Anti-Romulus: Notes on the Peculiar Institution of Self

My principle source text for today. Published by Melville House, 2014.

I’ve been reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years (previously mentioned here,) by the great anarchist anthropologist David Graeber over the past few days (this isn’t another book review post; while I like those, they are mainly a way of catching my breath, and I don’t feel the need to do that at the moment.) Graeber’s passing earlier this year hit me rather hard; I didn’t discover Mark Fisher until after his passing, so (if anything) it hit me a bit more like one of the deaths in 2016 – Carrie Fisher and Gene Wilder spring to mind there. He passed away in a Venetian hospital, and this has only cemented my feelings that Venice is a bit of a city of death; not in a terrible way, but in the sense of a beautiful place to go when you’re about to pass away.

But I’m getting off into the weeds. It’s the mark of a great thinker that what they brush against in passing might begin a small cascade that grows into an avalanche that reshapes your thinking. Graeber’s work – like Fisher’s – often seems, to me, to be made up of a series of these moments. I’m not yet done with it, but I wanted to trace out some ideas that were set off by a rather innocuous section – a meditation on Roman property law.

Allow me to start, as it is, with the beginning. This will take the form of a series of quotes and summaries wrenched from their original context and strung together:

In Roman law, property, or dominium, is a relation between a person and a thing, characterized by absolute power of that person over that thing. The definition has caused endless conceptual problems. First of all, it’s not clear what it would even mean for a human to have a “relation” with an inanimate object. Human beings can have relations with one another. But such relations are always mutual. How could one have a mutual relation with a thing? And if one did, what would it mean to give that relation legal standing?

Tod de Spartacus by Herman Vogel.

Graeber then goes on to argue that the genesis of this is most likely in the Roman institution of slavery, which was peculiar in its omnivorous nature: it would devour indebted citizen, Greek philosopher, Germanic barbarian, Jewish rabbi, and Tunisian merchant without regard for any inborn quality. It was a condition that any person could slide into, but it ripped these people from their original context, rendering them simultaneously “people who were also a res, a thing.” It also led to a situation whereby Roman jurists had to hammer down everything relating to this situation: there were literally millions of slaves supporting the cities of the empire, and I’m going to personally guess that the threat of a Spartacist revolt was always on their mind.

In defining slavery, the Romans were also required to define freedom, which is essentially something along the lines of the capacity to do whatever one is not prevented by force or natural law. Of course, this technically means that slaves are “free” as by this definition, because their bondage is enforced by the threat of violence.

This is all running in parallel to the point I wish to make, and I can enthuse about the book all I want but it won’t make my point for me.

Roman mosaic from Dougga, Tunisia (2nd century AD). Uploaded to wikimedia commons by Pascal Radigue, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.

The Roman conception of property was essentially created as an adjunct to the institution of slavery as it was practiced in Rome. Which means that, to a Roman, to own a horse is to have a slave that is a horse. To own a loaf of bread it to have an enslaved loaf of bread in your power, and for you to be free to dispose of it how you will.

These Roman legal codes were not lost, but were the grounds for much commentary in the middle ages, and formed a grounding for the development of western philosophy. This ultimately leads to a situation (last extended Graeber quote here) where:

We own ourselves, therefore outsiders have no right to trespass on us. Again, this might seem an innocuous, even a positive notion, but it looks rather different when we take into consideration the Roman tradition of property on which it is based. To say that we own ourselves is, oddly enough, to cast ourselves as both master and slave simultaneously. We are both the owners (exerting absolute power over our property), and yet somehow, at the same time, the things being owned (being the object of absolute power.) . . . Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves. The most popular solution—to say that each of us has something called a “mind” and that this is completely separate from something else, which we call “the body,” and that the first thing hold natural dominion over the second—flies in the face of just about everything we know about cognitive science. It’s obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make sense without it.

Portrait of Rene Descartes by Frans Hals. I can’t express how badly I want to fight this man, how hard I would lose, or how little I care.

In short, the dominant western conception of self – the Cartesian dichotomy between the mind and the body – is ultimately based on a Roman legal fiction that was originally used to justify slavery. We all conceive of ourselves this way, and it brings with it a cloud of other associations that imply a variety of relations (property and hierarchy, first and foremost) that have been naturalized because this fiction doesn’t make sense without them, and it makes it impossible to root them out so long as the fiction remains in place.

The issue is that this isn’t natural. If it were natural, we would observe it in all philosophical traditions. No culture in the world denies the existence of sight, no culture in the world denies the existence of up and down. There are traditions that deny the separation of mind and body, and the attendant domination of the body by the mind.

