“Our vast imaginations pull in the opposite direction from our small, frail bodies.” – from here
Consciousness covers itself.
Consciousness covers itself with abstractions, with the abstract, as much with materialities, in the pragmatics of everyday life.
In the pragmatics of everyday life, the “social absolute”–Seitaro Yamazki’s fossils of the future.
Reminds me of “not the relativism of truth, the truth of relativism”–Deleuze and Guattari.
A critic questions the absolute. Is it capitalist? Is it not so much absolute as absolutising?
Is it relativisable? for example, through historicising what was thought absolute, see if it has been constructed, when and how. Then it can be made relative to historical circumstance, some determinations some accidents.
Is this deconstruction? No. Deconstruction starts from what is already there in the construct, the social construct, the epistemic construct, that is always at work to undo it: deconstruction has to do with an inner contradiction, a tiny difference and an infinitesimal crack in the foundation which will be singularly responsible for bringing the edifice down.
To see how it has been made so that it can be unmade: how the trick was done to undo it. It is usually words and their effect on institutions: is this Foucault’s genealogical method?
Yes, first is showing the social absolute is not absolute, but not by using the critical method. Not by using the critical method because the critical method is also historicisable, is too timely.
Another absolute is called for… this is a bit like Alex Hochuli, George Hoare and Peter Cunliffe‘s suggestion that leaderless political movements are ineffectual; especially so when looking at anti-politics. Anti-politics has its leaders, leaders whose appeal is of a different quality than political, that is mythic, iconic and demagogic. (probably why political dirt does not stick to them)
Social absolute covers: a social self.
Yes, social self is individuated: the Other is an individual. God is. Absolute is.
…so the individuation has a timeline that it is relative to, so what? Critic of the critic asks.
Consciousness, political consciousness, covers itself in its timely exercise: in the pragmatics of everyday life.
Under consciousness is not the time of the social absolute but the individuating absolute, an internal time. An infernal time: the past is a fire that eats up the present.
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knowledge is a determination of the future: use it
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