October 11, 2007
Great Moments in Historical Materialism– Grounds of Critique
Posted by larvalsubjects under Critique, Ideology, Immanence, Individuation, Politics, Uncategorized
I apologize for my general lack of engagement recently on Larval Subjects. This is not from a lack of desire to respond and engage. Last week my office computer decided to blow up and I’ve only had computer access at home as a result. In the morning I’m generally rushing about to get to class, while in the evenings I’m generally too exhausted to do much of anything beyond drinking a glass of wine. Couple this with being in the midsts of putting together two presentations, four forthcoming articles, and getting the index for the book together, and you can bet that I’m ready to shoot myself. Time has been at such a premium that I found myself irritated, this morning, at having to waste an extra minute to find a pair of socks. Not rational, I know. Hopefully the situation will be rectified soon.
I recently came across the following passage in Book One of De Rerum Natura:
A property is that which not at all
Can be disjoined and severed from a thing
Without a fatal dissolution: such,
Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow
To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,
Intangibility to the viewless void.
But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,
Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else
Which come and go whilst Nature stands the same,
We’re wont, and rightly, to call by-products.
Even time exists not of itself; but sense
Reads out of things what happened long ago,
What presses now, and what shall follow after:
No man, we must admit, feels time itself,
Disjoined from motion and repose of things.
It is difficult to sense the full force of this passage. Or perhaps it is that we are today so accustomed to this thought that we do not tremble when confronted by these words. These truly are thoughts and words that make the world rumble, even if only expressed in a few verses. Lucretius distinguishes between properties and by-products. On the one hand, properties are qualities of a compound object (compound because it’s composed of atom and void) that cannot be disjoined from the object without that object being destroyed. Even though the weight of a compound object can be changed, it is not possible to separate weight from an object. One might object that wetness can be subtracted or disjoined from water when it turns into ice. However, the person that argues such a claim has failed to recognize that in transitioning from water to ice the atoms composing the compound have configured to form something new. Similarly, a new connected property here emerged: cold from ice.
Lucretius’ stunning observation– I’d be interested to see whether it was commonly made in antiquity, I cannot think of other examples off-hand –is that by-products are not connected to the object itself. Lucretius’ examples are clear enough: regardless of whether I have the property of wealth, poverty, slavery, freedom, or am in a state of war, or peace, I remain the same person. That is, were I to lose all my wealth, I am still this person who has lost all of his wealth. As such, these properties are not connected properties of my being. This might be more difficult to see in cases of war and peace until we recall Deleuze’s theory of sense, where senses like “battle” are not in the bodies in conflict, but hover above it as an incorporeal sense of the event. More concretely, we have learned this century that war is a speech act… And if we know this, especially in the United States, then this is because today we have many actions that are police actions, though qualitatively indiscernible from war at the level of how bodies are interacting.
Lucretius’ distinction between properties and by-products has implications that reach far beyond the examples he gives, and which are a central axiom of historical materialism. His examples of freedom and slavery are particularly telling. Freedom, slavery, are not natural features of physical bodies, but are rather a product of relations among bodies. That is, they are, according to this metaphysic, institutions. Many will recall that Aristotle had argued that non-Greeks and women are naturally inferior to Greek men, thereby treating this inferiority as a property of these bodies. Aristotle naturalizes social relations, thereby treating them as the natural order of things.
If Lucretius’ words cause the world to shake, then this is because this thesis belongs not only to the various social identities we might possess, treating them all as by-products rather than properties, but it also extends (without him saying so) to all social institutions as well. Being-a-king is not a property of the king, but is instead a by-product of being recognized as a king by his subjects. Gender relations between men and women are not the natural way of things, but the result of ongoing autopoiesis whereby both parties involved reproduce themselves in their gendered identities through their interactions with one another (without it being possible to say one group produces the identity of the other). Sexual identities are not natural properties, but are again by products of practices and institutions.
