Specious Being
Specious Being? some notes on species being
I’d like to begin to make some cursory notes on the concept of species being. This’ll begin with a list of resources and will proceed, from there, to pile together a small heap of thoughts
Howard Slater’s review of Species Being and Other Stories by Frere Dupont | Internationalist perspectives debate (initiated by Rose) | Marcel Stoetzler’s ‘Adorno, Sex, Non-Identity’ | Alfred Schmidt’s The Concept of Nature in Marx | Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Special Being’ from Profanations and ‘Critique of the Instant and the Continuum’ from Infancy and History | Benedict Seymour’s ‘Blurred Boundaries: art, sport and activity’
New notes on Species Being
Dupont relates species being as something lifted from Marx’s early writing and the only point at which he does come close to defining it or his particular use of it is to say something like - ‘revolt, that is species being’.
Revolt is central to Dupont’s critique of existing left theory and also at the very centre of the constitution of the human – human essence as change, suffering, refusal, perversity and so on…
‘Revolt exists beyond use-value, and it is manifested beyond useful revolt. It expresses what is human but not as a social value, more as a the injured response… Most Revolutionary Theory thus misrepresents discontent and greivance and attempts to contain it within an ideological framework… but with, at best, only temporary success – revolt also revolts against revolution. Human essence overruns, and so thwarts, all understanding of it…. at the present juncture there is a tendency amongst the proletariat to express the rejection of capitalist relations through prolonged sickness, depression, obsessions, fanaticism, drunkenness, interpersonal violence… rather than say by marching through the streets in protest. For the left this recomposition of struggle into an intimate bodily reaction feels like a retreat – but they are wrong, in fact it is an advance, it is a move closer to the proper ordering of perspective and significance. Revolt is an intimate relatedness to the world, and therefore most real at the level of immediate feeling – it is really felt, it cannot be reduced to a mere political perspective…’ - Frere Dupont, Species Being and other Stories, Ardent Press, 2007
This is also relevant to Dupont’s category of the pre-human – which is much more fully rendered than species being, yet pretty confusing at first. What, I understand now, is that the ‘pre-human’ is everything that cannot be admitted into the current conception of the human and this is closely related to Dupont’s attack on political mileaus – instead wanting to form a politics beginning from everything which cannot be admitted into / cannot be admitted by these mileaus. Dupont would appear to be drawing on / playing on theories of the pre-individual in individuation – the pre-individual that is the mileau and pre-condition for the encounter between I and we and what each draws upon in their individuation.
Species being in the Grundrisse
Initially I’d thought that Species Being is not referred to in the Grundrisse, however the Dyer-Witheford (Species-beings: For Biocommunism
Nick Dyer-Witheford Paper Presented at the Historical Materialism Conference, “Many Marxisms”, London School of Oriental and African Studies, Nov. 7-9, 2008.) cites pages (Nicolaus trans) 243 ‘that their common species-being [Gattungwesen] is acknowledged by all. It does not happen elsewhere that elephants produce for tigers, or animals for other animals.’
p.496 ‘He appears originally as a species-being [Gattungwesen], clan being, herd animal – although in no way whatever as a {GREEK WORD – political being} in the political sense. Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation [Vereinzelung]. It makes the herd-like existence superfluous and dissolves it… In bourgeois society, the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively; but the thing which stands opposite him has now become the true community [Gemeinwesen], which he tries to make a meal of, and which makes a meal of him.’ [See Camatte??]
In addition to these two explicit mentions, the ‘all-sided activity’ much cited in Loren Goldner and Benedict Seymour’s recent piece on Sport and Art is explicitly related by the Grundrisse’s translator, Martin Nicolaus, to the idea of species being:
‘Finally, instead of ’species-being’, the Grundrisse speaks of two very broadly and generally defined types of human individuality. The first is the ‘private individual’, meaning the individual as private proprietor […] The place of this type is taken by the social individual, the individual of classless society, a personality type which is not less, but rather more, developed as an individual because of its direct social nature,. As opposed to the empty, impoverished, restricted individuality of capitalist society, the new human being displays an all-sided, full, rich development of needs and capacities, and is universal in character and development.’ Martin Nicolaus, foreword to Grundrisse, p.51.
