by John Moore From Anarchy and Ecstasy, Visions of Halcyon Days
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"In an important article, Jay Vest convincingly demonstrates that the words "will" and "wild" derive from a common etymological root. For primal Europeans, nature was pervaded by a will force that remained beyond their power to influence. What nature autonomously willed became identified as wild.
Wilderness then means "self-willed-land" or "self-willed-place" with an emphasis upon its own intrinsic volition... This "willed" conception is itself in opposition to the controlled and ordered environment, which is characteristic of the notion of civilization. While control, order, domination and management are true of civilization and domestication, they are not essentials of primal culture... Nature worship among primal Indo-Europeans evidences a traditional theme of sacred natural places, free from desecration by humans and their technology. Such sacred places were wilderness in the deepest sense; they were imbued with will- force,—willed, willful, uncontrollable—and with spirit. Thus, they held about them a sacred mystery—a numinous presence. It is from this tradition that the "will-of the-land"—wilderness—concept emerges.1 Vest's remarks recover important information, but remain curiously exteriorized. The contours of a spirituality structured around the recognition of a sacred wilderness—the significance of its symbolism and ritual—are skilfully outlined. But the interiority of this experience—what it felt like and what it meant to be immersed in such a wilderness—remains beyond Vest's purview. One reason for this deficiency may be the lack of an appropriate vocabulary. Vest's article establishes that primal notions of wilderness are diametrically opposite to those operative in contemporary mainstream discourse. Archaic humans regarded the wilderness as a site of positive energies, whereas today power complexes demand that it be considered as a place of evil and negativity which deserves domination and exploitation. In Against His-story. Against Leviathan!, Fredy Perlman retraces the process whereby power—through authority structures, imperial and Judaeo-Christian civilizing forces—converts nature into a wasteland, thus forcing the term "wilderness" to acquire pejorative connotations. But the semantic history of a cognate term which denotes the interior experience of sacred wilderness—"bewilder"—has not received similar examination. Necessarily, this semantic reconstruction must be speculative. Contextual factors, however, indicate appropriate orientations for an accurate recovery of the term's original meaning.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides two definitions of the verb "bewilder": literally, "to lose in pathless places, to confound for want of a plain road," and figuratively, "to confuse in mental perception, to perplex, confound, to cause mental aberration." It is my contention that as the notion of the wilderness was forced to abandon its positive meanings and acquire negative connotations, the originally unified meaning of "bewilder" was divided into two partial definitions, whose connotations were then inverted. Wilderness, as Vest avers, simultaneously denoted a location and a condition: a state inhabited by willful, uncontrollable natural energies. In such states,2 humans surrendered their individuality, renounced personal volition to the will-of-the-land, and merged individuated desire within the expansive needs of the wild. In doing so, they became channels or mediums through which the wilderness could become articulate and operative in the human sphere. The process was ecstatic: the surrender of the ego; the merging of individuation within holism, produced sensations of bliss and promoted ecstatic/erotic actions. Any incipient characterological sclerosis, absorbed through prolonged participation in communal relations, was discarded or dissipated. Any tendencies toward the formation of Leviathanic structures were thus dispersed.
Individuals undergoing this process were bewildered, in the original, integrated sense of the term. They entered "pathless places" in two senses. First, wilderness areas (i.e., the vast totality of the world) contained no paths or tracks—neither the roads of imperial domination and plunder constructed by the Romans, nor the routes of commerce carved by Islamic merchants. By definition, the wilderness remained free from incursions by technology. And secondly, there were no established journeys to be undertaken, no predetermined paths to traverse. All social codes were annulled: vision, emotion and behaviour were no longer subject to regulation and control. Total transformation was possible. But the directions—for unlimited eversion were no longer, or only minimally, under individual control. The individual will, subsumed within the will-of-the-land, no longer retained the power of volition. Possessed by the wilderness, individuals eagerly became vehicles for its sacred and ecstatic expression.
Evidence to substantiate these contentions regarding the bewilderment process can be derived from a consideration of an associated term, "amazement." The OED variously defines "amaze" as "to put out of one's wits... bewilder, perplex," "to overcome with sudden fear or panic," and "to overwhelm with wonder, to astound or greatly astonish." It also defines "amazedness" as "loss of self-possession through fear." This cluster of ideas clearly parallels the meanings attached to "bewilder." Indeed, they may ultimately derive from a common origin. The OED notes that "amaze and a maze were often identified." And this etymological link provides the crucial connexion. In certain primal traditions, the maze or labyrinth played a homologous role to that of the sacred wilderness area—in fact, the two may have been indistinguishable:
Extremely complex ideas were expressed through the symbol of the labyrinth. First, the initiate had to find the way through the underworld—the womb of the Mother—going through symbolic death to be reborn through her on a larger psychic level. Simultaneously, by dancing the winding and unwinding spiral, the initiate reached back to the still heart of cosmos, and so immortality, in her. The dance would have been combined with sexual rites and the taking of some hallucinogen like the legendary soma. In the resulting illumination soma and self were experienced as one with the cosmic self in orgasmic ego-death. The ecstatic centre of the labyrinth was the no-mind centre of orgasm experienced as death, creative madness, and loss of the conditioned "self."3 "Bewilderment" and "amazement" once denoted the experienced interiority of radical purification through displacement. Losing one's self in a maze meant precisely that, not merely a sense of disorientation. Bewilderment entailed an encounter with death and transcendence, and so was necessarily characterized by complex interacting responses, including terror, wonder and ecstasy. The wilderness overwhelmed the individual will from three directions. Spiritual techniques for arousing the coiled kundalini energy eroded ego boundaries and merged the individuated self within the cosmic All. Hallucinogens derived from poisonous substances transported the individual to the brink of physical decease. And uncontrollable sexual desires overcame any social inhibitions placed on the search for erotic pleasures. The combination of these three elements took the individual to the edge of dissolution—as a psychological, physical, and social/ethical entity. But only to the edge: vestiges of consciousness remained so that the wilderness could become aware of itself, achieve a knowledge of its own awesome nature. However, the process remained reciprocal: the individual emerged transformed and whole, often bearing shamanic gifts—such as prophetic powers, healing capacities and visions—to enrich the community. Such symbiosis constituted the core of the ancient Mysteries.4 Once "wilderness" acquired pejorative connotations, however, the bewilderment phenomenon underwent a similarly negative redefinition. The originally integrated meanings of the process were separated and demonized, gradually assuming the forms in which they are currently known. On the one hand, bewilderment now signifies the feeling experienced when one is lost, disorientated in an unfamiliar—and hence potentially threatening—context or environment, unable to find an exit. On the other hand, the term denotes a derangement of perceptions, not in a positive sense of possession by the wilderness, but in the negative sense of perplexity and bafflement. To lose one's self now becomes an adversity because the failure of the cognitive faculties reveals, not a wealth of inner spiritual resources, but an emptiness—a subjectivity evacuated by power and glutted with totalitarian trivia.
