Posted by Hate Company on March 01, 2000 at 10:18:12 PM EST:
O.T believes that by accusing me of believing that what is essential in this moment will always be. What I said, before the falisification, was: communication was always the principle of the world, the human principle. Proof: it is the world's principle now. Or could it be that, for O.T, the world can change principles? Can I have a blue one, then?
Hate Company continue toujours de sauter ce qui ne l’arrange pas : pourquoi la communication devrait traverser un process historique ? Si c’est le cas, la communication dépend de l’histoire ou du process. Mais il va nous dire que la communication est l’humanité, et que le tout est l’histoire, et que tout est process, etc.
Exactly! The communications is humanity, for communication is the human principle. All is shaped by communication. It is not true however that history is the communication: it is just that history is the history of the communication. Hegelian dialectics, if you wish, is exactly the process of communication through history. For Plato, the dialectic method was communication (conversation), an that's the meaning of the ancient greek word "dialektiki". Maybe you guys have a different definition?
La différence entre communication et humanité est la suivante : la communication est la réalité, l’humanité n’est pas une réalité, elle est à réaliser. D’un côté Hate Company, qui n’est plus à une contradiction près, prétend que communication et humanité c’est la même chose (alors pourquoi y a-t-il deux mots différents pourrions-nous répondre à ce militant qui utilise bien ce vieil argument imbécile pour infini et éternité) et ailleurs il soutient “ Of course, natural selection could help build communication. But no humanity ”. Ce n’est donc la même chose que quand ça l’arrange.
You, perhaps, have some trouble understanding? Let me reveal this to you then: the use of a world in a certain context defines it's meaning. You say that these two propositions: "communication and humanity is the same thing", and "natural selection could build communication but no humanity" are contradictory. But, humanity, could be used both in the meaning of "humanoids" (i.e homo sapiens animals, human slaves) and in the meaning of this "realized humanity". Do I have to spell it out every time? Communication is the same thing with humanity, it is the quality of humanity. "Why the two words then?", the O.T imbeciles ask next. What'ts the problem, never heard a synonym?
O.T then proceeds to express it's surprise that other things existed before humanity, and were the cause of communication. If one takes this suprise to be real, they are not aware of the existance of the universe. Or, well, they believe that they could communicate as easily even without being born.
"No infinite can be said freed of time" you write, and then that "the example of pi finishing with humanity (...) shows that the infinite one is no possible". If that doen't imply that for you infinite means eternal, what does? I take it that you cannot conceive infinity as a quality and not as a quantity. (And then you claim that my assuming that for you infinite means eternal was a "bad assumption").
Pour le militant Hate Company la pensée des Indiens est moins aliénée que la pensée des pauvres modernes, et les totems sont davantage une construction sociale consciente que la marchandise. Le plus ou le moins de l’aliénation, le fait que la marchandise soit moins une construction sociale consciente qu’un totem (rappelons à ce propos que l’économie existe en tant que pensée, comme n’importe quelle religion, et que c’est précisément une construction sociale consciente pour expliquer cette autre construction sociale consciente qu’est la marchandise ; il n’a pas suffi de dire que Dieu n’a pas de réalité pour faire cesser le christianisme, et il en va de même pour l’économie, avec laquelle le prétentieux Voyer disait en avoir fini dès 1991), c’est tellement ridicule que la réponse est dans l’exposé.
So for you economy is a conscious social construction? How could that be! As an ideology, as a religion, economy exists only as false consciense, only as a lie. How can it be a "conscious social construct" then? It is a social construct, alright, but a conscious one? If it was such it would be abolished immediately.
As for your saying that "il n’a pas suffi de dire que Dieu n’a pas de réalité pour faire cesser le christianisme, et il en va de même pour l’économie, avec laquelle le prétentieux Voyer disait en avoir fini dès 1991", I agree, but that is a critisism already applied by Marx to the Young Hegelians in "German Ideology". After all this was the essence of my first "On Voyer" posting: you don't overcome economy just by stating so in your theory. Practical action needs to be taken.
Et ça continue, satisfait de soi : “ "the thought of the goods is the absense of human spirit". Not absense of spirit altogether, just absense of human spirit. ” Nous voilà donc maintenant avec deux pensées, une qui est humaine et l’autre qui ne l’est pas. Après qu’on nous ait rabâché que toute communication, toute pensée, était humaine ! Elle est quoi alors, bon militant, la pensée non humaine ?
It is exactly the spirit which ecsapes humans. Things have aquired human qualities, the fundamental one being spirit. It is the fetishism of the trade, ne c'est pas? In this world things really act, and thus have spirit, where humans (within the meaning of humanoid slaves) do not. This non-human thought is nothing else but the thought of the goods.
Hate Company is thus, without surprise, incompetent to explain us how functions the desalienation. It cannot read: we did not speak about the reification (unless its " objectification " is different thing that the reification, Verdinglichung), but of alienation, i.e. the movement of the thought which becomes different thought. The reification is besides a particular form of alienation and not as it claims it alienation a particular form of the reification: " However, alienation is only has special form of the objectification of
thought. " But one is not any more short of that.
To quote Lukacs from his 1967 Preface to History and Class Consciousness:
"Hegel's reluctance to commit himself on this point is the product of the wrong-headedness of his basic concept. For it is in Hegel that we first encounter alienation as the fundamental problem of the place of man in the world and vis-á-vis the world. However, in the term alienation he includes every type of objectification Thus 'alienation' when taken to its logical conclusion is identical with objectification. Therefore, when the identical subject-object transcends alienation it must also transcend objectification at the same time. But as, according to Hegel, the object, the thing exists only as an alienation from self-consciousness, to take it back into the subject would mean the end of objective reality and thus of any reality at all. History and Class Consciousness follows Hegel in that it too equates alienation with objectification (to use the term employed by Marx in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts). This fundamental and crude error has certainly contributed greatly to the success enjoyed by History and Class Consciousness. The unmasking of alienation by philosophy was in the air, as we have remarked, and it soon became a central problem in the type of cultural criticism that undertook to scrutinise the condition of man in contemporary capitalism. In the philosophical, cultural criticism of the bourgeoisie (and we need look no further than Heidegger), it was natural to sublimate a critique of society into a purely philosophical problem, i.e. to convert an essentially social alienation into an eternal 'condition humaine', to use a term not coined until somewhat later. It is evident that History and Class Consciousness met such attitudes half-way, even though its intentions had been different and indeed opposed to them. For when I identified alienation with objectification I meant this as a societal category - socialism would after all abolish alienation - but its irreducible presence in class society and above all its basis in philosophy brought it into the vicinity of the 'condition humaine'.
This follows from the frequently stressed false identification of opposed fundamental categories. For objectification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society. If we bear in mind that every externalisation of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectification, that every human expression including speech objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between people. And in so far as this is the case, objectification is a natural phenomenon; the true is as much an objectification as the false, liberation as much as enslavement. Only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man's nature is subjugated, deformed and crippled can we speak of an objective societal condition of alienation and, as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective marks of an internal alienation. This duality was not acknowledged in History and Class Consciousness. And this is why it is so wide of the mark in its basic view of the history of philosophy. (We note in passing that the phenomenon of reification is closely related to that of alienation but is neither socially nor conceptually identical with it; here the two words were used synonymously.)"
P.S On a second thought you may be right that control is a declining area of the world, a kind of a historical artifact. The progress of alienation (in the definition of which we still disagree) should make the trade totally independent of human spirit (and thus control) if it haven't done so already.