1.4 LOS PIRATAS EN CARTAGENA
1.4.1 BIOGRAFIA SOLEDAD ACOSTA DE SAMPER (1833-1913)
The foregoing should suffice as a brief overview of some of the fundamental respects in which modern politics expresses and enables monological possibilities of thinking/relating, as delimited in its essential structure by the modern ontological
settlement. Let us now turn to one final site of tremendous importance in the delineation of distinctly modern views of nature and nature-self relations: namely, that of modern conceptions of property. For in this, we encounter perhaps the dominant set of
codifications operative within (neo)liberal state law, and the forms of life this enables, of the appropriate relationship between human beings and the nonhuman, “natural” world. These codifications are moreover essential for understanding the way we monologically experience the world as fungible and calculable “standing-reserve”.
2.4 Modern Property as a Manifestation of the Monological
Relation
Modern property is often described as a “bundle of rights”, or a legal relationship that governs social relations between people with respect to (tangible and intangible) things.69 It is an enforceable claim in being grounded in the state and its sovereignty; and it moreover forms a central pillar of contemporary forms of (globalizing, modernizing, neo-liberal, capitalist, etc.) political-economic order and the kinds of worldly relations that characterize and sustain these. Indeed, the scope of “things” being assimilated to the proprietary relationship would seem to be growing: as we witness a continued, widespread, and globalized enclosure and privatization of land and “resources”, an
intensified commodification of “things” (including genetic code and biological processes)
69 Bruce Ziff, et al. A Property Law Reader: Cases, Questions, and Commentary, 2nd Ed. (Toronto:
through patent and intellectual property law, and so on.70 One author has eloquently suggested, on this account, that contemporary (neo)liberal law expresses an
understanding that “all existents, as actual or potential property, are subject to one or another individual’s rightful, transactional power.”71 If therefore we wish to ask after the kinds of relations to the nonhuman and “nature” cultivated by modern liberal society and dominant within it, property in its Western, liberal-capitalist form constitutes a necessary site for consideration.
What is moreover essential for us here is the way Western understandings of property – and the elevation and generalization of the proprietary relation within contemporary Western/modern life – express, foment, and enforce particular
understandings about what it is to be a human being in the world, what beings are, what it means to live a good life, how it is meaningful and authorized to relate to extant beings
qua “nature” within everyday life, and so on. Specifically, it privileges a largely transactional and economistic view of existence; a reduction of beings to calculable fungibility under the sign of exchange value; and a profoundly anthropocentric evaluation of nature and relation to it. Let us try to see a little more closely some of what is involved here.
“The most revolutionary modern contribution to the concept of property,” Hannah Arendt once wrote, was that “according to which property was not a fixed and firmly located part of the world acquired by its owner in one way or another but, on the contrary, had its source in man himself.”72 An emblematic thinker for us to consider relative to this development is John Locke. And indeed, in Locke’s theorizing of
property as having its source in man, we would seem to find a particular transmutation of the general modern view that nature is intrinsically meaningless, combined with the view that it is human beings who furnish meaning. In this instance, however, the problem of
70 Becky Mansfield, “Introduction,” in Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society
Relations ed. by Becky Mansfield (Blackwell, 2008), 1-3.
71Andrew Wender, The Juridical Prism: Modernity’s Transmutation of the Religious, as Refracted Through
Secularist Law. (2006) PhD Thesis. University of Victoria. Available at: <https://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8443/handle/1828/1952>, 161.
“meaning” stands to be posed in terms of worth, which is implicitly worth for, and originating from, us.
For Locke, nature left to itself is conceived as lying in waste, given by God to man in common. In this state, nature of itself is worth little until appropriated, removed from nature and transformed through human bodily activity, understood as labour: “’Tis
Labour then which puts the greatest part of Value upon Land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing: ‘tis to that we owe the greatest part of all its useful
Products.”73 It is in being mixed with my labour, imbued with my own activity and hence an extension of myself, that nature gains value and becomes productive. And this process simultaneously grounds my right to something as property, which is to say as exclusively enclosed from the commons and subject to my own right of use and possession, to be ordered and disposed as I see fit.74
It is important to note here that by framing nature as common, and by setting up the alternative between common nature lying in waste and property qua objects
appropriated and reworked by willful labour, Locke also sets up a blackmail whose colonial consequences are drawn out quite explicitly and deliberately in his text. Land unappropriated in the modern sense (and it is clear that Locke is thinking of English-style enclosure and agriculture here), and thus not monologically reworked, must be viewed as lying in waste. Such land is held by human beings (as a general class of beings) in
common, and this means nothing other than that Indigenous relations to the land
(especially, we presume, those of hunter-gatherer peoples) must be null and void. “In the beginning all the World was America,” Locke asserts: which is to say that America now can be viewed as terra nullius.75
73 See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988),
at 298.
