Twilight Of The Machines Part 4

"Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. Painstaking studies designed to prove the contrary have buried the obvious beneath tons of print."' Which is not in anyway to deny the centrality of cla.s.s rule, but to remind us that divided society began with division of labor. The divided self led directly to divided society. The division of labor is the labor of division. Understanding what characterizes modern life can never be far from the effort to understand technology's role in our everyday lives, just as it always has been. Lyotard judged that "technology wasn't invented by humans. Rather the other way around.""

Goethe's Faust, the first tragedy about industrial development, depicted its deepest horrors as stemming from honorable aims. The superhuman developer Faust partakes of a drive endemic to modernization, one which is threatened by any trace of otherness/ difference in its totalizing movement.

We function in an ever more h.o.m.ogeneous field, a ground always undergoing further uniformitization to promote a single, globalized techno-grid. Yet it is possible to avoid this conclusion by keeping one's focus on the surface, on what is permitted to exist on the margins. Thus some see Indymedia as a crucial triumph of decentralization, and free software as a radical demand. This att.i.tude ignores the industrial basis of every high tech development and usage. All the "wondrous tools," including the ubiquitous and very toxic cell phone, are more related to eco-disastrous industrialization in China and India, for example, than to the clean, slick pages of Wired magazine. The salvationist claims of Wired are incredible in their disconnected, infantile fantasies. Its adherents can only maintain such gigantic delusions by means of deliberate blindness not only to technology's systematic destruction of nature, but to the global human cost involved: lives filled with toxicity, drudgery, and industrial accidents.

Now there are nascent protest phenomena against the all-encompa.s.sing universal system, such as "slow food," "slow cities," "slow roads". People would prefer that the juggernaut give pause and not devour the texture of life. But actual degradation is picking up speed, in its deworlding, disembedding course. Only a radical break will impede its trajectory. More missiles and more nukes in more countries is obviously another part of the general movement of the technological imperative. The specter of ma.s.s death is the crowning achievement, the condition of modernity, while the posthuman is the coming techno-condition of the subject. We are the vehicle of the Megamachine, not its beneficiary, held hostage to its every new leap forward. The technohuman condition looms, indeed. Nothing can change until the technological basis is changed, is erased.

Our condition is reinforced by those who insist-in cla.s.sic postmodern fas.h.i.+on-that nature/culture is a false binarism. The natural world is evacuated, paved over, to the strains of the surrender-logic that nature has always been cultural, always available for subjugation. Koert van Mensvoort's "Exploring Next Nature" exposes the domination of nature logic, so popular in some quarters: "Our next nature will consist of what used to be cultural."" Bye-bye, non-engineered reality. After all, he blithely proclaims, nature changes with us.

This is the loss of the concept of nature altogether-and not just the concept! But the sign "nature" certainly enjoys popularity, as the substance is destroyed: "exotic" third world cultural products, natural ingredients in food, etc. Unfortunately, the nature of experience is linked to the experience of nature. When the latter is reduced to an insubstantial presence, the former is disfigured. Paul Berkett cites Marx and Engels to the effect that with communism people will "not only feel but also know their oneness with nature," that communism is "the unity of being of man with nature." Industrial-technological overcoming as its opposite-what blatant productionist rubbish. Leaving aside the communism orientation, however, how much of today's Left disagrees with the marxian ode to ma.s.s production? Where is any serious critique (one with consequences) of the ma.s.sified, standardized Dead Zone that continues to spread everywhere?

A neglected insight in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents is the suggestion that a deep, unconscious "sense of guilt produced by civilization" causes a growing malaise and dissatisfaction.14 Adorno saw that relevant to "the catastrophe that impends is the supposition of an irrational catastrophe in the beginning. Today the thwarted possibility of something other has shrunk to that of averting catastrophe in spite of everything."

The original, qualitative, utter failure for life on this planet was the setting in motion of civilization. Enlightenment-like the Axial Age world religions 2000 years before-supplied transcendence for the next level of domination, an indispensable support for industrial modernity. But where would one now find the source of a transcending, justifying framework for new levels of rapacious development? What new realm of ideas and values can be conjured up to validate the allencompa.s.sing ruin of late modernity? There is none. Only the system's own inertia; no answers, and no future.

