1844/2004/2044: The Return of Species-Being

Abstract

autonomist, poststructuralist Marxist version of species-being. The starting point for such an interpretation is the unusual, and largely unnoticed, reinstatement of themes from the 1844 Manuscripts in Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's deliriously vitalist and resolutely anti-humanist Marxism. 6 Further suggestions of such an account of species-being can be found not only in the works of Spivak and Read already mentioned, but also in a fascinating study by Joseph Margolis, and in the writings of Thomas Keenan. 7 There are, moreover, connections to be drawn between the species-being of the 1844 Manuscripts and the Marxian version of 'biopolitics' developed in MichaelHardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire. 8 These connections are made explicit in Paolo Virno's recent, brief discussion of Gattungswesen in relation to concepts of 'multitude' and 'general intellect'. 9 In what follows, I elaborate on these directions.Extracting such an interpretation of species-being from the 1844 Manuscripts is an act of retrospective reconstitution. Given Marx's brilliant inconsistencies, such a reading must sometimes work against the grain of the text, even as elsewhere it goes with the flow. This is not an effort aimed at antiquarian purity, but, rather, an attempt to cannibalise parts for a new intellectual machine adequate to contemporary conditions of virtual and biotechnological accumulation. It is archeological futurism, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's seizure of historical remembrances flashing up in 'a moment of danger'. 10 'The present living species' 'Species-being' is neither natural reproductive collectivity, nor a set of biological requirements for food, water, shelter, and sex. As Spivak points out, Marx tends to speak of these as 'species-life'. 11 Species-being is the fulfillment, alteration and expansion of these life-needs through social activity, rendering 'life activity itself an object of will and consciousness '. 12 This involves, according to Marx, a combination of self-consciousness, material capacity, and collective organisation. In the process of humanisation,

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