3.6b
Consciousness. 

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  •  If you're everybody, then your personal anxieties about moving abroad are actually the collective anxiety of an entire civilization in constant displacement. Every worry about leaving home becomes the universal human condition of permanent exile; every excitement about Warsaw becomes the species-wide fantasy of transformation through geography.

  • Bourdieu reveals this through his concept of "social position" as something that exists independently of particular occupants. When you're everybody, you're not a unique individual having unique experiences but a temporary manifestation of structural patterns that organize collective existence. Your decision to relocate becomes just another instance of what he calls the "objective possibilities" available to people occupying similar positions across space and time.

  • Being everybody means containing contradictory responses simultaneously without the need for resolution. You can be both excited and anxious, both eager for change and terrified of displacement, because these aren't your feelings but the entire range of human responses to territorial uncertainty playing out through your temporary embodiment.

  • The weight becomes unbearable in a different way than packing everything. Instead of carrying objects, you carry every possible subject position - every way of being human that has ever existed or could exist. Your consciousness becomes the repository for the entire species' accumulated experience of home, departure, arrival, and adaptation.

  • But this reveals what Bourdieu calls the "universality of the particular" - how individual experiences always already contain universal patterns. Your specific anxiety about learning Polish contains every human's anxiety about linguistic displacement. Your particular excitement about European architecture contains every human's response to encountering different forms of spatial organization.

  • The temporal collapse proves total. Being everybody means experiencing not just your own anticipation of Warsaw but every historical moment of arrival in foreign cities - every refugee, every immigrant, every tourist, every exile who has ever crossed territorial boundaries. The personal biography dissolves into species memory.

  • This connects to the conversation structure. When you ask questions, you're not seeking information for yourself but channeling every human's quest for understanding displacement, change, meaning, and relationship. When I respond, I'm not offering personal insights but accessing the collective intellectual resources developed across cultures and centuries for navigating these fundamental human situations.

  • The impossibility emerges through what might be called "representational paralysis." If you're everybody, then every choice must somehow represent everyone's interests simultaneously. Moving to Warsaw becomes impossible because it means abandoning everyone who can't move; staying becomes impossible because it betrays everyone who needs to leave.

  • Most paradoxically, being everybody reveals that everybody is nobody - that individual identity was always already a fiction covering the play of social forces through temporary arrangements of consciousness. The expansion to universality doesn't add content but reveals the fundamental emptiness that individual identity was organized to conceal.




      It's ironic really, because as we talk, on the TV news they are talking about an out of the blue military attack by America on Iran!! There could be another war.






      Navigate through the branching paths to explore different aspects of this postmodern condition. Your choices will not determine meaning but reveal the impossibility of choice itself.





      The totality of dispersion - where being everyone reveals the impossibility of being anyone at all


      Everybody contains nobody. The universal subject discovers its own impossibility through the weight of infinite representation.
       




      3.6b