June 15, 2000

The Class Structure of Consciousness

0.

Not even nature is free.

1.

The old-philosophical, i.e., metaphysical, or cosmological, aspect of life is the question of consciousness and being, conscious being, or human being.

2.

If other animals, some of which are clearly conscious, have ever made a study of their mode of conscious being, we will never know. Investigation of human being thus subsumes all fields of human endeavor outside of those related to physical survival, since human being presupposes being, i.e., a certain amount of the means of subsistence at hand: in the strongest, most concrete sense, human being is the mode of being which is free simply to be.

3.

Freedom is a precondition of human being.

4.

“Human” may as well be a synonym for “conscious.” Spinoza would have had something to say about this. The pantheist would also have appreciated the proposition that God has no eyes but our eyes, no ears but our ears. Thus, by way of logical extension, pantheism also discovers that we are the eyes and ears of the universe.

5.

We do not know whether there are extraterrestrial beings, but in any case, we still remain at least one species-set of eyes and ears.

6.

This seems to weaken the distinction between is and ought already, before this has really even begun. If we are the eyes and ears of the universe, then each and every individual who carries those eyes and ears has a “duty” to perform, a function to fulfill, and yet those duties and functions are not the rigorous, painful, and strenuous ones Kant would have suggested—there’s no categorical imperative. And yet these duties and functions do indeed seem to be oughts, requiring nothing more than for one to be what one is: a human being, which, of course, requires freedom.

This sounds weak, bad-utopian; right away, the memory of the timid, tepid, and fascistic uses to which relativistic teleologies apparently of this sort have been put pop back. But since when has this collapsion of the is-ought distinction, which I readily admit has been tried before, ever been attempted within a libertarian framework? Someone warned us not to forget totality, as it was the only concept which, though regulative, i.e., negative, in nature, is capable of holding its own against all ideological mystification; it forces you to see systemic, global contradictions clearly. The force of this particular regulative concept (most of which are weak and very specialized) could be said to be derived from its having tallied the debt owed by all of the objects ever loan-sharked by their concepts, all the contents ever shortchanged by their forms: totality is quite simply the return of the repressed, a super-Sphinx with a revolutionary cosmochip on its shoulder, and you better come correct.

8.

A regulative concept being total—as is the only such instantiation, the concept of totality—actually turns around and becomes positive, i.e., grounds a position in the process of its destruction of all partial positions. How else could a “philosophical” theory about consciousness ground the communist position? But I run ahead of myself.

9.

Totality won’t let you leave anything out. If you hack together some bullshit with pretensions to world-explanation, and it doesn’t at least explain why it must not address a certain issue clearly unaddressed, you’re dismissed with a flick of the pimpslappin’ wrist. Fuck what you heard. Being, Seyn, or, since Martin Luther, Sein, requires human being, Da-Sein, to become conscious of itself. And Da-Sein is not an ontological abstraction from the necessary substrate of conscious matter; each human being, each ontic particular, carries the entire duty, the whole of the cosmological telos, already.

10.

Everyone wants to know everything.

11.

But this sounds foolish and unnecessary. If the cosmological telos is realized already, if everyone is already equipped with consciousness, even animals, what further need do we have of “philosophical” theories like this one? Can’t we just sit and contemplate our navels after workhours?

12.

No. Everyone wants to know everything.

13.

Children are not yet thinkers, though they think. Animals are not yet humans, though they are conscious. It would seem from these metaphors that I am teasing out the childish and animalistic elements of humanity. But my only point is that it cannot be directly proven that there is anything more to be done other than to survive and “be”; all I can do is (1) set forth most strenuously the enormity of our cosmological function, which is in fact our actual, real, objective function—it is what we do, which turns the is-ought distinction of the blind pragmatists and partial realists against itself, exploding it in the most powerful dialectical conversion of pure quantity into liberating quality ever (since global capitalism) by claiming the entire weight of “what is the case,” and, what is more, what has been, and not only for the 10,000 or so years of organized human society with masters, lords, serfs, slaves, and proletariat, but for the 20 billion or so years of matter’s existence—no matter how poorly we perform it, no matter how unconscious of it we are, and (2) compare it to the practice of the global society which proceeds still unaware of its cosmic mission.

14.

Humanity has yet to relate itself to the universe as anything resembling a species, which, recall, was the only totality concept which enabled protestants like Feuerbach to finally shake free of God. Only in a handful of minds has the question of totality—however it has been stated, whether in terms cosmic, biological, social, cultural, or even, at the most primitive levels, national—ever come up in a timely fashion—we know plenty of barbarians who claim nationality today, ethnicity tomorrow, when these have been obsolete in principle since Egypt, or Greece, or Rome, or, even more conservative, since 1492, or, at the very latest, at the date of the close of the next-to-the-last ethnic-cleansing, wherever that was on the planet—, and in relation to this type of telos of human existence, consciousness is seen to be the end, quite literally, but not after the style of the various idealisms, which believe that by individual grasping after the Absolute, life on earth will be made more meaningful.

15.

In eutopia I do not want, after I wake up from my 2 pm - 4 pm nap, to go to the bar down the block, before an evening of painting and reading, to get drunk and talk with some undereducated, overmediated workers about what’s on the news, and think “there but for the grace of God go I.” None of us undereducated, overmediated workers enjoy one another’s company as it is. The condition of the fulfillment of each is the fulfillment of all. “Weeeeeee’re in this [hell] together...” (Al Jarreau)

16.

The nature of our ideational enterprise must be total and infinite, and this idealism, if you wish to call it that, realizes that material barriers exist against its realization.

17.

Consciousness is not realized simply because it has not been set as a goal. It has been a means of wealth accumulation, and in the minds of the slaves, peasants, serfs, and proletariat, self-deception with the nostrums of religious belief; in the minds of the middle classes throughout history, consciousness has been filled with striving-after: the petit-bourgeoisie and other middle classes are mass-produced Johnny-Come-Latelys. Even the purest thought to date has been so clearly class-determined, as to become a status symbol: The quality trademark of all too many of the well-read.

18.

But man does not set himself problems he is incapable of solving, because the concepts don’t exist for the formulation of the problem, which can only be the coming to consciousness of a contradiction which must be superseded.

19.

The fundamental contradiction, originally advanced within, but subsuming even those identified by, the critique of political economy, is the fact of consciousness in every human being, and the frustration of the consciousness of consciousness as the species orientation, recognition of it as the only human being, the only “meaning of life.” Its supersession calls for worldwide revolution. We are “nothing but” the eyes and ears of the universe; it is revolutionary that we are nothing less than this.

class.consciousness class.struggle species.being