Meanwhile our context is that of a sociability of uncertainty. The moorings of day-to-day stability are being unfastened, as the system begins to show multiple weaknesses. When it can no longer guarantee security, its end is near.

Ours is an incomparable historical vantage point. We can easily grasp the story of this universal civilization's malignancy. This understanding may be a signal strength for enabling a paradigm s.h.i.+ft, the one that could do away with civilization and free us from the habitual will to dominate. A daunting challenge, to say the least; but recall the child who was moved to speak out in the face of collective denial. The Emperor was wearing nothing; the spell was broken.

October 8, zoo6.

Finding Our Way Back Home.

The candles are flickering. Not only has modernity failed; it has become a threat to the survival of life on our planet. Genuine hope withers as we face modernity's final stage, a totally technicized existence. Faith in progress is gone, and the self is now disintegrating and dispersing into cybers.p.a.ce.

Czeslaw Milosz spoke of the prevailing "logic of precipitous decline, one so remarkable in its constancy as to be without historical a.n.a.logy."' A growing number of books tell us all about modernity's enveloping crisis, only to provide "answers" that in no way depart from modernity's framework. Postmodernism has tried to use "absence" as its foundational idea, arguing against the possibility of unmediated existence, or of attaining another, qualitatively different state of being. Postmodern thinkers dare not imagine or acknowledge the more likely foundation of our misery: human alienation or "absence" as cause and culmination of ma.s.s society on a global and unitary scale.

Any return to life outside of this one must remain forever closed to us. Such is the almost unanimous judgment, even though this ban is the very condition of civilization's continued existence.

The void at the core of all this is "addressed" by (among other things) consumption. The insatiable hunger of modernity is built-in; no amount of re-shuffling the deck-by the Left, for example-can change this. Buying, working, anxiety, stress, depression are inherent, and exhibit an ever-deepening spiral. Consumption of the very life of the land is the way of civilization. Once people felt that historical development redeemed us from the meaninglessness of cycles of consumption. No longer. To consume is to devour, to hunger always in vain, and there is nothing redeeming about it.

But where all is integration into the totality, there is also a fear of totality and a different sort of hunger-a yearning for spiritual depth and renewal. Our sense of an overwhelming loss of wholeness, meaning, and authenticity drives a new impulse. The age of politics is over, because too many people know how pointless it is to continue choosing within the prevailing model for living. A few still a.s.sert that philosophy must chug along, running on conceptual resources compatible with our situation in a thoroughly disenchanted world. But more and more people know that this is not enough; that it is, in fact, intolerable.

Where do we look for rescue? Our predicament points us toward a solution. The crisis of modernity is, in a very basic sense, a failure of vision in which our disembodied life-world has lost its "place" in existence. We no longer see ourselves within the webs and cycles of nature. The loss of a direct relations.h.i.+p to the world terminates a once universal human understanding of our oneness with the natural world. The principle of relatedness is at the heart of indigenous wisdom: traditional intimacy with the world as the immanent basis of spirituality. This understanding is an essential and irreplaceable foundation of human health and meaningfulness.

Only if these ties are re-established can a spirituality that matters return. Religion, a contrived human projection (cf. Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, et al.) is no subst.i.tute. Tom Porter, Mohawk, put it succinctly:" Now we have religion whereas before we had away of life."' Every ideology is likewise founded on that loss of kins.h.i.+p with a prior world, that primary alienation from nature.

Novalis and Nietzsche both referred to philosophy as a kind of homesickness, the desire to be everywhere at home. Now we are nowhere at home. But our lament, our mourning for lost connection is only pointless suffering until it is linked to a reversal of our course. Modernity takes us ever further from home, and denies that any homecoming is conceivable. Yet the ensuing nihilism is urging into presence a new spiritual dimension that uncovers pathways that could lead us back-pathways that have been systematically hidden from sight during io,ooo years of civilization.

