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.A different signifier, the acoustic image  árbol, will do just aswell.Or the semantic domain, the collection of signifieds, might be other-wise organized, amalgamating concepts that in English are distinguished as trees and  bushes under a common term.Significance, then, is not174 / Varieties of Human Nature fixed in the term  tree,  bush,  vegetation  but is held in contin-gent, oppositive relations between the terms between  tree and all thewords for what are not thought of as trees.Put another way: The meaningof the sign derives not from the  thing it designates, or even from the signalone, but from comparisons and contrasts internal to the semiotic system,which is itself  external to the organism proper.It is thus  convention an implicit agreement among speakers about how to oppose and relateterms not  necessity, that sustains the structure of language.9 Or rather,one might say that convention is the prime necessity for language to meananything at all.The same structured convention and struggles over it not a genetic codeor natural law hold everything social in its place.Culture the uniquelyhuman system of public meanings is elaborated out of signs, and everycomplex human behavior (tool use, ritual, social labor, and collective be-lief, surely, but also gender roles and sexual culture) presupposes culturalmeanings, hence linguistic communication.So structured, the organiza-tion of any society mirrors or extends that of language in general: Its reg-ularities are  arbitrary,  unmotivated by the inherent nature of thingsthemselves, and  relational. Its structure consists not of fixed parts, butof bundled relations between (changing) parts.As Durkheim famously ar-gued, social facts owe their existence to other social facts, circulated as partsof a social whole.The  functions they serve are related to social exigen-cies, not organic necessities.And according to an old anthropological saw,culture is sui generis: The meanings internal to culture derive from cul-ture, not from nature.No less a figure than Alan Sokal ardent defender of positivism and ob-jectivity in the  science wars  affirms the basic, logical differentiation be-tween the objects and methods of the natural sciences and those of socialtheory:Special (and difficult) methodological issues arise in the social sciencesfrom the fact that the objects of inquiry are human beings (includingtheir subjective states of mind); that these objects have intentions (in-cluding in some cases the concealment of evidence or the placementof deliberately self-serving evidence); that the evidence is expressed(usually) in human language whose meanings may be ambiguous;that the meaning of conceptual categories (e.g., childhood, masculinity,femininity, family, economics, etc.) changes over time; that the goal ofhistorical inquiry is not just facts but interpretation, etc.To say that physical reality is a social and linguistic construct is just plain silly,but to say that  social reality is a social and linguistic construct isvirtually a tautology.10Marooned on Survivor Island / 175human nature in motionMarx grasped the essential point, somewhat in advance of (and, I think, moreprofoundly than) other social theorists, when he penned the construction-ist paradigm in a nutshell:  The human essence is no abstraction inherentin each single individual.In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations. 11What Marx meant by this is that  the nature of individuals.depends onthe material conditions determining their production. 12 But Marx did notsimply replace the essentialist concepts of his day with a straightforward orstatic form of social determinism.As opposed to thinkers like Saussure andDurkheim, Marx would not even define  society or  culture as that whichimposes rules upon the individual in a wholly external manner:  Above all,he warns,  we must avoid postulating  Society again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual.  The individual, he adds paradoxically,  is the socialbeing. 13 Dialectically tacking between what is  inside and what is  out-side, Marx attempted to capture the dynamism and irreducibility of hu-man existence in certain double-edged propositions. Nature, he writes, inand of itself  is nothing for man, yet it provides the  foundation for hu-man existence in the sense that it exists for human beings as a  bond withother human beings (that is, as a social and socialized nature).Or in yet an-other maieutic turn of phrase, human beings are said to take on culture asnature:  The nature which develops in human history.is man s real na-ture. So powerfully are human dispositions linked to social practices thatfor Marx, even basic anatomy is caught up in the making of history:  Theforming of the five senses, he writes,  is a labor of the entire history of theworld down to the present. 14 In another passage, he evokes the full di-alectical flow of acts and facts, sense and labor:  This activity, this unceas-ing sensuous labor and creation, this production [is].the basis of the wholesensuous world as it now exists. 15In such pyrotechnic prose, Marx poses claims about the relationship be-tween culture and  human nature that are both stronger and more dy-namic than those forwarded by the classical traditions of social theory.First,Marx asserts that human beings are social creatures in their innermost na-ture.(Merleau-Ponty summarizes the point this way: The human being  isnot in society the way an object is in a box; rather, he assumes it by what isinnermost in him. )16 Second, Marx refuses the temptation to imagine thissocial nature generically, as a set of stable givens, timeless norms, or per-formative scripts.(It was on precisely these grounds that he critiqued theradical humanist Ludwig Feuerbach, who had invoked generic  Man in-stead of  real historical men [and women] in his arguments  Man really176 / Varieties of Human Naturebeing German all along.17) Third, Marx understands that social relationsare  arbitrary  or better yet  contingent  and  conventional, but hemoreover sees their volatility.Whereas more conservative theories under-stand conflict as a secondary or accidental aspect of the social order, Marxexpressly argues that tension and struggle are implicit in certain kinds ofsocial relations.Finally, Marx is relentlessly opposed to philosophies thatbegin from the idea outward, but he is also waging war against mechanis-tic materialism (the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ancestor of scien-tistic reductions today), which begins with  the thing and treats humanbeings as things among other things, subject to the same natural laws asother material things.The  matter treated in Marx s materialism is neverconsidered separately from the consciousness that, through human action,commingles with it and transforms it.That is,  the thing is always  sen-suous human activity, practice [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]