Nicolaus cites the following pages as referring to this question of ‘rich all-sided individuality’ or species-being. (Grundrisse p. 161-162, 172-3, 325, 487-8, 540-542, 611, 652, 706, 708, 712, 749, 831-2)
and
The key quote is:
‘Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [Naturbedürftigkeit], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one.’ Marx Grundrisse p.325
More from the Grundrisse
The reciprocal and all-sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product – exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualized, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. Activity, regardless of its individual manifestation, and the product of activity, regardless of its particular make-up, are always exchange value, and exchange value is a generality, in which all individuality and peculiarity are negated and extinguished. This indeed is a condition very different from that in which the individual or the individual member of a family or clan (later, community) directly and naturally reproduces himself, or in which his productive activity and his share in production are bound to a specific form of labour and of product, which determine his relation to others in just that specific way.
The social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of individuals in production here appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals. The general exchange of activities and products, which has become a vital condition for each individual – their mutual interconnection here appears as something alien to them, autonomous, as a thing. In exchange value, the social connection between persons is transformed into a social relation between things; personal capacity into objective wealth. The less social power the medium of exchange possesses (and at this stage it is still closely bound to the nature of the direct product of labour and the direct needs of the partners in exchange) the greater must be the power of the community which binds the individuals together, the patriarchal relation, the community of antiquity, feudalism and the guild system. (See my Notebook XII, 34 B.)[19] Each individual possesses social power in the form of a thing. Rob the thing of this social power and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons. Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal, also) thus disintegrate with the development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society arises and grows in the same measure.
Grundrisse p156-7?
I found the Internationalist Perspective debate useful and Rose’s [http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_species-being.html] description of species-being is very good, if a bit optimistic and instrumental in terms of relatedness to class consciousness. Mac Intosh’s [http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_social-being.html] reply is good too and especially in insisting on an historically situated species-being, though he misses the point by assuming that SP refers to an essence tied up at best with primitive communism or at worst bourgeois essentialism/romanticism. Meanwhile, I think Sander’s contribution [http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_43_human-nature.html] manages to relate species-being to the financial crisis and builds a bridge (at least for me) between Dupont’s surrealism and some of the pressing empirical factors acting on the possibilities for its realisation
What is interesting is that neither Rose, nor MacIntosh (nor Dupont) relate the concept to this later appearance and transformation in the Grundrisse.
From the Internationalist Perspective debate on Species Being
by Rose
1) Species Being(1)
To speak of species being and social being means at the outset placing oneself on two different levels. When one speaks of species being, the reference is to a concept of human nature, and a concept is an abstraction. That abstraction only exists concretely when it assumes a form – a social form. If species being represents human nature, human needs, in a large and abstract sense, social being would be the way in which those general tendencies and those needs find a concrete form and expression; a form that is constantly changing and evolving in a dynamic interaction between the historical conditions and the praxis of the human collectivity that lives it. Social being, thus, reflects every aspect of the transformation that this praxis has on the objective conditions that make up the social environment, as well as the effect on the consciousness that the collectivity develops through its own practice. In that sense, it is mistaken to oppose species being to social being: one cannot exist without the other.
But can one speak of a "human nature" or is it created by the very activity of social being? In a sense, one must answer both questions in the affirmative. In effect it seems clear to me that the human species is marked by certain broad features, and that these are essentially the same in all epochs, in all cultures. At the same time, the forms in which these features express themselves depend on the social context within which they are placed. The life force and death force [pulsion], the drive to understand [pulsion épistémophilique] (the need to understand the world), the need to belong to a collectivity and to bond with other members of that collectivity, the need to give and to receive love, creative activity, the aesthetic quest, are all elements that mark our species from the cave paintings of Lascaux to its most formidable technological developments.What puts the human being perpetually in motion, what makes her never stop, what makes him never satisfied, is the quest for, and expression of, his species being through the mediation of her praxis. In that respect, one cannot speak of species being without inscribing it in history, that is to say, in the movement of continual transformation that man effects on his environment in the effort to satisfy his needs.
