Twilight Of The Machines Part 1

Twilight of the Machines.

John Zerzan.

Preface.

Specialization, domestication, civilization, ma.s.s society, modernity, technoculture... behold Progress, its fruition presented more and more unmistakably. The imperative of control unfolds starkly, pus.h.i.+ng us to ask questions equal to the mounting threat around us and within us. These dire times may yet reveal invigorating new vistas of thought and action. When everything is at stake, all must be confronted and superseded. At this moment, there is the distinct possibility of doing just that.

People all over the world are showing that they are ready to engage in this dialogue. The challenge is to broach a new conversation in one's own society. The effort begins with a refusal to accept the givens that are turning on us so relentlessly, so viciously. The confrontation is with the increasingly pathological state of modern society: outbursts of ma.s.s homicide, an ever more drug-reliant populace, amid a collapsing physical environment. The initiative remains disconnected and marginalized, with enormous inertia and denial in its way. But reality is persistent, and it's calling forth a questioning that is as unprecedented as the darkening situation we face.

Clinging to politics is one way of avoiding the confrontation with the devouring logic of civilization, holding instead with the accepted a.s.sumptions and definitions. Leaving it all behind is the opposite: a truly qualitative change, a fundamental paradigm s.h.i.+ft. This change is not about: * seeking "alternative" energy sources to power all the projects and systems that should never have been started up in the first place; * being vaguely "post-Left", the disguise that some adopt while changing none of their (leftist) orientations; * espousing an "anti-globalization" orientation that's anything but, given activists' near-universal embrace of the totalizing industrial world system; * preserving the technological order, while ignoring the degradation of millions and the systematic destruction of the earth that undergird the existence of every part of the technoculture; * claiming-as anarchists-to oppose the state, while ignoring the fact that this hypercomplex global setup couldn't function for a day without many levels of government.

The way is open for radical change. If complex society is itself the issue, if cla.s.s society began with division of labor in the Neolithic, and if the Brave New World now moving forward was born with the s.h.i.+ft to domesticated life, then all we've taken for granted is implicated. We are seeing more deeply, and the explorations must extend to include everyone. A daunting, but exciting opportunity!

Twilight of the Machines is offered in this spirit. Part i deals with remote origins and developments within early civilization. Part 2 has a more contemporary focus. May a.s.sumptions be questioned, and may conversations proliferate!

-John Zerzan.

Too Marvelous for Words.

(LANGUAGE BRIEFLY REVISITED).

A few years ago the now-deceased philosopher of science and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was invited to sign a pet.i.tion being circulated by well-known European thinkers. Its thrust was that society is in need of input from philosophers, who draw upon the "intellectual treasures" of the past. In these dark times, the pet.i.tion concluded, "We need philosophy."

Derrida, Ricoeur and the other liberal concocters of the doc.u.ment were no doubt shocked by Feyerabend's negative reaction. He pointed out that philosophy's "treasures" were not meant as additions to ways of living, but were intended to express their replacement. "Philosophers," he explained, "have destroyed what they have found, much in the way that the [other] standard-bearers of Western civilization have destroyed indigenous cultures... "' Feyerabend wondered how civilized rationality-which has reduced a natural abundance of life and freedom and thereby devalued human existence-became so dominant. Perhaps its chief weapon is symbolic thought, with its ascendancy in the form of language. Maybe the wrong turn we took as a species can be located at that milestone in our evolution.

"Writing... can be seen to cause a new reality to come into being," according to Terence Hawkes, who adds that language "allows no single, unitary appeals to a 'reality' beyond itself. In the end, it const.i.tutes its own reality."' An infinitely diverse reality is captured by finite language; it subordinates all of nature to its formal system. As Michael Baxandall put it, "Any language... is a conspiracy against experience in the sense of being a collective attempt to simplify and arrange experience into manageable parcels."'

At the beginning of domination and repression, the start of the long process of depleting the riches of the living world, is a very illadvised separation from the flow of life. What was once freely given is now controlled, rationed, distributed. Feyerabend refers to the effort, especially by specialists, to "reduce the abundance that surrounds and confuses them. "4 The essence of language is the symbol. Always a subst.i.tution. Always a paler re-presentation of what is at hand, what presents itself directly to us. Susanne Langer pondered the mysterious nature of symbols: "If the word 'plenty' were replaced by a succulent, real, ripe peach, few people could attend to the mere content of the word. The more barren and indifferent the symbol, the greater its semantic power. Peaches are too good to act as words; we're too much interested in peaches themselves." 5 For the Murngin people of northern Australia, name giving and all other such linguistic externalizations are treated as a kind of death, the loss of an original wholeness. This is very much to the point of what language itself accomplishes. In slightly more general terms, Ernest Jones proposed that "only what is repressed is symbolized; only what is repressed needs to be symbolized."'

Any symbolic mode is only one way of seeing and connecting. By reversing our steps, in light of what has been progressively de-realized or lost, it appears likely that before the symbolic dimension took over, relations between people were more subtle, unmediated, and sensual. But this is a forbidden notion. Commonplace statements like: "Verbal language was perhaps the greatest technical invention [!1 of human life" and "Language enables human beings to communicate and share with each other" deny, incredibly, that communication, sharing, society didn't exist before the symbolic, which was such a relative late-comer on the evolutionary scale. (It appeared an estimated 35,000 years ago, following nearly two million years of successful human adaptations to life on earth.) Such formulations express perfectly the hubris, imperialism and ignorance of symbolic thought.

