Thinking Other-Wise: UCSC’s History of Consciousness and My Research on Unconsciousness

The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) offers a graduate program in History of Consciousness that operates as a radically interdisciplinary investigation into the ways knowledge, power, and subjectivity intersect across historical and social contexts. While it has been influential to scholarship in critical theory, political thought, and cultural studies, it also provides a rich conceptual framework for understanding recent research on psychoanalysis, technology, and textuality—concerns deeply present in my own works, including The Authors of Silence, From Writing to Archives to AI: Derrida’s Tools, Cyborgs, and the Meaning of Repair, AI as a Supplement to Humanity, and my ongoing book proposals on AI, the Psyche, and the Meaning of Repair and Digital Derrida, Language, Writing, and the Machinery of Thinking.

Rather than merely celebrating the program’s legacy, this post provides an academic lens on how certain thematic pillars of History of Consciousness—its questioning of discipline, its emphasis on power and ideology, its inheritance from European critical theory, and its drive toward radical historicization—inform and resonate with my own interdisciplinary projects.

UC Santa Cruz Humanities building

Consciousness as a Historical and Political Construct

One of the key features of UCSC’s History of Consciousness program is its insistence that consciousness, whether individual or collective, never arises in a vacuum. Instead, it is historically produced, shaped by socio-political structures, and mediated by ideology. In my work, I adopt a similar approach by interrogating the relationship between self-reflection and broader societal mythologies:

• The Authors of Silence (particularly “The Essential Revision and Conclusion”): This dramatic text stages encounters between historical and psychoanalytic figures—Jefferson and Freud in dialogue—to explore how personal convictions and cultural pathologies reverberate across centuries. Like the History of Consciousness tradition, the scene argues that the subject’s inner world cannot be separated from the political landscape or the historical past that has quietly shaped it.

• AI as a Supplement to Humanity: Here, the debate turns to whether artificial intelligence can (or should) mirror the structures of human consciousness—and, crucially, how ideological norms seep into technological design. If consciousness always emerges from complex socio-political conditions, then the development and deployment of AI equally reflect the power relations, biases, and historical vantage points of its creators.

In both cases, the impetus to treat consciousness as a historically contingent and politically charged phenomenon echoes the fundamental premise of the UCSC program.

An Interdisciplinary Critique of Knowledge

The History of Consciousness program embodies a critique of siloed disciplines, arguing instead for boundary-crossing scholarship that draws upon philosophy, cultural theory, media studies, anthropology, literature, political science, and more. My inquiries—ranging from psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) to deconstruction (Derrida) and from political critique to imaginative drama—speak to this interdisciplinary spirit:

1. From Writing to Archives to AI: Derrida’s Tools, Cyborgs, and the Meaning of RepairThis piece relies on multiple intellectual traditions—deconstruction, psychoanalysis, media theory—to trace how the archive has transformed in an age of digitization. Such an exploration aligns with the broad scope of History of Consciousness, which similarly situates textuality, technology, and subject formation in broader cultural contexts, rather than cordoning them off into “purely literary” or “purely technical” domains.

2. Digital Derrida, Language, Writing, and the Machinery of ThinkingBy reimagining Derrida’s problematics of language and writing in the digital era, I examine how the production and dissemination of “knowledge” become entangled with corporate infrastructures, ideological frameworks, and the political economy of software. This integrative critique—melding literary theory, philosophy of technology, and cultural politics—mirrors the program’s core commitment to rethinking knowledge across disciplinary lines.

Influence of European Critical Theory and Postmodernism

The History of Consciousness program has been marked by its deep engagement with Continental thought—Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and beyond. It probes how “truth,” knowledge, power, and discourse co-construct each other in historical time. These questions are central to my own corpus:

• The Authors of Silence uses dramatic staging to enact Foucauldian problems of discourse, highlighting the institutional power behind certain forms of knowledge (e.g., Jefferson’s role in shaping U.S. foundational myths) while revealing how repressed histories (e.g., the violence of slavery) persist in the background.

