Power, Externality and Consciousness

"Power concedes nothing without a demand" indeed. To attempt to be a conscientious opposition, not merely siding with the party not in power, but siding with the people against all misuse of power, requires an understanding of how power affects consciousness, how easily we are duped into docility and defensiveness, and how to find a way out of all that. And then, having isolated that precarious formula, one must absorb the realization that winning political struggles is only partially, and sometimes never at all, about having better ideas, or even the talent for communicating them to others. Most of us have, if we have at all, only localized and limited power to shape the contingencies that surround us and practically define us.

That last limiter is one that new age discursive determinists (translation: academic hippies who think we need a "consciousness shift, dude") find offensive. They think it gives the capitalists and their stormtroopers too much power. Of course, that begs the question; we don't "give" them power by acknowledging them; we didn't create them with our minds, we didn't otherizingly threat-construct them, whatever. If the argument is that we shouldn't "give them power" in our minds when trying to forge strategies and self-consciousness in order to fight for a better world, then point well-taken, but metaphor-based self-motivation is one thing (I'm actually a big fan of it in some contexts) while trying to understand the political world is quite another. If that makes me a dualist, then both of me is proud to call us that.

The explanation I offer does not strip us of our autonomy, while it does embrace the appeal to external facts, the representations of others, to understand the external limitations on our autonomy. It is not a discursive recognition of externality that limits us; it is the discursive failure to imagine remedies to limiting externalities, to imagine ways to transcend limits. What the new agers, the idealists, the lingo-fetishists fail to realize is that we need to give those externalities their due in the first place. It's solopsistic not to; it's stupid, and historically reflective of the naive elitism of thin-blooded aristocracy who, having never gone hungry, had no idea what hunger was really like.

Moreover, insofar as I concede that "truth" in the metaphysical sense is a rhetorical construct, and even find sympathy with Heidegger's awkward but effective attempt to explain the difficult distinction between constructed truth and "reality" in Being and Time, I would simply argue that such constructs, having the political weight they have, ought to be democratized and socialized along with all other public production facilities. If truth is a product, it should be manufactured to meet human needs, not the profits of a few. Undeniably, representation plays a determinative role in the political process, and even in economic exchange and production. Ideology shapes power and is power. To acknowledge that, and even to allow for a great degree of subjectivity in interpretation, does not require a radically subjective view of externalities, alterity, and actually existing structures. It merely requires giving others their due.