Here is how Marx defined species being in the 1844 Manuscripts: "To say that man is a species being, is, therefore, to say that man raises himself above his own subjective individuality, that he recognizes in himself the objective universal, and thereby transcends himself as a finite being. Put another way, he is individually the representative of mankind." "Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species – both his own and those of other things – his object, but also – and this is simply another way of saying the same thing – because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being." (2) "The animal is immediately one with its life activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being."(3) "It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created. In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him."(4) Marx defined a human nature, a human essence of man, which is situated beyond modes of production or features of the environment. One of the characteristics of alienation or estrangement, for him, is precisely the loss of this species being. The capitalist mode of production renders the product of production alien to the person who has produced it, thus making man alien to himself – and, therefore, to his human essence; that is to say, alien to the universal, collective, character of the human being, to his need for bonding, for creative activity, for knowledge, for self-consciousness and consciousness of his environment, as well as alien from his capacity to project himself into the future.
2) Social Being: The Individual Alienated By The Capitalist Socio-Economic Matrix
Social being is, therefore, the effort to manifest [révéler] species being, through a determinant social practice, and to satisfy its fundamental needs.
Throughout human history, there has been repression of human needs, exploitation, domination. These social relations have been situated in a context of real scarcity and the submission of human survival to the hazards of nature – even if these two elements have progressively evolved. The capitalist mode of production brought with it a number of fundamentally qualitative changes: for the first time in history, the human collectivity has developed the means to potentially put an end to scarcity, and has potentially succeeded in freeing its survival from the contingencies of nature. Capitalism has made it possible to free us from the reign of necessity. Alas, we know all too well the next chapter of this history. In order to survive, the capitalist system must preserve scarcity. There, resides a fundamental contradiction of the system: it contains within itself its own negation; its evolution and its very development imply its end. That contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the mode of production compels the capitalist system to produce not more freedom for individuals, but more destruction and a growing alienation. "The political economist tells us that everything is bought with labour and that capital is nothing but accumulated labor, but then goes on to say that the worker, far from being in a position to buy everything, must sell himself and his humanity."
In the same movement, there develops, on the subjective level, alienation. Alienation marks a break [coupure] between the activity of man and his species being: in his overall activity, the human being becomes alien to himself, alien to other humans, alien to what constitutes his human essence. He is reified and cut off from his links to nature. And the social relations in which she acts refract this reified image of a human-commodity. Her praxis is no longer the effort to reveal and give shape to her species being, but rather negates species being in an alienated relationship of man to himself. From being creative, human activity has become sterile, and the only perspective for individuals stuck in that social relationship is to … do nothing ("lazy" adolescents, the "whatever" generation). Alienation also entails a loss of the consciousness that the human being has of his species being and of his identity. But the "motor" that makes it possible for man not to lose himself in that alienated relationship to which his daily practice condemns him, is precisely his consciousness and an intuition of his unsatisfied species being. In decadent capitalism, man, overcome by his own creations, is no longer the master of them; she no longer controls the machine, but is controlled by it. The widening gap between the basic needs of one’s species being and their negation by the very practice of men, permits the emergence of a discontent that goes beyond simple economic demands, culminating in a questioning and in a quest for the satisfaction of real needs. The existence of species being, therefore, constitutes a key element in the process of the development of consciousness and of questioning by the proletariat, through the pressure that it exerts on even the most alienated individuals.
"The machine accommodates itself to man’s weakness, in order to turn weak men into a machine. …. [The capitalist] turns the worker into a being with neither needs nor senses and turns the worker’s activity into a pure abstraction from all activity."(6) "This estrangement partly manifests itself in the fact that the refinement of needs and of the means of fulfilling them gives rise to a bestial degeneration and a complete, crude and abstract simplicity of need …."(7) The activity of the worker, far from being a creative activity, where man realizes and affirms himself, is an activity that impoverishes him, "in which he mortifies his body and destroys his spirit." "The result is that man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions he is nothing more than an animal."(8)
Alien to his own nature, man is also alien to his real needs. And to complete this process, the dominant ideology unceasingly diverts the individual from his quest for his human essence and the satisfaction of his needs, and perverts those needs by providing them with false gratifications.
1. "Species being" in English, L’etre generique in French, are the accepted translations of Marx’s concept of Gattunswesen in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).
2. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts(1844) in Karl Marx, Early Writings (New york: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 327.
