Alfred,
Diane touched on it, but probally with different reactions than I. What if
rather than seeing Herder and Kant's quotes as polar opposites we saw them
relationally. For me, freedom seems as good a candidate for an empty
abstraction as consciousness. Your development of freedom if I understand it
has this transcendental nature that does not escape the critique you gave to
consciousness.
Kant says: Humans are the only species that need a master
Herder reverses and says to be human = freedom not in need of a master.
On freedom, I am with Marx when he says even in the most brutal, oppressive
of environments there is freedom, the question is for who. As I fully well
acknowledge living in a society like the states what I have come to know as
freedom is not transcedental its material base is on the exploitation of
others - specifically those living in the so called 3rd world. We can
examine this on class, cultural, gender or a multitude of other levels, but
it seems very wrong in my mind to even give freedom a trancendental quality.
Second, I am with the line of reasoning forwarded by Foucault and Rose in
that in liberal democracies the central way a population is governed is
through freedom. The 19th century debates are interesting here, there was
no ethical romanticism involved the central question was how as a society
should we govern. Giving freedom a trancendental quality and ignoring that
it is a particular way to rule a population seems to ignore its material
existence.
We are given this thing called the state where power is invested - the
master for Kant - and on the other this civil society where freedom becomes
embedded. Kant emphasizes the state and Herder civil society as if they are
really seperate things. I would argue the two were brothers one creating the
state as an oppressive master and the other civil society as a sort of
transcendental natural state - freedom. It seems to me what is needed is
moving beyond this "fiction" of sorts in that the division is not so clear
cut.
Rather than seeing contraint as in oppossition to freedom we can see it as
what makes freedom possible. I believe Butler makes a similar argument in
*Bodies that Matter*. Rather than the old guard of seeing them as polar
opposites - when in actuality they were the same thing - we see them more
along the lines of being constituted. Contraints exist - the liberal
solution though is to make this as invisable as possible. They exist as
developmental milestones, standards, classifications, qualities of the
psyche, "passive" environment, ecologies(?) etc.
Internalization, consciousness, freedom are centerally a form of politics
and it seems wrong to give them a transcendental quality that puts politics
outside that process. In this sense they are all material - they occur and
get meaning from social practice. To say or pretend there is a natural state
called freedom where there are no masters just seems wrong.
Nate
-----Original Message-----
From: Diane Hodges [mailto:dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu]
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 9:57 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re(2): ilyenkov-ideal: synopsis >>> "consciousness", freedom
alfred's clear voice resonates:
>
>Not only did I want, firstly, to avoid speaking of "consciousness":
>an abstract word ("-ness"!) obviously reified and treated sometimes
>as a substance or a something that can have changing qualities, even
>has gotten a kinship such as with the sub-, un-, over-,
>full-"consciousnesses", at any rate located within the single
>individuals or also within society as a whole, sometimes as a
>location where "things" and "ideas" and even people are in, etc. etc.
>-- a real fiction! Do you "have" it, day and night, or only awake?
>No, you are not conscious in sleep but you have "consciousness"? What
>about dozing? -- I also did not want to become entangled in what is
>special about humans in terms of "consciousness" as was to expect the
>discussion would go.
thank you so much for sharing this thought - this is precisely what i was
aiming towards,
that singling out human "consciousNESS" is archaic and, at best, colonial
in the worst sense of the word.
>
>I'll have a so much simpler and embedded view in the framework of
>semiotic ecology of what usually is so thoughtlessly called
>"consciousness" that these endless discussions of whether only humans
>have "consciousness", probably arising from the the motive to make
>sure we are different simply bores me.
aaah yes! it bores me too. as i tried to explain, it is not boring
because it is incomprehensible, but because it refuses to advance into
transgressive sites of new
possibilities, ...if only the theories could somehow surpass their
orthodoxy and meet the current concerns of ecological relations. if only
the institutional thinkers could begin to consider the interconnection of
life in a life-world, not a human-world, but a complex organism of
magnificence difference.
