On the ethical unconscious

So I recently listened to a wonderful, non-academic lecture by Anthony Paul Smith (who blogs at the consistently stimulating An und für sich) on grey ecology entitled "Is the City a Machine for the Making of Gods?" Although the focus of the lecture was a critique of apocalyptic "green" ideology (via a clever deployment of Heidegger and Bergson), one of the elements that I found most intriguing was Smith's appeal -- almost in passing -- to the idea of an ethical unconscious. (Supposedly, the idea traces all the way back to Deleuze, via Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money... But I know next to nothing about Deleuze and Goodchild, so it's new ground for me.)

The idea's implementation goes something like this: Instead of forcing the consumer to consciously fret about ethical decisions ("I have to make sure that I consciously spend my money on goods that reflect ethical stances with which I agree, I have to consciously choose to purchase chickens that weren't boxed up in tiny cages, etc."), Smith suggests that we simply make certain actions illegal -- for example, the raising of chickens in repulsively dark, tiny, filthy cages, etc -- so that the consumer is has no other option than to choose ethically. In other words, to move the ethical choice from the sphere of the conscious to the sphere of the unconscious.

Now, at first glance this certainly reeks of some sort of authoritarianism (even totalitarianism -- "You must like being forced to choose ethically!"), but this is also where Smith provides the greatest insight: he points out that, although we may object to the reduction of our "free will" by moving the ethical from the conscious to the unconscious, money already acts as an ethically unconscious mediator. In other words, the use of money already orients our ethical actions in a certain direction. We choose the chicken that has been raised in a cramped cage not because of some conscious ethical choice, but rather because of a conscious choice about money -- i.e. our consciousness is only concerned with the fact that this chicken is cheaper/est. But the key here is that it is still an ethical choice; it's just that the ethical has been moved into the unconscious, while our conscious is preoccupied with the question of price/money.

So a directed ethical unconscious, despite its appearances, wouldn't actually reduce the free will of the individual; rather, it would be emancipatory in the sense that ethical choices could be determined by collective political action rather than by the whims of the market.

I'll have to do some more thinking on this... And I really want to read Goodchild.