3. Ibid., p. 328.
4. Ibid., p. 329.
5. Ibid., p. 287.
6. Ibid., p. 360.
7. Ibid., p. 359.
8. Ibid., p. 327.
9. Ibid., p. pp.351-352.
10. In continental Europe today, those on the left who oppose the present forms of globalization, but who acknowledge that a certain globalization of the economy is progressive, style themselves not as anti-globalization, but as "alternative globalists," after alter mondalistes - a distinction not yet current in the Anglophone world.
11. Op. Cit., p. 365.
12. Ibid., p. 356.
13. Ibid., pp. 350-251.
From reply to Rose by Mac Intosh
But what of Marx’s own claim that man has a species being? This was clearly Marx’s view in 1844, a view consonant with his Young Hegelianism of the time. Indeed, that vision seems to me to be integrally linked to a Hegelian philosophical anthropology and philosophy of history, a vision that Marx would largely – though never completely – overcome. The first problem with this vision is that any historicity of species being is a once only phenomenon. It is generated with primitive communism (or with the birth of the human species) and then becomes both innate and unchanging; that is, it then loses its historicity. Human being, in the form of species being, once it emerges, then becomes fixed and a-historical. For me, such a vision constitutes a formidable obstacle to the historicity of human being and social relations that I believe is constitutive of Marxism as a theory. The Hegelian provenance of the young Marx’s conception of species being, Rose’s reliance on the Paris manuscripts of 1844, also leads to a teleological vision of history, in which the end or goal is fixed at the outset, and in which history becomes a narrative of a loss of the paradise of primitive communism, man’s alienation in class society, and the regaining of paradise (albeit on a "higher" level) through the communist revolution. Such a teleological vision, such a philosophy of history, even when Hegel is stood on his feet, bears an uncanny resemblance to Jewish-Christian eschatology, in which the historical process is pre-ordained, and in which, on the one hand, humankind’s freedom to produce itself (one of the bases of Marxism, for me) is implicitly denied, and on the other hand, the "fact" of contingency, the aleatory, in history is replaced by determinism (to me the mortal enemy of Marxism).
The concept of species being, in my opinion, blocks the way to the very historicity of human being that holds out the promise of the revolutionary transformation that can break the links to both the pre-given and existing forms of subjectivity in which humans have been historically trapped.
Sander’s response
‘[…] the more capitalism’s real domination is developed, or in other words, the more it is based on automated mass-production, the smaller the part that attacks on wages, direct pauperization, represents in the totality of ways in which the capitalist crisis affects the working class. The reason is that the more productivity grows, the more the relative cost of wages declines. Today, capitalism’s crisis affects the working class in many ways not as workers specifically but as human beings: Wars, the destruction of the environment, the destruction of social services, the destruction of community, the growth of insecurity and anxiety…Is it not necessary that the working class, in its struggle, develops an understanding of how all these aspects are linked with its fights for wages, employment and other workplace-related issues, in order to grasp the scope of its undertaking? Is it not the case that the revolution is possible because the working class embodies a human nature that is threatened by capitalism, and only it is in a position to defend it?’
From Jacques Camatte, ‘The Wandering of Humanity’
Activity - ‘capital pushes human beings to engage in the most diverse activities’
‘In its perfected state, capital is representation. Its rise to this state is due to its anthropomorphization, namely to its capitalization of human beings’ and in the opposite ‘capital forces human beings to be human’ Footnote [1]
Gemeinwesen – Watchword ‘at present it is capital that is recomposing man’
‘The finite, limited human being, the individual of bourgeois society, is disappearing. People are passionately calling for the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen. But at present it is capital that is recomposing man, giving him form and matter; communal being comes in the form of collective worker, individuality in the form of consumer of capital. Since capital is indefinite it allows the human being to have access to a state beyond the finite in an infinite becoming of appropriation which is never realized, renewing at every instant the illusion of total blossoming.’
‘Structurally and biologically man is a supersession because he is an overpowerful being. In other words, human beings are explorers of the possible and are not content with the immediately realizable, especially if it is imposed on them. They lose this passion, this thirst for creation — for
what is the search for the possible if not invention ? — when they are debased, estranged, cut off from their Gemeinwesen and therefore mutilated, reduced to simple individuals. It is only with the real domination of the capitalist mode of production that the human being is completely evacuated.’
