Caliban & The Witch: Chapter Three ("The Great Caliban")

The War On Magic, The War on the Body: The fourth essay in our book club on Silvia Federici's brilliant opus.

This is the fourth of a series of essays written for an open book club on Silvia Federici’s profound book, Caliban & The Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Previous installments:

• Preface and Introduction.

• Chapter One.

• Chapter Two.

I’m making this first book club series free for everyone. If you would like to support my work and get essays that I make available for paid-subscribers only, consider becoming a monthly or yearly supporter:

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“We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism.”

…

“To pose the body as mechanical matter, void of any intrinsic teleology — the "occult virtues" attributed to it by both Natural Magic and the popular superstitions of the time — was to make intelligible the possibility of subordinating it to a work process that increasingly relied on uniform and predictable forms of behavior.”

To understand this chapter well, remember that one of the core beliefs of Marxism is that a new class of people — the bourgeoisie — birthed capitalism into the world. The word itself means “city dweller,” but it refers to the capitalist class: those who own the means of production and exploit the labor of others in order to profit. As a class, however, they functioned not just as an economic force but also a social force, changing society and the way we see ourselves and each other.

To understand this process, consider what happens when an American or English businessman decides he wants to set up a factory in an “undeveloped” village in Africa. Of course, he’ll need workers for his factory, and he needs them to show up on time, to have certain skills and knowledge, and most of all to have a certain work ethic.

However, let’s then say the villagers in this village have never worked for a capitalist before, are accustomed to just working for themselves, don’t have watches or clocks, and are also quite used to being somewhere or doing something when they feel like it, rather than when they are told to.

So, the first day, half of the workers the owner hired don’t show up. Half of those who do show up don’t stay the entire day. And all but maybe one or two of them do the work as they think the work should be done, rather than how the owner told them to do it. And they take breaks they’re not supposed to, or they stop for important prayers, or they leave in the middle of work to care for a family member or sit all day talking to their friends.

This situation isn’t imaginary. This is exactly what happened when capitalists in Europe opened the first factories.

Of course, now we all “know” how to go to work. We know we can’t just leave the office because we feel like it. We know we have to be there at a certain time, and stay for a certain number of hours. We know we can’t bring our family or cook lunch at our desk or randomly leave because we had a vision or wanted to go visit an important tree.

This chapter, more than any of the others, explains how we got to this point.

If you’ve read my book, Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life, or if you’ve been reading my essays for a while here, you’ll know that the body is a core focus of my politics and also my spiritual understanding of the world. What you might not know, however, is that this chapter of Caliban & The Witch and an essay Silvia Federici wrote for a journal I edited are why.

In fact, I don’t think I would be who I am now were it not for Federici’s work. That isn’t to say it wouldn’t have been possible to understand what I now understand because of her. Anyone who engages in spiritual body practices can come to an intuitive understanding of the body and how alienated we’ve become from it within capitalism. Still, though, what might not be as easy to arrive at is the understanding of how this all happened, how we “lost” our bodies, and why capitalism not only produces (and reproduces) this alienation, but also requires it.

We have to externalize the body in order to become workers and consumers. We have to distrust it, to forget what it is capable of, in order to treat our work, our life, and our creative powers as commodities to be bought and sold. To labor for others, to sell our time and effort and lifeblood itself to others, we must see these things as resources to be strip-mined from an inanimate terrain in which we temporarily dwell.

We have to do these things, but also, we were forced, trained, disciplined, and fooled into doing this.

“One of the preconditions for capitalist development was the process that Michel Foucault defined as the "disciplining of the body," which in my view consisted of an attempt by state and church to transform the individual's powers into labor-power. This chapter examines how this process was conceived and mediated in the philosophical debates of the time, and the strategic interventions which it generated.”