>The question is unanswerable
>for two reasons: (a) we don't know and cannot find consensus what it
>is, (b) we can't ask the animals, not even our babies. In fact, (c) I
>think we cannot even know for sure whether you and I and anybody else
>"have" the same "consciousness" or different "ones". Find out whether
>your sweetheart "sees" that rose in the same or a different "red" as
>you see it!
exactly - this is often dismissed as a purely subjective-perspective, (as
if there were anything pure about subjectivity!) - indeed it is these
impossible differentiations that judy was pointing towards, regarding
memory and experience, language and history,
and indeed as i was recently reminded backstage, while the
cultural-historical leanings of this list stem from marx, the blooms and
variations that have since been cultivated point towards very different
and more complex interpretations of what and how culture and history
interact with our bodies as mindful of society and as socially intertwined
with
the worlds we choose to surround ourselves in and outside of -
any certainty or dogma can only put walls around these necessary glimpses
of what faces us now in these turns of history and technology.
>
>I am sure all a bit more complex animals are aware of the things in
>their environment pertinent or interesting to them and in particular
>of their co-specific social partners on all levels of relation, and
>also of predators and prey / food in general etc. Because they can
>compare, they can anticipate their acts to some extent (e.g. only
>display and go away or fight) and the probable consequences of their
>own acts. There is so ample evidence for that from the last few
>decades of research that the astonishing problem is one of the
>development of the pertinent sciences: to what degree are they to be
>trusted in view of the fact that they could for so long operate in
>the myth only humans were aware of things.
the history of creatures such as whales, for instance, indicate that their
evolution moved from land-legged beast to water-based mammals - and
agreed: your point about "trusting" or feeling secure in "our" ability to
trust animal behaviours is as suspect as the very existence of such
processes, given that it so recent that humans even noticed animal
socialities and forms of intelligent communication.
this is perhaps why i am so distrustful of institutionalized writing at
times, given our short history of an awareness of others, given the
much-contested possibility of understanding life as something more than
hierarchically organized in superiority-inferiority structures, but in
complex manifestations of complexity and history.
>Structurally spoken to be
>aware is based in internal symbolization or semionization. I'll
>discuss that later on. At least, phylogenetically, those having
>front-brains are well equipped with all required preconditions. If
>anybody contends: to be aware of X is not "consciousness", I think,
>s/he is obliged to say how the latter is to be understood and how it
>differs from the former. Would it not be ethical to choose the words
>so as not to contradict their common use.
precisely - the language of 19C theory cannot be situated in 21st century
contexts as absolute and insulated from the histories that have taken
place in between these modes of activity. that is why these languages
fail, every time, to explicate new possibilities for understanding the
human condition.
>
>Secondly, I thought it more germane to our discussion to point to
>something that characterizes the human condition in its heart and
>that has a deep connection to the idealism and materialism Ilyenkov
>is suggesting.
in terms of semiotics, i have to pause here and remind myself that our
casual understanding of the heart is so profound that it baffles - the
human heart, beyond cardiological understanding, plays an insurmountable
role in the ways we think of ourselves in-relation to others, in the ways
we act with others, feel with others, think of ourselves, and speak of
others, and ourselves, it is - again - a feature of poetics that provides
us with glimpses of how the human heart has surpassed it's organic
function and integrated in social and cultural materialities, activities,
and relations. It is not an ideal, or an Ideal, but a
pragmatic feature of the human condition which cannot yet be spoken of in
theoretical discourse, sadly. thankfully, it still finds its place in
poetics and languages outside the
institution.
