mostly warded off and repressed. Here Freud advances one of his boldest claims: “I hold that the concordance between the individual and the mass is in this point almost complete. The masses, too, retain an impression of the past in unconscious memory traces.”34 Memory here becomes both onto- and phylogenetic in ways that do not necessarily lead us back to racially coded and ideological notions of primitivism. In fact, the notion of the return of the repressed leads the psychoanalyst to the surprising conclusion that if the idea of a collective unconscious makes any sense at all, it is only because the unconscious, understood in this way, is always already collective to begin with:
The term “repressed” is here used not in its technical sense. Here I mean something past, vanished, and overcome in the life of a people, which I venture to treat as equivalent to repressed material in the mental life of the individual. In what psychological form the past existed during its period of darkness we cannot as yet tell. It is not easy to translate the concepts of individual psychology into mass psychology, and I do not think that much is to be gained by introducing the concept of a “collective” unconscious—the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a general possession of mankind.35
Freud and Lacan’s notion of an inextinguishable unconscious memory—despite the appearance of insurmountable conceptual distances, not to mention a certain Jungian family resemblance—is furthermore not unrelated to the notion of a species-like memory that acquires almost cosmic dimensions in the writings of Henri Bergson and, after him, with Gilles Deleuze. This is the memory of an all-embracing past, of life itself as pure recollection—a realm that is neither real nor merely possible, but actually virtual and virtually actual at all times. “What Bergson calls ‘pure recollection’ has no psychological existence. This is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious. All these words are dangerous, in particular, the word ‘unconscious’ which, since Freud, has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological existence,” Deleuze explains: “We must nevertheless be clear at this point that Bergson does not use the word ‘unconscious’ to denote a psychological reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological reality—being as it is in itself.”36 This is memory not just as the agency of language, not even as the unwritten and obscure record of the human species, but directly as a structure of being: memory as immemorial ontology.
Far from falling for a Jungian interpretation, what Revueltas adds to this notion of an unconscious, indestructible, and quasi-ontological memory is the political question of its rude awakening. In this sense, he is certainly not the only one during the late 1960s and early 1970s to tackle the possibility of a collective popular memory. In his testimonial novel L’Etabli (The Assembly Line), the French Maoist Robert Linhart also writes: “Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten in the indefinitely mixed memory of the working class. Other strikes, other committees, other acts will find inspiration in past strikes—as well as in ours, the trace of which I will later discover, mixed up with so many others . . .”37 Revueltas, though, is precisely interested in the recovery of these traces, in their phantasmatic reinscription or even resurrection. What happens, in other words, with the consciousness that the bricklayers in his second anecdote were “on the verge” of acquiring? Once this spectral consciousness sinks back into the depths of a latent collective unconscious, where it will remain insistently as a virtual memory of the human species, how can such remnants be made to re-emerge? By what kind of act—whether political or theoretical?
Before we turn to the theory of the act, however, we must consider how—when the same bricklayers partake in an architect’s project to build a private home, which is then sold to the homeowner—a supplementary alienation of human work takes place in the selling of property and the juridical passage of the house from the hands of the bricklayers, through the architect’s plans, to the homeowner’s enjoyment. Simplistic as this third and final cognitive anecdote may seem, we should nevertheless not ignore the powerful effects of alienation, here in the sense of separation and subtraction, on the general reserve of human labor:
This alienation, which sunders the thing from the object (making it into a thing without object), radically—at the roots—affects the subject and strips him of his essence. Placed before the subtraction of his object into the thing, he does not cease to possess the object (given that the object will be present in some place), but he leads it astray and appears in front of that stripped thing . . . in the condition of mere amnesia, as empty consciousness, hidden from his generic I, exactly as if one said that an individual forgot where his or her house is.38
For Revueltas, all architecture is in fact a preemptive form of archaeology. Indeed, the task of critical reason consists precisely in an operation similar to the uncovering of an archaeology latent within every architectural structure.
As Revueltas writes in one of his more ominous passages, “Archaeology states: this piece of architecture will disappear”—not because of some vague Heraclitean awareness of the flow of time behind the rapid succession of architectural styles and fashions, “but because archaeology as such consists in thinking about and questioning (in consciousness) the how and why of the contradictions by virtue of whose antagonisms cultures and civilizations disappear.”39 In this and other passages from Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas comes extremely close to a definition of dialectical and historical materialism that is similar to the one found in the fragments and annotated remains—the refuse and debris of modernity, as it were—taken up and reused by Benjamin in his unfinished Arcades Project. “Here we are of course not talking about archaeology as a scientific discipline,” Revueltas explains:
We are referring, rather, to an archaeology understood as a particular form of historical consciousness, in the same sense as when we talked about architecture. Archaeology, then, appears as a rethinking, as the repetition in consciousness of past architectures (cultural formations and so on), and these, in turn, as determinate forms of the totality of a historical consciousness in movement, which is nothing but the movement of its self-destruction.40
If the task of theory is revealed in the principle that all architecture is an anticipated archaeology, this must be understood in the rigorous sense of coming to know the past labor that vanished or disappeared into the monumental presence of the present. History, seen in this dialectical sense, is not an accumulation of cultural riches so much as the large-scale vanishing of misery into the unconscious of humanity’s constitutive, generic, and originary prehistory. As Revueltas writes,
In this way, as self-historicization without rest (which never reaches quietude), history is a constant repetition of itself in the continuous mind of human beings, in their generic mind and unconscious memory—the unconscious that is first ahistorical and then historical and social—(not in the vulgar sense in which one says “history repeats itself,” but as presence produced, and producing itself, within the limits of human eternity), the natural history of man that goes back over itself without end.41
How, then, does humanity escape from the almost mystical slumber of its general intellect and unconscious memory? Here, both Revueltas and Benjamin, like so many other Western Marxists, seem to have been inspired by a statement of principle that appears in a letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge. “Our election cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or a political form,” Marx had written to his friend and fellow Young Hegelian: “Then people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.”42 Benjamin would turn this election cry into the cornerstone of his dialectical method as a materialist historian. “The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian,” Benjamin wrote in his notebooks for The Arcades Project, in which he also wondered: “Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the ‘now of recognizability,’ in which things put on their true—surrealist—face.”43 Is this
