The Parasite - Michel Serres
There can be no life without roads. (The Incandescent, 117)
The human does not exist without experience. (The Troubadour of Knowledge, 31)
The eighteenth-century highwayman, Dick Turpin, jumping over a turnpike trust gate. Who is parasiting whom?
Speech and Parasites
What does it mean to speak?
Purely from a physiological standpoint, speaking involves the flow of air over the vocal cords. Vibrating molecules from the vocal cords change the frequency of the sound waves passing over the cords. If the flow of waves emitted can make their way to the auditory and other senses of the listener, and if both parties share the same language, then these frequencies add up to communication, which emerges out of noise.
However, speaking is not simply an uninterrupted flow of air and sound waves. If the flow of air over the vocal cords is open and smooth, all that we would utter and all that we would hear are vowels.
Consonants are interruptions of the air flow. This is precisely the definition that linguists, speech therapists, and phonologists have of consonants: they block, regulate, and/or restrict the flow of air across the vocal cords and into and out of the mouth. Without this interruption and regulation, words cannot be formed because the air is flowing uniformly. We would only emit and hear smooth tonal changes. Purely phonetically considered, a scream is the emission of vowels without the interruption of consonants.
Vowels can certainly communicate feeling and convey frequency waves that we can interpret as emotion, but words require a highly coordinated and adept capacity for stopping and starting the flow of air over the vocal cords and their reception by another’s physiology.
To get from vowel-like utterances to words that ‘suddenly produce meaning,’ requires interruptions of the smooth flow of the vowels.
Give it a try.
Vocalize the short ‘a’ sound as in hat or bat or cat. It flows and will do so as long as you can sustain exhalation.
Now vocalize the sound of the letter ‘d’ and you will experience a build up of air pressure behind the dam formed by the tongue pressed against the back of your front teeth. Releasing the tongue causes the ‘d’ sound to emerge.
We must be careful to not impart svabhava to these distinctions between vowels and consonants. They are not things. There are a host of quasi-vowels that do not block the flow of air. They channel it smoothly but with some restriction. Vocalize the sound of the letters ‘h’ or ‘w’, and you will experience these quasi-vowels that exist somewhere between the pure flowing vowels and the hard separations of the pure consonants.
Making these sounds, however, is not speaking.
Intelligible spoken communication requires a highly coordinated fluctuation of these motions — a coordination that is simultaneously intentional but so rapid that much of the motions do not rise to the level of consciousness. We don’t think about making a ‘d’ sound when we say ‘dog’. It just happens, though we may intend to say ‘dog’.
For Michel Serres, speaking requires parasitism:
Let us return to the white fall. To the wind of the voice, to the yell, to the open, sonorous flow of vowels. Call or complaint, united flow, laminar breath. Articulated language begins with the sowing of consonants. But consonants are interruptions of the voice. Rupture, stopping, bifurcation of this flow. Yes, consonants are parasitic. They block the breath, cut it off, forbid it, close it, propel it, help it, modulate it. They are obstacles and aides, like ordinary parasites. (The Parasite, 188-9)
The ‘return’ that Serres calls for is a characteristic move. It is not a ‘return’ that seeks the purity of an essence as if everything has gone wrong and needs a reset. It is a return that stares into a thing to find its relations as its origins. Later, in L’Incandescent, Serres will refer to this return as a descent, which will involve tracing the current moment back through time by seeing as many of the ruptures, stops, bifurcations of the flow that makes the specific now of the observer possible.
In this case of human language as the observable present, we descend through our physiology to find the origin of language as a parasitic relation of the consonant that interrupts the yell, the united flow, and the laminar voice, none of which require this interruption.
Tracing this descent back to now: once the capacity for interruption becomes genetically coded, recurring and predictable, then and only then can human language form. The communication of tone becomes the articulation of words. This origin does not happen at an instant, nor is it the expression of an exclusively human capacity.
So many arrows of time need to be woven together for this capacity to emerge. Only a very few of these arrows are identifiable as residing in something that we call ‘human.’
How long did it take for the larynx to descend far enough for vocal cords to emerge? How long before neurotransmitters would connect to this descended larynx? How long before these changes became a general feature of the species and not just the mutated characteristics of an individual? How long before the larynx gained its double function — emitting sounds and blocking food entering the respiratory system? How long before these physiological capacities became symbolic information and not just noise? How long before symbolic sounds become words and words become sentences? How long before these words begin negotiating exchanges? How long before these words become assertions of obligations and then of law? How long before exchange, obligation, and law become declarations of war and subsequent treaties of peace?