We don't know when speech originated; but soon after domestication gained the upper hand over foraging or gatherer-hunter life, writing appeared. By about 4500 B.C. engraved clay tokens, records of agricultural transactions and inventories, became widespread in the Middle East. Five thousand years later, the Greek perfection of the alphabet completed the transition to modern writing systems.

The singular excellence of modern humanshas of course become a basic tenet of civilization's ideology. It extends, for example, to Sapir's definition of personality as a systematic psychological organization depending on constellations of symbols 7 The symbolic medium of language is now widely felt as an all-defining imprisonment, rather than a liberatory triumph. A great deal of philosophical a.n.a.lysis in the past century revolves around this realization, though we can hardly imagine breaking free of it or even clearly recognizing its pervasive presence and influence. This is a measure of the depth of the impoveris.h.i.+ng logic that Feyerabend sought to understand.Certainly it is no small endeavor to try to imagine what human cognition may have been like, before language and symbolic thought took possession of so much of our consciousness.

It is grammar that establishes language as a system, reminding us that the symbolic must become systemic in order to seize and hold power. This is how the perceived world becomes structured, its abundance processed and reduced. The grammar of every language is a theory of experience, and more than that, it's an ideology. It sets rules and limits, and grinds the one-prescription-fits-all lenses through which we see everything. A language is defined by grammatical rules (not of the speaker's choosing); the human mind is now commonly seen as a grammar- or syntax-driven machine. As early as the i7oos, human nature was described as "a tissue of language,"' a further measure of the hegemony of language as the determining ground of consciousness.

Language, and symbolism in general, are always subst.i.tutive, implying meanings that cannot be derived directly from experiential contexts. Here is the long-ago source of today's generalized crisis of meaning. Language initiates and reproduces a distinction or separation that leads to ever-increasing place-lessness. Resistance to this impoveris.h.i.+ng movement must lead to the problematization of language. Foucault noted that speech is not merely "a verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but... the very object of man's conflicts." He didn't develop this point, which is valid and deserves our attention and study. The roots of today's globalizing spiritual crisis lie in a movement away from immediacy; this is the hallmark of the symbolic.

Civilization has made repeated, futile efforts to overcome the insta- bilityand erosion of substance caused by the rule of the symbolic. Among the most well-known was Descartes' attempt to give "grounding" to science and modernity in the 17th century. His famous mind-body duality provides a philosophical method (based on suppression of the body, of course) that we have suffered from ever since. He claimed certainty for the system by means of the language of number, as expressed in his a.n.a.lytic geometry. But the dream of certainty has been consistently revealed as a further repressive subst.i.tute: an illusory foundation on which domination has extended itself in every direction.

Language is conformist in the profoundest sense; even objective reality yields to its pressure. The so-called factual is brought to dissolution, because it is shaped and constrained by the limits of language. Under its reductive force, we forget that we don't need symbols to be present to meaning. The reality of pre-linguistic social practices is screened from us by more than the practical, empirical limitations of access to time past. Primal existence has been ruled irrelevant, and indigenous lifeways are everywhere under siege, because of civilization's pervasive over-valuation of the symbolic.

Yet an exploration of social life in the early symbolic epoch need not be overly speculative, and may reveal important connections. We know from archaeological and ethnographic evidence that early on in divided society, inequality was often based on ritual knowledge: who possessed it, who did not. The symbolic must have already been very much present and determinant; or why wouldn't inequality be based on, say, knowledge of plants?

It could well be that language emerged from ritual, which among other attributes, is a subst.i.tutive form of emotion. The dissociated, symbolic process of ritual activity parallels that of language and may have first generated it: emotionally displaced expression, abstracted cries; language as ritualized expression.

From early on, ritual has mystified power relations.h.i.+ps. Deacon has argued that language became necessary to enable the contracts on which society depends.' However, it is more than likely that social life long predated language. Contracts based on language may have appeared to meet some challenge in society, such as the beginnings of disequilibrium or inequality.

At a later stage, religion was a further (and even less successful) response to problems and tensions in human communities. Language was central there, too. Word magic runs through the history of religions; veneration of names and naming is common (the history of religious life in Ancient Egypt is a well-doc.u.mented example)."

Problems introduced by complexity or hierarchy have never been resolved by symbolic means. What is overcome symbolically remains intact on the non-symbolic (real) plane. Symbolic means sidestep reality; they are part of what is going wrong. Division of labor, for instance, eroded face-to-face interaction and eroded people's direct, intimate relations.h.i.+p with the natural world. The symbolic is complicit; it generates more and more mediations to accompany those created by social practices. Life becomes fragmented; connections to nature are obscured and dissolved. Instead of repairing the rupture, symbolic thought turns people in the wrong direction: toward abstraction. The "thirst for transcendence" is initiated, ignoring the s.h.i.+fting reality that created that desire in the first place. Language plays a key role here, re-ordering and subordinating natural systems that humankind was once attuned to. Symbolic culture demands that we reject our "animal nature" in favor of a symbolically defined "human nature".

