[This is Part II of a three-part essay. Part I can be read here. Part III can be read here. — Ed.]
PG: When I write, I try to reach beyond the social, and even beyond the human state. It’s something that I’ve been doing for a long time.
TWR: Does this lead you towards more order or more chaos?
PG: Towards reason. That’s what guides me. I’m not a logician, I don’t know much about it, but I’m haunted by reason.1
ON KEEPING ENEMIES CLOSE
We must mention something too relevant to be swept into a footnote before castigating universalism for carving its own blind spots. In philosophy of education, its alternative is to its antagonist’s liberal underpinnings perhaps a prefiguration of the neo-liberal stance: The pluralist and constructivist framework,2 of a Piagetian (thus still too Kantian) bent, while abstractly opposed to the flattening and boisterous pompousness of universalism, boils down to proposing a deafening solipsistic choir.3 In other words, when castigating universalism we are not whimsically enjoining pluralism, singing away the evils of the world under the pretense of ‘creative’ ways of sticking our heads up our own arses. This is not mere rhetoric: to push our heads in the sand would be a step beyond what constructivist-pluralism attains, for it would be in agreement with a meaning-pregnant world, with which such framework is not. It would abort pragmatic parturition in favor of an ex nihilo semantic caprice.
ENLIGHTENMENT BRAND UPON THE BRAIN
In our Part One, we contended that in order to be understood as pragmatically universal, the form of the human is historically informed. We also suggested that labor captures the form of the human into its social mediation, necessitating the ideology that, in sum, one only becomes a human, a socially embedded singular instance of such form, through labor. While taking no issue with the map where particular instances of Homo sapiens are not fully human in its ideal sense, we do question if it is a formation into labor that can project said particulars into a self-reflexive universal. Naturalizing the human social formation in labor obfuscates the historical contingency not only of labor, the value-form, but even of the human, and sociality.
Beyond bypassing the wealth of intelligibility to be gleaned from Ilyenkov’s materialist account of activity as a dialectical buttress to, among other stuff, abstraction and labor, the non-skeptical naturalizing gesture also mystifies the logical abilities-cum-practices of identifying and generalizing under an ambiguous status: If these, along with labor, are unquestioningly thrown back into a primordial soup of essence, how can they be analysed by logic and neurophysiology? Consequently, labor appears in two guises: as a sort of immediate social mediation obfuscating that in such mediation labor is posited to be existentially and essentially necessary to the form of the human without any exception to contingency. In this manner, the form of the human is made to appear exclusively contingent upon labor; but then it also shows up in the human social formation as something that, in forming personhood, is actively mediated as an end. Taking these two aspects seriously: Why the redundancy? Surely not just “because,” which is all the more reason to suspect the onto-epistemic purchase of the means, and the ethical legitimacy of the end.
Under such conditions and the purview of a philosophy of pedagogy,4 labor prefigures itself as the mode of production of the form of the human, and even as the mode of distribution of such ontological status. One might wonder if in these circumstances being a singular human is a matter of being valued, or of having use as such.
In what follows, we will provide some pointers for an investigation on the mode of production of the form of the human as informed by the logic of labor. Given the pretendedly universalist purchase of the term and the steering impact it has in the social syntheses of labor and the form of the human, we will consider Bildung (formation) as a mode of production. Formation is to be understood as a method of enculturation, through which learners are supposed to acquire tools enabling them to become intelligent: to navigate and further develop, or realize, the realm of intelligibility. As such, enculturation will be critiqued as the mode of production of intelligence.
We will claim that a labor-mediated formation operates through a universalist/formalist logical framework, which is demonstrative, apodictic, merely syntactic, and abstract; all too tied up in the maze of hylomorphism. Conversely, that an allegedly universalist pedagogy is strongly informed by labor’s logic. In this guise, such formation does not gather the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of intelligence according to the stipulations above. At the end of this essay, we hope to have given a strong illustration of how profound is labor’s mediation of the logic of pedagogy, in its coarse universalizing of identification and generalization. All the while, we will leave various suggestions, presuppositions, even metaphysical expostulations, towards another account, in which real abstraction and labor are functionally5 divested and scaled back from axiomaticity.
