Things and Objects
I have asserted that there is no clear-cut distinction between man and nature, and yet there is no harmonious unity either, for what always remains is an inherent contradiction derived from their structural discordance, which is only partially overcome through labour and its products. This contradiction is dialectical, not logical, which means that nature and man are two complementing opposites in an everlasting reciprocal and material exchange. If there were no opposition, there would be no need for man to labour in a particular way in order to survive.
Nature creates, while man produces. The product of our labour is not the outcome of a natural process, it is not done by instinct, and it produces artefacts: it is artificial. However, and if I stick to my initial conclusion about man and nature, the natural-artificial distinction is far from being self-evident.1 Take the difference between nature and the natural for instance – the former being the total environment (biosphere) and the latter a feature of things and processes created by nature (including human beings). It could be argued that the split between external and internal nature gets reproduced within the concept of the natural. This would mean that some of the features of natural processes would somehow be present in human-made artefacts – a kind of internalisation of the natural. This distinction requires going beyond the mere appearance of things and address the internal order which structures them. The natural order would be that which is based on natural laws.2 This means that human-made artefacts which are based on the laws of nature, such as airplanes, locomotives, bridges, and engineering works in general, belong to the natural order, even though they are obviously artificial – in the sense of man-made (Borchers 1968, 33). They would not be possible without the abstraction of natural laws in the physical laws of science. An airplane would be unthinkable without the principles of aerodynamics, in turn developed by studying the flight behaviour of birds, fluid mechanics, and so on. This means that all natural things are the de facto expression of the natural order, but not all artificial things belong to the artificial order. What is this order? What are its properties? Van der Laan understands it in fundamental discordance with the natural order, starting from the first architectonic construction:
The house will not have, therefore, a form determined by nature, as in the case of a bird’s nest. Wherever intelligence intervenes as a principle of form, it appears the break with the homogeneous world of natural forms (...) these new forms maybe the subject of a new order, an artificial order, which has its place in nature. (Van der Laan 1960, 5-6)
How can these two orders be effectively distinguished? Human intelligence seems to be one of the key elements. But what about airplanes or locomotives, are they not the product of the human intellect? To find a way out of this impasse a crucial distinction derived from the dual constitution of the human body must be developed: the difference between thing and object. I will first draw on the specific definitions given by Borchers and Uexküll, for then contrast them with some insights by Heidegger.
For Borchers, a thing is the sensory data we perceive using our external senses – the passive functions of the body, such as our sight, touch, smell, and the like. The passive body captures the various stimuli arising from the thing; the appropriate organ transforms the corresponding stimulus into a nervous excitation that goes into the brain which transforms it into a sensation. Take a jug for example, as a thing is for us something hard, brown, of a certain size, weight, smell, temperature, and so on. The passive body, constituted by our external organs, unifies all the separate sensations emitted by the brain into a unitary and coherent form which we then transfer out to our surrounding world, filling it with things of all sizes, colours, and shapes, and creating a perception out of them.
In the previous chapter I stated that there is an immanent relationship between our sensory apparatus and nature. Now I can explain the implications of this assertion. The given definition of thing implies something which is already there, outside of us, and that we ‘internalise’ through our senses to form a unitary perception of the world. However, the sensations that we perceive from things are not out there – properties of the thing itself – but rather created in our brain in a process which always starts from the thing, passes through the body-brain, and finishes again in the thing. Uexküll called this process sensory circle (Uexküll n. d., 29). This means that sensations, say like hearing sounds, do not exist in the world independent from us, but only the air vibration as a stimulus to our ear: the circle closes when we transfer the sound sensation back to thing and make it appear as if it comes from it and not ourselves. When the circle closes we are no longer able to ‘distinguish between something initial and something final anymore, or otherwise, between an organism and an exterior world’ (Borchers 1968, 144). Therefore, the distinction between external and phenomenal world is decisive and mirrors that between external and internal nature: the first is independent from our perception; the second comes about only when the circles of perception are completed. Our phenomenal world, self-world, or Umwelt comes from our own constitution as subjects and organisms, from our experience- space as its encounters with the external world.
