Species-Being
Discussion
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"Species-being is rather the capacity to collectively transform this natural basis, making ‘life activity itself an object of will and consciousness’ (Marx, 1964: 67). Witnessing the titanic processes of nascent factory capitalism Marx describes species-being as manifested in the cooperative organization of labour, the increasing power of humans to affect their natural environment, the emancipation of women, the formation of metropolii, and the application of science and technology not only to industry but to the very ‘forming of the five senses’ (1964: 112, 129, 134, 141).
Having introduced Gattungswesen in the Manuscripts, Marx shortly thereafter abandoned it, except for fleeting mentions in Grundrisse and Capital. Because the Manuscripts were not published until 1932, species-being never entered the Leninist lexicon. It was, however, enthusiastically embraced by Marcuse (1972) and Lukacs (1978). No sooner had species-being been resurrected by the Frankfort School, however, than it was repudiated by Althusser (1969), for whom the idea lay on the wrong side of the epistemological chasm between early, immature, and late, scientific Marxism. It reeked of essentialism and teleology. Question of species-being, of the relations of the human to the ‘hedgehog, dragonfly, rhododendron’ were a philosophic trap, belonging to separate theoretical universe than the proper Marxist concepts of ‘the mode of production, productive forces…the relations of production…determination in the last instance by the economy…and so on and so forth’ (Althusser, 2003: 279, 264) This verdict, resonating so strongly with the post-structural critique of ‘man,’ held sway for some time.
In the last decade, however, the concept has drawn renewed comment from Gayatri Spivak (1999), David Harvey (2000), Jason Read (2003), Paolo Virno (2004), Eugene Thacker (2005), and, more obliquely, Melinda Cooper (2008) and others. Ideas do not fall from the sky; this sudden burst of Gattungswesen chatter is not coincidental, but conjunctural – a Mayday signal, perhaps. If in 1844 we had the factory, and in the mid 20th century the social factory of Fordism, now we have the factory planet – or the planet factory, a regime that subsumes not just production, consumption, and social reproduction (as in Fordism), but life’s genetic and ecological dimensions.
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As Donna Haraway (2008: 323) remarks Marx is ‘both at his most humanist and at the edge of something else’. Gattungswesen might really better termed ‘species-becoming’, the activity of a species whose only ‘essence’ is its historical plasticity. ‘Labour’ is humanity’s paradoxical anti-essential essence, its natural ability to change its nature. Gattungswesen can be thought of as the emergent capacity of a human collectivity to identify, assemble and alter itself – to be a species not only in itself, but for itself and also transforming itself, directing its own evolution. Marx’s account warns against apocalyptic or euphoric views of this; it reminds us that humans have always made themselves by a series of grafts, symbioses and prostheses with tools, nutrients, and altered landscapes, so that, as Katherine Hayles put it, ‘we have always been post human’ (1999: 278-9). But it is also a critique of this process. For Marx understands the unfolding of species-being as determined by class and conflict. Alienation, the central problematic of the Manuscripts, is not an issue of estrangement from a normative, natural condition, but rather of who, or what, controls collective self-transformation. It is the concentration of this control in a sub-section of the species, a clade or class of the species–who then acts as gods (albeit possibly incompetent gods) – to direct the trajectory of the rest.
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Marx’s account of species-being is an affirmation of the dynamic capacity of humans to change themselves. But singularity capitalism promises such transformations to a few, denies any meaningful determination of the direction of the process and dictates that some step onto the train across the backs of others. Today’s species transformations are fueled not just by the continuing labours of an industrial proletariat, building machines for its own replacement, but a new realm of bio-workers whose role is to provide the raw materials for the creation of alien life, for the fabrication of successor species: the organ sellers, surrogate mothers, experimental subjects of big pharma, plant and animal breeders dispossessed by corporate biopiracy, coltan miners, e-waste scavengers, and chip assemblers, the labourers of the singularity, whose destroyed lives feed the next mutation in life itself.
When the bio-rifts of neoliberalism make the masters of the planetary economy more and more literally alien from those they rule, no wonder archaic fundamentalisms are the reactive response. The Manuscripts identify two forms in which species-being is alienated: capital and religion (Marx, 1964: 111). As these two complicit alienations of species-being, futuristic capital and atavistic faith, twine around and turn on each other and on themselves in increasingly terrifying wars, all these species-altering forces converge in the one activity where Marx underestimated capital’s transforming powers: the means of destruction. "
(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/digital-labour-species-becoming-and-global-worker)