[This is Part I of a three-part essay. Part II can be read here. Part III can be read here. — Ed.]
On Labor, Universality, and the Production the Human
Besides, he did not know which side of eternity it was. He was not sure that eternity could be bisected—or if so, that there were equal halves—for it might be divided in so many ways, unequal ways. And his was but this particle. Was there sound, and was there color? Was there darkness? Was there light? Was there a human being? He was probably a poor oyster who was jealous of his own pearl, he believed. He was the sunlight which is jealous of the shadow. 1
— Marguerite Young
Introduction
For some, and we can say many, labor is something given. For one, it can appear an inevitable fate of Homo sapiens, even its so-called nature, its essence. Whereupon it seems the claim is that the form of the human is distinguished from others by its essence being labor; moreover, that the form of the human is identical to labor — where Form takes an axiomaticity in harmony with a seldom contested reading of Plato in which the Forms belong to an unchanging realm, disjoint from this other sensuous world, if only to be somehow captured into its lowly matter. That is to say, the world supposedly is two-tiered, where the lower is essentially formed and informed by the higher. We will operate in disagreement with this account of Plato’s Forms. In what follows, we want to suggest a pragmatic fruitfulness in the concept by taking Alunni’s (via Chatelêt) configuration of the term’s operativity in the duality of, precisely, form as configuration and form as operation.2 This will bear fruit in Part 3, where Form will be grasped as the concrete negative operating a configuration of abstract determinations. So we are positing that while there are Forms indeed, there is no two-tiered world, and as such, there are no immutable forms encoding natural essence into reality, neither are they given through sensuous experience, nor are they immutable essences of the make-up of the world, including Homo sapiens.
Leading to another clarification: Homo sapiens is not identical to the form of the human. The former is a species of the genus Homo, classified under biological taxonomy, itself subject to various methodological and historical fluctuations, whereas the latter is a provisional, historically contingent bundle of different and differentiating activities that members of the species Homo sapiens deem as characteristic of the human. A mundane description of the latter works through negation in an illuminating way: “human is not an animal,” though Homo sapiens is an animal under biological taxonomy, precisely one of the bundle of different and differentiating activities constitutive of the human. Better: constitutive of the form of the human. At almost a “manifest” level of the scientific image of the world,3 the human is already at odds with what the world seems to say it is.4 Is the form of human inscribed in the Homo sapiens genome? What are we to make of those activities shared by Homo sapiens and other animal species? Is the former that much “not-animal” when elephants enact complex, historical activities like tool-use and death-rites?
If there is any indication that the form of the human is not contingent upon its homonymic natural substrate, it shows in the terrifying agonies great numbers of Homo sapiens continue to suffer under others who disagree on whom the form of the human is embedded, no matter if by gods or nature. Not that such horrors are inhuman by themselves, but precisely because they still are a constituent part of a certain, bluntly universalised form of the human, one which we, not the first to do so, sadly not the last, will ask to account for devouring its own particulars.
What can we learn from this? First, that the form of the human is indeed not contingent upon its biological taxonomy, or better, the latter is not sufficient (and possibly not even necessary) for the former, were it so, there would be no grounds for disagreement on who deserves it, Eden would run through our veins; Second: contrarily to doctrines of essence, the form of the human is formed—again and again, like in a game of telephone. Both claims are important for our purposes. The former, by opening the form of the human to universal access. The latter, by virtue of an incredible vice: that the form of the human rests upon its conception as inhuman; it can only be formed if its abstract negation. All that it is not, including its still obscure neurobiological substrate, is developed into its determinate negation, that which it determinately is not, in order to become what it holds itself to be. For deliberate perplexity: the form of the human is none other than that of transformation.
