I was delighted to read this very interesting article from anthropologist Dusan Kazic published on AOC. Building on aspects of Latour’s work, both in the Inquiry and elsewhere, Kazic presents a compelling vision for exiting from “The Economy”, that artificial metaphysical construction that dissociates us from the interactions that comprise real “economic” activity. Here is a translation. Kazic has a book forthcoming with La Découverte, based on his doctoral research, entitled Plantes animées. De la production aux relations avec les plantes. Latour has referred to him in some of his recent work.
I hope you enjoy it!
COVID-19, MY AMBIVALENT ALLY
DUSAN KAZIC
PUBLISHED IN AOC, 15 SEPTEMBER 2020
COVID-19 arrived at the end of 2019, at the very moment I was defending my thesis, which set out to describe the multiple dynamic relationships between French farmers and plants.[1]
Barely three months after that defence, COVID-19 became my “ambivalent ally”. Awfully, it confined me to my house, along with half of humanity. And yet, at the same time, it served as a scientific ally by putting a clear stop to what can be called the universalist “grand narrative” of the Economy – to be understood here in the disciplinary sense – which asserts that humanity is obliged “to produce in order to live”.
The COVID epidemic has imposed a hiatus upon this highly naturalized story, which tells us that production constitutes the materiality of humanity, that we cannot live without it, and that we are obliged to produce in order to subsist. In this story, a world without production is impossible to imagine or conceive, for the reason that humanity would starve and life on Earth would be made impossible. All that can be imagined are ways of “producing and consuming differently”, that is, ways of changing “modes of production” and consumption. At a push, we might think about “getting out of growth” or “conceiving of a society without growth”, but getting out of production itself is altogether unthinkable.
And yet, that’s what the issue boils down to. My anthropological work, based on surveys and observations of about sixty farmers in France, breaks with the production paradigm on which the two predominant political regimes of modernity rest – capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other – and proposes that we enter new worlds that I have called (for want of a better word) “post-productive”. This term “post-production” does not refer to futuristic or utopian worlds. It refers to present, real worlds, ones which do not exist under the auspice of “naturalistic” epistemologies where humans “produce in order to live”, but by means of epistemologies where we try our best to exist with the other-than-human world through multi-specific links [au travers de liens multispécifiques]. To put it another way, it is about moving from a paradigm of production to a paradigm of relationships with plants, conceiving of an agriculture without production, which at the same time would not prohibit us from feeding ourselves.
In describing the multiple relationships between farmers and plants, I have tried to show that production does not constitute the materiality of our modern world, but rather that it is our relationship with plants that constitutes our true materiality. The concept of production is an abstract, economic, universalist and naturalized concept that has spread on this Earth through two political regimes that emerged with the arrival of modernity – capitalism on the one hand and socialism on the other. These two regimes, which are a priori opposed to each other, agree on one thing (one could say that they share a common epistemology), namely, that they both consider “production” necessary if humanity is to be kept fed.
Contrary to what ecologists and les décroissants say, capitalism and socialism are not productivist regimes, but regimes of production in their own right. They are conceived and designed to produce, not to live alongside the non-human world. By critiquing (only) the “productivism” of these two regimes, both ecologists and les décroissants seek a form of “good production”, and at least for one of them this has to take place without growth . However, this idea of “good production” only serves to essentialise “relations of production” and does not break with the paradigm itself.
Capitalists and socialists have been fighting for more than a century to get hold of the famous “means of production”, all the while being in agreement on the core matter, namely that production constitutes our materiality and that we are obliged to produce in order to feed ourselves. This is why, since the beginning of the COVID epidemic, all leaders – whether they are capitalists, communists or ecologists – have wanted to “restart production”. But none of these regimes take into account our links with the other-than-human world because they don’t think they live alongside them, or rather they consider these to be “secondary” to the production that is supposed to constitute our materiality.
I showed in my thesis that farmers have never been in a relationship of “production” with their plants, but of “co-domestication”. Farmers domesticate plants just as plants domesticate farmers, and this has been going on since the dawn of time. In concrete terms, this means that neither farmer, nor carrot plant, nor tomato plant, nor courgette plant, nor chicken, cow, pig or sheep has ever “produced” a single carrot, tomato, courgette, chick, calf or lamb. If we eat and live on this Earth, it is thanks to our relationships with living beings, without which no-one could live. This is why we cannot say we are suffering with hunger more during the lockdown than before it. As we enter into a new world, then, it is entirely possible “to imagine preventative measures against the resumption of pre-crisis production”, to use the title of Bruno Latour’s article – because we have never lived in production, but always in a world that is about more than merely the human.[2]
How did we arrive at such a naturalisation of the concept of production such that we have deemed it constitutive of our materiality? What has happened to make this concept of the Economy – which can be defined “as the exploitation of resources of labour and capital in order to produce goods or services” – become so dominant that we have come to believe deeply that it causes us to live?
