Dawning recognition: a definition
This is a comment on a comment, so I don't expect a lot to come out of it. Previously (I won't call it dialogue) I suggested that "today many Americans confront newly crappy conditions with too much of a dawning recognition." I said this because I thought it indicated something important about the present-day political imaginary, the one debunked in today's Weekly Watch. So here it is.
Public persuasion is hard. It's one thing to say "it's all bullsh*t," and another to show how. Nobody outside of the caucus99percent bubble cares about cool flag-waving apathy, just as we don't care about their flag-waving (D) or (R) hangups or their participation in bullsh*t political dramas. The outside world is like, I put a political sign in my front yard! Whatever. So if we want to change things and persuade people, "it's all bullsh*t" is a non-starter. In the "Desperate Escalations" video cited in today's Weekly Watch, Alastair Crooke talked about being "culturally blocked." That's a big problem with our political culture for sure.
But occasionally in the electronic media people can see dawning recognitions which identify a great absence, a gap or lacuna, within the perceived social drama appears, appearing as a great hole in the space-time fabric, like the wormhole in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And so they can see a dawning recognition that something is somehow "different." Here's a solid definition: dawning recognition is the act of imagining that something that has been going on for some time is brand-new.
On the map of bullsh*t politics, dawning recognition is about two degrees to the left of the usual ignorance. Dawning recognitions thus suggest other meanings to our politics than the usual ones. A dawning recognition might represent what used to be called a teachable moment, a moment in which a standard narrative can be revealed as bullsh*t. But usually dawning recognition merely comes and goes, nobody learns anything from it, and the social imaginary remains unaltered. This is where we step in as teachers, if we can hope to be such a thing.
Here are two examples of dawning recognition which might be of interest now.
Zelensky's claim: "I'm willing to give up land for peace."
Now, of course, Zelensky was promoting war against Russia for the past nearly three years or so, trying to get back some land within the borders of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's definition of "Ukraine" so he could give said land to BlackRock and the banking cartels. I guess he recognized at some point that throwing half-a-million Ukrainians on the war barbecue toward this end wasn't a good idea as regards his own survival. It's all still fake, of course: a real recognition of what might help him survive would result in Zelensky retiring to one of his homes somewhere in the world outside of Ukraine, and letting the West deal with Russia without his puppet-work and (hopefully) without the greater ambitions of global conquest which fed the Ukraine-Russia war in the first instance.
My second example is Bernie Sanders: There is no choice: we must defeat the oligarchs
Key paragraph:
"We just cannot sit back and accept candidates who are not prepared to stand up to Big Money interests and fight for the working class," Sanders said. "We cannot continue to do that. So, in one way or another, we have got to bring forth candidates who [will stand up to Big Money]."
Sanders, of course, spent the last four years telling us we needed to vote for the oligarchs, as long as said oligarchs had the sacred (D) next to their names. I guess he dawningly recognized, sometime last month, that such a ploy didn't work, and won't work. But since he's not recognizing any need for a political party _for_ the working class at this time, there he is again, advocating something else which also won't work.
At any rate, those are two shows, above, of dawning recognition. Make of them what you will. Maybe they can be teachable moments. Maybe they aren't. We can only hope.
Comments
It starts with an awareness
.
of some dichotomy or schism
followed by your 'dawning recognition'
that the pieces do not fit together
source comprehension is next which
begets formulating a response.
IMO.
it would be nice if Sanders dawningly recognized
that a full break with the Democrats was necessary.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
When the other genocides happen
I expect the present-day apologist for the current one to tell the world "we had no idea."
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
I always thought "imaginary" was an adjective. So I googled it
Imaginary as a noun.
Here is my conception of the modern social order: When A gives money to B, B does what A wants B to do. You can call this capitalism, and overthrow it and replace it with a more humane and socially responsible way of life.
If it is not replaced, my opinion is that civilization will degenerate into some form of hell.
So best of luck with the new imaginary.
Show me. Don't tell me.
This is not directed at any one individual. It is my sincere take on this kind of social "science."
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
discussion of the social imaginary
is not really social science. It might have once been psychology, but psychology has become cognitive psychology, and discussion of the social imaginary is definitely not cognitive psychology. The social imaginary is descended in an Oxford English Dictionary sort of way from Lacan, who was in the school of Freud. Freud was an explorer and a coke-head; Lacan is unreadable. Nobody cares about that branch of psychology any more.
It might also once have been philosophy, but philosophy has become analytic philosophy, a field obsessed with words like "epistemology" and "ontology" instead of trying to figure out what human beings are, which is what Socrates tried to do. Socrates said "know thyself," or some other such forgotten message.
So discussion of the social imaginary is nothing. Or, rather, it's nothing if you don't think of the radical things you can think about when you think about the social imaginary. More specifically, the social imaginary is nothing if you believe in the system, the system that today claims to know what psychology and philosophy are.
So what is money? And why are our society's fools doing things merely upon receipt of money? Karl Marx said about money, in the Grundrisse, his outline of a grand plan for everything, that “money, so far as it already exists in itself as capital, is thus merely a draft on future labour." But to accept that definition, we have to imagine "future labor," just as when we work for wages we have to imagine that our wages will pay the bills some time in the very near future when we pay them. The f*ck anyone knows what the future will really bring -- it's all common assumption.
Money is not really a physical thing -- people said it was gold, but that wasn't enough, and then they said it was paper-cloth bills and coinage, and that wasn't enough, and so now money is pixels on a screen.
No, money is an imaginary. Money has to be imagined. And an imaginary is something that has to be imagined, that cannot be proven to exist merely by pointing to a physical object. And since money circulates, it is a social imaginary. If you want to replace capitalism, you'll have to replace the imaginary that gives us money. Otherwise A will continue to give MONEY to B, and B will do what A says. The Bolsheviks couldn't replace the money imaginary, and the Maoists couldn't do it either. Fidel and Che? Nope. Che tried the hardest, in my estimate.
So it will get nobody anywhere to sneer at the concept of the imaginary.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon