ANARCHY AND DISPERSION

Considered in its own terms, as a structure of production, the DMP is a species of anarchy.

The domestic mode anticipates no social or material relations be­tween households except that they are alike. It offers society only a constituted disorganization, a mechanical solidarity set across the grain of a segmentary decomposition. The social economy is frag­mented into a thousand petty existences, each organized to proceed independently of the others and each dedicated to the homebred principle of looking out for itself. The division of labor? Beyond the household it ceases to have organic force. Instead of unifying society by sacrificing the autonomy of its producing groups, the division of labor here, as it is principally a division of labor by sex, sacrifices the unity of society to the autonomy of its producing groups. Nor is any higher cause entertained by the household's access to productive re­sources, or again by the economic priorities codified in domestic pooling. Viewed politically, the DMP is a kind of natural state. Noth­ing within this infrastructure of production obliges the several house­hold groups to enter into compact and cede each one some part of its autonomy. As the domestic economy is in effect the tribal economy in miniature, so politically it underwrites the condition of primitive society—society without a Sovereign. In principle each house retains, as well as its own interests, all the powers that are wanted to satisfy them. Divided thus into so many units of self-concern, functionally uncoordinated, production by the domestic mode has all the organiza­tion of the so many potatoes in a certain famous sack of potatoes.

That is in essence the primitive structure of production. But of course not in appearance. In appearance, primitive society is a poor likeness of primordial incoherence. Everywhere the petty anarchy of domestic production is counterposed by larger forces and greater organization, institutions of social-economic order that join one house to another and submit all to a general interest. Still, these grand forces of integration are not given in the dominant and immediate relations of production. On the contrary, precisely as they are negations of domestic anarchy, they owe part of their meaning and existence to the disorder they would suppress. And if in the end anarchy is banished from the surface of things, it is not definitively exiled. It continues, a persistent disarray lurking in the background, so long as the house­hold remains in charge of production.

Here, then, I appeal the apparent facts to the permanent fact. "In the background" is a discontinuity of power and interest, lending itself moreover to a dispersion of people. In the background is a state of nature.

Interesting that almost all the philosophers who have felt the need to go back there—granted not one of them ever made it—saw in that condition a specific distribution of population. Almost all sensed some centrifugal tendency. Hobbes sent back ethnographic report that the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Underline (for once) the "solitary." It was a life apart. And the same notion of original isolation appears ever and again, from Herodutus to K. Biicher, in the schemes of those who dared speculate on man in nature. Rousseau took several positions, the most pertinent to our purpose in the Essaisur I'origine des langues.³²

32. The scheme of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men is more complicated. True that men in the first period were isolated, but for lack of sociable qualities. By the time Rousseau brought in the potential conflict that in the analyses of others (such as Hobbes) was functionally linked to dispersion, something like society already existed and the earth was fully occupied. However, it is clear that Rousseau had the same understanding of the relation between private force and dispersion, because he felt compelled to explain in footnote why at this later time people were not centrifugally scattered, that is, because the earth had already been filled (1964, vol. 3, pp. 221-222).

In the earliest times the only society was the family, the only laws, of nature, and the only mediator between men, force—in other words, something like the domestic mode of production. And this "barbaric" epoch was, for Rousseau, the golden age, not because men were united, but because they were separated. Each one, it is said, considered himself master of everything; that could be: but no one knew of nor coveted more than he had in hand; his needs, far from bringing him nearer his fellows, drove him away. Men, if you will, attacked each other upon meeting, but they rarely met. Everywhere reigned the state of war, and all the earth was at peace (translation mine).

Maximum dispersion is the settlement pattern of the state of nature. To understand what conceivable significance this can promise the present analysis—that is, supposing the reader has not already aban­doned the effort to its apparent folly—it is necessary to ask why the political philosophers thus rendered natural man far-flung and for the most part alone. The obvious answer is that the sages posited nature by a simple opposition to culture, stripped then of everything artifi­cial, which is nothing less than society. The residue could only be man in isolation—or perhaps man in the family, that concord of natural lust, as Hobbes called it—even if the man in question was really the rugged individual become now so common in society that he claimed to be only natural. ("L'etat de nature, c'est le bourgeois sans socie'te.") But beyond the obvious, this conception of a scattered distribution was also a logical and functionalist deduction, a reflection upon the necessary deployment of men supposing the natural rather than the political state were in effect. Where the right to proceed by force is held generally rather than monopolized politically, there discretion is the better part of valor and space the surest principle of security. Minimizing conflict over resources, goods, and women, dispersal is the best protector of persons and possessions. In other words, this di­vision of force that the philosophers imagined forced them also to imagine a humanity divided, putting the greatest distance between one another just as a kind of functional precaution.

I am at the most abstract, the most hypothetical, in brief, the wildest point of speculation: that the deeper structure of the economy, the domestic mode of production, is like the state of nature, and the characteristic movement of the latter is also its own. Left to its own devices, the DMP is inclined toward a maximum dispersion of home­steads, because maximum dispersion is the absence of interdepen­dence and a common authority, and these are by and large the way production is organized. If within the domestic circle the decisive motions are centripetal, between households they are centrifugal, spinning off into the thinnest probable distribution—an effect proceeding in reality to the extent it is not checked by greater institutions of order and equilibrium.

This is so extreme that I must cite some possibility of its ethno­graphic relevance, even at the cost of recapitulating known facts and anticipating later arguments. Carneiro, as we had seen earlier, took some care to show that villages of the Amazon Tropical Forest are typically inferior to the 1,000 or even 2,000 inhabitants they might sustain on existing agricultural practices. He rejects, therefore, the usual explanation of small village size, to wit, that it is due to shifting cultivation:

I would like to argue that a factor of greater importance has been the ease and frequency of village fissioning for reasons not related to subsistence [that is, to techniques of subsistence]. . . . The facility with which this phenomenon occurs suggests that villages may seldom get a chance to increase in population to the point at which they begin to press hard on the carrying capacity of the land The centrifugal forces that cause villages to break apart seem to reach a critical point well before this happens. What the forces are that lead to village fission falls outside the present discussion. Suffice it to say that many things may give rise to factional disputes within a society, and that the larger the community the more frequent these disputes are likely to be. By the time a village in the Tropical Forest attains a population of 500 or 600 the stresses and strains within it are probably such that an open schism, leading to the hiving off of a dissident faction, may easily occur. If internal political controls were strong, a large commu­nity might succeed in remaining intact despite factionalism. But chieftain­ship was notoriously weak among most Amazonian villages, so that the political mechanisms for holding a growing community together in the face of increasingly strong divisive forces were all but lacking (Carneiro, 1968, p. 136).

My point is that primitive society is founded on an economic dis-conformity, a segmentary fragility that lends itself to and reverberates particular local causes of dispute, and in the absence of "mechanisms for holding a growing community together" realizes and resolves the crisis by fission. We have noticed that the domestic mode of prod­uction is discontinuous in time; here we see it is also discontinuous in space. And as the former discontinuity accounts for a certain underuse of labor, the latter implies a persistent underexploitation of resources. Our very roundabout and theoretical tour of the domestic mode of production thus comes back to its empirical point of departure. Constituted on an uncertain household base, which is in any case restrained in material objectives, stinted in its use of labor power and cloistered in relation to other groups, the domestic mode of prod­uction is not organized to give a brilliant performance.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 1044