Theses on Impossible Humanism
A Mythological Account
Made with Artbreeder.
0. The idea, or perhaps pre-idea, concerning an incoherence at the heart of “being human;” a corresponding sense that it may be desirable to establish a humanism on the assumption that the Human itself does not, cannot, exist.
We have little interest lately in vivisecting our thoughts, and no inclination at all until we ourselves have had a chance to think them in the first place. For there are many ways of thinking, many ways of becoming a thinking subject, but so many of these are rendered incoherent if the work of exploration is given over too quickly to the taxonimization and mass production of thought-machines.
We are not satisfied, insist on the right not to be satisfied, with assembling or deconstructing paradoxes, modeling stiffly the gross facsimile of moving life as with pins and string and so much meat. Palpating them from, as it were, the outside, draining all their essential fluids, and waiting until the last electric shivers subside against the cold counterpulse of the laboratory table.
Such disassemblage is a kind of commodifying process, insofar as it removes the object of taxonomy from its life-world with its own active reality and turns it into a mere instantiation of a type, an example, a simulacra, of a creature, a paradox, a method, a Human, parts neatly labeled, laid out and sealed in a black plastic TV dinner tray, overnight delivered for your convenience, pop it into your mind with so little effort, just Nuke-it-and-Go.
Our zero-thesis is a call for an opposite approach, against taxonomy and against the commodity form. Writing as a human to humans, we suggest (1) that the idea of humanity knows itself to be a thoroughly non-duped heir, a membrane which must enclose itself. Not wishing to kill the thing before we understand it, our postulates aim not at dissection but rather knowing from within, an orgasmic collapse of the knowledge-knower into and upon itself.
1. Humanity is an intrinsically mythical category, operative by means of its relationship to the Sacred and the Profane.
Concepts (flows of relevance, grooves in supply chain of the mind) do not, as it is unreflectively supposed, arise fully-formed from a neutral summary of flat facts nor passively emerge from the inward architecture of subjects themselves. There is no such thing as a s clean idea, a self-contained concept, a self-evident truth— except that which is imagined retroactively. Of such imagination, we might say that taking what is Real and processing it into what is Known was perhaps the first job to be exported overseas, shipped out beyond the edge of the horizon of conscious where the spray of the oceanic feeling never fully drys out. Knowledge produced a priori,—psychodomestically!—simply wouldn’t do, can't do, could only refer back to itself. It had to be raised, as it were, into the air, to Heaven, or the pineal gland, or the ever illusive real world, or nowhere at all, provided it not be embodied in the subject.
The idea of Zero-point Science, which can only tend to alienate knowledge from both the epistemic production and from the knower himself, is the First Myth of the Human. (It is, for that matter, the creation story of all concepts within the domain of naive realism, though it is with the Human that we are chiefly concerned here.) The situation is thus like a Master Artist whose work is highly fashionable. Having delegated all the real work to an apprentice well trained in his style, he affixes to a finished piece his sign, “from The Studio of-”. (This process can even go on long after the master is dead, or never existed in the first place!) The truth of a thing becomes entirely wrapped up in the idea of it being received from above, from out there, a transcendental totality defined first and foremost by its separation from and ontological superiority to the knowing-self.
The second Myth as to the origins of the Human is that favored by the liberal-progressive type. Fittingly, it is story characterized by a logic of progression, an ideological logic which has room only for the machine and the machine’s engineer, society and social engineers, and nothing else.The myth is this: the concept of humanity is a historically embedded, socially constructed process of realizing, or approaching the realization of objective truth. Humanity is bloody, still so bloody from its ancient and ongoing political birth. And like a literal birth, upon being introduced into the world, the Human grows. With patience, he moves from the familiar to the distinct. I am. You are. He is. White to black, male to female, master to servant.
If the first account of the category of humanity was a Myth of Nature, then the second might be called a Myth of Neighbors. Or we might call it the Cosmopolitan Myth, for to the Practitioner of Cosmopolitanism politics is nothing more nor less than the process of bringing every person into a single neighborhood, a single world-city, that is, the Cosmopolis.
