4.1 - The Constitutional Situation

Summary

In our analysis so far, two lines converge. The first line, developed in the first part of the book, sought to establish the conditions of a critical phenomenology. The focus was on what emerges as a problem, the conditions of that emergence, and what in turn sustains those conditions; the critical effort was to submit all three moments to question. The sections on semantics and structures that run through the book turn phenomenology towards hermeneutics, that is, towards thinking about meaning and interpretation. At stake is the loss of terms for redress. As normative expectations become increasingly displaced by cognitive expectations in the modalities of governance by information and the optimisation of outcomes, the key question that must be held on to, I argued, is what are the conditions of iteration of something as a problem such that a political solution might be sought. At that point a critical phenomenology is read into Marx’s eleventh thesis, a thesis that resists reading solutions off situations in fragmented and closed forms of ‘understanding the world’ – the positivisms that express the depleted forms of the Verstand (Hegel’s term for the absence of dialectical thought) – but reconfigures the problem to which a solution might be adequate in the direction of expanding potentiality, or what we call constituent power.