Species-Being

Species-being (Gattungswesen) is Marx's term for the essential, generically human capacity for conscious, purposive, creative labor — what distinguishes human activity from animal subsistence. Where an animal produces only according to the immediate needs of its body, the human being produces universally and freely, according to inner laws and aesthetic sensibility, and for others. In the argument of anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, species-being functions as the normative ground from which Marxist critique draws its critical force: capitalism is objectionable precisely because it estranges (alienates) workers from this constitutive creative faculty — the poietic, making dimension of human life. The concept thus anchors the diagnostic power of alienation; without the positive content of species-being, alienation would name only a lack rather than a determinate estrangement from a specific human essence.

Within the source's argument, species-being also supplies the normative warrant for Marxist film theory's critical practice. The analysis of film form — the work of identifying ideological contradiction, exposing reification, and imagining otherwise — is itself an exercise of the species-being's creative-critical faculty. Critique is not merely the negation of alienated existence but its own affirmative expression of human making; the theorist's labor mirrors the creative freedom that capitalism suppresses. This move prevents the theory from collapsing into pure negativity: it has a positive telos, namely the "freedom of creative and life-sustaining activity" as the concrete expression of what human beings generically are.

Within anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019, species-being occupies a foundational position in the argument's normative architecture. It is the positive content that makes the concept of Alienation determinate: the cross-referenced synthesis of Alienation defines estrangement as the loss of something essential, and species-being names precisely what is lost. In Kornbluh's Marxist (rather than Lacanian) register, alienation is not the irreducible structural condition it is for Lacan — where the loss of being is constitutive and irremediable — but rather a historically specific deprivation that can, in principle, be overcome. Species-being thus marks the exact point of divergence between a Marxist and a Lacanian account of alienation: where Lacan insists that the subject's estrangement from full being is the price of entry into language and cannot be sublated, the Marxist concept of species-being implies that a recovered or liberated human essence is conceivable.

The concept also intersects with Creative Labor and Dialectics as cross-referenced canonicals. Creative labor is the practical enactment of species-being — the concrete activity through which humans express their generic essence — while Dialectics names the structural form of the contradiction (Contradiction being another cross-ref) between that essence and the alienated conditions capitalism imposes. Species-being in this source is thus not merely a philosophical residue but the living normative telos that organizes the entire Marxist critical project, including the formal critique of film as a medium that can either reproduce ideological mystification or express humanity's creative self-understanding.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.33)

The ultimate prescription is for this freedom of creative and life-sustaining activity, a freedom to engage in it as the expression of the species-being, of making and producing and creating

The phrase "expression of the species-being" is theoretically loaded because it reverses the usual negative framing: species-being is not merely what capitalism denies but what critical and creative activity positively expresses, making the theorist's own labor — "making and producing and creating" — a living enactment of the emancipatory norm it advocates. The triadic accumulation ("making and producing and creating") reinforces that species-being is an active, generative essence, not a static property, grounding the normative force of Marxist critique in an ontology of human poiesis.