• AI, the Psyche, and the Meaning of Repair delves into the psychic dimension of artificial intelligence—reflecting Althusser’s sense that ideology interpolates subjects, but does so now in a digitally enhanced environment, where “repair” becomes not just a mechanical fix but an ethical and psychological imperative.

Such investigations are inseparable from the post-structural impetus to deconstruct normative claims about objectivity, progress, and rationality—a bedrock of History of Consciousness thinking as well.

The Legacy of the UCSC Program: History, Archives, and Social Justice

UCSC’s History of Consciousness program was originally conceived in the late 1960s as an experimental site for examining how discourses of race, gender, class, and empire operate in historical and institutional contexts. Figures like Hayden White, Angela Davis, and Donna Haraway exemplify its broad thematic range—historiography, political activism, feminist science studies, among others. My projects, too, build upon this tradition of rethinking archives, subjectivities, and power:

• “From Writing to Archives to AI” references not only Derrida’s Archive Fever but also the “institutional” management of knowledge that Angela Davis critiques in her analyses of prison systems, and that Donna Haraway critiques in her analyses of “situated knowledges” in science. My text extends these conversations by examining how digitally archived AI systems reproduce or challenge historically entrenched forms of exclusion.

• “AI as a Supplement to Humanity” resonates with Haraway’s “cyborg” figure and Davis’s emphasis on social justice by considering how the boundary between human and machine—much like the boundary between citizen and captive—has historically been drawn along lines of power and normative assumptions about who (or what) counts as “fully human.”

The synergy is clear: while History of Consciousness addresses wide-ranging intellectual frameworks, my own writing zeroes in on how these frameworks manifest in the interplay of psychoanalysis, AI, and ethics. Both ultimately interrogate how knowledge institutions—including universities and technological infrastructures—are never neutral ground.

Challenging Traditional Disciplinary Boundaries in My Work

Like the History of Consciousness graduate program, my work arises from a refusal to treat “critical theory,” “psychoanalysis,” and “technological critique” as isolated pursuits. Instead, they function as convergent lines of inquiry that:

• Demonstrate that the ethical imperatives (e.g., the question of how AI might replicate oppressive social arrangements) cannot be divorced from the psychoanalytic (how desire and the unconscious motivate certain behaviors and policies).

• Show that the political (whether in American electoral drama or global labor conditions of tech production) is inseparable from the philosophical (concepts of personhood, authenticity, or autonomy).

In this sense, each blog post or project I’ve produced can be read as an exercise in histories of consciousness, interrogating how multiple forms of knowledge and power are sedimented in narratives, technologies, and selves.

Toward a Broader Academic Engagement

To see the conversations I create in The Authors of Silence—where historical figures speak to present crises—and in From Writing to Archives to AI, where Derridian frameworks meet the politics of data, is to observe the ongoing interrogation that the History of Consciousness program exemplifies: a fusion of historical consciousness with a critical lens on how our present emerges from the overlapping discourses of philosophy, economics, culture, and technology.

Rather than offering a straightforward “promotion” of the UCSC program, my purpose here is to situate my own scholarship within this broader terrain of critical, interdisciplinary inquiry. It is an acknowledgment that the same theoretical and methodological impulses driving the History of Consciousness tradition at UCSC—namely, the refusal of disciplinary purity, the insistence on historicizing subjectivity, and the perpetual critique of power—likewise animate my exploration of psychoanalysis, AI, and the meaning of repair.

Concluding Reflections

At its core, the History of Consciousness program teaches us that no form of consciousness—human or otherwise—exists outside historical processes or political entanglements. My works, from the psychoanalytically-inflected dialogues of The Authors of Silence to the Derridian analyses of AI as a Supplement to Humanity, all grapple with how knowledge is produced, archived, mediated, and contested in contemporary life.

In continuing these lines of thought, I aim not only to expand on the legacy of critical theory championed at UCSC but to engage in a collective project of understanding how we became who we are, how we might yet change, and how technology intersects with those questions in increasingly urgent ways. The impetus is thoroughly academic, yes, but it is also politically charged and ethically driven—consciousness, after all, is never neutral, and its history is still being written.