The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences

5. The Sociality of Agency

5 The Sociality of Agency T he second way of addressing the idea of the social also emphasizes its centrality to any theory that claims to represent or express what is human about human affairs. The key texts can be placed conveniently under two related theoretical registers, Marxism, by which I mean the critique of capital in regard to its intrinsic limitations, and post-structuralism, by which I mean the critique of the theory of the sign.1 Thesis I of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” states: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism . . . is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively . Hence it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. (1978, 143; emphasis in original) This means that subjectivity, reduced either to individuated consciousness or magnified as culture, is lost to the idealist no less than it is to the vulgar materialist. Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual . In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled: (1) To abstract from the historical process and to 102 Chapter 5 fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract—isolated—individual. (2) The human essence, therefore, can with him be comprehended only as “genus,” as an internal, dumb generality which merely naturally unites the many individuals. (Marx 1978, 145; emphasis in original) Thesis VII concludes: Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual, whom he analyzes , belongs in reality to a particular form of society [that predicates its intelligibility as such on] the standpoint of . . . socialised humanity. (1978, 145) The theses are not intended to establish that individuals are effects of a fully formed society. Rather, they converge on the key proposition from The German Ideology that “the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals” (Marx and Engels 1976, 31). What counts here is not the organism, the relation of humans with the rest of nature, but agency and therefore activity; and what counts about human beings is that what they do is “a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” (31; emphasis in original). That “what individuals are depends on the material conditions determining their production” (32) means that individuality itself performs a social reality that cannot be understood as causally, mechanically , or structurally determinate. To say that the assertion is a “first premise of all human history” only appears to set the stage for formal derivations; it is not a primitive assumption in regard to which positive theories ultimately are to be evaluated. This is clear from both the content and the rhetorical features of Marx’s prose. For example, the mitigating expression, “of course,” indicates that the assertion lacks the status of a positive proposition within a formal argument. It signals that something is being said about language itself. From that point of view, the assertion states a rule for forming meaningful statements about human affairs according to what is distinctively human about them independent of biology or classification by species. Marx’s own references to “species being” reinforce this interpretation insofar as they identify what is human with what it is to be social. Otherwise, “human affairs” refers to nothing but formal “objects of contemplation ” constituted as such by “dumb generality.” That these references also rely on “the standpoint of . . . socialized humanity” in no way undermines the point. To make affairs humanely intelligible is to account for them in terms of how they make themselves accountable. It follows that species specificity in any other sense cannot be a basis for theorizing, since that requires a comparison among categories that effectively eliminates consideration of what is human about those affairs. What is distinctively human must be understood as The Sociality of Agency 103 specifiable only within human affairs. It is only in this sense of a languageconstituting rule that the claim can be a “first premise of all human history.” This conclusion...