One is one’s life embodied. One lives, and the content of one’s life is molded into one’s flesh. It is true that we are shaped by our environments. But we also produce those very environments, externalizing ourselves into the world.
To exist is to exist as a unity of subject and object. Subjectivity refers to one’s subjective experience of life. In common phrasing, we think of this as our “internal” or “mental” lives. It includes our specific perspectives and understandings of the world, things which are not necessarily physical. Objectivity refers to one’s physical presence in the world. In particular, the existence of one’s material body among other material bodies.
Many philosophers asserted that only our subjectivity is certain to us, because all of our interactions with the objective world are mediated through it. René Descartes, for instance, famously declared “I am thinking, therefore I exist.”¹ By this, he meant that the sureness of his existence lay in the presence of his subjectivity. He did not consider the notion of “I exist, therefore I am thinking” to be a valid method of reasoning. In this perspective, we become separated from our bodies and thus existences in the material world and thus conceive of ourselves as monads.
Yet, this perspective cannot account for our lived unity as subjects and objects. Our subjectivities are not separate from the objective world, but are shaped by it. Our subjectivities, on the other hand, inform how we shape the world as thinking and acting beings. Karl Marx was a man who held a deep understanding of this. In his early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he elaborated this view:
“Whenever real, corporeal man, man with his feet firmly on the solid ground, man exhaling and inhaling all the forces of nature, posits his real, objective essential powers as alien objects by his externalisation, it is not the act of positing which is the subject in this process: it is the subjectivity of objective essential powers, whose action, therefore, must also be something objective.
“An objective being acts objectively, and he would not act objectively if the objective did not reside in the very nature of his being. He only creates or posits objects, because he is posited by objects — because at bottom he is nature. In the act of positing, therefore, this objective being does not fall from his state of “pure activity” into a creating of the object; on the contrary, his objective product only confirms his objective activity, his activity as the activity of an objective, natural being.”²
Marx recognized our presence in the world as component parts of our environment, including its formative power on and in us. This is something which has been understood as far back as the early philosophers of Classical Antiquity. His innovation was in recognizing our mediation of our subjectivities with the objective, material world through objective, material social-activity— labor. He transcends the so-called mind-body problem of Descartes, showing the unity of our “internal” and “external” existences.
Flesh Molded by Life
The objectification of our subjectivities in the world is the aspect of this analysis which is typically focused on. Yet, the objectification of our social-activity and our shaping of the world into ourselves is often neglected. By focusing on this less-travelled end of the feedback loop, we can derive important lessons about our bodies, identities, and psychologies as individuals and social beings.
We can take this in a purely material direction. For instance, analyzing how our physical diets influence the shape and composition of our bodies. To refer to a common aphorism, “we are what we eat.” Yet our diets also act in conjunction with our everyday activities — protein does not automatically lead to muscle growth, it only does so in conjunction with physical activity. Further, our bodily metabolisms vary by individuals, so a one-size-fits-all conception does not necessarily work in discussing the influence of diets on body composition and shape.
Friedrich Engels used this material approach to analyze the influence of labor on the evolutionary formation of the human body, positing:
“Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini.”³
An illustrative example which gets to the root of this principle is the aforementioned musculature of a body. Muscles are not purely a product of inheritance or environment. Rather, they are the embodiment in an individual of past, repeated activities — lifting weights, doing exercises, jogging regularly, and so on. These material activities in and on the world objectify themselves into our muscles. Specific exercises develop specific muscles in specific ways. We often joke about those who focus exclusively on working out their upper bodies or their lower bodies. Yet this common object of humor also exposes an interesting philosophical truth — What you do as a subject, as an actor in the world, informs what you are as an object, as a body among bodies.
