Consciousness and Revolt: An Exploration toward Reconciliation
R.C. Smith
271 pp – Now available free, online
Norwich: Heathwood Press, 2012/2015
By Glenn Parton
The revised and updated edition of Robert C. Smith’s book, Consciousness and Revolt: An Exploration toward Reconciliation (now available online and for free), is creative and stimulating, and integrates many complex and difficult ideas, from Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Critical Theory, into a unique emancipatory politics that entails personal and interpersonal transformation. For a work that Smith first started writing at a relatively young age – the result, as he put it, of his ‘earliest survey of some of the more pressing philosophical issues we face’ – Consciousness and Revolt is a fantastic accomplishment that challenges the historical, social and economic architecture of modern cognition.
His starting point is an analysis of the “closed and hardened subject,” and the need for “an open, sensitive and free-flourishing subject.” This basic problem is discussed in Marcusean terms of breaking the “vicious circle” through the emergence of a new sensibility, de-colonizing the ego, and liberating the repressed Subject similar to what Freud described and to what we read in much of the first-generation Frankfurt School.
Smith wants to break the “vicious circle” through what he calls “experiential coherence” and a many-sided or “multidimensional view” of human transformation that breaks from the cycle of dominant epistemology, abolishing self-fabrication and the impulse of thinking in absolute terms (i.e., Adorno’s critique of identity thinking). Regarding the former, what we read is the earliest stages of a complex philosophy of experience, which analyses the multidimensional and intersubjective nature of experience with phenomena – an intimate form of subject-subject relating that Smith argues is blocked today by the sort of cognitive paradigm that Adorno critiques in Negative Dialectics. This leads Smith to hypothesize the early coordinates of a democratic theory of truth and an altogether more reconciled form of “experiential experience”.
But before Smith finally gets to this point, he reflects in several sections of text that the dilemma today is that the coercive legacy of capitalist society is entwined with the issue of subject-formation. Within modern capitalist society, within the modern social totality – with its dominant and coercive institutions and structures, as well as its deeply ingrained instrumental rationale and mode of cognition, we not only misconceive the phenomena of our thinking by way of the impulse toward identity and mastery – “the false universalizing tendency of thought” – but also our selves and how we relate with one another. The subject, we learn, is mediated socially. As a result of this mediation, our identities, our self-development, is also a product to whatever degree of our internalization of our sociohistorical-cultural structures, and, as Smith says, of the “totalized experiential orientation” which operates at the heart of contemporary society. In this sense, Smith’s position is very close to the one David Sherman presents in Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity (2007), namely that: “Although subjectivity is plainly mediated by the existing sociohistorical structures, it also has the capacity to affect these very structures in turn, and therefore the self-identities they engender” (Sherman, 2007; p. 6). One step further Smith wants to challenge not only our general knowledge gaining processes – or the status quo theory of knowledge cemented in contemporary capitalist society – but more broadly the “general view of the world” found on the level of standard and routine praxis.
In grounding his critical analysis in a study of “experiential experience”, including the phenomenology of consciousness, Smith is able to dialectically balance between recognition of dominant social structures and systems, which, as we’ve seen in response to the emergence of new social movements for example, might exercise violent direct repression, while simultaneously leaving room for recognition of the efficacious subject who can build transformative power and create societal change. To paraphrase, he writes: ‘In our efficacious and phenomenological freedom as subjects in the world we are able to think “otherwise” and imagine another world, not to mention actually affect the process of change’.
Though there are obviously issues about the blocking of transformative change within reified society, including the problem of ideology and even also the “self-deceiving belief” in the “economic totality” as a one-dimensional and “distorted vision of life”, Consciousness and Revolt does a tremendous amount of justice to all those in the world who struggle to create a more just, democratic, reconciled future. On this note it is perhaps no surprise that the book appears to be written for those actively engaged in struggle for a better world, offering both affirmation and a “broader foundational perspective” which may help inform this struggle on the need for “many-sided change” and an “alternative anthropology, epistemology and cosmology”. Smith’s thoughts on how we may continue breaking the “vicious circle” through experiential coherence and a many-sided human transformation process (that challenges the foundations of dominant ideology) is appealing, because it rests on the claim that we have the conscious ability to critically self-reflect on our experience so long that, in our challenge against the modern cognitive paradigm, we resist the basic epistemological processes behind the manufacturing of ideology (or “totalized worldviews”).
In emphasizing “ideology critique” in a way which focuses on the epistemic foundations of what Smith sees as the essential elements to all dominant and coercive totalitarian political formations, not just capitalist ideology, he examines a level of radical praxis as a revolt of coherence in awareness, first, and then a revolt of coherence in action second. The unsung hero of Consciousness and Revolt in this regard is Adorno’s negative dialectics. Adorno’s theory that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder breaks the cognitive paradigm of identity thinking and instrumental reason, according to Smith, because it acknowledges a non-conceptual “moreness” behind one’s experience, and together with Adorno’s notion of “mimesis”, in which we abandon ourselves to the object, Smith envisions a method of coming to know reality better, a reconciled form of relating with the phenomenal world, ourselves, and each other, and ultimately a bottom-up (prefigurative) social transformation.
According to Smith, the very structure of political thought today (ideology and abstract theory) is perpetrated by a hardened, stunted subject, for which the antidote is, in part, to live “openly and groundedly.” In other words, we have a choice. We either have our openness and coherence for wholly absorbing our experience so as to discern certain values in a persistent and open-ended manner, or we have the reproduction of dominant systems of thought and finally also the reproduction of dominant social structures. Openness toward the diversity of the world, including interacting with others in non-alienated, non-hierarchical ways, is self-transformative and normative, giving value and meaning to a life of intersubjective togetherness (a point which ties into Smith’s idea of a phenomenological ethics). As the author puts it: letting the phenomena speak, opening ourselves to “otherwise” and “moreness,” a never-ending process of learning, a fluid and unfolding reality, comprise the best hope for “foundational change”.
