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| Pix Credit here: David plays for Saul 1 Samuel 16:14-23 |
On the eve of the mechanization of the story of humanity; at just the moment before humanity cedes its own stories, individually and collectively, to virtual incarnations of itself that can use its input to "think" for itself (as the manifestation of principles drawn from endless iterations of the objects from which principles are drawn) one can be witness to a marvelous revealing occurrence. In the singular and the plural, those who feel (and well may be) empowered to influence such things have been engaged in frantic and quite ostentatious rationalization of the human self, that self within a curated complex of social relations, and the signification of these self-selves into a basis for rationalizing not just the past but also making inevitable particular pathways into the future. What makes this interesting is that now, for the first time in a long time, those who seek to engage in such acts (for and to us) not not just self aware, they are also taking the masses along for a ride on the self-awareness adventure that are their conscious and deliberate forays into narrative. Self-awareness appears to be both a necessary predicate for the democratization of storytelling as cognitive rationalization structures, but also for its transposition from humanity to its virtual self-construction and the detachment of that self-construction into the mechanisms of generative virtual intelligence created (perhaps) in our own image.
None of this is new, of course. Human have been rationalizing themselves and the world around them since the first sacrifices were offered to please whatever spirits were invested with authority to make the world work. The prize--the gathering of perception to construct, and support as natural the construction of a cognition of things "as they are", or "as they ought to be" or "as they function" and "as is natural" etc. has been an instrument of social relations from the time that human looked around and found themselves in such relations and then started to think about those relations as detached from themselves. The dialectics that followed haunt us still. And perhaps that is inevitable. All of this is necessary, of course. Human collectivity, if it is to serve ends to which it is to be put, must be convinced that the structures and objectives of a particular collectivity at a particular point in time is "natural" or at least the accumulated expression of the wishes of is collectivity or the optimization of organization in the face of some danger--physical or spiritual. And off one goes into the sacred lands of orthodoxy and hierarchy, as well as functional differentiation among the masses. Even pre-historical humanity had its shamans, hunters, warriors, etc. and their narratives to hold it all together, along with the dialectics that such architectures inevitably bring as people are born and die and as circumstances change.
Of course, all of this may be swept away as the mania for comprehensiveness, egged on by technological possibilities, will make it irresistible to detach stories (and their rationalizations) from human storytellers. Human collectives as virtual realities (even ones with quite unavoidable effects in the physical world) lend themselves not just to virtual representation (in the old school forms of text, performance, and the support of a storytelling caste within social relations), lend themselves to virtual construction. And virtual construction, and its curation, lend themselves to virtual construction by virtual representations of human story makers. None of this is bad or good, new or old; it does however become more valuable as its content, practices, and construction, are better exposed. . . . or that exposure may destroy the enterprise down to its foundations. May believe requires believers; and believers do not necessarily like to see the mechanics making belief believable.
With this in mind it is almost nostalgic to watch, and watch with both wonder and admiration, the efforts of human communities to consciously develop and seek to naturalize stories that are not just stories, but are also critical signifiers of meaning, expectation, and the "right way" of approaching the world and the humanity within it. It is particularly useful to watch this production where not just the story making but the underlying rationalizing objectives are substantially transparent. That produces a bit of a nod toward the democratization of engagement in the construction of the instruments of collective social cognition through stories and invites a democratic engagement with its politics. It is even more interesting when these are utilized as part of a sometimes contentious dialectics among two social collectives bent of deploying their own stories in the service of their own cognitive rationalizations of the world around us. Its inter-subjectivities lend themselves both to politics, and to the construction of the iterative modalities through which self-referencing intelligence can undertake the task at a higher (and perhaps more detached) level of production.
A quite useful example of this late-human craft may be observed in the program held 5 December 2024 organized by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which was created by Congress in October 2000 with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President. For other essays around the CECC's work see here: CECC.
The Program, The Preservation of Memory: Combating the CCP’s Historical Revisionism and Erasure of Culture, engages in the story making of one collective but developing counter stories either from out of parts of the story that they suggest ought to be included, or by drawing different significations from them, the result of which lends itself to the construction of a different cognitive structure on which a different sort of politics might be built. That, of course, is the nature of the beast; the lifeblood of politics, and the stuff of the contemporary entertainment of belief for the masses. Information about the event follows below. The hearing will be livestreamed on the CECC’s YouTube channel. This impulse is not unique to this apparatus, or to this culture, or to this time; this is a global impulse with manifestations that differ only to reflect national characteristics within the stages of history in which such collectives appear to find themselves at any given moment.
The Preservation of Memory: Combating the CCP’s Historical Revisionism and Erasure of Culture
Thursday, December 5, 2024
10:30 am (EDT)
2360 Rayburn House Office Building
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engages in systematic efforts to curtail historical inquiry into subjects deemed “sensitive,” such as the Tiananmen Massacre; control narratives regarding the history of the CCP; and erase the culture of repressed peoples, including Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uyghurs. Writers, artists, and independent historians are currently engaged in efforts to preserve history and language in the face of CCP repression. This hearing will highlight their efforts and examine the various tactics used by the CCP to revise history, including lawfare and the silencing of academics who offer alternatives to Party narratives. The hearing will also explore the ways that diaspora communities are preserving their own culture and language and transmitting them to the next generation. Witnesses will offer policy recommendations.
Hearing will be livestreamed on the CECC’s YouTube channel.
Witnesses:
Rowena He, University of Texas (Austin) and author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices for the Struggle for Democracy in China; former associate professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong until banned in 2023.
Julian Ku, Faculty Director of International Programs, and Maurice A. Deane Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law, Hofstra University.
Rishat Abbas, President of Uyghur Academy International
Geshe Lobsang Monlam, Ordained Tibetan monk, founder of Monlam Tibetan IT Research Center.
Temulun Togochog, US-born Southern Mongolian young activist, freshman at Mercer County Community College Honor’s Program in New Jersey
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