“For these people the concrete has become an asylum, a hideout, salvation. Cedar–well, yes, that’s something concrete; so is asphalt. You can speak out about the concrete, express yourself as freely as you like. The great thing about the concrete is that it has its own clearly demarcated armed frontiers with warning bells along them. When a mind immersed in the concrete begins to apprach that border, the bells warn that just beyond lies the field of treacherous general ideas, undesirable ideas, and synthesis. At the sound of this signal the cautious mind recoils and dives back into concrete. We can see the whole process in the face of our interlocutor. He might be going along, talking in the most lively of ways, quoting numbers, percentages, names, and dates. We can see how firmly he is anchored in the concrete, like a rider in the saddle. Then we ask: ‘That’s all well and good, but why are people, in some way, shall we say, imperfectly satisfied?’ At this point we can see how his face changes. The alarm bells have gone off: Attention! Yoiu are about to cross the border of the concrete! He looks desperately for a way out—which is, of course, to retreat back into the concrete”.
This quote made my day. It is beautiful. And you though it was about some self-important pragmatist in the Digital Humanities . Well apart form that, I am sorry to tell you, you are wrong. It is about that nice bloke the Shah of Iran and the intellectual landscape (if you can call it that) under his dictatorship. It is from Ryszard Kapuscinski’s wonderful book ‘Shah of Shahs’.
I always thought that English practicality was hiding something underneath. I still really don’t get it. I struggle with it; it seems more extreme here than anywhere else. I suppose all class based societies including my own need their practical mythologies. Practicality is just an ideology; like any other. It is the people censoring themselves against imagining anything better.
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“For these people the ambiguous has become an asylum, a hideout, salvation. Cedar–well, yes, that’s something ambiguous; so is asphalt, with its myriad separate pebbles. You can speak out about the ambiguous, express yourself as freely as you like, even more freely than about the concrete. The great thing about the ambiguous is that it has its own clearly demarcated armed frontiers with warning bells along them. When a mind immersed in the ambiguous begins to approach that border, the bells warn that just beyond lies the field of the concrete: treacherous general ideas, undesirable ideas, and synthesis. At the sound of this signal the cautious mind recoils and dives back into ambiguity. We can see the whole process in the face of our interlocutor. He might be going along, talking in the most lively of ways, quoting Hegel, unlikely metaphors, societies’ impenetrable mechanisms, or anything else that, lacking empirical import, can support just about anything. We can see how firmly he is anchored in the ambiguous, like a rider in the saddle of a black horse that sometimes is white. Then we ask: ‘That’s all well and good, but why are people, in some way, shall we say, evasive to the point of being plain stupid?’ At this point we can see how his face changes. The alarm bells have gone off: Attention! You are about to cross the border of the ambiguous! He looks desperately for a way out—which is, of course, to retreat back into the ambiguous: ‘evasiveness is part of the economy of narrativity’”.
Excellent! I was hoping someone would look up and read this quote (especially considering I didn’t leave a page number). Well done! And I have glad that the author has read it and completed it with their own extension and rendering.
Still, the European empiricist will go to Africa to prove that there are Africans in Africa; over and over and over again. Africans already know they they live there; long before they were mapped, counted, observed, taxonimised, and schematisided within the great European mind museum.
What??
‘Glad to have escaped the trap, panting with relief, he again starts talking with animation, haranguing and crushing us with the concrete in any form…” RK