[From nobody Wed Sep  6 10:22:56 2017
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Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 02:29:47 +1100
From: rc&am <rcollins@netlink.com.au>
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To: pen-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu
Subject: Re: [PEN-L:1564] In Defence of Humanism  pt1
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hi there rob,

a long discussion, so here's part one.

i think there's a lot of will in foucault, the will to power being the most
obvious example.  is this too pessimistic in 'discipline and punish'?  probably.
but foucault is certainly on the side of those who argue for will as a key
explanatory principle, which he perhaps why he is closer to weber than marx.   i
hear tell foucault's last work was on ethics, but i go by rumour here, not having
read it.i don't get upset when people want to study penthouse or mills and boon.
i think there is a difference between validation, as in celebration, and
validation as in they are both appropriate things to study and learn from.  as you
say, there is a difference in how one goes about this pedagogically, but i reckon,
what's the big deal?  not every analysis of popular american culture is a
baudrillard, gushing away at it.  so, the problem is not what one takes up as
illustrative or as an object of study, but how.  i'm more offended by conservative
cultural studies, whether that be of shakespeare or of mills and boon.

to insist on attention to the practices of social reproduction (and the centrality
of labour in the reproduction of capitalist societies) seems to me like
materialism, not humanism.  isn't it an insistence on the material processes
rather than agency that you have in mind here?  i do have a problem that some
so-called pomos privilege ideas as decisive, but that isn't the same thing as a
critique of anti-humanism.  in any case, labour is not an abstract category in
marx such that it has attributes and ways of being that span the epochs.  there's
stuff in marx about the abstractions of labour, about the relation between various
versions of this as an abstract concept to material practices and transitions, but
this is not an insistence on labour as an abstraction.    labour is an abiding
category of experience, but saying that doesn't say anything unless you are -
through such an assertion - saying that the specific form of labour under
such-and-such a social formation is the only or most appropriate expression of
that.  in which case, this would be taking the given forms of labour as the
abstraction, reifying them.

not everyone labours or does so (or is allowed to do so) creatively.  does this
mean they aren't truly human.  i have a dog who keeps herself pretty busy, working
and playing, and mostly it's indistinguishable.  is my dog more human than me
because it works more than i do?  {only kind of seriously...

doesn't habermas' ideal speech situation look suspiciously to you like the mythic
classical model of citizenship?  does to me.  remember, the citizens were citizens
because they had slaves, not because they were naturally endowed with
communicative rationality.

a friend of mine says that i'm a rationalist at heart because i always expect to
have rational discussions with people and, when confronted with something else i'm
bewildered.   but i try real hard to remind myself that even this rationalist
fantasy of mine is most likely a desire to submit all communication to transparent
and decided premises, which is just not how we are.   in any case, i'm better now.

on a different tack: who decides what these rules of logic and rationality are?
this is problem one.  problem two: doesn't logic impose a law of
non-contradiction?  contradicting oneself may well be a pain for those talking to
you, but ( a la freud), it is probably a signpost to the truth of what one is
saying which they am unable to say without contradiction for reasons which are not
transparent to the person speaking.   and, a la marx, any attempt to wipe out the
law of non-contradiction  would wipe out the possibility of understanding the
relation between (e.g.) labour and capital.

every time i see someone argue that human nature is the rock that society can't
fully overcome, sounds to me like a pretty powerful rhetorical strategy in the
service of this or that teleology.  but this doesn't finally convince me.

> 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.

well, why not?  they already have and will continue to.  they 'might as well', but
this is not saying they would not exist as well or they would exist better in
other kinds of arrangements...

>  Discourse is, inter alia, a
> set of prescriptions, isn't it?

sure, but it has contradictions, the space in which you find both the possibility
of freedom and of things being other than they are.  there's a difference between
regulating communication with the brickbat of moralism that is humanism and
accepting that rules can and should be open to contest.  we - as in anyone i've
ever come across and most of the world's population - is not in power are we?  so,
why would we protect the unspoken rules of discourse and action from contest by
asserting a divine or natural basis for those rules?

and rob, you really can't claim that anti-humanism leaves you with no politics,
that it just relativises everything (including history).  this is kinda petulant.
it's also quite wrong.  where do you and everyone else get your politics from? not
nature, but from the spaces of contradiction that are present here and now, which
includes the versions of the past that you have been instructed in.  why does this
trouble you?  why isn't it enough?  it's more than enough for me.  it also forces
me to justify my politics in ways i find harder but more satisfying than simply
claiming i know what human nature is or is not.'conditions of possibility of
statements' is actually kant's question.  was i asking about conditions of
possibility?  i don't think so.  i was asking about the context of the citation -
fairly straightforward.  anyways, i have the 78 progress press edition of capital
v1.

we could debate for ages about whether or not marx thought capitalism was wrong in
moral terms or on its own terms.  i go for the latter.

> But social constitution is not necessarily mutually exclusive of natural
> determination, is it?

there's a long answer, and a short one. the short one is this:  here you have
slipped from asserting the primacy of human agency to slipping in nature as the
immutable bedrock.  have i misconstrued?

> P1: Society must invest labour into extraction and production to survive
> (labour is definitively social, if you like);

extraction of what? surplus?  some hunter gatherer economies did not produce a
surplus - are/were they not human?  is this the same as surplus value?  neither
production nor surplus has any abstract status in marx - that's the whole point of
the exercise.


> Alienated from their hidden original selves in importantly similar
> ways?

...what hidden selves?  the 'behind their backs' stuff is an argument against
subjectivism and voluntarism, not an argument for why capitalism is bad or even
for asserting a true hidden self.

> The revolutionaries Marx hands us are not definitively starving, are they?
> 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?

the stuff about starvation, you'll recall, was a remark on the imulpse to nominate
injustice, and this, in relation to the observation that the world is replete with
food.  so, i was remarking on the existence of a contradiction.  this was not a
theory about the agents of revolutionary praxis, was it?  but, if you want that,
then you should recall the comments i made about the contradiction of capital.
marx names workers - productive workers -as the only ones capable of overturning
capitalism because they are the antithesis and precondition of capital.  there's
no moral weight assigned to workers.  gee rob, are you getting all lassallean on
me?

the rest later,

best,

angela



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