So far, such grounds show some solidity through their plasticity. It already seems difficult to conceive of a form of the human identified or structured by the concept of labor. If labor is held to be a given, a genomically or even Lamarckian-ly inscribed necessity, then we should take for granted that through labor, humans “just are.” Retrospectively, under this lens, we should even find precursors of labor distributed in ancestor species preceding Homo sapiens. The absence of a strictly historical marker for the emergence of labor does not entail its necessitation into the dawn of the species; neither does it entail deracination of labor from the human as impossible; nor does it warrant labor a naturalized universality. It would be hard, though, to produce anything as a “strictly historical” fact: when observing the granular transformation of rules and formations that regulate and appear regular in the species and its contingent form of the human, one drowns in a flurry of materials. A historical marker for labor could then very much be the moment when the species becomes able to effect the logical step where some or another activity is understood as labor; this logical marker becoming definitely a historical marker when labor is pragmatically universalized in the form of the human.
There is a naturalist aspect to this conundrum: what is the natural substrate affording such logical change? Is performing equivalence a natural trait? Is the human cognitive apparatus inevitably scaffolded for abstraction? Is it mechanically forbidden from going beyond generalization? Is goal-directedness contingent upon valuation? Is there a neurophysiological correlate for ‘value’? No matter how terrifying the answers, shying away from even placing these questions will make any emancipatory project unable to become unstuck from necessity.
We suspect our troubles began not with labor, but value and the equivalence relation5, making the contemporary predicament of capitalist subsumption a sort of logical living fossil with some prosthetics. Advancing the scale-sensitive conjecture of capital as a pattern-governed, hypostatized as norm-governed, behavior in Homo sapiens reinforces the stringency of questioning to what extent the ideal form of the human is universally isomorphic to its biological origin, and of what intelligibility, if any, is to be gleaned from positing so. If the former is the case, how can such an ideal face the questions posed by the ever more glaring neuro-diversity in the individuals of the species? To what extent can or should the form of the human be said to be universal? Biology, geology, cosmology remind us that “universality” is also parochial. Any way out of this is entailed by reconfiguring the universal into that which, along with logically exploding its domination-by-fate, procures its own renewed abolition.
Perhaps immodestly, this essay is a negative exhortation to dispel the fateful notions that labor produces value, the human must produce value, and forming the human caters to this pseudo-natural, inflated to universal, necessity; that in being inextricable from the form of value, the form of the human is itself value, all of it leading to the notion that the mode of production of the human is the mode of production of value; that the means of the mode of production of the human is its end, labor. Under such line of reasoning, a universalist, allegedly necessary, mode of production of the human is that of the mediation of value. Conflation of certain terms compresses enormous amounts of intelligibility into naturalized frameworks, these gaining a transhistorical purchase that cements their axioms, their unexamined givenness, into natural law, carving their explanation into the past, and explaining the future away.
We contend that, as claimed above, a universal form of the human is historically informed, and that this conditions how a particular human will be formed; in its turn, how the particular human will be made intelligible, if it is, to the universal human. This formation is effected through educational institutions, themselves subject to historical contingency. Broadly speaking, under the capitalist social formation, what the formation of the human constitutes is a formation away from contingency, into necessity. It can be the necessity of natural law, the necessity of logical laws of thought; it can also be the necessity of divine law, the fatefulness of sexual difference, the necessity of essence, the necessity of the form of the human itself as a closed chapter in no need of revision as seen in legitimating the necessity of genocide. Some of these are previous to the capitalist social formation, nonetheless still present in it. It can also be the necessity of the capitalist social formation; more precisely, in order to critique that and other existing or desired alternative social formations: even the necessity of labor.
Part One
Ending Labor at the Beginning
De-naturalizing labor is no easy task. It certainly fails if we are satisfied with considering labor the logical operator of abstraction. For one, labor can only be understood as such after the real abstraction that identifies and generalizes is put into effect through social synthesis, a synthesis that realizes labor.
Evald Ilyenkov took special care in thinking about the form of the human after Marx, and in unveiling how “human forms of life activity” lose much purchase when formalized as one single, pseudo-universal activity: “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble,”an “aggregate”, adds Ilyenkov, “of social relations.”6 Only by analysing what is understood by the “whole aggregate,” what it is composed of, can “the separate individual [be seen as] only human in the exact and strict sense of the word, insofar as he actualises, and just by his individuality, some ensemble or other of historically developed faculties (specifically human forms of life activity).”7 By “life activity,” we think it is possible to understand it as the bundle of pattern-governed behaviours identified in life species. By “human life activity”, we thus claim it as the bundle of pattern- and norm-governed behaviours identified in the Homo sapiens species and in its ideal model, the form of the human. In this scenario, activity is a blanket concept from which labor can emerge as a pattern governing the species behaviour and as a norm governing its ideal model. It remains to be seen how natural is such pattern, and how provisional is such norm.8 We think our stance is not antagonical to Ilyenkov’s when he claims that “Man exists as man, as the subject of activity directed to the world around and to himself, from such time, and so long, as he actively produces his real life in forms created by himself and by his own labour.”9 Note the conjunction: the human becomes the ideal model of the species through activities among which labor is found.
