Thinking Other-Wise: A Genealogy of Radical Inquiry and the Ethics of Encounter

or ... A Proposed Introduction for a Volume on the History of Consciousness Tradition

Reimagining Thought, Rethinking Boundaries

Thinking other-wise is an invitation to disrupt ingrained patterns of thought and to reimagine our relationship to the “other” at every level—philosophical, political, and ethical. It builds on a tradition of inquiry that refuses to confine consciousness to an isolated, internal faculty, recognizing instead that what we call “subjectivity” emerges through discourses, social institutions, and power relations. Historically, these dominant frameworks have often spoken in a singular voice, marginalizing or excluding many who fall outside its presumed universality.

Yet “thinking other-wise” suggests more than just thinking “differently.” Its hyphen points to the centrality of the other: the ethical need to attend to a multiplicity of voices, perspectives, and lives, especially those historically relegated to the edges of knowledge. In doing so, this approach reworks and extends insights from the University of California, Santa Cruz’s History of Consciousness tradition, while also drawing into the conversation the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who foregrounded ethics as a relation to the other that cannot be subsumed under any totalizing discourse.

The Call of the Other: Levinas and the Master’s Discourse

Within modern critical theory, Levinas stands out for articulating a radical vision of responsibility to the other that precedes all attempts at rationalization or mastery. His perspective resonates with the genealogical and deconstructive impulses at the heart of the History of Consciousness program, which likewise challenges “master discourses” for their historical tendencies to exclude. By placing Levinas alongside thinkers who unmask hidden power structures—like Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault—we shift our focus from merely analyzing oppressive systems to asking how we might enact a sustained commitment to those excluded from master narratives.

This Levinasian emphasis on the other reframes the conversation about (un)consciousness, insisting that any genuine effort to think other-wise must start from an ethical demand. Rather than adopting the standpoint of an abstract, self-contained individual, we are asked to consider how communal and societal structures inscribe themselves into (un)consciousness, and how we might envision new forms of encounter based on care and relationality, rather than dominance. It is an ethos that moves beyond critique alone, proposing to transform how we speak, think, and act in relation to the other.

The Legacy of Suspicion: From Marx to Nietzsche and Freud

To begin such a reimagining of knowledge, the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud offers a powerful launch point. Sometimes referred to as a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” their collective influence birthed the notion that accepted social, moral, and psychological norms are woven from ideological, genealogical, and unconscious threads. Far from passive reflection, consciousness is actively produced and policed:

Marx situates our thinking within the socio-economic structures that shape both how we live and how we value. His critique insists that the struggle over material conditions also becomes a struggle over consciousness itself.
Nietzsche exposes moral systems as neither fixed nor transcendent, but historically contingent valorations rooted in will-to-power. His genealogical approach to values resonates with the imperative to think other-wise, for it opens space to question any “truth” that claims timeless universality.
Freud unsettles the comfort of transparent self-knowledge by revealing how desire, repression, and the unconscious disrupt the clarity of rational discourse. Even our ostensibly most private experiences partake in broader symbolic structures.

Together, these thinkers remind us that (un)consciousness is never a self-enclosed interiority but participates in socio-historical contexts—contexts prone to occluding or silencing those who do not align with their reigning images of the “normative” subject.

From Desire to Discourse: Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida

Subsequent contributions by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida push these insights in new directions, further explicating how consciousness is shaped and reshaped by language, discourse, and power:

Lacan reframes Freud by insisting that the unconscious is structured like a language: desires find form in symbolic codes, while the subject is continuously mediated by discursive and cultural signifiers. Consciousness, on this view, is unsettled not only by unconscious impulses but by the very “grammar” of identity.
Foucault offers genealogies of modern institutions—prisons, asylums, clinics—and shows how their “discourses” produce entire fields of knowledge, which in turn shape how we understand the deviant, the criminal, and the ill. By emphasizing power’s productivity, he unearths mechanisms that define entire categories of persons as “other.”
Derrida unravels conceptual binaries (nature/culture, self/other, presence/absence) that prop up systems of exclusion, demonstrating how these oppositions are neither stable nor innocent. His concept of différance points to meaning’s perpetual deferral, refusing closure even in the most tightly woven texts.

Each thinker recognizes, in different ways, that the self stands in constant relation to the other—whether that other appears as a repressed drive, a discursive category, or a fissure in language’s presumed clarity. Their analyses show why no account of consciousness can be considered complete if it excludes the precarious presence of those on the margins.

