Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:56:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: humanism and anti-humanism



 

“Maybe the right model for understanding humanism, and 

particularly liberal humanitarianism, which has always been 

intimately connected with imperialisms, is some kind of 

anthropophagy.” (Thiego)

 “Eat the rich!” (Aerosmith)

 

All very interesting but starting to get somewhat dubiously relevant to the problem of humanism/antihumanism – of course different societies (sometimes even different individuals) have varying ideas of the meaning of the word “human”, and of course not all of these are imperialistic and oppressive – and of course some of them lead to conclusions which in western humanism would appear as bizarre – but as Lowe has already said, that’s not the kind of “human” which “antihumanism” attacks.  I’ve always considered the debate in the same kind of terms that Lowe has set out.

 

If Thiago means by humanism what he says he means in his reply to me, then I’ve no objection to saying that I’m a humanist in his sense.  Word-labels are arbitrary; if a dog is a person who studies politics, then of course I’m a dog.  If the government says that anyone who opposes the capitalist system is a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.  But I was under the impression that this discussion was orienting to a wider debate, and in that wider debate, humanism refers to something quite specific – the idea of the human or “Man” as the central category for generating ethical and political concepts (with human or Man inscribed as singular rather than diverse and fixed rather than flowing).

 

Lowe is right – antihumanism is a bad term (one I rejected for a long time), because it sounds as if it means the same as misanthropy, i.e. hatred of humans.  But as a specific position, it need not take the form of a “project” at all – only a single position (and one could hardly pin people like, say, Stirner and Althusser together as if they have a single “project”).  There is no more an “antihumanist” project than there is an “atheist” project.  I don’t believe in a personal God at the centre of the universe, therefore I’m an atheist.  I don’t believe in a singular, essential Man or humanity at the centre of the universe, therefore I’m an antihumanist.  This no more forecloses my use of other figures which could broadly be called “human” than my atheism requires me to foreclose all the various existential, aesthetic and psychological states associated with God and belief in various religions (for instance, experiences of intensities, of commitment, etc.).

 

The phrase “administration of things” reeks of regimes of place, and systems like the USSR (at least after the early period) amount to nothing more than immense regimes of place.  I don’t like regimes of place because they foreclose and repress potentialities and because they are closely connected to microfascisms of various kinds (including microfascist elements in Leninism and Stalinism).  Thiago is attacking regimes of place when he denounces the “administration of things”, but it strikes me that his assumption that humanism is inherently a critical discourse in relation to such regimes of place is unfounded.  An order of places, or of things, may be constructed in many ways; the foreclosure of the “human” is not necessary for it to operate.

 

Perhaps early Soviet art (constructivism, Eisenstein…) and some of the conceptions of Leninists such as Brecht can be seen as involving an attack on humanism, but this certainly was not the case for high Stalinism or for any kinds of Stalinism/Leninism outside Russia – the theme of socialism as realising “man’s” essence through collective labour, of the personal, human figure of the Leader, and of the struggle between Man and Nature are far more prominent.  I know this partly from having read some texts by Stalin, Mao etc.  But one could also look here at Zizek’s work on Russia (e.g. the essay “Repeating Lenin”) – and also at Foucault’s book “Remarks on Marx” (published by Semiotext[e], originally an interview with an Italian Marxist) in which he analyses structuralism as a kind of disavowed or repressed element in eastern Europe, denied by the regimes because of its subversive potential, residing precisely in its identification of elements in the early revolutionary period and which
 are later denied.  So Stalinism is paradoxically the re-humanisation of Leninism, at precisely the point when it commits its most “inhuman” atrocities.

 

The Enlightenment tradition is not all Thiago is making it out to be.  One of my recent endeavours has been a critique of Rawls, who is very much humanist in that a “conception of the person” is at the centre of his theoretical/metaphysical apparatus.  Yet the consequences are oppressive, because this conception is used to judge others.  It is very much a product of Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal distinction, and it is partly for this reason that Stirner’s and Spivak’s critiques of this vein of Enlightenment theory ring true for me.  Kant reaches the conclusion that people like the Australian Aborigines are not truly human because they do not express a transcendental dimension; they live immediately in the present.  Rawls says the same, but his targets are different – the “unreasonable”, the “criminal”, the psychologically different, etc.  What happens here is that the “human” is reified as an essence, then turned into a master-signifier and used to construct an order of place.  Hence,
 Spivak’s claim that the “human” is used in Enlightenment thought as a universalising figure of western colonialism, and Stirner’s claim that humanists end up putting the “spook” before actual people so that they love the human and hate humans, are largely borne out.

 

I agree with Thiago that humanism is a universalisation, and this is precisely my problem with it – it tries to subsume existence into a universal category; it totalises, instead of enabling flows of difference.  It is for this reason very much NOT rhizomatic, because the rhizomes are forced to attach themselves to a single trunk, tha master-signifier, the idea of the human.  

 

It is this structural feature of the master-signifier which I object to – and the points Thiago makes regarding my invocation of structuralist theory do not affect this.  I think that he is quite right, and that I was wrong to speak simply in terms of all language as binary oppositions, especially since I’ve used this argument against Zizek in the past.  But master-signifiers necessitate a binary division of existence or at least an inclusion/exclusion binary.  This is a necessary feature of them, although in my view they are not in any way necessary – we need to overcome them.

 

Of course, if my attack on Rawls includes claims that it is “inhumane” or unfitting for actual people, I might be open to Thiago’s accusation that I’m just substituting one humanism for another, or that I’m criticising pseudo-humanism rather than humanism.  Be that as it may; I don’t mind being a humanist if all it means is that I’m in favour of the self-emancipation of actual people, but for me the term means more than this.  It means making the “human” into a master-signifier of one’s own discourse, and judging everything else in relation to this central pole.  As a supporter of flows of difference, I make claims for emancipation on behalf of the human, but also on behalf of the peculiar, the psychotic, the animal, the unique, etc.  It’s all a question, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it, of thinking univocity instead of representation, of thinking becoming instead of being, and of adopting minoritarian figures of resistance and difference instead of majoritarian figures of
 essences and master-signifiers.