74 Ibid, 290, 295, 306.
75 Ibid, 301.We can also recognize how, at the same time, the Lockean framing of things prepares for a
particular species of workaday colonial moralizing: for where we accept the Lockean framing of ownership and valorization of productive labouring qua reworking the land in modern European fashion, Indigenous peoples must appear indolent and unproductive as well as propertyless. Such a construal would seem to have had no shortage of life within colonial consciousness where a sense of arrogant civilizational self- superiority dovetails with an increasingly economistic (and accordingly impoverished) worldview. If we recognize the basic tenor of Locke in contemporary colonial sentiment, it has been no less present historically. Consider the following statement by a Canadian Indian Reserve Commissioner to an
The labour of our bodies, for Locke, is an essential human behaviour; but it also furnishes an original model of the proprietary relationship and source for it more broadly. In the first instance, human beings can be said to be the proprietors of their own person, and of the labour of their bodies. From this, Locke reasons that we must accordingly have a right of property in whatever our labour has been “joyned to”.76 This proprietary
relationship has its roots moreover in the way we can be said to properly be the masters of ourselves.77 We can see again the centrality of a metaphysics of the will and its constitutive metaphors of rule and dominion here: as laying the very possibility for me to be the self-directing master of myself, i.e., the commander and author standing behind the labour of my body.78 But these metaphors extend into our relations with things: in
labouring, we subdue79 nature; in ownership, the freedom to “order and dispose” similarly returns us to a willful relation of rule. (And, it hardly need be said, we can see how a Christian vision of the ethical and existential uniqueness of human beings as godlike, persons in the fullest sense, etc., is reproduced here.)
It is interesting to see how the proprietary relationship here, grounded in labour, dovetails with the conception and valorization of technoscientific mastery articulated for example in Bacon. If in the latter, subduing and commanding nature, compelling “her” to obey our ends, etc. is to be the route to material progress and the assumption of our proper vocation in the world, in the former the same activity (intervening in and subduing nature, reworking it through our own self-authored activity) grounds precisely our right of ownership over extant things, their individualized enclosure under human dominion. (And we can also see the atomistic ontology at work here, both in the identification and hence appropriation of objects, and on the side of the human proprietary and labouring
Indigenous audience on Vancouver Island in 1876: “Many years ago you were in darkness killing each other and making slaves was your trade. The Land was of no value to you. The trees were of no value to you. The Coal was of no value to you. The white man came he improved the land you can follow his example—he cuts the trees and pays you to help him. He takes the coal out of the ground and he pays you to help him—you are improving fast. The Government protects you, you are rich—You live in peace and have everything you want.” Qtd. in Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from the Edge of Empire.” In Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94:1 (2004), at 170.
76 Ibid, 288. 77 Ibid, 288, 298.
78 That Locke thought about question of mastery and wilfulness in this way would seem evident from the
rest of his text; see, for example, ibid, 269, 283-4, 306.
subject.) Needless to say, understanding things in these terms ensures that the relation of “mixing” (Locke) that occurs between people and things is something that occurs in a monological, one-way fashion.80 But most importantly, we can see here how – turning from the domain of Cartesian epistemology, to technoscientific discourse, to politics, to ownership – the same basic relation to the world, grounded in a metaphysics of the will and an effectively materialistic and hence mute, intrinsically meaningless nature, comes broadly to prevail and to be enforced.
Beyond the anthropocentric relationship established by grounding ownership in use and labour, however, it is also necessary to consider here the role of wealth-
production as the defining economic goal of market capitalism in coming to define the nature of property and hence the way we apprehend the nature of worldly objects/entities under modern conditions. Much of what is involved here takes us, not surprisingly, well beyond Locke. Bradley Bryan for example has argued in this vein that changes in the legal understanding of property should be understood to reflect the way the law has evolved in application to, and relative to the needs of, capitalist society. Most particularly, these shifts reflect the kinds of contexts in which property rights come before the law – namely, in matters of contract, tort, and succession.81 For Bryan, what is
essential here is the way that “’use’ comes to be subsumed in the capacity to contract and bargain that goes with the [proprietary] entitlement to use and enjoy;” and through this development, we see a slide occur through which “what something is,” insofar as it is understood in terms of its being property, “is not determined by who owns it but by what it is worth.” The “use” value of something, in other words, tends to be occluded by questions about the value of something as it can be bargained for, about the monetary value of appropriate remedial compensation for damages, and so on. Accordingly, property comes to be increasingly understood in terms of the value for which it can be exchanged – at the same time as we, through generalized processes of commodification,
80 And though Bacon will speak of first being a student of nature and following its workings, in order to
later command it, the materialist metaphysics underlying his technoscientific ethos (and that of modernity generally) ensures that this mathematized “studying” cannot and precisely must not mean dialogue in anything like the sense one has, e.g., with other subjects, or with world of natural imbued with anything like “mind” in the neo-Aristotelian sense.