Feminist and Cyborgian Turns: Reconfiguring Bodies and Technologies

Aligned with a Levinasian ethic, feminist and queer interventions further enlarge our sense of how (un)consciousness is both shaped by, and resistant to, entrenched power. In a program like History of Consciousness, these contributions have been indispensable for revealing how gendered, racialized, and technologized identities provoke us to rethink everything from the body to the laboratory.

Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, for example, breaks down strict boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture. Rather than seeing these categories as neat opposites, she proposes hybrid identities that unsettle any single narrative of what it means to be human. This cyborgian perspective nurtures a form of care that foregrounds relational webs, highlighting how thinking other-wise implies an ethical responsiveness to the many forms of embodied difference.

Theresa de Lauretis offers a parallel intervention that underscores the interplay between psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural representation. In her groundbreaking work on film theory and the “technologies of gender,” de Lauretis shows how discursive and visual practices construct and contest our understandings of subjectivity. By framing gender as both a conceptual apparatus and a site of ongoing negotiation, she illuminates the dynamic processes through which identities are produced, inhabited, and sometimes subverted. This approach bridges feminist theory with psychoanalytic insights into how the unconscious continually shapes—and is shaped by—our cultural narratives, revealing the productive tensions between embodied experience and the symbolic orders that strive to contain it.

Moreover, in championing situated knowledges, feminist and queer theorists bring forward lived experiences that classic discourses so often overlooked, from the vantage points of those historically subject to systemic exclusion. Rather than framing these interventions solely in negative terms (as critiques of male, Eurocentric canons), they emphasize the generative possibilities of reimagining how knowledge emerges from embodied life—be it “female,” “trans,” “marginalized,” or interspecies. By placing figures like Haraway and de Lauretis into ongoing conversation, we discover how a confluence of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and deconstruction can deeply reshape our understanding of what it means to be subject, what it means to be human—or post-human—and, most crucially, how power relations inform these definitions at every turn.

Marxian Legacies in HistCon: Lukács, Jameson, Davis, and the Reimagining of Class Consciousness

A key element in the History of Consciousness tradition—and one that resonates with many of the aforementioned thinkers—derives from Marxian philosophy. While Marx’s fundamental insights into ideology and historical materialism laid the groundwork, subsequent generations of Marxian theorists have honed, critiqued, and expanded these ideas in ways that deeply inform HistCon approaches.

The Lukács Connection: “History and Class Consciousness”

The very name “History of Consciousness” may find its roots in Georg Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher whose 1923 work, History and Class Consciousness, remains a cornerstone of Western Marxism. In that book, Lukács introduced concepts like “totality,” “reification,” and “imputed class consciousness,” aiming to show how the proletariat, if fully conscious of its true conditions, could act as a transformative social force.

Class Consciousness: Lukács defined it as the thoughts and feelings of a social class, and what they would think and feel if they had an accurate understanding of their situation.
Marx’s Method: Lukács’s text provided a philosophical account of Marx’s method, bridging the gap between Capital and the Bolshevik political moment.
Bolshevism: The work attempted a philosophical defense of Bolshevism, aligning revolutionary politics with Marxian theory.
Influence and Condemnation: Despite influencing figures like Adorno, Debord, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty, and Žižek, History and Class Consciousness was condemned in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Lukács himself later distanced himself from certain arguments he had made, particularly around alienation.

This contested legacy—radical in scope, yet often silenced—mirrors the broader HistCon ethos of uncovering and analyzing how power shapes consciousness, even in the revolutionary sphere. The resonance between Lukács’s project and the History of Consciousness tradition underscores a shared commitment to examining how social forces become internalized and contested within subjective experience.

Fredric Jameson and the Cultural Turn

Among the Marxian-influenced thinkers whose work has shaped HistCon is Fredric Jameson, a theorist known for analyzing cultural productions—literature, film, and art—through the lens of ideology. Jameson famously argued that we “always historicize,” insisting that cultural forms are inseparable from the socio-economic conditions in which they arise. By interpreting texts as symbolic resolutions to real historical contradictions, Jameson extends Marx’s insights into the superstructure, showing how even our aesthetic sensibilities are mediated by material realities.

