Unconsciousness raising riffs, of course, on practices of consciousness raising which was in the air when I was growing up among feminists and activists in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. That was my first encounter with the term. Its psychoanalytic, psychedelic, and aesthetic valences came later.
Coming of age in a space where critical consciousness around norms is the norm, where consciousness is, ostensibly, raised, where in principle one is liberated–one is among the liberators–is full of paradoxes.
Some of us, maybe most of us, learn things ‘out of order’–one encounters a method, a term, in its present usages and only later learns its roots. Certainly, if you were raised by radicals as I was, you read against the canon before you learn the canon–if you ever do. You read French and Black feminism and queer theory, not Chaucer. You read Julia Kristeva before you read Freud. You read Audre Lorde before you read Plato. You read Adrienne Rich not Ezra Pound. You read Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire before you read John Dewey or William James. You are a creature of emergent properties. You never needed to come out of any closet; you were never in one. You are a product of revolutions, of revelations, of liberations. As Hélène Cixous put it, “My desires have invented new desires . . . I write by the other light.”
So, what will your awakening consist of, you children of revolutions, demystifications, and dis-alienations? Consciousness raising inaugurates reckoning, transparency, political change. (The unconscious ‘stops not being written’ as Lacan put it.) As a teleology, consciousness raising is a fantasy of arrival, but arriving, like insight, like understanding, is temporary.
In fiction there is the notion of the epiphany–a surge of awareness. The classical idea of a reversal of fortune, and of anagnorisis–the moment of recognition–is a result, narratively, of prior distributions of unconsciousness among any number of protagonists that all contribute contingently to the revelation. In the narrative trades, the colloquial notion of ‘the reveal’ gets at this.
Psychoanalysis is described as the unconscious of two people talking to each other, trying to . . . what? Find something out. Psychoanalysis as a detective story in which ‘the reveal’ keeps–now in a Borgesian way, now in a Zen way–dissolving into and becoming something else or becoming nothing (Cf ‘Detective Nothing’). That Oedipus is the core myth of the history of psychoanalysis is telling. Not romance or comedy, but rather tragedy is the genre of self-discovery. Nothing frees us from the knowledge that is tragedy, not politics, not philosophy, not religion, not technology. Perhaps an orientation towards non-knowledge helps–what do I know?
Another dimension of this collection–its ‘eco-poetics’–concerns the tragedy of creature life under the reign of capitalism and its requirements, its highways, factory farms, fragmentations, and enclosures. Thinking about light pollution, or ‘roadkill’ in these poems I am imagining my way into the beings of those creatures who must navigate ever more dangerous and alienating traversals, and the terrible loss all beings incur because of the dominance of anthropocentrism, profiteering ontology, and geographies of the car which proliferate unchecked, despite all the liberation movements which have benefited so many of us, animal liberation remains undone. Next on the liberation agenda: half-earth socialism? In which the claim is made–one that is hard to disagree with–that without robust provisions for more-than-human life, humankind has no future.
Miranda Mellis is the author of four books of fiction including Crocosmia (Nightboat, forthcoming 2025), The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist. Other publications include a book of aphorisms and prose poems, Demystifications, and several chapbooks: The Revolutionary, The Quarry, Materialisms and Unconsciousness raising, which recently appeared from above/ground press. She co-authored The Instead with Emily Abendroth and was an editor at The Encyclopedia Project. Originally from San Francisco, she now lives in Olympia, Washington and teaches at Evergreen State College. http://mirandamellis.com