As a sidebar, I’m sick of people describing something as natural when it’s only observed in their own culture – if a glance beyond the global north can prove something wrong, then it isn’t natural, and insistence that it is will not make it so.

Diagram of the homunculus theory of mind, taken from the website Conscious Entities.

It is, however, a deeply buried social construct. I’ve been insisting the opposite for years (after taking a phenomenology class in college and digesting the ideas for a few years), that I am not a mind that “inhabits” or “controls” a body, but that I am my body. Still, I find myself easily slipping back into the same attitudes of mind over matter and discussing the strange experience of embodiment with my transgender friends.

There is the pervasive idea in our culture that the mind is an immaterial agent that owns our bodies, operating it through a kind of fleshy control module located behind the eyes and between the ears. But this isn’t how it works – it’s not even correct to say that you’re controlled by your brain. Information passes into the brain in a number of ways – not just from the senses, but also along other channels. Consider: the bacteria in your gut has the ability to produce neurotransmitters and hormones that can alter your behavior. Instead of picturing the brain as a wrinkled little sovereign crouched at the top of the spinal column, perhaps it would be best to think of it as the beleaguered secretary for a democracy with a franchise of a hundred trillion.

Octopus using a coconut shell as a defensive tool, taken from The Guardian. Of the animals listed, crows and octopi have been observed using tools, and crows, dolphins, and elephants have all been known to intentionally get intoxicated. Maybe it’s a vertebrate thing, or perhaps we just can’t understand octopus narcotics.

This is all getting off into the weeds. There’s a reason for that: we can’t really know what the mind is for the same reason that we can’t really understand the eye just by looking at it; we know what it does in general terms, we can guess at some of the broadest principles, but it’s impossible to really understand. The mind, I feel comfortable saying, is much more complex than the eye, and we don’t have an alternative (anyone who tells you that computers are anywhere near strong, or “general”, AI are most likely selling something or parroting someone selling something.) Until we do, we can’t get an objective picture of the mind – unless we can get a dolphin, a crow, an octopus, or an elephant to weigh in on it, and preferably the others giving alternative perspectives.

What this means to me is that we should act as if this question is unsolvable until such an opportunity arises. What that means is that we need to be careful about the metaphors we use to frame the issue, and I’m going to say that picking metaphors that bring in relationships of slavery and domination are a bad idea, full stop. They’re going to be hard to wipe out, especially because it’s impossible to really legislate changes in language, much less in the metaphors that people use to talk about things.

You can’t just unilaterally decide that certain metaphors are supposed to be retired, and demand that other people change their way of communicating. What I suspect you can do is try to craft more robust and useful metaphors that communicate ideas more effectively, supplanting the old metaphor in a pseudo-Darwinian fashion.

I’m not sure what, exactly, such a metaphor should focus on, especially with so much other metaphorical baggage in play – we use metaphors to cast ourselves as computers, as corporations, and so on – and negotiating not just a new metaphoric relationship but building it up as robust and naturalizable would be difficult. I hesitate to take a page from Eclipse Phase or the general thinking of the transhumanist movement (I don’t think it’s productive to compare the mind to software or the body to hardware, and the burden of proof isn’t on me there: that’s a naturalized metaphor and I refuse to argue on their terms.)

Perhaps viewing the mind not as the owner of the body, but of our whole being as some kind of flowering plant, would be productive – the mind as the flower and the body as the leaves and roots, to emphasize the interdependent relationship of the two aspects? Perhaps encoding them in the relationship between a dependent philosopher or artist and their patron (like the relationship between Leonardo da Vinci and Cesare Borgia,) with the dreaming, abstract-thinking mind depending upon the body for continuation and sustenance would be useful. This strikes me as a simple inversion of the original problem, and I’m not a big fan of the idea of encoding inequality in a basic metaphor.

Clearly, I’m still working on it.

An aside: where did “like a boss” and similar statements begin? The default, it seems to me, is to dislike one’s boss, to the point liking one’s superior is an anomaly: yet everyone wishes to be this figure that wields power without possessing esteem.

When you get down to it, this is all an issue of subjectivity. We are all subjects (meaning that we’re beings that have subjective experience of the world and exhibit agency in that same world.) and our mode of subjectivity is produced by the world that is presented to us: being a subject in a neoliberal world is an alienating and difficult experience. You don’t have any real fellowship with anyone outside of sporting events and churches and everything is simultaneously your responsibility and too big for you to do anything about, and everything costs so much money and you’re supposed to start a business – so you better hope that people keep having children, or else who are you going to be the boss of? Everyone’s becoming the boss of someone else, the population needs to increase geometrically so you’re actually the boss of someone. But, of course, overpopulation is a real problem. You’ve been told that (and you’re not going to admit that you think that it’s not really the white children that are the problem, but you think it.)

