"But Never a Man": Humanism and the Division of Labor

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 2020

Empirical data show that members of underrepresented and historically marginalized groups in academia undertake many forms of undervalued or unnoticed labor. While the data help to identify that this labor exists, they do not provide a thick description of what the experience is like, nor do they offer a framework for understanding the different kinds of invisible labor that are being undertaken. We identify and analyze a distinct, undervalued, and invisible labor that the data have left unnamed and unmeasured: ontological labor, the work required to manage one's identity and body if either or both do not fit into academic structures, norms, and demands. We argue that ontological labor efforts should be understood as a form of labor. We then provide a characterization of ontological labor, detailing the labor as navigating one's obligations to give and managing entitlements to take. We also highlight the ontological labor that takes place through instances of resistance, such as through complaint or refusals.

The provocation and point of this paper is that universities of the North during the era of neoliberalism of have been sucked of their human life-giving capacities. What remains are closed doors and bare walls. Lest we give the impression of a hopelessly romantic view of the university (and embark upon a lament for some paradise lost), let us be clear from the outset: there is no such place – and there never has been. As will be outlined below, a consideration of the history of the university reveals it was born and has persistently drawn its life breath from oxygen formed in the tension ridden mix of an impulse to human freedom and accommodation to powers of church, state and capital. But, we contend, history is now the witness to the almost complete dissolution of that tension: to the exhaustion of emancipatory impulses in the service of indoctrination, regulation and accumulation. In the church-state-capital triad, it is the latter that has emerged hegemonic. Importantly, we argue, its dominance has emerged with the rise of what Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy describe as monopoly capital: the move from competitive (small entrepreneurial business) forms to monopolistic (large corporate business) regimes of accumulation (Baran & Sweezy 1966). A central feature of monopoly capitalism is its need for significant financial support of national states and the harnessing of public resources such as universities to feed accumulation. It is no surprise that neoliberalism, despite its neoclassical economic pronouncements, is a ‘big state’ advocate (Harvey 2005). Our argument is that neoliberalism, as the political workhorse of monopoly capitalism, has overseen a makeover of universities so they might behave like a monopoly capitalist corporation. Our time is the time of the near global domination of capital. The university has succumbed. In its colonisation – its capitalisation – the university has not only reinvented itself as a willing ally of capital but has also set about remaking itself in its image.

Every time that we have to determine an object, we are obliged to use terms (such as nouns or adjectives) able to indicate its main characteristics. One of the most representative examples of definition is that offered by Aristotle: “Man is a rational animal”. ‘Animal’ and ‘rational’ are the two properties that allow us to collocate “man” into a precise category, containing all the other beings definite by the same essential properties. The primary goal of philosophy is consisted in individuating these determinations, but also in reconsidering their status: do the categories have an ontological value, or are they mere determinations thank to which our mind can build, classify and especially control the reality? The contemporary debate on gender is undeniably connected with the process of categorization. My prospective moves towards a specific evidence: the academic approach, that puts its stress on the necessity to complete a categories list able to include all the aspects of the reality, seems to privilege only the general and superficial features; consequently it disregards the peculiar connotations which define an individual in his/her irreducibility to roles and stereotypes. Whether the goal of the linguistic categorization is to built general classes, the humanities and, in particular, the psychoanalysis, have claimed the right of the single individual. From the above, this paper aims to discuss the traditional process of categorization, trying to put in evidence the limits involved in the classical definition of category, in order to move toward a new prospective that will be the basis for a richer theory of singularity. After discussing the principal approaches to sexuality and their limits (from Essentialism to Constructivism and Queer movements), the essay will conclude with the most prolific psychoanalytic thought (in particular the Lacanian concept of sessuation) in order to demonstrate that, far from being only a gene or a social construction, the sexual identity always includes the subject’s mediation.