These contemporary meanings of "bewilderment" are so ingrained that it seems an impossible task to retrieve this term. Hence, as an alternative I propose the notion of bewilderness. The primal meanings of "bewilder" are now apparent. The amalgamation of "bewilder" and "wilderness" in this new term possesses the advantage of restoring the emphasis on the wild component of the former term. But the addition of "ness" to "bewilder" also remains appropriate. Vest demonstrates that the suffix "ness," in addition to expressing a particular state (e.g., sweetness, tiredness), originally denoted a "land" or "place." Hence, as a term "bewilderness" reunites the two separated aspects of "bewilder" as geographical dislocation and as a spiritual condition.
The reasons for coining this neologism are far from antiquarian. The experience denoted by bewilderness remains crucial for all proponents of anarchy, who recognized that syncopating the spiral dance could facilitate total revolution. Bewilderness constitutes both the means and an end (i.e., the beginning of another cycle). Like anarchic Zen, it postulates a supersession of everyday, socially conditioned consciousness on an individual and later generalized scale. It promotes psychosocial biodegradation or ecdysis: the refusal of assigned identities, the divestment of polysemic integuments, the disgorgement of totalitarian toxins. Dispossession becomes Possession, not so much through an expropriation of the expropriators, as an evacuation of and from the evacuating control complex. This process is purgative and therapeutic: the vacuum becomes inundated with waves of ecstasy that prefigure, and hence promote the shift toward, total global anarchy.
Techniques for recovering bewilderness are available. Many of Starhawk's magic exercises, for example, attempt to elicit precisely this condition. She proposes wordless chants, inarticulate noises which resolve into the sounds of the wilderness communing through individuals and groups. Such techniques aim to liberate the involuntary, be it a yelp of pain, an orgasmic groan, a growl of anger, or any other expression. The individual invokes, and waits to discover what energy emerges. Magic consists of merging and participating in these energies, and shaping their manifestations. The nature of the resulting patterns depends on the metaphors and symbols utilized. For example, Starhawk, characterizing subjectivity within hierarchical control structures, discerns three aspects of the self: Younger Self, the playful, sensory element that appears when the infant distinguishes itself from its environment; Talking Self, the later rational faculty of abstraction and codification; and Deep Self, the all-pervasive oceanic consciousness: Imagine Talking Self's domain as a house we live in, and Younger Self's domain as a garden that surrounds it completely. Beneath the garden are the caves and wells of Deep Self; outside it are the other realms of reality, the wilderness. There is no clear dividing line between Younger Self's garden and the wild until Talking Self builds a wall. Younger Self constantly brings in plants and animals... In order to walk out into the wild, we must first pass through the garden.
Or, conversely, in order to examine any piece of the wild Younger Self brings in, in order to name it and set it on the shelves of our house, it must first be brought through the garden. The clearer the paths are, the more familiar we are with their windings and turnings, the friendlier we are with the creatures that inhabit them, the clearer are our contacts with external reality - both physical and metaphysical.5
Despite its illuminating qualities, Starhawk's metaphor remains descriptively inadequate because it lacks any notion of the historical relativity of the configuration of elements she discerns within subjectivity. Deep Self can undoubtedly be found beneath the garden (and the house), but also - and most prodigiously - in the wilderness. Here lies Starhawk's major error. Rather than contrariety, one finds identity: the wilderness is Deep Self, and vice versa. Primal peoples realized this fact. They also knew that Talking Self was a useful and beneficial agency, but only so long as it remained contextualized, in situ, within its proper, circumscribed dimensions. Its constant tendency to hypertrophy was recognized, and thwarted by the bewilderness process. But in hierarchical control structures, this tendency is encouraged, and Talking Self becomes deracinated, denatured, (pre)dominant. Hence, in terms of Starhawk's metaphor, the central issue should not be tending the garden, making it more hospitable, indeed civilized, but rather flattening the wall. Younger Self's garden should by degrees imperceptibly shade into the wilderness, allowing for an untroubled access to and from the two complementary areas of hearth and hinterland. Any strict demarcation automatically creates and maintains the divisions of private property.
Jacques Camatte provides another metaphorical representation of this issue when he proposes a recovery of the unconscious:
What is the subconscious if not the affective-sensual life of the human being repressed by capital? The human being has to be domesticated, shaped to a rationality which he must internalize - the rationality of the process of production of capital. Once this domestication is achieved, the human being is dispossessed of this repressed sensual life which becomes an object of knowledge, of science; it becomes capitalizable. The unconscious, becoming an object of commerce, is thinly sliced and retailed in the market of knowledge. The unconscious did not always exist, and it exists now only as a component in the discourse of capital. To demolish barriers and walls, to recover the unconscious and reactivate it in everyday life - these are metaphors for a process which bewilderness can help to facilitate. Bewilderness is an extreme condition, an encounter with transcendence, possession by elemental energies. But it allows the possibility of more measured and integrated lifeways. After such experiences, individuals and communities can accept convivial coexistence because they wittingly live within and amidst the oceanic consciousness. And such a state characterizes the condition of total anarchy."
