negate
recollecting
reduce the power of something by becoming more aware of it
negative thinking > achieving negative goals > recollecting

The stratagem of recollecting is a stratagem of awareness, usually through some form of analysis. Thus at the mental level we have psychoanalysis, while at the social level we have cultural theory.

Marx said the point was not to understand the world, but to change it. But there is an obvious link between the two goals: how can we change if we do not understand? And how do we understand if we do not recollect?

The stratagem of recollection goes further: it asserts that understanding is not merely a precursor to effective change, but is part of the change itself.

At the extreme, by understanding we change our perception of the problem, which may even make the problem vanish or transform. Thus understanding doesn’t merely contribute to the change, but becomes the change itself. Thus recollection may turn into reframing.

But the stratagem of recollecting may lead to error insofar as it tempts into a search for the cause of suffering. Specific occurrences of disease, inequality, neurosis and death may have specific causes; when specific causes are found, this is often the first step towards remedying them. But some Positive Thinking addicts seem to believe that there is no place in their world for any disease, inequality, neurosis or death; for them, acceptance of suffering is tantamount to Negative Thinking. They are therefore driven to search for the cause of suffering, in the hope of eliminating it altogether.
 
Psychoanalysis One of the principles of psychoanalysis is that you can often eliminate something simply by becoming fully aware of it. The idea is that something is more powerful when it is unconscious, and that its power reduces when it becomes conscious. On this view, bringing unconscious desires and fears into consciousness is of itself therapeutic.

This is called insight.

The symptom becomes a message or messenger. Instead of trying to eliminate the symptom, the stratagem is to listen to it. NLP suggests this, as does psychotherapy. "The symptom as a sign of illness is also a guide home." [Connelly]

Class
consciousness
Political activists of a Marxian tendency deplore what they see as a lack of class consciousness among the people whom they regard as their natural constituency. A simplistic account is to take this lack of awareness to be an ideological trick, played by the ruling classes. A simplistic cure is then to reveal the trick to the oppressed classes, who at once thereby break free from their ideological chains, as a vital prerequisite step towards breaking free from their political chains. A similar structure potentially applies to social inequalities of all kinds, including gender and ethnicity.

[Gramsci]

This rather crude parody would of course be rejected by most modern thinkers. However, there is still a strong sense among politically motivated writers, that a raise in the awareness of a social injustice is of itself a significant step towards elimination of the injustice. Both the disadvantaged group and the remainder of society need this awareness: hence the importance of so-called Race Awareness Training (RAT), in which white people are enabled to feel guilty about the treatment of black people, supposedly as a way of improving the lot of black people.

History as
repetition
One common tactic of political activists is to describe a current situation as a repetition of a previous situation. By recollecting the outcome last time, we may better solve the problem this time around. Those who do not remember history are supposedly condemned to repeat it.

The first problem of this tactic is to agree which piece of history to refer back to. During the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the reemergence of Balkan strife in the early 1990s, the situation was variously compared (by different parties) with the Vietnam War, the First World War, the Holocaust, the Crusades, even with prehistoric tribalism. Each attempted recollection, of course, leads to different policy conclusions.

The second, more serious problem with historical recollection is that it sometimes fails disastrously: the Second World War was arguably caused by actions intended to avoid a repetition of the First World War.

Meditation One view of meditation is that is makes you aware of things.
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Page last updated on December 18th, 2000
Copyright © 2000, Richard Veryard