Introduction into Historical Consciousness

Perhaps you have looked out at the sky and wondered what your life would be like in 20 years. Perhaps you have set studying in your room and caught a fleeting thought about the day-to-day of Isaac Newton while memorizing his account of distance or force, or perhaps of DaVinci when he painted the Mona Lisa, or of Mozart composing his Sonatas. You may have formed a thought about such men, a thought purveyed by the author of the text about their prowess, their professionalism, their grandiosity. Here you engaged in an act of historical consciousness.

Some years later, you then found out that Newton was a loveless shut-in who for years committed himself to the study of alchemy. This was a realization in and of historical consciousness. Perhaps you also discovered DaVinci’s homoerotic art and Mozart’s letters to his cousin about poop. These too were discoveries in and of historical consciousness.

What, then, is historical consciousness? Is it merely an awareness of historically renowned persons? Not at all: consider the Rape of Nanking in relation to the opium wars, or perhaps of the Antikythera mechanism and ancient Greek sortition. Yes, the Greeks had computational mechanisms for telling time and voting and, yes, the Rape of Nanking and the Opium Wars are both typically subsumed under China’s century of humiliation. The discordance of Chinese century with China’s contemporary economics, as well as the discordance of calculations technology with the ancient world as “pre-technological” are both discordances of historical consciousness: “Wait, you meant to say the ancients had computers?” Almost, but not quite—my use of the term provokes a discordance of the imagination, a feeling that something which ought to be modern, the computer, is not actually so. Here again we have a hint of historical consciousness: an immediate feeling concerning the worn-and-received, the stereotypes about a given period of mankind’s history, and the recently-experienced, a fact that tears the stereotype asunder.

Is historical consciousness, then, merely discordance among the faculties? Is it an imaginative schema where understanding has broken down? Is it, then, a simple irony:

Indeed, here we see a mode of historical consciousness afoot—call it the discordant mode. Here is another:

The mode of historical consciousness here is at once discordant and concordant. It is obviously a concordance of spatial relations and physiognomies. Less obviously, it is an interesting concordance because it strikes a discordant note between contemporary, digitally-native senses for depiction and those of the past. We prefer to think that, like the computer, the images of the past are so many relics of a bygone age. Instead, here we are struck with a biting similarity, that our contemporary modes of depiction are no more than pastiches and imitations of an older form. This mode of consciousness takes up the spirit of Ecclesiastes, whose author Qohelet wrote over 2000 years ago that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Or, as some of us now worn-weary by change prefer to say, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Historical consciousness, as given in these images, is ocular and memetic. It strikes our eyes in part through a series of techniques of exaggeration, whose visibility is most clearly given in the caricature:

We see in the caricature, as in both of the above images (which contain specifications of the general conception of ‘caricature’) deliberate exaggeration. Through the stretching and squashing of features, distinction may be drawn out of the face of the individual. Hereby, the individual may, in point of dialectical fact, be drawn into comparison with the features of other individuals according to the precepts of imagination:

What reveals the individual is indeed a constitutive production of the specification, or particularization, of the genus within which the individual is situated. Or, more simply: our attempt to reveal the character of an individual is at the same time a revelation of the general conditions under which a character becomes possible. For the above two caricatures, the revelation of their distinctness is indeed an application of 2-3 rules of exaggeration: shrinkage of the eyes, expansion of the lips and distance between lips and chin, and exaggeration of the whole head relative to the body. Clearly, differences can be conceived relative to each. Despite difference, however, we will see a unity of procedures—a type of character and caricature brought about by these procedures.

Through use of types, we see another mode of historical consciousness. Indeed, upon the beginning of the ministry of Jesus Christ, he asked his disciples (Matthew 16:13-20):

“Who do people say the Son of Man is?”  They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

Men of Christ’s time and space did not believe in reincarnation, not per se. They did, however, believe in a kind of elongated historical subjectivity. Thus, when the Lord called Abraham, he said (Genesis 12:1-3):

“I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.

And, after the binding of Isaac, the consequence of which being the destruction of Abraham’s legitimate lineage, he spoke to Isaac via an angel as follows (Genesis 26:4):

I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring, all nations on earth will be blessed.

Jesus, and latter-day Christians, could reasonably conclude himself to have been a “son of God” because his preaching deliberately contained references to previous texts. Jews beside these Christians could yet intelligibly see Jesus as a prophet, albeit a false one so far as the Talmud is concerned, so far as his mode of activity and consciousness were typical of previous prophets. The Christians, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, thus called the whole set of allegorical readings typology—Christ a “New Adam” and a New Law, Mary a “New Eve,” and a “New Ark of the Covenant” carrying that New Law. Typology of this kind is yet another mode of historical consciousness, one in which originary events (types) may echo through the chambers of history into “antitypes.”

We have since secularized this way of thinking. We now commonly ask: “who will be the next Oprah?” or perhaps “Who will be the next Taylor Swift?” Upon asking these questions, we are practicing another mode of historical consciousness.

