The Spanishness Office — Q21,50
The abstract concept of the overall culture of a nation or population being a singular, nearly-physical place such that if people don't like how Spain's culture is treating the people of Spain they could just all flood into the Spanishness Office and take it over.
[Dimensionality:] S1 - motif or phenomenological description of concept
[Field:] Western Marxism / Gramscianism (W)
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This one really confused me for the longest time.
I remember outlets like PragerU and Fox News getting so upset about it circa 2015, almost always in the context of "universities!" "people coming to universities and making them into nothing but women's studies, Black studies, and gender studies!"
and quite honestly, I found that so incomprehensible I basically wrote the entire thing off as a reactionary conspiracy theory that had nothing to do with real life.
Only much later did I finally find out that Antonio Gramsci had existed and I was like "......oh". Gramsci believed, in a nutshell, that Marxist parties would only successfully form if progressive types already controlled all the bourgeois positions of prestige and held them down from reactionaries.
What had seemingly happened was Tory types had found out about Gramscianism and freaked out about it and confused anarchism and anti-racism for Gramscianism when they were never the exact same entity.
From there things only got more confusing. I asked myself many times if Gramsci was remotely right on the particular point that people could occupy parts of society to change culture, or "the popular mentality" as he put it.
For a while I thought he was simply wrong. "It's like he thinks there's a single Spanishness Office that rules on what all culture will be. Can there really be such a thing?"
I was convinced for a while that there was no Spanishness Office. What Gramsci recommended might work practically for some purposes but it wasn't actually changing "culture".
Only after a lot of thinking did I realize that most likely, it was a deepity to try to claim this, because after everyone had been going on about "culture" and "mentality" and "attitudes" I'd made a wrong assumption in thinking that "culture" and "mentality" were actually what any of this was about.
What I think now after dissecting this concept over and over is that it is actually an argument about free will. What people are actually doing is arguing over whether corporations and government offices have free will.
And that may sound ridiculous. But if, say, a corporation is being misogynistic, it has to be making that decision somehow. This leads people to elaborate discussions about how they can basically hijack or rebuild the free will of corporations into a different "desire" to mitigate the damage they cause as fast as possible.
So, are there Spanishness Offices? Yes. There are going to be some ten million Spanishness Offices that will all do whatever they want in spontaneity to the detriment of everybody unless millions of people in millions of places can conquer each and every one of them separately.
I remember outlets like PragerU and Fox News getting so upset about it circa 2015, almost always in the context of "universities!" "people coming to universities and making them into nothing but women's studies, Black studies, and gender studies!"
and quite honestly, I found that so incomprehensible I basically wrote the entire thing off as a reactionary conspiracy theory that had nothing to do with real life.
Only much later did I finally find out that Antonio Gramsci had existed and I was like "......oh". Gramsci believed, in a nutshell, that Marxist parties would only successfully form if progressive types already controlled all the bourgeois positions of prestige and held them down from reactionaries.
What had seemingly happened was Tory types had found out about Gramscianism and freaked out about it and confused anarchism and anti-racism for Gramscianism when they were never the exact same entity.
From there things only got more confusing. I asked myself many times if Gramsci was remotely right on the particular point that people could occupy parts of society to change culture, or "the popular mentality" as he put it.
For a while I thought he was simply wrong. "It's like he thinks there's a single Spanishness Office that rules on what all culture will be. Can there really be such a thing?"
I was convinced for a while that there was no Spanishness Office. What Gramsci recommended might work practically for some purposes but it wasn't actually changing "culture".
Only after a lot of thinking did I realize that most likely, it was a deepity to try to claim this, because after everyone had been going on about "culture" and "mentality" and "attitudes" I'd made a wrong assumption in thinking that "culture" and "mentality" were actually what any of this was about.
What I think now after dissecting this concept over and over is that it is actually an argument about free will. What people are actually doing is arguing over whether corporations and government offices have free will.
And that may sound ridiculous. But if, say, a corporation is being misogynistic, it has to be making that decision somehow. This leads people to elaborate discussions about how they can basically hijack or rebuild the free will of corporations into a different "desire" to mitigate the damage they cause as fast as possible.
So, are there Spanishness Offices? Yes. There are going to be some ten million Spanishness Offices that will all do whatever they want in spontaneity to the detriment of everybody unless millions of people in millions of places can conquer each and every one of them separately.