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Title: The Garden of Peculiarities Author: JesĂșs SepĂșlveda Date: 2002, 2005, 2011 Language: en Topics: Green Anarchy, green anarchism, art, standardization, community, anti-civ, alienation, language, deterritorialisation Source: Retrieved on March 4th, 2015 from http://www.meme.co.za/garden.pdf Notes: Originally published in Spanish in 2002 as âEl jardin de las peculiaridadesâ.
Acknowledgments: The author acknowledges the important input through
conversations and suggestions during the writing of this book of Kevin
Donald, Paul Dresman, Liisa Korpela, Amado LĂĄscar, Bill Rankin, Janine
SepĂșlveda, Wolf Sohlich, and John Zerzan. I also thank Jorje Lagos
Nilsson and Ălvaro Leiva for their support in publishing the first
edition in the Spanish original (Ediciones del Leopardo: Buenos Aires,
2002). My gratitude also is given to Daniel Montero for translating this
text into English
Ideology crystallizes itself like a map in memory. It legitimizes itself
by propagating the false idea that the world in which we live is the
best possible world, or the system is the best system, regardless of its
shortcomings. For this reason, it is common to hear that socialism is
better than capitalism, the free market is better than the proletarian
state, democracy better than fascism, military dictatorship better than
communism, republic better than monarchy, feudal bondage better than
slavery, city better than country, etc.
However many of these arguments are launched, they all are ultimately
absurd because they tend to justify repression at the altar of a
supposed necessary order. Ideology demonizes its opposition as partisans
of a supposed and constructed chaos, praising moderation and fostering
resignation. Ideology skirts logic and cajoles the naive population into
accepting evil as inevitable, which carries with it either the
aftertaste of fatality or arrogance, but always with surrender or
sacrifice. In this vein, it is not uncommon to hear it said that change
is impossible, or that there are no longer ideals worth fighting for nor
hope to embrace. Ideology programs collective desperation. It alienates.
It defeats. It is as recalcitrant as a dogma, because its ultimate goal
is self-perpetuation. It uses every means available toward this end:
genocide, ecocide, elections, or simply fearâfear that paralyzes the
imagination, or erases it.
Ideology operates like a narrative that domesticates by way of its own
systemic standardization. It expands like a virus, or transparent and
mimetic plague, which expresses itself in trends or in name-brand
identities. No one sees it, no one feels it, no one touches it, yet
everyone speaks with its tongue. It strangles the mindâwhich is
connected to a server or a mainframeâand plugs in the eyes. It
reproduces itself mechanically and accumulates unsatisfied desires in an
oscillating spiral. This spiral is like the pleats of an accordion or,
better yet, an artificial heart sounding its own agony. The beating of
this false heart will continue until the empire rearms, the government
regroups, castes are revived, or until the system collapses, a victim of
its own decadence.
Ideology crystallizes itself like a map. This map, however, is falseâit
portrays the world as a mental creation, a stage constructed over the
base of the gears of productivity: the gearing is the material and
ideological bubble in which the so-called political and economic systems
of eco-social domination exist. Ideology justifies itself with the false
idea that this is a happy and viable world, and that, despite its
shortcomings, it is better to close your eyes to accustom yourself to
survival and to avoid any disruption of the dream. When a person dreams,
the nightmares cease and fantasy flowers. This can be, however, highly
subversive, because in addition to letting the imagination fly, dreams
erase narratives and turn the maps upside down, disposing of them in
fetid waste-dumps.
Domestication is a process that some animals on this planet suffer. It
reduces the wild and accustoms the animal to the absence of the natural
state of living beings on this planet. It eliminates any wild
characteristics that naturally negate planet-wide standardization. It
erases that which is natural and spontaneous and which made life
possible on this planet. It homogenizes every living creature and
organizes life into unities that categorize everything living and
breathing on the planet. It places human beings outside the animal
kingdom, creating categories of kingdoms and organizing plants and
insects as dead objects on this planet. Domestication is a process
suffered like a strange sickness that weighs on life in every corner of
the planet, threatening to destroy the existence of all who inhabit its
magic.
Affection instills strength. Without it, it is nearly impossible to
struggle with experiences too intense and painful to endure. Tenderness
is a way of life, opposed to the automatization of the clock and forced
labor. Robotization is a way of death, opposed to the liberation of time
and leisure, which allow tenderness to grow like a healthy trunk in the
garden of all and so spread its aroma among all beings that inhabit the
planetary garden.
In contrast, globalization imposes a standard mold on our garden. It
manifests itself in a triple process: imperial expansion of capital;
worldwide standardization through economic control by transnational
companies, and domestication of the soil through monoculture, destroying
natural variety and paving the earth. Its avarice threatens all natural
cycles. The soil is the skin and the flesh that covers our planet. Clean
air is the landscape that gives us oxygen and protects us from dying,
burnt by the penetration of ultraviolet rays. Condors and Magellan sheep
have been blinded due to the weakening ozone layer. Water gives us life.