The physiognomy of time, if we may be permitted to denominate this mode, is a reading of the faces of characters, of seeing in them aspects of ourselves. We will note that “character” must be taken in its etymological and colloquial senses as (1) interchangeable with characteristic, namely, that specific-difference through which the individual is given in contradistinction to other members of his class and (2) that name given to the agent/actor in a given narrative, the characters of the plot.

A physiogonomy of space was once quite popular. By the 1800s, it had become quite fashionable to speak of the “character” of a people, its “national character.” This too the internet has naturalized into “country balls” and more recently “country humans”:

The use of such characteristic thinking was clear well before the internet, though. By analogizing the characteristics of a whole people with the features of a man or woman, nationalist artists (or, if we wished now to be cheeky, “propagandists”) could easily depict the whole people in a series of scenes:

Of course, the ancients across cultures had long since done this, an activity that anthropologists have now (somewhat regrettably, by their own lights) called “animism”:

The strategy employed here is just as described in the modern period among nationalists: namely, the analogy of certain behavioral traits among some members of a class to the behavioral traits associated with one or another characters insertable into a series of scenes, a plot or, as known in Ancient Greece, a mythos.

My transposition from the strategy conducted by the ancients to that conducted by the moderns is yet another mode of historical consciousness. The first thinker to realize it as such was Giambattista Vico, whose work in The New Science enumerated, for the first time, the details of poetic genius, or the ingenium of universality. For Vico, the intensities of embodied experience are stock through which the mind analogized to the outer world. From the characteristic forces of bodily members and social experiences bound up with them the earliest humans conceived of a Universal Subject which, like them, managed the causal forces whose existence wrought feeling in them. By such a means, a complex structure of mythical poetics was devised, one that anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and psychoanalyst Joseph Campbell have only named pieces of.

The second major thinker to realize the continuous analogistic work of consciousness over historical time was GWF Hegel. Through his account of dialectics, Hegel claimed to have resolved all knowledge into causal force knowable within his system of philosophical sciences. Taking his latter-day student Wilfred Sellars’ proviso that “philosophy is how things in the largest possible sense hang together in the largest possible sense,” Hegel had achieved what he took to be the final act of knowing—the resolution of Substance into Subject. If, before, causal forces were a disorganized series of intensities, through the Critique of Pure Reason orchestrated by Immanuel Kant, Hegel could now say that such forces had an organization. This organization, Hegel resolved, appeared through the Subject of History, Reason itself. Reason, or History’s own self-development, was none other than the actuality of all institutions, their wirklichkeit, whose actuality was determined through a historical series of responses to problems immanent to previous modes of activity. These modes of activity each have an analogue to the structure of any possible human consciousness, which structure Hegel unfolds in his philosophical propaedeutic, the Phenomenology of Spirit. The rest of the Hegelian system takes Vico and imposes Kantian form, deducing the logical, natural, and finally spiritual structure of any possible analogy from one locus to another. In each case, local motion proceeds through contradiction, or the inability of a subject to resolve its predicates purely into itself. If, for instance, we speak of Being, then it is not clear of what we speak. Certainly we speak of All Being, but the addition of the predicate “All” to Being is redundant and analytic—if we have only stipulated Being, then there is only and all Being, necessarily. Therefore, for the predicate to be conceivable, some other intermediary subject must have wrought its emergence. But this is in contradiction with the specification of Being alone. Therefore, “All” must arise through something negative of Being, namely, Nothing. But all of nothing is also incoherent, so we must admit of some oscillation between Being and Nothing, the very process by which we conceived of the predicate “All” at all. This oscillation is Becoming, or change.

By means of Becoming, the rest of Hegel’s system proceeds to develop the characteristics of progressively more complex modes of consciousness. In his philosophy of history and aesthetics, he will note that these modes correspond, roughly, to the real development of history. Consequently, we may say that every mode of consciousness develops not merely according to a rational structure, the structure of World Reason, but that it does so through the real, historical series of contradictions and analogies between characteristic features of subjects and the inability of those subjects’ predicates to be said of the subject without the introduction of some other subject. Subject introduction continues until Hegel resolves himself of Absolute Knowing, both in the Phenomenology and through the Encyclopedia more broadly. Historical consciousness, in Hegel, is therefore a mode of inference in the use of predicates in relation to a subject. It is, moreover, the admission of some subjects with attendant predicates, the denial of others, as well as the admission and denial of relations among them particular to one historical epoch or another.

When historical consciousness wonders if there will be another Taylor Swift, it is wondering: given the media environment in which Taylor was raised, and given the person she is, will the fit of characteristics between environment and individual arise again in the future so that someone may occupy a similar space in a future media environment? Here, I pose the subjects “environment” and “Taylor” and I predicate of them characteristics which fit each to the other. Here, I have engaged in a particularly modern, post-Darwinian mode of historical consciousness, one neither Hegel nor Vico themselves practiced. To the contrary, with Niklas Luhmann, this mode of consciousness considers environment-organism relations as a system unto itself. Despite this, the mode of articulation remains Hegelian and Vichian—what pattern in the future will resemble the pattern now?

