Consciousness has recently become an immensely fashionable theme within the new-found cultural popularity of the natural sciences. However, what is immediately noticeable about the proliferation over the past decade of books and journals with ‘consciousness’ in their titles or invoked in their texts is that they seem to be drawn to the cultural glamour of the concept, but with little sense that the concept of consciousness has an entirely other history. Consciousness seems to lie around in the culture like a sparkling jewel irresistible to the neurotheorists. There seems to be no recognition amongst the many biologists, artificial intelligencers, physicists and philosophers who have played in print with their new toy that the concept of consciousness is part of other discourses. Above all I want to underline that while for these neurotheorists consciousness is located within the individual human organism – and sometimes just the brain within that – the older tradition, coming from the humanities and social theory, sees it as located in subjectivity and intersubjectivity within a historical context. As David Lodge (2002) has pointed out, novelists may approach consciousness more readily than neuroscientists. The methodological individualism expressed in the objectivist language of the natural sciences erases both ‘me’ and ‘you’; by contrast in social theory both agency and structure are crucial. For social theory there can be no development of individual consciousness without a social context.