Limiting conditions describe what is permissible at any given time and must not be overstepped, according to Kant.

Hannah Arendt cited this clear proscription by Kant against the fulfillment of an ideal without which proscription we would have a liquidation of the past and, consequently, meaninglessness.

Less clear is whether Kant left unaddressed or rather failed to supply a wished-for answer regarding the more salient question of the preservation and continued observation of obsolete limiting conditions. For instance, you might at some earlier stage find it possible to do a thing which would no longer be permissible later, insofar as the antecedent object can still find a receptive site in the subject.

Where these earlier examples are permitted to co-exist, often they are contained within a class function and made to serve as markers of what not to do, what didn’t work.

An early morning commute through Macomb County serves as an example. There you have a thickening of space resulting from a sudden forced slowing of a uniform rate of speed, which slowing in turn results from an interruption of a maintained distance or protective bubble. The interruption itself can be called more than a problem in the sense that it arises from too exact of an estimation of the relation between the whole and the part, and this on the part of the part, in order to accommodate oneself solely on the basis of possibility rather than permissibility.

It is an outcome of the intersection between the individual and the collective whose excess spills over any that can be reclaimed presently, and later will be unusable. You can’t keep the change, yet their bundling is what produces added value, value that can be separated out yet cannot be claimed individually because the effect of excess was in the first place an illusion that relied on the logic of equivalency and not identity.

The possibility of the interrupting activity or the disruption may become vestigial over subsequent stages. Where it is possible to harness present excess in order to effect illusory change, for example, that excess would nonetheless need to be of the kind of energy capable of becoming something else. Conflation as technique is one way to effect that.

LeCorbusier’s remarks on auto design further illuminates this question, in particular the use of contradictions to provide friction to a functioning body at a certain level, whose placement at right angles from each other concealed their nature. Abstracted as an idea, the design principle allows for the limited circulation of a certain sensibility that retains the subjective condition of object-plus-author. That is, given a particular arrangement of lines, a geometrical possibility can be appreciated. Space can be represented without the aid of material sensations to confirm its existence. At the same time, such a representation of space can be extended wherever the registering of a particular arrangement of society in accordance with this sensibility can be visualized purely using geometrical abstractions.

Within such a system, a contradiction allows for a concept to be explained such that impossibilities can be charted and errors of judgement can be identified. Yet, you wouldn’t need to designate another space of the ‘not’ where it’s possible to make an abstraction of the contradiction, one that’s portable. To go one further, such a space already exists as a byproduct within and alongside the space you’re in which apparently is inhabitable without the actually existing aid of any sensory support. That at least is the claim or conceit.

The law that recognizes past injustices as at the root of present inequity is itself characterized by a thinness of space as distinct from presently lived thickness which no humanist tradition can recuperate without forfeiting a part of its own legitimacy.

The question of whether cause continues its original function as a civilizational posit is thereby raised. If to ‘do’ because you might and not that you may signals the persistence of a past permissibility, this points to an advanced state rather than an obsolete one to the degree that they co-exist.

Yet, isn’t this an explanation after the fact, a post hoc attempt, an amendment to place under a governing set of laws inequalities between relations a formal and official disavowal of them, those very castes outlawed elsewhere on the grounds they obstruct development and advancement and is at the root of stagnation?

Moreover, it implies a governing body of law that is permitted to advance at a higher rate of speed having formally distanced itself from, having placed behind itself past inequalities that are still lived.

In thought, revolution is to perfectly understand a system, to see it from underneath, to make it transparent, give it a thinness in representing it as so understood, so as to place it in the past which is the not.

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