When I was in undergrad at Hampshire College one of my professors, Meredith Michaels would refer to certain books as "worker bee" books. The term was not pejorative. Worker bee books were the books that did the work, traced the development of a philosophers thought, or the connection between different philosophers. They were patient and methodological. They were not the kind of books to be read on a whim, but they were the books that you were very glad existed when you did your research. The work they did laid the foundation for other claims and ideas. Incidentally they were the kind of books that were primarily bought by research libraries, which is to say as we lose research libraries, or as their budgets are cut or put towards online co-learning centers, we are losing some of the basic infrastructure of thought. The worker bees build the hive.
Melanie Zappula's L'Imitation d'autrui et l'Invention de soi: Le concept d'ingenium chez Spinoza is one such book. As the title suggests its singular focus is on the concept of ingenium, a word that can be translated as spirit, complexion, or temperament. Zappula spends a lot of time talking about precisely what is at stake in all of those various translations, and why Spinoza used this term in particular, especially in the way that it avoided identifying exclusively with the body, as in temperament, or mind, as in spirit. However, the more striking and important thing is the way in which the term is used for Spinoza to refer to both an individual, and a people as being defined by their particular ingenium. As Zappula writes,"The concept of ingenium appears thus as a univocal concept which designates the singular affective complexion of a person or of a people this does not preclude questioning the potential effects of asymmetry."
With respect to the former, that of the individual, Zappula argues that there are four decenterings of the concept of identity.
1) Identity of a person is not substantial since a person is not a substance but a mode
2) the affective identity of a person is not characterized by permanence but by its capacity to integrate changes
3) identity of the self is not characterized by opposition with another, but by difference with an other and the integration of these differences, as is demonstrated by the imitation of affects of an other.
4) the affective identity of a person is not thought a priori, that is to say independently of its existence, only on the plane of essence, it is made by its existence, which implies that it is not possible to separate essence from existence.
Every ingenium, every individual, is both singular and relational, which is to say singular because they are defined by their relations, and relational because they are singular. The word I would use for this is transindividual, Zappula does not go into that word, although she does cite Balibar's writing on it. This is in part because her focus is Spinoza and not the concepts and debates that Spinoza has made possible. However, it is also because she is interested in thinking the asymmetry of these two different senses of ingenium. This brings us to what is in some sense the problem of Spinoza's political and social philosophy. Given that Spinoza also refers to the ingenium of a people. How are we to think that intersection of the ingenium of a people and the ingenia, plural and different, of the people?
This problem is central to Spinoza's thought, as much as Spinoza writes of the power of a people that is combined to act as if with one mind, he also argues that no one can surrender their right to act and think. Between these two extremes, between the identity of a people and the irreducible identity of people.
As Zappula argues in Spinoza's political writing, particularly the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, there is the need to adapt politics, the laws, to the ingenium, the character, of the people. This is in some sense Spinoza's explanation for prophecy, which attempts to cater to the imagination and passions of the people. Politics is not entirely powerless when it comes to the ingenium of the people. It is something that can be adapted, transformed, as well as adapted to. As Spinoza also writes in the TTP about the people of the ancient Hebrew State, whose character, ingenia, were in some sense shaped by discipline and commands that they developed habits of obedience, "[T]o men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but freedom.”
How do we reconcile these two relations of the ingenium of the people, one in which it is the habits and customs, which are upstream from democracy, something which the state must adapt to and the other in which the institutions of the state produce the very ingenium, the habits they need. Zappula's answer is to distinguish between two different aspects of the state. It is the laws which must adapt to the existing ingenium of the people, but the laws are not the entirety of politics. The politics which shapes the behaviors and habits of the people is in excess of the law. Of course Spinoza did not clearly articulate what this other to the law is, and this is precisely where words like ingenium, habits, or manners, come into play, to designate that aspect of human life which is not natural, but social. produced in and through relations and institutions.
Spinoza did not articulate this because it was barely known by his time, all of these words like ingenium, character, temperament, especially as they are situated at the intersection of the individual and the social, are the words which have now been fleshed out by social and political thought. Which is not to say that everything about them is known, or that Spinoza's thought about the social nature of the affects might not have something to contribute. Of course he does, but, as is often the case Spinoza's insights, his movement beyond substantial accounts of individuality, to a relational understanding, one that encompasses affects and ideas, bodies and mind, are at the same time hampered by his limits. When it comes to examining the constitution of the imagination and affective constitution of a people Spinoza only had the history of scripture and its interpretation to draw from. Today, we can benefit from the study of the myriad scripts which society produces and reproduces.
This then is the thesis that I would like to use as a conclusion: the ingenium that politics must necessarily adapt to is produced not just upstream of politics, of the laws and dictates of the state, but outside of it, in the worlds of popular culture, and, most importantly, in the capitalist economy, which shapes so much of our thoughts and desires. That is the short version. The longer version is that the right is much better at mobilizing the affective and imaginary resources of day to day life under capitalism, to make people into at least the fantasy of a people (but that is going to take more than a blogpost).
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