WHEN WE LIVE AS ONE

Evaluating modes of collective consciousness as we inhabit a shared home.

Laying the Foundation

I can see it in a scrawl of images. Their details are potentially particular yet also universalized, washed of specificity, spanning out from the ever-lengthening annals of a memory that is in part my own experience and in part transmitted, taken from contexts beyond my own life. A group of inseparable friends, all young girls, clawing their way through the pangs of adolescence under the male gaze; extended family and friends encircling a full dinner table as they celebrate a hallowed festival that binds ancestry to the contemporary; a collection of apartments or houses arrayed into a neighborhood, the shops down the block, grocery stores to feed us and parks to play in, all these edifices and their inhabitants packed together to create the components of a community. Fill in the absent details and each generic grouping becomes your own, another snapshot of the fluid self melding seamlessly into the collective body.

Our gatherings are tangible evidence that we do not each live a singular existence. We read ourselves as inextricable members of mystical wholes, the self seen refracted through a multiplying lens. A person admittedly prone to obsessions, I am obsessed with collective identity. Its stark and unambiguous contours in some circumstances, its rippling, amorphous shape in others. The way it posits each individual as occupying a shared perceptual space: a form of processing the world that supposedly aligns us with others “like” us, allowing us to transcend our one body and mind. I am a being within continuous multitudes. I am never merely one person.

Collective identity can be difficult to define.

Melucci, it existed in relation to social movements, as “an interactive and shared definition” of a united body and its goals for taking political action. Yet the term has assumed a broader meaning. We can evoke a litany of identity categories by which people enter into collectives: ones grounded in ethnicity, race, nation, gender, sexuality, class, culture, ideology, industry, geography, generation. In an American milieu notoriously steeped in the credo of individualism, commitment to our collective identities can enable both a reckoning with systems of power and a rejection of compulsions to assimilate. This is how I typically conceive of and appreciate collectivity, as a mutual recognition among those linked by common pasts and concerted futures. Collectivity operates as something of an affect—an intuitive, ambiguous register of feeling, a palpable invisible state that wafts through shared spaces, in which all members of the group understand emotively that their lives are converging with sociological significance. Collectivity speaks to us with and without words: in the languages of familial pasts, in the literatures of cultural presents, but also in the appearance of a familiar face, the façades of a famous neighborhood, in the delicate mechanisms of a never-to-be-forgotten ritual. Perhaps, then, we can call collectivity a form of consciousness.

Collective consciousness feels pleasant when articulated this way. But when I discovered it, careening through the pretty pages of a novel, I found it to be one of those frustratingly common things: a concept both exceptionally compelling and troubled, unsettling.

It sits at the helm of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House—published to great acclaim last spring as a companion to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. In Egan’s rendering of today’s America, the digital era has engineered a new corporate exploit to eternalize and publicize the human mind. Anyone (who pays) has the capacity to download the entire vault of their memories, thoughts, and senses into a technicolor cube, and, for those who so desire, upload them to a shared archive known as the Collective Consciousness. Anyone who “externalizes” their consciousness to the Collective receives free rein to view the digitized perceptions of others who have done the same.

faction, opposed on ideological grounds, hides from this ubiqui- lective consciousness expandsliteral. In a way, by seeing into those who elect to record their becomes an imminent lure. It is an opportunity to transcend the harsh silo of the skull, to mineences for one’s own curiosity, ultimately subsuming ourselves and each other into a conglomerate human living project. It is incredible: terrifying, impossible one character describes it, “The collective is like gravity: almost no one can withstand it. In the end, they give it everything. And then the collective is that much more omniscient.”

It is through this omniscience that I would like to crack open the question of collective consciousness. Let us understand collective consciousness as a state of heightened group sentience, in which members of a group experience some sort of mutually-influencing interiority that generates a shared awareness of a concurrent exterior. In other words, a group of people experience a set of the same events in the outside world, and certain conditions lead those people to perceive these events through a shared vantage. Collective consciousness may elides individuals into a joint plane of seeing. With this framework, Egan’s warning of “omniscience” implies a model of group thinking in which the collective processes the world in an absolute, united manner. I approach such a phenomenon with skepticism toward this absolute and excitement toward this unity. The Candy House treats the omniscience of the collective as an endeavor that is frightening if unbridled (in its techno-capitalist example) yet generative if transformed into a model that is artistic. The book concludes with an alternative model of collective consciousness—that of the book itself, a work of fiction that weaves a network of interlinked characters and illuminates their interiorities side by side, for every reader to experience as a whole.

