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Collective Consciousness

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Collective Unconscious


Tuckman's Stages of Group Development

Maturity Levels

ML1

 

ML2

ML3

ML4

ML5

ML0

Task Focus /

Relationship Focus

Forming

 

 

Storming  

Norming

Performing

Adjourning

Leadership Maturity

Dictator / Directing   Coach / Selling Participant / Supporting Enabler / Delegating Expert / Self-Management Tyrant / Micro-Management

Non-Conflicting Capability Levels

CL1 Chaos

 

 CL2 Systems

CL3 Standards

CL4 Measured

CL5

Optimised / Agile

CL0

Negligence

Performance Impact /

Team Effectiveness

Working Groups   Pseudo Teams Potential Teams Real Teams High Performing Teams Enslaved Individuals -

Culture of Fear

   

 

Negligence

Threshold

 
Collective Unconscious  

 

CAPABILITY MATURITY "SWEET SPOT"

Collective Subject / Collective Agency  

 

.


Emergence of Consciousness

Consciousness is emerging in systems of higher degrees of complexity, systemicity (interconnectedness) and interdependence. "a high value of Φ (system’s overall informational integration - DVS) is a necessary condition for a correspondingly high level of phenomenal consciousness" (What is It Like to Be a Group Agent)

Same seems being true to any cognitive system, including but not limited to a Collective. Examples can be found in rise of self-awareness and ability to cooperate and support each other at groups facing dangerous and life-threatening situations.

Planetary Consciousness is extension of Collective Consciousness into Global scale.


https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/collective-consciousness/

collective consciousness

The term collective consciousness refers to the condition of the subject within the whole of society, and how any given individual comes to view herself as a part of any given group. The term has specifically been used by social theorists/psychoanalysts like Durkheim, Althusser, and Jung to explicate how an autonomous individual comes to identify with a larger group/structure. Definitively, “collective” means “[f]ormed by [a] collection of individual persons or things; constituting a collection; gathered into one; taken as a whole; aggregate, collected” (OED). 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” (OED). 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.

Although history credits Émile Durkheim with the coinage of the phrase, many other theorists have engaged the notion. The term has specifically been used by social theorists like Durkheim, Althusser, and Jung to explicate 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. Durkheim and Althusser are concerned with the making of the subject as an aggregation of external processes/societal conditions. Also worth noting (though of a slightly different variety) are the writings of Vladmir Vernadsky, Katherine Hayles, and Slavoj Zizek, (specifically his pieces about cyberspace).

In his Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim’s social conscience arises from his social theory. Desperate to know what causes individuals to act in similar and predictable manners, he observes: “If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in an attenuated form, the same effects as punishment….” (Durkheim 3). He eventually comes to the conclusion that “A social fact is 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” (Durkheim 8). 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 affect 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.

Louis Althusser, an avid Marxist, specifically concerned himself with the “making” of the individual as a process of external coercion. In his formulation, the subject is created via a top-down network of “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, which “present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions”(Althusser 143). At the top of the structure is The State, which aims to control the bottom (the individual subjects) through a series of institutional mediations. ISAs present all forms of communication and information to the public. They are every imaginable institution: Education, The Media, Law, Religion, etc. These ISAs direct power onto the subject at all times, honing her from the outside into the subjective (and subjected) body that will uphold and reproduce the power of The State. In Althusser’s formulation, the 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 ISAs 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. Carl Jung coined the term collective unconscious to denote the shared contexts and meanings of individual’s dreams. According to Jung, there exists a pre-experiential set of “mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one’s own folk or in those of other races” which yield “a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind” (Jung 322). 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 Jungian “collective unconscious” is important when considering its other, “collective consciousness” because it suggests an original set of archetypes common to all members of a group, and out of which they formulate meanings, contexts, and patterns within the group.

The Althusserian and 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. Marshall McLuhan defines media 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 the McLuhan vein, is intimately linked with the word medium, described as “Something which is intermediate between two degrees, amounts, qualities, or classes; a middle state” (OED). 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 carry/transmit/interpret/reify messages/information from one site to another. Having described the contemporary historical epoch as “posthuman,” media theorists like Katherine Hayles strongly depend upon the notion of collective consciousness. In a McLuhan-esque maneuver, internet theorists mark “code” (the binary-numerical formulations which create internet-language) as direct replications of the human genome: differences are produced by slight variations on a set of simple, universal entities. In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles remarks that “the post human is ‘post’ not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will.” (Hayles 4) A coded human existence is one without the singularity of the liberal subject. Instead of a multiplicity of singular wills or a cacophony 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. In a 1998 interview with online technology review “Telepolis,” Slavoj Zizek described the consciousness of Internet culture as “this neo-Jungian 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.” The “collective mind” that Zizek here discusses refers to Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s noosphere. The noosphere is “The part of the biosphere occupied by thinking humanity”—the last of a tripartite evolutionary system in which human cognition is freed from the confines of an organic body. The noosphere is also “characterized by (the emergence or dominance of) consciousness, the mind” (OED).

