Consciousness died seventy years ago. It has been replaced by electronic media.
No one is listening now, we leave messages on voice mail but our addressees never get back to us, no one can hear us above tempest sounding alienation.
No one reads what we write, and rf they do then tomorrow they'll read someone else's webpage (we can make the message as simple as you like, write it in single syllable words a foot high on the walls of the amphitheatre or scribble it on origami paper and fold it seven times, slip it in the menu at a truckers' caff, 'capitalism is rubbish, communism is good, you alone have the power of transformation'. Our Prospero spell binds nothing to our will).
On the couch, the neurotic prattles on, matching hats to heads in the psychoanalytic rigmarole, a-ha I am Oedipus, a-ha here is the castrating father, a-ha the phallus. It soon became evident to Freud's gang that the recognition of formulas was part of the problem and in the same way but at the risk of appearing ridiculous we have discovered that consciousness, that is knowledge, does not equal power. Every worker-unit understands its own exploitation but how significant is understanding when all proposed alternatives are as unconvincingly schematised as the ghosts of Christmas's past, present and future? What sane person would jeopardise their wage packet and mortgage for creased blueprints of socialism's fairground rides when capitalism supplies dvd players, Thai restaurants and central heating? By what means, precisely, would an analysis of alienation and a promise of eventual redemption through revolutionary transformation change anything should a worker choose to commit itself to that routine? I know I am held in a vice, I can feel it closing, it hurts, but how do I help myself by thinking about it? Isn't it better to be distracted by beer and art? How many worker-believers with fully articulated consciousness would it take before reality jumps its tracks? (On the internet individuals band together to buy in bulk and get those prices down, is this solidarity?) The structure of the pro-revolutionary party is such that no amount of recruits is enough, there is always some circumstance that will convince it that playing the resistance game and thereby retaining its organisational integrity is preferable to risking all in a revolutionary gambit. All defined structures seek stasis. So tell me one more time of how Israel crushes Palestine, or why Nike dumps on Malaysian workers, sing me the song of the Zapatista's and maybe at last I'll get patriotic for our common cause, but it's more likely you'll be asking me for contributions to finance the 'struggle' (one Trotskyite group in the early Nineties used to stop shoppers in the street to ask them if they had a bank account before trying to get them to subscribe to their glossy mag by direct debit, if you replied no to their first question they immediately lost interest).
Is consciousness Our Side in This World? Joschka Fischer has passed across the spectrum of political consciousness from pro-RAF crash helmeted street fighter to K/For-ist German Foreign Minister, but through those thirty years he never ceased to be a bourgeois. Back then he was in the vanguard of the revolution and now he leads a nation state - now Fischer has come to accept his class status (achieved transference), consciousness had pushed him into falsity, into rebellion against his essence but now he does not feel guilty, he has come home, he was young, it was all those years ago, now he regrets only being held to account for what he did back then. What difference is there between the anti-capitalist spectacular events and a Benetton advertising campaign, both compete in the pit of quick ideas and branded distinction? Knowledge, information, communication, consciousness, are held by, and do not hold, the world; those middle class individuals who revolt against capital for political reasons always seem to to earth indistinguishable from what they oppose (groovy protest, a product of groovy capitalism); for them revolution loses its appeal, they find that when their energy is spent they have been in error, their revolt was no more than their energy. Their subsequent understanding, that revolution is impossible because it did not happen under their stewardship, is really only an insight into their typically bourgeois ambitions, that and the realisation of the structural impossibility of revolution as a mere continuing of the intensification of protest politics. Earth First! grasped this point by declaring that the London First of May demonstrations in 2000 were not protests at all but were expressions of capability, like IRA promo video's and shots over coffins. But there was no self-examination as to what kind of collectivity was present on that day and how it related to the wider public, what was it expressive of? No doubt the organisers would prefer it if we focused on the political consciousness of the crowd rather than, say, its class identity, ie., an informal leadership showing us the way to revolution. If these were not protesters, if they were not representative of a wide section of the populace then who were they and by what right and under what terms did they make the presumption that we should go and join them? Seventy million Hindus, ten thousand anti-capitalists, historical dust.
'Proletarian consciousness' too is always earthbound, it is constituted under a star of diversion, we look elsewhere, we hold on to the things we can; what motive is there for contemplating what's over the rainbow when history indicates that here might be Oz and there might be Kansas?
All political consciousness is bourgeois.
Workers cannot believe, as belief is a betrayal of experience; who can believe and get up before dawn?
Have I fired off enough bombast to take away your will to live? Have I won because I'm the last one talking? Stacked enough pancakes to make a... stack. But what is this, what is it really? Don't I do the consciousness thing as much as anyone else, but dishonestly and with suspect motive? I don't know. But it doesn't concern me if hypothetical readers cannot understand what I'm saying because in literature I think the writer must dictate and the reader must follow, the writer must determine the rules of reading otherwise a democracy takes hold like that of Hollywood's preview performances and the demand of producers for happy endings. Writers create readers and not the opposite. I did not demand that Hegel, Kafka, Carroll, ought to exist, and out there, there is no 'market' of readers which demands particular products before they have been written. I do not see my task as a theorist of revolution to either convince or explain to people who wouldn't read what I had to say even if I did. My aim is to write as well as I am able within certain formal bounds, I have no time to explain and only just enough to describe what I find out. Description must precede explanation.