Ever Present - Loss of Historicity - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15122063
I'm trying to think about the asserted sense of us being stuck in a continuous present and having lost our historical sense.

I see that the lack of historicism is assertedly a quality of our postmodernist times.
https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/jamesonpostmodernity.html
1) the weakening of historicity. Jameson sees our "historical deafness" (xi) as one of the symptoms of our age, which includes "a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation (x). Postmodern theory itself Jameson sees as a desperate attempt to make sense of the age but in a way that refuses the traditional forms of understanding (narrative, history, the reality obscured by ideology). For postmodernists, there is no outside of ideology or textuality; indeed, postmodern theory questions any claim to "truth" outside of culture; Jameson sees this situation as itself a symptom of the age, which in turn plays right into the hands of capitalism: "postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order..., but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself" (xii). Jameson calls instead for the return of history; hence, his mantra: "always historicize!" Jameson pinpoints a weakening of history "both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose 'schizophrenic' structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts" (Postmodernism 6). As Jameson explains, the schizophrenic suffers from a "breakdown of the signifying chain" in his/her use of language until "the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time" (Postmodernism 27). Our loss of historicity, according to Jameson, most resembles such a schizophrenic position.

And this characterizes perhaps academics in humanities for some, but it seems to be the state of many people.

https://internationalfriendsofilyenkov.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/artinian-2017-radical-currents-in-soviet-philosophy-vyyggy-ilyenkov.pdf
For living life by only responding to the signals coming from a specific concrete situation would mean a direct abandonment of one’s will to power, a cessation of the process of subjectification in favor of a permanently solidified subjectivity; existing as a Being rather than a Becoming. This can be compared with the condition of generalized proletarianization described by Bernard Stiegler (2010) as a condition of profound loss of knowledge – leading to loss of activity – in two dimensions: how to live (savoir-vivre) and how to do (savoir-faire) (2010: 40).
...
The proletariat, by being subject to capitalist hegemony in everyday life, loses its ability to think and to do. The process of human formation becomes re-directed toward human functioning as simple machine, a state of servitude devoid of autonomous thought and activity; it becomes a machinic appendage of the will of the capitalist. This total loss of the energies of becoming – the radical foreclosing of human subjectivity into a mode of servitude – marks the negation of what Vygotsky imagined as human development, the complex movement toward human freedom-in-action.

This emphasizes a kind of unfreedom as one is more akin to an animal in crude needs and satisfactions and not governed by reason, as one shifts from what one desires at each moment more so than a more abstract relation to a possible future.
In sum, Vygotsky understood freedom as a condition made possible by the practice of abstract thought, which is to say of directed human creativity on the unified planes of thought: affect and action. The point is to be able to “rise above the field” of the most immediately present here-and-now.


Instead, we're entirely subject to a status quo because we lose a sense of both historical being and of creative thought/doing(action).
... ideology is also seen to include less systematic, less easily articualted, everyday forms of consciousness. It has a material basis of daily social relations and does not originate primarily in "ruling class tricks" or a "non-social" consciousness. Those meanings and beliefs that are reified are particularly important. Loss of a sense of historicity and human creativity culmints in the naturalization of aspects of a mutable social system.
...
commonsense thought is held to play ana important role because its lack of "conscious historicity," and therefore self knowledge, prohibits the questioning of popular beliefs effectively discounting the possibility of change and anturalising the social order. Furthermore, because it is not systematic, contradictory ideas can coexist o be combined.

So we act, but we do not really think as we rely on habits and ideas which aren't really understood and thought through, characterizing our actions as passive more than active.
Activity for Spinoza concerned the quality of action rather than the mere fact of acting: the mind is active when its ideas are adequate and passive when its ideas are inadequate. For Spinoza, we are said to act when we are the adequate cause of our actions; that is, when the ideas on which our actions are based are adequate ideas. This is a totally different sense of action from the common one that makes no such profound distinction. So many of the actions that we feel ourselves to be engaged would, according to Spinoza’s line of argument, be understood as vain repetitions. Often such repetitions perpetuate what they are intended to change. This, of course, is a standard psychotherapeutic position, where an action that is claimed by a patient to be effective is revealed to be preserving the situation that the patient wishes to change. For Spinoza such activity, though it comprises concrete actions, is not really activity at all; or it is passivity, to be precise, because it is driven by inadequate ideas.


So what are the conditions that give rise to a historical sense and an abstraction from the immediacy of the world and mere reactions to it and habits from it? How do we develop into relatively freer people?
It seems following Spinoza's characterization, there is a need to be 'active' or creative in regards to Vygotsky.
While an individual can educate themselves, it seems this isn't sustainable in terms of intergenerational development. That there is still the issue of everyday living for the mass of people and the conditions which support or hinder their ability to
think through their situations beyond the immediate appearances and preconcieved ideas.
Last edited by Wellsy on 22 Sep 2020 15:52, edited 1 time in total.

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