Collective consciousness – fact or theory?
Today, the term
“collective consciousness” is overused and implies to a condition of the
subject within the whole of society, and how any given person or individual
comes to perceive themselves as a part of such given group. Whether or not the
term reflects any facts depends on the mindset of the person using the
terminology to express their own opinion or theory.
Many social theorists [key hint] like to explicate how an
autonomous individual comes to identify
with a larger group or structure. One could cite either political groups such
as Black Lives Matter or social groups such as Facebook or Twitter as a source
of such “collective consciousness.”
Definitively, “collective” means “[formed by a collection of individual persons
or things; constituting a collection; gathered into one; taken as a whole;
aggregate, collected.”
Likewise,
“consciousness,” (a term which is slightly more complex to define with the
entirety of its implications) signifies “Joint or mutual knowledge,” “Internal
knowledge or conviction; knowledge as to which one has the testimony within
oneself; esp. of one's own innocence, guilt, deficiencies,” and “the state or
fact of being mentally conscious or aware of anything”
By combining the two
terms, we can surmise that the phrase collective consciousness implies an
internal knowing known by all or a
consciousness shared by a plurality of persons. The easiest way to think of the
phrase (even with its extremely loaded historical content) is to regard it as
being an idea or proclivity that we all share, whoever specifically “we” might
entail.
Many other theorists have engaged the notion and have made it a social term
that implies factual collective thinking or ideologies. The term has
specifically been used by social theorists to explain how an autonomous
individual comes to identify with a larger group/structure, and as such, how patterns
of commonality among individuals bring legible unity to those structures.
Society should be
concerned with the making of the subject as an aggregation of external
processes/societal conditions. Unfortunately, most of these rules are developed
on the ideas or mindset and beliefs of socialist with their own theories. This could
hardly be accepted as a factual source but rather just what it is – a theory. Society
is desperate to know what causes people to think and to act in similar and
predictable manners.
There appears to be a social mantra or mandate that if they (we) don’t submit
to the conventions of society, e.g. if I don’t dress, talk, act or conform to
customs and practices in society, I might be ridiculed, or provoked into social
isolation. A form of isolation in which I am kept and punished for not
following the collective train of thought on matters of social importance.
This makes it a
social fact that needs to be recognized by the power of external coercion which
it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals, and the presence of
this power may be recognized in its turn either by the existence of some
specific sanction or by the resistance offered against every individual effort
that tends to violate it”
Thus, humans come to
act in certain ways via a kind of reward/punishment system enacted at the
level(s) of both The State and the social spheres; subjects are trained in a
kind of inward-outward movement; the individual may have certain barbaric
proclivities, but the assimilation process into the social sphere corrects
those tendencies by the distribution of positive or negative reinforcements.
Collective
consciousness is the effect of the
trained subject—through the process of becoming a subject, an individual learns
to be common: to dress, speak, and act like her neighbors. The “socially
conscious” subject is the legible subject, one who exists in a degree of
visible sameness in relation to the other members of the group/society.
At the top of the structure is the government or commonly referred to as the state, which aims to control the
bottom (the individual subjects) through a series of institutional mediations. Secondly,
this training process or orientation of
information to the public comes in every imaginable formats that include
social media, public education, the media, reforms in law and religious principles, etc. these sources have or attempt
to apply their direct power to the public
the subjects (people) at all times drilling them with a honed effort from the
outside into the subjective format that becomes suggestive in nature and
upholding the intended spirit or thought
developed by the state, media or other sources.
This applied power
that is subjected in an inwardness of an individual member of the public is
born from a lifetime bombardment of external coercion-- individuals come to
fulfill certain common duties, have common aspirations, follow common
life-trajectories, etc.
The “consciousness”
of each individual is not something which originates from a singular interior spirit but rather is pressured into being by
the external devices of the State. Thus, collective consciousness again
represents the individual’s relationship to a larger group or structure but marks the sameness (the same set
of principles sources applies to all subjects) among members of that group,
which act to make that group a cohesive whole.
The aforementioned prescriptions of collective consciousness express the phrase
as the internal representation of external conditions present in any given
society. These are exerted upon the subject in a variety of ways and then assimilated into the subject’s
consciousness. The idea is that the collective is a mass of like-minded persons
who will (re)emerge to reproduce the production force.
Thus, collective
consciousness is the affect/effect upon and inside of any given public whose
thoughts and actions are constantly mediated by outside pressures. The notion
of collective consciousness also owes a tremendous amount to the emerging
popularity of psychoanalysis in the 20th century.
Certainly, if one
looks closely to the coined term you can denote the conclusion of shared
contexts and meanings of individual dreams or thoughts consciously or
subconsciously. Hence the development of pre-set
ideas or thoughts exists that set-off
motives or meanings of ideas or images that can be found in the myths of one’s
own race or those of other races. In some way, these myths develop biases or
bigotry which yield a collective meaning, making it a common property of what
we call mankind or the human race supported within our society.
The unconscious is
the portion of the self of which the individual is unaware, yet which still
exerts control over the behaviors, desires, and drives of that individual. As
such, unconsciousness is never entirely divorced from the consciousness within
the individual, and one necessarily informs the other. One of the main goals of
psychoanalytic speech is to bring the unconscious into consciousness, so that
the patient may become aware of why she behaves in certain fashions.
The “collective
unconscious” is important when considering its other, “collective
consciousness” because it suggests an original set of models common to all
members of a group, and out of which they formulate meanings, contexts, and patterns
within the group. Certainly, you can see the ‘power of suggestion’ at work here.
These mental processes or psychoanalytic readings presents a more classic
meaning of collective consciousness, yet its discursive qualities ring true for
the ways in which we presently think of the term as a foundation of media
studies with the term
media defined as an
“extension of man,” indicating that humans create the world and their tools in
their image, likening technological apparatuses after their senses. Media, in
this vein, is intimately linked with the word medium, described as “Something
which is intermediate between two degrees, amounts, qualities, or classes; a
middle state”. The internet is the ultimate medium; it provides a virtual
meeting place for persons to gather and perform daily rituals of subjectivity
(even at the micro-level of person to person discourse) all channeled through a
technological network.
Collective consciousness is a term much needed by media theorists because it
postulates one, if not the effect of
media—whose broadest primary function is to convey, carry or transmit messages
it deems important to their core values. Ensuring their message gets sent and
received in many places at once can carry with it both social and political
power.
Some suggest that this
infringes on the will of free people and their
free-will power as it binds or bonds them with a message that is distinguished
to be from another -will source. Hence the free become unfree of the social
pressures applied.
Instead of a
multiplicity of singular wills or a disharmony of different spirits and
personalities, subjects are transcribed into codes operating via variations of
ones and zeroes.
Present media theorists sometimes link the notion of collective consciousness
to signal the internet as a major intermediary in the creation of a truly
global society. Herein lies my message to my readers – the goal of a truly global society aka United Nations is at
stake here. Using the consciousness of
Internet culture as “this idea that we live in an age of mechanistic, false
individualism and that we are now on the threshold of a new mutation...We all
share a collective mind.”
This is the
eradication of the thinking humanity – the destruction of a singular biosphere transferred
into an evolutionary system in which the human recognition
is freed from the confines of a single body or a purely organic body and turned
into a whole new mechanically developed body.