To do this, we need to reopen a story. This will not be pleasant reading for Marxists. Accusing “capitalism” of all the evils on this Earth in order to place oneself on the right side of history, that is to say on the side of socialism, theirs is a simplified and hazardous story that leads nowhere. It was not the liberals who most naturalized the concept of production, but Marx himself, and the Marxist discourse that ensued.
By calling farmers “barbarians”, by deeply despising them (as did many authors of his time), that is, by understanding nothing of the agricultural world, Marx at the same time made a serious mistake in his analyses of “capitalism”. Capitalists do not appropriate to themselves the means of production in order to create wealth through private property – the commonly accepted definition of “capitalism” – rather, aided by private property and the concept of production, capitalists make wealth by severing [réduisent]their relations to the world, which is exactly the opposite of what Marx thought. In other words, capitalists ontologically strip living beings in order to reduce them to the status of “resources”, then transforming them into “products” and “commodities”. Marx postulated without any empirical foundation that man is a being who produces in order to satisfy his basic needs. The act of production in the Marxist doxa is a universal and ahistorical anthropological category that refers to humans everywhere, whereas in fact no one has ever produced anything. Neither capitalism nor socialism nor “societies outside the orbit of those developed by the Enlightenment”, in the words of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, are based on production, but on “certain relations of life and death between humans and the non-human world”. There have never been different regimes of production on Earth – there has never been socialist production, there has never been capitalist production, there has never been Asian production – but there are different ways of living alongside the non-human world, as anthropologists have taught us over the last century and a half. By making production the materiality of all humanity, Marx gave the Economy a power it could never have imagined, that of generating naturalized, universalist grand narratives (about the Market, about Production, about Growth, about Consumption) on a gigantic scale, with no connection whatsoever with our “animated world”, cutting us off deeply from a world that is more than the human.
Capitalists and Marxists are heirs to Economists, those formerly called “physiocrats”, who emerged in France in the 18th century by asserting this very strange idea, without any empirical basis, that “agriculture produces to make the nation rich” (while the farmers themselves had never heard of the term production), then opposing it to other sectors considered “sterile”. Instead of criticising the concept of production itself, liberals and Marxists will criticise the physiocrats by stipulating that other sectors are also productive, thereby extending the concept to the whole social domain. After the Russian revolution, the Marxists transposed the concept of production into the regime which was being established, and then to all Socialist countries, by seeking to develop “productive forces”. Capitalists and Marxists are enemy brothers both fighting for the “means of production”.
We now understand why we all agree with the idea that we have to produce in order to live. In this sense we are not all Marxists or capitalists, but we are all physiocrats. We all have the same vision of the Economy down to the decimal point. We just seek to house it in two opposing regimes that are essentially in agreement on the core matter. The physiocrats have locked us into a dead-end story. This is why I became an “eco-agnostic”.
To get out of this naturalised story, it is not enough to get on board with “green socialism” or with “green capitalism”. We will have to re-describe ourselves afresh as being in relation with the non-human world by not believing what the Economy says. This is the meaning of the questionnaire proposed by Bruno Latour at the end of his article on preventative measures, which invites us to imagine the preventative measures that could be taken against the return of pre-crisis production.
In order to stop being a physiocrat, I proposed to “animate” the plants so that they are no longer reduced to the status of “resources”, as the Economy does, so to be able to enter into relation with them. The concept of production severs us deeply from our relationship with the non-human world and renders us “without ground”. For example, the act of talking to plants, entering into particular relationships of partnership with them or subjecting oneself mutually to them, is not allowed by these epistemologies because it is seen as “far-fetched” or secondary. This is why it is vital to break with the central concept of the Economy in order to plunge ourselves into our true materiality which is constituted through our links with the non-human world.
To begin to uncover this “animated world”, we must stop believing the Economy when it says that humans and corporations produce in order to put “products and goods on the market”. The suspension of this narrative provides an opportunity to account for the world in a different way and to see how we might live when we are not reduced to the status of resource by the Economy. A smartphone, a plant, a cow – these are products and goods for the Economy, but not for the people with whom they are in daily contact. The computer on which I write is not for me a product or a commodity; it is a writing machine that allows me to give shape to what I think.
In order not to fall back into production, that “second nature”, we’ll have to get rid of the prophecy with which Das Kapital began:
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.