The flow is first, then the capacity for interruptions of the flow. Even later comes the possibility of labeling these interrupted flows as ‘words’.
We can call this a smooth arrow of time only retrospectively and only by hovering above the messiness of the reality. Where and when along this percolating timeline would we draw the line that demarcates the human essence of language, its svabhava? The choice will always be provisional.
It will also be made through a declarative act of speaking.
The provisional declaration becomes political when this arrow of time is retrospectively smoothed out, and when we believe we can say, ‘There is the beginning of the thing itself. There at that moment and in those features is the human essence.’
Let’s take stock of this descent into the temporality of human speech: At minimum, human language emerges from multiple arrows: (1) the lungs, larynx, and tongue line up so that the smooth flow of the yell becomes (2) interrupted, regulated, articulated, bifurcated by the tongue’s new found capacity to move with neurological precision inside the mouth and for (3) the emitted sound waves to cross an atmosphere that conducts these waves with fidelity across space and time to be (4) received by another who can hear and perhaps respond. (5) None of this happens in single cell organisms, which evolved billions of years before any of this physiology became coordinated.
Language, clearly, is not a thing. It is a coordination of many, many motions that took a very long time to establish their relationships.
Again, this is a smooth arrow of time only if we retrospectively ignore a lot of details.
Incandescence and the Clinamen
This is not to say that the yell or the vowel is pure and that the consonant is an impure imposition originating outside the purity. This would be too dichotomous for Serres.
This is an instance of a clinamen — a deviation from an equilibrium that causes new motions, new relations, and new equilibria to occur and eventually dissolve.
Serres moves quickly, however, and we can never rest by saying that a clinamen, or a parasite, is always the same thing.
To experience this, we need to understand Serres’ recurring use of ‘whiteness’ that begins the passage I cited: ‘Let us return to the white fall.’ Whiteness is the presence and rejection of all color — what he will later call l’incandescent (incandescence). An object that we see as white is rejecting all lightwave frequencies. Our optical physiology renders this as white — the total absence of color. It is all color frequencies all at once, and because it is rejecting everything, it is nothing. Nagarjuna would say that it is empty and that it lacks svabhava.
The stem cell is a typical example for Serres. It is the cell that can become any cell, but by itself, it does nothing. It must be put into relation with other relations for it to do anything operational. Something must make its home in the cell and influence its self-reproducing processes (DNA, RNA) to move in a direction that was not there until the parasite arrived.
We must be careful in staring into this incandescence and this clinamen to find an inherent logic. We find only the pure possibility of relations that are not reducible to a priori laws such as F=MA or élan vital or difference-and-repetition or differánce.
Emphatically in The Parasite, we do not find a primordial desire for ‘exchange’ or ‘production.’ In some ways, this economic view of humanity is Serres’ target in The Parasite: ‘… we have been caught up in economic history, a time of calculation of exchanges and of making up for losses. Does this history have an outside? That is precisely the subject of this book’ (31).
To find the outside of this economic history that has been so dominant for so long, Serres asserts the precedence of the parasitic relation before the exchange relation:
The parasite precedes the exchanger, the broker, I don’t know what to call him. The parasitic relation precedes exchange in general. There is always a hare in the garden. There always was a hare, even when the plot lay fallow…. That is why the relation of exchange is always dangerous, why the gift is always a forfeit, and why the relation can always attain catastrophic levels. It always takes place on a minefield. The exchanged things travel in a channel that is already parasited. The balance of exchange is always weighed and measured, calculated, taking into account a relation without exchange, an abusive relation. The term abusive is a term of usage. Abuse doesn’t prevent use. The abuse value, complete, irrevocable consummation precedes use- and exchange-value. Quite simply, it is the arrow with only one direction. (80)
What does Serres mean by making the parasitic precede exchange? Is he asserting a new fundamental law? Before exchange, were we in a Hobbesian state of nature where we were all parasitically in a war of ‘all against all’?
No. Serres is working on a way of thinking that treats relations as radically precedent. Things do not exist before relations, not even natural laws like F=MA, which are only more sophisticated things.
The whole question of the system now is to analyze what a point, a being, and a station are. They are crossed by a network of relations; they are crossroads, interchanges, sorters. But is that not analysis itself: saying that this thing is at the intersection of several series. From then on, the thing itself is nothing else but a center of relations, crossroads or passages. It is nothing but a position or a situation. (39)
Everything is parasitic all the way down and all the way back up again. This way of thinking — ‘analysis itself’ — sees both relations and things, but it sees them without a hard differentiation between them. To call a thing a ‘position’ or a ‘situation’ or a ‘crossroads’ is easy to misunderstand. We can still think of the position as an essence. We must think of position as emergent from within motions that are crossing, exchanging, and sorting themselves in relation to each other.