Now we live our everyday lives in a world system that is ever more symbolic and disembodied. Even economies are decisively symbolic; and we are told that the social bond (what's left of it) is essentially linguistic. Language was an intrusion that brought on a series of transformations resulting in our loss of the world. Once, as Freud put it, "the whole world was animate,"" known by all in a full, engaged way. Later the totem animal was replaced by a G.o.d, a signpost of the advancing symbolic. (I am reminded that indigenous elders who are asked to make audio or video recordings often decline, insisting that what they say must be communicated in person, face to face.) Language was a powerful instrument for technological and social disenchantment. Like every symbolic device, it was itself an invention. But it does not establish or generate meaning, which antedates language. Rather, it confines and distorts meaning, via the rules of symbolic representation-the architecture of the logic of control. Domestication also partakes of this underlying orientation, which has served domination in keyways. Language has a standardizing quality; this develops in tandem with the technological development it facilitates. The printing press, for example, suppressed dialects and other language variants, creating unified standards for exchange and communication. Literacy has always served economic development, and aimed to bolster the cohesion so necessary for the nation-state and nationalism.

Language is a productive force; like technology, it is not amenable to social control. In the postmodern era, both language and technology rule, but each shows signs of exhaustion. Today's symbolic reflects nothing much more than the habit of power behind it. Human connectedness and corporeal immediacy have been traded away for a fading sense of reality. The poverty and manipulation of ma.s.s communication is the postmodern version of culture. Here is the voice of industrial modernity as it goes cyber/digital/ virtual, mirroring its domesticated core, a facet of ma.s.s production.

Language does not bestow presence; rather, it banishes presence and its transparency. We are "condemned to words," said Marlene Nourbese Philip. She provides a wonderful metaphor of origins: G.o.d first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures man, woman, beast, insect, bird and fish lived happily together with this silence, until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased G.o.d deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. G.o.d cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence."

Dan Sperber wrote of an "epidemiology of representations"; his pathology metaphor is apt. He questioned why the symbolic spreads like an epidemic, why we are susceptible to it,14 but left these questions unanswered."

In the Age of Communication our h.o.m.ogenized symbolic "materials" prove so inadequate. Our isolation grows; what we have to communicate shrinks. How is it that the world and consciousness have come to be seem as mainly comprised of, and enclosed by, language? Does time structure language or does language structure time? So many questions, including the key one; how do we transcend, escape, get rid of the symbolic?

We may not yet know much about the how, but at least we know something of the why. In language, number, art, and the rest, a subst.i.tution essence has been the symbolic's bad bargain. This compensation fails to compensate for what is surrendered. Symbolic transactions deliver an arid, anti-spiritual dimension, emptier and colder with each re-enactment. This is nothing new; it's just more sadly oppressive and obvious, more corrosive of actual connectedness, particularity, nonprogrammed life. This strangling, unhappy state saps our vitality and will destroy us if we don't end it.

Representation is unfaithful even to itself. Geert Lovink concluded that "there is no 'natural' image anymore. All information has gone through the process of digitization. We just have to deal with the fact that we can no longer believe our eyes, our ears. Everyone who has worked with a computer will know this .11,6 Discounted, atrophying senses to go along with the distancing and decontextualization.

George Steiner has announced a "core tiredness" as the climate of spirit today. The weight of language and the symbolic has brought this fatigue; the "shadows lengthen" and there is "valediction in the air."'' A farewell is indeed appropriate. Growing illiteracy, cheapened channels of the symbolic (e.g. email)... a tattered dimension. The Tower of Babel, now built into cybers.p.a.ce, has never been taller-but quite possibly never so weakly supported. Easier to bring down?

Patriarchy, Civilization and the

Origins of Gender.

Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy means rule over women and nature. Are the two inst.i.tutions at base synonymous?

Philosophy has mainly ignored the vast realm of suffering that has unfolded since it began, in division of labor, its long course. Helene Cixous calls the history of philosophy a "chain of fathers." Women are as absent from it as suffering, and are certainly the closest of kin.

Camille Paglia, anti-feminist literary theorist, meditates thusly on civilization and women: When I see a giant crane pa.s.sing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of conception: what grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt, where monumental architecture was first imagined and achieved. If civilization has been left in female hands, we would still be living in gra.s.s huts.'

The "glories" of civilization and women's disinterest in them. To some of us the "gra.s.s huts" represent not taking the wrong path, that of oppression and destructiveness. In light of the globally metastasizing death drive of technological civilization, if only we still lived in gra.s.s huts!

Women and nature are universally devalued by the dominant paradigm and who cannot see what this has wrought? Ursula Le Guin gives us a healthy corrective to Paglia's dismissal of both: Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is other outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

There are certainly many who believe that early civilizations existed that were matriarchal. But no anthropologists or archaeologists, feminists included, have found evidence of such societies. "The search for a genuinely egalitarian, let along matriarchal, culture has proved fruitless," concludes Sherry Ortner.3 There was, however, a long span of time when women were generally less subject to men, before male-defined culture became fixed or universal. Since the 197os anthropologists such as Adrienne Zihlman, Nancy Tanner and Frances Dahlberg4 have corrected the earlier focus or stereotype of prehistoric "Man the Hunter" to that of "Woman the Gatherer." Key here is the datum that as a general average, pre-agricultural band societies received about 8o percent of their sustenance from gathering and 20 percent from hunting. It is possible to overstate the hunting/gathering distinction and to over-look those groups in which, to significant degrees, women have hunted and men have gathered.' But women's autonomy in foraging societies is rooted in the fact that material resources for subsistence are equally available to women and men in their respective spheres of activity.