Such a process, nothing less than Divine in scope, makes for a sacredification of politics as well as Humanity. This is the politics of the rehabilitated Christ and whitewashed Dr. King, a politics of Heavenly Kingdoms and Universal Moral Arcs. That the coming of the promised land—that heavenly city in which all humans recognize each other as such—is totally assured yet at the same time perpetually deferred is a paradox which only tends to strengthen the cosmopolitan ideology. Every proponent of this framework admits how slow, how painfully, unjustly slow progress is. Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, nationalism, class loyalties, all are either the denial of humanity’s uninterrupted same-ness, or a failure to give that fact moral weight. Their profanity, more than their stupidity or raw harm, forms the ever threatening contrast which outlines the sacred project.
But such obstacles to the Project of Universal Humanity do not dissuade practitioners from the humanistic theory or faith. Quite the opposite. Few things have the potential to strengthen the prevailing ideology like a good crisis, especially one which is kept at a perpetual simmer, or slightly at a distance. The enemies of humanity (bigots and , corporate structures and climate collapse) are active and numerous. One need not necessarily dedicate all of one’s time to holding the line, provided one genuinely believes the line is there.
Neither of the forgoing Myths sufficing for our purposes, I instead propose to offer a new one. Perhaps with luck it will even be true.
2. The Human is at once immanent and transcendent, occupying always the midway point between me and the Human itself.
“But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.”
Before the Stranger appeared the Human was not among us. Later, the Human was everywhere going ahead of us everywhere yet always out of our sight. When the Stranger lifted his right foot, we noticed that the Human could stand on Its left. When the Stranger was cut, no one could deny that the Human would bleed. I say these things, and yet I do not say that the Stranger and the Human are the same. The distinction is subtle, but clear enough once you caught on. The Stranger stands across from us, flesh and soul. The Human is identical to him in every way, except that the Human does not exist.
The relationship between the myself and the Human is N fold. First, there is the relationship between myself and a category. I encounter the Stranger, and in them I encounter a depth of both similarity and difference I had not known before. The relationship between myself and the Stranger forms the material pattern out of which a more generalized category may emerge. This alone is no profound thing; children see instances and generalize from them through the negative process of experimentation and correction (thus for example, every furry creature with four legs is a cat to a child insofar as cat designates a conceptual process of recognizing that something is furry and has four legs; ). I see the Stranger and I see that He is Like-me without being-me. Thus arises a category of like-but-not.
Next, there is the relationship between myself and a category. What sort of category is Humanity? The relationship with the Stranger is of course a necessarily mythic encounter. A myth is a kind of paradox. A myth does not cease but rather only begins to be believed when it is recognized as a myth. It is believed in a mythic way , as opposed to suddenly realizing, “oh, its just a myth.” Anyone who is capable of saying “just a myth” has not understood the kind of information that is being conveyed at all. In order to be comprehended for what it is (or what it might become, it must first be negated at its literal (superficial) level. The register on which the myth is believed is a very deep register.
The medium by which a myth is conveyed may be more or less literally believed in addition to/against the mythic sense. Clearly Hegel’s Lord/Bondsman dialectic is a metaphysical fiction, and all the more revelatory for it. The relationship between the Jews, the Stranger, and the LORD is mytho-historiography. Lacan’s Mirror Stage can perhaps be understood as part of the genre Ursula K. LeGuin called “psychomythology,” a way of storytelling that is meant to record and operate upon the ways in which a Subject becomes itself. Kant and Levinas
The Human is a category distinguished by its negativity, operating on a logic which states Of that which is not denied, there is Nothing to be affirmed.
It is important to recognize that in all of these foregoing processes, recognition precedes identity; humanity flows from the stranger to me. The Human is the Other of my Other, the very experience of myself being thrown into his relative position. Following the formula laid out in Leviticus, he is with us, and he is like us, and the polar relativity of “him” and “us” dissolves into a process of becoming-us, for we find ourselves having always already been thrown into the harsh disjunction of an artificial, negative type…
The injunction to love the stranger begins with an assimilationist logic, but it ends with the expirence of alterity, an orientation not towards a cosmopolitian future but an unsettling of oneself both historically and, by implication, ontologically as well.
