Or, as I suggested, a simple acknowledgement that such a being does not exist. But, alas, ideologies can't be dismissed with charms--although charms, talismans, fetishes, and the like can be very useful to ideologies.
<< Even if the bourgeoisie discovered the individual, this does not mean the individual doesn't exist... >>
I never wrote that the individual didn't exist. I wrote that the individual *existing outside of society* does not exist. And the bourgeoisie did not invent the individual as generally understood, even in bourgeois society. Any number of works of ancient literature, including histories, will celebrate the exploits of very well-delineated, unforgetably-drawn human individuals--they are just never defined as existing *outside of society*. In truth, bourgeois literature has very few examples of the individual-existing-outside-of-society, either; the concept is just too unreal. It is merely something that "everybody knows" is true, even though a few seconds of thought should show that it isn't.
Some of the problem here may be that the common-sense view of an individual--the characteristics (loaded word, I know!) that make Joe or Sue or Juan or Aloysius or whomever what "they are" in relation to others, and the characteristics with which they define themselves--is mixed up, or seen as synonymous with, or purported to be synonymous with, the narrower bourgeois concept of the individual-outside-of-society, which is nothing but an ideological construct with no basis in reality. In fact, the bourgeois concept is "anti-individual" (really, anti-human) in the common-sense view of the word, in that it requires people to conform to an absurd abstraction.
That purported bourgeois ideal--the free, conscious individual--actually exists to the extent that a person recognizes one's place in one's current society and the ways in which that society's power relationshisps actually exist, i.e., to the extent to which one is in touch with reality. And (if that reality is inhuman and unfree) to the extent to which one is in conscious struggle against it. And to the extent to which one can see beyond current bourgeois reality to a free society of truly free *individuals*. Existing, as they must, within human society.
>From some comments you directed to Yoshie F:
<<... it is difficult to see whatever inspired the myths of Cyclops or Circe as ensembles of social relations ...>>
These (lest we forget, mythical) creatures were monsters, or, more accurately, god-monsters. Not human. Their human traits were grotesquely exaggerated or grotesquely debased. How is this evidence for your skeptic's (or your?) side?
<< Ancient Greece would have found Kaspar not very remarkable. >>
If you mean they would have just thrown him into that great anthropological pile that they classed as "barbarian," that they may have made little distinction between the strangeness of any "savage" foreigner and a cognitively starved feral child, well, maybe. But to see (lest we forget, fictional) Hauser as at any important level equal to a Greek? Impossible, based on any evidence of the ideology of ancient Greece about which I know.
BTW, doesn't this little exercise in mind-melding with the Greeks and explication of myth take us into those areas of non-material non-science that you yourself declared off limits?
----Original Message Follows---- From: Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Possibly dumb question about socialization/sociability Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 15:03:40 -0400
Gregory Geboski:
> ...
> 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?
If it's a phantasm, some simple charm should be able to dispel it.
> Sorry for the rhetorical questions, but the answer is clear: Bourgeois rule
> and its effect on ideology in the broadest sense. The very idea of this
> construct of an "individual" defined apart from human society has been basic
> to bourgeois thought. (And the rejection of this bourgeois construct is
> basic to Marx's thought, for one--see, e.g., the intro to the Grundrisse.)
> ...
Marx being a materialist, then, we can expect to see a materialist analysis of the social and individual aspects, if any, of human beings. By "materialist" I mean "based on the phenomena of the physical universe which most of us agree exist." Is that what I'll find in the intro to the Grundrisse? I was wondering if Marx had turned is attention to this issue, but I doubted it.
Even if the bourgeoisie discovered the individual, this does not mean the individual doesn't exist. Actually, my reading indicates that among some tribal peoples, for example the North American Indians, a good deal of individuation existed, probably more than in most capitalist polities of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Hence, perhaps, the attraction of the idea of the Noble Savage for 18th-century intellectuals; but only as raw material.)
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> ... 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. ...
I am skeptical whether we can know this. If there were humans living out of the purview of the literate classes of those societies whose records were preserved, we would at most catch only a glimpse of them. We have numerous myths, legends and folk-tales of singular individuals usually depicted as living in forests or on remote islands; those could be the glimpses. Of course, this does not prove any of them were entirely asocial; but on the other hand it is difficult to see whatever inspired the myths of Cyclops or Circe as ensembles of social relations.
I suspect the reason that we see more fascination with peculiar individuals like Kaspar Hauser in the last few centuries is because the increasing intensity of State surveillance and control has made such outliers increasingly rare and, therefore, wonderful. Ancient Greece would have found Kaspar not very remarkable.
My thanks to those who provided some keywords; I'll be looking around.
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