In the context of the generally egalitarian ethos of huntergatherer or foraging societies, anthropologists like Eleanor Leac.o.c.k, Patricia Draper and Mina Caulfield have described a generally equal relations.h.i.+p between men and women.6 In such settings where the person who procures something also distributes it and where women procure about 8o percent of the sustenance, it is largely women who determine band society movements and camp locations. Similarly, evidence indicates that both women and men made the stone tools used by pre-agricultural peoples. 7 With the matrilocal Pueblo, Iroquois, Crow, and other American Indian groups, women could terminate a marital relations.h.i.+p at any time. Overall, males and females in band society move freely and peacefully from one band to another as well as into or out of relations.h.i.+ps.' According to Rosalind Miles, the men not only do not command or exploit women's labor, "they exert little or no control over women's bodies or those of their children, making no fetish of virginity or chast.i.ty, and making no demands of women's s.e.xual exclusivity."9 Zubeeda Banu Quraishy provides an African example: "Mbuti gender a.s.sociations were characterized by harmony and cooperation."'

And yet, one wonders, was the situation really ever quite this rosy? Given an apparently universal devaluation of women, which varies in its forms but not in its essence, the question of when and how it was basically otherwise persists. There is a fundamental division of social existence according to gender, and an obvious hierarchy to this divide. For philosopher Jane Flax, the most deep-seated dualisms, even including those of subject-object and mind-body, are a reflection of gender disunity."

Gender is not the same as the natural/physiological distinction between the s.e.xes. It is a cultural categorization and ranking grounded in a s.e.xual division of labor that may be the single cultural form of greatest significance. If gender introduces and legitimates inequality and domination, what could be more important to put into question? So in terms of origins-and in terms of our future-the question of human society without gender presents itself.

We know that division of labor led to domestication and civilization, and drives the globalized system of domination today. It also appears that artificially imposed s.e.xual division of labor was its earliest form and was also, in effect, the formation of gender.

Sharing food has long been recognized as a hallmark of the foraging life-way. Sharing the responsibility for the care of offspring, too, which can still be seen among the few remaining hunter gatherer societies, in contrast to privatized, isolated family life in civilization. What we think of as the family is not an eternal inst.i.tution, any more than exclusively female mothering was inevitable in human evolution.'

Society is integrated via the division of labor and the family is integrated via the s.e.xual division of labor. The need for integration bespeaks a tension, a split that calls for a basis for cohesion or solidarity. In this sense Testart is right: "Inherent in kins.h.i.+p is hierarchy."" And with their basis in division of labor, the relations of kins.h.i.+p become relations of production. "Gender is inherent in the very nature of kins.h.i.+p," as Cucchiari points out, "which could not exist without it." It is in this area that the root of the domination of nature as well as of women may be explored.

As combined group foraging in band societies gave way to specialized roles, kins.h.i.+p structures formed the infrastructure of relations.h.i.+ps that developed in the direction of inequality and power differentials. Women typically became immobilized by a privatizing child care role; this pattern deepened later on, beyond the supposed requirements of that gender role. This gender-based separation and division of labor began to occur around the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic eras. 15 Gender and the kins.h.i.+p system are cultural constructs set over and against the biological subjects involved, "above all a symbolic organization of behavior," according to Juliet Mitch.e.l.l.' It may be more telling to look at symbolic culture itself as required by gendered society, by "the need to mediate symbolically a severely dichotomized cosmos."'' The which-came-first question introduces itself, and is difficult to resolve. It is clear, however, that there is no evidence of symbolic activity (e.g. cave paintings) until the gender system, based on s.e.xual division of labor, was apparently under way. i8 By the Upper Paleolithic, that epoch immediately prior to the Neolithic Revolution of domestication and civilization, the gender revolution had won the day. Masculine and feminine signs are present in the first cave art, about 35,000 years ago. Gender consciousness arises as an all-encompa.s.sing ensemble of dualities, a specter of divided society. In the new polarization activity becomes gender-related, gender-defined. The role of hunter, for example, develops into a.s.sociation with males, its requirements attributed to the male gender as desired traits.

That which had been far more unitary or generalized, such as group foraging or communal responsibility for child tending, had now become the separated spheres in which s.e.xual jealousy and possessiveness appear. At the same time, the symbolic emerges as a separate sphere or reality. This is revealing in terms of the content of art, as well as ritual and its practice. It is hazardous to extrapolate from the present to the remote past, yet surviving non-industrialized cultures may shed some light. The Bimin-Kushusmin of Papua New Guinea, for example, experience the masculine-feminine split as fundamental and defining. The masculine "essence," called finiik, not only signifies powerful, warlike qualities but also those of ritual and control. The feminine "essence," or hhaaphhabuurien, is wild, impulsive, sensuous, and ignorant of ritual." Similarly, the Mansi of northwestern Siberia place severe restrictions on women's involvement in their ritual practices.' With band societies, it is no exaggeration to say that the presence or absence of ritual is crucial to the question of the subordination of women. Gayle Rubin concludes that the "world-historical defeat of women occurred with the origins of culture and is a prerequisite of culture.""