Soil, air and water are parts of a natural cycle that pollution
interrupts. Then, fire gives us the energy we need, and the sun nurtures
us with compassion and tenderness.
Certainly we all need tenderness: the cat that stretches itself between
the calves of guests or meows in your lap; the dog that jumps excited at
your return and looks for your recognition. Tenderness reconnects us to
all things and makes us well. Who has not felt pleasure at touching the
face of a loved one or bathed in the pleasure of a belovedâs touch?
Robotic cybernetic replicas only work. They falsely perceive time, they
understand it as a continuous line where past, present and future
intersect simultaneously but in an unreal way. The notion of time is an
authoritarian imposition of the social order that justifies itself with
the false idea of progress, a model of legitimization of the dominant
order: industrialization, imprisonment and territorial delimitation.
Materially, we live in the present, in existence itself.
âHic et nunc,â so goes the Latin refrain, here and now. Because of this,
memoryâalways active and arbitrary, changing and selectiveâgives us a
perception of our own experience. Experience amplifies peculiarity, a
process distinct from history, this is to say from the standardization
of the official. The only common factor to all the peculiarities there
are on earth is tenderness. Affection is a primary necessity of human
beings. Knowing, then is to understand that without tenderness and love,
no revolution can be possible.
Efficiency is inflexible. An automatic collector on the bus processes
only exact change to print a ticket; otherwise, it does not work, and it
invalidates the operation. The automatic teller buzzes at a wrong button
pushed and rejects the plastic card. This is the logic of efficiency, or
the reason of inflexibility. In the same way, being indecisive is a sign
of inefficiency, which marks and burns with the stain of the flexible.
The sap that flows through nature spreads without a stable base of
identity. Rather it flows spontaneously, precipitately. It does not
reproduce itself identically, and it rejects the molds of mechanization.
This fluid is in constant movement. While the river runs, its particles
have no possible replica. In this way, freezing a single drop, isolating
it from the general flow, is an act against nature. cloning nature in
order to pour its double into a test tube is a reifying act. Nature is
peculiarity itself and is fragile like every snowflake. Its spirit is
flexible. The logic of standardization articulates itself instead
through the mechanisms of efficiency. An experiment cannot make itself
flexible; it requires a stable pattern that must be tested under
inflexible conditions and coordinates. Life flows in an organic way,
like the sap of plants; it is not a laboratory experiment under
scientific control. On the contrary, it flowers with the flexibility of
a bud. Sap waters the world through each one of its peculiarities.
Efficiency negates nature, given that it tries to impose a control panel
over the garden, which sprouts spontaneously and organically. Efficiency
expands and colonizes, ignoring all peculiarity Because of this, its
function is to construct categories that operate with the logic of
taxonomic standardization. Thus it differentiates and creates sets while
it negates the differences in these same sets, which cannot resist the
light and organicity of their own peculiarities.
Reality is a garden of peculiarities forged from a constellation of
other peculiarities, which at the same time disperse themselves in their
own universe to the rhythm of the sap that flows and flowers. The fluid
does not organize itself nor does it represent itself. It is only a
flow. Everything that inhabits it is part of its own organicity, which
grows in the constant movement of each unique and unrepeatable
constellation. The organicity of changeâwhich sometimes expresses itself
like bubbles in boiling waterâsurfaces when humans concentrate their
energyâwhich becomes self-reflexive consciousnessâand corrects the
course of daily events. But organicity is also natural and independent
of consciousness. For example, global warming, caused by human
technology, will make the planet cool down to counteract the frightening
and artificial heat of fossil fuels. This will cause floods, tsunamis
and even the disappearance of coastal population centers. To not
understand this is to alienate oneself from the course of life that
flows between each and every one of us. It is to fall into reification,
that is to say, into the logic that situates subjects like dead matter
in a control panel. This is the panel that turns the mechanized system
on and off, negating with its measured tic-tac the permanent course of
life.
A few things are certain, or at least, nearly irrefutable. One of these
is that life flowers around trees. Another, that trees cannot live
without water. On the contrary, they dry up. Clearcutting and the
damming of rivers do not only imply the human and corporate-human
dominion over nature, but also the destruction of every fountain from
which life emanates. The defense of the planet, by every possible means,
is not only a question of self-defense, but also of survival.
The instinct of self-preservation of the human species has brought about
dominion over nature. But this very dominion threatens our
self-preservation. It is a vicious circle that sooner or later will
break down. And any breakdown will be a total breakdown, a rupture both
mental and material because it necessarily involves our ways of
perceiving and interacting with nature.