Hypatia, 2016

To gather is a political act. Whether a gathering is capable of eliciting the participation of those present is a sign of the underlying vision organizing a collectivity. The marginalization of persons and modes of thought within gatherings that stand in for the field of philosophy in the United States speaks to the politics of these acts. Their underlying vision delimits the fate of alterity in our discipline: the silencing of persons whose lives may necessitate or invite thinking ignored realities, inhabiting unrecognized traditions, and/or working with alternative methodologies, conceptual tools, and symbolic forms. The Roundtable on Latina Feminism, however, presents us with the potential for a robust vision. It critically fosters affective relations capable of withstanding the challenges of alterity and oriented toward building a collective vision for philosophical thinking.

Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, 2009

To gather is a political act. Whether a gathering is capable of eliciting the participation of those present is a sign of the underlying vision organizing a collectivity. The marginalization of persons and modes of thought within gatherings that stand in for the field of philosophy in the United States speaks to the politics of these acts. Their underlying vision delimits the fate of alterity in our discipline: the silencing of persons whose lives may necessitate or invite thinking ignored realities, inhabiting unrecognized traditions, and/or working with alternative methodologies, conceptual tools, and symbolic forms. The Roundtable on Latina Feminism, however, presents us with the potential for a robust vision. It critically fosters affective relations capable of withstanding the challenges of alterity and oriented toward building a collective vision for philosophical thinking. In philosophy (φιkοrοφίa), an essentially collective form of labor, the political is immanent to its unique critical and creative power. Western academic philosophy, however, confronts a particularly insidious obstacle to the collectivity it presumes: its practitioners' difficulty in grasping the fact that there is no shared vision making sense of its disciplinary unity. Despite the growing literature and clarity of voices helping us comprehend the historical and material conditions that contribute to the cognitive-epistemological difficulties in noticing the lack of a philosophical vision, there is little political and ethical force to these epistemic resources. Instead, we gather within the same university and classroom walls; under the same descriptive institutional categories and units; bounded by selective journals and presses; and together in national and regional conference centers and Internet sites. In other words, we habitually codify our functions and partake in normalized practices that serve to perpetuate the idea of a project that succeeds at accomplishing its epistemic goals. As practitioners in the field of philosophy we imagine ourselves " philosophers. " The reproduction of failed rituals in endeavors that sustain a mythical identity and cultural ties highlights the degree of social alienation within the discipline.

Counterfutures: Left Thought and Practice Aotearoa, 2017

2011

it is possible to figure out how the phenomenological tradition, from its early stages, has originally approached the mind-body problem underlying the opportunity to develop an interactive conception based on the assumption of a radical interweaving between the experiential and the bodily domains. According to this view, perceptive experience can be conceived as a method through which the subject travels in the environment following his motor intentions and exploiting his skillful knowledge of the sensorimotor constraints that link the execution of a goal oriented action to the variation of the phenomenal features. Working on the clarification of the notion of embodiment we have the opportunity to cease to unreflectively privilege only one possible explanation of our experience. The human mind, observed through the lenses of embodiment, emerges at the interface of the brain, the body, the material and social environment. This is an inextricable mash influencing all aspects of our life. We are agents whose nature is fixed by a complex interaction involving our personal experience, a particular kind of physical embodiment and a certain embedding in the environment. This very combination of experience, flesh and environment is the main character of our being in the world. The assumption of agency as a critical aspect of our experience motivates the introduction of another classical philosophical problem such as that concerning the notion of free will. We usually consider human beings natural organisms that are morally responsible for their own actions. Yet this assumption represents one of the most intriguing puzzles that, from ancient Greece to the contemporary era, has absorbed philosophers and scientists of every kind. Are we really free agents? What does our subjective experience of agency reveal to us? And how do these questions relate to the fact that we are natural embodied beings? Except in cases where we are physically constrained, we consider ourselves free beings that think, believe and act autonomously, that is, according to the states of consciousness that characterize our own mental life. We consider ourselves responsible for our own acts because we perceive ourselves as being able to freely project the actions that our body can perform. Accordingly, the possibility of a free choice appears to be strictly related to the possibility of assigning independence to a particular domain such as our subjective consciousness. The subjective sense of agency, that is, the feeling that we control our own movements and actions, is certainly an essential, constant element of our XII Humana.Mente-Issue 15-January 2011 a radical indeterminacy characterizes a decision-making process cannot secure a condition for rational, responsible free actions. After having introduced and replied to some major objections to libertarianism, Zhu provides an interesting account of how indeterminism can be considered a freedom-enhancing condition, arguing for what he calls a deliberative libertarianism. According to Zhu, indeterminacy, instead of being an obstacle to the libertarian's purposes, can be considered a crucial element of creativity that plays a critical role in practical deliberations and problem solving. Three contributions from our call for papers conclude the Papers Section of the volume. They have been selected through a blind review process from among many other contributions we received. The first of them, by Liz Disley, emphasizes the role of social interactions in self-perception. The author focuses on the phenomenological experience of collective work as a paradigmatic example of intersubjectivity and human interaction. Following suggestions from Hegel, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Disley argues that the experience of physical work can improve one's own capacity for intersubjectivity, thus enhancing the role of the agent's embodied nature. The second paper, by Susi Ferrarello, focuses on the notion of practical intentionality and investigates how it affects a decision-making process. Relying on a phenomenological approach, combining Husserl's theory of knowledge with Husserl's conception of will, the author defines a balance between logical and practical acts, showing how logical reason is necessary to give voice to our knowledge of reality, while practical reason is the starting point for every logical act. Finally, David Vender's paper focuses on the role of acquired skills as emblematic aspects of action. According to the author, we do not have to be fully aware of our contribution to an action for it to count as a genuine act, nor do we necessitate a rational justification of it, but we must be able to adapt ourselves to the perceived situation. In view of that, Vender points out the critical role of balancing underlying perceptual and bodily orientation in executing complex actions. As usual, we are also publishing a series of commentaries that provide new takes on well-established texts. They offer new, challenging arguments on the timeless questions concerning theory of agency and free will. Commentaries in this issue include the