81 Bradley Bryan, “Property as Ontology: On Aboriginal and English Understandings of Ownership,” in
come to understand the relations we have to the world and to each other in increasingly transactional terms.82 Arendt offers this diagnosis of what is at stake here:
In the progressing transformation of immobile into mobile property . . . eventually the distinction between property and wealth, between the
fungibles and the consumptibles of Roman law, loses all significance because every tangible, “fungible” thing has become an object of “consumption”; it lost its private use value which was determined by its location and acquired an exclusively social value determined through its ever-changing exchangeability whose fluctuation could itself be fixed only temporarily by relating it to the common denominator of money.83
This development, which is also not separate from the growth of “consumer society” generally, says a great deal about how we as moderns come to understand ourselves, the world around us, and what constitutes “real world” relations with the “real world”. Owned things (and we can recall the suggestion here that all extant things now seem to stand as actual or potential property) lose their uniqueness, their essential emplacement in the world, their irreplaceability and the substantive ties we might have with them: since the fundamental assumption in reducing anything to the terms of market value is that things are precisely exchangeable (this is precisely what reducing things to monetary value within the capitalist market does).84 And it is this being-replaceable, for and before other humans qua transactional agents, that determines their value – in ways that moreover come to expression and enforcement through the rationalizations of law and everyday social life.
It is also interesting to take note here of a concurrent phenomenon, which is the slide in everyday usage from understanding property as a right in something (to use, enjoy, exclude, etc.) to simply taking property to mean the things themselves. As one text on property law in Canada has put it:
[This change] came with the spread of the full capitalist market economy from the seventeenth century on, and the replacement of the old limited rights in land and other valuable things by virtually unlimited rights. As
82 Ibid, 13, 14.
83 Arendt, The Human Condition, 69. This passage is also quoted in Bryan, “Property as Ontology.” 84 This is a point also emphasized by Arendt. Ibid, 165-166.
rights in land became more absolute and parcels of land became more freely marketable commodities, it became natural to think of the land itself as property.85
We can return at this point to Heidegger’s diagnosis, that under the terms of modern thought qua “technology”, things themselves come to disappear, even to cease to concern us in their own right; what matters rather is the story of us and our will, our values, and hence the availability of things before us for use and abuse.86 This availability now determines things as what they are – resources, related to exclusively as “standing- reserve”. And in this we can also feel the danger of solipsism that attends our
subjectivism: that in the end we come to encounter in the world only ourselves and our self-authored activity, which is at best elevated to concern with the (no less atomized) aggregate of human social relations managed by the state. And property would seem to be a crucial site in which to see how this occurs in far-reaching and consequential ways – especially in the continually expanding conflation of object and marketable property (i.e., as commodities, or things produced for sale) under modern conditions. Beings disappear on the one hand into a story of human freedom (to imbue with value through labour, to use, enjoy, transact, etc.) on the one hand, and calculable fungibility (i.e., monetary value and hence exchangeability) on the other.
2.5 Singular
Nature or Multiple Worlds?
Having covered the ground we have, it will hopefully be possible now to clarify my reasons for dwelling on the theological and cosmological roots of our dominant, modern ontology and the fundamental interpretation of the world this lays out. What lessons are to be drawn here?
At one level, I emphasize the theological heritage latent within our thinking as one way to undermine the guise of neutrality in which modern universalism tends to present itself. A key component of that sense of neutrality stems from the way modern
85 Bruce Ziff et al, A Property Law Reader, at 5.
86 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 27. A similar point is made by Bradley Bryan,
thought has understood itself as secular – as marking the self-freeing of humanity to itself independently of its former religious and theological tutelage, and so on. By identifying and separating out fact from value, and science from religion – and connectedly, the public realm (purportedly) in step with science from the private realm of belief – modern thought and society enact what are effectively strategies of containment that localize “the religious” while preserving the domain of a universal, “real world” as that which is of common concern. (The meaning of the word “secular” as connected to a this-worldliness and temporality that only makes sense as opposed to matters of faith or otherworldliness, and so on, is indicative here of its own constitution within a Christian framing and its domestic dualisms.)In ways touched on briefly in the last chapter, this containment of the religious within a separate sphere (as being eminently a private matter pertaining to the culturalrealm) furthermore sets the conditions for a generalized disenchantment by providing the terms through which alternate ways of thinking and being stand to be domesticated within the modern order – i.e., by structuring the categories through which these are able to speak and be identified (e.g., cultural as distinct from natural, as
“values”, “beliefs”, and so on). Here is, in other words, the false peace of multiculturalism, where one nature is preserved.
From what has been said, however, it will be clear that this containment is always something of a ruse. For it can only ever occur within the context of a basic framework, a prior construal of “the world”, of nature and culture and the human and so on, that is