fear, hostility and violence. Much of it, no doubt, has to do with the
contestation for power - a fight for a larger share of the (capitalist) pie, aided and abetted
by an unconscionable corporate media industry quick to exploit the basest desires in
the mega-war of capitalist competition - against which such "self-preservational
instincts" become defensively susceptible to closed, localized, protective and parochial
identities.

Nevertheless, irrespective of all the above disequilibrium, it is equally true that
the process has unfolded within the inherited inequities of modernity. It is the means to
correct injustice and economic privation that have come into question, for which no
solutions have been forthcoming that are capable of adequately theorizing "how things are"
and thus of mobilizing our collective imaginations for meaning and change.

It is within this over-all atmosphere that this issue has been put together. Nothing here
is offered as "solutions." But, irrespectively, much thought has been put into presenting
work that, in however an indirect, peripheral or imperfect ways, confront the dilemmas of
our time, and do so from positions external to dominant structures. Work that tries to pierce
through the opacity of the status quo, strives to create meaning, and comes from within a
hope that making sense is possible, and that it can be made better.

As usual, we would very much like to hear from you with your
thoughts, work, contributions.
- the editor