If the previous chapter represented a rehabilitation of Marx’s analysis, this chapter, “The Great Caliban,” is a rehabilitation of Michel Foucault. What Foucault did extremely well in his work was to trace all the mechanisms of physical, mental, psychological, institutional, and legal control that arose in Europe during the transition to capitalism. Especially in his works, The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, and Discipline and Punish (each of which reads like a horror story), Foucault gives us litany after litany of what was done to humans to turn us into modern subjects. But what he didn’t do — nor could he — was accurately tell us why this all happened.

Briefly, Foucault’s explanation is that the modern state (conceived as much larger than just the government) deals in what he calls “biopower.” Here is one erudite reader’s explanation of the idea (thanks, Constance!):

Described as “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” Biopower is a set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of people become subject to political power. “And instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances, and of required performances – as in discipline – one tries to affect, precisely, a population.” (Foucault 1978) It represents the technology of the epistemic shift into the Modern era.

Federici generally accepts Foucault’s framework, but, as with Marx, notes that it’s inadequate. Just as Marx completely ignored the particular war against women in the transition to capitalism, Foucault’s analysis skipped the witch hunts and went straight to the medicalized torture of the female “hysteric.” And again, it is often as if the body doesn’t really exist within Foucault, except as a terrain of experimentation and control by men of science and power.

But enough about Foucault, because Federici’s analysis moves far beyond a mere rehabilitation of his work.

Bodies into Machines

Remembering my earlier point that the capitalist class had to create a working class, much of this chapter explores the larger framework the bourgeoisie attempted to inculcate into us. Particularly, they needed to transform our sense of ourselves as connected to villages, peoples, families, and places into atomized individuals.

In fact, individualism is a capitalist creation. By individualism I specifically mean the idea that we are each individually responsible for our own actions, our own thoughts, our own material conditions, and our own positive or negative traits.

Consider a point Federici makes in the previous chapter, that even people’s relationship to God was “privatized” during the transition to capitalism:

Even the individual's relation with God was privatized: in Protestant areas, with the institution of a direct relationship between the individual and the divinity; in the Catholic areas, with the introduction of individual confession. The church itself, as a community center, ceased to host any social activity other than those addressed to the cult.

What preceded this individualism wasn’t exactly collectivism, however. Instead, much of the way we saw ourselves before capitalism parallels (in diminished form) the way animist peoples see themselves and the world. What follows from a belief in the agency of stars, plants, spirits, and gods is the conclusion that they influence us and are in relationship with us. If you believe your ancestors persist in some way, then it automatically follows that you believe some of your actions are shaped in response, reaction, or relationship to their presence.

The way we saw ourselves before capitalism was similar to this. Belief in magic wasn’t only common: it was very, very normal: even priests, popes, and early “scientists” believed it existed. These beliefs needed to be eradicated from our cosmology, because they led us to think certain things and act in certain ways which were inimical to capitalism:

“This is how we must read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages. At the basis of magic was an animistic conception of nature that did not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus imagined the cosmos as a living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element was in "sympathetic" relation with the rest. In this perspective, where nature was viewed as a universe of signs and signatures, marking invisible affinities that had to be deciphered (Foucault 1970:26-27), every element — herbs, plants, metals, and most of all the human body — hid virtues and powers peculiar to it.”

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“Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalization of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action. "Magic kills industry," lamented Francis Bacon, admitting that nothing repelled him so much as the assumption that one could obtain results with a few idle expedients, rather than with the sweat of one's brow.

Magic, moreover, rested upon a qualitative conception of space and time that precluded a regularization of the labor process. How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky and unlucky days, that is, days on which one can travel and others on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry and others on which every enterprise should be cautiously avoided? Equally incompatible with the capitalist work-discipline was a conception of the cosmos that attributed special powers to the individual: the magnetic look, the power to make oneself invisible, to leave one's body, to chain the will of others by magical incantations.

It would not be fruitful to investigate whether these powers were real or imaginary. It can be said that all precapitalist societies have believed in them and, in recent times, we have witnessed a revaluation of practices that, at the time we refer to, would have been condemned as witchcraft. Let us mention the growing interest in parapsychology and biofeedback practices that are increasingly applied even by mainstream medicine. The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior. Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work.

