3. The Crisis of the Humanities: Huston's Humanism

To engage in a sustained fashion with the paradigmatic humanist categories of knowing that buttress Huston's text—including, but not exhausting, those of truth, presence, coherence, singularity, originality—will guarantee our responses' exclusion from the more readily publishable knowledges of the prevailing post-al regime. This post-al regime, after all, has produced the most “innovative” and “advanced” thinking of its time; its supporters have not only witnessed, but also contributed to and vigorously celebrated, Western-European humanisms' historical decline—the impossibility of an access to any ordering signified—and its subsequent loss of theoretical legitimacy in the various institutional sites of seventies and eighties Western culture. This extended superstructural “battle” between philosophical humanism and French pest-structuralism—marketed successfully as the “Crisis of the Humanities” in higher echelon institutions such as Stanford, Duke, Northwestern and Syracuse University and now as the “P.C” debate (see Debating P.C., Ed. P. Berman. New York: Laurel, 1992)—has been both extensive and influential.

However, we do not see the struggle over the social ends, outcomes and political-effects of the tenets of Western-European humanism to be either an epistemological or a discursive (cultural) struggle as it has so often been portrayed. This is to say, that we view humanisms' disappearance (certainly not its eradication behind the innovative knowledges of post-structuralism, and even, more so lately, its seeming resurrection in “cultural studies") from the cultural scene of writing as the result of global-historical and material pressures and not as the result of the pressure brought to bear by epistemological “sharpness” or “rigor." In other words, the sustained crises that have beset these core humanist categories of knowing—crises that haunt the writing of Huston's text—are not endowed with any finality through either the quality and the thoroughness of post-al “argumentation”, nor is the demise of these categories guaranteed through the differing and deferring effects of “differance” (which is that post-structuralist reading strategy underwritten and enabled by yet an other series of finalities and demises).

Humanist modes of intelligibility, it should be recalled, have been subjected to historical materialist critique in the texts of Marxism for the past hundred years! It is hardly contemporary “movements” or “new” modes of thinking which have brought these questions to bear at this particular moment. Rather, we see these cultural and epistemological questions—in this case, those surrounding the so-called “Crisis of the Humanities” of which Huston's text takes part in managing—to be questions that have been set on the dominant agenda through the demands of contemporary class struggles. Humanisms' unquestionable foundation in the dominant traditions of Eurocentrist imperialism has been on the historical agenda before—and has been critiqued at length on such questions in texts such as Engels' Anti-Dühring. Philosophical humanism (and its foundations in bourgeois empiricism and positivism) we think will most certainly will be a (dis)enabling factor in the class struggles up and through the approach of the twenty-first century. “A philosophy is not disposed of by the mere assertion that it is false," as Engels continued in his polemics against the young Hegelians in Ludwig Feuerbach (New York: International Publishers, 1988, 19), a critique which is filly applicable to contemporary contestations among students and pedagogues alike.

The protocols of response that we have taken up in our “Letters to the Editor” section, then, are less informed by the protocols of the contemporary bourgeois academy—the practical interests of the ruling class—and more so by the interests that have been historically staked in uncovering the materiality—the enabling historical conditions—of these struggles, struggles which are rooted, not in discussions, debates and responses, but in objective social practices. This response, is also aimed, as we have foregrounded in responding to the implications of Huston's text, at uncovering the theories of pedagogy and pedagogical practice that Huston's text advances, as well as the implication of these understandings for the very students and pedagogues confronted by them on a daily basis. In short, our response to Huston's mystified renarration of our revolutionary and interventionary publication is not a response to Huston at all; it is an argument for the relevance and sustained praxicality of Marxism in regards to contemporary concerns, student and otherwise; this response argues along the lines of the more “advanced” theoretical texts that the A.O. provides as well as from within the tradition of Marxist struggles for the general advancement of global democratic practices: that the questions at the fore, the most seemingly irresolvable antagonisms now arising, are first, foremost and necessarily questions of class struggle that can only be resolved therein.

Huston's narrative is carefully organized with the aim of placing its presuppositions beyond contestation, beyond history and beyond critique. It is a narrative that acquires its authority from the cultural ranks of the prevalent bourgeois philosophies, theories of political economy and intellectualism that have continually opposed materialism behind the authority of philosophical idealisms; that have erased “history” and “theory” with the call to “ideas” and “experience”; that have refused “class” for the more inclusive “the people." Through a textbook rehearsal of the embeddedness of this tradition, Huston's text foregrounds its discursive aims as “both general and simplistic” (this issue, 3), that is, not as “theoretical” but, rather of and for the “people”; a document interested in “common humanity”, in human emancipation and, that is above all, rooted in the certainties of common “experience”; Huston's text is a text of “ideas” and “ideals”; these are not foundational “principles” however, but, rather, more agile and reversibly pragmatic post-al “ideals”. Huston, after all, proclaims an decided aversion to any “pre-existing canon” (4) which, on the other hand, the theorists of the A. 0. march behind with awestruck (collective) devotion and blind (socialist) uncriticality.

Huston, however, appears to accommodate class, as an analytical category, both in “form” and in “faith”: class, as it is stated, is both “important” and “relevant” (3). However, as the “form” and “faith” of the argument finally bottom out—and this narrative arrives at its conclusion and, as well, at its conditions of possibility—it turns out that “critiques of capitalism need not be based on class” (4); a committed “concern” for “humans and other life forms” (4) is sufficient. However, humanism—an outmoded theory of the subject—is the outcome of a historically vanquished class struggle (the successful dictatorship of the bourgeoisie). In other words, what constitutes Huston's notion of the “human” or, for that matter, “other life forms"? What is the “inner truth” of humanity that allows Huston's unproblematic invocation of “human” (at one point in history, the Supreme Court of the United States did not even consider African-Americans and Latinos to be, by legal standards, “human").