If Egan provides us with two possibilities, what other models of collective consciousness can we identify—and evaluate—in our present world, where the capacity to literally view inside each other’s minds remains an unactuated fiction? Is collective consciousness real—or better yet, is it desirable? Does its omniscience forebode an invasive attempt to universalize, to flatten the field of difference, or can it foster an empathetic striving toward unity?

I posed these questions to other members of the Indy community—what better way to grapple with collective consciousness than by engaging a collective consciousness? We each took up a model and reflected in conversation.

Staging the Scaffolds Fiction

My practical take: collective consciousness is not so much about accessing another’s interiority in a real, transcendent-of-bodies-and-mental-barriers way, like they do in The Candy House, but rather about developing a deep and intense empathy. This is an empathy of pain, need, and satisfaction. It is a treaty contingent on an agreement to see the ‘other’ as oneself. In search of access to this hyper-empathy, maybe we don’t have to look too much further than the local bookshelf. Open your nearest piece of fiction and flip to the first page; willfully enter into the contract of mutual trust made between narrator and reader. We are taking on a suspension of disbelief. Think of ‘disbelief’ as it is used often nowadays—to deny, to invalidate, to claim one reality as priority over another. But to enter a novel is to suspend the disbelief that comes with not being able to see something for yourself. You agree, instead, to see the world encased within the story, through only what the narrator tells you, the narrator’s eyes that naturally shape the trappings of the universe one way or another, if only based on the moments they observe and the moments they elide. This is empathy, to enter a world that is not your own and to believe in it, connect with it, derive joy and pain from the joy and pain experienced in narrative. This kind of empathy, perhaps, is even deeper than that you might feel for people you physically know—you cannot access the interiority of other people, even if you feel that you understand them. In fiction, however, interiority is laid bare. The subjectivity of worldbuilding is impossible to avoid, the thought process that slowly carves out the silhouette of someone you come to know. Someone who is not you, but could be you, who lives in a world you come to see as yours. Then your own real, interior world, I think, becomes larger for it. Inside one head, you hold multiple realities; you house your own collective. –JW

Pictures and Memory

How do we connect to our individual and shared histories? When we look at a photograph, how do we mediate the real past and the accessible present, given that the “real” experience of the past exists out of frame?

When we see old photos—Mom as a young girl, Dad in college—on film, or grainy digital—we become uncertain, and caught by the sudden recognition that we don’t even know how much we don’t know. How many nights did she stay up late to finish her dissertation? Did he fight with his landlord, or dream of moving away? These people represent our knowable origins— how we inhabit cross-generational collectives— yet remain, distinctly, unknowable. The past is basically impossible to ingest, even when it feels like we’re looking right at it.

Today, photo-sharing apps and modern technology allow us to amass a hugely detailed personal record, as well as participate in a kind of omniscience produced by the recording and sharing of many perspectives of one event. These technologies offer the promise of successful ingestion of the past. They propose that closing the gaps in our personal and collective histories leads to a closer understanding of our pasts. But in every record of history, however well-recorded, there is potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error, even—especially—if that history is our own. When accessing our histories, there is not only the problem of the relative gap in the record—which can potentially be closed with a closer record—but also the absolute gap that cannot be mediated between the past and the present. Thus, just because we have the ability to keep an unprecedentedly close record of our lives doesn’t actually mean we will have any more epistemic certainty about ourselves and our pasts. The cross-generational collectives that create us constantly challenge us to reckon with these gaps. When I look at old photos, I’m also reminded that even though the passage of time makes it imperfect, this kind of collectivity is just as powerfully real. –AQ

Mass Protest

Imagine a sea of people, flooding concrete streets with the liquid mass of bodies who move in unison. There are megaphones, and there are speakers rotating through, and there are people passing out water and snacks and voter registration cards, caring for one another, observant of those around them while attentive to the organized motion, the central focus of the crowd, everyone looking in the same direction. And there is yelling, total yelling, prophetic yelling.

What we see here is the precursor to the ballot box, everyone marching toward that eventual queue of voters made methodical by bureaucracy, but here we protestors eschew composure, proclaim the unvarnished, as all that yelling churns a collective story out of the fray of individuals.