To return to vowels and consonants: A word is a thing only because it emerges out of the flow of highly coordinated interruptions of air flow. A word is a multitude of shifting positions constantly in coordinated motion with each other.
As such, language orders time in the construction of sentences. All sentences seek to organize space and time.
Example: Exchange, thematically central to The Parasite, does not exist without language that can enter into negotiation and fulfill promises. To begin to understand this, let’s ask, ‘What is being exchanged?’ The answer will always be something parasited before the relation of exchange can happen. Simply understood, the produce of the garden (where the hare is always present) is extracted from the earth before it enters into the exchange relationship. The exchange relationship itself is mediated by language that needed to evolve to a certain point were value can be vocalized — i.e., compared, measured, equated, all of which requires transmission of sound waves punctuated by the alternation of vowels and consonants.
This is an ordering of time that cannot happen without vowels becoming consonants, consonants becoming phonemes, phonemes become words, words becoming sentences, sentences formulating obligations and entering into negotiations, and so on. As we continue this descent through language and through its capacity to negotiate exchange, we find a narrative billions of years in the making.
None of this arrives fully baked in an embodied instant that we can call ‘the human.’
Once it exists, language can be studied retrospectively as an object with an essence. But to do so, as Serres is trying to articulate, is to ignore the complexities of motions — incandescence, branches, clinamens, parasites, turbulence, equilibria — that give rise to things that become our objects of knowledge, exchange, use and absuse.
We grant them essences, svabhava, only retrospectively and from within the temporality that has made them appear to be things.
Parasitic Time
It should be clear that parasitism is not a univocally bad thing for Serres. It is a way of thinking that stares into things and finds relations that make the things possible.
For Serres, parasitic relationality is a composition of time. But time is not a thing.
This will take some explanation.
Time and Experience
Time, experience, and turbulent motion are intimately related in Serres’ worldview. This is especially so in The Parasite and The Birth of Physics, which immediately preceded it in 1977.
A laminar flow has no time because there is no differentiation of motions. Whether the flow is moving or not moving cannot be decided because there are no relations that aren’t completely fixed. There is no distinction between movement and rest.
A consequence: there is no capacity for experience until a differentiation of motion occurs.
Another consequence: when all relations are fixed, there is no time and no history because nothing is happening. ‘Nothing can happen, nothing is produced in a homogeneous field’ (Birth of Physics, 53).
This should automatically complicate our notion of time, which requires change to be happening. You can get a glimpse of this if you’ve ever found yourself leaving a train station where your train and another train are moving at the same speed. You know you are moving, but as you stare at the other train moving along with you, it is easy to lose the sensation of motion. Make this experience encompass all motions, and it becomes clear that motion or rest are the same thing in such a homogeneity.
Time, for Serres, can only happen when this equilibrium is disturbed:
Elsewhere [in an essay called ‘The Origins of Language’] I said that living organisms are bouquets or blades of time, that they are exchangers of time. That life, certainly, is nothing but time, but that this proposition is not simple. (The Parasite, 186)
Why is this proposition not simple? Because time is not one thing. It is a highly specific blending of ‘three kinds of time, so different that they can be said to be contradictory’:
the reversible one, datable by the long equilibria of the world, and the two irreversible ones, those of entropy and of Darwinian evolution …. Life would be the intertwining of these three separable chronies. I leave a free piece floating around, the inconsolable hope in the transparency of the work we leave to posterity. (The Parasite, 186)
Time can only be understood as the highly specific intertwining of moments of equilibria, the movement of entropy, and the negentropic movement of evolution. None of this forms a smooth line, and all of them together make time happen.
Time is better understood as the ‘percolation’ of these three motions. This means that time happens as a result of highly coordinated and often turbulent motions that can only be understood in their specificity. We can take different perspectives — higher or lower — to see different configurations of time and motion, but our perspectives will always only be partial, based on the specificity we are interested in at the moment.
This is why Serres has to ‘leave a free piece floating around’ for posterity to figure out. He is not Kant leaving a hermetically sealed, beautiful object (The Critique of Pure Reason, Metaphysics of Morals) for posterity to learn and rigorously apply.
He is leaving a project that can never be finished.
What is the project?
