It says something about this much-vaunted price mechanism of Hayek's that it's a lot cheaper for us to argue via Chico, California than it would by phone across Victoria. The technology might be distance-insensitive, but the price ain't. In fact, I hear the telco companies have a whole stack of fibre cables in the ground between Canberra and Melbourne but have no commercial reason to attach switching taps at either end. So much for natural scarcity and the concomitant rational allocation of resources through price, eh?
Anyway, more amateur philosophy ...
>i've met declared foucaultians who just made the step from weber to
>foucault, because (apparently) foucault was more sexy.
Well, he was definitely that. French sex has better PR than German sex (and Foucault was, by all accounts, a pretty spectacular practitioner - other than Weber's fetish for military uniforms, there's nothing of note about him, is there?). But I still reckon Foucault smacks of iron cages - where, exactly, in *Discipline and Punish* does one extract even 'optimism of the will'?
>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.
Yeah, but there's a difficult line to draw in the shifting sands you describe. I reckon a lot of self-styled radical cultural theorists go well over the top in claiming Penthouse, Mills and Boon, and soapies are as valid as Hamlet. This can quickly amount to a glorification of consumption of hegemonic pap in the name of democratising 'culture'. Studying this stuff can be useful, of course, but it does rather depend on how you're studying it. I don't know how to get around this, though. I've long been a fan of Raymond Williams, but I don't reckon he ever beat it either.
>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.
Yep, fair enough. But 'labour' as a category is something to stress in this day and age anyway (so many pomos throw it out whilst rejoicing in the apparently enlightening instance of a Russian eating a Big Mac or an American eating Peking Duck), and it also occurs that 'labour' here is not in isolation, but in combination with some other constants. Perhaps if we take 'em together we do get a picture - one that might highlight and question contradictions, for instance, the one between the social character of production and the private nature of consumption.
And perhaps we are naturally creative labourers by inclination (which would explain why we're tapping away at these keyboards instead of doing nothing), because we're human!
>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.
I'm still taken with Habermas's development of the notion of 'intersubjectivity'. I know Oakeshott wouldn't be too popular around here, but I like him on modes of association, too. All too much to prattle on about here, but the ideas surrounding 'communicative rationality' do appeal to me as pretty compelling.
I also reckon all societies demand of their beliefs that they sit well with experience (notwithstanding that what we experience is *in part* a function of what we believe) and seem coherent rather than contradictory. I'm drawn to the likes of Habermas here again. The existence of language seems predicated on logical norms and rational argument.
>herd animal?
'No man is an island' is not just in Jon Donne. You can find it in The Epic Of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi's Laws, The Oddyssey, The Bible etc. (excuse my culturally narrow canon - I'm culturally narrow by training and profession).
>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?
Impala are herd animals, but the boys get very competitive, come Spring ...
Stuff that contravenes human nature can persist for a long time - as can stuff that has come to contravene conditions. Especially if the stuff in question is not complete (eg. not every aspect of our being is commoditised and not every moment of our day is spent on competition). I do hold these projects are, in fact, 'incompletable'. Our social being insists not every externality can be eliminated and not every co-operative bond can be eliminated (business, war - hell, 'power' in general - are undoable without co-operation). I reckon Marx's notion of the contradictions central to our order derive precisely from such humanist insights. Taken to its logical extremes, capitalism makes too powerful an enemy of that which it can neither seduce nor defeat: human nature. And Gramsci is compelling on the limits to hegemony; Habermas on the ultimate vengeance of communicative rationality etc.
>> 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?
Well, at least it's harder to defend the notion that market forces can be read back into history all the way to Sterkfontein (an implicit position in much of what our economics op-eds tell us, and a position Doug suspects Brad of holding) than are the modest propositions I've been putting.
>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.
But as soon as you abandon the notion of human nature you have to admit humans might as well exist under any one order as under any other. Discourse could then make us into the beings the discourse assumes us to be! Then why bother resisting the discourse? Discourse is, inter alia, a set of prescriptions, isn't it? A set of regulatory universalisations, isn't it? Why not just join the good Milton in helping our peers understand that it is as easy to go with the flow as it is pointless to oppose it? Tom recently posted a self-pitying article from a Latin American right-wing general. His argument? 'We just did what was right at the time, and nobody now is in any moral or intellectual position to criticise us for it. They should let by-gones be by-gones, and leave us in peace, in our sumptuous villas.' Is this a difficult position to argue against for an anti-humanist. It's not for me.
>can't find it in my edition, doesn't have a reference for dogs. not
>that i don't believe you.
I was under the impression that the 1906 Chicago *Capital* was something of a standard reference. Fromm quotes it in *Marx's Concept of Man* (1966). Ungar, NY: p24.
>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.