Still, to remain compatible with Ilyenkov becomes difficult when he goes on to define labor as:
“the real transformation of the world around [man] and of himself, which is performed in socially developed and socially sanctioned forms [as] just the process – beginning and continuing completely independent of thought – within which the ideal is engendered and functions as its metamorphosis, idealisation of reality, nature, and social relations is completed, and the language of symbols is born as the external body of the ideal image of the external world.”10
Ilyenkov’s ideal11 is the objective, or gegenstandlich, where matter abstracts from itself, in order to have a model for navigating and transforming (even exchanging) the concrete—it is a moment of the material, propitiated by real abstraction, that enables activity. As such, Ilyenkov takes labor as the process “independent of thought” in which the human actualizes itself. In here, labor appears to have become conflated with activity, and the human has become subject to labor. Indeed, that seems to have become the case at a planetary scale. But we contend that labor is only one of those “socially sanctioned” patterns that have been allowed to take precedence in the task of actualizing the human. That can only happen after a pattern in the species has identified and generalized human life activities into labor; after some process, itself indeed possibly independent of self-reflection, a pattern-governed behaviour such as real abstraction, has invited/coerced the species into reifying the pattern as a norm which is blind to itself. In a different way, it has become independent of thought in the way its critical reception has been curtailed.
There are two attitudes in this naturalistic claim of ours: one involves positing some minimal logical feature embedded in Homo sapiens cognition as a pattern governing its behaviour; the other is contending such naturalization is precisely what disavows taking such pattern as a norm. Enter the inhuman, exeunt our bearish pride. If identifying and generalizing are features of life activities, we can infer they are, first, not strictly human life activities; second, that as steps in abstraction, they appear to be a feature of, among other life species imbued with degrees of goal-directeness, Homo sapiens. Then are they necessary features of any contingent form of the human? Are they the strict conditions of possibility for a form that takes itself to be emancipation from necessity? Is it wishful thinking to suspect that although ideology may be one of Homo sapiens’s neurobiological patterns, the critical capacity to overcome ideology (again and again) may be one too? Has “the dialectic” been in the room all the while?
Still: We seem to be in the presence of a logical misstep where the inhuman1 (generalized patterns) is being identified with the inhuman2 (that which the human strives to be through the norms it engenders); where the general is taken to be the universal; where form has superseded on matter, and the latter is foreclosed into only one, abstractly singular, way of transforming itself. If that is the case, can it really be called transformation? And can it come to be known as universal?
A Proviso: It’s Not “Back in the Day Things Were Better”
Leap by leap, pattern-governed abilities of abstraction have reified themselves in de-realizing practices of abstraction: from identification and generalization, through value and the commodity, towards labor and capital, and back. Before examining how this logico-historical skipping record is reproduced and amplified in formation, a proviso on our pointing to activity as that which is logically obfuscated by labor: the aim in questioning the essentialization of labor is not to elide any sort of class-consciousness, but to further evince the all-encompassing mystificatory features of its practices. Replacing labor with activity is not mystifying the former under a new name, but to actively pursue the aim of removing “concrete labor” from the circuit where it becomes commodified. Activity is also abstract, and it can synthesise12 many new concrete entities, concrete labor among them. But that is where it becomes positively constrained: under activity, concrete labor is precluded from being abstracted away into social reproduction.