Quasi-Subjects and Objects
The project is not one thing. It is the incandescent capacity for experience to continuously expand temporally and spatially. This is crucial to understand if one wants to fully grasp Serres’ intent.
Twenty years down the road, he will elaborate this vision of a ‘transcendental quasi-subject’ in L’Incandescent:
This quasi-subject therefore adds up the ‘atomic’ subject and its communication routes. It envelopes or integrates these relations in an indefinite way. (The Incandescent, 117-8)
Let’s pause the citation for a moment to understand what Serres is saying here. The ‘atomic’ subject is our Enlightenment inheritance. We have been trained to see ourselves as individualized entities that are completely self-contained.
In a fully networked world, however, this atomic view of ourselves is myopic and, at times, dangerous.
Example: I am holding an empty water bottle and need to dispose of it. The atomic view isolates this situation to just me. The quasi-subject view, however, stretches my awareness to envision all the routes and relations that make this situation possible. I imagine the ‘waste chain’, which is largely invisible, but I am still a crucial link in that invisible chain.
I must broaden the vision: quite literally, I am not the only one making this choice right here, right now. Millions of similar situations are occurring globally at this moment. This is because the world is globally networked in such a way that we’ve mass produced this situation as a kind of perversion of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’.
Consequence: I am no longer the lone individual operating according to my own interests. This atomic subject must be understood as the integration of innumerable and indefinite relations, which includes the literal and metaphorical routes that stretch us into a global community as quasi-subjects.
These routes include the parasitic movement of our trash into the ocean as the modern dark side of the ‘invisible hand.’ These routes also include all the networks that make my individual situation into the actions of a globalized ‘we’.
I do not act alone because I am not simply an I.
Serres continues:
The roads leading to the various habitats on the map of space allow us to attain the quasi-subject unifying knowledge, space and time, allow us to attain this general equivalence of people and groups. The incandescent is named one. (The Incandescent, 118)
We are so thoroughly networked that it is disingenuous to think of ourselves as lone individuals with a limited sphere of influence. The water bottle I dispose of will end up god knows where. The pollution I generate will be absorbed and trapped in the atmosphere.
My actions are not solely my actions.
Reimagining our selves within all of the global networks that make us who we are has become the experiential challenge. We have to imagine the roads and routes that lead to and from us as part of us.
More importantly we are part of them. We are the routes that lead us to being a global ‘we’, which is now visible from space.
The Earth needs only to be observed by satellite, at night, for these great dense spots to be recognized. Japan, the Northeast American megalopolis from Baltimore to Montreal, the city that is Europe, an enormous herd of monsters that Paris seems to watch over like a shepherd from afar, and the broken rim of the Dragons: Korea, Formosa, Hong Kong, Singapore … When it is unevenly distributed, skyrocketing demographic growth becomes concentrated and stuck together in giant units, colossal banks of humanity as powerful as oceans, deserts, or icecaps, themselves stockpiles of ice, heat, dryness, or water; these immense units feed on themselves, advance and weigh upon the planet, for worse and for better. (The Natural Contract, 16-17)
The global 'we' as seen at night from a composite image taken by satellite.
Everything is Moving
To understand quasi-subjects and quasi-objects as experientially consequential, we need to see motion everywhere:
there can be no life without roads…. Everything moves, even trees, in which sap circulates and whose foliage whirls in the north wind. Everything moves, even the molecules in the minutest cell. Everything lives from communicating. Everything exists from exchange. Relation conditions life and precedes exchange. (The Incandescent, 116-7)
This is a crucial experiential step ‘to attain the quasi-subject’: to see that ‘everything moves’ and, consequently, we are nothing but an entanglement of relations.
If everything is in motion and relational, this includes space and time, which means that it includes ourselves and our capacity for experience. As we saw above with the capacity for speech, this radical relationality sees things only insofar as those things are emergent from interacting motions.
Speech is a blending of parasitic motions that are in contract with other motions.
Yes, the parasite and the contract can coexist.
A consonant is a parasite because it can only exist as an interruption of the smooth flow of air out of the lungs and across the vocal cords to be shaped by the tongue. When this parasitic capacity begins to cooperate with the smooth flow of air, something like language is possible. To use a later term from Serres, a ‘natural contract’ is formed. To be sure, this contract is a necessary but not sufficient condition for spoken language. Many other motions have to be included in the contract, but the point to be stressed here is that human language is not an easy-to-identify thing other than the specificity of the motions involved to make it possible.