The objectification of our social-activity in ourselves doesn’t only take a purely material form in our bodies. It is also at play in the concepts and languages which mediate our understandings of the world. Many philosophers recognize the importance of concepts to mediating the information we receive from our senses, but fail to recognize the foundations of these concepts in historical social-activity. Marx, once again, explained this in Notes on Wagner:
“[Humans] begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., that is not by “finding themselves” in a relationship, but actively behaving, availing themselves of certain things of the outside world by action, and thus satisfying their needs. (They start, then, with production.)
“By the repetition of this process the capacity of these things to “satisfy their needs” becomes imprinted on their brains; men, like animals, also learn “theoretically” to distinguish the outer things which serve to satisfy their needs from all other.
“At a certain stage of evolution, after their needs, and the activities by which they are satisfied, have, in the meanwhile, increased and further developed, they will linguistically christen entire classes of these things which they distinguished by experience from the rest of the outside world. This is bound to occur, as in the production process — i.e. the process of appropriating these things — they are continually engaged in active contact amongst themselves and with these things, and will soon also have to struggle against others for these things. But this linguistic label purely and simply expresses as a concept what repeated activity has turned into an experience, namely that certain outer things serve to satisfy the needs of human beings already living in certain social context //this being an essential prerequisite on account of the language//.
“Human beings only give a special (generic) name to these things because they already know that they serve to satisfy their needs, because they seek to acquire them by more or less frequently repeated activity, and therefore also to keep them in their possession; they call them “goods” or something else which expresses the fact that they use these things in practice, that these things are useful to them, and they give the thing this character of utility as if it possessed it, although it would hardly occur to a sheep that one of its “useful” qualities is that it can be eaten by human beings.”⁴
The specific concepts we fit our sense-information into are the congealed mass of the history of social-activity. We inherit these frameworks from past generations, and so we inherit the legacies of their worlds and actions. We can never act apart from society or history. The inheritances of social history are embedded into our fundamental psychological operations through language. This does not mean we are merely slaves to the intellectual baggage of our ancestors. Rather, we are ourselves ancestors of our future descendants, and our activity will inform them just as our own ancestors activities informed us. We do not operate like clockwork, but operate as thinking beings within a given context.
Specific social practices, social relations, and social history are literally embodied in us, whether physically or psychology. This is an outlook which goes beyond both liberal individualism and mechanical determinism. Even in everyday life, this feedback loop is at play. We aren’t mindless laborers. We think while we work, and thinking is necessarily a component of working. What we do and how when we work informs our ways of thinking, the rhythm of our lives. Repetitive, hyper-specialized work can certainly impair our capacities for thought, but this is itself a certain way of thinking tied to our ways of working. A human being, a subjectivity, can never be fully reduced into a mindless machine, an object devoid of subjectivity.
Embodied Sickness
If we are social activity embodied, then harmful activity can also be embodied in us.
In a material sense, this can mean things such as lung cancer from living in a coal mining community, or a missing limb from a factory accident. Certain forms of labor might harm our spines, our shoulders, our knees… If we live in a food desert, we might have heart disease and diabetes. If we live in cramped conditions, then our joints can be negatively effected.
In a psychological sense, we can look at this on a personal or a social level. For the former, it can be trauma from horrific experiences within our lifetimes. Those experiences embody themselves in our psychologies and the way we understand the world and our activity in it. Childhood abuse is a frequent example of this. It can also mean the inheritance of ways of thinking informed by trauma from past generations. Increasingly, we recognize that this is at play in the communities of descendants of African slaves. Here, we make the step from the personal to the collective which enables us to begin to recognize the potential for broad social sicknesses embodied in social psychologies.
For instance, a society with fundamentally harmful conceptions of the relation between the self and the other, or of entire groups of people, will embody oppressive relations in the way its participants think. Our own society’s structure fosters hyper-individualistic and misanthropic psychological structures, as I discussed in “A Lonely Life.” Thus, social “common sense” can be sick, too.