It is becoming too obvious that what bars our way is our failure to put an end to the reigning inst.i.tutions and illusions. We must allow ourselves to see what has happened to us, including the origins of this disaster. At the same time we realize that true revolt is inspired by the realization that it is not impossible to bring the disaster to a halt, to imagine and strike out in new directions-to find our way back home.

Productionism or the primitive future, two materialities. One brought on by the extinguis.h.i.+ng of spirit, the other by embracing spirit in its earth-based reality. The voluntary abandonment of the industrial mode of existence is not self-renunciation, but a healing return. Turning from this world's present state and direction, let's look for guidance from those who have continued to live spiritually within nature. Their example shows what we need to make our way to what still awaits, all around us.

I : TOO MARVELOUS FOR WORDS.

' Paul Feyerabend, Conquest ofAbundance: A Tale ofAbstraction versus the Richness of Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 270.

Terence H. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977), pp.149, 26.

Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p.44.

4 Paul Feyerabend, Killing Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 179.

I Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 75.

G Ernest Jones, cited in Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 43.

7 Edward Sapir, The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures," Journal of Social Psychology5 (1934), pp 408-415.

8 For example, Johann Gottfried Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language.

9 Michel Foucault, TheArchaeology of Knowledge, translated byA.M.Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 216.

Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), pa.s.sim.

" Ernst Ca.s.sirer, Language and Myth (New York: Dover, 1953), pp 45-49.

" Sigmund Freud,Moses and Monotheism, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), p.114.

" Marlene Nourbese Philip, Looking for Livingstone (Stratford, Ontario: Mercury Press, 1991), p. 11.

14 Dan Sperber, 'Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations," Man 20 (1985), pp 73-89.

'S The major rise in the incidence of autism is not metaphorical. Autism as a retreat from symbolic interaction seems to be a terrible commentary on its unfulfilling nature. It may not be coincidental that autism first appears in the medical literature in 1799, as the Industrial Revolution was taking off.

'6 Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 26o.

17 George Steiner, Grammars of Creation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p.3.

2: PATRIARCHY, CIVILIZATION AND THE ORIGINS OF GENDER.

'Camille Paglia, s.e.xual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefert.i.ti to Emily d.i.c.kinson (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1990), p. 38.

Ursula Le Guin, "Women/Wildness," in Judith Plant, ed., Healing the Wounds (New Society: Philadelphia, 1989), p. 45.

3 Sherry B. Ortner,Making Gender: the Politics and Erotics of Culture (Beacon Press: Boston, 1996), p. 24. See also Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future (Beacon Press: Boston, 2000).

4 For example, Adrienne L. Zihlman and Nancy Tanner, "Gathering and Hominid Adaptation," in Lionel Tiger and Heather Fowler, eds., Female Hierarchies (Beresford: Chicago, 1978); Adrienne L. Zihlman, "Women in Evolution," Signs 4 (1978); Frances Dahlberg, Woman the Gatherer (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1981); Elizabeth Fisher, Woman's Creation: s.e.xual Evolution and the Shaping of Society (Anchor/ Doubleday: Garden City NY, 1979).

5 James Steele and Stephan Sherman, eds., The Archaeology of Human Ancestry (Routledge: New York, 1995), p. 349. Also, M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies, Female of the Species (Columbia University Press: New York, 1975), pp 210-211, for example.

G Leac.o.c.k is among the most insistent, claiming that whatever male domination exists in surviving societies of this kind is due to the effects of colonial domination. See Eleanor Burke Leac.o.c.k, "Women's Status in Egalitarian Society," Current Anthropology 19 (1978); and her Myths of Male Dominance (Monthly Review Press: New York, 1981). See also S. and G. Caf- ferry, "Powerful Women and the Myth of Male Dominance in Aztec Society," Archaeology from Cambridge? (1988).

'Joan Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, eds., EngenderingArchaeology (Blackwell: Cambridge MA, 1991); C.F.M. Bird, "Woman the Toolmaker," in Women inArchaeology (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies: Canberra, 1993).

'Claude Meillasoux,Maidens, Meal and Money (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1981), p. 16.

I Rosalind Miles, The Women's History of the World (Michael Joseph: London, 1986), p. 16.