Reimagining ourselves as part of a cosmos where ‘everything moves’ must include time and space. And because Serres will not reduce relations to fundamental laws — which would simply be new things — time and space become emergent from disrupted equilibria.
In other words, we must grant a specificity to time that is not available in a Cartesian and Kantian world where everything flows in a one-way arrow from the subject to the world as a collection of passive objects. The Cartesian/Kantian flow of space and time isolates the individual as an ‘atomic’ subject. It creates the illusion that we are originally alone in the world as thinking individuals, and that our relationships with the world and with other individuals form after our atomic subjectivity is established. Beings are first; relations are second.
Quasi-subjects and quasi-objects parasitically redirect this arrow of time to find the primacy of other flows, other motions — bifurcations, blockages, propulsions.
Time percolates because everything is motion. We are ‘composed of roads’ (The Incandescent, 116).
Time, Experience, Soul
Patterns such as parasites, clinamen, incandescence, and contracts become tools of experience. Serres called them ‘operators’. They are designed to expand our capacity for seeing the routes that integrate us. They are designed to activate our quasi-subjectivity.
As operators, these tools can allow us a fluid perspective on our experience. We can rise above the fray to see our relations, but we can never call that home. The rising above is in the service of descending into our networked experiences.
Serres is at his most clear in Le Tiers-Instruit (translated as The Troubadour of Knowledge) in the centrality of experience as the expandability of the soul:
In being exposed through experience, man enters into time and opens it. The human does not exist without experience.
Let us call soul the kind of space and time that can be expanded from its natal position toward all exposures. (The Troubadour of Knowledge, 31)
Experience is fundamentally temporal and spatial beyond the confines of the isolated individual. We need the concept of the soul to orient ourselves to this exposure and capacity for expansion. This is not a soul that is an entity that we ‘save’; nor it is a soul that is disembodied. As always for Serres, the whole of the body is crucially important to experience: ‘Thus the thorax, the uterus, the mouth, the stomach, the sexual organs, and the heart are dilated and full themselves with wind, with life, with wine, with songs, with goods, with pleasures, with the other or with recognition — with hunger, with thirst, with misery and with resentment, also’ (The Troubadour of Knowledge, 31-2).
This is a radically different understanding of subjectivity than we inherit from Descartes and from Kant — i.e., from the Enlightenment. Serres uses the same terms for subjectivity — soul, experience, ‘the human’ — but he is parasitic in his use/abuse.
He creates a new spatial-temporal trajectory from within the Enlightenment’s own trajectory by being parasitic on the Enlightenment.
Again, here is an indication that parasitism is not a value judgement. Rather, it is a way of envisioning and enacting innovations (that are always interruptions) within an existing equilibrium —i.e., an existing set of ossified contractual motions.
Because the interruption comes from within a contractual equilibrium, it has to improvise its criteria out of the motions. The consonant interrupts the vowel because it emerges within the contractual motions of the larynx, respiration, tongue, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and an atmosphere conducive to sound wave transmission. It does not arrive from outside the system. A new equilibrium — spoken language — becomes possible from this initial parasitic action, which is initially a genetic accident within a much larger entanglement of motions.
To be clear, disruption and de-centering are not absolute values for Serres as they were for much of the knee-jerk poststructuralism of the last two decades of the twentieth century. For Serres, there is no end to motion, and we should not desire an end. Rather, there are equilibria that stabilize, get parasited, and expanded into other equilibria.
This parasitic power opens up new flows of time and space as a kind of ‘whiteness’ or ‘incandescence’ or ‘clinamen’ that interrupts, bifurcates, promotes, aides, redirects an existing set of motions.
We should be careful about letting our Enlightenment biases creep back in. This is not a ‘state change’ as a physicist might think of it. This is their bias, however, for desiring the world to be reducible to things with svabhava — natural laws such as F=MA. A physicist’s ‘state’ is underwritten by the assumptions that a state is a reflection of laws. If we know the law and the state, then we know what happens next.
Serres will avoid talking about states. For him, if there is anything like a state, it is nothing but very slow motions: ‘There are indeed no stabilities except in a universe in which everything flows, unstable’ (Birth of Physics, 51).
Panchrone
If we are to activate quasi-subjectivity, we must descend through the motions that make us. This means descending through time. For Serres, this is far more difficult and far more radical than imagining ourselves in another space, such as another planet.
‘Panchrone’ — to see oneself as a function of temporalities, which means to see oneself as a bundle of motions infinitely interwoven with le Gran Récit.
