Individual Oikeios
By Leo Diamond
As the climate crisis grows, the call to action is beginning to be sounded on all fronts, not just those that deal directly with the physical processes producing environmental change. Beyond oil divestment or critiques of the basic assumption of indefinite growth at the core of capitalism, the ways in which we actively engage with and think about the natural world we are affecting are also coming into question. The discussion that Aldo Leopold started in 1949 with A Sand County Almanac and the proposition of a "land ethic," which called into question and demanded change to the way we engage with the land, is coming to a point of ever greater importance and scope. Now, modern approaches to environmental thought are beginning to challenge the way we engage with the history of our relationship to the land as well.
Jason W. Moore's Capitalism in the Web of Life does just this, turning a critical eye both to the contemporary relationship between nature and capitalism, as well as to the historic one. Moore's critique comes primarily from a movement against a common notion in both popular and environmental thought, specifically the Nature/Society divide in which human constructs–both material and interpersonal–are viewed as separate from the motions of the wider ecological web. Beyond fringe interactions these two spheres are taken as separate. Moore instead turns to the oikeios, a way of viewing the connection between the human and ecological as one built on relationships rather than differences. This characterizes his main idea connecting the major player in human material and social construct, capitalism, and the natural environment. Moore describes the need for a world-historical view, in which we understand nature-in-capitalism and capitalism-in-nature as the interplay of relationships which are dependent on each other. Natural environments produce new forms of capitalism which in turn produce new environments. Under capitalism, nature is not destroyed but is forced as oikeios to perform labor, and in doing so is changed and changes the very force that demands that it work. This theory is not comprehensive or even complete, and neither does Moore claim it to be, yet it provides a framework which can be used to think about the ways historic forms of capitalism and the environment have informed each other, and how they might do so in new ways in the future.
I want to shift the perspective laid out by Moore, and use this notion of oikeios to not only consider how historical modes of nature and capitalism are formed, but also how current ones exist. Can we use this framework to consider individual perspectives in which nature-in-capitalism and capitalism-in-nature exist around us? Can this reconceptualization be applied to the individual as they approach capitalism in the web of life? By drawing on the social theory of Hannah Arendt, we can explore the extent to which our modern notions of the human relationship to nature and the individual's ecological perspective under capitalism obscure the relationships which form the oikeios. Once this veil has been revealed, consideration of its form through the tracing of a material quality of capitalism, specifically waste, can help us peel it back, and view the intertwining of capitalism in the web of life as it approaches us today.
Part 1: The Veil Between Society and Nature
To understand how the oikeios can operate from the point of view of the individual, we need to understand how that individual is shielded from the relations which compose it. Under capitalism, the majority of people operate as laborers or consumers, but what do those terms actually mean in our society? Using the definitions and relations Hannah Arendt lays out in The Human Condition can answer these questions in a way that still keeps us within the nature-in-capitalism paradigm. Arendt's thought spans much of history, from the Greeks to the modern age, but her view of the way labor operates in modern society helps characterize the veil between capitalism and nature. For Arendt, labor operates in an explicitly biological and natural space, it is "the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor." This process is cyclical in nature, as are all natural processes, and is characterized by continual reproduction and consumption from birth till decay. Similarly, products of labor are those which are intended to be consumed and returned to the natural cycle. Arendt dubs individuals whose lives are characterized by this mode of activity animal laborans. This is contrasted to that of work, the activity of the homo faber, which is related to the environment through destruction and change. Work is the process of making something new, of bringing the raw materials of nature into the world of human construct necessarily by their destruction. At the basic level these works include things like buildings, crafts, and art, which persist beyond the natural cycle and help to contribute to the human world. While the products of labor are consumed and integrated back into the environment, the products of work are meant to stand out and last beyond an individuals own biological processes. Arendt's basic notions of the major human activities necessarily bind humanity and human relations to the web of life, creating an initial understanding of Society as inherently related to Nature. Through laboring we directly attend to our own personal biology by engaging with the wider natural world. The products of labor which we consume are brought into our bodies from the environment, and return from whence they came as we age, reproduce, and die. Yet under capitalism and industrialism in the modern age the position of the laborer has changed, and with it the relationship between nature, the products of labor, and human construct.
Capitalism, the goal of which is the accumulation of earning and spending power, has attempted to dissolve the position of homo faber. Modern capitalism has created a society of laborers, people whose only purpose is to engage in the cyclic nature of life, to ensure the necessary consumption for survival. It does not matter what the labor itself consists of, in most cases, the division of labor which Smith and Marx identify has served to strip the activity of anything which might require the skill and creativity of work, as long as one is laboring to "earn a living" they are simply participating in the consumption/reproduction process. Under capitalism we are a society of producers and consumers, and to Arendt this means we are a society of waste. Since the position of work as creating lasting human construct in the material sense has degraded, all production is meant for consumption, "things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a catastrophic end." So to the individual under capitalism, their primary mode of activity is characterized by consumption in order to maintain their personal biology, yet the connections to a wider ecology are still hidden both in Arendt's social theory and in the reality of the consumer experience.