The simultaneous rise of symbolic culture and gendered life is not a coincidence. Each of them involves a basic s.h.i.+ft from non-separated, non-hierarchized life. The logic of their development and extension is a response to tensions and inequalities that they incarnate; both are dialectically interconnected to earliest, artificial division of labor.

On the heels, relatively speaking, of the gender/symbolic alteration came another Great Leap Forward, into agriculture and civilization. This is the definitive "rising above nature," overriding the previous two million years of non-dominating intelligence and intimacywith nature. This change was decisive as a consolidation and intensification of the division of labor. Meillasoux reminds us of its beginnings: Nothing in nature explains the s.e.xual division of labor, nor such inst.i.tutions as marriage, conjugality or paternal filiation. All are imposed on women by constraint, all are therefore facts of civilization which must be explained, not used as explanations. z, Kelkar and Nathan, for example, did not find very much gender specialization among hunter-gatherers in western India, compared to agriculturalists there. 14 The transition from foraging to food production brought similar radical changes in societies everywhere. It is instructive, to cite another example closer to the present, that the Muskogee people of the American Southeast upheld the intrinsic value of the untamed, undomesticated forest; colonial civilizers attacked this stance by trying to replace Muskogee matrilineal tradition with patrilineal relations. "

The locus of the transformation of the wild to the cultural is the domicile, as women become progressively limited to its horizons. Domestication is grounded here (etymologically as well, from the Latin domus, or household): drudge work, less robusticity than with foraging, many more children, and a lower life expectancy than males are among the features of agricultural existence for women. z6 Here another dichotomyappears,thedistinction betweenworkand non-work, which for so many, many generations did not exist. From the gendered production site and its constant extension come further foundations of our culture and mentality.

Confined, if not fully pacified, women are defined as pa.s.sive. Like nature, of value as something to be made to produce; awaiting fertilization, activation from outside herself/ itself. Women experience the move from autonomy and relative equality in small, mobile anarchic groups to controlled status in large, complex governed settlements.

Mythology and religion, compensations of divided society, testify to the reduced position of women. In Homer's Greece, fallow land (not domesticated by grain culture) was considered feminine, the abode of Calypso, of Circe, of the Sirens who tempted Odysseus to abandon civilization's labors. Both land and women are again subjects of domination. But this imperialism betrays traces of guilty conscience, as in the punishments for those a.s.sociated with domestication and technology, in the tales of Prometheus and Sisyphus. The project of agriculture was felt, in some areas more than others, as a violation; hence, the incidence of rape in the stories of Demeter. Over time as the losses mount, the great mother-daughter relations.h.i.+ps of Greek myth-Demeter-Kore, Clytemnestra-Iphigenia, Jocasta-Antigone, for example-disappear.

In Genesis, the Bible's first book, woman is born from the body of man. The Fall from Eden represents the demise of hunter-gatherer life, the expulsion into agriculture and hard labor. It is blamed on Eve, of course, who bears the stigma of the Fall. 1' Quite an irony, in that domestication is the fear and refusal of nature and woman, while the Garden myth blames the chief victim of its scenario, in reality.

Agriculture is a conquest that fulfills what began with gender formation and development. Despite the presence of G.o.ddess figures, wedded to the touchstone of fertility, in general Neolithic culture is very concerned with virility. From the emotional dimensions of this masculinism, as Cauvin sees it, animal domestication must have been princ.i.p.ally a male initiative. z8 The distancing and power emphasis have been with us ever since; frontier expansion, for instance, as male energy subduing female nature, one frontier after another.

This trajectory has reached overwhelming proportions, and we are told on all sides that we cannot avoid our engagement with ubiquitous technology. But patriarchy too is everywhere, and once again the inferiority of nature is presumed. Fortunately "many feminists," says Carol Stabile, hold that "a rejection of technology is fundamentally identical to a rejection of patriarchy." z9 There are other feminists who claim a part of the technological enterprise, which posits a virtual, cyborg "escape from the body" and its gendered history of subjugation. But this flight is illusory, a forgetting of the whole train and logic of oppressive inst.i.tutions that make up patriarchy. The dis-embodied high-tech future can only be more of the same destructive course.

Freud considered taking one's place as a gendered subject to be foundational, both culturally and psychologically. But his theories a.s.sume an already present gendered subjectivity, and thus beg many questions. Various considerations remain unaddressed, such as gender as an expression of power relations, and the fact that we enter this world as bis.e.xual creatures.

Carla Freeman poses a pertinent question with her essay t.i.tled, "Is Local: Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Glo- balization".3 The general crisis of modernity has its roots in the imposition of gender. Separation and inequality begin here at the period when symbolic culture itself emerges, soon becoming definitive as domestication and civilization: patriarchy. The hierarchy of gender can no more be reformed than the cla.s.s system or globalization. Without a deeply radical women's liberation we are consigned to the deadly swindle and mutilation now dealing out a fearful toll everywhere. The wholeness of original genderlessness may be a prescription for our redemption.

On the Origins of War.

War is a staple of civilization. Its ma.s.s, rationalized, chronic presence has increased as civilization has spread and deepened. Among the specific reasons it doesn't go away is the desire to escape the horror of ma.s.s-industrial life. Ma.s.s society of course finds its reflection in ma.s.s soldiery and it has been this way from early civilization. In the age of hyper-developing technology, war is fed by new heights of dissociation and disembodiment. We are ever further from a grounding or leverage from which to oppose it (while too many accept paltry, symbolic "protest" gestures).