Who is he, this Panchrone, who am I then, if not this provenance in return, this traceability, this river of unpredictable fire, this interminable descent where this contingency that thinks today is constituted from almost nothing? … Panchrone says of time, which precisely does make thought vary: through time I change, disappearing in going back up it but constructing myself in following it. (The Incandescent, 121-2).
Descent and ascent, disappearing and constructing the self: this is an extraordinary challenge, but it is one that we have been undertaking as we move back through the development of human language. In that movement, the human and its capacity to speak have dissolved into contingency.
As we’ve traced its provenance, we find percolating time. We are nothing but the temporary result of fits and starts, of bifurcations and routes, of time that is an arrow only retrospectively: ‘Body and understanding, he is made of time. Better, in him as in a tree, the Universe folds or unites its flows. From the air he breaths to the water drunk, nails, faeces or noble neurons, Panchrone is several billion years old.’ (122).
Spitting in the Salad Bowl
Central to Serres analysis in The Parasite is the emergence of ‘the economy’ based on private property, both of which are fundamentally parasitic.
In the Social Contract, Rousseau says private property happens, but he does not say how or when. It must have happened through an interruption injected, sometimes violently, into the commons.
Serres asks: ‘how do we make the common proper?’ He uses the French term le propre which can also mean clean: ‘one’s own [le propre] is what is clean [le proper]’ (144):
Whoever was a lodger for a long time, and thus in a group even in the most secret acts where the private is never safe, remembers someone who was not willing to divide the salad course. When the salad bowl came, he spat in it, and the greens were his.
The result: ‘Private property exists. Suddenly it is stable.’ (The Parasite, 140-1).
Time is reconfigured by this parasitic action. The smooth contractual movement of passing the salad within the communal meal is interrupted by parasitic action that changes time.
Time can no longer pass as it had been expected.
Imagine this as if you are the lodger waiting for the communal salad. You have an experience of time that is part of the contractual motions of the communal dinner. Someone spits in the salad and lays claim to it. You are no longer waiting. Time is fundamentally different — not just experientially different, but really, contractually, and materially different.
The salad will not arrive at your place setting. The contractual flow of time is broken, and a new trajectory of time and space must be found.
The same happens with the transformation of the voice by consonants:
‘Yes, consonants are parasitic. They block the breath, cut it off, forbid it, close it, propel it, help it, modulate it. They are obstacles and aides, like ordinary parasites’ (The Parasite, 188-9).
Doesn’t spitting involve the same physiological motions as does speech? Isn’t spitting a form of communication that uses the breath and the tongue to make a clear statement — a more definitive statement of ownership than merely declaring that ‘The salad is now mine’?
As should be abundantly clear, parasites do not do one thing because they are not a thing expressible by a mathematical law, such as F=MA. They are motion without a prior law, and as such, they are quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, they are clinamen, and they can be contractual.
It is difficult to decide if these quasi’s are relations or being:
I have not said enough whether the parasite is being or relation. It is, first of all, the elementary relation. (224)
This quasi-object is not an object, but it is one nevertheless. (225)
What are we to understand by ‘the elementary relation’? What could elementary mean here? From all that has been said, it cannot be a fundamental law. Elementary’ must mean incandescence, whiteness, indeterminacy that opens to possibility.
But the possible is only possible because of Eternal Recurrence, which Serres will reference from time to time. Not every new now is wholly new. The past lingers automatically in the present, as Bergson said.
Without Eternal Recurrence, private property cannot be retained. The spittle in the salad bowl must automatically be preserved in the present long enough for the new pattern to hold. When it holds, it expands when the pattern becomes the possibility of contracts as stable processes: ‘A process has to be found, originating at one point, that can fill some surrounding space; some sort of expansion has to be created…. It has to be a sound or an odor. It must hit the open ears or nostrils’ (141).
Parasites, as we have seen, cut off, forbid, and close while they also propel, modulate, and aide the chaotic motions of Eternal Recurrence.
Modernity begins when this parasitic action of private property becomes ‘the economy’ as an expansive movement that will not stop until the globe is enveloped.
Parasites and Time’s Arrow
Violence happens when we try to compose historical time as a smooth linear flow. It never works that way, and it takes overt and covert violence to make it smooth. The forward moving arrow of time needs to be balanced with a sense of justice that often moves against that arrow — or at least disrupts its smooth flow.
Let’s take an example directly from the Enlightenment.
In 1776, Adam Smith famously wrote, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the baker, or the brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’ [1] While this has become a famous and oft cited statement about how the economy works, it bares very little resemblance to the actual practices of living that any of these professions experienced in the eighteenth century.