' Zubeeda Banu Quraishy, "Gender Politics in the Socio-Economic Organization of Contemporary Foragers," in Ian Keen and Takako Yamada, eds., Ident.i.ty and Gender in Hunting and Gathering Societies (National Museum of Ethnology: Osaka, 2000), p.196.

" Jane Flax, "Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious," in Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality (Reidel: Dortrecht, 1983), pp 269-270.

"See Patricia Elliott, From Mastery to a.n.a.lysis: Theories of Gender in Psychoa.n.a.lytic Feminism (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1991), e.g. p. 105.

"Alain Testart, Aboriginal Social Inequality and Reciprocity," Oceania 6o (1989), p. 5.

" Salvatore Cucchiari, The Gender Revolution and the Transition from Bis.e.xual Horde to Patrilocal Band," in Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, eds., s.e.xual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and s.e.xuality (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge UK, 1984), p.36. This essay is of great importance.

'S Olga Soffer, "Social Transformations at the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition," in Gunter Brauer and Fred H. Smith, eds., Replacement: Controversies in h.o.m.o Sapiens Evolution (A.A. Balkema: Rotterdam 1992), p. 254.

'6 Juliet Mitch.e.l.l, Women: The Longest Revolution (Virago Press: London, 1984), p. 83.

" Cucchiari, op. cit., p. 62.

A Robert Briffault, The Mothers: the Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (Macmillan: New York, 1931), p. 159.

" 9 Theodore Lidz and Ruth Williams Lidz, Oedipus in the StoneAge (International Universities Press: Madison CT, 1988), p. 123.

- Elena G. Fedorova, The Role of Women in Mansi Society," in Peter P. Schweitzer, Megan Biesele and Robert K. Hitchhock, eds., Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World (Berghahn Books: NewYork, 2000), p. 396.

" Steven Harrall, Human Families (Westview Press: Boulder CO, 1997), p. 89. "Examples of the link between ritual and inequality in forager societies are widespread," according to Stephan Shennan, "Social Inequality and the Transmission of Cultural Traditions in Forager Societies," in Steele and Shennan, op.cit., p. 369.

Review Press: NewYork, 1979), p. 176. - Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women," Toward an Anthropology of Women (Monthly 13 Meillasoux, op.cit., pp 20-21.

'^ Cited by Indra Muns.h.i.+, "Women and Forest: A Study of the Warlis of Western India," in Govind Kelkar, Dev Nathan and Pierre Walter, eds., Gender Relations in Forest Societies inAsia: Patriarchy at Odds (Sage: New Delhi, 2003), p. 268.

" Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees' Struggle for a New World (Beacon Press: Boston, 1991), PP 99,143.

z6 The production of maize, one of North America's contributions to domestication, had a tremendous effect on women's work and women's health." Women's status was definitely subordinate to that of males in most of the horticultural societies of [what is now] the eastern United States" by the time of first European contact. The reference is from Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen E. Stothert, Women in Ancient America (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1999), p. 88. Also, for example, Gilda A. Morelli, "Growing Up Female in a Farmer Community and a Forager Community," in Mary Ellen Mabeck, Alison Galloway and Adrienne Zihlman, eds., The Evolving Female (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997): "Young Efe [Zaire] forager children are growing up in a community where the relations.h.i.+p between men and women is far more egalitarian than is the relations.h.i.+p between farmer men and women" (p. 219). See also Catherine PanterBrick and Tessa M. Pollard, "Work and Hormonal Variation in Subsistence and Industrial Contexts," in C. Panter-Brick and C.M. Worthman, eds., Hormones, Health, and Behavior (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999), in terms of how much more work is done, compared to men, by women who farm vs. those who forage.

known for her hunting prowess, bears responsibility for the Etoros' fall from a state of well" The Etoro people of Papua New Guinea have a very similar myth in which Nowali, being. Raymond C. Kelly, Constructing Inequality (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1993), p. 524.

ze Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the G.o.ds and the Origins of Nature (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000), p. 133.

" Carol A. Stabile, Feminism and the Technological Fix (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1994), p. 5.

jO Carla Freeman, Is Local:Global as Feminine: Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization," Signs 26 (2001).