Paul Shepard's 'Coming home to the Pleistocene' is a book critical of the Hebraic tyranny of linearity of historical consciousness, while also critical of the whole I.E. aggressive warrior and sacrificial culture, written from an anarcho-primitivist perspective - agriculture as a violence that ended the 'game' and the natural connect of man, animal, ecology. When I read Shepard and later Norman Brown's classical essay 'Life against Death', it became clear to see why Spinoza has such a huge following by anarcho-primitivists, and libertarians. When the "connect" with the nature becomes another deification, any growth is perceived and experienced as Tyranny and Violence. Agriculture was a tyrannical move to the anarcho-primitivists. The evolution into the erect human posture was a tyrannical self-repression to Freud. Anarcho-primitivism champions "balance", and the "lost connect", and ancient "cyclical consciousness", but to want to arrest and delay the modern momentum set off by human greed is an anti-natural plea against the very natural selfish, greedy character of human nature, of life itself, and its will to growth, to exceed, to exploit. I remember discussing this with Natalie some months back as this ideology being a useful and can be no more than a temporary Brake, but I can't seem to find that thread, so starting this as a new topic. Anarcho-primitivists believe a re-turn to pagan [matriarchal pre-Aryan or Edenic] cyclical consciousness, mythical sensibility of time, values, attitude, natural synergies is the only way to overthrow the effects of modernism and its linear revolution... the re-turn of the feminine-Goddess, the pre-Oedipal Mother to correct present hyper-violence, and fear of mortality... but can this esteemed more than a temporary refuge, a temporary sheltering? I'm not sure and its something I have to see but did not communal-Egalitarianism emerge from Matriarchal values? Isn't Communism the deep wish for the end of all Labour felt as violence and rejoice in a saturnalia, the lap of the mother?
Isn't that why and how some retards manage to connect dionysian/orgiastic/matriarchal paganism with communism?! [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Is that why Heidegger, a certain anti-exploitative, anti-Roman, anti-technological/pro-techne selected Heidegger continues to remain popular despite his Nazi association? [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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"Against the dominance of calculative thinking in the age of technology Heidegger prescribed Gelassenheit, openness or attunement, that cues in thinking to the forgotten question of Being. For Heidegger this meant restoring our sensitivity to language and to poetry specifically, for it is in language, he argued, that Being first reveals itself to us. “Language,” he wrote, “is the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.” We cannot seek the truth of Being under our own initiative as subjects reaching out to grasp objects, but instead must discern its “call” in language and respond poetically. The poet then, for Heidegger, is one who attunes herself to Being’s call and transcribes the experience into poetry, thus bearing witness to the encounter."
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"Bruce says: Well said. Indirectly, it seems that Heidegger implies the necessity of "revelation" through language to hear Being, not as being, but as what is more primal and more central than we ourselves. Even with the Postmodern critique of the Cartesian Enlightenment project, still we find it difficult to avoid imagining ourselves as the central subject in the universe, as the ones who evaluate all that is and can be known. Perhaps Heidegger, in spite of his moral failures, also contributes to a epistemological humility that leads to deeper listening to the One who stands outside of being and yet enters it to save us from ourselves.
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James says: The way in which Judaism and Christianity speak about God seems, I believe, less abstract than either the Heideggerian or Cartesian program suggests. First, there is throughout God's revelation a redemptive salvation directed to the renewal of BOTH individual and community life. For example, beginning with Abraham, we do not sacrifice children to win God's favor transforming life on all levels and into the future. Israel's mission is to implement God's redemptive grace for the goyim. The Christian's duty is to carry Israel's mission forward to the ends of the earth to the end of time. Throughout God's revelation we find our being entwined by grace with others, not as rulers but as servants. I believe Heideggerian and Cartesian reflection on being are weighted toward an 'imperial' enactment rather than servanthood....
Even if I suspect why Heidegger is favoured today [no matter what he really was but how he lends himself to a certain slant of interpretation], incorrectly, at any rate, what this alerts me to is the hesitation I always had in calling myself simply pagan; which is why I have always held, 'Paganism' to me, in the real I.E. sense revolves around Self-ishness, a Nietzschean disciplined vigour and Joyful self-assertion.
Was Nietzsche, not once again right, to ask "Is Dionysos Really understood?"... !
HISTORY IS NOT A CHRONICLE but a Hebrew invention about the way the cosmos works, a notion that became the accepted “word” for the civilized world. One of the problems with this version is that it does not see the past reoccurring in the present. Yet Octavio Paz reminds us: “The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”1 History as written documentation of “what happened” is antithetical to a “constantly return- ing present,” and as a result its perception of time and change is narrow- ly out of harmony with the natural world. Written history is the word. Time is an unfinished, extemporaneous narrative. Prehistoric humans, in contrast, were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” They possessed a detailed knowledge that was passed on from generation to generation by oral tradition through myths—stories that framed their beliefs in the context of ancestors and the landscape of the natural world. They lived within a “sacred geography” that consisted of a complex knowledge of place, terrain, and plants and animals embedded in a phenology of seasonal cycles. But they were also close to the earth in a spiritual sense, joined in an intricate configuration of sacred associations with the spirit of place within their landscape. Time and space as well as animals–humans–gods–all life and nonliving matter formed a continuum that related to themes of fertility and death and the sacredness of all things.2 During prehistory, which is most of the time that humans have been on earth, the dead and their burial places were venerated and myth- ic ancestors were part of the living present, the dreamtime ones whose world was also the ground of present being. Ignore them as we will, they are with us still.
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The roots of history as written, as Herbert Schneidau has shown us,3 were formulated by the Hebrew demythologizers who created a reality outside the rhythmic cosmos of the gentiles who surrounded them and who were grounded in prehistoric, mythical consciousness with rituals of eternal return, mimetic conveyance of values and ideas, the central metaphor of nature as culture, and, most of all, the incorporation of the past into the present. Unlike history, prehistory does not participate in the dichotomy that divides experience into good and evil, eternal and tem- poral. Rather, it belongs to a syncretic system that accepts multiple truths and meanings and attempts to reconcile them. This state of consciousness is not due to a rational process. The mythic mind, as John Cobb Jr. has explained it, does not recognize the “separateness of subject and object” but instead sees “a flow of subjective and objective contributions . . . bound together” where there is no “clear consciousness of subject as sub- ject or of object as object."