The dominion over the environment and creatures that inhabit it does not
bring about preservation but colonization. Its effect is concrete: the
conquest of the planet, of animals, of plants, of insects and, of
course, humans. Real people, those who still have not been alienated
from their own naturesâby luck or resistanceâ still feel a strong
connection with the earth and maintain a strong connection with their
ancestors. Native peoples have a sense of well-being not seen in
civilized cultures. Primitive populations still preserve an atavistic
wisdom. In their eyes, the understanding that we are nothing but nature
is an act of simple lucidity.
This radical revelation deconstructs all taxonomiesâand epistomological
classificationsâthat tend to justify the objectification of people in
reifying categories: kingdoms, classes, races or orders of any type.
Human beings are nothing but nature. Every creature is singular and
unrepeatable. Colonizing cloning and the notion of a monolithic
identityâas a subjective identity identical to every other identity, and
thereby petrifiedânegates the peculiarity of every being.
Civilizationâand by extension its sublime expression, the cityâembodies
this negation. Its tendency is toward expansion, and it carries along
with it colonialism and the holy war. Christian, Muslim, Inca, Aztec,
Japanese, Ottoman, Greco-Latin and Chinese civilizations, among others,
have shown their proclivity toward invasion and conquest. Civilization,
seen as second nature, has legitimated the destruction of anything other
than its own civilized order. The negation of the truly natural is the
base of the civilized order, which expands like a conqueror and
manifests its bloodthirsty ways in the extermination of indigenous
communities and aboriginal cultures.
For civilization, every act of destruction of its icons is an
iconoclastic or terrorist act. When civilization destroys a way of life
or culture different from its civilized order, this becomes civilizing
action. This is the logic of colonialization. The extermination of
colonized communities is not just brought about by the cracking of the
whip or the shot of the cannon, but also by the clearcutting of forests
and the construction of dams.
The individual tends to see him or herself as an individual subject.
This is to say, as an indivisible being, unique and monolithic. This
vision has generated a false consciousness of the being that justifies
pragmatic individualism as much as the cartesian disembodiment of the
self: âCogito ergo sum,â mind over body, the virtual world, personal
space, etc. The institutional propaganda of school and the
authoritarianism of the expert scientific voice have impelled civilized
populations to internalize the notion of the monolithic subject whose
incorporeal identity reifies itselfinto an expansive ego, thus
reproducing the instrumental logic of colonizing western thought. The
expansive âIâ turns itself into a unique and indivisible individual,
thus negating its own multiplicity, plurality and flexibility, all that
constitutes its own peculiarity. Thus, while the monolithic identity
negates multiplicity, disembodiment rejects reality. So, the indivisible
identity reifies itself through the disembodied consciousness of the âIâ
And this consciousness is nurtured and forms itself through the
standardizing mechanizations of taxonomic knowledge.
The individual is not a being apart from its totality, nor is it
fragmented between body and consciousness. The individual is a part of
its totality, and its body interacts with reality. Denying this is
justifying alienation. To feel the wind, for example, that crosses our
pores when we stop at night to look at the stars, is sufficient proof
that this totality exists. To believe the opposite is to be sadly
alienated.
Poetry and art prevent the standardization of peculiarity. Artistic
language suggests, instead of describing comprehensively, the immediate
presence of being. Art and poetry dismantle the reduction driven by
intellectual control, allowing its practitioners to become a part of
totality. This transformation is called authenticity or oneâs own voice,
that is, the genuine that exists in everyone.
This authenticity is nothing more than the peculiarity of every being:
that which opposes standardization expressed byâamong other thingsâ the
reification of the âI.â To think, for example, that one is an image
projected in a mirror, or to believe in the formal and pictorial
combination of a portrait, or in a mechanically reproduced
imageâphotography, video or filmârepresents an alienating distance
between the reality of a being and the reifying Cartesian consciousness
to which the civilized world submits. Images as mediating ideological
constructs of human relationships constitute what Guy Debord early on
called âThe society of the spectacle.â Since then, the world has
conglomerated like a swarm of bees around panoptical centers of
domestication: television, Hollywood, the cult of celebrity. This is
without even taking into consideration surveillance and control. Images
massively lead individuals to see themselves as individual subjects,
that is, as indivisible beings, unique and monolithic, thus ignoring
their flexibility, plurality and mulitiplicity. This final trilogy is
the stuff of which the innate peculiarity of the self is made.
Monads, according to the philosophic system of Leibniz, are indivisible
substances of different natures that compose the universe. The neutrino,
according to the physical sciences that speculate about black holes and
parallel universes, is an electrically neutral particle of unappreciable
mass. Human beings are part of the universe and we are all different
from one another. Personality is not reproduced; it constantly grows
within us. This occurs because we are divisible, multiple and flexible
beingsâthe child who was is not the old person he or she will soon be.
The obstinate personality also varies. It is unique and polydimensional.