How did it come to be that war is "the proper work of man," in the words of Homer's Odysseus? We know that organized warfare advanced with early industry and complex social organization in general, but the question of origins predates even Homer's early iron Age. The explicit archaeological/anthropological literature on the subject is surprisingly slight.

Civilization has always had a basic interest in holding its subjects captive by touting the necessity of official armed force. It is a prime ideological claim that without the state's monopoly on violence, we would be unprotected and insecure. After all, according to Hobbes, the human condition has been and will always be that of "a war of all against all." Modern voices, too, have argued that humans are innately aggressive and violent, and so need to be constrained by armed authority. Raymond Dart (e.g.Adventures with the Missing Link, 1959), Robert Ardrey (e.g.African Genesis, 1961), and Konrad Lorenz (e.g. On Aggression, 19 6 6) are among the best known, but the evidence they put forth has been very largely discredited.

In the second half of the zoth century, this pessimistic view of human nature began to s.h.i.+ft. Based on archaeological evidence, it is now a tenet of mainstream scholars.h.i.+p that pre-civilization humans lived in the absence of violence-more specifically, of organized violence. Eibl-Eibesfeldt referred to the !Ko-Bushmen as not bellicose: "Their cultural ideal is peaceful coexistence, and they achieve this by avoiding conflict, that is by splitting up, and by emphasizing and encouraging the numerous patterns of bonding."' An earlier judgment by W.J. Perry is generally accurate, if somewhat idealized: "Warfare, immorality, vice, polygyny, slavery, and the subjection of women seem to be absent among our gatherer-hunter ancestors."'

The current literature consistently reports that until the final stages of the Paleolithic Age-until just prior to the present io,ooo-year era of domestication-there is no conclusive evidence that any tools or hunting weapons were used against humans at all.' "Depictions of battle scenes, skirmishes and hand-to-hand combat are rare in huntergatherer art and when they do occur most often result from contact with agriculturalists or industrialized invaders," concludes Tacon and Chippindale's study of Australian rock art.4 When conflict began to emerge, encounters rarely lasted more than half an hour, and if a death occurred both parties would retire at once.'

The record of Native Americans in California is similar. Kroeber reported that their fighting was "notably bloodless. They even went so far as to take poorer arrows to war than they used in economic hunt- ing."6 Wintu people of Northern California called off hostilities once someone was injured. "Most Californians were absolutely nonmilitary; they possessed next to none of the traits requisite for the military horizon, a condition that would have taxed their all but nonexistent social organization too much. Their societies made no provision for collective political action," in the view of Turney-High.' Lorna Marshall described Kung! Bushmen as celebrating no valiant heroes or tales of battle. One of them remarked, "Fighting is very dangerous; someone might get killed."9 George Bird Grinnell's "Coup and Scalp Among the Plains Indians"' argues that counting coup (striking or touching an enemy with the hand or a small stick) was the highest point of (essentially nonviolent) bravery, whereas scalping was not valued.

The emergence of inst.i.tutionalized warfare appears to be a.s.sociated with domestication, and/or a drastic change in a society's physical situation. As Gla.s.sman puts it, this comes about "onlywhere band peoples have been drawn into the warfare of horticulturalists or herders, or driven into an ever-diminis.h.i.+ng territory."" The first reliable archaeological evidence of warfare is that of fortified, pre-Biblical Jericho, c. 7500 B.C. In the early Neolithic a relatively sudden s.h.i.+ft happened. What dynamic forces may have led people to adopt war as a social inst.i.tution? To date, this question has not been explored in any depth.

Symbolic culture appears to have emerged in the Upper Paleolithic; by the Neolithic it was firmly established in human cultures everywhere. The symbolic has a way of effacing particularity, reducing human presence in its specific, non-mediated aspects. It is easier to direct violence against a faceless enemy who represents some officially defined evil or threat. Ritual is the earliest known form of purposive symbolic activity: symbolism acting in the world. Archaeological evidence suggests that there may be a link between ritual and the emergence of organized warfare.

During the almost timeless era when humans were not interested in dominating their surroundings, certain places were special and came to be known as sacred sites. This was based on a spiritual and emotional kins.h.i.+p with the land, expressed in various forms of totemism or custodians.h.i.+p. Ritual begins to appear, but is not central to band or forager societies. Emma Blake observes, "Although the peoples of the Paleolithic practiced rituals, the richest material residues date from the Neolithic period onward, when sedentism and the domestication of plants and animals brought changes to the outlook and cosmology of people everywhere."" It was in the Upper Paleolithic that certain strains and tensions caused by the development of specialization first became evident. Inequities can be measured by such evidence as differing amounts of goods at hearth sites in encampments; in response, ritual appears to have begun to play a greater social role. As many have noted, ritual in this context is a way of addressing deficiencies of cohesion or solidarity; it is a means of guaranteeing a social order that has become problematic. As Bruce Knauft saw, "ritual reinforces and puts beyond argument or question certain highly general propositions about the spiritual and human world... [and] predisposes deep-seated cognitive acceptance and behavioral compliance with these cosmological propositions."" Ritual thus provides the original ideological glue for societies now in need of such legitimating a.s.sistance. Face-to-face solutions become ineffective as social solutions, when communities become complex and already partly stratified. The symbolic is a non-solution; in fact, it is a type of enforcer of relations.h.i.+ps and world-views characterized by inequality and estrangement.