The issue lies in Arent's notion of "worldliness," and its application to the waste produced by modern capitalism. Arendt specifies the notion of the world as a creation of human construct, both material and interpersonal. This imposes a conceptual barrier between humanity and the wider natural world, echoing the Nature/Society divide which Moore attempts to surpass. As Angela Last states in her analysis of the concept "worldliness constitutes the foundation of human activity in that it is about common care for ‘what lies between people’, there seems to be no room for safely admitting matter other than as an outside or interspace." Thus there is a gap in perception for the individual where the material beginnings and ends of labor production move out of the sphere of direct human contact. In the cycle of labor, it appears as if "things appear and disappear, manifest themselves and vanish." Yet excess is produced, waste does not disappear, but rather enters the environment and exits the individual's sphere of perception. The barrier between the material motions of capitalism and humanity are thus erected. As a society of laborers being aware of our own biology is our primary focus. We are concerned alone with its maintenance, and the material inputs and outputs of the products of labor which we consume lie outside of the world, outside of our perception. Our social organization under capitalism then is one in which the individual's connections to nature as they exist in society are obscured, and in order to bridge this conceptual gap, an examination of material aspects which labor pulls from and secretes back into the environment is necessary.
Part 2: Piercing the veil that obscures the oikeios
An individual's perception of the oikeios, the relationship between our organization of society and the environment that forms the nature-in-capitalism and capitalism-in-nature method of observation, is obscured by their position as a laborer and consumer under capitalism. The humanistic focus on Arendt's "world" (or Society as Moore would name it) prevents our ability to view the ways in which nature flows into and out of the sphere of human production. So how can we bring these relationships into the consumer's sphere of perception? As Arendt notes we are a society of laborers under capitalism, and so we are all intimately tied to our own biology and life. For the individual to properly see the oikeios and to care about relationships that lie outside of the explicitly human realm, we need to begin close to that intimate sense of life which is a necessity of labor, and expand from there. One very effective analysis is that of the product of meat, something close to us in form and origin, a product of life itself. By looking at an artistic analysis of meat as a commodity under capitalism, we can begin to form a connection, however small, between the notion of the human world and the wider environment. Once we understand how that bridge is formed, we can expand our analysis to other, less intimate products, and understand the oikeios that they form as well.
In their essay "Red," Thomas Menely and Margaret Ronda examine the alienation of the individual from the ecological reality of capitalist production through a materialist lens. Applying Marx's notion of the commodity form as an abstraction of material reality, they also critique "green thought" and introduce "red-inflected green criticism" to understand the gap between individual and ecology. These ideas are helpful, and by applying them to Dziga Vertov's Kinoglaz we can see just how Vertov shifts our vision from the abstract commodity form back to the biological source of meat, bridging the gap between the consumer and the environment.
Vertov's critique of capitalism comes through a literal reversal of the exploitation of meat as a commodity, tracking its journey from the hands of a consumer, back to the butcher, and finally back to a living animal. At the butcher, the animal is reconstructed, filled once again with its blood and entrails, and redressed in its skin. Ronda and Menely address these usually discarded parts of the animal in their discussion about waste. "Waste is the unproductive outcome of production, a by-product from which no value can be extracted. Sometimes this 'something,' [...] is reintroduced, accidentally, into a given regime of social or environmental visibility." As product of labor, waste is not just an outcome of production but also of consumption. What is not consumed, what is not reabsorbed into the lifecycle that labor facilitates, is passed onto the environment. The reconstruction of the animal which Vertov presents challenges this notion of waste under capitalism when it comes to the products of nature. Rather than flowing out and away from life, the "waste" flows back in and the body of the bull shudders and stands up again. Vertov makes the waste visible, and reframes our conception of it. What is a necessary part of the capitalist butchering industry, excess product of no value to be drained off and out, we instead understand as a vital part of a living organism. Thus Vertov begins to link the input to the cycle of labor (the live bull), the commodity (its dead flesh), and the excess which is drained away (the viscera), and in doing so begins to link the world with the earth from which it is sourced. This is furthered through the implication of the color red, as while we cannot see the color of the viscera which returns the bull to life, we understand that it is a deep shade of red with which we are all familiar.
