I remember a friend in graduate school saying that our task, at least when it came to writing dissertations, was to write something that a database could not produce. He was a bit ahead of the curve, this was sometime around the late nineties early two thousands. Databases could not write books then, but they are getting closer to it. Or, more to the point, a particular kind of academic monographic, the sort the traces the development of a concept in a single author oeuvre or a comparison of two thinkers, seems to be increasingly the kind of thing that a machine could write. That is the bad news. The good news, is that such monographs seemed useful to write, but never that fun to read in the first place. What if we could leave such books to the machines that generate them and consume them. What kind of writing should we do in the age of (seemingly) intelligent machines?
My answer to this question comes from a few books that I have read in the last few years, idiosyncratic books--for lack of a better word. The books that I am thinking of are Gray and Johnson's Phenomenology of Black Spirit and Renault's Maîtres et Esclaves: Archise du Laboratoire de Mythologiques (to take books on Hegel as an example). Beyond that, and moving from Hegel onto animals, there is Leigh Claire La Berge's Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary (which I reviewed here) and Aaron Shuster's How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka's New Science (Which I should have reviewed at least on this blog). They are all are, among other things, books that a machine could not write.
In the interest of self promotion, this is a blog after all, I would say that my own book, The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work was an attempt to write in the idiosyncratic rather than generic for better or worse.. I didn't just want to write a book on Spinoza and Marx, partly because others had done it better than I thought that I could, or a book on Spinoza and Marx and work, but one that also reflected my own talents, I hope, in combining philosophy with an analysis of popular culture, and, more importantly, my own belief that culture and work are the two places where ideology is produced and reproduced.
As I ask myself the question, what book comes next, and while I have contemplated more academic books, I continue to think about not just writing odd books, but about using them to expand the terrain of philosophy and politics. (The larger point here is that the university as the basis and ground for philosophy is not something that we can take for granted, and we need to invent new ways of thinking, writing, and teaching). Given my loves and passions, and given Leigh Claire's great book on cats, people keep asking me if I am going to write about dogs.
I have written about dogs a few times here, in an early post where I used this title, in a piece on my job in an animal shelter, and a two pieces on the politics of dog, under Trump and Biden. I was thinking about this idea the other day when I happened to be teaching Adam Smith. Dogs feature prominently in The Wealth of Nations. When Smith makes his famous remark about mankind's tendency to "barter, truck, and exchange," defining humanity as homo economicus, he contrast this to not just animals in particular or any animal, to dogs. He tells the story of two greyhounds chasing a hare, as much as they run in tandem, with sometimes one, sometimes the other in the lead, but this is no cooperation or exchange. A fact that becomes clear as soon as they catch their prey and growl and tear to get the biggest chunk. As Smith puts it, “Nobody every saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” Humans exchange, animals do not.
That is not the end of it. Smith continues to discuss dogs. Because they do not exchange, or barter, they are not only excluded from the benefits of the invisible hand, but cannot make use of their diversity and difference. As Smith writes,
"The strength of the mastiff is not the least supported either by the swiftness of the greyhound or by the sagacity of the spaniel, or by the docility of the shepherd’s dog. The effects of those different geniuses and talents for want of the power or disposition to barter and exchange, cannot be brought into a common stock, and do not in the least contribute to the better accommodation and convenience of the species.”
At this point dog is not just a metonym for animal, for the nonhuman, but a very specific and unique figure. Dogs have the greatest interspecies variability of any mammal, greater differences of size, color, speed, strength, and temperament within the species than practically any other animal. The position of dogs in Smith's thought is a unique and tragic one, they are unable to exchange or trade, but they would have the most to gain by such an exchange. Imagine if dogs could combine their different abilities, bringing together the strength of one, the speed of another, and so on into some kind of collective action. It is like some scene out of a cartoon where they break out of the dog pound in some elaborate plan where the chihuahua sneaks and steals the guards keys, the mastiff knocks the door down, and so on.
Lady and the Tramp
Humans can make use of their differences, even if they are not as great as that of dogs. As Smith writes, "Among men, on the contrary, the most dissimilar geniuses are of use to one another; the different products of their respective talents, by the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, being brought, as it were, into a common stock, where every man may purchase whatever part of the produce of other men's talents he has occasion for."
The idea of a society founded on the differences between human beings can be traced back to at least Plato's Republic. In that text Plato famously claimed that our finitude, our lack of self-sufficiency, was best addressed by everyone doing the one job that they were best suited for, by using their talents. Universal dependency and the variability of mankind are the foundation of the social order. As much as Smith keeps this idea he reverses its basis. Differences are not natural but artificial. As Smith writes,
"The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education."
As something of an aside, Smith's invocation of the way that philosophers and street porters become different would seem to be echoed in Marx's assertion of how one accepts a world in which some are street porters and other philosophers, accepts the division of labor. As Marx writes in Capital, "The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education [Erziehung], tradition, and habit [Gewohneit] looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws."
The repetition of habit in both formulations is the point where two senses of training intersect. For Smith habit, the repetition brought about by the highly specialized division of labor produces and reproduces skill, while for Marx the repetition of wage labor produces subjection. One could also open up a
larger discussion of habit and character in Spinoza (nearly as close to my heart as dogs) or, even broader,
the concept of second nature. One does not need to turn to Spinoza or even Marx to find more ramifications of habit, Smith has his own dialectic of habit.
The Wealth of Nations is one of those books that is more cited than read (like
Capital), and those who cite it the most faithfully often overlook the downside of this habit. Habit produces skill for Smith, but it also restricts and delimits imagination and understanding. As Smith writes, (in a passage that is almost never cited by those who think the whole book is about the invisible hand),
"But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding,or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless the government takes some pains to prevent it."
Smith's dog society, a society of highly specialized workers all benefiting from each other's specialization resembles less a cartoon, of different dogs combining their differences and talents, than an animal shelter, where every animal is in its little cage, barking and lunging because that is all that it knows how to do. Where every puppy lacks the socialization to play, to explore, to even walk up a flight of stairs. Or, as Smith follows the passage above, the solution to this problem, of a specialization that warps the mind and body as much as it produces things, is education which the invisible hand cannot produce. Smith, like Hegel, in his own way stumbles upon a kind of contradiction of capitalism, a contradiction which capitalist society produces but cannot resolve.
For Hegel this was the rabble, the mass of unemployed, for Smith it is in some sense the employed and destroyed by the ravages of work.
At this point we are not even talking about dogs anymore, the allegory has gotten loose, but we are talking about something which I write about in
The Double Shift, and am interested in writing more about, and that is the way that work produces and reproduces not only differences, street porters and philosophers, but hierarchy. This is where we leave the philosopher's kennel, because the real difference between the specialization and interspecies diversity of dogs and humans,
is that with humans the differences of talents and abilities at work intersect with, and are naturalized by differences of race and gender. Or, we could say, to offer something of a conclusion, albeit a hasty one, that where Smith proposed education as a way to reconcile the specialization of labor and the needs of society actually existing capitalism found a different solution,
naturalizing the differences produced by and demanded by the division of labor through the concepts of race and gender.
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