2019

For the last years Humanism has been called upon by political and religious leaders. Intellectu-als and academics of varied stock and diverse sensibilities mourn the loss of humanist values and call in earnest for their hasty reinstitution. When asked how to restore meaning to the term "humanism", Heidegger answered: "by providing man with a measure other than himself". Accordingly, if anything akin to humanism should still be justified, this can only be with the question of the human measure not only as a historical legacy, but also a task and future per-spective. This paper aims at imagining a post-humanism that -having worked through the grief for lost anthropocentrism: being "post" with regard to traditionally anthropocentric humanism -has discovered that boundaries certainly constitute an obstacle for humans, but they also con-stitute the symbolic space that allows for the manifestation of a surplus necessary to human life. That would be a new and promising understanding of the human measure. KEYWORDS Humanism, human measure, post humanism, transhumanism, civilisation According to Eugenio Garin, one of the 20 th Century's foremost scholars of Italian humanism and -alongside Ernesto Grassi 1 -one of the most committed advocates of its philosophical nature, the underlying philosophy of Italian humanism may be seen as a continuous enquiry into the measure of the human -its limitations and its prospects; a lesson on this measure for the artist, the scientist, the priest, the politician (i.e. what we today term civil society), rather than the professional philosopher; an admonishment to meet the task that the measure itself im-1 See E. Grassi, La filosofia dell'umanesimo. Un problema epocale, Tempi moderni edizioni, Napoli 1986.

2009

In the corporate university, a capitalist enterprise, the fact of contingent academic labor should not be seen as an aberration, a scandalous (but perhaps temporary) anomaly that could be solved within and by the very system that produces it. Rather, the ever-increasing number of contingent academic workers, and the consequent reduction in the number and power of full-timers, is the norm. Not only is it the norm, but it is the coherent, logical consequence of the corporatization process. That is, there could be no corporatization without the logic of sovereignty and domination whereby contingent labor in the first place, and all other labor in the second, must be, as is, superexploited. The originary idea of the university as a place for learning (perhaps even disinterested learning) is gone. 1 To have faith in that idea at this point in time would be having faith in a romantic past, it would be a useless, if not politically dangerous, nostalgia. Yet, if the past is barred, the futu...