This humanist order has, through idealist texts such as Huston's, historically presented and thereby defended itself from criticism, as the only possible aim and end, the highest and final “truth” of all history and for all humanity. Huston, for instance, “hope[s] to contribute to fostering human social arrangements that: are ecologically rational, allow people, as individuals and collectivities, to participate in all of the decisions that affect their lives, replaces competition and hierarchy with mutual aid and complementarity, and displaces senseless toil with meaningful work and leisure"(3). However, as Engels has written in texts such as Anti-Dühring far from being the natural articulation of an inherent “will-to-freedom”, “human rights” etc. this position is a nothing less than an extension of the idealist social agenda intitiated [sic.] by the philosophers and other intellectuals of the emerging eighteenth century bourgeoisie.

Huston's text is enabled by the contradictory constitution of its (extra)institutional relations. It is a virtual duplicate of the kinds of attacks on marxism which can be found in journals like Z, which occupy the left-wing of the activist “broad left” (for a critique of the “broad left," see the A. 0.'s 'Statement of Principles'). Such positions introduce makeshift “dual," tri," “quadri," (etc...) systems analysis to counter what they claim is a violent reductionism on the part of Marxism and hence to "take into account” race, gender, sexuality, ecology, etc., and not incidentally, to produce the ideological conditions of comfortable coalitions among activists who can continue with their experientially based “mobilizations” and reformist tactics with an easy “sense” of their “connectedness” to “everyone else." These ideological discourses depend upon the “trickle down” effects of the dismantling of Marxist theory from high-tech (post)modern theorists and ethicists; at the same time, these academic intellectual/bureaucrats depend upon their theories being “reflected” in the activist practices of those whom they must claim to represent within the academy. Huston's text represents the converging point of these interdependent practices (which must maintain a safe distance in order to reproduce the existing division of labor—i.e., not too much “rigor” on the activist broad left, not too much “politics” on the academic broad left) and therefore reveals their constitutive contradictions. Huston criticizes the A. 0. as a “scholar-activist”, assuming the easy compatibility of these categories with his practices: however, as an “activist” Huston chides the A. 0. for not being inclusive enough, while as a “scholar”, he challenges the A. 0. to come up with “proof of its assertions, i.e., to reproduce the dominant liberal academic assumption that one must have “proven knowledge” according to the dominant standards of “truth” (standards which imply that political criteria for knowledge are inherently “false"). Huston's liberal academicism produces a “modern” humanist annex to the postmodern knowledge regime of pluralized truth, which nevertheless needs to denounce and reject revolutionary knowledge as false; while his “activism” provides an empirical referent for postmodern anti-foundationalism, which in its in carnation as cultural studies, still needs to reference the data of “experience” in order to demonstrate the violent “totalitarianism” of Marxist class analysis. In other words, it is the post-al “advanced” theorists, who are positioned so as to remain strategically silent, who will appropriate the bulk of the dividends yielded by Huston's argument, just like the profits of the small businessman are appropriated by the transnational corporations.

Indeed, it is this contradiction which makes it possible for Huston to respond to the A.0. while those faculty members specifically invited have failed to do so. These faculty members, the subject positions that they occupy, “know” the terms of struggle and their own reliance upon their concealment—they “know” that their explicit allegiance to a post-al brand of post-politics would be readily exposed in a “debate” with the A. 0.; they also know that they have “other” places to go—the major publishing houses, popular academic journals, etc. Huston, meanwhile, as a graduate student in geography, who does not contest the dominant uses of “geography” and its annexation by the post-al regime (otherwise he would have written a very different letter; he would have contributed a critique of the theoretical discourses and institutional practices which regulate his workplace and thereby have contributed to a collective theorization of these practices) is useful as a “stand-in” for these professors (a part of the layered division of labor among petty-bourgeois “scholar-activists"), whose “mopping-up” operations they can champion from the sidelines, while allowing the critique of his “naive” discourses to buttress the sophistication of their own (ideologically identical ones). We are interested, though, not in reproducing this layered division of labor in our critique, but in organizing all these “high” and “low”; “activist” and “scholarly”; “naive” and “sophisticated” practices with a common ideological space, so that their common purpose in reproducing the existing relations of production can be focused, exposed and explained.

The protocols of our response allow for a historical materialist interrogation of Shaun Huston's text as a means of uncovering its latent presuppositions about this prevailing social order and not how, at the superstructural level, this liberalist order (through texts such as Huston's) attempts to organize the distribution of its social surplus (profit). We are interested, further, in why this “ethicalizing” margin of radicalism, like Huston, is merely content to call attention to the distribution and redistribution of this social surplus (profit)—that is, in merely calling attention to YOUR STUDENT FEE AT WORK YOUR STUDENT FEE AT WORK—a slogan which is currently affixed to all S.U. student organization propaganda—is by now, a common-sensical slogan and protocol of response instituted at the level of the academy in order to highlight precisely the same issues that provide texts such as Huston's with their legitimacy. These post-al texts and their protocols echo the aims that have historically provided the underpinning ideological justification for the everyday activities of the global market and its International Stock Exchange: that is, how to most effectively reorganize the social surplus (whether in the form of stocks, profit, money or commodities) without changing the relations in which one class produces this surplus value for another.