Re: [sudo-discuss] a safe space, what does it mean to you?

In practice social space is impossible without implicit rules guiding appropriate social behavior for that space. Sociality is relational, and all relations have an accepted physics starting with the dyadic form of cultural exchange, including the structure of language and gesture itself - an agreed-upon, generative set of implicit rules governing social communication that we already must accept as the basis for any sort social practice (and corollary underlying moral schemas) to be engaged in. NB/SR may have constituted a site-specific, subcultural set of unspoken mores, but their points of divergence from the mass culture, or their lack of explicit articulation, does not render them nonexistent: In the case of consecrating a definition for 'safe space' - a prohibition against physical intimidation, or against ethnoracial/gender/ableist discrimination, and in fact many other implicit 'rules' generally abided by at NB/SR come to mind. As we strive to resist the determinist, ever-acculturating structures and strictures of capitalism and mass culture in our own ways, I personally feel we must be wary of a sort of unattainable utopianism that in its nature precludes any possibility of realization: be it some perfect social space without any 'rules' or a language/argot that is perfectly politically correct or un-misconstruable. When relations are implicit, we can all have our own unarticulated sense of what the social 'rules' are, even perhaps to the point of pretending they dont exist. To hack the implicit into explicitness is what cultural anthropologists do, and in general is an enlightnening, reflexive, science-minded excercise that can result in exactly the kind of actionable transparency for our community so valued by SR. -my 2c