We tend to look backward at this century and find the smooth arrow of time moving from an agrarian economy where land is shared to a capitalist economy and private property as a ‘natural’ development. The great British historian of this period, E.P. Thompson, wrote: ‘Paternalists and the poor continued to complain at the extension of market practices which we, looking back, tend to assume as inevitable and “natural.” But what may now appear as inevitable was not, in the eighteenth century, necessarily a matter for approval’ (‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd,’ The Essential E.P. Thompson, page 324).
The vision of history that we inherit from the Enlightenment is that ‘human nature’ is realizing itself as fundamentally capitalist. All the processes that Smith describes in The Wealth of Nations are assumed to be the result of human nature freeing itself from artificial constraints and doing what it was made by God to do — accumulate wealth.
What we find when we stare into the material reality of the Enlightenment is anything but this smooth arrow of time. Rather, we find percolating time manifested as resistance to this arrow. That resistance took many forms, and recourse to the law, as the codification of long-standing rules for fairly running markets, was one of them.
We cannot underemphasize this point: the parasitic practices that the customary laws were designed to prevent became the fundamental practices of the emergent capitalism — and justifying these once-parasitic practices as ‘natural’ was part of the process of smoothing out time’s arrow. The poor would appeal to these customary practices and the supporting laws as a way of protecting transparency in the markets, but eventually they would lose.
Let’s look at how this parasitic transformation of time worked.
The Pitch Market
A local ‘pitch market’ was a model of transparency. A grower of grain would bring his family’s wares to the market. Two bells would ring. The first signaled that the market was open for the local inhabitants to make their purchases from the local farmers. Once that process was complete, a second bell would ring, signaling that the bulk purchasers could begin negotiating for what was left.
The sequence of the pitch market — i.e., the composition of time — was crucial to the fair treatment of the local population. Prices were fixed, by custom, and the goods sold by the farmers had to be present and inspectable by a local regulator such as the local Assize of Bread. The individual would buy grain and take it home to bake bread for the family.
The entire process required a composition of time where buyers, sellers, regulators, and the goods to be sold are present and visible to each other. Contrary to Adam Smith’s invocation of ‘the invisible hand,’ this transparency and the composition of time that makes it possible became the target of parasitic practices that eventually came to be seen as simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘invisible.’
These customary rules of the market were all designed around transparency and providing the local population first shot at purchasing goods of a known quality at a fairly set price. To be sure, this was not a utopian situation. It was full of its own parasitism and violence, but it does fairly represent the form of market economy that the butcher, the baker, and the brewer inhabited.
Knowing that price fluctuations for a subsistence economy could wreak havoc on the local population, this ‘moral economy’ (as Thompson called it) was designed to keep things stable and predictable for the local population. Quality and prices were regulated by this moral economy, which was codified in laws and institutions overseeing the exchange process.
The Sample and the Parasite
Specifically prohibited were practices that drive modern capitalism today and were considered parasitic within the pitch markets. The eighteenth century had specific names for these parasitic economic practices, and we easily come across these words in the primary sources: forestalling (buying grain before it is brought to the market), regrating (buying in order to sell in the same or another market at a profit), engrossing (buying up the whole of the crop before it gets to market) [2].
The parasitic practice was embodied in the ‘sample,’ which was illegal in the pitch market economy but became common practice as that economy gave way to the ethic of ‘wealth accumulation.’ Thompson cites one eighteenth-century pamphleteer on these parasitic practices:
The farmers (he complained) had come to shun the market and to deal with jobbers and other ‘interlopers’ at their doors. Other farmers still brought to market a single load ‘to make a show of a market, and to have a Price set,’ but the main business was done in ‘parcels of corn in a bag or handkerchief which are called samples.’ (323)
As a marketing tactic, the ‘sample’ allowed these ‘interlopers’ to buy large quantities of grain from farmers before the grain coming to the traditional market. A market emerged spatially outside of and temporally before the traditional ‘pitch market.’
Samples became abstract representations of larger quantities that would not actually be seen before they are divided and transported away from the local market. Thompson quotes a petition brought in 1733 to the House of Commons:
‘In 1733 several boroughs petitioned the House of Commons against the practice: Haslemere (Surrey) complained of millers and mealmen engrossing the trade — they ‘secretly bought great quantities of corn by small samples, refusing to buy such as hath been pitch’d in open market.’ (323)
The abstraction of the ‘sample’, along with the other parasitic practices it enabled, forced a recomposition of time from the customary sequence of market days and bell ringing. This recomposition shifted the entire game to favor the big buyers, who could create a shadow market occurring before the pitch market.