Something entirely different – although closely connected – happens when we react towards the external world. This happens when the result of a stimulus goes beyond a mere sensation or perception, when our body reacts to certain stimuli coming from the thing and performs an action. If ‘our sense organs serve our perceptions’, then ‘our motor organs our actions’, affirms Uexküll (1957, 6). Our Umwelt splits in two parts: a perceptual world of sensations, which comprises all things perceived; and an effector world of actions,
which comprises objects produced and used by man. For Uexküll (1957, 6), our essential biological activity consists in perceiving and acting.
I call briefly “objects” to all things which executes actions appropriate to the service of man (...) an object is thus a thing signalled by its ability for execution (...) The distinction between thing and object is not familiar to the naive observer. He considers all things as objects, because he only contemplates them in their relations with men. (Uexküll n. d., 63-64)
A tree can serve to give us shade but it is not an object, since it does not correspond to the structure of our actions which we carry in our memory (Uexküll n. d., 64). On the contrary, if we pick and fill a jug with wine, and then we pour the wine into a glass, then the jug turns from a thing into an object of use, it articulates with our actions. Now it is clear that thing and object designate one and the same body in space, and that a jug as thing can be something relative as object if, for instance, we use it as a vase. Heidegger used this example in his seminal 1950 essay The Thing, in which he wonders about the essence of a thing, and why we have lost access to it in the modern world. However, for him a thing is what is essential to an object, whereas the latter is only the external appearance or ideal representation of the thing (Heidegger 1971, 164-65). Heidegger claims that what makes the jug a thing, is it being a vessel, and what makes it a vessel, is the property of being a holding void, he argues that ‘the jug is not a vessel because it was made; rather, the jug had to be made because it is this holding vessel’ (Heidegger 1971, 166). According to the previous definition given by Uexküll and Borchers, for Heidegger the thing is the object, namely, things which ‘effect our purposes’ (Uexküll 1957, 6). Yet, objects are not simply useful things, but rather pre-existing schemes of action contained in our memory and the thing: objects are not actually material and visible. The object in a jug – or a bottle for that matter – is always the same, no matter the particular material in which it was made, nor its various shapes or designs: the object consist in the action of holding (taking and keeping) and then pouring out, as Heidegger rightly asserts. This sequence of actions can be performed in different ways, but the coordinated rules remain the same, thus an object is not even merely a series of actions, but rather the invariable scheme or set of rules which structures them. If we don’t know previously these rules for using the jug, this will remain only a thing sending various stimuli which our external organs will capture and turn into a perception, but it will not send any stimulus to our internal (effector) organs, and consequently, our body will not react with a corresponding unitary action.
Things carry an external and independent existence from man; accordingly we perceive them with our sensory organs, forming a unique human perception of them. Whereas objects are dependant and internal to our organic constitution, hence we only grasp them with our internal organs – including memory – and then we react performing a unitary bodily action on the thing. Things belong to the natural order when they don’t resonate with our willed actions; while objects pertain to the artificial order, not only because they are man-made but, more importantly, given they emanate from mental laws which effect our intentions and purposes towards the outside world, changing it continuously.
Use, Exchange, and Value
The artificial order is produced in thought; its laws fundamentally contradict the laws of nature rather than mimic or make abstraction of them. The jug is a product of human labour, the reshaping of earth materials by the human hand. But as Heidegger asserts, the jug had to be realised because it existed previously in the human mind, not as the image of a specific jug design, but more fundamentally as the purpose of fulfilling a need: that of holding and pouring liquids. The coming into being of the jug depends on human action performed on nature, but this is not what makes it artificial. The jug is an artificial object since 1) it had to be previously conceived with a clear intention; 2) it had to be designed or constructed according to geometrical laws which do not exist in nature; and 3) once completed it had to be ‘activated’ by the human body, and thus ripped off from the realm of passive things, and turned into an active object.