>Also it is something of the greatest political and
>ethical scope -- and with Ilyenkov & Co., indeed with cultural
>psychology this cannot be avoided. Humans are animals that can act
>this or that way to some extent and at least in part on the basis of
>their knowing of context and its past and of their related ability to
>imagine possible futures and to some extent imagine the probable
>consequences of their acts and so their desirability from this or
>that point of view. Herder had this insight and if it had been
>accepted with the beginning of the 19th century our human world would
>look crucially different, I am sure. This is the core of freedom and,
>I wrote it already, the other face of it is responsibility. I think
>of individuals and of groups.
here, i think it is a mistake to assume that if a 19thC thinker had been
taken to task, this world would be different, because even Herder composed
in a context of kinds of ignorance enabled by his own historical
situation.
Even the Greek philosopher, Lucretius, wrote compellingly about the human
heart and the mind, but again, the historical constraints of his history
and culture cannot be surpassed, we cannot simply lift text out of history
and plant it into a different context
without also dragging pieces of that limited history into it - it is a
kind of contamination effect ...
it is one thing to be inspired by historical texts,
and quite another to simply take them as truth-texts and wonder,
"what-if...?" - it is possible to be inspired by Herder or whoever,
but it is crucial to understand it as a particular fiction of a particular
history
and re-situate an other possibility, with metaphor and with transgressive
thinking, across disciplines, through texts, not inside of texts as though
contained by the words
themselves.
we are, after all, creators, liberators, inventors, as much as we are
destroyers, dominators, and mutilators. i only wish there were more of
the former and less of the latter.
>
>
>No, in my view, freedom and responsibility are better candidates for
>crucial qualities of humans in culture than anything else. Will you
>readers now call me an idealist? The alternatives, so fashionable in
>science and philosophy, not at all only Marxian, are:
>
>(a) we are preprogrammed -- the Leibnizian solution of "prestabilized
>harmony" of matter and ideas/spirit;
i am not sure we can assume "prestabilization" has any relevance, because
the instant we leave the womb, that condition is disrupted and conflicts
take over whatever
harmonics might have been created in the initial stages of growth.
we are preprogrammed in the sense you refer, but this is irreparably
disrupted by social and cultural practice, from the moment one asks, "is
it a boy or a girl?" the harmony is driven into a different social
conflict that is ceaselessly reproduced throughout life. the trick is to
deal with the conflicts, not to re-discover the harmony - again, as much
as we are creators,
we are at the same time destroyers - finding ways to
deal with these conflicts of sociality are essential, i think, more than
seeking harmony,
harmony is the illusion of refusing to recognize the ways sociality
disrupts the initial experience of unity.
>
>(b) we are programmed with a bit of chance mixed in (by definition of
>unknown origin) -- the Platonian solution of the truly real and
>eternally programmed world of ideas and the shadowy and erroneous
>copy of it we are forced to live in;
i'm not sure i am understanding your implications here. i've written about
the concept of a true-real as being specifically relational, that is, a
proximal quality of human perception - the farther away we are from events
and experience, the less "real" they are to us: the closer our bodies are
to what is "real", the more true these words seem to be,
but to claim that there exists a truly-real for everyone is, i think,
assuming more than the human condition can possibly fathom at this point
in our social history.
>
>(c) we are the playthings of some superman which we imagine,
>depending probably on our's and other's experiences and on what our
>masters have told and tell us and force us to believe and some more
>such factors. A superman, at times said to be mighty and powerful, at
>others just and benevolent. Only nobody has seen that superman, only
>his self-declared representatives here.
now what's this alfred? a comment on theology? the fundamental weakness of
human beings to assume responsibility for their actions?
the inherited effect of a patriarchal ideology?
>
>These are the extant historical options I can think of. (c) has a
>long tradition in many parts of the world; (b) is the scientific
>stance today; (a) has arisen time an again and implements the highest
>dream of our "best" scientists. (Hegel and Marx and, obviously,
>Ilyenkov made use of (a). For a modern scientist example read E. O.
