If that is a disadvantage, it is one that we accepted when we decided, more than 200 years ago, to constitute ourselves a free people.
Those sentiments were echoed in Occupy's founding principles -- "constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love".
According its website:New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times.Got that?
In these cases, we both discover who we are "on the inside", and actively constitute ourselves.
It is through language that we tear ourselves away from nature and constitute ourselves as a subject.
At the same time, we constitute ourselves through our own choices: though the facticity of my situation creates some constraints on my possible self-interpretations, it is always up to me to decide the meaning of those constraints, and this means that what I take to be limitations are in fact produced by my own interpretations or meaning-giving activities.
During the late 1940s, Reagan and his wife provided the FBI with names of actors within the motion picture industry whom they believed to be communist sympathizers, though he expressed reservations; he said "Do they expect us to constitute ourselves as a little FBI of our own and determine just who is a Commie and who isn't?".
Put another way: if we are committed to having the system of government that the Constitution constitutes, then we obligate ourselves to do certain things -- like elect a body of senators, as described in Article I.
Let us not, though, delude ourselves; discussion of this topic brings the Member States, those with centralised constitutions and those constituted on federal lines, with their own conceptions, head to head with each other.
Over 50 years ago Marshall McLuhan wrote, "the new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute a huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics".
