a conversation with someone several hundred kilometres away, via telephone lines of a few thousand... (i'm innumerate, so it doesn't really figure anyway)
Rob Schaap wrote:
> One or two 'scientific Marxists' aside, we were nearly all humanists in the
> mid-seventies
and some important conjunctural reasons for this it think (more on this below).
> (Althusser never made it to Hobart), so I guess I need
> someone to explain to me why I should abandon my default-setting.
> Interestingly, once Foucault hit Oz shores, he took over our humanities
> faculties almost completely, and I've met hardly anyone under 35 whose
> default setting isn't that of anti-humanism.
well, there's no accounting for orthodoxy - well, there probably is...
i've met declared foucaultians who just made the step from weber to foucault, because (apparently) foucault was more sexy. the same is probably true of many of the shifts in lit depts, though it's probably important not to overstate this and side with the leonie kramer 'great books' brigade, who i kind of think are (for pomos and marxists) a common enemy, and one which actually has a growing control over the academy.
a bit like the current pope's assault on vatican 2, the reaction has pretty much set in, through lit depts, history.... i digress, but only slightly.
i also never came across any althusserians in australia (aside from a brief attachment of my own), anyone who would own up to it anyway. there was a good urban myth doing the rounds that althusserians were vicious and hostile, and dangerous to boot, but i never spotted one. when i pleaded to be introduced to one, no one could give me any names. so, i took this to be a war without a target. this is going back ten years, and althusser has made something of a comeback - or at least people are admitting to reading his stuff.
> I've never budged from one simple position: If humanity is not, from
> Sterkfontein to Armageddon, a necessarily labouring, necessarily rational,
> necessarily empathic herd animal whose capacities allow and demand time and
> energy beyond that devoted to necessary labour, I just don't get it. I
> think this is enough to warrant the 'humanism' tag all by itself. My naive
> impression was that a little disciplined reflection would allow me to come
> up with the kinds of freedoms necessary most to reflect such a
> species-being, thus affording a universal definition of real freedom. But,
> just 'coz it's hard, doesn't mean the premise is wrong.
it's not just hard, it's impossible to do without prescription. labouring: there are many different ways of labouring, true. but it is also true that to labour is a banal statement, in the sense that - content-wise - it can be filled with an infinite range of modes. if it is infinite, then it cannot work as a premise. if it is asserted in finite terms, then it is prescriptive. the problem is not simply that it is prescriptive (i don't have an anarchic view of this), but that any attempt to define its attributes can only be conceived under the burden of the present organisation of labour. rational: do you mean as in thinking? or as in, a particular mode of thinking? the problem i would have is that the former rests on the latter when it comes down to actually filling the concept 'thinking' with any kind of content. herd animal? sure, why not? but is not capitalism of a certain kind the enforcement of competition, in which case, how does it continue if it is against human nature?
> Of course, we have to be careful here, distinguishing both between essense
> (human nature) and the specific expression of same we find in real moments,
> or between what Marx called 'constant drives' and 'relative appetites'.
okay, what are the constant drives? and, how do you actually go about distinguishing between constant drives and relative drives? seriously. this is kind of it - bottom line for me: the very moment you begin to assert certain things as constant, they can easily be shown to be assertions of relative as constant, whether that be historically or in terms of internal social distinctions. this is a mighty crude way of putting it, but there's nothing i can think of that could be asserted as a constant in any more than the most banal of ways. once you begin to define what these drives are, you arrive at relative definitions. go on rob, try it.