Anna Piepmeyer

Winter 2007

WORKS CITED

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

“collective, adj.2” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 16 Feb. 2007 .

“consciousness, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 16 Feb. 2007.

Durkheim, Emile. Rules for the Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. 1982. (Extracts available at: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/ xDur.htm.)

Jung, C. G. Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 10). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd Edition, 1970. (Extracts available at: http://www.netreach.net/~nhojem/ dreamq.htm.)

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extension of Man. MIT: MIT Press, 1964, 1994.

“medium, n and a.” OED Online. September 2003. Oxford University Press. 16 Feb. 2007 .

“noosphere, n.” OED Online. December 2003. Oxford University Press. 16 Feb. 2007 .

Zizek, Slavoj. “Hysteria and Cyberspace.” Telepolis. July 1998. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/ 2492/1.html


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_consciousness

Not to be confused with Social consciousness.

For the related philosophical term, see Higher consciousness.

Collective consciousness, collective conscience, or collective conscious (French: conscience collective) is the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society.[1] In general, it does not refer to the specifically moral conscience, but to a shared understanding of social norms.[2]

The modern concept of what can be considered collective consciousness includes solidarity attitudes, memes, extreme behaviors like group-think and herd behavior, and collectively shared experiences during collective rituals and dance parties.[3] Rather than existing as separate individuals, people come together as dynamic groups to share resources and knowledge. It has also developed as a way of describing how an entire community comes together to share similar values. This has also been termed "hive mind", "group mind", "mass mind", and "social mind".[4]

Historical use of collective consciousness

The term was introduced by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in his The Division of Labour in Society in 1893. The French word conscience generally means "conscience", "consciousness", "awareness",[5] or "perception".[6] Commentators and translators of Durkheim disagree on which is most appropriate, or whether the translation should depend on the context. Some prefer to treat the word 'conscience' as an untranslatable foreign word or technical term, without its normal English meaning.[7] As for "collective", Durkheim makes clear that he is not reifying or hypostasizing this concept; for him, it is "collective" simply in the sense that it is common to many individuals;[8] cf. social fact.

Scipio Sighele published ‘La Foule Criminele’ one year before Durkheim, in which he describes emergent characteristics of crowds that don’t appear in the individuals that form the crowd. He doesn’t call this collective consciousness, but ‘âme de la foule’ (soul of the crowd).[9] This term returns in Sigmund Freud’s book about mass psychology and essentially overlaps with Durkheims concept of collective consciousness.

Theories of collective consciousness

Durkheim

Durkheim used the term in his books The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). In The Division of Labour, Durkheim argued that in traditional/primitive societies (those based around clan, family or tribal relationships), totemic religion played an important role in uniting members through the creation of a common consciousness (conscience collective in the original French). In societies of this type, the contents of an individual's consciousness are largely shared in common with all other members of their society, creating a mechanical solidarity through mutual likeness.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.

— Émile Durkheim[10]

In Suicide, Durkheim developed the concept of anomie to refer to the social rather than individual causes of suicide. This relates to the concept of collective consciousness, as if there is a lack of integration or solidarity in society then suicide rates will be higher.[11]

Gramsci

Antonio Gramsci states, “A collective consciousness, which is to say a living organism, is formed only after the unification of the multiplicity through friction on the part of the individuals; nor can one say that ‘silence’ is not a multiplicity.”[12] A form of collective consciousness can be formed from Gramsci's conception that the presence of a hegemony can mobilize the collective consciousness of those oppressed by the ruling ideas of society, or the ruling hegemony. Collective consciousness can refer to a multitude of different individual forms of consciousness coalescing into a greater whole. In Gramsci's view, a unified whole is composed of solidarity among its different constituent parts, and therefore, this whole cannot be uniformly the same. The unified whole can embrace different forms of consciousness (or individual experiences of social reality), which coexist to reflect the different experiences of the marginalized peoples in a given society. This agrees with Gramsci's theory of Marxism and class struggle applied to cultural contexts. Cultural Marxism (as distinguished from the right-wing use of the term) embodies the concept of collective consciousness. It incorporates social movements that are based on some sort of collective identity; these identities can include, for instance, gender, sexual orientation, race, and ability, and can be incorporated by collective-based movements into a broader historical material analysis of class struggle.