The color red is important to Ronda and Menely as a way of considering how capitalism affects our relationship with the natural world, and plays an especially powerful role in considering meat. Thinking of the "waste" which Vertov returns to the body of the bull, the color red takes on both a material and abstract significance. Materially, the bull's viscera is the red of blood, which Ronda and Menely say "bespeaks corporal vitality at the point of its vulnerability, life in its capacity to die." Thus to kill and butcher the animal is to "seize the line that distinguishes life from death for humans and other animals alike." For the bull, waste is the red of blood which gives life, and it becomes an important point which links animals and humans in the thin line between life and death. Kinoglaz emphasizes this, with the reversal of time showing not the movement out of blood as death, but its movement in as life. While we all have an abstract concept of our own death, what we understand so primordially is life in opposition to death, the struggle to stay alive. The red waste becomes a point which begins to bridge the gap between the individual and nature, representative of a common ecological force between human and animal. Additionally, to emphasize this link between human and animal is to begin to expand Arendt's notion of the world. To engage with the biological simply as part of a material earth, which is excluded from the sphere of human construct, is to ignore the shared interpersonal constructions possible between the human and the natural world. The motion of the blood, and with it the motion of the film, is also red in its symbolism. Ronda and Menely state that "red is often the sign of what remains otherwise unseen: the absent cause, the hidden poison, the underground resistance," and thus "red ecology, as we characterize it, draws on the semiotic and symbolic conspicuousness of red to turn attention to the otherwise invisible sites, the slaughterhouse and the market, where organisms and ecological matter are transformed into commodities." The motion of the film is not just red in its subject matter, but is red in the ways it attracts attention to the capitalist meat industry. Unless they are directly involved in it, most consumers are removed from the process of slaughter and can only see meat in its commodity form, as the product of labor which is meant to simply be consumed. They cannot see the red blood of the animal as it drains away and the bull is transformed into the product we know. By placing the slaughterhouse under the lens of the camera, Vertov directs our attention towards it, and through the backwards motion of the film he reverses the process of abstraction from the material to commodity, linking the worldly products of labor with their ecological sources and sinks.
Through the red ecological point of view of Kinoglaz, with its reframing of waste under capitalism and the blood red character which that waste takes in the meat industry, Vertov bridges the gap between individual and ecology. The power of the blood and viscera emphasizes our consanguinity with the animal, an effect which he strengthens in the intertitles. Rather than use the inanimate it/its pronouns for the dead bull, he chooses to use the animate he/him/his. With this reframing we understand that the red waste is actually all of the biological machinery which keeps the animal alive, and forces us to consider that same machinery inside us. Through this, Vertov asks us to reconsider the position of animals (and subsequently ecology) under capitalism and inspires us to see meat and its waste as it actually is in its material form. He asks an important question, as a society of producers only concerned with our own biology and its maintenance, only paying attention to the world as constructed of human construct, can we expand that notion of the world to incorporate interpersonal relationships with non-human entities as well?
Through this analysis we can see one path down which we can go to in order to see the oikeios. We need to expand our concept of the world beyond a gate kept bubble of human construct to understand how we can form both material and interpersonal relationships with "worldless" aspects of the environment. Vertov examines how this is possible with meat, a product which shares with the individual the intimate aspects of life and death, but can we expand this notion to other less similar products–say, plastic–and begin to expand the web of oikeios that we can see?
Part 3: So what?
This gap in our perception of the role humans play in the larger ecology and cycle of our planet is both what has gotten us into the position of facing down climate crisis and what keeps us in a position of inaction. In the society of animal laborans, every product is made for consumption, not to last in the world but to be consumed and recycled. And yet this is certainly not the position most commodities take under capitalist production. Analyzing meat helps us to understand the need to expand our notion of what can be considered present in the world of human material and interpersonal construction, but meat is only one form of commodity, one whose waste conveniently decays and is broken down to be reabsorbed into the cycles of life. Once we understand how this product is brought from the environment into the human world, and subsequently exits it, we can turn our eye to other commodities as well, ones which do not disappear so easily. The greatest and most pressing example is plastic. As a product of labor under our current organization of capitalism, plastic is made for consumption. It is not the result of work, the activity which means to create lasting structures which make up the human world, nor is it meant to be. Its purpose is to be used to sustain the biological process and to subsequently be discarded. And yet, it does not disappear. Unlike meat, once it is consumed and exits the world it cannot be degraded and returned to the ecological cycle. It is a product of labor which cannot be consumed, and falls out of the world as neither a creation of homo faber, meant to last as a piece of human construct which informs our existence outside of the cyclic process of labor, nor as a piece of the environment from which it is created. Plastic exists in its own space, formed from materials which are sourced from nature for the purpose of consumption and persistent beyond every notion of use, and yet not present to our notion of what constitutes the world.
As a product of our current mode of social organization, plastic as it appears in both the world and the environment is a product of capitalism, and for the individual to understand the web relationships it forms with our current mode of capitalism and the environment it is necessary to break down the Nature/Society divide. In order to see the oikeios, we need to expand what we understand to be present to the human world, both in what we have the ability to form interpersonal relations with but also in how our modern modes of production produce human construct which persists beyond our simple scope of perception. To shift our focus from our own personal biology to the entire biosphere is no small feat, just as to fully understand Moore's world historical view of nature-in-capitalism and capitalism-in-nature will require significant further thought. But if we are to attempt it, using artistic works like Vertov's Kinoglaz, which can address the individual and attempt to broaden their notion of what the world might contain are vital.
Leo Diamond is a rising 4th year in the college majoring in English Language and Literature and minoring in Chemistry. His academic interests are in nature writing and the environmental humanities, specifically in thinking about how individuals engage with the natural world and whether that engagement can affect the way a person perceives the wider global environment. Outside of academics, Leo is the president of the UChicago Triathlon Club, and treasurer of the URock Climbing Club. Additionally he acts as student director of the Phoenix Outdoor Program and the Undergraduate Coordinator for the Global Organization for Wilderness Medical Education, two programs dedicated to sharing knowledge and experiences of the natural world.