Political Unconscious: Jameson’s notion of the “political unconscious” parallels the Freudian understanding of repressed desires, only here the repressed is history itself, surfacing in cultural artifacts.
Postmodernism: His analyses of postmodern culture examine how late capitalist structures not only transform economic relations but also shape our very experience of time, space, and subjectivity.

Angela Davis, Hayden White, and Expanding Critiques

Angela Davis, whose scholarship and activism exemplify the intersection of Marxist analysis with critical race theory and feminism, is another pivotal figure associated with the History of Consciousness program. Through works such as Women, Race, and Class and her speeches on prison abolition, Davis challenges the mainstream discourses that omit or tokenize marginalized perspectives. In my own project, The Authors of Silence, Davis’s ideas resonate as we explore how silences—both institutional and internal—can be reinterpreted as sites of radical possibility. Just as Lukács expanded Marx’s method to speak to class consciousness, Davis extends these conversations to encompass racial, gendered, and penal dimensions, revealing how capitalist structures intersect with patriarchal and racial hierarchies.

Meanwhile, Hayden White, another crucial presence in HistCon’s orbit, taught us to see historical narratives as constructed artifacts rather than transparent windows onto “what happened.” His blend of literary theory and historiography aligns well with Marxian approaches that interrogate how historical “truths” are shaped by ideological frameworks. White’s emphasis on emplotment and the narrative nature of historical writing complements Jameson’s cultural critique, highlighting the textual strategies that govern how societies remember and interpret their past.

The History of Consciousness Tradition: A Constellation of Radical Inquiry

For many years, the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz has hosted thinkers who resist rigid departmental boundaries. Blending anthropology, politics, philosophy, literary criticism, and more, the program weaves together genealogical, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and Levinasian strands. Its participants maintain that genuine inquiry demands immersion in the flux of real-world power dynamics and the people whose stories rarely make it into received historical narratives.

Thinking other-wise belongs within this constellation. It not only draws on the suspicion cultivated by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud but also extends it toward a deep ethics of the other that resonates with Levinas, a genealogical critique amplified by Foucault, and the deconstructive impetus sharpened by Derrida. It recognizes that our inherited structures—whether in scholarship or everyday life—often claim universality while remaining blind to the multifaceted ways that different bodies, minds, and communities experience and create meaning.

Toward an Ethic of Other-Wise Engagement

If the “master discourse” has historically sought to universalize one dominant point of view, to think other-wise is to imagine knowledge that is conscious of its situatedness and open to what it has traditionally excluded. This approach does not reduce ethics to a simple formula; instead, it spotlights:

Irreducible ResponsibilityFollowing Levinas, responsibility for the other does not wait for rational justification. It arises at the threshold of encounter, urging us to respond before any discourse of mastery can subsume the other.
Radical InterdisciplinarityTrue to the History of Consciousness spirit, a disciplinary silo cannot account for all dimensions of power, desire, and language. Social critique, ethics, textual analysis, psychoanalysis, and even technological studies must collaborate.
Cyborgian CareLike Haraway’s cyborg, this ethic recognizes that the boundaries separating human from machine or organism from environment are fluid. Care emerges as a principle of navigation through these assemblages, calling us to attend to vulnerabilities and interdependencies.
Transmutation of CritiqueCritique does not end in deconstruction; it transforms how we engage with each other. By revealing what has been left out of official histories, thinking other-wise invites new forms of collective imagination and political possibility.

Conclusion: A Collective Invitation to Think Other-Wise

At a time when the interplay of technological innovation, social upheaval, and ecological fragility demands renewed reflection, thinking other-wise stands out as both a provocation and a promise. It challenges us not just to think differently, but to think in a manner that remains perpetually attentive to the other—reconfiguring how we produce knowledge and how we live ethically in an interconnected world.

By gathering lessons from Marxian ideology critique, Nietzschean genealogy, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian power analysis, Derridean deconstruction, feminist engagements with bodies and technologies, and Levinasian ethics of encounter, a volume on the History of Consciousness tradition can offer a methodology for our era. It reminds us that consciousness, in all its historical entanglements, is never just “mine” or “yours.” It is relational, marked by traces of the past, shaped by discourses of exclusion, yet open to transformation through engagement with the other.

Thinking other-wise, then, is the work of forging new idioms of care, critique, and community—an ongoing project that continues to redefine what it means to inhabit our shared and ever-diversifying world.