Er, I have said this, Ange (in one of my responses to Kelley). Just that (possibly unknowable) human nature isn't entirely a function of relations du juour (I argued that there is stuff in us that just doesn't change in the blink of a few hundred years - no matter how much the form of its expression may change). I DO agree with Martha's paragraph as Roger quotes it - I just want to allow for the possibility of yet another dimension, that's all. In this particular context, I thought it sensible to allude to a nature that might be doing its thing behind our back in much the way Marx says the exchange relation organises us. I now wish I'd chosen some other way of making a very modest little point, as the certainty-freedom-problem point got lost in a plethora of accusations of misogyny, uncritical physicalism and ahistoricism (and gawd knows what else).
>he's argued against
>various analyses or statements with the claim that they're wrongly trying
>to change human nature, as in young gals bonking old blokes, right?
No! I'm saying it's wrong to proscribe such behaviour in future just because a lot of it might be a function of lousy power relations in the here and now. Some instances might not be (I offered but one possible explanation why it might not be - that there is no logical reason reason why a younger woman should not find an over-50 man sexually attractive and perhaps even a natural explanation for younger men less often finding over-50 women sexually attractive - nothing scientifically verifiable and nothing autonomously decisive, mind - just something we might happily tolerate in our fondly imagined future, if it were still a discernable phenomenon there, rather than proscribe).
The point is, on top of the problems some of us have in trying to get from 'is' to 'ought' is the problem of getting to 'is'. We have to be sure not to proscribe what might be natural if that particular way of expressing the possibly natural is not in itself antisocial (which, I submit, our example isn't). One post (a long time ago now) led me to think that such a proscription was in the air, and I reacted against it, that's all.
>more
>specifically, the significant conceptual point here would be i think "Human
>nature is both historical (i.e., relative to the mode of production within
>which it emerged and develops) and universal, insofar as every mode of
>production shapes the world in its own image."
Importantly true. But mebbe not the whole truth. Mebbe history and its motions-du-juour might never be wholly knowable for the simple reason an intellectually unattainable, very slowly changing human essence might be complicit in our ensemble of human relations.
>that is, instead of bracketting off human nature _away_ from contingency
>and historicity, what is included in the brackets is instead considered as
>the speculative moment of a contingent mind.
Yeah, but there's no reason a speculative moment of a contingent mind can't do science and concern itself with eg. genetics or cosmology, is there? And the speculatively contingent does not negate the transcendentally true, never mind the universally true, it just fundamentally qualifies the certainty with which you may present your conclusions about eg. 'worm holes' or 'black holes' etc. when you come to the point of deciding whether and how to construct a time- or cross-dimension-travel technology.
On the one hand, speculative contingency might be all we have, but I was grateful for its capacity to come up with the technology of the aspirin this morning. On the other, as it is all we have, we must be very light-handed and flexible in applying its suggestions to, say, a communist non-patriarchal scenario in which the dos and don'ts are ours, as citizens in a real democracy, to decide.
>the differences between rob and i however run to whether or not it's
>desirable or possible to render this moment as either speculative or
>biological.
I reckon it's desirable to allow for it (because raw nature must logically be - just as it was before conscious creatures walked the earth), and not possible to establish the exact parameters and magnitudes of the purely biological in an always already encultured setting. I have not described ANY moment in human affairs as *purely* biological (those who menstruate or give birth are female but what that means, and therefore how they're seen and responded to, always make up part and parcel of this purportedly value-free biological fact - value can never be divorced from fact - but if 'fact' is going to have any meaning at all, 'only females menstruate and give birth' has got to be afforded that status). Foucault's HIV status was a biological fact in this important sense. So was his death. The day has come when AIDS can be ameliorated, and might come when it can be cured, and the biological fact of whether someone is HIV+ or not consequently matters decisively.
>i think there are significant implications that emerge from
>the latter, not least of which is that of a certain hypostatisation or
>reification of (to follow through with the spinozian lingo) a certain
>finitude, to collapse infinitude into finitude, or to render a contingent
>apprehension of universality as the outer (or base) limit of all we can be
>and are. not just that, but i -- like carrol (gee) -- have a serious
>aversion to utopian sentiment, but i would qualify it in present company to
>acknowledge that we also can't do without it. my question remains then as
>to whether such utopian figurations, or presentations of universality, are
>indicated as fixed (hardwired) or acknowledged as necessary but speculative
>fictions. for me, the struggle is over "the emergence of new needs,
>aspirations, and powers", not the naturalisation of what already exists.
Utopianism is only dangerous if it is framed as a wholly achievable state of the absolute as lived life. Then you have a world in which all must agree and those who do not must be not just wrong, but actively against perfection. Nothing would be too cruel and unusual for such specimens in such a world. Allowing for an inaccessable essence in dialectical unity with the relations du juour is one good way of avoiding such a world, I reckon.
>contextually (and so polemically) i would consider the issue of
>predication, of new needs, aspirations and powers to be more the most
>important thing as we look ahead to the vast expanse of the 21st century.
So old needs, like time to love those you love, time to fulfill your creative urges, the capacity to be creative in doing what is necessary etc etc ... what of these needs?
>this is the sense of what i get from N30 and J18, and why doug's reports
>regarding the diversity marks a new moment in the configuration of 'we',
>neither homogeneous nor pluralist.
>but i'm wandering...
I don't think you're wandering. If there be no single perfect future and if people in the here and now experience the here and now differently (both big F facts, for mine), then diversity in opposing various aspects of the present is inevitable. And when the overthrowing is done, there'll still be diversity, and still be contradictions (albeit, some of 'em will be new contradictions). Yep, 'we' is not just so many of 'I'. But 'we' is every bit as much about stuff we have in common - some of it the same stuff we had in common in when Methuselah was a lad.
>ps. the thesis that we get more alienated the more complex a society
>becomes strikes me as a dodgy kind of primitivism. (someone pass me the
>cold towel, i'm agreeing with yoshie as well.) though, i still have a
>penchant for the way in which the frankfurters took up the critique of
>instrumentalist reason and certainly wouldn't rule out the importance of
>that.
I don't reckon the implicit goal of instrumentalism is complexity at all, Ange. Single systems of means, with identical rules for efficiency that tell decisively in coordinating like ends, is the point of the instrumentalist idealogue, I reckon. Complexity, like diversity, is 'good' in the sense that stuff is naturally so, for mine. There I go again ...
Cheers, Rob.