Democracy at Work

Susan forwarded a link to a new web page Democracy at Work that looks promising - on the possibilities for (and, in many instances, the actuality of) democratic decision-making in the workplace.

Imagination & Possibility

Imagination is among the cognitive capacities that we have for exploring possibilities; it enables us to operate in the subjunctive mode that is essential to both art and politics. It also stands in unavoidable tension with the common demand that art and politics hew a realist line. We should, on this contrasting view, operate in the indicative mode, attending to what actually is the case rather than to what might be. I think that this tension is crucially important, is less a burden than an opportunity, and that both art and politics are richest when we are trying to discover the bounds or explore the borderlands of the subjunctive and the indicative, the possible and the actual.

At the start of his tome The Man Without Qualities, Austrian novelist Robert Musil, while discussing his protagonist Ulrich, offers the following observation.

To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle ... is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.

Whoever has it does not say, for instance: here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well it could just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable ...

Here Musil is offering a hypothetical. Is what he calls a “sense of possibility” parasitic on the existence something like “the sense of reality?” I actually suspect that the opposite is that case. I cannot defend that claim here. I hope to come back to it at some point. For the moment, I love this Orion advert. The facial expressions and the palpable 'sneakiness' the boys evince bring to mind my own experience as a kid. The scene gives some indication why, temporally at least (as opposed to conceptually), imagination comes first.

Possibilities

Possibilities

Wislawa Szymborska

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.