hi all,
{i'm a bit confused where this thread may have originated or be at the moment... so apologies for the xposting..}
can someone please explain to me the attraction of humanism? rob? never could see it myself. maybe it's because it sounds all warm and cosy, but i think it is nothing of the sort. the so-called anti-anti- humanists tend to postion anti-humanism as something beyond the pale, an expression of some kind of obliterating desire. what after all could be more dangerous than to be anti-humanist, where this is understood as being akin to being anti-human! what is neatly elided here of course is the difference between the word 'human' as we use the term, and humanism as an anthropology, as a view of what being human is and, by implication, is not..
but, from where i sit, me thinks that humnaism - by definition - closes off possibilities for transformation, and limits our horizons according to a version of what it measn to be human that can always be shown to be historically specific. a critique of humanism on the other hand opens the terrain of possibilities.
> Doug Henwood
> writes:
>
> >I'm not sure where I stand on this, but I
> >think one reason MF is so compelling is that he forces us (or should
> force
> >us) to think about all those lazy assumptions of a timeless human
> essence
> >from which capitalism estranges us.
hi doug, i thought that marx kind of compelled us to rethink the notion of a timeless human essence before foucault. i guess they have a - at times - vastly different analysis of how certain attributes come to be deemd as what it means to be essentially human. but then, i also think that in the history of marxism, there has been a consistent attempt to make marxism into another form of essentialism, which is why foucault may seem apposite.
> alex writes:
>
> Ummm...but aren't those "lazy assumptions" the cornerstone of Marxism
> itself?
no.
> Doesn't historical materialism rest upon Marx tweaking Hegel's
> notion of "the spirit" estranged from itself?
isn't this feuerbach rather than marx? doug quoted foucault: "Michel Foucault: When I speak of the "death of man," I mean that it's a matter of fixing a rule of production, an essential term, to this "production of man by man." seems to me that this parallels the exact problem that marx has with feuerbach, though with less emphasis on the epochal shift to the death of god/man that foucault wishes to emphasise, and more attention to the already-divided notion of Man: ie, as a determined and obfuscatory abstraction from the class divisions and the historical division between 'production' and 'ownership' in capitalist social relations. i think there are more parallels between foucault and marx: the insistence on epochal shifts as discontinuous, as revolutions rather than evolution, on the creation of distinct understandings of what it means to be human as founded in particular historical moments. there is a big difference between the two also: foucault, of course, often isolates discursive formations as discrete entities, and renders the organisation of power as something ineffable - as simply a will to power. this is also an assertion about human nature i would think.
> Wasn't it Marx's
> contention that man is essentially a producer,
homo faber is i think properly hegel's ground, whose direct descendant in socialist politics is lassalle, not marx. (see marx's 'critique of the gotha program' and his insistence that labour is not the source of all value) in any case, if we are to use producer in a less phenomenological sense, and more in an abstract way, then you are asserting little more than that people are capable of changing the environment around them. a banality me thinks, and one that if pursued very far would get you into all sorts of trouble. like: are hunter-gather economies not then expressions of what it means to be human? is it our fate to be workers?
> who under capitalism is
> alienated from the fruits of his own labor, an alienation that can only
> be overcome by revolution?
indeed, under capitalism! but this is hardly an exemplary case for establishing what the human essence is. if it is, then we are truly doomed. this to me would be to junk the possibility of revolution.
from an unrepentant anti-humanist,
angela