However, this was not an option for the 17th-century ruling class which, in this initial and experimental phase of capitalist development, had not yet achieved the social control necessary to neutralize the practice of magic, nor could they functionally integrate magic into the organization of social life. From their viewpoint it hardly mattered whether the powers that people claimed to have, or aspired to have, were real or not, for the very existence of magical beliefs was a source of social insubordination.”

Note particularly Federici’s point about the resurgence of “witchcraft” now. One need only glance at any of the witch hashtags on Instagram or peruse any of the scores of pulp magic books published by Llewellyn or other capitalist publishers to see her point. Magic — filtered through capitalist body discipline — is absolutely no threat to the capitalist order.

The bourgeois war on magic took place overtly through the witch trials, but also more subtly — and powerfully — through a slow, sustained war on the body itself. This war on the body had many fronts. One was the ideological realm, where a new conception of the body as something external to the self, something we “have” rather than “are,” began to be favored as more “intellectual” than previous conceptions. The result of this change was that we then saw the rest of the world also as external and inert.

“To pose the body as mechanical matter, void of any intrinsic teleology — the "occult virtues" attributed to it by both Natural Magic and the popular superstitions of the time — was to make intelligible the possibility of subordinating it to a work process that increasingly relied on uniform and predictable forms of behavior.”

“In this sense, Mechanical Philosophy contributed to increasing the ruling-class control over the natural world, control over human nature being the first, most indispensable step. Just as nature, reduced to a "Great Machine," could be conquered and (in Bacon's words) "penetrated in all her secrets," likewise the body, emptied of its occult forces, could be "caught in a system of subjection," whereby its behavior could be calculated, organized, technically thought and invested of power relations" (Foucault 1977:26).”

This mechanistic view — in which the world and humans are seen as machines — leads to alienation. Another front of this war was the physical attacks on the body, new forms of torture, discipline, punishment, and repression of bodies.

As is well-known, the response of the bourgeoisie was the institution of a true regime of terror, implemented through the intensification of penalties (particularly those punishing the crimes against property), the introduction of "bloody laws" against vagabonds, intended to bind workers to the jobs imposed on them, as once the serfs had been bound to the land, and the multiplication of executions”

“But the violence of the ruling class was not confined to the repression of transgressors. It also aimed at a radical transformation of the person, intended to eradicate in the proletariat any form of behavior not conducive to the imposition of a stricter work-discipline. The dimensions of this attack are apparent in the social legislation that, by the middle of the 16th century, was introduced in England and France. Games were forbidden, particularly games of chance that, besides being useless, undermined the individual's sense of responsibility and "work ethic." Taverns were closed, along with public baths. Nakedness was penalized, as were many other "unproductive" forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse.”

…

“But the definition of a new relation with the body did not remain at a purely ideological level. Many practices began to appear in daily life to signal the deep transformations occurring in this domain: the use of cutlery, the development of shame with respect to nakedness, the advent of "manners" that attempted to regulate how one laughed, walked, sneezed, how one should behave at the table, and to what extent one could sing, joke, play (Elias 1978: 129ff). While the individual was increasingly dissociated from the body, the latter became an object of constant observation, as if it were an enemy.”

Behaviors we see now as merely being “polite” or “civil” needed to be beaten into us over hundreds of years. And again, if you’ve read Being Pagan or many of my essays, you’ll already know that “polite” comes from polis (and so does “police”…), and civil comes from civitas. That is, the entire order of behavior we now consider correct and good is part of the urban order of power.

I noted in the previous installment of this series, also, that the Slavic and Austro-Germanic greeting “servus” derives from a Latin phrase used by slaves to their masters. So does the Italian word “ciao.” In French, “monsieur” and “madame” are likewise servile addresses, and in English, Mister and Missus meant “master” and “mistress.” It was the bourgeois class, rather than the aristrocracy, who made such addresses the “polite” way to address someone in modern society.