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The Hebrews, who initiated the move away from the earth and toward the historical view, did not try to reconcile opposing beliefs. Nor did they have a sense of place. To the contrary they insisted on “deracination from the spirit of place” and asserted that they were “journeyers” to the Promised Land.5 In the Hebrew view, the realm of the sacred was grant- ed only to Yahweh. Objections to the oldest traditions of time and the past imply a deeper strain that has to do not with the content of history, but with a self-conscious alienation that first became evident in the Hebrews. The assault on the local wisdom of primal peoples culminated in the outwardness of nature and the inwardness of the personality. Focusing on heavenly domination over earthly phenomena, history became an attempt to look away from earth.
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The Hebrews, the Greeks, and, following in their steps, the Christians asserted that events are novel, uncertain, tangential, and contingent rather than embedded and structured, the result of the thoughts of a living, omniscient, unknowable God. The past was a highway on which there could be no return. The prototype of this linear sequence of ever-new events, where noth- ing was repeated and to which nothing returned, was the Old Testament, a record of tribal endogamy, identity, and vision. Thirty-two hundred years later, history has grown fat with the civilized written records that replaced oral traditions and added vast secular data to religious history. This breakaway from the mythic life, which linked our species to the nat- ural world, began when the early Hebrews rejected the nature/process sto- ries and rites of their pagan contemporaries for the myth of a single god who, outside the world, reached into his creation, willfully deranging its rhythms, acting arbitrarily, making life a kind of novel, a history.
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The effort of the Hebrews to distance themselves from the sacred immanence in the natural order initiated what Cobb has called the “reflective con- sciousness” of humankind in the “Axial Period” (between 800 and 200 B.C.)—a transitional state of human cognition in which the archaic mind was altered and a “conscious control of symbolization and action” emerged.7 Although the Hebrews had begun to develop a “reflective con- sciousness,” a state of consciousness in which they actively attempted to understand their place in the greater scheme of things, they were still locked into a kind of projection of their unconscious that symbolized sub- jective elements arising from a deep substratum of the mind.
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The Greeks, Cobb argues, succeeded in distancing themselves from sacred immanence in the natural order through further development of the “reflective consciousness.” The change of the “structure of existence,” the way they envisioned the possibilities in their lives, moved from the unconscious to the conscious. In the case of Homeric Man, “the object of conscious experience . . . was primordially the sensuously given world . . . in which the subjective was subordinated to the objective.” Out of this grew “esthetic distancing”—an ability to see beauty in the world, in nature, in the human body, and in temples and other human artifacts, esthetically pleasing forms corresponding to rational psychic structures. By esthetic projection of beauty and perfection onto their gods, Cobb says, “the Greeks subordinated mythical meanings to the rational con- sciousness. . . . Gods were conceived as visual objects” and an “intelligible order” was imposed on the myths. In this way the mythical became the mythological. Things could be treasured for their beauty as opposed to their utility or their numinousness. Careful study of the objects of art resulted in “demonstrated laws of form and quantitative mathematical laws,” which allowed replication and thus the development of mathe- matics, natural science, philosophy, drama, and performance music. Sci- ence and esthetics emerged together—invented for the West, so to speak, by the Greeks. Greatness was equivalent to excellence and beauty rather than to morality. The gods became drama and sculpture; nature was reduced to the sensed source of intellectual description and artistic power.
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For Christians the crucial events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment. Christian existence was defined as spiritual existence that expressed itself through “radical responsibility for oneself ” as well as “self- transcendence” through love of others. Christians further emphasized the distinction between the word of a patriarchal god and all myths of an earth mother—thereby separating themselves even more from the numi- nous earth and its processes.10 Individual responsibility for self-scrutiny in terms of sin or good works took precedence over the timeless sacredness of the earth and its processes. The notion of the unreturning arrow of his- torical time in the Western mind was taken up by Christianity.
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What was once the slow movement through habitats and terrains, enriched by narratives and the ongoing reciprocity with true residents, has been reduced to what Michael Sorkin calls “evocations of travel . . . places that refer to someplace else . . . the urbanism of universal equiva- lence,” and electronic simulacra. These false landscapes, such as Disney- land, instead of containing secret reflections of our individual maturity, yield immature adults whose mythology is Mickey Mouse. Nature becomes a stage where the regimes and tales of power are enacted. To con- ventional history, technocracy adds the planetary imperialism of franchise business and the wasted landscapes of industrial and nationalistic enter- prise, recreation as sheer kinesthetic motion, and the vacuity of the escape industries—as Sorkin puts it, the “celebration of the existing order of things in the guise of escaping from it.”
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Much of what we call “Western” has its roots in Hebrew supernaturalism and Greek hubris, behind which lurks the hieroglyphs of barter. Elsewhere I have tried to describe history as a crazy idea, fostered not as an intellectual concept so much as the socially sanctioned mutilation of early childhood experience by blocking what Erik Erikson called “epigenesis,” the complicit outcome of inheritance and environment.17 Through education, history corrupts the intrinsic expectation of prehistory. Young children show natural tendencies that have always been part of the myth- ic mind as they personalize experience and show an intense interest in the natural world, especially in animals. They cling tenaciously to the pro- clivities that we try to educate out of them, the natural impulses that are the fundamental source of their creativity. Edith Cobb wisely said of childhood that its “purpose is to discover a world the way the world was made.”18 Children are in tune with that world. We personally experience childhood as a yearning, an intuition of the self, as other selves and other beings, a shadow of plant and animal kindred, vestiges of community that haunt us, and a need for exemplary events as they occur in myth rather than in history.
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Schneidau has told us that myths “do for the group some of the things that dreams do for individuals.”
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Myth and the unconscious are the sources through which we access our numinous past and ease ourselves out of fears and contradictions into “mental patterns that can be dealt with.”21 By discrediting the importance of myth, the ideology of history has corrupted basic human thought processes that have been enriched by myth since we became human. There has been an educated genuflection before the idea of myth since Carl Jung and then Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell attempted to demonstrate that myth is a narrative expression of universal internal archetypes. But, in general, myth has come into ill use and has been depicted as stories that are false, beyond comprehension, or unbelievable. “It is only a myth,” we say of stories too fanciful for reality. As a result of this general disrepute, it is difficult for many to credit “factual” history as the new myth of time and progress.
