Re: humanism

malgosia askanas wrote:

>Well, I would very much like to know both: what Doug means and what Foucault
>meant. With Foucault, one can find it out by reading him. But reading
>Foucault's remarks on humanism in, say, _What is Enlightment_, doesn't in any
>way illuminate for me how Doug uses the term, since Doug seems to assign to
>it some kind of primary role as our internal moral guide, which seems to have
>very little to do with Foucault's usage.

Ok, "What humanism means to me." F says in an interview in the new New
Press collection, "I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of
liberation, because if it is not treated with precautions and within
certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there
exists a human nature or base that, as a consequence of certain historical,
economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or
imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression." Later he says he emphasizes
"practices of freedom over processes of liberation" (pp. 282-283).

I'll concede partial agreement with this point of view; vanguardism, which
I'm no fan of, certainly justified its grotesqueries by appeal to a
high-falutin' liberation that excused abuses of practical freedom (and
democratic self-organization). And certainly our desires are as socially
formed as our repressions. But I'm not willing to surrender entirely the
notion that there's something "essentially" human that we all share and
which is distorted and abused by repressive - or exploitative, a Marxist
might rather say - social systems. Why would you object to class
exploitation or racial, colonial, and sexual discrimination if you didn't
think there was some denial or disparagement of the subordinate parties'
humanity?

I'm not sure what "practices of freedom" and "processes of liberation" are,
by the way.

A real-world political movement deeply influenced by Foucault is ACT-UP.
ACT-UP is in many ways an admirable organization - effective, imaginative,
democratic, and radical. But it was organized by people who faced stigma
and early death from a new disease. Could a group be organized on similar
lines to transform the US healthcare system? To revive the US union
movement? There's a sustainability problem with "practices of freedom" that
are unconnected to "processes of liberation." And a generalizability one,
too, since skepticism about universals is hard to reconcile with solidarity
across social groups.

Doug






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