Class 11: ibn Tufayl and originary accumulation

Iyko Day’s “Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies” develops Rosa Luxembourg’s intervention into old Marxist historical narratives – narratives, which, as Day observes, Marx had himself already abandoned by the time of Capital – in which Luxembourg argued that primitive accumulation (or, more accurately, “originary” accumulation) occurs at both temporal and spatial distance from the capitalist metropole. Capitalism requires a periphery to exploit to renew itself. It wants land to turn into wasteland. And only sometimes – this is among Day’s chief interventions (44-45) – does it want people to turn into labor.^[1]

I am reminded of a 1991 memo by Larry Summers – or, I should say, by disgraced Harvard economist Larry Summers – in which Summers infamously wrote “I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.” Now, Summers explained that he was a victim of context collapse: the memo was intended ironically; it was maliciously leaked without its explanatory, or we might say, social framework; it was certainly not intended to be policy guidance; and that therefore – and here I am extrapolating – that it should more taken no more seriously than we do Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Let it be so. Swift’s point was of course not that raising Irish children as livestock is so absurd as to be laughable, not, that is, that he was just making a joke, but rather than the English were already essentially anthrophages when it came to the Irish – a very medieval critique, by the way.^[2] So too Summers’ joke at the expense of World Bank logic and the discipline of economics attests not to Summers’ individual sin, but to the sin, if we can call it that, that produces Wastelands and Wastepeople. Joke or not, Summers was describing a real process or at least a real logic, and doing so as an agent capable of enacting policy. Whether an ”agent” is also a “subject” or just a certain concentration of historical forces is another matter altogether.

Originary accumulation has been and remains through to the present originary dispossession: that’s among Day’s points. What’s wanted is the ground, or what’s in the ground, and what’s needed to make use of that is labor, not necessarily with the goal of converting people into an urban proletariat; dispossession is the method, the aim extraction, nonteleologically, nondevelopmentally (46). “Civilization” happens elsewhere. We should ask whether the alienation of labor in the ongoing process of originary accumulation differs in kind or only in degree from the ongoing alienation of capitalism itself – is “improvement” the goal of the use made of proletarianized labor even in the metropole? If originary accumulation is a “stage” in capitalism only recursively (42) – that is, ongoing, but with a difference – and if originary accumulation is perhaps better understood not as a stage but as an inherent structure of capitalism (47), then we have to ask how we can distinguish originary accumulation from capitalism as such. I’ll leave answering that up to those of you have a better command of Marx than I do.

The relevance of all this to ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan may feel quite distant, not least of all because the city fails to make any use of Hayy at all. But they’re sharing a week on the syllabus for a reason. Here’s why. As many readers do, I’m going to begin with Hayy’s attempt to restore his adoptive mother to life. He searches her innards for the organ whose capacities have been blocked. Just as we’re unable to hear if our ears are stuffed, so too, Hayy reasons, must there be some occluded organ causing his mother’s collapse. He wants to cure her. That’s what drives him, initially. Once he has determined that the empty chamber of the heart had once contained the source of his mother’s vitality, he then seeks out another wild animal, “and cut into it as he had done with the gazelle, until he reached the heart….he poked his finger inside and found it was almost hot enough to burn him. The animal expired on the spot, but the boy had established to his own satisfaction” (22).

But he still wanted more, which was knowledge of bodies, and from thence the cause of bodies, and from thence, ultimately, to the perfect being who preexists eternally all causes. He carries his intellectual process through ongoing acts of reduction to a single cause. As he reasons, all living things, however heterogeneous their organs, are each individual beings (25). All animals are in some sense identical, insofar as they are variations on the theme of an animate body (25-26). All bodies are in some sense identical because they all have length, breadth, and depth (27). His process of simplification can be understood as one of reduction, subtracting out apparent differences until he finds the one thing everything has in common. What they have in common, so far as he realizes, is not that he’s the one looking at everything – though this single point of view shouldn’t be passed by without some analysis! – but that they are bodies, and that, speaking hylomorphically, the form of bodies derives from something disembodied (28). This realization is generalizable. To put this is another way, truth for Hayy lies in learning not to apprehend what is immediately before him: all that is worth apprehending is the general, or the abstract. It is not so much that everything becomes equivalent but rather than everything is pared away until it’s been reduced to the one, so that anything more than that one becomes unimportant.

And this is what gets me back to Iyko Day’s article. Here’s Day:

In a colonial context, the violence of abstraction carries over into the racialized modes of relation embedded in the emergence of modern legal personhood. Defined as an appropriative, self-possessed individual, the legal subject of capitalist relations conceals itself through the illusion of abstract equivalence that works to devalue personhood through property. It is a racial construction that stands in reactionary opposition to Indigenous modes of relation. (50)

What are these “modes of relation” (50)? We get them in Day’s conclusion, which aims to harmonize with the work of indigenous scholars Erica Violet Lee and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson to promote “different modes of relation” (53), namely, “indebtedness, connection, and a reappropriation of historical time” (53).

We can say observe that Hayy’s trajectory towards abstraction began most vividly when he turned from trying to cure his mother to studying life itself. Surgery becomes vivisection (22) and eventually, and inexorably, he turns from honoring bodies, as when he learned burial from the crows (20), to becoming indifferent to them (40).

But we can also observe that Hayy’s disconnection from the created world occurs virtually without exploitation. He domesticates only horses and seems never to engage in sustained agriculture. He does all his own work. Unlike his most famous descendant, Robison Crusoe, he has no people to put to use. If we like, we can call him an indigene. He’s the only one on the island after all! And yet he arrives systematically at a world-abandoning abstraction, indifferent to the needs of community. Whether we can accuse him of some manner of guilt either for his actions or his thinking – if we can easily distinguish the one from the other – is something to be worked out in seminar, carefully! Let’s do it.

1. “Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies,” After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon (Cambridge UP, 2022), 40-54. ↑
2. Philippe Buc, “Manducation et domination: Analyse du Métaphore,” L’Ambiguïté du livre. Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la bible au moyen âge (Beauchesne, 1994), 206-31 ↑