Ritual is itself a type of power, an early, pre-state form of politics. Among the Maring people of Papua New Guinea, for instance, the conventions of the ritual cycle specify duties or roles in the absence of explicitly political authorities. Sanct.i.ty is therefore a functional alternative to politics; sacred conventions, in effect, govern society.14 Ritualization is clearly an early strategic arena for the incorporation of power relations. Further, warfare can be a sacred undertaking, with militarism promoted ritually, blessing emergent social hierarchy.

Rene Girard proposes that rituals of sacrifice are a necessary counter to endemic aggression and violence in society." Something nearer to the reverse is more the case: ritual legitimates and enacts violence. As Lienhardt said of the d.i.n.ka herders of Africa, to "make a feast or sacrifice often implies war." Ritual does not subst.i.tute for war, according to Arkush and Stanish: "warfare in all times and places has ritual elements."'' They see the dichotomy between "ritual battle" and "real war" to be false, summarizing that "archaeologists can expect destructive warfare and ritual to go hand in hand.""

It is not only that among Apache groups, for example, that the most ritualized were the most agricultural," but that so often ritual has mainly to do with agriculture and warfare, which are often very closely linked.' It is not uncommon to find warfare itself seen as a means of enhancing the fertility of cultivated ground. Ritual regulation of production and belligerence means that domestication has become the decisive factor. "The emergence of systematic warfare, fortifications, and weapons of destruction," says Ha.s.san, "follows the path of agriculture.""

Ritual evolves into religious systems, the G.o.ds come forth, sacrifice is demanded. "There is no doubt that all the inhabitants of the unseen world are greatly interested in human agriculture," notes anthropologist Verrier Elwin." Sacrifice is an excess of domestication, involving domesticated animals and occurring only in agricultural societies. Ritual killing, including human sacrifice, is unknown in nondomesticated cultures."

Corn in the Americas tells a parallel story. An abrupt increase in corn agriculture brought with it the rapid elaboration of hierarchy and militarization in large parts of both continents.14 One instance among many is the northward intrusion of the Hohokams against the indigenous Ootams" of southern Arizona, introducing agriculture and organized warfare. By about iooo A.D. the farming of maize had become dominant throughout the Southwest, complete with yearround ritual observances, priesthoods, social conformity, human sacrifice, and cannibalism." It is hardly an understatement to say, with Kroeber, that with maize agriculture, "all cultural values s.h.i.+fted ."17 Horses are another instance of the close connection between domestication and war. First domesticated in the Ukraine around 3000 B.C., their objectification fed militarism directly. Almost from the very beginning they served as machines; most importantly, as war machines."

The relatively harmless kinds of intergroup fighting described above gave way to systematic killing as domestication led to increasing compet.i.tion for land.'9 The drive for fresh land to be exploited is widely accepted as the leading specific cause of war throughout the course of civilization. Once-dominant feelings of grat.i.tude toward a freely giving nature and knowledge of the crucial interdependence of all life are replaced by the ethos of domestication: humans versus the natural world. This enduring power struggle is the template for the wars it constantly engenders. There was awareness of the price exacted by the paradigm of control, as seen in the widespread practice of symbolic regulation or amelioration of domestication of animals in the early Neolithic. But such gestures do not alter the fundamental dynamic at work, any more than they preserve millions of years' worth of gathererhunters' practices that balanced population and subsistence.

Agricultural intensification meant more warfare. Submission to this pattern requires that all aspects of society form an integrated whole from which there is little or no escape. With domestication, division of labor now produces full-time specialists in coercion: for example, definitive evidence shows a soldier cla.s.s established in the Near East by by 4500 B.C. The Jivaro of Amazonia, for millennia a harmonious component of the biotic community, adopted domestication, and "have elaborated blood revenge and warfare to a point where these activities set the tone for the whole society."3 Organized violence becomes pervasive, mandatory, and normative.

Expressions of power are the essence of civilization, with its core principle of patriarchal rule. It may be that systematic male dominance is a by-product of war. The ritual subordination and devaluation of women is certainly advanced by warrior ideology, which increasingly emphasized "male" activities and downplayed women's roles.

The initiation of boys is a ritual designed to produce a certain type of man, an outcome that is not at all guaranteed by mere biological growth. When group cohesion can no longer be taken for granted, symbolic inst.i.tutions are required-especially to further compliance with pursuits such as warfare. Lemmonier's judgment is that "male initiations... are connected by their very essence with war.""

Polygyny, the practice of one man taking multiple wives, is rare in gatherer-hunter bands, but is the norm for war-making village societies." Once again, domestication is the decisive factor. It is no coincidence that circ.u.mcision rituals by the Merida people of Madagascar culminated in aggressive military parades.33 There have been instances where women not only hunt but also go into combat (e.g. the Amazons of Dahomey; certain groups in Borneo), but it is clear that gender construction has tended toward a masculinist, militarist direction. With state formation, warriors.h.i.+p was a common requirement of citizens.h.i.+p, excluding women from political life.