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As a culture we may choose or invent any language or set of gods we like. But that we must make up a language and choose gods is what it means to be human. Some cultures are more socially and ecologically attuned than others and produce institutions and perhaps even individuals who are less churl- ish, loutish, and brutish. Although cultural modes differ, one is, in itself, as “good” as any other. There is no inherent difference in the humanity of different peoples. We are a species. If the lives of some are better, it is because they live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to meeting the “expectations” of the genes: the contract with evo- lution is being more generously fulfilled. Our world does not make us; nor do we make ourselves; we are the continuing creation of the interac- tion between our organic structure and the way we shape the world around us. It’s possible to do it badly. It’s also possible to do it well. We are an epigenetic phenomenon: our development is elaborated continu- ously during our entire lifetimes as it has been down through the ages.
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The Voice of life is made up of calls, drums, songs, musical instruments, moving wind and water; they tell us of the livingness of the world in a surprisingly coherent milieu. Vision discovers parts but sound links them. This process starts internally, like the rumble of an earthquake, becoming internal and external at once. Gary Snyder has called it “the primacy of together-hearing.” Even percussive music and great intervals of silence are evidently conducive to our well-being. We have been surrounded now for millennia with domestic places that have become metaphors of a diminished self. Perhaps one way home is the path through music.
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In its thousand years the clock has become the great corporate destroyer of spontaneity. In her book on D. H. Lawrence, she refers to his Plumed Serpent regarding the replacing of bells in the church with drums: “In a few sentences Lawrence hints at the enormous changes implicit in moving from rigid clock time with metallic bells to drums timed to the natural rhythm of the day: dawn, first sun showing, sun highest in the sky and sunset.” She goes on to say, “The bells call attention to the Christian Church standing there focusing all power onto itself; the drum connects humans with their circumambient universe and with nature’s changing cycles.” LaChapelle goes on to explain that “the drum is not a return to past ages; rather it is a remembrance of who we really are”—we lived to the syncopated beating in the womb, to the mea- sure of the mother’s heartbeat and that of her fetus which beats twice as fast. “The drum,” she says, “has always been the center for sacred rituals in every culture in the world. . . . and the vehicle for ritual dancing as well.”
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...as Lévi- Strauss has revealed, civilized thought attempts to simplify rather than clarify the complexity of the world. It does so by unifying and seeking continuity, variability, and relativity rather than by conceptualizing new schemes, as does “savage” thought, that then become additional objects to be comprehended. Stated simply, the “civilized mind” attempts to simpli- fy and level the world whereas the “savage mind” is not afraid to become enmeshed in its complexity. Birth and death provide the material for a rich and diverse conceptualization [such as initiation ritual] . . . which transcends the distinction between the real and the imaginary.” It may seem that primal thought with its spiritual depth is not scientific, but Levi-Strauss regards such thought as “a science of the concrete.” He says: “The manner in which primitive peoples conceptualize their world is not merely coherent but the very one demanded where objects are discontin- uous and complex.”
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In treating plants and animals as elements of a message, primitive thought discerns “principles of interpretation whose heuristic value” is only recently matched in our society by telecommuni- cations, computers, and electron microscopes and modern information theory. “The entire process of human knowledge,” he concludes, “thus assumes the character of a closed system . . . The scientific spirit . . . con- tributes to legitimize the principle of savage thought and to reestablish it in its rightful place.”
"The philosophy of the hunt tells us that games are infinite. Life goes on and nature provides the essential structure in a rule-regulated cosmos. The ecology and behav- ior of the "game" animals become the metaphorical model of human society, the rules of one's own biological being, and the world's working or playing. Winning and losing are transient phenomena—some small part of the whole. Opponents are essential. One loves one's enemies. To destroy them in any final sense is unthinkable.
Somehow that sense of perpetual play and the brotherhood of endless but leisurely opposition has faded with our primal ancestors, its place taken by the need for complete victory, a final solution. The authoritarian decree, reiterated again and again, has been the death of the others, the defeat of nature, of germs, of wolves. It is all the same, an obsession with total supremacy, as though the objective were to obliterate all defeated foes, all pests, all disease, all opponents, all the Others. To end the game.
Sacrifice does accommodate the "problem of death," as Campbell claims, but it does so merely by domesticating death. Sacrifice reverses the hunter/gather idea of gifting in which humans are guests in life who receive according to their due; in its stead it substitutes offerings as a kind of barter with blood as currency. Agriculture—domestic crops, for example —is characterized by glorious abundance or desperation. Harmony with the world is reckoned in terms of mastery over parasites and animal competitors by enlarging the scope of the simplification of ecosystems and, ceremonially, by sacrificial rites of negotiation with gods with human faces. Ostensibly a participation with the cosmos, the sacrificial ceremony is only a thinly disguised bribe.
In this "New Age" in search of messianic solutions to modern problems and the recovery of a lost world, we have uncritically embraced the shaman as visionary, medicine man, guru, ecologist, cosmologist, and wise man or woman and accepted the model of shamanistic thinking as ecological and nature-friendly. Spontaneous healers, usually women, have always accompanied humans. But the shaman is a latecomer—part of the agricultural fear of curses and evil spirits, the use of intoxicants, the spread of male social dominance, the exploitation of domestic animals (especially the horse) as human helpers, and the shift of sedentary peoples toward spectatorship rather than egalitarian participation.
Among foraging peoples, healers appeared spontaneously and did not necessarily hold other powers, sponsor séances, go on vision quests, do magic tricks, or wield political influence—all of which were true of the later shaman. Esther Jacobson, a scholar on Scytho-Siberian cultures, has shown how shamanism emerged as a late expression of what separates us from nature and marked the decline of the great cults of the bear and the mountain. The veneration of terrain features—lake, cliff, river, mountain, and cave—that attached people spiritually to place reflects "archaic traditions which go back before shamanism," which became a male-dominated political practice. Also lost were "contrasting relationships of bear/woman and bear/man" that carried "totemic inderstanding of tribal origins."
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The shift away from affirmation and participation in palingenesis—the round of life—to an attempt to control it can be seen in the deterioration of the ceremony of the slain bear as it was influenced by the outreaches of agrarian thought. In primal form the festival was an egalitarian, ad hoc, celebration of the wild kill as a symbolic acceptance of the gift of food. Modern tribal ceremonies of the bear cult have all but disappeared or have been altered, as in the Gilyak and Ainu of East Asia who kill a reared bear, scheduling the death of an animal under human control—surely not a hunt. The ancient ceremony degenerated to a shaman-centered spectacle of the sacrifice of a captive bear, deflecting evil from the village. The animal cannot be the focus of veneration and the object of sacrifice at the same time.
