The big-picture questions of ultimate goals and wondering about what this is all about is something I most unfortunately muse over excessively. But despite being frustrating it is important, in my opinion, to have some idea of where it is we dream to go.
Firstly, obviously my goal in talking about issues regarding privilege, class, feminism, etc. is to highlight the particularities and injustices of our culture. Here, the things people have been taught and the way things work in order to hide unfairness is firstly not universal (i.e. there is no need for things to always be this way) and secondly a product of inculcation.
Yet, at the same time, in highlighting injustices, Im appealing to something which has a cultural meaning. I am using English, I am making sense in some way. So, clealry even if Im not societys biggest fan, Im working with it. I also dont want it to end, necessarily, just to change.
The kind of things Im working on are based on the assumption that awareness of injustice will also change the level of injustice, it will lead to more justice. But this isnt necessarily the case, there are people who dont care about fairness or equality. This seems to limit the scope of what talking about issues can actually do. However, I do notice that usually an appeal to fairness is culturally meaningful. If people become aware of it, they generally dont like it, its just that unfairness is so well hidden most of the time that most people dont realise what is going on.
I think it seems obvious that activism isnt intended to be some move toward post-culturalism, because there is no evidence to suppose that culture inherrently creates injustice. And indeed, what we would consider to be injustice is contested yet nonetheless embedded in the idea that individuals should be rewarded for working hard (rather than being born into a particular family or getting by purely through similar kinds of luck). In that case, activism assumes culture and there isnt wrong with that.
But, in turn, that would mean that activism is about changing culture and society in particular ways. Therefore, it leads to utopia-creation (or at least a move towards some kind of utopia). For me, relaying an alternative also limits activism because firstly, so few people are willing to articulate a utopia because, and secondly, in doing so you have to acknoweldge that from a seemingly utopian world, other problems, not yet imagined by the activist or by people generally, may arise which may render the utopia even worse than what we all started with. Think Animal Farm.
We also lose perspective in that as much as we might be worried about practical problems surrounded with people trying to live in their everyday lives without pain and undue suffering, such problems tend to become clouded and relayed to others in the talk of ideology. Someone not being able to feed their family, working two jobs, is a victim of capitalism, etc. But as soon as you start abstracting, we lose the raw experience of what it is like to work day-in and day-out and still not be able to achieve basic survival for those relying on you. The experience in itself is reason for activism, it is not really about capitalism or ideology, it is about living. I feel that activism should best turn to empathy, trying to record and understand the daily livesw of other people. Losing the language of ideology is not an option, but getting in those voices needs to be crucial if what is going to underlie activism is to be more important that an imperfectly realised utopian vision.
