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Riffs on a Politics of Destination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Elizabeth Faue
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Extract

The subject of this panel recently reminded me of a joke my father told me when I was eight or nine years old, “the 1929 knee-slapper.” It seems a traveling salesman was hopelessly lost in the countryside. After hours of driving around, he pulled up to a farmhouse and greeted the farmer. Hesitantly, the salesman asked the farmer, “Where does this road go?” The farmer rather adamantly replied, “This road don't go nowhere. This road stays right here.“

I imagine a philosopher spending hours trying to figure out the deeper meaning of the farmer's answer. Where is “right here“? What or who is in motion, and what is the real message to the harried and hurried salesman, confused by unmarked roads in the countryside, all of which “lead” somewhere without going anywhere? Is the farmer asserting a collective or individual sense of ownership of the roadway, or merely projecting his disdain at the linear logic of a representative of market capitalism?

Type
A Roundtable on Gender, Race, Class, Culture, and Politics: Where Do We Go from Here?
Information
Social Science History , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 39 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1998

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