The Anti-Consecutivist Devil is in the Details

World War II memoirs testify to the poverty of Consecutivist thought. One would expect that the suffering in the period of collapse would sharpen one's faculties of mind, but most memoirs display dry Consecutivism: that is, their authors--with the caveat that most of these texts were written long after the fact, when their authors must have succumbed to the restorated unbound Consecutivism--ruminate about the dry topics so dear to the Consecutivists. Tragedy, hardship, man's cruelty to man--all these themes ring hollow to a reader liberated by Anti-Consecutivism. For it is only when one refuses to adopt the prescribed hermeneutical frameworks drenched in Consecutivist non-sequiturs that one can truly be cooperative to the Anti-Consecutivist truthmodel. The Devil, to invoke the Consecutivist proverb, is in the details: it is only by paying attention to the details that one can see the big picture.

NYC and the Anti-Consecutivist Movement

New York presents a true Anti-Consecutivist with a challenge: how to reconcile the allure of a Consecutivist showcase with unflinching dedication to Anti-Consecutivist politics. For if one is to imagine a part of the city (Grammercy, say, or even Tribeca) in which Anti-Consecutivism has taken hold, one should see through the remnants of Consecutivist universe, and move beyond the coordinates of Consecutivist imagination. Once liberated from those constraints, as if overcoming the Matrix (a clever Consecutivist ploy, by the way, to coopt the subversive--about that in some other post), an Anti-Consecutivist will be faced with the functional poverty of Anti-Consecutivist structures. It is this functional poverty that provides Anti-Consecutivism with its conceptual wealth. For it is only once one has lost the ability to rely on the wealth of structural opportunities that one can imagine the wealth of multidimensional interpretations. This radical Anti-Consecutivist hermeneutics, however, is at risk in New York, as its (the city's? the hermeneutics'?) ambiguities are channeled through its all-embracing tentacles towards resuscitating the obvious: namely, the admission that, after all, the humanities have failed, and that we look back at the ruins of progress in order to imagine another reason.

Towards a Consistent Critique of the Everyday

Anti-Consecutivism is about embracing the rhythm of the everyday. The everyday, as one might guess, is a problematic term; it is as evasive as it seems obvious and empirically knowable. Moreover, it constitutes an aporia that Western philosophy has not yet unraveled--if only because of its poststructuralist excesses. For the seemingly paradoxical issue at hand is that it is only when we are far removed from pondering the everyday that we can grasp its true structure. Grasping, embracing, and living the everyday is the true goal of an Anti-Consecutivist. Departing radically from the Enlightenment practices of ontology and hermeneutics, an Anti-Consecutivist needs total immersion in order to be removed--at once a critic and an ever-changing subject. It is only when one has decided to answer everything that one has ontological and hermeneutical credentials to question anything. Anti-Consecutivism thus places the everyday into the focus of critical inquiry, while removing it from the ever-widening field of inquisitive criticism.

How this looks in practice can be seen from analyzing that most overlooked aspect of the everyday: namely, the relationship between time and space, the crux, it will be noted, of much of modern critical thought which, regrettably, has refrained from theorizing the everyday. An orthodox Anti-Consecutivist will collapse the reified conceptual relationship that has eclipsed fields of alternative interpretations of the everyday, while sticking rigidly to the theoretical purchase of the framing time-space continuum. S/he will map this continuum--a nod to a beautiful intellectual tradition--onto a newly charted, multidimensional discursive field of interpretations, and try to trace the tensions that emerge from the different interlocking power relations, decentered, as it were, by the radical act of such mapping.

It is very liberating.