On holiday, and re-reading the beginning of Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s The Self Awakened, full of enormously potent and clarifying observations, and often quite intellectually thrilling to read, so much so that it gets my ‘feels too good’ suspicion heuristic going.
Anyway, out last night having a – is it possible to get bad food in Cádiz? – very good meal, on my x glass of wine and was unable to get past the sentence (my italics) in this paragraph on ‘shrunken pragmatism’:
A further consequence of this position is to exclude the possibility that we might be able to transform the character of our relation to the social and cultural worlds we inhabit rather than just to change, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that comprise them. It is a mistaken view. Institutions and ideologies are not like natural objects, forcing themselves onto our consciousness with insistent force and reminding us that we have been born into a world that is not our own. They are nothing but frozen will and interrupted conflict.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened
Once again forcibly reminded just how frozen 12 years of economic stagnation has made the ideology of the political and mainstream epistemic space in the UK.