This must be replaced with a simpler sentence stating that corporations make lots of “animated things” with which people relate in a multitude of ways. This makes it possible to get out of the “second nature” on the one hand, and on the other hand, not to turn things into inert and inanimate objects with no power to act on us. Our world is as animated as that of other peoples, as the philosopher David Abram has shown, but the modes of animation are not the same. In order to achieve a good symmetry between Us and Others, we must get rid of the idea given to us by the Economy (but not exclusively) that we should be characterised as living in a “society of production and consumption” surrounded by “products and goods”. Of course, we are still that white people who have decimated countless indigenous peoples and who are in the process of devastating the world, but “we must reject the idea that we are a people of merchandise” (cited from here).
With this shift in theory, we no longer find ourselves in a production regime or in a “market society”. The question is no longer how to relaunch production or choose which modes of production we should put in place, but to know which animated things we have to make and transform, with which living things we wish to enter into relation, and so on.
To get out of production, we must “get out of the Economy”. The construction site is huge. In order to lay a first stone, we could, for example, advance the hypothesis that the jobs to which such questions inevitably lead us do not depend on the Economy, but on the “state of the world” [l’état du monde]. This is what COVID-19 has shown: jobs cannot be created or maintained without taking into account the state of the world.
With the ecological changes that are underway, as we know, some jobs will disappear and others will be created (this is why I maintain that universal income – with a decent income – must be part of all public policy proposals, because there won’t be jobs for everyone – and that’s a good thing!) What I basically want to say is that we should stop thinking of jobs depending on the Economy, or rather that we must distinguish jobs from the Economy. I am fully aware that this is one of the most difficult theoretical, epistemological and political journeys to make, but COVID helps us to think about this turning point. The idea that “you have to relaunch the Economy in order to create jobs”, the story that the Economy tells, is one where you never know what “relaunching the Economy” means, because you never know what you are relaunching when you say that.
To bring home the strangeness of this fully-naturalized motto, we can make a comparison: it would make no sense to say “that anthropology or philosophy must be relaunched in order to create jobs”. We can deduce from this that jobs are not created by the Economy, but by something else. In order to find out by what, we have to carry out investigations free from the economic episteme. Nor should we believe that the circulation of money depends on the Economy. In his Debt: 5,000 Years of History, David Graeber taught us that the invention of money predates the birth of the Economy.
Economics is a discipline born in the 18th century that tells stories about this world. It’s up to us whether to believe it or not. The problem is that, as physiocrats, we believe much more in the stories that Economics tells than in those told by other social sciences. In order not to fall back into the physiocratic episteme, that is, into the world before, we should not plead for “another Economy”, as many authors do. If we need a slogan, it could be that “nothing is Economic”. At least it leaves the door open to tell new stories.
For example, when Total destroys a mountain to build oil wells, one must resist the hasty claim that this is part of its “economic activities” or even that it is the “fault of capitalism” – socialism would do the same thing. This is part of its problematic relationship to the other-than-human world, which has absolutely nothing to do with the Economy. It can be said that it is an activity that destroys the world, derived from the fact that Total does not live with this mountain, unlike the humans and living beings who do. On the one hand, we are faced by a mountain that has been de-animated by Total so as to be reduced to a resource, helped by the stories of the Economy; on the other hand, we are faced by a mountain that is animated by humans and other living beings who live there. The effect of this displacement is that an “economic activity” becomes an “anthropological problem”, and ultimately a political one, since it concerns our ways of living with human and other-than-human beings. We are no longer in the Economy, but in an animated world engaged in ontological conflict over our ways of living.
Some may object by saying “we can’t escape the fact that the money has to come in at the end of the month so we can eat”. Again, just as it makes no sense to think that eating and earning a living depend on philosophy or anthropology, there is no reason to believe that this is a matter for Economics. We don’t need a “relaunch of production” or an “economic restart” [reprise], but rather a restart [reprise] of anthropology so as to manufacture non-economic realities. Our existence depends not on the Economy but on many other things.
Clearly, we must resist giving Economic explanations to destructive events, just as much as to events where money is involved. Above all, we must resist criticising these realities in order to replace them with other realities, which means that we will have to describe ourselves differently without resorting to Economic notions. In other words, to get out of Economy and out of production, that is, to stop being physiocrats, we will have to enter into a conflict of realities through which we might re-describe “capitalists” in a different way, rather than continuing to criticise them. In his novel Les Furtifs, Alain Damasio writes that the ultimate goal of capitalism is to “sell reality” [vendre la réalité].
To extend this idea and reverse the perspective, one must no longer believe that those who destroy, de-animate and oppress the world are “capitalists”. I leave it to the readers to imagine what else to call them, in the hope that we will be able to describe relations of power and domination between humans, but also between humans and non-humans, in a radically new way.
[1] See « Plantes animées. De la production aux relations avec les plantes », soon to be published at Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
Political Theology at the Time of the Anthropocene 