Toward a Non-humanist Humanism

Theory after 9/11

William V. Spanos

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781438465982
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos critiqued the traditional Western concept of humanism, arguing that its origins are to be found not in ancient Greece's love of truth and wisdom, but in the Roman imperial era, when those Greek values were adapted in the service of imperialism on a deeply rooted, metaphysical level. Returning to that question of humanism in the context of the United States' war on terror in the post-9/11 era, Toward a Non-humanist Humanism points out the dehumanizing dynamics of Western modernity in which the rule of law is increasingly made flexible to defend against threats both real and potential. Spanos considers and assesses the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek as humanistic reformers and concludes with an effort to imagine a different kind of humanism—a non-humanist humanism—in which the old binary of friend versus foe gives way to a coming community without ethnic, cultural, or sexual divisions.

1

Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization

Rethinking The End of Education

To return to play its purely profane vocation is a political task.

—Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation”

I introduce this volume of essays on the urgent question of the human in the post-9/11 age by returning to my beginning over twenty years ago—in the aftermath of the Vietnam War—specifically, to my then controversial book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (1993)—from the liminal vantage point of the post-9/11 occasion, an expanse of volatile historical time that has borne witness to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the renewal of the United States’ initiative (following its “kicking of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’” at the time of the first Gulf War) to achieve global hegemony. I am referring to the American imperial initiative, precipitated, above all, by the al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which, in providing the United States with a “new frontier” (enemy),1 “justified” the George W. Bush administration’s declaration of an unending global “War on Terror,” which is to say, not only to undertake, in the name of “the clash of civilizations,” unilateral “pre-emptive wars” against “rogues states” and the imposition of ventriloquized governments on them (“regime change”), but also, and equally, if not more important, particularly as it pertains to the issue of higher education (knowledge production) and the American polity, the announcement of the Homeland Security State, that is, the establishment of the state of exception as the universal norm. This return to the beginning of my engagement with the question of humanism and humanist education has not only offered me the pleasurable opportunity to reread for the first time what I wrote about higher education in the United States so long ago at such a volatile time but also, given the epochal transformations, both local and global, that have ensued in the interim, a certain anxiety about some of the recommendations concerning the university, humanist studies, and, not least, the “post-human” I proffered in the concluding chapter of that book. In the following remarks about The End of Education, written retrospectively from the vantage point of the fraught local and global post-9/11 occasion, I will first posit what I continue to think is not only valid about my initial understanding of the idea of humanism but, because it remains inadequately thought, in need of further elaboration: that humanism is not simply a worldly/historical, but also and at bottom an ontological phenomenon, that is, a way of representing (the truth of) being at large. Second, I will suggest that the modern University had its origins in the disciplining of being in the age of the Enlightenment. Third, I will show that the poststructuralists’ de-centering of Man constituted a revolution—an event, in Alain Badiou’s sense of the word—that was immediately betrayed by their failure to perceive the ontological de-centering of Man as a de-centering that also occurred at the more “worldly” sites on the continuum of being. Fourth, I will suggest that this betrayal, aided and abetted by the United States’ globalization of the free market in the post–Cold War period and, after the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, its apotheosis of the “Homeland Security State” and the normalization of the state of exception, enabled an invasion of the University by neoliberal capitalism intended not only to recuperate but to aggrandize the control over knowledge production it lost during the turbulent Vietnam decade. I am referring to the corporate initiative tacitly (in the name of the failing economy) but massively committed to the obliteration of both the residual traditional function of the humanities (the production of good—nationalist—citizens of the nation-state) and, above all, the function of the humanities inaugurated by the protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s that would supersede the former—the instigation of critical consciousness—in favor of reducing them to service departments: instrumentalist apparatuses for providing students—native and foreign—with the skills (particularly “global English”)2 to operate the electronic tools of the neoliberal global free market. Fifth, and in keeping with the lesson of the betrayal, I will attempt to radicalize the concept of humanism (and of the secular with which humanism has been perennially associated) to more clearly distinguish it from the traditional Western understanding of the term, which identifies it with Western civilization. Sixth, I will return to the question of the post-human—and its implications for the University and the coming polis—as it has re-emerged in the context of the in-between time I have called an interregnum inaugurated by the self-de-struction of the American exceptionalist ethos with the United States’ declaration of its unending war on terror. Taking my directives from the time of the now precipitated by this self-de-struction of the American calling, I will, finally, seventh, proffer a number of recommendations concerning higher education that the post-9/11 occasion has compelled into urgent visibility.