(I am digressing, because I become filled with such fury when I think of how this world around us was shaped.)

Moving on, Federici sees the war on the body and the war on magic manifest most powerfully together in the creation of “labor.” Labor is not merely a synonym for work, though it is often used this way. Labor specifically refers to a perhaps magical aspect of work: the human ability to transform things (raw materials, time, skill, capital) into something else. It’s the alchemy of work, and is therefore the most valuable commodity a capitalist seeks. You can have hundreds of tons of gold inside a mountain, but without labor it stays in the mountain. You can have thousands of acres of land and enough seed to sow it a million times over, but without labor you won’t see a single crop.

The capture of labor power could only happen if humans no longer recognized it as something they were. Instead, they needed to think of time and physical effort as a commodity, something to sell in return from wages. Fortunately for the capitalists and unfortunately for us, mechanical philosophy (the mechanistic worldview, or in a way

Paul Kingsnorth

's “machine”) proved a perfect tool to sever us from ourselves.

“It was a social alchemy that did not turn base metals into gold, but bodily powers into work-powers. For the same relation that capitalism introduced between land and work was also beginning to command the relation between the body and labor. While labor was beginning to appear as a dynamic force infinitely capable of development, the body was seen as inert, sterile matter that only the will could move, in a condition similar to that which Newton's physics established between mass and motion, where the mass tends to inertia unless a force is applied to it. Like the land, the body had to be cultivated and first of all broken up, so that it could relinquish its hidden treasures. For while the body is the condition of the existence of labor-power, it is also its limit, as the main element of resistance to its expenditure. It was not sufficient, then, to decide that in itself the body had no value. The body had to die so that labor-power could live.

What died was the concept of the body as a receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as "irrational" was branded as crime .This state intervention was the necessary "subtext" of Mechanical Philosophy. "Knowledge" can only become "power" if it can enforce its prescriptions.This means that the mechanical body, the body-machine, could not have become a model of social behavior without the destruction by the state of a vast range of pre-capitalist beliefs, practices, and social subjects whose existence contradicted the regularization of corporeal behavior promised by Mechanical Philosophy. This is why, at the peak of the "Age of Reason" — the age of scepticism and methodical doubt — we have a ferocious attack on the body, well-supported by many who subscribed to the new doctrine.”

Put another way, the cosmological shift where we began to see the body as something external to us, as something mechanical or “inert,” occurred alongside the changes in the way we understood work. If humans were machines, then machine logic (timing, oiling, calibrating, refining, etc) could be applied to them. A human who isn’t a machine wakes when they desire to. A human under machine logic, however, wakes to an alarm clock. Of course, he wakes to the clock because he needs to labor so he can get a wage, showing simply how labor, machine logic, and the body are related.

Another point on war on magic and the body is that many of the “men of science” who articulated these new ideas about the body were also often witch-hunters, demonologists, or otherwise obsessed with crushing magical practices. If you read my essay The Mysteria: The Mystery of Lawlessness, you’ll recognise one of the men Federici cites: Jean Bodin.

The incompatibility of magic with the capitalist work-discipline and the requirement of social control is one of the reasons why a campaign of terror was launched against it by the state — a terror applauded without reservations by many who are presently considered among the founders of scientific rationalism: Jean Bodin, Mersenne, the mechanical philosopher and member of the Royal Society Richard Boyle, and Newton's teacher, Isaac Barrow. Even the materialist Hobbes, while keeping his distance, gave his approval. "As for witches," he wrote, "I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can". He added that if these superstitions were eliminated, "men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience" (ibid.), Hobbes was well advised. The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in which much social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about the body was gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms.”

Read that last sentence again:

This is, again, the Machine. Capitalism was born from the witch’s stake and the factory floor.

To change humans into alienated workers who forgot what else they — as bodies — were capable of, the capitalists needed to terrorize all these rough, feral, wild aspects of our existence out of us. However, capitalism needed even more than this. It needed us eventually to discipline and terrorize ourselves, to internalize the machine logic of the capitalists, to think of this all as “natural.”

