The end of the Neolithic? (Part 2)

Abstract

ions. To say ob-ject is to say that reality is offered up to be seen, or “thrown before” the eyes of an observer. From the objectification of our immediate environment to the contemplation of essences (according to the etymology of the Greek notion of theory), sight is always primary in the metaphysical approach to being. Consequently, the critique of metaphysics is just as much a critique of image-worlds as it is a critique of the technological apparatus. Indeed, the rise of conceptual abstraction with respect to the perceived world, that is to say, the increasingly systematic reduction of moving reality to countable, geometric coordinates capable of being 2. Translator’s note: The French objet, like the English word “object,” comes from the Latin objectus (thrown in front; ob 1 jaceō, jacēre, from 1 to throw). Similarly, the French word jeter (to throw) comes from the Latin jaceō, jacēre. apprehended technologically, has been accompanied by a proliferation of images. This increase has accelerated through our current moment to the point where the ubiquitous spectacles of postmodernity can be considered as the contemporary culmination of humanity’s gradual attempt to replace life’s inner vibration within the whole fabric of the real by a succession of stable, objective, and rationally delimited abstractions. As a leap forward out of the immediate experience of things, we effortlessly pass from the world of tools to the world of machines and then on to the world of spectacles (and also of specters), as described by Guy Debord in 1967, in the second paragraph of The Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life” (Debord 1994, 12). As such, the theorist of Situationism agrees with Marx, for whom post-Hegelian speculative philosophy was essentially the “first wholesale production of ghosts” (Marx and Engels 1968, 179 [erste Gespensterfabrikation im Grossen]; see also Derrida 1993, 214; Vioulac 2015, 245). Like Marx, he places this spectral condition in the wake of the entire history of Western philosophy, a project he defines as “an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision” (Debord 1994, 17). The specificity of the society of the spectacle, though, can be found in the layering of alienation by consumption upon alienation by labor. Moving from the proletariat to the society of consumption (consommariat), the human masses are submerged in a universe of mechanical products. And their capacity for productive control (or the unity between knowing and doing), which determines their power of revolution, is in turn spectralized. As such, what occurs is not only the rational fulfillment but also the collapse of theoretical contemplation, that original invention of metaphysics, which attains its purest essence but also loses any establishing capability within the image-world of mechanized consumption. For Heidegger, the inaugural moment of this dramatic fold in humanity’s relationship to the world, epitomized by humanity’s metaphysical outlook and technological apparatus, can be found in the Greek invention of the logos (Heidegger 2014). This invention resulted in a harmony between pure reason and the real, such that the Lifeworld became fixed as a cosmos, resonating to the mathematical rhythms of the music of the spheres. An idea was thus introduced, still readily accepted in twentieth-century philosophy, that the Greek logos was the source not only of metaphysics but also of technocapitalist modernity, which is the fulfillment of the 3. “In diesem [Wesen] also ruht die unergründliche Vorzeit; aber obwohl es treu den Schatz heiliger Vergangenheit bewahrt, ist es doch in sich selbst stumm und kann nicht aussprechen, was es in sich verschließt” (from a manuscript of 1813). 4. Sentence struck out in the manuscript: “The first historic act of these individuals, through which they distinguished themselves from animals, was not that they thought, but that they began producing their own means of existence” (emphasis original). 5. See also: “Geometry comes from surveying, arithmetic from the art of numbers, mathematical mechanics from everyday mechanics, etc. Thus, without even precisely formulating a hypothesis here, nature and the intuitive world transform into a mathematical world, the world of nature’s mathematical sciences” (Husserl [1935–36] 1989, 375). See Vioulac 2015, 181–83. Labrusse: The end of the Neolithic? (Part 2) 335 metaphysical order—paradoxically so given its seeming lack of a transcendent horizon. The invention of the logos has only been made possible by the prior alienation of living relations of production, which Greek thought (and, after it, all of Western metaphysics) excluded from its field of vision. It thus obscured the fact that the polis made concrete use of two fundamentally technological instruments: slavery, on the one hand, which invalidated the human element (Vioulac 2015, 39; citing Heidegger’s Fundamental Problems in Phenomenology), and money, on the other, which reduced reality to computability. This ideological alienation from an individual’s labor in the abstract logic of production reached its peak in the modern technoindustrial system, when the financial economy achieved an unrivaled power of derealization and machines replaced slavery, causing the worker’s dismembered body to effectively disappear (it is either simply dismissed or it becomes virtually an extension of the machine). If, however, the inventions of slavery and money played a role in the invention of metaphysics, the excavation of the origins of this process requires a conceptual and historical return prior to classical Greece, in the direction of the Neolithic revolution in its broadest conception (Testart 1985). Despite his lack of reliable archaeological data and hermeneutic instruments, Marx was the first to gesture in this direction when he suggested that modern processes such as the objectification and abstraction of life could be conceptualized with reference to their “prehistoric” roots. For that matter, as early as 1845, in The German Ideology, he denounced the artificial dichotomy between “prehistory” and “history”: “When short on substance and when there is no debate over stupidities of a theological, political, or literary nature, we Germans do not see history, but ‘prehistoric times’ [vorgeschichtliche Zeit]. It is never explained, however, just how we passed from this absurdity of ‘prehistory’ [Vorgeschichte] to actual history. Nevertheless, our historical speculation seizes on this ‘prehistory’ because it is believed safe from the encroachments of ‘brute facts’ and because it gives free rein to speculative instinct, allowing hypotheses to be produced and destroyed by the thousands” (Marx and Engels 1968, 58). In the historical context of German philosophy of the time, these attacks were directed at Hegelian and Schellingian Idealism. In Schelling’s Zeitalters of 1811–15, in particular, the notion of an “abyssal prehistory” [unergründliche Vorzeit] (Schelling 2012, 6) strengthens the methodological demand to disentangle speculative reasoning from any factual basis. But there is also a direct link between Marx’s hypothesis that man’s production of his livelihood was “the first historic act” (Marx and Engels 1968, 45) and the impending invention of prehistory in the field of archaeology and universal history. Two decades before the word “prehistory” itself was largely publicized, it is as if Marx foresaw that the Neolithic (which had not yet been named) could be placed within a history that leads up to the present. He also intuited that the source of the productivist economy and alienation through labor could be identified within it, as both are based on a systematic rationalization of the real. This allowed him in Das Kapital to describe the system produced by the Industrial Revolution as “the consequence of a history that spans back thousands of centuries” (Marx 1993, 574). He subsequently read and meticulously commented on the works of ethnographer-prehistorians such as Lewis Henry Morgan and John Lubbock, the inventor of the category of Neolithic (Marx 1972). Related intuitions can be found in Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. In order to move from the Galilean logos (and thus also from the “mathematical world of Greek idealities”) to their origins in certain concrete technological activities, he employs examples that, consciously or not, evoke Rousseau with their connection to the birth of agriculture as a type of relationship with the world and not as an archaeological fact: “The practice of land surveying, which had no conception of idealities, preceded the geometry of idealities. Such a pregeometric activity, however, provided the basis of geometry’s meaning, the basis of the great invention of idealization. This included the invention of geometry’s ideal world and, consequently, constructions—a method of objectification that created idealities by means of ‘mathematical existence’” (Husserl [1935–36] 1989, 57).