Targeting universalism in a materialist critique of pedagogy is not arbitrary. For better or worse, it has been favoured as a guiding ideal in countless Marxist practices in the twentieth century. Justice, Truth, Reason, Beauty, Humanity. None of these are strange to a socialist or left-bent ear; nor are they to a fascist one. In themselves, they carry no salvation, much like an F note can be part of its own major chord or the second term in the C minor chord, making it sound either ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ according to Western auditory indoctrination. Universalism can regiment those ideals as normative beacons for any critical project, but the category which it intends to universalize will axiomatically constrain its onto-epistemic purchase. In the case of universalism through traditional Marxism, it can beget social frameworks such as an ontology based on labor. In other words, a “social ontology” structured upon the standpoint of labor will beget a universe of labor. And, as per our introductory remarks in Part One, a universe of labor will be a universe under capital, even if a so-called capitalist class is abolished. For it may just be the case that the laboring class was also a capitalist class all along, exploiting the possibility of particularity away from intelligible universality. In such terms, the previous sentences may just as well have been describing the logic of a non-Marxist, non-communist, but universalist social formation.
In the framework of labor-mediated pedagogy, either in genuine capitalism or in pseudo-socialism, labor is the immediate criterion of sociality itself: naturalized through its obfuscation of the abstract conceptual domination of the value form, it “immediately” mediates aims, methods, and expectations of the particular human and the human at large. It generalizes them into totality, while positing universality. Under generalization, any contradiction is flattened, its unintelligibility supposedly resolved, when in fact it is glossed over and merely approximated to the nearest pre-existing equivalent.
As suggested in the last paragraphs of Part One, we are taking the Ilyenkovian logical notion of activity as undergirding various species’ patterns as thinking bodies, which is a sort of an algorithm describing clayish matter throwing itself to a wall to see if it sticks. The short version of the story: among the synthetic practices of Homo sapiens at play, labor showed up; helped by and helping real abstraction, it subsumed and will keep on subsuming practically every particular activity. From there, activity-that-was is split into, on the one hand, particular, concrete labor and, on the other hand, abstract human labor.6
Before its capture by commodity mediation, any novel concrete particular labor stands as such. Yet, as soon as it is commodified and split into the use-value/value ambiguity, such novel concrete labor is compressed, made unintelligible, as just another indiscernible component of abstract human labor. It becomes immediately equivalent to any other concrete labor captured in this mediation. Much like “5” and “7” are “only” numbers across a sea of integers, any two concrete labors that have entered the commodity-mediation are “only” one and another labor, their abstract values resolved in their price. That there can be a price upon commodities which have no recognized value further goes to show that it is almost meaningless to say one labor ought to cost less or more than another (or that a certain diploma has more value than another). Nonetheless, the normativity of commodity-mediated social relations is strongly constrained by the modal status bestowed by the mediation. Possibility and contingency are exclusively circumscribed to sections of the mediation, where activity has already been split into abstract and concrete labor. Necessity, meanwhile, conditions the whole circuit. That is, it precludes the intelligibility of some novel synthetic activity as at least not-Labor, rendering it impossible. That one novel, concrete particular “labor” is determinately not another, and that it is also abstractly not just ‘Labor,’ is eaten by necessity.
Remember, activity has already gone down the drain: under this framework, whatever the human does is labor, whatever is labor is human. Producing the human, the concept of labor is not sufficient nor granular enough for a form of the human that is not labor-mediated. As a universalizing category, it condemns itself to an un-reflective parochiality7, a logical movement not strange to contemporary critiques of an Enlightenment that has tied itself in knots.
TWO WORLDS, ONE ANNIHILATION
The social syntheses of the last four centuries patching the human, reason, universality, and the formal as given have their most restricting knot in antiquity — Aristotelian hylomorphism, with strings made from fibres of real abstraction, as we’ll see further below. For now, we deal with the most recent cramps.