Every dimension of being is divisible by everything that constitutes it:
mind, body, experience, memory, etc. To lean toward neutrality is also
negating a part of the being. We irradiate positive and negative
vibrations. We can also be magnetic and arbitrary.
Our bodily mass is visible, palpable, and enjoyable. It can be
appreciated. The body is real. Neither the neutrino nor monads can
accurately describe the human being completely. The multiplicity, which
overwhelms or fulfils us, describes on a human scale, the multiplicity
of the universe, the multitude of multiple universes. Truly, every-thing
inhabits everything, although not without contradictions. Multiple
universes are a reality. It is like going to a party and meeting
multiple people, parallel to themselves.
Probably, from the collision of these two universes other universes were
born, grew, developed themselves, matured, grew old and died over time.
At some point in this riddle we find ourselves, just like the
microscopic organisms we host inside our bodies. The expansion of the
universe represents its growth and ageing. And it will have the right
age at the moment of its dying or concentration of its multiple entirety
into the empty hole. We canât do anything about this because there is no
machine that can take us from this universe to another, although, of
course, it is possible that death is nothing more than a voyage to other
coordinates where the stampede of energy that keeps us alive is still
flowing.
Retaking lifeâs path in order to correct it is what Indo-American sages
believe is necessary. Maybe that would mean returning to a pre-neolithic
stage, knowing what we already know. Is that a dilemma? There is no
drama in being born, developing, maturing, growing old or maybe dying.
The important thing is that in the meanwhile we can live in a state
ofpermanent celebration. Life organized as a carnivalesque and prolonged
act of being is an intelligent way of alleviating the pain. Celebrating
our time on this rotating orb stimulates our community feeling. We all
have to live with everyone and around everyone. We have no other choice.
The state of permanent festivity leads to the joy of being and has a
liberating movement. For this reason, the revelling impulse
dehierarchizes and makes us happy.
And in moments of tranquillity, silence and leisure, it is good to
appreciate the infinite expansion of the night and our growth in between
the maturity of everything that inhabits the planet: the astral dome
that gives us cover and lets us live.
Beauty is fragile. This is another almost irrefutable truth. The calypso
orchids that grow along the paths of the temperate forest take at least
nine years to reproduce. This is a heroic act of palingenesia that takes
place in the middle of the forest. In the spring their rose color graces
the skirts of the pine trees. But if an intruder touches its stem, the
orchid eventually dies. Not so if only the petals are touched. This is
the beauty of life, fragile and delicate, like everything that passes
through our hands. Human beings are nothing more than nature. To pretend
differently is to fall into alienation. It is to forget beauty. Usually
children go to the zoo. This experience is part of our early trainingâit
distances us from the rest of the animals. We all inhabit this planet,
which feeds and gives shelter to every living thing. The balance between
everything and the planet is as fragile as the orchid. Looking past the
function of nature, the desire to find its utility and control it and
dominate it, is a central challenge. On the other hand, to observe
nature in order to appreciate it is to find plenitude. Our existence and
the existence of everything else on this planet depend on this
challenge. For this reason, unlearning the conditioning of our childhood
in order to be able to appreciate natureâs beauty is a primordial
necessity.
Human beings can be beautiful creatures. But for this to happen we need
to shift our perception of reality from the utilitarian to one of
appreciation. In other words, we need to replace the instrumental with
the aesthetic. The dominant ideological paradigm creating the present
gives free rein to technological reason, but it displaces creation.
Heidegger calls this latter mental agitation âpoiesis.â But to replace
the drive to dominate, expand and colonizeâin order to radically
dismantle economies based on competition and comparisonâit is absolutely
necessary to change the lenses through which we see reality. This is to
say, refashion your perspective to appreciate day, night, the seasons,
waves, the potency of rivers, the birdsâ songs, the movement of animals,
the woods, bees, women, men and all of the constellations of
peculiarities that form other constellations of peculiarities and that
spring savagely like orchids in the forest.
The State exists because it territorializes itself. It builds itself
through colonizing territorial expansion. This expansion comes about
through the forced deterritorialization of the original inhabitants from
the lands that the state has appropriated. This appropriation implies
the mobilization of military force that the state can use to expand or
maintain its territory. This has meant wars and genocide. But the state
also has its experts to write history; they turn the facts around so as
to justify their atrocities and obligate following generations to repeat
the meaningless official litanies written by the experts.
Education, then, is nothing more than the institutionalization of
disciplines of training and domestication, a training ground where
children and adolescents are taught to perpetuate the dominant system.
There they learn to give way to the dominant order and they begin the
process of reification. On these parade grounds or schools of social
indoctrination, the ideology that legitimates the system is reproduced.
