Good day.
I am still working my way through the opening sections of the Joseph Fracchia book on historical materialism and what he calls the “corporeal organization of the body.” I came to the book with an assumption that it would fit with my own longstanding interest in forms of what I have called political ascetics, or forms of intense bodily discipline that conform to various ideologies. So far, my expectations have been met: for a work on Marxist theory it’s incredibly readable, and it helps develop threads or lines of flight that connect with other thinkers as well. For example, just as I was putting the book down to take a break and write some notes, I remembered a well-known passage from Uexküll’s Foray, which discusses the respective Umwelten or environmental life-worlds of the spider and the fly. For Uexküll, the spider’s craft, when executed perfectly, is to build an object or artefact that fits the fly’s world perfectly, so perfectly in fact that it’s invisible to the fly. The image or metaphor the Uexküll uses is that of the the tailor, who understands the contours and movements of the body of the fly (what Fracchia might call its “corporeal organization”) even better than the fly does. This has two ramifications: 1) the spider attends carefully and one could even say passionately or lovingly to the nuances of the shape and movements of its prey, and 2) that love is still tied-up in a relation of predation. The two worlds fit together almost perfectly, and yet they do so in a manner that allows the spider to eat the fly.
The spider’s web, then — what Fracchia might call the actual or “artefactual” web — is more than just a funny or pointed metaphor for the internet (WWW). It can serve as a site for an extended meditation on exploitation and alienation in relation to the technical world, or what I will simply call technics. For Uexküll the spider’s web-work embodies a logic full of care and attention to such a degree that it “fits” the contours of the prey’s body perfectly. Technics responds to our lives, bodies and movements in some of the same ways: initially of course out of an original state of human vulnerability, but increasingly in the name of convenience. Whereas the “perfect fit” of the fly’s body leads to its consumption, the imaginary of late modern capitalism instead promises (to use another metaphor) to put us “in the driver’s seat,” giving us the illusion of control and wish-command to a degree that various forms of execution and delivery seem invisible. But let’s be clear. Just like the fly, the consumer is consumed. The process is not total, but that’s simply because its extractive heart requires a future where more extraction can take place. That future is one of pure surplus, quantified (as Marx and before him Ricardo figured out) at precisely the amount that allows for the reproduction of both biological/corporeal life, and of what passes for social life as well. Put differently, the web lovingly and carefully creates its own futurity, articulates a particular tomorrow (or even just simply another moment of encounter or “engagement”) that feels necessary.
At the same time, this is the place where the extended metaphor breaks down, perhaps, since Uexküll point about the spider and the fly was to draw a contrast between their respective environmental life-worlds (Umwelten). Along the lines of his interpretation, communication across the species-bound contexts of perception and action was/is difficult if not impossible. Each form of life has its carefully elaborated and co-evolved context which in turn determines how it perceives the world and comports itself within it; indeed, speaking of “a world” in the singular may not even be possible (here we can see how Uexkull influenced Heidegger’s understanding of animal consciousness as being “poor-in-world” and so on).
When we talk about technics, in contrast, the schism or split isn’t one between human beings and our others, but between different stages in the productive process. Collectively speaking, we create the world in which we live. As producer, we’re like the spider, and as consumer we’re like the fly: we build the web of convenience from which extrication seems ever-more difficult, and the prey for that web is us. We seek intimacy and friendship with others, and the forms of mediation work as engines of extraction; we seek to know ourselves better — for example by analyzing the very code of our genome — and that process is interrupted and détourned, hacked and commodified. In order to know more — about others, about ourselves — we voluntarily (if unconsciously) become the site of aggressive forms of extraction; human encounters become “engagements” where surplus data can be mined. As consumers we are also producers of this surplus, which in turn is used to confine our lives even more tightly, to tie it to a script of pre-articulated “convenient choices.” Stopping the flow becomes difficult, a conscious effort with no immediate payoff, and one that pales in comparison to the wish-fulfillment space of the contemporary market.