This is probably the most positive/specific way to define the Human: a kind of ghostly embodiment of contingency. All the undetermined potential of what it means to be like you without being you. More specifically, the idea of humanity gestures at the unlikeliness regarding the fact of your own existence, or particular constellation of more or less real attributes. You are the instantiation of a type. This is not a type with any definitive original or mold, but a copy of a copy, a simulacra, which has only other instantiations against which to judge itself—collectively and quite uneasily amalgamated in the Human form. By its very definition, this form cannot have a positive reality of its own, anymore than the form of mathematics, or beauty, or power, or love can be said to singularly exist. Rather, the Human is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “Hyperobject,” an entity which “phases” in and out of space, time, and sense.
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It should be obvious, then, that humanity cannot begin as an extension from the self, radiating outward, accumulating degrees of difference like a tourist collecting kitsch. The realization that you are but one possible instantiation of physical, psychological, linguistic, and historical attributes strikes one like a rapid onset disease, rendering inoperable capacities you didn’t even realize you had, until you reach and discover their ghost in the outline of their absence. Then you fall back into your old self, just as easily recovering, but every limb, every cell, every way of being feels altered, overstimulated skin kissed gently raw by a new sense of unreliability. And this self-undoing movement, that too is all too Human, perhaps the most Human quality. For it is a fact of any category which does not contain itself is the certainty of instantiation without ever collapsing into particularity.
“ If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them. ”
Leviticus is the third book of the Torah. Its name derives indirectly from Levi, third son of Jacob (called Israel), the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham. The descendants of Levi, called the Levites, included Moses and his brother Aaron. From them the priest class was drawn, from which we get the above mentioned “Priestly sources.” To them was given authority over religious ceremonies and legal judgement, and they appear to have constituted the ruling class of the Israelites at least until the reign of the Kings. According to tradition, Leviticus and the other four books of Moses were written as word for word transcriptions of the history of the people, recounted by Moses divinely inspired by the Lord. In contrast, most historians of the Bible recognize multiple oral and written sources of the Torah, known as the Jahwist (J), the Elohist (E) (so called for their preferred names for the Jewish God), the Deuteronomist (D), and Priestly (P) sources.
The commandments laid out in Leviticus provide are an excellent example of relationship between ideology and law.
4. The Human is a site of Liberation, which is to say, a site of Violence.
[cis and trans relations]
5.
particularity and instantiation
social animal
/
. The Human is a dialectic of paranoia and nostalgia.
Humanism is a kind of paranoia, a need to allow for everything while affirming nothing. Like all paranoia, the Humanist variety gives rise to its own kind of pleasure, though it is rarely self-consciously experienced as such. The pleasure arrives insofar as one feels as if he understands (without ever ceasing to be himslef) all of humanity, as if he is able to account for all the innumerable, self-alchemizing components which make up the possibility of being human. After all, if that were the case, it would perhaps follow that he also understands all of the innumerably remixed components which have given rise to his own, specific reality, including any and all possible components by which to transcend it.
There is also a kind of sideways nostalgia at play, orientated not so much backwards in time, but at the broad spectrum of possible ways of being, up to and including a wide range of mutually exclusive ways of understanding those ways of being. This feeling of nostalgia in equal parts tempers and (following Lacan’s objet-a) fulfills the pleasure which clings, like sticky resin, to the paranoid way of thinking. The recognition that one cannot fully comprehend what it is like to be another, and therefore cannot internalize a fully functioning Other in opposition to which one might understand oneself, insures for the paranoid subject that he can never fully understand either humanity or himself. This of course is cause for wretched joy, as it means the work of paranoia—the endless compilation of obscure data points, postulating models and counter-models, and generally despairing over ever more complexly structured blindspots—can never be conclusive, which means it need never, can never end.
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migrants—humanity as reintroduction of society, particularity and instantiation, the rational subject outside looking in
reserve labor—the pressure of the individual
the madman—rules you didn’t know you had, lack precedes prescience
rejects—humanity as sacrificial excess
the alien—the opposite of fate
the virus—partial humanism, praxis
there is no such thing as humans, there are only embodied societies.