I am not suggesting that each rally speaker, each chant leader, each active attendee shares a uniform ideological vantage or an equal proximity to the injustice at hand. To suggest a universal plane of understanding the politics would be to dress the protest in the very subjects it exists to decry, to drench the movement in whiteness or heteropatriarchy or capitalism once again. Each person arrives at the protest with a distinct combination of identities; we each come here pulled along by the hand of a unique lived experience. But when I posit the presence of a collective consciousness in justice-oriented politics, I am looking at the crowd and I am thinking of the way speech moves us, the protestors, into the shared space of the social story. Each of us is engaged in the process of conveying a series of inextricable stories that coalesce, stories about the way the state governs now and the way we could transform it yet. With those coalescent stories, a numerical mass may become a thinking collective.

I am articulating collective consciousness as a pure form of engaged democracy. One in which democracy manifests as an intangible affective space, where a collective perception of grief, grievance, and hope is transmitted between each of our unmelded bodies. Though each of us remains tethered to our individual voting patterns, nuanced beliefs, histories, and identity-based experiences, we share in the affective sense that we are creating authentic democracy by moving together, rising together, seeing what we call one another to see. Our ‘selves’ may be too heterogeneous for a blanket politics, but outside of us roams something seeing and breathing, a sentience of our collective creation. –MC

A Non-human Collective

There was a pottery teacher at my high school who once got in serious trouble for pushing a student who made a bad joke about his Lenin poster into a wall. Before he quit, he gathered a group of us on stools and handed out packets of articles about the communal life of trees. I was introduced to an idea that has become almost mythological for the environmental left—the “Wood Wide Web.” Underground fungal networks tie the roots of trees together, passing not just nutrients but valuable information between them. Forests were not vertical arenas, trees writhing upward to claim their share of sunlight, but cooperative enterprises. Fellow trees spread warnings about threats through the fungal network, and send resources to struggling neighbors. There were arguments in the packet that these networks could preserve patterns of activity as memories, potentially going back millennia, that evolve into forest-wide behavior resembling cognition. It was a model of decentralized, harmonious, collaborative co-existence that could, if you chose, be called conscious. To the teacher, in a class full of already-individualized American teens, it must have been a parting attempt to put forth an alternative. Somebody mentioned that the 400 printed pages in these packets must have cost a few trees; he laughed and did not push them into a wall.

The “Wood Wide Web” thesis, once the basis of books, TED talks, and much eco-ethical thinking, died recently. A series of experiments in 2019 examining the networks closely found that the fungi act less like volunteer bucket brigades than canny day-traders, bargaining for portions of everything they pass along. The trend of novels like

The Candy House composed of indirectly-related stories from different perspectives attempts, in part, to imagine de-centralized forms of collective consciousness. With Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory (2018), that trend reached its zenith, and the interwoven logic of trees became for the first time a best-selling paper-mill of a premise. Now it looks kind of naïve.

The search for honorable life in nature goes on: Lacy M. Johnson, in an article on slime molds included in the Best American Science and Nature of Writing of 2022, writes that this startlingly smart organism, which nevertheless has no central nervous system or clearly-separate individuals, “has so much to teach us.” The note of surrender is undeniable. If we cannot look to nature to prove that we are for each other, will we do it ourselves? –ZB

Inhabiting the House

Maybe that is exactly how we can move forward. By doing it ourselves. Living in this home together. Just as one of us said in the scaffolding— we house our own collective. Because within the multiplicity of human subjectivity, as we each inhabit something greater than our individual perceptions, the perceptions of all those people circling around us move inward and inhabit us. We have come together to lay the groundwork for our cognitive commune, and in staging the scaffolding, we realized that beyond the fiction of The Candy House, the collective consciousness is already liveable for us, if we are careful and caring enough to look for it. We find collective consciousness when we embrace the great, boundless belief that other people’s depths coexist with our own, in a way that makes each of us more real. We find it when we occupy the gaps between our presents and our pasts, because the shared memories which situate us within a collective past may never be fully knowable, and yet they are the vital backstories that gave us our lives. We find it when we experience the emotional narrative of a mass rising up, aligning individual stories into an imperative to see what another sees. We find it when we look beyond our own humanity toward other ecological examples and encounter both the wonder of inspiration and the disappointment of imperfection. That imperfection will remain constant. But so will that inspiration, that compulsion to try and fill those gaps with our capacious joinedness.

We, this tiny word, bears the answer to our search for a real life, everyday model of collective consciousness. Lurking behind this plural pronoun is a series of vibrant and irreducible individuals, who can never be fully subsumed into a smooth, consistent collective. Still each one chooses to stand behind those two letters that make one word because we understand the power—and often, the truth—of a conscious we. After all our rigorous thinking, we are left here compelled by the omniscience of a pronoun. ‘We’ sees into all of our minds at once. ‘We’ brings us into a single existence while only existing as long as we are many. We are the house in which we are living.