For all its methodologically novel breadth, Kant’s modern project took the form of hylomorphism’s cleaving of form and matter into perilous logical territory. Robert Brandom didactically called this the 2-stage representational theory, where the “reality” of which the human somehow partakes (with different degrees of logical and metaphysical consequence according to theoretical variations) is unsurmountably split between representeds and representings; senses and references; “thingly,” material, concrete stuff and so-called immaterial, mental, abstract projections in a void of detachment.8 A facile rhyme with the historically specific commodity-mediation, where human activity is contingently split into concrete and abstract labor, noumenalizing activity. It becomes unclear, which out of them is material, concrete or abstract, apparently precluding synthetic development. The Kantian intelligibility gap, which invites, even begs for naturalizing or essentializing categorical moves, is the poetic historical-logical egg, laid by the older labor abstraction—the perfect way for the latter to become universally justified and proselytised as a necessary end; so, a fateful beginning. The whole universe is spread open before a young mind: you can be whatever you want to be; as long as it is what you were told you are.
The locus, where labor is universalized, is that of decontextualized free-floating reason. Understood as separate from the world of “things,” reason is made to function as an arbiter for classification of their properties. “Things”, the abstract prefigurative of “commodities,” of which we take particular instances of the human and proto-persons to be a subset of, are subjected to a one-way relationship from Reason and its unexamined tenets. By induction, this vector is deemed necessary and natural: “Things” have always been like this for “things,” hence there is no Reason to give credence or intelligibility to the possibility they can or will ever be otherwise. In this universe, matters are preemptively closed. Learners are forbidden from bootstrapping themselves as someone who may introduce change in the(ir) universe.
Reduced to an abject version of its abilities, Reason accumulates an instrumental function, merely or totally regulatory and independent of historical specificity. “It can be applied to [the world], with greater or lesser degrees of adequacy.”9 This account will have it that only the world ought to change, and this normative injunction is never to be reflected upon Reason itself. Any novelty the world may produce, even a revision of Reason itself coming from the figure of a Learner, necessarily undergoes triage in terms of a rational instrumentality judging anything not-necessary as merely and totally impossible in Reason’s universe. Ahab can only think of the whale; all else is value-less and so, meaning- or senseless. An observation: any critique of instrumentality in here is not meant as anti-productivist; quite the opposite. The question, exempting instruments from any moral offense, is: Who’s really saying “No” when “Computer says ‘No’”?
The greater part of this essay’s intelligibility hinges upon the notion of context-sensitivity, the contingent revolving door between a coarse and a wealthier, even radicalized notion of universalism. In the former, context-sensitivity is rendered ineffectual. A universe split into a world of “things” and a world of reasons, giving existential precedence to the latter, structures itself as single purveyor of context. Asymmetrically, a representation of a “thing” in a mind of such world is world-less, and subject to arbitrary abstraction. In a framework other than one axled by hylomorphism’s onto-epistemic intelligibility gap, a “thing” is historically embedded in an inferential web of norms and modality. It becomes much more than a thing. In the coarse-universalist framework, matter’s representation is amputated of its inferential connections and grafted into a logically separate, merely other and othering “world.” Although it purports to be a transparent 1:1 correspondence of the context of the world of referents, such contextual optics makes itself opaque. It amounts, at best, to a combinatorics of the senses of its own given referents, de-sensitized to any outside sense hosted by socially (pragmatically) embedded referents. It takes its normativity to be modality, and renders any external incompatibility as unintelligible.10
To illustrate the point (somewhat prosaically): In an english-speaking school, an english speaking instructor writes the signs “2+2=” on the blackboard and looks to the class with inquiring eyes. One learner, whose native language is portuguese, exclaims: “Quatro!” The instructor claims the locution is incorrect, and looks to other students. Portuguese-speaking readers will perhaps feel some astonishment, given “in portuguese ‘dois mais dois igual a quatro,’” even “2+2=4.” That is, the portuguese speaking community’s linguistic and meta-linguistic norms map these meanings (of equality) as equivalent. Nonetheless, we have to agree with one aspect of the english-speaking instructor’s reasoning: in that setting, an acceptable, context-sensitive locution would have been “Four!” against the portuguese word “quatro.” That is: in an english-speaking school, historically specific normativity structures an inferential web between arithmetical signs and english words which entitles interlocutors to interchangeably navigate between the two. Bringing in a third language does indeed necessarily bring local incompatibility or dissonance into this normative framework, but this may not stay forever unresolved. While it is a normative framework, we want to, outside of coarse-universalism, be alert to the fact that modally, it is possible, that “quatro” can take the place of “four” or “4”; that materially, each and any of them can be logically mapped over the others if expressed in a meta-language that marks them as such11, this being a finer universalism’s gyroscopic12 understanding. In this narrative, coarse-universalism errs by hoarding context all to itself, taking English language to be necessarily married to the normativity of arithmetic by taking “two plus two equals four” as the necessary sense of “2+2=4” and converting any other sense into impossibility. In its turn, context sensitivity suggests a scenario where the instructor would develop the dialogue into an inquiry into the portuguese, context-specific meaning of “quatro,” where both student and instructor come to understand (learn) that it can be inferentially linked to the erotetic meaning of “2+2=” and an inquiring look. In radical-universalist fashion, the inferential web of the concept of Four is further enriched, as is the concept itself. In other words, the universality of “Quatro” (or “four”) is reflected in one of its particulars. Otherwise, “four” (or “quatro”) is just a “thing” to which entry is refused in the realm of the mental, and generalized as non-universal.