New members of society internalize a false consciousness, which inflates
in them like a lung until everyone repeats with more or less success the
same discourse. Its idea is that everyone says, dreams, and thinks that
this is the best of all possible worlds. And if it has its faults, it
doesnât matter because they can be fixed. Thinking anything different is
to be part of the anarchistic ranks, to go crazy or to call to
insurrection. According to Adorno, standardization obliges the subject
to choose between mercantilization or schizophrenia. There is no exit
from this binary mold. In this society, preferring the garden to cement
is seen with distrust. And depending on the political wind of the
moment, this preference can cost oneâs life. When the system breaks and
sheep escape from the flock, prisons grow with criminal efficiency, as
well as coups dâetat, raids, tear gas, repressive measures, war, etc.
While all of this is occurring, the state rein forces its propaganda
through radio, television and newspapers. And so the state materializes
itself in the minds of individuals.
Nation states assemble their repressive apparatiâpolice and militaryâto
protect the transnationals and expand a lifestyle of standardization
based on the reduction of humans into economic units of production and
consumption. With this, a new kind of territorialization and labor
slavery is produced. The technology and the goods that the global
minority, dominant class uses are manufactured in sweatshops that
operate with the logic of exploitation. Schools and factories are
centers of control imposed by the state. In order to abolish the state,
it is necessary to abolish factories and schools. The authoritarianism
that the civilized order reproduces in these institutions is responsible
for ethnic cleansing, political genocide, and social exploitation. In
order to construct a work without hierarchies, jails, propaganda, or
coups, it is necessary to sweep, away the state. And it depends on us to
wipe it off the face of the earth.
Any attempt to standardize life is a form of domination that imposes an
alienating model over people. European colonization and American
transnationalization impose standardizing patterns over the differences
and peculiarities of the planet and its people. Every standardizing
pattern is a by-product of state and business planning, which operate in
temporal-linear terms: the progression toward macrostandardizing goals
that take away all liberties. Colonization fostered by the so-called
civilized world negates the peculiarity of natureâpeople, animals,
vegetation, soil, etc.âand destroys the liberty of life. To defend
oneself against these perpetrations is a vital kind of will that
requires thinkingâwith imagination and audacityâof a different world.
For this reason, in the absence of educational centers it is absolutely
necessary to embrace personalized education, each person teaching the
other, everyone at the same time. If half of the world transfers its
knowledge to the other half, there is no need for authoritarian campuses
of standardization.
Institutional education reproduces in each generation the false idea
that this is the best of all possible worlds, or, at least, the one that
functions the best, without placing too much importance on its
shortcomings. Thus, the process of normalization of knowledge through
written textsâto the detriment of oralityâis nothing more than the
process of standardization of a certain perception of the world. In this
sense, education has an ideological function: to reproduce a
standardizing discourse regulated by the state. It legitimates itself
through the fabricated intersection between power and knowledge, that is
to say, between state control and the professional fields of experts.
For this reason, the appropriation of one does not exist without the
appropriation of the other. Only when groups of humans live organically
in communities and cultivate their own food toward I lie end of enjoying
the liberating pleasure of a permanent carnival state and prolonged
aesthetic appreciation will formal education, as well as the
exploitation of 90% of the human population and the destruction of the
planet, no longer fit within the perception of reality.
The guarantor of destructive repression is the state, and it is up to us
to dismantle it.
The notion of race is linked to colonial practices. The Western World is
constructed on a base of the distinction between a âweâ and a âthey.â Or
rather, between what constitutes oneâs own ethnicityâas if by magic,
ethnicity becomes a racially neutral standardizing patternâand âthe
othersâ: that which is associated with barbarians, or the Ethnic, in
modern terminology.
Ethnocentrism manifested itself in slave logic, imposing Eurocentric,
supremacist categories. The Machiavellian concept of racial superiority
perpetuated itself through the equating of Caucasian-European and
civilized. Thus, the notion of race justifiedâand
justifiesâcolonization, which is nothing more than ethnocentric dominion
over nature and other ethnicities. The colonial expansion ofthe West
classified and categorized the colonized: groups of people, animals,
plants, soil, etc., through their technically self-justifying
taxonomies. In this way the West marched along imposing the scientific
instrumental rationality that justifies colonial practices and universal
models.
Mercantile capitalism unfurled the maps and printed the dictionaries,
accelerating its steamroller march. This ethnic expansion was the
expansion of the colonizing ego legitimating itself in diverse
historical narratives under the banner of civilization. In the name of
civilization the notion of race has been constructed. This notion is the
direct consequence of the instrumental mechanism of technological
thinking that categorizes human experience and standardizes reality.
The notion of humanity is tied to the notion of the world. Its origin is
religious. In the West, for example, God created man and Later woman.
