At 12:49 PM -0400 4/24/01, Gregory Geboski wrote:
>Your question seems to assume that there is some burden of proof on
>people who claim the (what should be obvious) point, that people are
>in fact not "people" in many real ways if they are isolated from
>their fellow humans. Yet it is the other half of your
>formulation--the "individual" acting somehow "outside" of
>society--that seems favored as the assumed postulate. Why? Is there
>any actual evidence of the existence of this pathological creature,
>beyond the grossest accidentally or criminally-induced exceptions?
>Why is this phantasm even considered an object of serious scientific
>study?
Isn't a preoccupation with possibilities of "feral children" & the like a capitalist phenomenon, flowering especially in the eighteenth & nineteenth centuries? More specifically, an ideological response to the anxieties caused by primitive accumulation, colonialism, industrialization, & the rule of "Freedom, Equality, Property, & Bentham"? In the pre-capitalist world, there was no question that individuals are ensembles of social relations, and relations of mutual obligation & dependence in a hierarchical class society were taken for granted. In contrast, in the capitalist world, commodity fetishism obscures the facts that we are never independent of social relations & that our world is more socialized than ever (even though wealth created by socialized production is privately appropriated & turned into an alien power over living labor which may look in ideology like the power of "society" over an "individual") -- hence the ideologically felt need to "prove" that humans are indeed social creatures.
Yoshie