Nothing ever seems to be lost for good when it comes to the consciousness of human work. For the most part, however, even while being perhaps indestructible, the common mass of generic human labor vanishes or evaporates into the depths of a spectral or phantasmatic type of memory, a collective yet transhistorical memory that is closer to the unconscious than to consciousness, and in which experiences are accumulated, preserved, and repeated from time immemorial, until those rare moments when, as in a sudden act of awakening, they re-enter the field of vision.
Freud and Lacan had already insisted on the indestructible nature of the unconscious. The memory of desire is unlike any other form or kind of memory, precisely because of the fact that nothing is ever forgotten by desire. Lacan thus recalls that Freud’s discovery is very much bound up with the discovery of “the inextinguishable duration of desire, a feature of the unconscious which is hardly the least paradoxical, even though Freud never gives it up.”31 For Lacan, of course, the locus of this peculiar kind of memory is none other than a certain automatism of language itself. It is inscribed in traces, archives, bodies, and traditions as in a machine-like structure, or on a magical writing pad similar to the one famously invoked by Freud:
There is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire—given that there is no need which, when its satiation is forbidden, does not wither, in extreme cases through the very wasting away of the organism itself. It is in a kind of memory, comparable to what goes by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which are based on an electronic realization of signifying composition), that the chain is found which insists by reproducing itself in the transference, and which is the chain of a dead desire.32
Freud himself had suggested in Totem and Taboo—and again, even more clearly, in Moses and Monotheism—that the latency and partial return of repressed materials be seen as phenomena characteristic not only of the life of the individual, but of the history of the human species as well. Speaking of the difference, or gap, between the official history of Moses and the oral tradition, Freud suggests that what is forgotten nonetheless survives elsewhere: “What has been deleted or altered in the written version might quite well have been preserved uninjured in the tradition.”33 There are thus permanent traces of this history that remain, even if they were 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