How could any part of this shit show be natural?

What a load of bullshit.

If the neoliberal self is a house, it’s a house haunted by prior conceptions of self. There’s the social-democratic self, the grandfather with the union job who didn’t go to college and still sent an absurd number of children off to college (you [and by you I implicitly mean “me”, because I’m using myself as a model here] have an advanced degree and you’ve never made anything like a living wage.) There’s the settler-colonialist self, with his bloody hands and his continent of dead men. There’s the feudal-sovereign self you imagine was a king, but was most likely a peasant farmer in some corner of England that’s a day’s travel from London, but is treated like the moon. And in the basement of this all, haunting it all, is the ghost of the Roman-Imperial self, the jurist who decrees that you are the basilisk, the worst paradox: you are the slave-that-owns-itself.

Again, what a load of bullshit.

This idea has older roots. The Roman slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus once wrote that “you are a little soul, carrying a corpse.” Edgar has paraphrased this in the past as “you are a ghost, poking a monkey with a stick.” Either one gets the idea across.

This leads to a number of effects: not just self-control, but the need for self-control — after all, if the body is an independent, abject being, a beast gripped by overheating drives that have to be moderated by the cool rationality of the mind, it gives license for these drives to run wild when reason is out to lunch. By partitioning them, walling them off, disavowing them, we create the situation where it is inevitable that the abject slave-subject, the body, breaks its chains and runs wild. True responsibility would not be reason ruling over the appetite, but reason and appetite working in concert — if we conceive of them as separate at all.

I can’t help but think of Joy Division when the subject of “control” in the abstract comes up — but the song itself is about a young woman Ian Curtis knew in passing who suffered from epilepsy, and who eventually died from the condition. Here it is most starkly: self-control as life and death.

Slavery obviously exists in some corners of the world. At some times, for large swathes of the human population, it is wiped out. Maybe, as Robert Evans contends in the “Bastard Manifesto” episode of Behind the Bastards, human beings are inherently aggressive and hierarchizing – though he proposes that equality is a technology that we developed over the years to deal with this problem. We may be inherently bastards, but we’re also inherently naked, and I seem to be wearing pants as I write this, despite being in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Because of this, I don’t see why the fundamental relationship of my being (myself to myself) should be one of master and slave, or owner and property.

I contend that this is a problem which can be solved. It will take time and effort, but it is not an insurmountable problem. I also view this as a problem that must be solved, especially if I’m serious about my conviction that hierarchy tends to be harmful (I accept it in emergencies, but permanent hierarchy is definitely a problem.) If hierarchy can be denaturalized, I think that the whole human race would be better off, and I think that it would ultimately lead to a better world for all of us (we could at least stop listening to oil executives when it comes to climate change.)

Of course, I’m reminded of a quote I read from a different David Graeber piece, this one published in The Baffler, called “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse”, in which he wrote:

Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint?

(okay seriously, that was the last block quote.)

What this means is that, oftentimes, demands for particular courses of action right from the outset are a conservative impulse, a way of protecting the status quo so that nothing, fundamentally, has to change. This is patently false – the world changes because people work together to make a change in it. It’s all in the negotiation of different interests. This negotiation, when it happens explicitly, happens in language, and that brings the assumptions of that language into the process of negotiation. The dualistic conception of the self has had a long time to filter into language.

In my opinion this has reached its apex in what I think of as the corporate conception of the self – we talk about “my body” and “my mind” and “my self” but this all suggests a relation of ownership that runs through the whole thing without a particular owner. Almost like each of us is the entrepreneurial head of a tiny little corporation, and we conceive of the different aspects of it – the body, the mind, the self, the relationships – as assets to be nurtured or disposed of as befits our strategy for this quarter. This conversion, of the Cartesian homunculus from lilliputian spectator to tiny businessman, is the cornerstone of the neoliberal project, it seems to me, which wants all of us to turn every part of our being into a financially countable asset.

Image taken from the Radical Philosophy article on Viveiros de Castro.

This, I feel, is most likely the cultural reaction to the transformation of corporations into legal people – after all, if corporations are people, maybe that means that people are corporations. While awful, and in need of legal revisions to fix the breach this has introduced, I’m not sure that this is quite as pernicious as it seems to some other commentators. After all, it raises questions about what it means to be human, and to quote another Anthropologist I read this year, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in Cannibal Metaphysics: “When everything is human, the human becomes a wholly other thing.”

And perhaps opening up that conceptual space to examination – provided we remain conscious of human rights, and avoid saying anything barbarous as a result – is something valuable.

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