These concepts are perhaps familiar to us today– though I hear people making such claims on behalf of the natural all the time –so it is difficult to hear just how much they make the world rumble and shake. However, if there is one central function of the project of critique and historical materialism, this is to show the essential contingency of social institutions and identities… The way they are “by-products” or “accidents”, rather than properties. The activity of demonstrating the contingency of institutions is not an activity of “debunking” or falsifying. We might, for instance, show that rights are by-products or accidents of certain social organizations. This does not render rights false, just as it is no less the case that I am a professor because being-a-professor required a whole host of institutions from universities, places to teach, states, and my students acting towards me as a philosopher. Rather, if rights are by-products or accidents, then this is because they can fail to exist in certain bodies. This entails that perhaps we fight all the more vigorously for the existence of these by-products. Rather, in the activity of critique, in the activity of uncovering contingency, we render possibilities available, allowing us to counter-factually envision how other forms of life might come to be. The slave that comes to see the institution of slavery as a contingent by-product of his socio-historical setting rather than a natural property of his being also comes to envision the possibility of another life, another world. Perhaps we should begin with the premise that we’re all slaves. Perhaps this would paradoxically be the most affirmative position one could advocate. Sometimes the entire world is changed through a simple distinction, an incorporeal transformation, a concept, that then functions as a lens so potent it is able to concentrate light into fire.
October 12, 2007 at 1:58 am
This is an interesting articulation of a method which I feel like I’m fairly familiar with (as you suggest we probably ought to be). I’ve called it the technique of ‘denaturalisation’ before, and you’re right, it’s extremely effective. I like this description of it (what can I say, you have a way with words ;-)), although there are a few things that I wanted to ask you about (not presuming that in this turning-over-of-thoughts you’re actually advocating the bits I’m critiquing, but just to put them out there for discussion). It struck me that the example of water becoming ice was remarkably similar to the rich person becoming poor. I’m not sure that one ‘remain[s] the same person.’ Sure, we tend to narrativise it in that way, but we seek consistency rather than difference in those narratives, so it’s unsurprising.
Perhaps this links to a larger point: you point out that certain contexts see *only* particular things as by-products (those which suit the political desires of the time) and leaves the rest as natural(ised). What I’m trying to suggest is that in seeing the rich person becoming poor as the *same* person, we may be naturalising the individual as the site to which these ‘by-product properties’ attach. I suppose this is mostly a Foucauldian point, really: that the ‘person’ doesn’t pre-exist the context, and that seeing the ‘person’ ‘themselves’ as not necessarily a natural formation is key to what he would see as a thoroughly resistant form of ‘render[ing] possibilities available’ because it’s challenging that which power is most thoroughly invested in (the individual.)
My other point (sorry to ramble; apparently when I delurk, I do so with a vengence! ;-)) is related to this question, but is more about bodies and individuation: the language of ‘by-products,’ combined with your point above, seems to suggest (and I may be misreading, so please feel free to correct!) that individual bodies pre-exist their coming into contact. Perhaps, instead, their individuality can be understood as the result of particular relations within what we might call the body politic (or really, any other noun which tries to get at an originary bound-togetherness, since these things tend to be multiple).
And finally, something about the language of ‘property’ here makes my skin prickle, primarily because it feels a) capitalist in some sense (and I think that capitalist understandings of the subject leave a fair bit out, that is, tending to render possibilities *unavailable*) and b) vaguely essentialist, because it feels like once you’ve stripped out the non-properties (the by-products), you have the true essence of the thing. And essentialism… well, in the end, I guess this is kinda the same point as above. But intriguingly, I think that our ability to see certain things as properties of people is an extraordinarily powerful politicised force given the capitalism of the context. But I think that’s a story for another day… Thanks again for this; the turning-over of these ideas in another context is intriguing and useful. I do hope your computer gets either de-blown-up or replaced soon!