When they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, an enraged God
threw them out of paradise, forcing humanity to live outside of the
Garden of Eden and to incessantly search for a salary and a roof for
shelter. This is the justifying narrative of domestication. Thus, God
put humanity into the world. In this same way, the European world was
characterized by human presence. This narrative was called the Sacred
Word or Bible. The sacred texts of the Middle East had other names: the
Koran, Talmud, or Torah. In these narratives, the correspondence between
humanity and the world was built on the concept of the chosen people:
the sons of Allah or Jehovah. This religious vision is also found in
some indigenous cosmologies. For example, in the sacred Mayan-Quiche
text PopulVuh, the creators put the âmen of cornâ on earth. In this way
the triumvirate of creation, humanity and world form a discursive
triangleâideological and religiousâthat explains life through fantasies
and founding myths.
These notions fell into crisis with the European conquest. For the
conquistadors, the possibility that other human beings could exist in
unknown lands complicated their traditional world-views, given that it
refuted their theological doctrines of creation and that it
deconstructed the official view imposed by clergy. For the indigenous,
the bearded men from across the sea were demigods. Lamentably, the
indigenous discovered their invadersâ true natures too late.
In this context of ideological conflict, the idea of the New World
solved the European ideological crisis and began the long and sad
cosmogonic, social and vital crisis of the indigenous peoples.
Colonization starts with the notions of humanity and the world. And
these same notions galvanized the push to modernity that among other
things humanized nature while naturalizing control over nature.
Colonization has been nothing more than the expansion of capital and
technological thinking through the culture of standardization on a
worldwide scale. This practice reached its apex with European expansion.
From the beginning of the 20th century it unleashed its destructive
power with the appearance of imperialism: the oligopolistic phase of
capitalism. This isnât, how-ever, a phenomenon tied exclusively to
nation and ethnicity building (at least not in this stage of so-called
âglobalizationâ). For the first time in recorded or remembered history a
single group of individuals controls on a transnational scale a
worldwide machine capable of annihilating the planet and extinguishing
the life of many of its creatures, among them, human beings. This
colonial stage has a monetary drive whose basis is ideological. Capital
needs to standardize lifestyles, cultural values, architecture,
language, landscape, thinking, etc. It looks to, in sum, make uniform
the perception of reality, thus assuring its own permanent expansion.
Its ideological foundation, which rationalizes conquest as an index of
growth, assigns a positive value to the expansionist drive. Growth for
growthâs sake, invading to invade, and eternal expansion are the axes
that form the rationale for expansion. They also constitute the logic of
capital, which grows and spreads until it consumes and destroys all of
those host organisms that allow and shelter life on the planet.
Expansion is, without doubt, the ideology of cancer, which will not stop
until it reaches an implacable metastasis.
In the pamphlet âReform or Revolution,â written at the end of the 19th
century, Rosa Luxemburg advocated the end of the salary system, in
opposition to the reformist program of Bernstein, which was centered in
the labor struggles for better wages through systemic reforms. The
history of social struggle in the last few centuries has been divided
into two camps with different totalitarian tendencies: those who prefer
the ends to the means or vice versa. This has led to sectarian or naive
politics, in turn leading, depending on the particulars of the case, to
fanaticism or vacillation. The radical course is certainly to abolish
the wage system. However, faced with a situation of subsistence or
material want, every penny means a substantial difference in terms of
the daily survival of the dispossessed. To deny this penny to those who
die of hunger every day is to fall into vanguardist self-righteousness.
It is to deny solidarity.
Capitalism, whether state or private, has taken advantage of the
reduction of human life to the realm of the material. By raising
standards of living, it has laid waste to quality of existence, and it
has destroyed on a terrible scale our natural resources. In societies
that are dependent on mass production, the notion of a good standard of
living functions as a counterweight to compensate for the alienation
produced by the industrial way of life, and at the same time this notion
creates the fantasy of consumption. To be able to choose between
manufactured productsâproduced by forced labor in a dependence
economyâis seen as an exercise of liberty. This is clearly a strategy of
standardization.
In the current model, the workerâs role is to form part of the systemic
gears that limit the possibilities of imagination and enslave human life
through wage dependence. Salary is a quantification of the value that
the system assigns to every human life. Its ultimate function is the
mercantilization of human beings. Every individual in this process is
reduced to an economic unitâor piece of merchandiseâwhose labor is to
produce and consume. In this way the subject acts as one more input to
the productive paraphernalia imposed by social machinery. Established
differences between groups and classes are not only related to the
position and role assigned in this paraphernalia, but also to the
capacity for consumption and acquisition of goods and services. This
consumerism is destined to decompress labor pressure,
bureaucratic-administrative insanity, and the injustices of the process
of the sale of the labor force. Two elements guarantee submission to the
social system.