 

Any discourse of resistance must, almost by definition, involve reference to flows or entities which exceed the existing order of place/things and which are irreducible to it.  This can include reference to the “human” as that which exceeds an “inhuman” system, to “human rights” beyond the oppressive present, and so on.  This is certainly one way to do it – although the order of places/things can also be identified with the “human” and “humanity”.  Thus, a discourse of resistance cannot rely on universality and likeness/sameness, but must necessarily be a resistance to such discourse.

 

One problem which hasn’t yet been addressed is the problem of characterological rhetoric.  The concept of the “human” often goes hand-in-hand with the use of pseudo-psychological and quasi-ethical conceptions to interpret and judge actions – the whole sphere of ideas such as courage, laziness, inherent criminality, virtue, weakness of character, etc. etc.  This is all based on treating the individual self as 1) a fixed essence and 2) the origin of actions, so that actions can be reduced to “traits” which then bear on the nature/character of individuals.  This type of deluded pseudo-psychology is precisely what the “anti-humanists” – from Nietzsche and Stirner to Deleuze, Reich, Foucault, etc. debunk.  And it is very much a live issue.  Molecular fascism lives on this kind of nonsense – it’s all over the tabloids, all over politicians’ rhetoric about “crime”, about “anti-social behaviour”, about “terrorism”, etc.  Also, the entire punitive/disciplinary apparatus is based on this –
 Foucault does a very good job in Discipline and Punish of showing how the carceral, while being as Thiego claims a rationalist/antihumanist subversion of humanism, also relies for its entire justification on its parasitic relationship to the juridical sphere, which is entirely humanist and is based entirely in the Enlightenment tradition, which precedes and in many ways founds the carceral system and which relies on this system for its effectivity.  How can there be courts without an idea of individual guilt, which is inherently humanist?  So antihumanism is a subversion of the juridical and the carceral.  

 

The rhetoric of the growing carceral superstate is still very much humanist, even though lawyers get shunted increasingly to the side.  For instance, Blunkett’s excuse for his various fascistic measures (ID cards, internment, etc.) is explicitly humanist: he says that the right to live free from the threat of terrorism is the most important human right.  When America “liberated” Kabul, Time magazine ran a photospread reminiscent Barthes’s discussions of universalism, with an unveiled woman smiling at the camera, boys playing football, etc.  This is very much humanist imagery, making out that American troops have humanised Kabul, which means at once, civilised it, taken away the atrocities of the Taleban, and also, made it immediately and intuitively comprehensible to an American reader, as if everyday life in Kabul suddenly becomes American.  The most common euphemism for tabloid/gutter-press/paparazzi journalism is “human interest stories”.  And so on.  The ideology of contemporary
 capitalism is explicitly humanist.

 

So the point is to inscribe figures of resistance and minoritarian figures.  This can include figures of the human, whenever the human remains a molecular, minoritarian figure (so we needn’t abandon strategic uses of humanism, of human rights discourse, etc.).  But it is important not to fetishise this figure and not to make it into a master-signifier.  If one does this, one is unable to resist systems of place which are based on the concept of the human.  I would say, for instance, that to read the “un-man” as an alternative figure of the human is to completely misread Stirner.  The point is not to posit this new type of man (indeed, the un-man is not even an ideal, but a product of humanism itself, its flip-side), but to use the idea of the un-man, of an escaping excess which resists humanist codings, as the starting-point for a line of flight which leads beyond both man and un-man and which becomes other through a uniqueness (singularity, univocity) which resists such encodings. 
 If there is a return to humanism in Stirner, it is the concept of the self or ego, and this worries me a bit about his work; his conception of the self, while subversive of the present, is far too molar.  Nietzsche goes further “beyond good and evil”, and beyond man and un-man, yet also relapses via ideas such as masters and slaves as fixed groups.  But this shouldn’t stop us trying to move beyond man and un-man; Deleuze and Guattari in my view have gone the furthest in this respect.

 

As an antihumanist, for instance, I can say that my inscription in the social system is not identical with myself, and therefore resist my interpellation in the dominant schemas of what it is to be “human”.  I can also say that my desires are not outgrowths of a central ego, which enables me to take a different, more realistic approach to dealing with my emotions than if I insisted on an ego-centred image of the self.  This makes it a useful discursive tool in constructing new forms of “care of the self” and new relations between myself and others – a tool of anti-capitalism, so to speak.

 

Of course, I will also use non-essential figures of the human to resist certain kinds of technocracy which are themselves antihumanist.  Zizek for instance makes a fetish of antihumanism, celebrating the rise of biotechnology and the commercial and state-led manipulation of genes, brain cells, the body, etc., because it is an attack on liberal humanism.  This is absolutely disastrous, and I’d much sooner rally to Thiago’s arguments than go down Zizek’s path.  But I think antihumanism can be used in a number of less silly ways, and I think it’s crucial to get rid of the role of the human/Man as master-signifier.  If this is what Thiago means by a materialist humanism, then fine, maybe I’m a materialist humanist too – Gramsci after all called Marxism an “absolute humanism”, without at all meaning an idea of the human as essence - but it’s important to oppose humanist essentialism and to insist on the importance of flows and escape.

 

Andy  


		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs 

--- StripMime Warning --  MIME attachments removed --- 
This message may have contained attachments which were removed.

Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list.

--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- 
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
---


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---