The Objectification of Oppression
At this point, we can understand that oppressive social relations can be embodied in us as well. If “sicknesses” can be embodied in us, and the nature and distributions of these “sicknesses” are socially determined, then relations of oppression are key to the logic at play.
Oppressors seek to render the oppressed as merely objects. Objects are acted upon, they are non-actors in the midst of acting subjects. Subjects categorize objects and mediate their interactions with them with categories which accord to the way they interact with the objects. That is, subjects objectify themselves into objects. Oppression is the objectification of subjects, the forcible appearance of them as mere objects of oppressive subjects. An oppressor sets out to make the oppressed purely what they make them as, what they define them as.
For instance, a rapist tries to turn his victim purely into the raped, into a sex-thing. Physically, he wishes to turn them purely into their violated body, and psychologically, purely into the trauma of rape. The colonizing society wishes to mark the colonized society as purely an extension of itself. Even in many critiques of colonialism, we see the colonized rendered purely as victims with no history or agency of their own. They are rendered purely as pitiful objects of the oppressor subject, leaving no potential for transformation.
The objectified subjects can be visible in their objectification, being actively made the opposite of subjects in the minds and practices of oppressor subjects, or they can be rendered invisible. I wrote about this in my recent essay, “A World Where Many Worlds Fit.” The narcissism of the bourgeoisie is one example of the oppressor subject implicitly projecting their subjectivities over the entire world — they see themselves as the universal, and those outside of them are simply left invisible as non-universals. They are considered, at best, props to be gandered at and exploited, and not subjects to participate in the community of equal, bourgeois subjects.
In conditions where objectification of the oppressed is embraced, sadism is an orientation of behavior common to oppressors. The sadist is a narcissist who wishes to render all subjects as objectivities and absorbing everything into his subjectivity, his desires. Yet he cannot enjoy this sadism unless he knows his victims can recognize him and feel pain and humiliation at the violation of their subjectivities. Paradoxically, he feels the weight of his power to objectify other subjects in the very nature of their subjectivities.⁵ He can never be fully satisfied. Yet his orientation is based on a desire to supplant other subjectivities into one order made by the sadistic individual, a typical goal of oppressors who aim to exploit the oppressed.
Masochism, on the other hand, is a character of those who come to desire their domination. This might appear as a contradiction and impossibility, but it is a psychology tied to the dialectic of identity and that of subjects and objects. Masochism can on one hand be a certain hidden sadism, as Robert J. Stoller argued.⁶ That is, it can be a desire to subvert the very act of oppression, of objectification and bondage, by subordinating it to the desires of the masochist as a subject. Yet, the very desire to be consumed into another subject, the bliss of Nirvana, can never be fully realized due to the implicit presence of sadism in this case.
On the other hand, a masochistic desire to be subsumed into another’s subjectivity by becoming an object might actually be a redirected desire for one’s own subjectivity. One may have grown into a world which asserted an all or nothing notion of subjectivity and objectivity, where one is either a master-subject or a slave-object. Thus, if one does not believe you can be a master, you might seek subjectivity by fully melting into the view of another rather than seeking recognition and affirmation as a fellow subject among subjects.⁷ Yet, this desire is also ultimately frustrated by the inability to establish full continuity between the masochist and the sadist. The very act of objectifying domination over the masochistic subject establishes their separateness from the sadist. They could not be dominated and experience the pleasure of domination if they were not a distinct subject.
Despite the attempts by oppressors to render the oppressed as purely objectification of oppressor subjectivity, they can never fully destroy the subjectivity of the oppressed. The oppressed remain living beings which can act and shape the world, even where their abilities to act in the world are organized and limited by relations of oppression. The oppressor and oppressed are caught in a dialectic of identity — the ruler is only a ruler with the existence of the ruled, and they cannot get by without a group to rule over and benefit from the unfree labor of.
