Thread by @TheLitCritGuy

#TheoryTime?

The Great Caliban: The Struggle Against The Rebel Body - A Thread.

As Foucault points out, one of the preconditions for the development of capitalism is the process of disciplining the body.

Federici understands this process of disciplining as an attempt by church and state authorities to transform individual power into labor-power.

So - the questions to cover: how was this process conceived and mediated in the philosophical debates of the time and what strategic interventions did it give rise to?

The 16thC in Western Europe - the era of the emerging mercantile middle class & the protestant Reformation also saw the emergence of a new concept of the person.

The embodiment of this new person is Shakespeare's Prospero who combines the brute materiality of Caliban with the spirituality of Ariel.

In his defeat of Caliban, Prospero admits that "this thing of darkness is mine" - reminding the audience that there is something problematic about this human combination of angel & beast...

This debate, foreshadowed by Prospero, emerges in the 17thC as the conflict between Reason and the Passions of the Body. (moving that old medieval debate of angel v devil to within the human body)

To quote Thomas Browne

"Let me be nothing, if within the compass of myself I do not find the battail of Lepanto: Passions against Reason, Reason against Faith..."

So, this historical shift is reflected in a shift in the metaphorical field as philosophical representations of individual society borrows images from the politics of the state.

Writers referred to multitudes, rebellious subjects, seditious and imperious commands all within the individual.

This is not just a linguistic point but reflective of a broader process of social reformation, whereby in the age of Reason the rising bourgeoisie attempting to remake the subordinate classes in line with the needs of capitalism.

According to Weber, the reform of the body is at the core of bourgeois ethics because capitalism makes acquisition the ultimate purpose of life rather than a means of meeting our needs.

Capitalism attempts to overcome our 'natural state' by breaking the barriers of nature, and by lengthening the working day beyond the limits set by the sun, the seasons and even the body itself.

Of course, Marx too sees alienation from the body as a distinguishing trait of capitalist work-relation. Labor as a commodity means workers lose control over their activity & it becomes a site of self-estrangement.

Furthermore capitalism encourages the worker to view their labor-power (faculties, energies etc) as a commodity. Reducing the body to yet another commodity to be exchanged.

By the 2nd half of the 19thC we see the emergence of the temperate, prudent worker - proud to possess a watch, and who sees the capitalist mode of production as self-evident laws of nature."

In contrast, in the era of primitive accumulation, the "liberation" of labour power was not sufficient to force the dispossessed proletariat to accept wage labor.

The peasants and artisans didn't peacefully agree to work for a wage but often became vagabonds, beggars and criminals - often preferring the gallows than this new condition of work.

This was the first capitalist crises. In response the bourgeoisie responded by making a disciplined workforce through bloody terror.

This was done through the introduction of laws defending private property, the 'bloody laws' that sought to bind people to their jobs as once serfs had been bound to the land and lots of executions.

During Henry VIII's reign some 72,000 people were hung. In the 1570s around 3-400 "rogues" were "devoured by the gallows in one place or another every year.."

There wasn't just this repressive response, but there was social legislation too. In 16thC France & ENgland games were outlawed (esp. gambling) taverns were closed "unproductive" sexuality curtailed.

The body - particularly the body of the proletariat - was both a threat but also the source of labour power which produced wealth.

The same subject which could rob, could also make you rich...

The body was a threat but was also fascinating - one only need to see the ways in which the body becomes the site for philosophy too - think of Descartes and Hobbes.

As Federici argues "in Mechanical Philosophy we perceive a new bourgeois spirit that calculates, classifies, makes distinctions and degrades the body only in order...to maximize its social utility."

Once its devices were 'deconstructed and it was itself reduced to a tool, the body could be opened to an infinite manipulation of its powers and possibilities.'

Just as Nature, reduced to a "great Machine" could be conquered and its secrets "penetrated" (to quote Frankenstein) so too could the body be caught in a "system of subjection" (Foucault)

As Federici puts it, 'the body had to die, so that labor power could live.'

What died was the idea of the body as a receptacle of magical power that had prevailed in medieval times - there's a direct link between what the mechanical philosophers found irrational & what the state made illegal.

It is in this context that we must read the attack upon witchcraft, that despite the best efforts of the church was still widespread

At the basis of magic was the idea that there was no separation between matter & spirit, and thus saw the cosmos as a living organism laden by occult forces, where every element is in harmony with the rest.

From palmistry to divination to numerology there were a variety of practices designed to bend the power of nature to human will.

A necessary condition for the rationalization of work is the destruction of magic, as magic is an illicit form of power - you could get what you want without work!

"Magic kills industry" to quote Francis Bacon - after all the idea that you could get what you wanted without labor was the last thing that was needed.

How could you impose regular working days if your workforce believed that some days were lucky or unlucky?

The common belief that magic charms could help you find treasure was an impediment to the institution of work discipline. Equally dangerous was the lower class interest in prophecy too.

Prophecy was often the means by which the poor externalized their desires, given legitimacy to their plans and even spurred to action. Hobbes warned prophecy was that which 'directs men in their deliberations.'

Magic and capitalism were fundamentally incompatible and thus, with the approval of many, a campaign of terror was launched against it.

To quote Hobbes again: "As for witches, I think not that their witchcraft is any real power, but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief that they have they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can"

Once these superstitions were eliminated Hobbes wrote that "men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience"

To quote Federici "the stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died...were laboratories in which much social discipline was sedimented and much knowledge about the body was gained."

A significant element in this context was the condemnation as maleficium of abortion and contraception - a condemnation which condemned the female body into the hands of the state and the medical profession.

Yet there was much resistance to these new disciplinary techniques - Federici brings up the Tynburn Riots Against the Surgeons

In early 18thC London friends and relatives of the executed would fight off the assistant of surgeons from seizing the corpse of the dead - for the fear of dissection was as a great as the fear of death.

Dissection was a second and greater death - and these fights at the foot of the gallows exemplify the clash between two opposite conceptions of the body, between the body as machine & the body as a source of power.

Medical knowledge depended upon these corpses - the course of science is intimately connected to the attempts of the state to impose control on an unwilling workforce.

The state was making new kinds of subject through these techniques, and developing this new kind of subject is what William Petty would call Political Arithmaticus - social behavior in terms of Numbers, Weights & Measures.

To quote Federici, 'we can see, in other words, that the human body, and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.'

I'll stop there - hope you've enjoyed this, and I strongly recommend 'Caliban and the Witch' - it's a genuinely brilliant read.

If you enjoy these threads, you can buy me a coffee here: ko-fi.com/A736KL3

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