Marx and Engels, Imitating Animals

The imitative capacity is one of the hallmarks of the human. In some accounts this is used as a differend for splitting off "animals." But it is quite obviously a problematic way of doing so for it means that nonhumans, as things imitated, will always be interpellating the human. Freud is pretty clear on this and many recent applications of psychoanalysis have rightly picked up on the way in which a theory of the unconscious makes a hard split between humans and nonhumans impossible (I'm thinking of Lippit's Electric Animal where he discusses Freud and Breuer, and Ziser's "Mirrors" piece in Angelaki for Lacan). Marxism, especially when emphasizing labor, also seems like it must endorse a naturalistic community. I'm not going to go into why I think this pertains to each of the brands of Marxism now on offer, but as a general principle it seems that any formulation of community offers an immanent critique of anthropocentrism as either a form of identity politics or as unable to account for marginal cases.

That said, we can also point to any number of cases within those (as well as more conservative philosophical traditions) where the mimetic or reflexive capacities function as a such a differend in the final analysis. Marx and Engels present a paradigmatic case in The German Ideology, writing,

"Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life."

Humans can indeed be distinguished from animals by any differend you like; that's why anthropologism is an effective ideology. I'm not bringing this up to dwell on an anthropological machine that has already been well criticized, or to give Marx and Engels a spanking for a sloppy humanism or their ontologization of labor. Rather, this passage exemplifies how these elements fit together. If one wishes to tally consciousness (or any other reflexive capacity you like) as the distinctively human capacity, one also accounts for the emergence of production ex nihilo. One starts producing in a distinctively human fashion without a prior model, even though that production will then be the production based on models.

Making sense of this story seems to require some kind of naturalistic mechanism, an accrual of habits no different from the instincts of other beasts (which would then beg the question of how an ontological split occurs). We seem to be, from this false origin onwards, already within Benjamin's (and before him Scholem's, and now Agamben's) world just like ours but slightly different--the difference being, we never were human. For my money Nietzsche is still the best expositor of that account.

However, I think another route is also possible, and this is to be found in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (technically only by Engels but based on Marx's notes; it's like when P Diddy released Biggie's tracks post mortem. One could offer a more high brow reading of this authorial situation through Specters of Marx). Here the imitative capacity is again crucial to the kind of animal the savage human is, but it is not cut off from other animals. As anyone could tell you, other animals imitate as well; there is no ground for this capacity by its very nature (I learn to imitate by imitating your imitations). If imitation is already in circulation as part of nature (Deleuze brings this out in his reading of Hume) then humans can develop economically by being with animals, rather than being against them.

Engels writes that the "first great social division of labor" came into being by the differences in production between nondomesticated and domesticated animals capable of rendering, "not only milk, milk products and greater supplies of meat, but also skins, wool, goat-hair, and spun and woven fabrics, which became more common as the amount of raw material increased."

Now the chief article which the pastoral tribes exchanged with their neighbors was cattle; cattle became the commodity by which all other commodities were valued and which was everywhere willingly taken in exchange for them - in short, cattle acquired a money function and already at this stage did the work of money.... In the climate of the Turanian plateau, pastoral life is impossible without supplies of fodder for the long and severe winter. Here, therefore, it was essential that land should be put under grass and corn cultivated. The same is true of the steppes north of the Black Sea. But when once corn had been grown for the cattle, it also soon became food for men.

Engels goes on to argue that, having learned to eat like animals, the pastoral tribes soon required a large labor force. Slavery becomes necessary and the social division of labor is complete. The fundament for this arc, however, remains the differential productive capacities of humans and nonhumans, and the attempts to at first borrow and then steal from the forms of labor available to different species. One might argue that humans have succeeded in this expropriation better than any other species, but one can hardly maintain that it is unique to humans.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that we can easily think of predation as this kind of expropriation, but it is the herbivorous herd animals that humans ultimately imitated to the greatest extent and which allowed for civilization to arise. Humans ultimately did not transform their species-being by taking the products of animals (meat, eggs) but, as Marx and Engels earlier wrote, by learning to "produce the means of subsistence," the mode of living off of grains. Humans were the first domesticated species.