...The Indo-European shamanistic heritage is evident among the Greeks in the hero Perseus—the Greek betrayer of the feminine traditions of oracular and collective intuition from which he originally came, hypocritically wearing the shaman's gear, wallet, cap, sandals, and shield, "in the cause of descent from father to son; of politics, not religion; of rationality, not divination or possession." The original visionary healing by individual women or men had been associated with the flight of birds who came to the healer. The professional shamanism that succeeded it was most fully developed by Indo-European pastoralists who reconceived the shaman's flight on the horse. The shaman, who had earlier departed the village by climbing a central tree or pole and taking flight, or who rode the drum, would instead leave by visionary horseback.
Riding a swift horse was the nearest experience of humans to intoxication and flight—to that ancient vertiginous excitement of the swaying tree. The mythical winged horse emerged as Pegasus sprang from the neck of the Medusa, decapitated by Perseus. As Medusa, the old goddess with her snakes, faded, her sacred horses were stolen by warrior heroes. "The wild and powerful thrust" of the "hoofs and beating wings" of Pegasus and the other winged horses of legend, says Butterworth, "imperatively demands the means and the knowledge" of control.
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WHEREVER THE INDO-EUROPEANS encountered indigenous cults, the victory over them was mythologized as a battle between a sky god and earth dragons such as the Greek Titans and Typhons. As it happened, the Indo- European incursions into the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates corresponded with the zenith of great city-states such as Ur, Kish, and Lagash. These cities grew up from the rich monocultures of the riverine flood-plains of the Near East. Their divine kings were seen in the sheep/goat idiom, an image of the benign pastorality in a mixed agriculture, as "the shepherd at the head of his flock," the defender against predatory enemies represented and then symbolized by the lion. Such autocracies had already begun the ideological move away from deified maternity, but not so far that the semidivine regents gave up the stories of being suckled at the breast of a goddess, or that priestesses did not still rule temples dedicated to one or another goddess of fertility.
The sacred nuptials central to ancient Mesopotamian agrarian renewal rites, seen as necessary to the success of the crops upon which a growing population depended, declined in mythic force just as the impact of Indo- European cattle-keeper invasions and three thousand years of soil loss and deterioration of vegetation, aggravated by climatic changes, made itself felt. The cutting of forests for construction and for fuel needed to heat, cook, make quicklime, and smelt metals, the destabilization of the water and soil by deforestation and overgrazing, and the salination of croplands may at first have intensified the worship of the sky god, Tamuz, son of the earth and water, who was dependent upon his mother/consort, the divine restorer of the seasons, to whom he looked for "release."
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Disorder in the basic ecosystems of the watershed and its life did not bode well for political or religious stability. The plant motif, embodied as seasonal renewal, with its emphasis on fertility in the earth, gradually lost ground to a heroic style shaped after the adventuring warrior and competitive pastoral society with its appeal to a distant sky god, instead of the village spirits, and the celebration of theft and recovery by countertheft, paradigmatic control over animals and women, and disdain for the earth. The sky god was imagined as a weather god, an outsider, a messiah who rides in to save all the people much as raiding parties of kinfolk or friends galloped in to rescue the stolen cattle or smite the enemy. Assistance in time of crisis or to augment a raid grew from pastoral society, but it became a major metaphor and mythic story by Hebrew times. The dream of the messianic savior became the Christian redeemer."
An Anarcho-Primitivist site with a hypothesis called - [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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"Christianity merged the Platonic ideal of a soul with the Judaic notion of an infinite God to create the first coherent dualistic cosmology. Islam absorbed both of these ideas into its doctrines. Together, Christianity and Islam conquered large portions of the world and brought their dualism along with their military power. For the first time, people identified themselves with universal values (such as salvation of the soul), which were seen as applying even to other groups who had no notion of these values. Increasingly, mankind was viewed as separate from the natural world. Following Genesis, Man was seen as having a God-given dominion over the rest of creation. Elsewhere on this blog, I argue that dualism and monotheism have caused a profound change in our collective consciousness over the past two thousand years. Underlying the monotheistic/dualistic thought pattern is the notion that two different dimensions exist: a worldly dimension of the body, and an eternal dimension of the soul. If my argument is correct, then prior to the advent of Platonic dualism and Judeo-Christian monotheism, people around the world must have viewed their cosmos with blurrier distinctions, not conceiving of two utterly different dimensions." [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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"The shift to agriculture is viewed by many anthropologists as “the most profound revolution in human history,”[1] one which established “the ultimate economic foundation for the past 10,000 years of population growth amongst the human population, indeed for the phenomenon of civilization as we know it.”[2] It began with the simple, but powerful, realization that if you did certain things to crops and animals, they produced more. If you collected seeds from this year’s harvest of wheat and planted them, then more wheat would grow next year in the same place. If you captured that baby goat and fed it your scraps, then it would produce milk for your family and could eventually be killed for meat.
These new techniques led to something that had never occurred before in human history: surplus. And over many generations and thousands of years, this simple change in home economics led to the development of vast civilizations that stretched around the world, a process described here by archaeologist Graeme Barker:
The ability to produce food and other products from domesticated plants and animals surplus to immediate subsistence requirements also opened up new pathways to economic and social complexity: farming could mean new resources for barter, payment of tax or tribute, for sale in a market; it could mean food for non-food producers such as specialist craft-workers, priests, warriors, lords, and kings. Thus farming was the precondition for the development of the first great urban civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, China, the Americas, and Africa, and has been for all later states up to the present day."
...why Spinoza has such a huge following by anarcho-primitivists, and libertarians.
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"Freud says not only that the human ego feeling once embraced the whole world, but also that Eros drives the ego to recover that feeling: "The development of the ego consists in a departure from primal narcissism and results in a vigorous attempt to recover it." In primal narcissism the self is at one with a world of love and pleasure' hence the ultimate aim of the human ego is to reinstate what Freud calls "limitless narcissism" and find itself once more at one with the whole world in love and pleasure. The erode energy in the ego is in the (unconscious) pure pleasure-ego project; and hence the pure pleasure-ego is in conflict with the reality-ego, until reality and pleasure can really meet and create what Ferenczi called "the erotic sense of reality." Eros, as a force in the human ego, seeks to affirm a world of love and pleasure: "Affirmation, as being a substitute for union, belongs to Eros."