The bourgeois order is not just a machine order, but it is also a management ethic. This long, sustained war on the body was necessary so that we would all eventually become at war with ourselves: we soon started seeing our body as a stubborn beast that needed to be whipped into submission, controlled by our wills, and made submissive to the mind.

“Most importantly, the supremacy of the will allows for the interiorization of the mechanisms of power. Thus, the counterpart of the mechanization of the body is the development of Reason in its role as judge, inquisitor, manager, administrator. We find here the origins of bourgeois subjectivity as self-management, self-ownership, law, responsibility, with its corollaries of memory and identity. Here we also find the origin of that proliferation of"micro-powers" that Michel Foucault has described in his critique of the juridico-discursive model of Power (Foucault 1977). The Cartesian model shows, however, that Power can be decentered and diffused through the social body only to the extent that it is recentered in the person, which is thus reconstituted as a micro-state. In other words, in being diffused, Power does not lose its vectors that is, its content and its aims — but simply acquires the collaboration of the Self in their promotion.”

…

The development of self-management (i.e., self-government, self-development) becomes an essential requirement in a capitalist socio-economic system in which selfownership is assumed to be the fundamental social relation, and discipline no longer relies purely on external coercion. The social significance of Cartesian philosophy lies in part in the fact that it provides an intellectual justification for it. In this way, Descartes' theory of self-management defeats but also recuperates the active side of Natural Magic. For it replaces the unpredictable power of the magician (built on the subtle manipulation of astral influences and correspondences) with a power far more profitable — a power for which no soul has to be forfeited — generated only through the administration and domination of one's body and, by extension, the administration and domination of the bodies of other fellow beings. ”

When you become angry with yourself or a coworker for being late for work, when you become frustrated and scold yourself for feeling too tired to focus, and also when you actively limit the enjoyment in your life (and resent others who do not) in order to be a good worker, you are doing what the capitalists taught us to do.

Looked at from an esoteric perspective, its almost as if some powerful enchantment is upon us. We shape our bodies and wills not towards our own desires, but rather to be model workers, model consumers, and model subjects. We don’t remember why we do this, nor do we often even suspect this isn’t the way it’s always been. As if under the thrall of some great sorcerer, we submit, and submit, and submit.

In fact, this is how I see it. Here is where my own perspective takes Federici a little further than her own scope. In my view, every order is a magical order, and also a religious order. That’s been the point of my series The Mysteria, to draw out the religious dimensions of political power. I mean, what else to make of the fact that the Nation State was dreamt up by witch-hunters like Jean Bodin?

What we’ll see in the next chapter is how the war on older forms of magical understanding was primarily a war on women, on their traditions, on their forms of knowing and being in the world, and also on their reproductive powers. Federici foreshadows that discussion with a short mention of the matter of maleficium (hexing, cursing, “evil” magic) becoming increasingly linked to herbal and other non-scientific methods of birth control:

“A significant element in this context was the condemnation as maleficium of abortion and contraception, which consigned the female body — the uterus reduced to a machine for the reproduction of labor — into the hands of the state and the medical profession. ”

A final point with which I’ll end this essay is found in a footnote to this chapter:

“Particularly important in this context was the attack on the "imagination" ("vis imaginativa") which in 16th and 17th-century Natural Magic was considered a powerful force by which the magician could affect the surrounding world and bring about "health or sickness, not only in its proper body, but also in other bodies" . Hobbes devoted a chapter of the Leviathan to demonstrating that the imagination is only a "decaying sense," no different from memory, only gradually weakened by the removal of the objects of our perception; a critique of imagination is also found in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1642). ”

I’ll expand upon this point in my next installment of The Mysteria.

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The next essay, on Chapter Four (“The Great Witch Hunt In Europe”), will be published on 5 April.

Please feel free to comment on this essay, as these are written with an eye towards participation. Your questions, insights, and comments will help enrich the understanding of others reading the book, too!