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.