On one hand, forced dependence of entire populations on the companies
that make and distribute products of mass consumption. On the other
hand, the maintenance of a high number of marginalized peoples, seasonal
workers and the permanently unemployed, who operate, according to Marx,
as a âreserve army.â In this case, getting a job is often a privilege
that permits subsistence, erasing and hiding its enslaving and
domesticating character. It is reinforced by sedentarism and subjugation
to a rigid schedule, symbolized by the act of âpunching the clock,â or
the factory whistle that announces the return from lunch hour. In the
Romance languages the word work comes from the Latin root âtripaliumâ:
the name given to an instrument of torture used by the Romans which
consisted of a framework of three sticks. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the
word âworkâ comes from the Scottish âweorc,â a theological term that
refers to all the moral activities that can be considered justification
of life. Usually its use is in contrast to the idea of âdestinyâ or
âgrace.â The imposition of work as a torturous activity, or justifying
action of hypocritical and self-righteous pragmatism, is a way of
assuring domestication. Salaried work assures the territorialization of
entire populations in zones delimited by authoritarian institutions. In
this way, the state guarantees the sedentarism and social control
necessary to administrate production.
The Latin âdomusâ means house, the etymological root of domestication
and domiciliationâtwo processes, which articulate themselves together in
the sense that the state extends its material presence to establish its
dominion. A clear example of territorialization can be found in
indigenous reservations, which openly emulate concentration camps or
state relocation centers.
Ghettoes are another example. There is also constant repression of those
who are in permanent movement: nomads, gypsies, vagabonds, etc. In the
present circumstances, dominant legality provides no space for the
homeless: indigents that the system rejects and ignores because they
alter the process of domiciliation. Curfew and state of siege are two
crudely repressive manifestations created by this process. Certainly,
along with domiciliation comes numbering. First it was numbers on
houses, later individuals: telephone numbers, computer passwords,
national identification numbers, social security or union cards, etc.
This is how ideology constructs its methods of identification and
inserts the notion of identity while at the same time fostering human
commodification. Every creature is converted into a digit easily
archived, categorized and reified. Domestic animals are numbered and
become domestic fetishes. People are transformed into pure merchandise
of numbered identity. This numeric social role is mediated by the
market, through the assigning of digits that classify everyone as such
and such unit of production, consumption, profit or loss. This is the
true wage. And for this reason, the wage system and monetary value are
inherent to the system. To undo one it is necessary to destroy the
other.
The utilitarian ideology that reduces human life to the realm of the
material and economic is the matrix of the system. Its theoretical base
is part of the different narratives elaborated by instrumental reason.
Its political practice is domestication, which is supported by the
squads of state repression and the self-justifying legal body. Its
objective is the perpetuation of the civilized order. This falsifies the
world, promoting a perception of reality distant from true totality and
reducing life to artificially constructed numbers (e.g. graphs and
statistics.) In order to dismantle this ideology it is necessary to
avoid standardizing reduction and to foment the flowering of the
peculiarities of every creature that inhabits the planet.
Perhaps the first step is to learn to appreciate all that which is found
outside of the civilized order, eluding the civilizing gestures so many
times taught in the home and school. Maybe it is necessary to imagine an
existence full of ends and means, which intersectâas Octavio Paz saysâin
a âperpetual present.â Maybe it wonât be so difficult to recognize the
necessity of leisure. Maybe solidarity is possible without having to
choose a, b, c or d, the base of the cretinizing logic of multiple
choice. The contradiction between revolution and reform is not quite
accurate; it certainly varies according to the state of the perpetual
present. An individual is revolutionary only when there is revolution;
the rest of the time he or she resists or provokes authority. And in
neither case should solidarity retract the ends or the means. If it were
this way, it would mean that everything human and natural had been
reduced to the zone of the economic. It would also mean that nothing had
changed, except the jargon that accelerates or slows down the rhetoric
of the friction that plays along the executionerâs wall during war or
class struggle.
Patriarchy manifests itself clearly in daily human interaction. If a man
has a strong personality, he is considered charismatic. But for a woman
the system assigns the pejorative marks of bitch, dyke, or meddler.
Patriarchy is a reality of oppression and control. It reaffirms itself
with rape and physical violence. And it exists in the sense that the
genders are separated into categories whose ideological essence lies in
the presumption of certain physical characteristics: psychological,
social, emotional, intellectual, moral, etc., distinguished by gender.
To think, for example, that women are in general one way and men in
general another presupposes the existence of profiles determined
categorically by sex: men on one side, women on the other. Patriarchy
is, on the one hand, a discourse written by men to justify masculine
privilege and, on the other, a repressive political practice. It is
ideology and power. And it depends on gender separation. Otherwise, the
whole world would degenerate. In order to dismantle patriarchy, it is
necessary to recreate another discourse, a discourse that will not only
degenerate ideology but also establish a new form of political
relationships.