It is distinct, in this respect, that Hegel calls his work in the Phenomenology a study of the shapes of consciousness and the experience consciousness goes through in them. Consciousness, by moving through these shapes, Hegel says,

will reach a point where it sets aside its semblance of being burdened with what is alien to it, which only is for it and is as other; a point where the appearance becomes equal to the essence so that its own exposition coincides at this very point with the genuine science of spirit. Finally, while itself grasping this, its own essence, consciousness will signify the nature of absolute knowing itself. (Phenomenology §89)

These shapes, or Gestalten des Bewusstseins, are alternately translated as figures and configurations of consciousness. Since Goethe and Gestalt Psychology, we recognize a more colloquial conception of the gestalt, namely, a whole which is prior to and constitutive of its parts. It is here, in the resolution of historical recognition of a shape, or pattern, of understanding, or inference, that we may resolve our colloquial view into that of Hegel. Namely, we may say that the patterned experiences of phenomenal Gestalten, or the arrangements and adjacencies of objects as experienced in comparable alignment, are so many instantiations of noumenal Gestalten, historical modifications of consciousness. Or, more simply, the recognition of a visual pattern, or characteristic, is always a mode of historical consciousness. Thank to Husserl’s phenomenology and Deleuze’s semiotics, we can always say it is a mode of time consciousness: it quite literally is a difference and repetition. But, with Hegel, we can also say that by considering or questioning of a Gestalt apparent to phenomenal consciousness, we are also engaging in some or another mode of an historical Gestalt. That is, every visual pattern is given to us in what the historian Reinhart Koselleck has called a “horizon of expectations” shaped by our “field of experience,” or with Deleuze and Lacan, a “virtual plane of immanence” which bodily intensities activate.

Let us take a Dali painting to explain my meaning:

Pretend as if the name of the painting were unknown to us. We see immediately two figures in comparable shape and pattern: a body looking down into the water and a hand holding an egg, out of which appears to be blooming a flower. We see, then, a kind of Gestalten common to both: a set of elements holding a central egg-like shape: body parts upholding the head on the left, and the hand holding the egg on the right. Here is a phenomenal gestalten. What of a noumenal gestalten? Again, without knowing the name of the painting, we can already draw inferences using body schema, per Vico, Merleau-Ponty, and Bergson. Moving left to right, as we do upon reading, we see ossification and desolation. The surrounds of our left-hand figure are compressed: immediacy of buttes and water enclosed. As we move right, we see an increasing spatial horizon, the distance of the mountains, as well as a desolate space containing a statue, an animal gnawing at a carcass, etc. The noumenal, or historical, gestalten thereby appears as a shape of historical consciousness informed by the temporal consciousness of left-right eye movement. Consciousness is historical in a lived sense—the movement from life to ossified death, and the series of archetypes and attendant emotions with which we experience them:

The last has become modified to the point of parody and carnival:

Upon familiarizing ourselves with the title of the painting, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, we see in it a more pronounced historical structure, one that we have seen repeated most recently in the influencer Clavicular:

We know, then, that our temporal consciousness of eyes moving from left to right is confirmed by the metamorphosis conceived in the image. Here again we have another kind of historical consciousness, namely, that between ourselves as experiencer and artist as intender. Yet, we also know that Narcissus is far more ancient than Dali. So, we experience another kind of historical consciousness—that between the historical consciousness of the intender and that of ourselves as experiencer.

Though more can be said, a full introduction into historical consciousness has now been cleared. Can we not see how Jesus as a type of Elijah is like unto Clavicular as a type of Narcissus? And can we not see that at least three or four separate modes of historical consciousness are involved in this statement, namely:

• Jesus → Elijah (ancient Hebrew allegorics, now received as Christian typology)
• Clavicular → Narcissus (contemporary intuitions about historical repetition, Ecclesiastes)
• {Jesus → Eljiah} → {Clavicular → Narcissus} (meta-articulation of ancient allegorics and contemporary intuitions)

Though often subsumed into the theory of “memes,” “reference,” “intention,” or discourses of collective memory and resemblance, historical consciousness appears as a distinct formulation of any of such discourses when one can self-reflexively decompose any communications event (of which a tweet or a painting is one) according to (1) the time-consciousness, or phenomenal gestalten, appearing intensively over sequenced events in embodied sensation; call this “syntagmatic” consciousness (2) cultural-consciousness, or the making-adjacent of this sequence to other previously-experienced sequences; call this “hermeneutic consciousness” and (3) historical consciousness simplex, or the comparing of sequences at one moment in some domain to sequences at another moment in another domain (above all typified in the immediate and obvious question of seriousness: Is the seriousness narcissus’ evolution comparable to the unserious stupidity of Clavicular? are these historical questions warranted given the lattter?); call this “paradigmatic” consciousness. These three modes together introduce us into historical consciousness complex, considered as a complex of judgments (1) about bodily intensity (2) cross-cultural symbols and (3) the movement of these in mutual dialectic over time (consider, eg., the difference between tanning in the 1800s vs now, or weight in the modern world vs. that still in development—these comparisons are complexes of historical consciousness).