Natural History:

Toward a Politics of Crisis

George Edmondson and Klaus Mladek

Virno

Beneath our built environment of cultural habits and rules, behind our "organization of work and solid communicative habits," between the furrows of every form of life, there persists a substratum of human uncertainty and groundlessness that constitutes a natural-historical invariant — or so Paolo Virno would have us believe. As Virno sees it, we humans are disoriented animals, so thoroughly lacking an instinctual blueprint to guide us, even at moments of maximum danger, that we are always generalists, always adaptable, never constrained by a preordained set of rules. Our instability and our language faculty, our anthropogenetic flexibility and mobility, our "dearth of specialized instincts," our permanent crisis: these qualities mean that we can adapt to any environment. But they also condemn us to a Manichean existence in which, on the one hand, our flexibility and adaptability make us ideally suited to the demands of the contemporary capitalist labor process while, on the other hand, our natural historical invariance — or, to be more precise, our invariant and dangerous groundlessness — constitutes an indestructible opening that makes us capable of insubordination.

Virno is clearly onto something important with his explication of the link between crisis, which he defines as "an emergency situation" wherein "a certain pseudo-environmental setup is subjected to violent transformative traction" and "the potentiality ... of the human animal takes on the typical visibility of an empirical state of affairs," and natural history, which he defines as the inventory of "the multiple socio-political" representations (i.e., diagrams) of "the biological invariant that characterizes the existence of the human animal" as a "potential animal" in time. We admit, in fact, that our position varies from his only by a matter of slight degrees. All the same, we find that his concept of "natural-historical diagrams," by which he means "the socio-political states of affairs which display, in changing and rival forms, some salient features of anthropogenesis," remains uncomfortably close to the harsh excesses of "biolinguistic capitalism" precisely because, like Negri and Hardt's "biopolitical productivity," it meets capitalism on essentially the same terrain: the same anthropocentric machine that separates political and linguistic human life from nonhuman and dumb apolitical life; the same fascination with original forms of productivity, innovation, and change arising from the dangers of an unruly state of nature; the same concept of an incontestable "metahistory" so basic as to determine the common behavior of humankind. Rather than further historicizing and politicizing natural history, Virno, in a distinctly Heideggerian manner, tends instead to ontologize natural necessities and, in that way, risks repeating the classical gesture of political thought: to separate an objective, indisputable sphere — nature — from the subjective interventions of thought and praxis. That can only mean reducing the critical ferment inherent in natural historical crisis to an organizing principle for future political life, which for Virno means only those "institutions of the multitude" that rely exclusively on the human form.

In Marx and the Frankfurt School, by contrast, natural historical crisis is permanent and pervasive, and it follows a specific dynamic of thought totality and dialectical decline in any given historical situation. Accordingly, it exposes even the assumption of capitalism's unfathomable complexity, the ungraspable character of its mobility and flux — in short, the ideology of permanent change that is said to be our fate — to the dynamics of transience. (One might even go so far as to say, in fact, that the permanent succession of crises on which capitalist circulation thrives is arrayed against precisely this insight into a more all-enveloping crisis.) For Marx, a real dialectics contains "the recognition of [the] negation" of every state, "its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed by anything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary." A real dialectics is "critical and revolutionary" (always complementary terms for Marx) because it is not merely a dialectics of concept and logic but a dialectics of natural history that extracts the transient kernel and momentary existence from any "historically developed form." Not surprisingly, this critical and revolutionary dialectical procedure draws out all the resistances and anxieties of the bourgeois order. In Hegel, nature had merely behaved unreasonably, refusing to play along in the dialectical playbook except as negation and as an antithesis to be sublated. Natural historical dialectics in Marx expresses real relations determined in particular historical situations wherein the inherent laws of nature operate as fundamental principles in the real. For Marx — and, following him, Adorno and Benjamin — the natural historical stratum identified by Virno is never sub, never an "invariant human nature" that suddenly erupts from underneath established cultural encrustations in times of crisis. In Marx's idea of natural history, what Virno calls "species-specific prerogatives" are themselves profoundly historical and constructable, inseparable from the sphere of world history in which they are enmeshed. Other than invariant, always part of a specific historical constellation with its own mode of expression and laws of transition, natural history persists as an indestructible layer in the midst of any cultural formation — there as infinite perishing and transience — even when that formation is thriving (because natural history elicits an immunitarian response that is coexistent with what is perceived as crisis). The persistent truth content of things, their still-living obstinacy, is not an authentic being; nor is it a constitutively dislocated and unsheltered "Being" in the Heideggerian vein....