Vizenor Concordance: On CONSCIOUSNESS

“My stories at the time were never decided with possessive pronouns and certainly not the consciousness of singularity in the ruins of civilization.  My sense of native presence and recognition in a world of literary envy and trickery was never secure in a dominant monotheistic culture.  Treaty reservations and native existential colonies in cities revealed cultural separatism but not a “specific civilization.”  The communal pleasure of mockery and irony in trickster creation stories and the elusive native stories of chance, totemic shadows, shamanic mockery and irony are not comparable to “metaphysical preconditions.”  Gusdorf declared that “Autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical preconditions. . .humanity must have emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings and must have entered into the perilous domain of history.  The man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not be repeated in the future.”” (2.5)

“German Marxism and Critical Theory at the Frankfurt School first focused on cultural materialism, communism, and the politics of fascism and consciousness.  Critical theories are creased and complicated by expositions, analytical translations, violence, political and cultural events, and creative perceptions.  Shamanic favors and the recognition of critical theories become a clever chase of native consciousness.  The consideration of native totemic shadows, trickster cosmology, the chance of irony and mockery on separatist reservations and in existential colonies, are seldom the subject of critical theories.” (3.2)