The sample was the spitting into the salad bowl that claimed the whole commons as one’s property.
The arrow of time emerges as a parasitic interruption of the cycle of the pitch market. It places another very different market configuration temporally before the pitch market.
As one-off practices, this isn’t a big deal. Over the course of the British eighteenth century, however, parasitic practices not only became normal, they became ‘natural’ once Adam Smith got ahold of them. Everything began to move into abstractions hidden away from those who relied on customs and the moral economy of the pitch markets for their livelihoods.
The transparency is lost. Invisibility is on the rise and accumulating wealth at unprecedented speed.
It becomes the ‘invisible hand’ as the national and global expansion of wealth accumulation that is nature’s expression of a properly functioning economy.
Watches and Scapegoats
This massive parasitism led to scapegoating on an unprecedented scale. Peter Linebaugh’s classic work, The London Hanged, documented the enormous increase in capital punishment and ‘transportations’ related to what would today consider petty crimes against private property.
This scapegoating — public hangings and ‘transportation’ to the colonies — was part and parcel of the Enlightenment’s parasitic straightening out of time.
Among the hardest hit by this escalation of parasitism were the butchers and bakers that Smith singled out. Perhaps an even more dramatic example, however, is what happened to watch makers.
In 1757, the London authorities saw the need for a new law: the Watch Fraud Act. Linebaugh quotes its preamble:
Whereas many persons employed in the making of clocks and watches have of late been guilty of divers frauds and abuses by purloining, imbezilling, secreting, selling, pawning or otherwise unlawfully disposing of the clocks and watches, or such parts therefore, or the materials for making the same, with which they have been entrusted… (228)
The law names and institutes these new forms of parasitism in the name of plugging the gaps and fissures that had opened in a highly contentious division of labour.
Perhaps the longest sentence in Marx’s Capital is dedicated to describing how many specialities and sub-specialties were involved in the making of clocks and watches [3]. The complexity of coordinating the flow of raw materials, payments, and intermediate goods left room for plenty of new parasitic activities and, therefore, scapegoating. William Udall, when he was an apprentice watchmaker, learned ‘how to scrape the insides of gold watches that had been brought in for mending.’ He was eventually ‘hanged for stealing a silver watch worth 40s’ (The London Hanged, 227).
Udall’s parasitic opportunity emerged within the new channels and circuits that wove together the political economists’ favorite eighteenth-century example of the division labour. It’s estimated that 120 different specialities were involved and at least 8000 men (the women weren’t counted). It is well understood how the division of labour put downward pressure on the incomes of those doing the work. The parasitic forces of low wages (often paid by the piece), dangerous work (plenty of mercury involved. as well as blindness), and delayed payments forced the laborers to the ‘purloining, imbezilling, secreting, selling, pawning or otherwise unlawfully disposing of the clocks and watches’ named by the Watch Fraud Act.
Crucial to this counter-parasitism was the parasitic pawnbroker. It’s estimated that there were ‘250 large pawnbrokers in London during the 1740’s and a great many smaller ones.
One writer defended them by saying that if employers would pay their workmen on the completion of work, there would be no problem of their acting as ‘fences’ or ‘locks’ for stolen good; thus he acknowledge the relation between wage-payment and the pawnbroker. (The London Hanged, 228)
In that same year of 1757, the Pawning Act was passed ‘requiring that brokers be licensed and record all pledges received’ (229).
While the laws are piling up trying to straighten out the arrow of time, political economists, including Adam Smith but not only him, are writing another kind of law — the law of human nature that would codify the new parasitic practices (sampling, the division of labour, wage labour) as ‘natural laws’ while the practices of the moral economy and the counter-parasitic practices of the pawnbroker economy were either regulated or criminalized.
Is this all parasitic? Yes, but only insofar as it is parasitic on parasitism. We can’t, therefore, use parasitism as a judgement. We can only use it as a way of looking at relations and how those relations create things. To call people ‘criminals’ who were once productive members of the moral economy is to ascribe ‘being’ to individuals who are simply moving into newly available positions as the arrow of time gets hammered out at their expense.
Footnotes
Footnotes
[1] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776, Book I, Chapter 2.
[2] See Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged, page 200 for these definitions.
[3] The sentence occurs in the chapter titled, ‘The Division of Labour and Manufacturer’. It can be found on page 462 of the Ben Fowkes translation.