Technically, it’s not just Descartes but a problem with the so-called Western “Enlightenment”. The methods of categorisation changed during this period, and are generally responsible for more modern racism and classism.
Prior to the Enlightenment, the notion was that all people were children of Adam and Eve. Structurally speaking, the clashes between say, Christianity and Islam were those of dogma, rather than race.
Race, and other categorisation methodologies, notably taxonomy, changed the structure of Western epistemology, building on mediaeval conceptions of Aristotle and then hyperfocus on what made things different. Where before, things were categorised on basis of similarity and sympathy, (a book on snakes might also contain reference to things with snakelike qualities or properties) now it became about grouping things together by referencing a boundary of difference. The mechanisms of capture are obviously visible in colonialism and land ownership.
This is why it’s so difficult and somewhat dangerous to project modern identities on ancient figures - the structure of their epistemology was different. Many people we now claim as gay or white or trans, for example, would not necessarily felt themselves to be these categories. Homosexuality, or heterosexuality as we currently define it, is from memory, only a couple of hundred years old, yet there have same sex relationships throughout history.
The way we construct our knowledge of the world is important - we see the world in terms of subject-object as an example. We privilege the subject over the object. This is an inequality which is writ large when we consider that workers are objects to corporations. We speak of dehumanization, objectification. We privilege the human over everything else, naming the everything-else “the world”
We reduce humanity to numbers, and then move those numbers around with mathematics, expecting them to behave as numbers. The anthropocentric is privileged, and the object is oppressed.
Object oriented ontology suggest we’re all objects - there is no subject. Objects distort each other. Similarly, if we recognise ourselves not as separate from everything else, we find ourselves at a very interesting point: what do we do when the human is not privileged?
Similarly, when we say Fuck Descartes (and I do, often) we are also calling out commodity fetishism as Marx did, for providing a singular connection between producer and consumer as the only relation that matters, a wielding of Occam’s Razor that is arguably flat out responsible for more murder and genocide en masse than anything else.
Perceiving the universe as a piece of clockwork with distinct, knowable parts requires the construction of the concept of parts - that’s to say, privileging the whole over the part, while also reducing the whole to parts.
Much the capture boundaries are arbitrary, as witnessed by the constructed nature of things like sexual orientation, gender, race etc. but also a question about our own bodies: where does one’s finger become hand, or hand become wrist, or wrist, arm etc? This also applies when we say that there are discrete systems: our digestive system vs our nervous system say. Recent discoveries regarding the effects of the gut microbiome suggest that it may be a so called”second brain”. This very well may explode the category, in the same way that genetic studies have blown assumptions of sex out of the water.
We need to recognise that much of what we perceive about the world is shaped by how we know it, and that how we know it is also a constructed thing.
Fuck Descartes. Fuck the Clockwork Universe. Fuck Late Stage Surveillance Capitalism and its attendant Big Data.
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