The ultimate aim of the Freudian Eros to affirm union with the world in pleasure is substantially the same as Spinoza's formula for the ultimate aim of human desire the intellectual love of God. God, in Spinoza's system, is the totality of Nature (Deus sire Natura). He defines love as pleasure (laetitia) together with the idea of an external cause (the source of the pleasure), adding that it is a property of love to will a union with the beloved object, in the sense that satisfaction lies in the presence of the beloved object. Hence for Spinoza the ultimate aim of human desire is to unite with the world in pleasure; and, as in Freud, this is the ultimate aim of an energy (Desire) which is in essence narcissistic. For Spinoza the energy of the individual is essentially directed at self-maintenance, self-activity, self-perfection (conatus in duo ease perseverance), which is also self-enjoyment (laetitia). Thus for Spinoza, as for Freud, the self-perfection (narcissism) of the human individual is fulfilled in union with the world in pleasure.
Hence the expansion of the self, in which human perfection consists, is at the same time the expansion of the active life of the human body, unifying our body with other bodies in the world in active interaction: "That which so disposes the human body that it can be affected in many ways, is profitable to man, and is more profitable in proportion as by its means the body becomes better fitted to be affected in many ways and to affect other bodies," Spinoza sees the inadequacy of the human body as currently structured to sustain the project of human Eros: "In this life, therefore, it is our chief endeavor to change the body of infancy, so far as its nature permits and is conducive thereto, into another body which is fitted for many things." What Spinoza cannot see, without becoming Freud, is that the endeavor to acquire "a body which is fitted for many things" is the endeavor to recover the body of infancy. Spinoza's "body fitted for many things" is structurally identical with the polymorphously perverse body of infantile sexuality in Freud, the body delighting in the activity of all of its organs. But Spinoza recognizes the "body fitted for many things" as the bodily counterpart of the intellectual love of God: "He who possesses a body fitted for doing many things, possesses the power of causing all the modifications of the body to be related to the idea of God, in consequence of which he is affected with a love of God which must occupy or form the greatest part of his mind, and therefore he possesses a mind of which the greatest part is eternal." Spinoza's intellectual love of God is identical with Freud's polymorphous perversity of children." [Norman Brown, Life against Death]
"oh great and silent earth, keeper of stories, mosser of bones can you tell me what became of the cedars of lebanon, the vast emerald forests that held all of europe with children laughing at their feet?
oh great and silent earth i plead for witness to the ancient pain: what bolt of lightning split my ancestors from their good sense, drove them to fear the seasons and guard against them, anxiously, by leaning on the seed?
what gave their hearts such a shaking that their roots divorced the wild glades and sought instead to tame?
oh dark and secret earth please! let me into the mystery - please: tell me, so i may tell the others, how we got so lost in our very own land, how we forsook the hunt and took up the slaughter-block, how we came to be herders and horsemen, the tangled berries giving way to shocking wheat,
how we labored, to bear famine; who we sacrificed, to beg rain; why we drove rickets into the bones of our children and tore the land out from under a wilderness who cradled our grandmothers' graves?
what put trembling in our prayers? hunger on our tables? a song of doubt on our tongues?
oh careworn broken earth i am sorry that we have torn at your flesh for an answer, blindly, fruitlessly, with canary and shovel, with axe and torch,
forced ourselves into forbidden valleys, between foreign ribs and intimate knees, in our search for it,
torn our own skin off, burned ourselves at the stake, thrown our children into the hungry sea, our men to smoking fields our women to pace raw in quiet chains
i am sorry that we have gone to every last island with our affliction and in our desperate mission to transcend it have passed it on
oh earth of every elemental power tell me why did you let your beauty be driven into the cracks of even one lonely mountainside? why did you give up your green dress to the blades and the burning villages, let the rocky sutures of your bones be opened and smashed, your rivers bloodied, then muddied, then damned?
oh earth! in your body i feel the ripples of a great shouting and is it the cry of death, i don't know is it the muddy throes, the last ragged breaths, the deepest possible pain, your spirit unearthing to depart on the poison winds i don't know
To the Anarcho-Primitivists, Language, Art, Metaphorical activity, and therefore Culture is a Retardation of man from nature, a Regression of his cognitive capacity. Any coding from which a culture manages to emerge, evolve, preserve itself is already oppression, tyranny. Freedom is unspoken understanding.
While one can symphathize, and I do, with the abstraction and ensuing nihilism that occurs from semantic objectification, to call language and art evil, is to remain a slave to nature. Language is a tool, it serves us, and not we it.
The difference in thinking is offered in a contrast on the metaphorical activity between N. and Zerzan:
Nietzsche wrote:
"The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. "If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king," said Pascal, "I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman." In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people—the ancient Greeks, for instance—more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses—and this is what the honest Athenian believed—then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.
But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving path which carries man where he would otherwise walk." The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence.
That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art's mastery over life can be established. All the manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption—in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes!" [On Truth and Lie]
Zerzan wrote:
"History, according to Peterson and Goodall (1993), is marked by an amnesia about where we came from. Their stimulating Visions of Caliban also pointed out that our great forgetting may well have begun with language, the originating device of the symbolic world. Compara- tive linguist Mary LeCron Foster (1978, 1980) believes that language is perhaps less than 50,000 years old and arose with the first impulses toward art, ritual and social differentiation. Verbal symbolizing is the principal means of establishing, defining, and maintaining the cultural world and of structuring our very thinking.
As Hegel said somewhere, to question language is to question being. It is very important, however, to resist such overstatements and see the distinction, for one thing, between the cultural importance of language and its inherent limitations. To hold that we and the world are but linguistic creations is just another way of saying how pervasive and controlling is symbolic culture. But Hegel's claim goes much too far, and George Herbert Mead's assertion (1934) that to have a mind one must have a language is similarly hyperbolic and false.