October 12, 2007 at 3:13 am
[...] continued fascination with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura has led to another wonderful post on historical materialism, in which Sinthome quotes a passage that expresses one of the forms of perception and thought [...]
October 12, 2007 at 3:43 am
Wildly, wow, what a way to level a critique! I simultaneously feel acknowledged, disengaged, and challenged; and thereby disarmed. What is one to do in the face of such deft and tasteful rhetoric (and argument)? At any rate, I very much share your concerns about the distinction between connected properties and by-products, and have sought to undermine it in the past through a series of metaphysical gestures designed to undermine anything like a substantialist metaphysics. A good example of this would be this post, where I attempt to show, through a highly selective reading of Hegel’s Logic, how the identity of an object is always a product of its inter-relationship to other objects:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/03/21/existents-hegels-critique-of-the-in-itself/
I have also sought to develop this thesis in my various attempts to figure out Deleuze’s account of individuation; especially here:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/09/29/working-notes-for-an-appendix-on-deleuzes-theory-of-individuation/
On the one hand, I find Lucretius’ thesis that the atoms are eternal and indestructible to be highly problematic (I tend to side more on the Leibnizian side of an infinitely divisible matter:
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/10/30/of-operations-badiou-and-structured-situations/
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/09/15/worlds-in-fragments/
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2006/08/29/leibnizs-garden-camera-phones-kandinskian-tidal-pools-and-figures-isolated-from-the-figurative/)
However, in Lucretius’ favor, there are two points worth cite. First, Lucretius is very clear, in Book II of De Rerum Natura that all beings differ and are characterized by difference, rather than in terms of a shared essence. As I understand it– and perhaps I’m reading far too much into the text –he’s implicitly leveling a critique against Plato’s primacy of the forms over appearances here, as well as the primacy of the formal cause in Aristotle. For Lucretius, all beings will differ as a result of their unique combination of atoms and circumstances, such that any “general terms” will only be approximations of real beings. Likewise, Lucretius also argues that there are no substantial objects, but rather only combinations of the void and atoms in constant motion. In other words, even the most apparently solid objects are in constant motion, perpetually changing, lacking any permanent essence (he gives a beautiful and highly amusing passage about flocks of sheep seen from a distance that appear to be still when we very well know they’re frolicking about and chomping on delectable blades of grass covered in morning dew).
None of this, of course, is to defend what does truly appear to be a residual essentialism in Lucretius. The idea behind posts like that is to locate and resurrect what have been potent critical tools throughout the history of philosophy and critical thought. For instance, I had a similar series, for a while, on the third book of Spinoza’s Ethics, that I discontinued when some friends poked some fun at me, saying they never read the propositions. So much the worse for them, I suppose. The idea isn’t to swallow the various critical systems hook, line, and sinker, but rather to extract these tools, in much the same way that Dr. Frankenstein might extract particular needed parts, and set them in new contexts. Lucretius was certainly a potent critical thinker… Potent enough to warrant the wholesale burning of his books across Europe and a good Christian like Saint Jerome fabricating stories about his demise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius#Life_of_Lucretius
Many thanks for your comment. I hope you’re not such a lurker in the future!
October 12, 2007 at 1:32 pm
“the distinction between connected properties and by-products” here reminds me of the distinction between two kinds of becoming in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. you can have a corporeal becoming on one side, and then this problematic, strange event on top of this that gives a form of being to relations external to their terms (if you read it as connected to bodies in general and not only to words). In a sense then the bodies do pre-exist, but they’re no more essensialistic than that the “by-products” can become the conditions for new ways the bodies can exist in (when the effect becomes the cause in logic of sense).
the whole picture would then be that the properties and the by-products work together against the essensialism.
(my english is not the best, sorry for that…)
October 12, 2007 at 1:57 pm
This had occured to me as well. I think the comparison comes out even more clearly in Deleuze’s discussion of incorporeals in the “Postulates of Linguistics” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze devotes an appendix to Lucretius in The Logic of Sense.