And, as you well know, I've written posts making much of this myself. But that doesn't mean I'm not on about examining labour now! It is something under capitalism it need not be somewhere else - and I argue this all within the context of an essential human, one who has worked for two million years, and even now fashions argumentative posts to strangers when it could be resting or making a start on tomorrow's quota of what s/he gets paid for.
>> All I actually thought I said was that sexuality is part of the human
>essence, and that any denial of its expression might therefore constitute a
>denial of something importantly human. I can think
>of more conservative approaches to sexuality than that. Can't you?<
>
>no, i'm having a hard time thinking of any that are more conservative --
>not in the sense of 'right-wing', but in the literal sense of 'conserving
>what is'.
What? How?
>specifically what forms of sexuality, desire, etc would you
>regard as a natural expression of what it means to be human? and, by
>implication, what forms aren't?
Conservative? Mebbe I'm a liberal on this - so sue me! Anything those involved want to do or are prepared to consent to, say I. This all started precisely because I wanted to warn against people seeking out politically correct dos and don'ts for sexual practice, didn't I? If 'discourse' decides younger women shouldn't fuck older men, 'discourse' is being a bloody self-righteous tyrant wherever a younger woman and an older man might want to fuck each other. We seemed headed towards a tacit notion that an illicit 'power' was responsible for this phenomenon, and that it'd stop (implicitly, have to be stopped) once we put things right. Bollocks to that, said I - it might not stop - and if it didn't, we'd have no call to stop it (unless we believed we can be discursively fashioned to discursively determined ends, without recourse to a possibly unknowable but logically tenable physical essence).
And, on labouring humanity, you also write:
>but what does this imply for the form that this creation and production
>take? in many ways, the constant tension between aesthetic (creative) and
>economic (production) conceptions of labour (as well as the desire to meld
>that contradiction, allow labour to become creation, etc) indicates a
>certain historical specificity already, right?
I'm saying capitalism is precisely the condition in which this particular tension between our creative selves and our economic selves is created, too! My humanist claim is that we are essentially (in the sense of necessarily) economic beings (we need to transform, allocate and consume) and essentially (in the definitive sense) creative. Just as well we're both (dare I say 'evolutionarily functional'?)! Unless, of course, we live in an order that ignores/suppresses our natural creativity whilst it makes us labour for most of our waking hours!
But even under our order, some wage workers get to experience the natural coming together of the economic and the creative.
Everything you do (whether it be for its own sake or towards an end; for sale or not - is necessary or not - whether we're physically alone or not) is decisively creative, as long as you (alone or together) are the one/s deciding what you'll do next in the process. For instance, I like being an academic because I do a lot of such deciding in the process of making my quid.
I once had jobs where I got on better with my workmates, absolutely stopped at 6.00 pm, and did the sort of stuff that makes one's body look and feel good. But I didn't have nearly so much agency in 'em - ie I was much more alienated from my labour (I can't look at that ghastly new Parliament House and feel myself part of it, although I did have a [miniscule] physical hand in its creation - bringing in and putting together drafting tables and moving bits of scaffolding from here to there, all at someone else's minute-by-minute commands - and all towards the realisation of a plan I didn't even like on paper, for a building I didn't think we needed.)
>it's already a position
>taken with respect to a certain historically-specific form of labour, a
>statement that would be unintelligible in another epoch.
All of which is right, and none of which contradicts what I've been trying to say, to my mind.
>that doesn't
>mean we can escape these references (they're necessary to any statement;
>without them, any critique would be unintelligible for us), but it does
>mean we should notice the mechanisms by which historical specificity is
>re-asserted as human nature, naturalised through the figure of the
>"non-social man".
So we define truth as the truest something can be at this point in time and space? Well, if it really matters, I'll go with that then. Does this really challenge humanism - that it is a discourse contending in a sea of currently commensurable discourses, for the status of truest possible truth? Don't think so. I can still postulate that (a) A system is wrong if it denies essential humanity (Marcuse wrote about this sorta stuff, and came up with 'surplus repression'), and (b) A system can't be wrong if humanity has no essence.
>we had some of this discussion as i recall some time back on whether or not
>marx had a physiological definition of labour.
Isn't 'concrete labour' physiological and specific - the actual work done by the actual people to make the actual thing? Marx's argument depends on this in as far as he needs to oppose himself to the classics via 'abstract labour' and 'socially necessary labour time', but he nowhere ignores the category. Well, he couldn't, could he.
>i think that discussion is
>related to this discussion about labour, and indeed the discussion about
>sex and gender. maybe we're all recycling...
Too right. Each of us defending a position we see as necessary to counteract the tyranny immanent in the other. On this, I reckon we both have an important point (neither humanism nor antihumanism can resist the slippery slope argument). So what about positing a largely unknowable essential human ('coz I reckon a couple of things are satisfactorily knowable - but mebbe it doesn't matter) within the context of the contingent historical relations category?
Cheers, Rob.