2

As I argued in The End of Education by way of an in-depth critical analysis of the influential discourses of exemplary modern post-theological, i.e., “secular,” humanists—such as Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, I. A. Richards3—and those modern university administrators (particularly at Harvard) who institutionalized their theoretical recommendations—humanism is not only a cultural (or worldly) but also an ontological category. Despite the obviousness of this point (as its apparent antithetical relation to theology testifies), traditional humanists, theorists and practitioners, from the Renaissance to the present, almost systematically failed to attend to the critical imperatives of this reality. They insistently represented God and Man, Theologos and Anthropologos, in binarist terms, but in failing to think (or in shrinking back from thinking) this opposition radically, they also failed to perceive that the new worldly (secular) dispensation demanded a radically different—anti-theological or de-centered—understanding of being, including human being. Unwilling in the last instance to abandon the ordering Logos (the Word), they posited a self-identical concept of Man that was the mirror image of the Self-identical God they were ostensibly rejecting. In the period of the Enlightenment (modernity), the Theologos became the Anthropologos. God as the measure of all things became Man the measure of all things. And the more complex secular world Man made was modeled on God’s Creation. It became a natural supernaturalism in which the “Word” of Man—the Anthropologos—was determinative.

To put this historical continuity between medieval Theology and Renaissance Anthropology alternatively (in the Anthropological language culminating in Enlightenment modernity), the ontological interpretation of being in the “new” dispensation remained metaphysical. The be-ing of being—the transience of time, the radical temporality or nothingness that produces anxiety (that emotion that has no thing as its object)—was represented from a transcendental (other-worldly) perspective: meta-ta-physica, from above or beyond or after the (temporal) thing themselves. Thus, as in theology, this humanist ontology privileged the all-seeing eye as the agency of knowledge production at the expense of the other (“adulterating”) senses. In so doing, this end-oriented or panoptic perspective vis-á-vis knowledge production also produced a binarist logic that unerringly privileged Identity over difference, Oneness over the transience of time, which is to say, endowed Man with a will to power over his differential others. As a result this metaphysical reduction, the be-ing of being underwent a momentous transformation. In re-presenting being from the fixed, Archimedean panoptic perspective, the “new” humanist/secular interpretation of being, like the old theological one, also reduced the anxiety-provoking temporality of the secular world to a reified Being or Summum Ens—or, in the language of poststructuralism, to a totalized (spatialized) structure: the all-encompassing centered circle. I quote Jacques Derrida’s definitive, but still to be adequately registered, poststructuralist analysis of the function of the circle in the Western “logocentric” tradition at length not only to underscore the continuity in this tradition between the Sacred and the Secular, God and Man, Theology and Humanism, but also to retrieve the inaugural revolutionary impact of its de-centering of the Anthropological Center:

It has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction always expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of free play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset. And again on the basis of what we call the center (and which, because it can be either inside or outside, can also indifferently be called the origin or end, arché or telos), repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]—that is, in a word, a history—whose origin may always be reawakened or whose end may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one perhaps could say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure on the basis of a full presence which is beyond play. If this is so, the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix … is the determination of Being as presence in all sense of this word. It could be shown that all names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence—eidos, arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence existence substance), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.4

