We may be on the horns of an antinomy here. Much of what you say has a lot going for it, but I remain convinced the dangers of humanism are not a reason to throw out the project all together. Liberal capitalism does need humanism, I think. But so, in my opinion, does socialism. My response is knee-jerk stuff, and probably not worthy of listing - but, just in case ...
You begin thus:
>1. for liberal, progressive humanism, the space of freedom, or at least the
>possibility of criticizing what is, is enabled by the distance between various
>claims to a universal Humanity and the concrete expressions of (how else
>to put
>it?) humanity. hence, certain traits are given the status of an abstraction
>(or perhaps this is an essence) - such as reason, labour, etc. - in order to
>criticise what are then deemed to be concrete contradictions to this (such as
>irrationality, the indignity of the conditions of labour, etc.).
>
>the problem with this is that you cannot (as marx argued in his critique of
>utopian socialism) argue for the historical universalisation of the conditions
>of bourgeois subjectivity (human rights, freedom of speech, etc.) and deny the
>specific moments of the 'exception', which are (as he shows) the actual
>historical constituents of such so-called essentially human ideals: that the
>ideal of individual freedom cannot be disociated from the emergence of
>exchange
>relations premised on the commensurability of different persons, values, etc;
>that the notion of human rights is founded on the practice and notion of the
>right to own property; etc.
>
>in short, whilst liberal humanism is definitely a step up from the
>anti-foundationalist liberalism of someone like rorty (who argues for
>liberalism with the US as the supposed exemplar of the best the world has to
>offer), it does not constitute a critique, but only the beginning of one.
I still don't get it. Am I necessarily a liberal because I am a humanist? And can't freedom-from-exchange-relation be imagined from inside that relation? And what is that would be free, anyway, if not the human subject? Or must we throw out 'freedom', do you think?
>2. as a beginning, it is okay, as adorno and others argued: to work on the
>immanent contradictions of bourgois concepts and ideals is a real point of
>departure for critique, but it can only work as a point of departure, and it
>can only work if it not assumed that the practice of theory is to resolve such
>contradictions. rather, it is to make them unbearable.
On the assumption that we can discover the human only when the human is free to pursue this humanity. That is, we do not know a lot about what humanity is, but we know we can't know while we are blinkered by a distortion of our potential as creative social beings. I go a step further, of course, in claiming that we can know some things about being human. Philosophically, the problem of realism is that the realist must insist that there is something whose nature does not depend upon thoughts and language but which can nevertheless be known. The most likely candidate for such a category is that which is the bearer/doer of language and thought in the first place: us (the 'usness' that was so fundamentally complicit in the evolution of thought and language, if you like). That's the extent of my realism, but it's enough to make a human out of ...
If Justin is reading these posts, this is where he'd jump in, I guess. 'Hope so ...
>3. but when humanism sets itself in a battle against anti-humanism, it really
>shows its dogmatic, and particularistic premises, becuase it now conducts a
>rearguard action against a critique of universalisms in an attempt to limit
>this critique, to halt it at the border of cliams such as: 'we are all
>essentially the same'; 'a marxian teleology is defensible on the grounds of
>human essence'; 'the critique of universalism is a kind of nihilism which
>threatens to destroy all that is good and worthy'.
I admit to some dogmatism here - at least, I find myself very hard to move on this and also feel what I believe to be the case is very important.
We must critique universalist claims, but I have never seen it done without the deployment of implicit universalist claims (eg. 'will to power' in Nietzsche and Foucault or a priori 'differance' in Derrida and Lyotard - and whatever 'discourse' and 'power' are in whatever hands they are being shaped). I still reckon the most modest of human universals (Habermas on communicative rationality; Chomsky on linguistic structure; Kant's categorical imperative; Marx's creative social being) afford us both rhetorical defence and critical space - such premises seem quite up to negating the whole legitimacy of our order, to my mind..
>needless to say, what is
>occuring here is not an argument for an ethics, for a politics, for
>revolution. all that is actually being advanced here are assertions which
>rest
>entirely on a faith in the transcendant and overiding: humanity as an
>abstraction. when it comes to specifying why what such-and-such regards as
>being 'truly human' measn, they falls back on the vaguest of claims in which
>the present can be easily seen as the model for the future: hence, humanism
>makes a faith in the present order a basis for even beginning to think about
>the future. this is precisley why marx objected to 'blueprints'.
Well, certainly a humanist would maintain that evidence for his suppositions can be found in any historical moment. So, yeah, presently discernable phenomena would be called into evidence. It doesn't follow we must hold by present orders, though. I don't think I'm trapped into defending the present at all. I think myself obliged to attack it, in fact. I still don't know why I'd attack it if I didn't hold to the critical standard precisely afforded me by my humanism
>3. the simple point is this: any attempt to wield certain concepts as
>universals may work well as a rhetorical strategy for making criticisms of
>capitalism intelligible and digestible, since this is the way 'advanced'
>capitalists societies like to see themselves, but it doesn't constitute a
>critique since the moment one begins to elaborate upon what these universals
>might be, one is back in the game of the utopians: projecting a one-sided
>version of various concepts as capable of abstraction (and hence,
>essentialisation) without the 'bad bits' that are actually their historically
>constitutive moment and their ongoing precondition.
Could humanists not hang on to the 'form/essence' dialectic. Our essence (as ahistorical pole in this dialectic) is capable of manifesting in a myriad forms (the historical pole) - and history could then be seen as a process of essence and form working its way through inevitable tensions between the constant former and the fluctuating latter. This needn't posit a teleology either. Just a critical guiding light (a Hegelian absolute?) - where essence and form converge - that need logically never be met nor approached historically, but must be strived towards ethically.
>4. i don't know what others would cast as the 'space of freedom'. i do know
>that many pomos share with many marxists versions of some of these: that the
>mind/will is the space of freedom against the unfreedom of the material world;
>that the party is the historical will of the masses which is a version of the
>aforementioned; that the identity of labour is the space of freedom since
>it is
>not capital. all of these suffer from - well - idealism (an obvious one), but
>more importantly, from making it seem as if ideas (even marxist ones) can be
>separated from material processes; or forgetting that the identity of
>labour in
>capitalism is actually capital, surplus value being surplus labour.
Our identity is not entirely that of capital, is it? The order's moves to bring the two into identity is in fact the site where we humanists would expect human self-consciousness to be driven to the surface. 'Coz it can't be done for a humanist (form can not annihilate essence completely, and the more it 'tries', the more the immanent contradictions manifest themselves discernably). I still think it can be for those not committed to humanism, though.
>5. i don't have a general theory of freedom. i do have a (borrowed)
>theory of
>capitalism in relation to labour (that the reality of capital is surplus
>labour, that the reality of labour is both that it is a precondition of
>capital
>and at the same time is irreducible to labour power since (unlike any other
>commodity) it must be reproduced day after day in order for the production
>process to even 'begin'. i don't think this casts it as the 'space of
>freedom'
>in the sense of a place outside of, or free from necessity, but i don't think
>the world is like that in any case, and i don't think fantasies of it being
>otherwise have been of any lasting help in this struggle. what do i think
>might be decisive? depends on where and what you're asking, but i'd begin by
>working through the contradictions, since this is the possibility of
>criticism. i can't make any more guarantees than that, and - despite what
>many people say - neither can marx.
Thanks for this, Ange. As I say, it doesn't matter much to me that we differ so. For reasons I can't infer from your ontology, we both seem bent on finding out how a humanity sans the exchange relation would and could manifest itself. And we both seem to suspect it could be better than what we have/are.
Cheers, Rob.