Inhuman Three

Jameson’s Marxism and Form has numerous passages on Sartre and the ‘Inhuman’, at least it seems so to me. Here, from one of them:

“Thus the desert, as I try to survive it, is revealed as an inhuman landscape.”

Only the project of surviving or crossing the desert discloses its 'inhumanity'. It is ‘an inhuman landscape only in relation to a specific project. But what has also been made known is our 'humanity' - by way of what resists and threatens it.

The project, therefore, is ontologically prior – both the human and inhuman are made known in arrears, in the wake of the project. The project is that First Judgement which discloses to us the contours and content of our World.

Okay, we are defined by certain basic ‘projects’, even if the project is only survival (thus, it is not to be thought of as a formulated project). There is, however, an inflexiblity and perverse bias already present in the environing world, and it's this which defamiliarises and removes our projects from us. Language itself, for example:

‘the inertia of the very language and ideas we use, which have in them […] a kind of counter-finality of their own, and which alienate our own thought and works to the degree that our original intention is deflected by this resistance and by the previous history of the material itself.’

That which confiscates from us our intentions and aims, and re-directs them along its own path – or the very product of such estrangement - can be defnied as the Inhuman.

This last also alerts us to the fact that the inhuman is not always simply non-human. The machines that enter into the mental activity of the factory girl (see below), the brutality of bureaucratic regulation and so on, are all human products, albeit rendered unrecognisable.

Sartre is also attuned to how the human takes on something of the colour of the inhuman. There is a famous, often quoted example from the Critique:

In the early period of semi-automatic machines, interviews have shown that girls involved in this specialised work drifted into specifically sexual daydreams while working, recalled their room, their bed, the night, the most private details about the couple in solitude. But in reality it was the machine that dreamed through them about their erotic experience: for the type of attention required in that particular kind of work allowed neither for complete distraction (thinking of something else entirely) nor complete concentration (thinking interferes with physical operation); the machine thus requires and creates in the human being an inverted semi automatism in order to complete itself: an explosive mixture of unconscious vigilance and; the mind is absorbed without being used, involving a kind of lateral control, while the body functions mechanically under a kind of surveillance.

The demands of the machine are met, internalised, by the worker. The specific bodily and mental disposition of the worker ‘answers’ the requirement of the machine, lives in symbiosis with the machine. The human organism has restructured itself around an inhuman presence and is now irrevocably modified. In trying to ‘subjectify’ the machine, the worker’s substance is subtly altered.

It seems to me that in all the variants of the ‘Inhuman’ I’ve mentioned rest on or relate to ideas of alienation or self-estrangement. The Inhuman seems to designate experiences which produce such estrangement or the material/ institutional embodiments thereof. Not particularly helpful, perhaps. So no more inhuman ruminations from me for the time being.