>Wilson, in his "Consilience" book: a strange mixture of all there:
>babtist background, accepting chance in his research, but dreaming of
>enlightenment with absolute rationality coming finally true and
>reigning science and society.) Are there other, principally
>different, options?
personally, i think the human condition is premised on a basic need for
completion that cannot be reached in perfection, that is, we are always
incomplete as individuals and so seek completion in any way that we can,
however malformed the ideal becomes, if it repairs the sense of
unknowability within, it functions to provide the desired illusion of
harmony.
i reckon there are aspects of sociality and activity not yet discussed
because they might dispense all-together with an ideal, or a superior
power, - there are discussions yet to be offered that indicate how it is
only with collective
sacrifice that we can recognize each other - so long as we keep trying to
retain a
sense of Self that is unique from the world that forms us,
we can never surpass the basic forms we idealize -
we are, i think, still barbarians, in terms of our short history, better
dressed perhaps, but still barbarians.
there are certainly exceptions to this dominant condition, but rather than
see these people as out potential, we idolize and reify these people in
mystics or saints, or we destroy them as threats to a dominant ideology of
theological conditions - clinging, still, to ritualistic superstitions
and totems for a meaningful existence.
i realize you saying much the same thing - it is just such a pleasure to
discuss these with someone who actually understands how history functions.
>
<snip>
>
>No, our principles of understanding are way off our attempts to live
>together. Why let we guide, no disturb our striving for a decent life
>together by so crazy theorizing?
oh hell's bells thank you for saying this. thank you for saying this!!!!
>
>But there is a fourth view, (d), as I have sketched, if you like a
>Herderian image of the world and of humans, an entirely different
>conception of the human condition. An evolutive view, basing on but
>going beyond biotic evolution: in making use of the latter's
>emergence of individuals becoming capable of accumulating; and also
>making use of personal experience; and in making use of the
>biotic/individual combined emergence of socially communicating,
>namely the emergencies of the individual evolutions and so forming
>cultural traditions. Making experiences in a cultural setting,
>suggesting innovations, and accepting and furthering innovations are
>all acts of individuals that are not possible in the social void and
>they all impact in such a grave way on others and the rest of the
>world that they must not become irresponsible because this should
>immediately call for restrictions of the freedom of the so acting.
>Irresponsibility and restriction of freedom thus stand in the way of
>being human. Often irresponsible acts are the only option open under
>pressure, i.e. restricted freedom, so those involved get into vicious
>circles. Why do we let all that happen all the time everywhere?
well i think it happens for all the reasons you outlined above, and which
i thoroughly agree with: i would add that much of these conflicts are
systemic - written in our bodies in ways that prevent us from thinking
differently, - again, this is why writing is so crucial for moving towards
something else, writing is a particular mode of communication , - indeed
it is from your reading other writers that you have your ideas, your
interpretations of other writers that prompts you to write,
and again, altering the ways we structure our syntax and cling to archaic
terminology is ultimately what prevents is from moving forward - and
again, i see poetics as an intellectual form of moving without
relinquishing the work of intellectual work - which is
a work of accountability and responsibility,
not to insist and make claims about truth, but to provide other ways for
thinking about what we
take for granted and what continues to be carried over into each new
generation.
these lurk, for me, in discourses and activities of gender, race, sex,
class, and other reproductive sites of denigration.
the colonial and patriarchal structures continue to organize most
so-called civilized cultures,
and these are reproduced in the languages we inherit from those regimes,
most formidably reified in the 19th C desire to universalize these
structures in concepts of apparent innocence.
no one is innocent, of course, and nothing about human history is without
its constraints - moving forward requires a different thinking, and a
different thinking requires a different way of moving with language, where
language is the body - the body is languaged, and semiotics are the tools
of our own demise as much as they are the tools of our possible survival.
thank you so much alfred, for this reminder of the important ideas about
freedom and responsibility, and especially for intellectual
accountability.
cheers,
diane
>
>Alfred
>--
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland ---
>alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch
>Website: http://www.psy.unibe.ch/ukp/langpapers/
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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