But in formulating this thesis, Smith is clear in his desire to transcend post-structuralism – in which there are no grand narratives and any remaining concept of truth is generally corroded – as well as avoid the traps of positivism and relativism. He manages this by introducing a complex, dynamic, multidimensional theory of truth which, at the level of radical praxis, refers to the articulation of a “revolt of coherence,” in which a concept of truth is preserved in the midst of one’s “constant experiential orientating with the world”.
Generally speaking, it is impressive how Smith has integrated so many difficult and complex ideas into a unique emancipatory political philosophy – a political philosophy which provides deep support for “Occupy-style initiatives” and spaces that “seek to reclaim the self, one’s subjectivity.”
The many passages of beautiful prose in this book also bring life to Smith’s deeply philosophical discussion and infuse a certain passion in the idea of bringing meaning back to experience (since capitalism has, for so long, been increasingly eliminating or exhausting meaning in terms of our existential lives). One example of this is found in the section on the body, where Smith writes that “there is no greater resource for truth than the body. It anchors us in the world (such that the body must be evaded in order to achieve a false sense of security)”, and enables “the immense passion of lived experience” that cracks the “hard shell of self-forgetfulness and evasive enchantments.” Accordingly, his discussion of Roquentin’s moment of ardent passion, in which he comes face to face with “otherwise” is a very intriguing interpretation of “nausea.” The idea of the experience of the absurd as a positive moment for self and social transformation is fascinating because it is usually thought of in a negative way only. Further, it is clear that Smith has learned much from Sartre and Husserl – although he is very critical of the latter, and seeks to build from and transcend the former. This comes out especially in some of the concluding sections of the book where an interesting discussion unfolds about the role of art, especially music, in penetrating into the bodily and sensory core of our being, fomenting a “revolt of coherent awareness.”
In closing, setting the notion of consciousness and revolt against the existential impulse to achieve a “false sense of ultimate security” – which, again, Smith argues underpins totalitarian ideology – we read how the initial foundation of social transformation becomes “faith in life,” entrusting oneself to the phenomena of their experience and to other people. What gives this analysis so much oomph is the link it draws between such a “faith in life” and an alternative prefigurative politics in which a new sensibility arises.
My favourite part of the book is the Epilogue, “Experiencing Absurdity,” that highlights something important and profound. Basing himself not only on Sartre, but even more so on Camus, what Smith says is persuasive and hopeful. According to him, there is the experience of absurdity, “everywhere and available to everyone,” that causes a “crisis” in the individual because it challenges, confronts, or goes against his or her ideology or inner belief system. In other words, it challenges the very core of their ideological and repressed “orientation”. Smith gives an example of a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk of a busy city street that evokes, he argues, the experience of the absurd (and I can think of no better word) in many people. We are smacked in the face by a disgusting and brutal reality, so to speak, and we feel and think that “we are awakening from a lie” and that “we are out of harmony with our totalized [ideological] vision of life.” What Smith says makes sense: we either absorb the critical realities of our experience or we consciously evade them, suppress them and continue along in a state of “experiential blindness”. In this sense, I can see how the experience of absurdity might help create moments which breaks the vicious circle, and become a bedrock in which a social critique is anchored, but only if, as Smith realizes, “a person lets the full weight of absurdity sink down into one’s mind.”
Experiencing absurdity, as Smith explains it, supports the central message of his book; namely, that a true philosophical method of consciousness and revolt rests on experience first that is simply there, before us, and begging to be heard, in a very similar sense as Adorno’s writing on the recognition of suffering.
The one concern or criticism I have has to do with the sad truth that many people today are closed to the experiences of reality and closed to one another. As Smith identifies, this is part of the contemporary problematic. It’s not that people are always completely or permanently closed – and sometimes also not closed without reason – but significantly closed nonetheless. In Smith’s references to psychology, especially in his recent work, this point is further developed. But it still goes without saying that any appeal to freedom or choice of individuals – as John Holloway emphasizes, if I understand him correctly – will not necessarily suffice to initiate a mass movement for radical change. Following Marcuse, I personally prefer to ground my faith for radical change in Eros. As Marcuse explains, Eros is a force in human nature and in the world that is independent of what human beings decide, think, or do. It is the constancy and pervasiveness of the sexual instinct that makes it a real force, or actually existing tendency, for genuine social transformation.
As Freud defined it, an instinct is an internal, constant urge from deep within the body that it can be repressed, but not eliminated or completely controlled, and as Marcuse argued, the sexual instinct (in the sense of the over-drive to bring one’s genitals into contact with the genitals of another) is a socially restricted/enforced version of Eros. This makes the sexual instinct a potentially revolutionary force (in my opinion) because, if Marcuse is right, setting it free (in accordance with its own nature to expand and self-sublimate) pushes us toward human emancipation (not to exclude the role of Reason and the “journey inwards”). Perhaps this point concerning Eros – the life force – is already present somewhere in Smith’s work, as his book certainly conveys, even if only implicitly, an affirmation toward the existence of such a force. Nowhere is this more evident than in some of his earliest reflections on revolutionary politics as a politics of healing.
References
Sherman, D. (2007). Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity. New York: SUNY.
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Glenn Parton
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