3: ON THE ORIGINS OF WAR.

'I Eibl-Eibesfelt, "Aggression in the !Ko-Bushmen," in Martin A. Nettles.h.i.+p, eds., War, its Causes and Correlates (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), p. 293.

W. J. Perry, "The Golden Age," in The Hibbert Journal XVI (1917), p. 44.

3 Arthur Ferrill, The Origins of War from the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 16.

4 Paul Tacon and Christopher Chippindale, 'Australia's Ancient Warriors: Changing Depictions of Fighting in the RockArt of Arnhem Land, N.T.," CambridgeArchaeological Journal 4:2 (1994), p. 211.

5 Maurice R. Davie, The Evolution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), p. 247.

6A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California: Bulletin 78 (Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1923), p.152.

' Christopher Chase-Dunn and Kelly M. Man, The Wintu and their Neighbors (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 101.

8 Harry Holbert Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practice and Concepts (Columbia: Univer sity of South Carolina Press, 1949), p. 229.

I Lorna Marshall, "Kung! Bushman Bands," in Ronald Cohen and John Middleton, eds., Comparative Political Systems (Garden City: Natural History Press, 1967), p. 17.

' George Bird Grinnell, "Coup and Scalp among the Plains Indians,"American Anthropologist 12 (1910), pp. 296-310. John Stands in Timber and Margot Liberty make the same point in their Cheyenne Memories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 61-69. Also, TurneyHigh, op. cit., pp. 147, 186.

" Ronald R. Gla.s.sman, Democracy and Despotism in Primitive Societies, Volume One (Millwood, New York: a.s.sociated Faculty Press, 1986), p. 111.

" Emma Blake, "The Material Expression of Cult, Ritual, and Feasting," in Emma Blake and A. Bernard Knapp, eds., TheArchaeology of Mediterranean Prehistory (New York: Blackwell, 2005), p. 109.

" Bruce M. Knauft, "Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution," in Leslie Sponsel and Thomas Gregor, eds., TheAnthropology of Peace and Nonviolence (Boulder: L. Rienner, 1994), p. 45.

14 RoyA. Rappaport, Pigs for theAncestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 236-237.

" Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Like Ardrey and Lorenz, Girard starts from the absurd view that all social life is steeped in violence.

'6 G. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the d.i.n.ka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 281.

" Elizabeth Arkush and Charles Stanish, "Interpreting Conflict in the Ancient Andes: Implications for the Archaeology of Warfare," Current Anthropology 46:1 (February 2005), p. 16.

ie ibid., p. 14.

'9 James L. Haley, Apaches: A History and Culture Portrait (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), pp. 95-96.

Rappaport, op.cit, p. 234, for example.

" Quoted by Robert Kuhlken, "Warfare and Intensive Agriculture in Fiji," in Chris Golden and Jon Hather, eds., The Prehistory of Food: Appet.i.tes for Change (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 271. Works such as Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Pierre Clastres, Archaeology of Violence (New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), and jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit, The Origins of War.. Violence in Prehistory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005) somehow manage to overlook this point.

" Verrier Elwin, The Religion of an Indian Tribe (London: Oxford University Press, 1955, p.300.

" Jonathan Z. Smith, "The Domestication of Sacrifice," in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 197, 202.

'^ Christine A. Hastorf and Sissel Johannessen, "Becoming Corn-Eaters in Prehistoric America," in Johannessen and Hastorf, eds., Corn and Culture in the PrehistoricNew World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), especially PP. 428-433.

" Charles Di Peso, The Upper Pima of San Cayetano de Tumacacori (Dragoon, AZ: Amerind Foundation, 1956), pp. 19,104, 252, 260.

z6 Christy G. Turner II and Jacqueline A. Turner,Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the PrehistoricAmerican Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), pp. 3,460,484.

"A.L. Kroeber, Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 224.

" Harold B. Barclay, The Role of the Horse in Man's Culture (London: J.A. Allen, 1980), e.g. P. 23.

"Richard W. Howell, "War Without Conflict," in Nettles.h.i.+p, op.cit., pp. 683-684.