In positing humanism as an ontological category in The End of Education, however, I did not intend, as all too many “anti-humanist” poststructuralists, including Derrida, in effect, did, to restrict humanism—and the thinking of its operations—to the ontological register at the expense of the more “worldly” sites. On the contrary, I was attempting to retrieve the worldliness it lost in the wake of the modern Western humanists’ division of being into disciplinary categories. More specifically, I was trying to show that being, far from being a worldless phenomenon, as it came to be understood under the aegis of post-Enlightenment humanism (then forgotten as a question, as Heidegger famously observed5 in Being and Time), was, in fact, an indissolubly related dynamic continuum, however unevenly developed at any historical moment, ranging from being, the subject, and language (knowledge production), the ecos, to the alleged “more worldly” sites: culture, gender, race, economics, the social, the political, and the global. My purpose, in so doing, was to suggest that the very idea of the West, particularly as it emerged in the Renaissance (the rebirth of Roman civilization in the wake of the medieval “dark ages”), was grounded in a metaphysical interpretation of being that privileged a mode of knowledge production that was complicit with the will to power, and to suggest that a worldly critique of the Western nation-state and its imperialist politics that did not attend to the ontological site was inadequate, if not self-defeating, since these “more worldly” sites have their structural origins in the structure of the Western interpretation of being.

This complicity between ontology (metaphysics) and world, knowledge and power, informing the emergent Western humanist paradigm—this ultimately dehumanizing logic of Renaissance humanism—was the witness of Martin Heidegger in his famously provocative “Letter on Humanism,” written in the immediate aftermath of World War II in response to Jean Beaufret’s question, “Comment redonner un sens au mot ‘Humanisme’?” (How can we restore meaning to the word “Humanism”?), where he traced the origins of modern Western humanism to Rome—its metaphysical reduction of the Greek understanding of truth, a-letheia (unconcealing), to veritas (the adequation of mind and things), that is, an originative thinking to a derivative or calculative apparatus of capture, and pointed to the complicity of Humanist ontology with worldly power: not only with education (disciplinary knowledge production) but also with Roman imperialism:

Humanitas, explicitly so called, was first considered and striven for in the age of the Roman Republic. Homo Humanus was opposed to homo barbarus. Homo humanus here means the Romans, who exalted and honored Roman virtus through the “embodiment” of the paideia [education] taken over from the Greeks. These were the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, whose culture was acquired in the schools of philosophy. It was concerned with eruditio et institutio in bonas artes [scholarship and training in good conduct]. Paideia thus understood was translated as humanitas. This genuine romanitas of homo romanus consisted in such humanitas. We encounter the first humanism in Rome: it therefore remains in essence a specifically Roman phenomenon which emerged from the encounter of Roman civilization with the culture of late Greek civilization. The so-called Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy is a renascentia romanitatis. Because romanitas is what matters, it is concerned with humanitas and therefore with Greek paideia. But Greek civilization is always seen in its later form and this itself is seen from a Roman point of view. The homo romanus of the Renaissance also stands in opposition to homo barbarus. But now the in-humane is the supposed barbarism of gothic Scholasticism in the Middle Ages. Therefore a studium humanitatis, which in a certain way reaches back to the ancients and thus also becomes a revival of Greek civilization always adheres to historically understood humanism.6

But it is in the later uncannily proleptic essay “The Question of Technology,” which addresses the developed modern (Enlightenment) version of Western humanism—its “Enframing” mode of revealing (Ge-stell)—that Heidegger articulates the full import of its dehumanizing logic:

What kind of unconcealing is it, then, that is peculiar to that which results from the setting upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Posthumanism in the Age of Globalization: Rethinking The End of Education
• Chapter 2. Speaking the Lie of the Truth to Power: A Meditation on the Truth of Modernity by an Incorrigible Caviler
• Chapter 3. American Exceptionalism and the State of Exception: A Genealogy of the Contemporary Security State
• Chapter 4. The Human in Modernity: A Genealogy of Bare Life
• Chapter 5. Revoking the Vocational Imperative: Post-poststructuralist Theory and the Interrogation of the Interpellative Call
• Chapter 6. Edward W. Said and World Literature: Thinking the Worldly Imperatives of the Interregnum
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover