Copernicus

Copernicus

If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force--and every other representation remains . . . useless--it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times. And since between every combinationand its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, . . . a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated. . . . This conception is not simply a mechanistic conception; for if it were that, it would not condition an infinite recurrence of identical cases by a final state. Because the world has not reached this, mechanistic theory must be considered an imperfect and merely provisional hypothesis.' Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke (Munich <1926>), vol. 19 (The Will to Power; book 4), p. 373 [D8a,1] (AP 116)


See Konvolute “K” for Copernican decenteredreference. SPIRALS, pattern recognition, meaning assemblage.

The Copernican revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was thought that a fixed point had been found in "what has been," and one saw the present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to become the dialectical reversal--the flash of awakened consciousness. Politics attains (AP 388) primacy over history. The facts become something that just now first happened to us, first struck us; to establish them is the affair of memory. Indeed, awakening is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious. What Proust intends with the experimental rearrangement of furniture in matinal half-slumber, what Block recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what here is to be secured on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening." (AP 388-389)
This fixed point or anchor, so-to-speak, is at bottom, the impetus for and the outcome of the construction of narrative--like the construction of constellations and the myths that explain them, remember them, and keep them worthy of remembrance. The fixed point creates the illusion of permanance within structures--an illusion that enables the deploymnet of the navigationalinstinct, the navigational instinct that presupposes a contained self--a vessel that has only a tangential relation to the external world and a preconfigured totality through which to guideoneself.