> No books at hand just now, but I quoted a bit of Capital here a couple of
> weeks ago, from V1, p 668 of the 1906 Charles Keer edition:
>
> 'To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature. This nature
> itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this
> to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc,
> by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general,
> and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.'
can't find it in my edition, doesn't have a reference for dogs. not that i don't believe you. i was thinking it was in relation to the utilitarians; i then also thought it sounded a lot like spinoza. in any case i would think the problem is that there is no human nature in general beyond the most cursory aspects whose manner of appearance in particular epochs is actually decisive for either analysis or politics. does this mean i disagree with the citation as it appears - probably.
it does get us to a more important point though. is marx's critique of capitalism that it does not satisfy human needs? what are these needs? are they immutable or ever-present? i would answer: no, socially-constitued, and no.
is the scandal of capitalism the alienation of the worker form her true essence? is surplus labour our true essence? gee, i hope not.
fun aside, there was a real importance to the humanist turn in marxism. it did have a critical relation to what it saw as the crimes of stalin, etc. but, the importance of a humanist marxism in the struggle against certain orthodoxies in various marxist m/ments is not the same thing as humanism in a struggle against anti-humanism, as we would now understand that term as referring to various marxist and non-marxist (but nonetheless leftist) projects. i think the worst version of the latter is probably e.p.thompson's foolish and lazy diatribe against althusser.
> I'll start by saying I don't for a minute reckon a Marxist view of the
> world need be synoymous with anti-individualism. This matters, because we
> have to highlight the dangers of a radically anti-individualistic doctrine
> (and the totalitarian prescriptions and simplistic explanations of the
> world that can attend it). Anyway, just because bourgeois thought is
> decisively and, ultimately, exclusively individualistic, does not mean it
> is the only individualism (eg. just check out Homer), nor that the
> individual can be cast out of explanations and prescriptions.
well, i actually agree with you. but does this imply methodological individualism? well, we would part company here. i'm all for not succumbing to one pole or the other in many of these kinds of disputes, but that doesn't at the same time imply that the individual is a given when it comes to explaining how the world works. i suspect foucault (eg) focusses on the latter insofar as he thinks discursive strategies are all there is, or at least what is decisive, so for him, the individual is actually the notion of the individual as it is deployed in certain discursive strategies. i think he is far from saying individuals don't exist in an empirical sense.
> And another thing: only a VERY vulgar, mechanistic, scientific Marxist
> would insist that socialist revolution is the role of the forces of
> production alone. Human agency is decisive, no?
yes. i agree. but the story doesn't end for me here: the actual forms of agency are decisive, and these forms are not decided, or at least, any decision is pretty irrelevant if it doesn't accord with historical, concrete circumstances in which we find ourselves in. this is why i'm not committed to any particular form of organisation as the best one outside of a discussion about the forms of class composition and the forms of struggle that prevail at any given moment.
i think the 'forces of prodn' brigade is silly, as you know. but then, i think the distinction itself has too often been read as a parallel to the distinction between base and superstructure, which has got to be one of the least fruitful moments of marxist history.
> For the revolution to be
> a socialist revolution, people must be able to think socialism under
> capitalism, and make an ethical decision to lend their weight to a humanly
> exerted human tide against extant institutions at a decisive moment. But,
> antihumanism affords us neither trans-discursive thought nor ethical action!
oh, rob. but there is no transdiscursive thought. the basis for thinking socialism under capitalism is immanent to capitalism: the co-operation that capitalism induces, the possibility of limiting necessary labour to a degree unimaginable, et cetera. postone does a pretty good job of showing the faultiness, scandals and possibilities i think.
is socialism an ethical decision? well, it may be ethical, but is socialism a decision? i can't decide anything unless i have a version of it before me, unless i have a sense of the real possibilities, and, i would think my ethics (by which you mean my sense of injustice i guess) is in any case prompted and given shape by the contradiction of (eg) starving millions in an abundant world.
someone else - who actually likes foucault - will have to take up the other comments. i actually think you may well have a point, but i never really liked foucault, other than his notion of discursive strategies, which i think in any case of more limited use than foucault presented it as.
anyways, i'd really like to see a list of what it means to be human, the constants.
bye for now,
ange
[ps. it's finally raining here and cooling down. i keep thinking melbourne is a perennial autumn, but it's just not so, and living here all my life does not deter me from this fantasy. the real just keeps right on intruding though, fuck it.