For an agent or proto-person being formed into such universe, fate is over-determining. Despite accounts of formation into rational, self-determining agency13 being understood as an ideal that ought to be pursued. In this framework, the “self-determining” aspect of agency is illusory. Under the pseudo-mediation of coarse-universalist principles, one is immediately formed into the framework’s expectations of a so-called agent, amounting to not much more than a bundle of reliable differential responsive dispositions,14 a hairy parrot. In this scenario, freedom is an anodyne descriptor for the combinatoric outputs of a pre-ordained set of degrees of freedom internal to this universe. Self-determining agency implies that agents may be able to glimpse, conjecture, create, determine an externality to the universe they are historically embedded in. The prevention of this ability’s flourishing exclusively binds the agent to the universe’s internal rules. The rules, which have been necessitated into law, becoming the agent’s fate. Self-determination is incompossible with the over-determinations of fate. Here, the agent’s universe is total and under-determines agency into abstraction; the intelligibility gap is now dug into personhood itself, ready for exploitation.
For someone formed inside such confines, no category is intelligible as a product of and tool for historical development. The naturalization and necessitation of a body of knowledge works retro-actively and into the distant future. No matter which subject amputated universality reclaims as figurehead of its transhistoricity, no matter which category it elects as teleological germ, it begins and ends subsuming every other category as either an instance of itself, or intellectual rubble, valued or devalued according to its mores. In this pedagogical setting, any contingency, any playful activity, is abstracted away from interaction: either due to understanding the learner as merely following a biological givenness of their species into rational development, to which the instructor is a mere witness to prewritten History, dispensable after all; or due to the educational framework’s endemic insensitivity to any “external,” particular dynamic manipulation by the learners. In other words: either the instructor’s role is one of a passive but judgmental guardian — that of merely evaluating the adequacy and success of a supposedly innate disposition towards universalism — or it is active, in requiring the instructor to dismiss and curb any developmental variation not in conformity with the tenets and expectations of an over-historicized form of the human. Interestingly, the former describes the Piagetian, more quietist decanting of the latter, which is still more severely Kantian. In both versions, no learner enters history, but is bent into it. A History that forms against change cannot be said to be true of itself nor towards the dynamics of categories it studies, much less true towards a context-sensitive concept of universality.
Categories, Concepts, Forms: independently of what these are called inside the universalist framework, in it, they are reified; mediated as being immediate; a “matter of fact.” We do not partake of the readings of Plato that take the Forms to be abstractly, only eternal, arresting Plato’s cosmology to the later tradition of the 2-World system,15 an interpretation that may itself be historically specific to the post-noumenal era. We mention this in order to be able to claim, while guardedly equating the Forms with concepts or categories,16 that such a reading of Plato is reification as Lukács would have it, which is a movement of thought taking historically contingent intelligibilities as unexamined necessary truths, naturalized or metaphysically amplified beyond the social formation that perceives them.17 Coarse-universalism, following its ahistorical tenets and jumping across the intelligibility gap it posits, transhistoricizes its whole conceptual framework. Pedagogically, this entails that one is not enabled to participate in the Forms and actually transform them, but is moulded18 into them. Reification is the fate of the Forms, of the purportedly universal form of the human, and of every particular instance of the human which, by enclosure in the world of “things,” is prohibited from access to the world of the Forms. If room for perplexity remains: how can one be formed by something to which one is irrevocably made unintelligible?How can a so-called particular human form another into some eternal universal, and do so through access to, when no-one has ever accessed it?