| This is an autobiographical study of Wuo Young-Ie, a labor movement activist-intellectual in Taiwan. He was recruited to the Taiwanese leftist community when he studied at U. C. Berkeley from 1985 to 87. After he returned to Taiwan, he became a journalist covering labor issues and then full-time activist. In 1994 he formally joined an activist/organizer group called "Workshop" which functioned as the secretariat of CALL (the Committee for Actions for Labor Legislation)---the most active labor coalition in the 1990s and early 2000s. Wuo later became one of the leaders of the Workshop, but his succession also brought about serious tensions between him and three female senior members. The study ends with an internal conflict in 2001, often called "a split" by other Workshop members, that led to Wuo leaving the group.;The motivation for this self-archiving is a normative/ethical one, trying to narrate against the tradition derived from Benda-Said that makes the contemporary intellectual's role model someone who is "critical but detached." Wuo discloses the dark side of his biographical details as well as the resulting organizational failures. He tries to testify that direct, embodied, day-to-day engagement with other actor-subjects is the core quality of intellectual self-transformation, social movements and any radical political intentions.;Inspired by the early Lukacs' emphasis on the "mediation process of organization," Wuo argues that the relational dialogues between individualities/classes, which are social, cultural, historical, political and economically defined/differentiated, are usually arduous and torturous, and this messiness cannot be suppressed with a detached misophobic gesture. Borrowing from Bourdieu's theory of practice, this thesis claims that any radical habitus will not be born out of voluntarism; it needs an intentionally created field to make it happen and keep it sustainable. Social movement organizations are "laboratorial micro public spaces" which allow for experimentation in new social relations and personal interactions. Radical actors must commit themselves to some kind of organizational life, that is, to a self-structured process that will lead to self-transformation.;Keywords: Radical intellectuals, self-transformation, organizational life, labor movement, body and violence, gendered life trajectory, leadership failure, laboratorial micro public spaces... |
