ABSTRACT
Historicized consciousness is consciousness of being historically conscious, a historical hyper-consciousness. All the origins, precedents, periods, traditions, trajectories, heritages, legacies, identities, causes, products, and contexts which make history make sense, have become things of the past with a history of their own. These historical categories have solidifi ed into historical fact, have affi rmed themselves as affi rmative categorical coordinators. As an apprehension, now, that everything of value now has historical value, is either in the past or from the past, historical hyper-consciousness can’t help putting the past fi rst, prioritizing remembrance. Hence, the present, now, is engulfed by history: history is not just the past, but also the always present,—life lived perpetually in the illusory mode of déjà-vu, careless with its actuality (cf. Bergson 2006: 123-124). It can’t be otherwise. The more history [crg] itself becomes historical, historical knowledge spreads, the forms it takes vary, and historical representations self-replicate virus-like through the population: the more thinking historically seems natural, the same things seem always to have happened before, and the more history-focussed behaviour is enforced. As history becomes more and more absorbed in itself, the now dissolves. Inevitably, the knowledge generated not just by professional historians, but by history-focussed behaviour in general, determines historical action and in turn becomes an historical object. The result is: history studies its own knowledge of itself; it enacts and studies itself. A world produced by self-consciously historical action, a society saturated with historical self-consciousness, a mind obsessed with historical representations: these all ensure the total historicization of reality and experience.