War is not only ritualistic, usually with many ceremonial features; it is also a very formalized practice. Like ritual itself, war is performed via strictly prescribed movements, gestures, dress, and forms of speech. Soldiers are identical and structured in a standardized display. The formations of organized violence, with their columns and lines, are like agriculture and its rows: files on a grid.34 Control and discipline are thus served, returning to the theme of ritualized behavior, which is always an increased elaboration of authority.

Exchange between bands in the Paleolithic functioned less as trade (in the economic sense) than as exchange of information. Periodic intergroup gatherings offered marriage opportunities, and insured against resource shortfalls. There was no clear differentiation of social and economic spheres. Similarly, to apply our word "work" is misleading in the absence of production or commodities. While territoriality was part of forager-hunter activity, there is no evidence that it led to war.35 Domestication erects the rigid boundaries of surplus and private property, with concomitant possessiveness, enmity, and struggle for owners.h.i.+p. Even conscious mechanisms aimed at mitigating the new realities cannot remove their ever-present, dynamic force. In The Gift, Mauss portrayed exchange as peacefully resolved war, and war as the result of unsuccessful transactions; he saw the potlatch as a sort of sublimated warfare.31 Before domestication, boundaries were fluid. The freedom to leave one band for another was an integral part of forager life. The more or less forced integration demanded by complex societies provided a staging ground conducive to organized violence. IN some places, chiefdoms arose from the suppression of smaller communities' independence. Proto-political centralization was at times pushed forward in the Americas by tribes desperately trying to confederate to fight European invaders.

Ancient civilizations spread as a result of war, and it can be said that warfare is both a cause of statehood, and its result.

Not much has changed since war was first inst.i.tuted, rooted in ritual and given full-growth potential by domestication. Marshall Sahlins first pointed out that increased work follows developments in symbolic culture. It's also the case that culture begets war, despite claims to the contrary. After all, the impersonal character of civilization grows with the ascendance of the symbolic. Symbols (e.g. national flags) allow our species to dehumanize our fellow-humans, thus enabling systematic intra-species carnage.

The Iron Grip of Civilization:

the Axial Age.

Civilization is control and very largely a process of the extension of control. This dynamic exists on multiple levels and has produced a few key transition points of fundamental importance.

The Neolithic Revolution of domestication, which established civilization, involved a reorientation of the human mentality. Jacques Cauvin called this level of the initiation of social control "a sort of revolution of symbolism."' But this victory of domination proved to be incomplete, its foundations in need of some further shoring up and restructuring. The first major civilizations and empires, in Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, remained grounded in the consciousness of tribal cultures. Domestication had certainly prevailed-without it, no civilization exists-but the newly dominant perspectives were still intimately related to natural and cosmological cycles. Their total symbolic expressiveness was not yet fully commensurate with the demands of the iron Age, in the first millennium B.C.

Karl Jaspers identified a turning point for human resymbolization, the 'Axial Age",' as having occurred between 8oo and zoo B.C. in the three major realms of civilization: the Near East (including Greece), India, and China. Jaspers singled out such sixth century prophets and spiritual figures as Zoroaster in Persia, Deutero-Isaiah among the Hebrews, Herac.l.i.tus and Pythagoras in Greece, the Buddha in India, and Confucius in China. These individuals simultaneously-but independently-made indelible contributions to post-Neolithic consciousness and to the birth of the world religions.' In astonis.h.i.+ngly parallel developments, a decisive change was wrought by which civilization established a deeper hold on the human spirit, world-wide.

Internal developments within each of these respective societies broke the relative quiescence of earlier Bronze Age cultures. Wrenching change and new demands on the original patterns were in evidence in many regions. The world's urban population, for example, nearly doubled in the years 6oo to 45o B.C.4 A universal transformation was needed-and effected-providing the "spiritual foundations of humanity" that are still with us today.' The individual was fast becoming dwarfed by civilization's quickening Iron Age pace. The accelerating work of domestication demanded a recalibration of consciousness, as human scale and wholeness were left behind. Whereas in the earlier Mesopotamian civilizations, for example, deities were more closely identified with various forces of nature, now society at large grew more differentiated and the separation deepened between the natural and the supernatural. Natural processes were still present, of course, but increasing social and economic tensions strained their integrity as wellsprings of meaning.

The Neolithic era-and even the Bronze Age-had not seen the complete overturning of a nature-culture equilibrium. Before the Axial Age, objects were described linguistically in terms of their activities. Beginning with the Axial Age, the stress is on the static qualities of objects, omitting references to organic processes. In other words, a reification took place, in which outlooks (e.g. ethics) turned away from situation-related discourse to a more abstract, out-of-context orientation. In Henry Bamford Parkes' phrase, the new faiths affirmed "a human rather than a tribalistic view of life."6 The whole heritage of sacred places, tribal polytheism, and reverence for the earth-centered was broken, its rituals and sacrifices suddenly out of date. Synonymous with the rise of "higher" civilizations and world religions, a sense of system appeared, and the need for codification became predominant 7 In the words of Spengler: "the whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it...."8 A common aspect of the new reformulation was the ascendance of the single universal deity, who required moral perfection rather than the earlier ceremonies. Increased control of nature and society was bound to evolve toward increased inner control.

Pre-Axial, "animistic" humanity was sustained not only by a less totalizing repression, but also by a surviving sense of union with natural reality. The new religions tended to sever bonds with the manifold, profane world, placing closure on it over and against the supernatural and unnatural.