Post Progressive
Progress is a complex word with a complex history. The first intellectually serious book I both read and understood concerned progress and its relation to ideas of eternal recurrence. I will not burden my readers with these more general considerations. Of more immediate interest is the idea of progress as it seems to be understood among people who call themselves ‘progressives’. These are people who advance what Lyotard terms the ‘emancipatory narrative’. In North America the emancipatory narrative concerns advancing the interests of certain marginalized communities historically disadvantaged (often egregiously so) in Canadian and American society. This emancipatory project is selective in certain ways. No one, for instance, is worried about Jehovah’s Witnesses or other historically marginal sects. Still, EVERY political project must have shape and if it must have shape it must have boundaries. Part of this will indeed come down to which groups appeal to our sympathies and which do