If the manner of appearance were all you had to work with, you'd have no standards for critiquing it, would you? Questions like 'does this performance reflect anything? Distort anything? Alienate anything? would be hard to address. Can an anti-humanist ask these? Or would we content ourselves with asking merely 'what were the particular discursive conditions of possibility within which this performance came about?'. See, I don't reckon I'd bother with that last question if I weren't looking for a change of that particular performance. And I wouldn't be doing that if I didn't have a notion that the performance in question wasn't right. Marx doesn't just reckon the exchange relation is fundamentally flawed in historic terms, but that it is wrong in moral terms (we can be ethical beings only if we're conscious of our agency in our relations, and the exchange relation regulates us behind our backs, so it is immoral) - the human as agentic fulcrum of being, if you like - all very humanistic, no?
>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.
But social constitution is not necessarily mutually exclusive of natural determination, is it? If we start from, say, these three premisis - all pretty uncontentiously Marxist, I submit:
P1: Society must invest labour into extraction and production to survive (labour is definitively social, if you like);
P2: How this is organised has a lot to do with determining the relations entered into within that society (relations of production can not be isolated from mode of production, if you like - neither can long exist without a compatible other);
P3: These relations have a lot to do with delimiting the scope of thinkable options and constraints that confront that society;
Then we'd have potentially different subjectivities inhabiting these different societies, wouldn't we? Each effectively organising itself to meet specific constraints and options. Some constraints might be met by those not organised to surmount them, while other societies might well have the wherewithal to surmount them, but don't meet that particular constraint. And if you can't surmount a constraint, either you disappear physically or a fundamental legitimation crisis produces a new order. Anyway, the upshot of all these diverse paths is that generalised commodity production eventually comes to dominate the world (as per Manifesto). Does this not, in some important ways, create subjectivities with much in common? Alienated from their hidden original selves in importantly similar ways?
For Marxism to make sense, need our naturalism extend no further than the proposition that we must eat to survive? Well, I reckon it does need to go further - all the way to humanism.
The revolutionaries Marx hands us are not definitively starving, are they? They are better off than the (potentially reactionary, if I have my dogma right) 'reserve army', anyway.
Why is it, that it is only those who must sell, and are in fact selling, their labour to survive, who Marx nominates as the decisive revolutionary subject? Partly, I guess the theory is that capitalism produces ever more of us proportional to the owners of capital (although it is worryingly conceivable that the reserve army is growing more quickly still). But, what would make us throw out the order that feeds us?
In the *Manifesto*, we have only our chains to lose - we are somehow not as free as we should be. In *Capital*, we are accumulating misery while the other mob accumulates capital (we're not just poor, we're *miserable*). The clincher is actually to be found, I reckon, in the dynamic Marx explicated in *The Holy Family*: 'dehumanisation which is conscious of itself as a dehumanisation and hence abolishes itself'. As Robert Tucker has it, 'The basis of the moral condemnation of wage labour is not that the wages are too low, but that wage labour by its very nature dehumanises man ... that it defeats his natural human urge toward spontaneous productive activity, converts his free creativity into forced labour and drudgery, and frustrates his human need for a variety of occupations'. (Intro to Tucker's ME Reader, pxxxi)
Marx's 'positive humanism' is explicitly there in the 1844 Manuscripts, and Althusser was fundamentally, disastrously, wrong in claiming it is not still there in Capital. 'Alienation' persists throughout, and therefore, so must 'man' - both as that from which the unwitting proletarian is alienated and as that to which the witting proletarian must aspire.
The constraint capable of ultimately bringing capitalism to its kness is not that it won't be able to feed us one day (conceivable though this may be), but that the basic conditions for us all to be free to pursue our nature mnight become evident to a majority just as aware of their not actually being free.
And antihumanism can't distinguish between freedom and unfreedom in this way - not by my paltry understanding, anyway.
That's what I (currently) reckon, anyway ...
>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
Perhaps I just don't understand the strong points to which antihumanism so boldly lays claim ...
>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 recognise a philosophical problem when I see one. I'm hinting at a structuration idea. *Not* methodological individualism.
>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.
I agree with you. I'm just saying that the individual is also a bit more/other than what discourse du juour puts there. Cramming what actually is into its concept always leaves a bit left over (was that Adorno?).
>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.
Abso-bloody-lutely - I'm only suggesting we factor humanity into this context to give praxis its raison d'etre - and that humanity is decisively and ultimately inescapably social, rational, empathic, and a creatively labouring animal.
>oh, rob. but there is no transdiscursive thought.
Alright - inbuilt transdiscursive tendency?
>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.
Yeah, I slipped up there. But we need a reason for us all to be potentially radically indignant at these circumstances, don't we?
>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.
That's a tenable example, but not, it seems, historically decisive - else we'd all be comrades by now.
>anyways, i'd really like to see a list of what it means to be human,
>the constants.
Marx posited some - the social being incined to explore and fulfill itself in creative and varied acts is there. I think there's already something with which to work in that. But he must have been aware that the freedom he imagined would itself teach us more about what constitutes human freedom - the ever-guiding light of that (impossibly?) distant convergence with the absolute?
>the real just keeps right on intruding though, fuck it.
A two-edged sword, Ange. This can, on occasion, be A GOOD THING. One day it will REALLY be Autumn. And there might REALLY be a human nature ...
Cheers, Rob.