Language transforms meaning and communication but is not syn- onymous with them. Thought, as Vendler (1967) understood, is essen- tially independent of language.
The claim that language greatly facilitates thought is likewise questionable, inasmuch as formal experiments with children and adults have not demonstrated it (G. Cohen 1977). Lan- guage is clearly not a necessary condition for thinking (see Kertesz 1988, Jansons 1988).
Verbal communication is part of the movement away from a face- to-face social reality, making feasible physical separateness. The word always stands between people who wish to connect with each other, facilitating the diminution of what need not be spoken to be said. That we have declined from a non-linguistic state begins to appear a sane point of view. This intuition may lie behind George W Morgan's 1968 judgment that "Nothing, indeed, is more subject to depreciation and suspicion in our disenchanted world than the word."
Communication outside civilization involved all the senses, a con- dition linked to the key gatherer-hunter traits of openness and sharing. Literacy ushered us into the society of divided and reduced senses, and we take this sensory deprivation for granted as if it were a natural state, just as we take literacy for granted.
Culture and technology exist because of language. Many have seen speech, in turn, as a means of coordinating labor, that is, as an essential part of the technique of production. Language is critical for the formation of the rules of work and exchange accompanying division of labor, with the specializations and standardizations of nascent economy paralleling those of language. Now guided by symbolization, a new kind of thinking takes over, which realizes itself in culture and technology. The interdependence of language and technology is at least as obvious as that of language and culture, and results in an accelerating mastery over the natural world intrinsically similar to the control introduced over the once autonomous and sensuous individual.
Noam Chomsky, chief language theorist, commits a grave and reactionary error by portraying language as a "natural" aspect of "essen- tial human nature," innate and independent of culture (1966, 1992). His Cartesian perspective sees the mind as an abstract machine which is simply destined to turn out strings of symbols and manipulate them. Concepts like origins or alienation have no place in this barren techno- schema. Lieberman (1975) provides a concise and fundamental correc- tion: "Human language could have evolved only in relation to the total human condition."
Language is the reification of communication, a paradigmatic move that establishes every other mental separation. The philosopher W.V. Quine's variation on this is that reification arrives with the pronoun."
"In the beginning was the Word . . . " the beginning of all this, which is killing us by limiting existence to many things. Corollary of symbolization, reification is a sclerosis that chokes off what is living, open, natural. In place of being stands the symbol. If it is impossible for us to coincide with our being, Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, then the symbolic is the measure of that non-coincidence. Reification seals the deal, and language is its universal currency.
An exhausted symbolic mediation with less and less to say prevails in a world where that mediation is now seen as the central, even defin- ing fact of life. In an existence without vibrancy or meaning, nothing is left but language. The relation of language to reality has dominated 20th century philosophy.
Language has been fundamental to our obligation to objectify ourselves, in a milieu that is increasingly not our own. Thus it is absurd for Heidegger to say that the truth about language is that it refuses to be objectified. The reificational act of language impoverishes existence by creating a universe of meaning sufficient unto itself. The ultimate "sufficient unto itself" is the concept "God," and its ultimate description is, revealingly, "I am Who I am" (Exodus 4:14). We have come to regard the separate, self-enclosed nature of objectification as the highest quality, evidently, rather than as the debasement of the "merely" contingent, relational, connected.
It has been recognized for some time that thought is not language- dependent and that language limits the possibilities of thought." Gottlob Frege wondered if to think in a non-reified way is possible, how it could be possible to explain how thinking can ever be reified. The answer was not to be found in his chosen field of formal logic.
Classic psychoanalytic theory ignored language, but Melanie Klein discussed symbolization as a precipitant of anxiety. To translate Klein's insight into cultural terms, anxiety about erosion of a non-objectified life-world provokes lan- guage. We experience "the urge to thrust against language,"" when we feel that we have given up our voices, and are left only with language. The enormity of this loss is suggested in C.S. Peirce's definition of the self as mainly a consistency of symbolization; "my language," conversely, "is the sum total of my self," he concluded." Given this kind of reduction, is not difficult to agree with Lacan that induction into the symbolic world generates a persistent yearning that arises from one's absence from the real world. "The speechform is a mere surrogate," wrote Joyce in Finnegan's Wake.
Language refutes every appeal to immediacy by dishonoring the unique and immobilizing the mobile. Its elements are independent entities from the consciousness that utters them, which in turn weigh down that consciousness. According to Quine, this reification plays a part in creating a "structured system of the world," by closing up the "loose ends of raw experience."" Quine does not recognize the limit- ing aspects of this project. In his incomplete final work, the phenome- nologist Merleau-Ponty began to explore how language diminishes an original richness, how it actually works against perception. The Murngin of northern Australia saw name-giving as a kind of death, the loss of an original wholeness." A pivotal moment of reification occurred when we succumbed to names and became inscribed in letters. It is perhaps when we most need to express ourselves, fully and completely, that language most clearly reveals its reductive and inarticulate nature.
Language itself corrupts, as Rousseau claimed in his famous dream of a community stripped of it."
The shift from objects to objectification, from reality to constructions of reality, is also the shift to domination and mystification. Objectification is the take-off point for culture, in that it is makes domestication possible. It reaches its full potential with the onset of division of labor; the exchange principle itself moves on the level of objectification. Similarly, none of the institutions of divided society are powerful or determinative without a reified element. The philosopher Croce considered it sheer rhetoric to speak of a beautiful river or flower; to him, nature was stupid compared to art. This elevation of the cultural is possible only through objectification. The works of Kafka, on the other hand, portray the outcome of objec- tifying cultural logic, with their striking illustration of a reified land- scape that crushes the subject. The question of the origin of reification is a compelling one that has rarely been pursued deeply enough. A common error has been to confuse intelligence with culture; namely, the absence of culture is seen as equivalent to the absence of intelligence. This confusion is further compounded when reification is seen as inherent to the nature of mental functioning. From Thomas Wynn" and others we now know that pre-historic humans were our equals in intelligence. If culture is impossible without objectification, it does not follow that either is inevitable, or desirable.
As suspicious as Adorno was of the idea of origins, he conceded that human conduct originally involved no objectification. Husserl was similarly able to refer to the primordial oneness of all consciousness prior to its dissociation." [Running on Emptiness]