It was this realm of objects at the service of man that Marx looked at in his enquiry on the nature of commodities. For him, commodities are first of all useful things that could be analysed either from its qualitative or quantative aspects (Marx 2011, 42). The former refers to its utility or suitability to human needs, the latter to the quantity of it that can be traded for another thing. Yet, objects are not really material things, but a performance plan deposited into the thing by our will: a result of our previous actions that serves our subsequent actions. In a first instance, Marx related this immaterial dimension of the object to the fleeting nature of use, stating that a useful thing ‘is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways’ (Marx 2011, 42). Nonetheless, he also understood the dependency of the object on the actual concrete thing:
The utility of a thing makes it a use-value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity (...) Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. (Marx 2011, 42-43)
The concept of use-value comes close to that of the object. Its concreteness is defined in terms of its actual performance, its activation by the human body – when this is not the case, it returns to its state of natural thing, of passive perception. An object is at the same time abstract (the product of mental laws and purposes), and concrete (the product of material labour and performance). However, it is from the point of view of quantity that a commodity comes into being as such. We can trade a certain quantity of a given commodity for a certain quantity of another – for instance, we could trade two jugs for one book. But what enables this equivalence? How can we establish the right proportion at which each commodity is exchanged? Marx affirms that
Exchange-value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange-value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange-value that is
inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms. (Marx 2011, 43)
Unlike exchange, the realm of use-values is completely heterogeneous: they are as diverse as human needs. This poses a problem, for if we want to barter a use-value for another, we have to equate two entirely different uses – say holding liquids (jug), and reading (book). Can we actually say that a book is worth two jugs since it is more ‘valuable’ in use? No, we cannot equate two different values in use because the utility of a thing – its ability to satisfy our needs – rests on a subjective-qualitative realm. Marx pointed out that we fall in a similar delusion when we try to explain exchange-value solely on its quantitative determinants – the fact that two jugs equal one book – since these 2:1 ratio is just the expression of something internal to all commodities: ‘first: the valid exchange-values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange- value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it’ (Marx 2011, 43). This mysterious element cannot be some material property of commodities either.
This common "something" cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities (...) If then we leave out of consideration the use-value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. (Marx 2011, 44)
In the previous chapter I followed Marx in that human labour is an ever-lasting necessity in which we engage in a continuous metabolic relation with nature. As a result, it is also the means by which things turn into objects of use. And lastly, labour is also the common substratum that allows commodities to be compared with one another. If each commodity requires a definite kind of labour to be produced, how to measure this diversity? That was for Marx the first problem after he identified labour as the substance of the value of commodities. However, this new concept of (intrinsic) value as something embodied in commodities and yet different from their use and exchange values, must be clarified. The first thing to bear in mind is that value comes into being only as commodities are exchanged for one another. Taken in isolation, a commodity has value (in use) only for the person who produced it, thus no social validity. Furthermore, commodities cannot be compared by their uses, since they differ qualitatively. On the contrary, ‘as exchange- values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use-value’ (Marx 2011, 44). More importantly, the different kinds of labour required for producing qualitatively different commodities, have no relevance in exchange either. What remains then is human labour as a general activity, since what happens in exchange is that
Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract. (Marx 2011, 45)
The concept of abstract human labour is crucial to understand Marx’s concept of value. The value of a commodity corresponds to the quantity of labour required for its production. Following Ricardo, Marx sets up the labour-time (hours, days, weeks, etc.) spent in the production of a commodity as the determinant of its value, but there is a central distinction that soon drove him away from this explanation. For if I decide to take a long time making a commodity, that doesn’t mean my commodity has more value: labour-time has to be viewed against the background of social relations and within society as a whole (Harvey 2010, 18, 20). And if abstract labour refers to the expenditure of human labour-power in general – stripped from any concrete distinction – then, says Marx, there must be a social average of labour-power, of the ability to do useful work under a certain amount of time, conditions, and intensity. So far as human labour ‘requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary’ (Marx 2011, 46), then the value of commodities will remain constant. Therefore, socially necessary labour-time is the time ‘required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time’ (Marx 2011, 46). This socially determined average time for the production of a commodity is what fixes its social value. A building takes for society, on an average, a long time and effort to produce, whereas a bed takes considerably less: the difference in their values is socially grounded. We are able to know these values only when we compare and trade commodities in the market, and not by themselves. Thus, we are able to determine how many jugs equal a book, how many books equal a bed, or how many beds equal a building.
There are also a number of similarities between Marx’s concept of value and that of the