Waiting For The Unknown

The cold, dark depository of endless experience is like the passageway between the real world, filled with a million little things you can point to and talk about but that you really don't know, and the other end, with its glowing gaze that blinds you as you wait for that one unknown element to appear and enlighten you. Unknown knowns are the things that we know, but are unaware of knowing. The coining of the term is attributed to Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek and it refers to the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality and intervene in it. It is the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say. Žižek first used the term as a response to former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statement at a press briefing given by on February 12, 2002, " There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know." Žižek argues that if Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns," that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the "unknown knowns" - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=125205