The master needs the labor of the slave, and so the master cannot fully consume the slave into himself. Even if he desires to render the oppressed as an object, the oppressor needs the subjectivity of the oppressed, which he can never fully abolish anyway. He might be able to change the nature of the oppression, but he cannot destroy the entire class of the oppressed as such while he remains an oppressor. Though the oppressed are marked by their oppression, their subjectivity enables them to change the world as it is and transcend it. We are what is, but what is already has the seeds of what could be.
The proletariat, for instance, is a class produced and exploited by the bourgeoisie. It is molded from the classes dispossessed and thrown into the war of all against all represented by the market. The proletariat is the domination of capital embodied in a certain historical form of labor — commodified labor operating to produce surplus-values to feed the profits of capital. Physically and psychologically, proletarians are marked by their lives in capitalist society.
Yet they can also transcend their conditions through revolution, which they have the potential for and interests in. They are grouped together in cooperative labor, and are branded with commonalities and common bonds to the market which enable the growth of networks of resistance. In their role as concrete labor, they contradict the despotic commands of abstract capital. They might be capitalistically produced, but they are also the embodied self-destruction of capital.
Categories of races are the historical objectifications of colonialism and imperialism. For instance, the notion of “Blackness” as a unified category did not exist before the Transatlantic slave trade flattened peoples of many African tribes into one racial category which was to justify their condition of commodified enslavement. North American, flung across networks of exchange and brutal exploitation, lost much of their languages and tribal identities.
At the same time, they gained a certain common identity in their condition of enslavement which enabled cooperation in resistance. “Blackness” is a product of slavery and oppression, but it is also a common identity which has become a means of uniting in opposition to common oppression. Though races are socially constructed through oppressive histories, they are also produced as the means of transcending those histories. Racialized people may become caught up in a dialectic of identity with the oppressor, but they also contain the potential for the transcendence of what is.
Womanhood and sex dichotomy are self-fulfilling prophecies which brand bodies and practices. Gender is not “human nature,” it is socially and culturally produced. The way we think about womanhood and manhood, and other genders, do not fall from the sky. They emanate from historically informed worldviews. Similarly for sex categorization based on a dichotomy. It is not a given, but is informed by the assumption that reproductive genitalia are automatically valid as a central logic for a categorization of human beings. Implicitly, this is aimed at a regulation of reproduction and definition of the reproducers as women. Thus, these expectations inform the muscular, social, and psychological development of sexed and gendered individuals.⁸ They are embodied, objectified in them.
Womanhood is patriarchy embodied into a category, but women have agency to shape it and challenge it through common spaces. The very nurturing ethics tied to womanhood roles enable a certain challenge to the mainstream, implicitly “masculine” character of bourgeois rationality. However, we must remember that the idealization of a given womanhood or generalized definition of woman is also the idealization of a given lifestyle. For instance, to idealize slenderness and meekness is to implicitly condemn working class women whose social activity does not objectify into such bodies. We ought not naturalize womanhood, but must remember that it is the objectification of specific historic relations. Womanhood as it stands cannot be the basis for liberation, but must be the basis for its own self-overcoming.
It is important not to conceive resistance as automatically representing new subjectivity. Even in resistance, the oppressed can be caught in a dialectic of identity with the oppressor. One can define oneself purely in opposition, in contrast to the oppressor. By doing this, by forever tossing the objectifications of oppression in oneself at the oppressor, one does not escape. One is still trying to prove oneself to the oppressor, acting as an object of him. One need not be purely the accusatory marks of oppression to be aware of those scars. One must resist as an innovative subject rather than as an object of oppression.
To escape from this oppressive objectivity is to reclaim one’s subjectivity and one’s right to practical action in objectifying oneself in the world. One should not ignore that one is are marked by oppression. Rather, one should recognize that one is marked but that one isn’t only what was enacted upon them — one holds a capacity for new life and thriving. One can engage in continued practical transformation of the world and oneself on the basis of what exists. As long as one lives, one doesn’t stop living. One is not only a survivor, but holds the potential to be a thriver.