According to Michelle Filippini, “The nature and workings of collective organisms – not only parties, but also trade unions, associations and intermediate bodies in general – represent a specific sphere of reflection in the Prison Notebooks, particularly in regard to the new relationship between State and society that in Gramsci's view emerged during the age of mass politics.”[13] Collective organisms can express collective consciousness. Whether this form of expression finds itself in the realm of the state or the realm of society is up to the direction that the subjects take in expressing their collective consciousness. In Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, the ongoing conflict between civil society, the bureaucracy, and the state necessitates the emergence of a collective consciousness that can often act as an intermediary between these different realms. The public organizations of protest, such as labor unions and anti-war organizations, are vehicles that can unite multiple types of collective consciousness. Although identity-based movements are necessary for the progress of democracy and can generate collective consciousness, they cannot completely do so without a unifying framework. This is why anti-war and labor movements provide an avenue that has united various social movements under the banner of a multiple collective consciousness. This is also why future social movements need to have an ethos of collective consciousness if they are to succeed in the long-term.

Zukerfield

Zukerfield states that “The different disciplines that have studied knowledge share an understanding of it as a product of human subjects – individual, collective, etc.”[14] Knowledge in a sociological sense is derived from social conditions and social realities. Collective consciousness also reflects social realities, and sociological knowledge can be gained through the adoption of a collective consciousness. Many different disciplines such as philosophy and literature examine collective consciousness from different lenses. These different disciplines reach a similar understanding of a collective consciousness despite their different approaches to the subject. The inherent humanness in the idea of collective consciousness refers to a shared way of thinking among human beings in the pursuit of knowledge.

Collective consciousness can provide an understanding of the relationship between self and society. As Zukerfeld states, “Even though it impels us, as a first customary gesture, to analyse the subjective (such as individual consciousness) or intersubjective bearers (such as the values of a given society), in other words those which Marxism and sociology examine, now we can approach them in an entirely different light.”[15] “Cognitive materialism”[14] is presented in the work by Zukerfeld as a sort of ‘third way’ between sociological knowledge and Marxism. Cognitive materialism is based on a kind of collective consciousness of the mind. This consciousness can be used, with cognitive materialism as a guiding force, by human beings in order to critically analyze society and social conditions.

Collective consciousness in society

Society is made up of various collective groups, such as the family, community, organizations, regions, nations which as Burns and Egdahl state "can be considered to possess agential capabilities: to think, judge, decide, act, reform; to conceptualize self and others as well as self's actions and interactions; and to reflect.".[16] It is suggested that these different national behaviors vary according to the different collective consciousness between nations. This illustrates that differences in collective consciousness can have practical significance.

According to a theory, the character of collective consciousness depends on the type of mnemonic encoding used within a group (Tsoukalas, 2007). The specific type of encoding used has a predictable influence on the group's behavior and collective ideology. Informal groups, that meet infrequently and spontaneously, have a tendency to represent significant aspects of their community as episodic memories. This usually leads to strong social cohesion and solidarity, an indulgent atmosphere, an exclusive ethos and a restriction of social networks. Formal groups, that have scheduled and anonymous meetings, tend to represent significant aspects of their community as semantic memories which usually leads to weak social cohesion and solidarity, a more moderate atmosphere, an inclusive ethos and an expansion of social networks.[17]

Literary and oral tradition

In a case study of a Serbian folk story, Wolfgang Ernst examines collective consciousness in terms of forms of media, specifically collective oral and literary traditions. "Current discourse analysis drifts away from the 'culturalist turn' of the last two or three decades and its concern with individual and collective memory as an extended target of historical research".[18] There is still a collective consciousness present in terms of the shared appreciation of folk stories and oral traditions. Folk stories enable the subject and the audiences to come together around a common experience and a shared heritage. In the case of the Serbian folk “gusle”,[19] the Serbian people take pride in this musical instrument of epic poetry and oral tradition and play it at social gatherings. Expressions of art and culture are expressions of a collective consciousness or expressions of multiple social realities.

Sporting events

Edmans, Garcia, and Norlia examined national sporting defeats and correlated them with decreases in the value of stocks. They examined 1,162 football matches in thirty-nine countries and discovered that stock markets of those countries dropped on average forty-nine points after being eliminated from the World Cup, and thirty-one points after being eliminated in other tournaments.[20] Edmans, Garcia, and Norli found similar but smaller effects with international cricket, rugby, ice hockey, and basketball games.

Websites

Various websites are known to search or represent collective consciousness like wikipedia.org, twitter.com[21] and makingpaisa.com/chc.[22]

Notes

  1. Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan (16 February 1967). "Práńa Dharma-The Sine Qua Non of Human Existence". PROUT in a Nutshell Part 6. Ranchi, India: Ánanda Márga Publications. Archived from the original on 2015-04-03. Retrieved 2015-03-02.

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