While for Ilyenkov activity is not an empirical, but a logical category,13 and such a stance is philosophically healthy, we are enamoured with a conjecture: activity is the craftsmanship of the platonic world soul, distributed across its body, the World Animal. In evolutionary biology’s (and metaphysical) terms, this is to say activity is a real pattern developed from a logical form, and as such it was the biological and logical scaffold for labor in the Homo sapiens species; it just so happens we have discarded it and are deluded into believing our niche has always been “just so.” But activity is still present: if there is a glimmer of hope amid capitalist subsumption it comes when noticing young individuals of the species engage in practices logically-other than labor, such as play.
So we are not, unlike talk of the glory of “true” and sweaty concrete labor,14 calling for a RETVRN, but for refusing to be removed from the playground. Technically, the suggestion is that although niche-embedded, activity is a baseline for potential autonomy. On the other hand, labor is already “for another”: it serves a generic socius, at a higher, more rarefied level of abstraction, one that compresses the intelligibilities gained in autonomy, these foreclosed from constructing a wealthier account of sociality. From the perspective of intelligence and intelligibility: while labor is a gamified, abstractly negating object, activity is the open-ended, determinately negating process of play.
It is with the class struggle in mind that we are looking for the nexus of phylogeny and ontogeny, where the form of the human is at its most logically and historically plastic. We are looking for a space where “the proletariat will practically negate its own social being together with that of the bourgeoisie,”15 the social space where play and labor are put at odds, where the latter’s abstractly negating logic is universally affirmed over the former’s. Ray Brassier provides the ethical (and so, meta-logical) lamp-post for this revolutionary topology:
“The practical shift from affirmation to negation marks the transition from reformist to revolutionary class politics. Effecting this transition requires grasping this hiatus as the interval within which history is made. This entails consciously apprehending and intervening into the gap separating the subjective and objective dimensions of social being and thus knowing when to act at the limits of knowing. Revolutionary possibility emerges in the interval between the objective consequences of subjective activity and their subjective redetermination.”16
Perhaps with childish presumptuousness, we contend to know where are the “limits of knowing” upon which history can be actively made.17 Unsurprisingly, it is mostly in school that capitalism is socially synthesised. Common sense and embittered family meals drive the point home: one goes to school in order to become an adult prepared for labor, no matter if humiliatingly “non-skilled” for those deemed less bright, or impairingly specialized for those healthy enough to be exploited in a less undignified manner; both groups separated, like intellectual and manual labor, but exploited18 and beaten into labor, regardless. Facing such intrusive impregnation of a subject retrospectively turned musty and brittle at the age where one is “allowed” to become a revolutionary subject, to what extent is a politics based on affirming labor a determinate negation of how the human has been formed and produced?
It is in school that the abstract abilities of identification and generalization are reified as universal practices. If we need an image of the logic-struggle, it is that of the clash between the logic of activity in the playground and the logic of labor inside the classroom. But as the game is rigged, there is no way young persons can be said to have spent more time in the playground than inside the classroom since the historical inception of both mass public instruction and of the kindergarten as a space of play, we come to internalize labor as the universal human life-activity.
A synthetic practice one can learn from children is the much abhorred social experiment: what else is the playground, if not social (and pre-social) experimentation? If a mode of social reproduction other than capitalism is to be socially synthetized, it may well be in the school, if that is, for the historical moment, where the playground is. To intervene and guide inside the playground is to experiment whether the human can shape up other methods of developing the ideal, for it is precisely found at the limits of knowing, in the thin membrane between patterns and norms. The ideal is always navigating the dialectical distance between local and global, pre-social and social, the subject and its cosmological19 synthesis. As Chatelêt would put it: “To think Space [. . .] is to think freedom.”20
If we are looking at, thinking of, a space where a logic is engendered and another is subsumed, it would not be an exaggeration to understand topology (and topos theory) as a revolutionary tool parsing the logical continuity between the pre-social and the social, allowing us to uncover the necessarily possible activation of activities other than labor. If philosophy has an interest in pedagogy, it ought not to shy away from the question whether pedagogies have a logic, and whether there is a logic that can be used for criticizing and tuning the universality which was modelled by and models for labor.21 For the moment, we ask: if the universal for forming human intelligence has been logically modeled by that which is said to be independent from thought, is it then a universal model for thought?
[To be continued in Part II.—Ed.]