What We Are and What We Could Be
This form of analysis is important both epistemologically and analytically — it avoids moralizing individualism, a homogenous, abstract, and alienated notion of social structures, and also avoids naturalizing our social relations or our characteristics. It can account for the personal and the political. The personal is political, and the political is personal.
However, we should also be careful not to merely naturalize us into what we currently are or the history of what we have been. We must remember that we aren’t merely what we do. We are also the potential for the transcendence of that which exists right now on a basis that is already present within what we are. Self-liberation is possible. The feedback loop of subjectivities and objectivities is not a closed one, but a dynamic one.
This framework also reminds us of the importance of caregiving and nurturing in any revolutionary movement if we wish to build something new. We live in a deeply sick and damaged society. We are dominated by the massive machine of an alienated society built in the image of capital. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we can see how a sick society embodies itself both physically, as with the virus, and mentally, as with the mass depression and hopelessness which has accompanied the crisis.
In our identity as individuals, our subjectivities can never be fully suffocated. Yet, there are healthy approaches to the subjectivity of ourselves and others and there are unhealthy approaches. We live in a deeply sick society stricken by violent individualism and a twin duo of narcissism and self-destruction. To recognize our existence as subjects who can transform the objective world through our subjectivities, we must remember that we are subject-objects. We are minds, but also embodied minds, and we are actors in the world among other actors in the world.
For a new world, a world which could heal from the sickness of what is which embeds itself in our bodies, we must develop a new social logic. This must be a logic premised on intersubjectivity, by an orientation which both recognizes ourselves as objects in the world and recognizes others as subjectivities rather than purely objects existing for our own ends.⁹ We need a world premised on nurturing, care, and community, not exploitation. If we wish to transform ourselves, we must remember that it cannot be an individual endeavor. To act as communal individuals is itself to begin the subversion of our sick world.
Revolutionary transformation is not merely a change in thinking of individuals producing a new order. It is enacted on the basis of seeds in existing relations among people. Where capitalism atomizes us, its relations of oppressions also produce potential modes of commonality and mutuality. Realizing a new society based on mutuality and the ethics of community on a universal scale is the key to transcending the objectification of a sick society into ourselves.
Our sick society and our embodiment of this sickness can themselves be embodied into the earth. We are nature, and yet we are a part of nature which consciously shapes nature. By our very existence as human beings, we shape the environment around us. This objectification is not the same at all times and in all places — it varies with what embodiments we are acting through and as. Oppressive societies, especially their unsustainable demands on human beings and the earth, drain life — human, animal, and earth alike. Capital is the most destructive of oppressive societies.
We must restore balance in our rhythms with the earth. Our rhythms with the earth can have agency, we do not merely react to the rest of nature but act with it. We are dancers to a rhythm, and we have choice in the details of how we choose to dance to that rhythm. The key is to destroy this system which refuses all organic rhythms in the name of all-devouring cannibalism.
When someone is afflicted, we treat them and nurse them back to health. We need a movement and a society which embodies this into its values as a means of transcending the alienation of capital. Capitalism is killing us and the earth, it demands that we sacrifice life for labor, and labor for abstract value. Socialism must assert the use of labor for life and the value of concrete flesh and blood against the domination of abstract value.
Capitalism has subjected us to domination by our own alienated, objectified labor in the form of commodities. Commodities rule us like an inhuman power through the organization of society for the market and for profits. Yet this impersonal power has a social basis in the capitalist mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it.
Where capitalism represents the domination of people by things, socialism must be the reconciliation of people and things and the realization of self-consciousness. We must no longer fee like mere victims of circumstance, of the harsh and impersonal, coldly rational rhythms of capital. We must be an active force which can mold ourselves and be the unity of subjectivity and objectivity in the world. We are not only the embodiment of what is and what has been. We are also the embodiment of potentiality and of the seeds for a new world.
