From Philosophical Research
- S–617 (pronounced 617. (S))[S] (pronounced (S):) shovel (meta-Marxism) 1:(-)1:(-)1
Core characteristics[edit]
- [P] (pronounced P:) label [string] (L)
- S–617 (pronounced 617. (S))[S] (pronounced (S):) shovel (meta-Marxism) 1:(-)1:(-)1
- [P] (pronounced P:) alias (en) [string]
- --
Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
Wavebuilder characterizations[edit]
- Lacanianism is the shovel dream of Careerism / Lacanianism is the class ideology of Careerism (ideology emerging from a particular layout of material objects which may or may not have individual owners conflated with the whole object) -> we need a new word for "ideology that belongs to a particular repeatable physical formation of people". "class ideology" makes total sense to me, but I don't think it's really a standard usage within Marxism. formational ideology? object ideology? shovel dream? we'll go with shovel dream for now.
- shovel (meta-Marxism) -> a metaphorical shovel is specifically a kind of object with a particular size and shape which if it were capable of taking a picture of the world and writing a description of it without deep deliberation over the meaning of what it saw would have its intuitive, unfiltered perceptions skewed a certain way by virtue of its shape, size, and composition. a literal shovel is smaller than a car or city block. a literal shovel cannot see anything materially speaking, but a camera can inasmuch as it can take a picture. a black-and-white camera takes a different kind of picture from a color camera. a shovel cannot see anything but a book can record a perception of the surrounding world, so in a sense, a physical book can see and retell what its author can see. a book cannot think or take a photo, and yet it can speak prerecorded messages which are capable of conveying perceptions that somebody once had. a book contains a shovel dream because its author once contained a shovel dream the day before it was written which was passed on to the book. from the point of view of science, the form the shovel dream inside the book takes is ontology: the creation of a graph of points connected by arrows where the definition of any of the points is largely defined by their relationship to other points. some people get lost in the fact that the book's shovel dream is recorded in "language", and unnecessarily start trying to assign all the qualities of ontology to language. this doesn't really make a lot of sense when large language models can reduce any language down to a mathematical graph devoid of words or phrases where, for instance, it might not be easy to tell English from Japanese at a glance. the fact that a whole language ultimately refers to the whole material world at once is part of what makes language language, as this form of reference allows for language to take on the quality of being a unique identifiable named language associated with a particular country or population in the way most languages actually are. ontology, on the other hand, can be totally disconnected from the material world. ontology can shape itself to become abstract art which does not actually refer to the real world even through metaphor, but which is simply a constructed world of its own that people can perceive through a writer's fabricated shovel dream.
this is how I get my possibly controversial definition of "abstract art", where abstract art is not a genre and instead artistic abstraction is simply art which either cannot or should not be read as "coding" itself to something in the real world, and all art is either representational or abstract on a wide continuum between the two. say that abstraction is a slider from 0 to 100%, you could perhaps say Pokémon is 70% abstract art. realistically it's quite difficult to measure it that precisely and ever think you have an accurate number, but reviewers can still break down every part of a piece of fiction that they believe to either obviously refer to reality in the sense it could be conveying social lessons or science facts, or obviously refer to nothing. you know, I have another weird idea. maybe we could have rating questions for art that do nothing but rate how "real" the art is, so you can roughly estimate how abstract things are relative to each other. the questions would go something like: is this piece about real organisms? (Pokémon is not, Warriors is.) does this piece portray the organism's ecology realistically? (you can argue White Fang does, but Warriors only partly does and Zootopia blatantly does not.) do real-world cultural groupings exist in the narrative? (if dogs can be Muslim, the answer is yes. if bison are building tepees the answer is yes. if pigs invent the USSR the answer is yes. if rocks are matched up to Black pop stars the answer is yes.) and so on.
- shovel dream / object or formation ideology / ideology or consciousness associated with a specific repeatable kind of population which is countable and separable and has a particular kind of internal structure / ideology or consciousness associated with a particular kind of materially-definable Social-Philosophical System / embodied cognition (model of objects that perform cognition doing it through studying the relationship of their physical object toward the world, here also applied to groups of people instead of just individuals) -> Hyper-Materialist concept. the motif of a particular kind of object having a particular kind of model of the world and ideology because it is a particular kind of object. almost always the object is a countable, separable population of people, but it's funny to figuratively refer to other kinds of objects to get across a concept that somehow absolutely nobody seems to understand. Hyper-Materialism is when all similar shovels have a similar shovel dream, and all similar rakes have a similar rake dream. a collection of rakes may have its own unique collection-of-rakes dream, but in principle it can be calculated by modeling the interaction of the individual rake dreams. individual people, not being shovels or rakes, can change their shovel dream at will, but changing the shovel dream of one individual may not have much effect on a large group. Marcuse thinks it's as simple as changing all the individuals one by one but that doesn't necessarily go fast enough. you have to understand the existing layout of various kinds of material objects producing shovel dreams and think about what changes in the layout of shovels could produce the right ones faster. the terrible thing is there are no shortcuts here. you can't just go "here are the bourgeoisie, here are the proletariat, they only need to become aware of the possibly-wrong model in this text". with the United States objectively not having the class structure described in Leninist texts, organizers really do need to understand the basic concept of shovel dreams and how to identify them and categorize them in the field.
