The Crisis in Humanism III

The final part of the three-part series on the crisis of humanism by Joost van Loon.

Social scientists, as always, were a bit late to catch on. So, when Marxists were still occupying their time with debates about the relative force of structural conditions versus class struggle, geneticists were already ten steps ahead, re-interpreting all that exists as forms of data-in-procession. When humanists finally purged their beloved Birmingham School from Althusserian structuralism, as emblematically performed in a sort of confessional mode by Stuart Hall, no self-respecting biologist attained a notion of the human species that depended on an organic understanding of human being; instead, human being was a mere variation of protein codes.

However, even if social scientists cannot be blamed for not reading biology, they can be blamed for failing to understand the world they inhabit. I am introducing a very delicate issue here. By the time the poststructuralist challenge to humanism became popular in the academy (in the early 1980s), most western nations at least already had legalised abortion. That is to say, the society which social scientists at least are called to understand, had already moved on from an anthropocentric definition of life, to a more functional one. The question is not whether one defines abortion as a ‘reproductive right’ or as a ‘moral issue’ (e.g. Ferree et al, 2004). That is completely irrelevant. The issue here is what the very allowance of abortion means in terms of one’s understanding of what life is. If one accepts abortion, one is faced with a choice to either accept that it is a permissible form of murder (that is killing another human being) – which, in essence, runs counter to the basic premise of humanism (so brutally exposed in Auschwitz) - or that some human life forms are not human enough to qualify as a life form. That is to say, whereas the first option heralds the end of the hegemony of humanism, the second effectively changed the meaning of human life by default (e.g. by referring to this as ‘the fetal life frame’, Ferree et al (2004) are able to present an allegedly neutral account of abortion-debates as index-cases of the state of political culture in Germany and the USA; using or not using the fetal-life frame thus becomes itself an arbitrary choice, which is allegedly motivated by political interests or will to power).

Finally, the death of humanism could and should have been perceived by the social sciences a lot earlier because it was evidenced in the way in which human social forms were being reconfigured. The post-war era is often coined as an era of consumerism, commodification and individualization. All three terms are nails in the coffin if humanism. All three signal some form of dehumanization, transference of the unique centrality of the human being as origin and destiny of reason, to values derived from market-transactions, object-relations and alienation. Indeed, what today is celebrated as innovative theoretical concepts, e.g. actor networks or assemblages, are nothing but descriptors of processing that were already dominating popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The Frankfurt School theorists saw this and cried out in despair, but to no avail.

The Crisis in Humanism II

Part two of Joost van Loon's three-part series on the crisis of humanism.

The crisis in humanism however, has not remained an exclusive philosophical affair. The 20th Century, the century of high modernism, also witnessed a human crisis in terms of the meaning-fullness of life. I am referring here to the existential insecurity that emerges when we are confronted by the possibility of a pure arbitrariness of being. This is when the plebs no longer desire for utopia (because their needs are forever being commodified) – when Nietzsche's brutal historical force of the will to power, is revealed in its bare nihilistic arbitrariness.

This pure arbitrariness of being owes quite a bit to a revolution in biology – when life (already stripped of divine mystery by modern 18th Century science) transformed from being defined as the capacity for self-reproduction, i.e. a cell-based entity – to something that was no longer predicated upon the primacy of the cell but merely evolved as a series of proteins, DNA, RNA, i.e. viruses. I am referring to molecular biology and in its wake the birth of genetics.

The idea of DNA as ‘the book of life’ is an ironic mockery of the mystery of intextuation and incarnation. The mystery is being exposed in a pornographic fashion, as a mere series of protein-based codes. There is nothing to life but long strings of codes, which can be deciphered, taken apart, re-assembled and (in theory) modified. Using the pioneering work of Shannon and Weaver in mathematical communication theory, genetics adopted the model of information-processing as the basic trope for understanding life. Being alive in this worldview, is identical to being in communication. Plato’s cave is turned inside out; there are no ideas, no real objects, just shadows on the wall. The age of genetics is the age of the reign of the Simulacrum.
(Photo credit: King Coyote. Permissions.)