Politics is a notion proceeding from the concept of âpolisâ: the ancient
Greek city, which was the germ of western civilization. Its organization
is configured definitively by the Roman idea of âpublic thingâ (from the
Latin âres publicusâ). In ancient Rome, publicâor commonâmatters were in
the hands of a group of patrician men. Early on they wrote the law that
relegated women to another space, outside of the public space. In
Greece, poets were also expelled from this public space. The Platonic
project of the âRepublicâ did not consider either artists or poets to
have sufficient merit to integrate into matters of state. Of course,
women were relegated to the home. In reality, everyone except the
patricians was expelled from public matters. In order to justify the
expulsion of the aesthetic from public matters, Plato repeated
insistently âpoets were liars,â given that they did not fit with his
sophist logic. In the same way, they were also considered effeminate and
sentimental. This is something that is still repeated and thought in
various circles, especially those relating to power. The infantilization
of women, poets and artists, of indigenous people, minorities, primitive
cultures, etc. has been carried out through exile to the feminine
sphere. This is associated pejoratively with the weak, emotional, and
illogical. Said notion was early on learned via force by the colonized
communities and later universalized by the civilizing logos:
instrumental logical thought. So, the public thing (res publicus)
reifies social and inter-subjective interaction among humans and
accelerates the process of reification.
In Spanish, to speak of âresesâ (cows)âto refer to cattleâis to speak of
things. For the logos, nature is a thing that is instrumentalized.
Patriarchy has instrumentalized not only women, but also men. It is, to
be sure, an ideological ramification of instrumental reason, because it
constructs generic categories between men and women in order to suppress
and control.
Peculiarity dismantles these categories. A woman is a peculiar and
unrepeatable creature. A man is another peculiar and unrepeatable
creature.
The categories âwomanâ and âmanâ tend to annul this peculiarity while
simultaneously engendering separatism. Maybe the only possible politics
that truly destroys hierarchical forms of social and inter-subjective
interrelation would be through the carnival. This is a festival in which
all of the petals of human peculiarity unfold without systemic bases,
except those ordered by nature itself. And it should be celebrated every
day. All of us have a place in the planetary garden: men and women, boys
and girls, the elderly. Our biological differences or sexual preferences
do not have to mean that some are banished from the planetary garden.
The distinction between private and public has been constructed
artificially in order to guarantee the repressive functioning of
patriarchal control. To abolish this distinction would also mean
abolishing gender notions that marked the beginning of Western
civilization.
The division of labor is not in itself the notion that produced
technological-instrumental thinking. It was a kind of division of labor,
organized in such a way so that some began to benefit from the labor
force of others. The division of labor is nothing more than a practice.
In contrast, instrumental reason is the product of the practice of
control which generates sophisticated forms of labor division, put in
place in societies of mass production in which the standardization of
the world crystallizes itself: in cities. In communities constructed on
a human scale, with direct and personal social relations, face-to-face,
the practices of instrumental control donât fit. What do fit are
practices of mutual cooperation. For example, while someone cooks,
another prepares the seed beds to cultivate garden vegetables, or works
the soil of the plot, where the beds will be created. Others gather
firewood or collect the fruits of the orchard. When a woman gives birth,
others help with water and care. While some have more energy, others,
like the elderly, walk more slowly. This is the way of life and the
organic movement of nature, divided into seasons, days and nights. There
is a pendular temporality The division of labor can be an organic
behavior of social activity instead of a salaried imposition that
conditions life. In a community constructed on human scale it is
impossible to do everything. Ubiquity has been denied us. When everyone
does a little of everything, simultaneously, or in parallel rhythms,
without specialization, it will be possible to live in the perpetual
present. Only in this way can we transgress the linear notion of planned
time. When our existence achieves the possibility of expressing itself
in the present progressive, we will be living in the here and now. This
will imply loosening the shackles of standardization.
The carnival is a âmemento vivereâ: it reminds us that we need to live
and celebrate the voyage of life with dignity integrity, solidarity,
love and tenderness. It is also a practice that can transform itself
into a politics of the common good.
Art operates like a symbolic appropriation of reality. The act of
representing reality or mediating our relation with the worldâthrough an
object or product of symbolic artâreinforces the process of reification.
Art is a representation that replaces reality. In this same way it is a
form of mediation of social and inter-subjective relations. Said
mediation is produced through cognitive reason, which filters the modes
of appreciation of reality. Becoming familiar with reality, the subject
internalizes it. This is an appropriation that occurs, straining reality
through a utilitarian and functional sieve. The codes of the filter are
the codes of instrumental rationality, which projects the expansion of
the subjectâs interiority over the worldâs exteriority. This develops
the cognitive mechanisms of appropriation, categorization, and control
of the otherâthat which is always unknown and unfamiliar. These
mechanisms are the product of fear of the outside. Because of this, the
projection of interiority upon the exterior world produces an expansive
and colonizing zeal. This zeal in turn projects the ego over the other:
the external world (nature), and the creatures that inhabit it (human
beings, animals, plants, and the soil). The expansive projection of the
âIâ over nature accelerates the process of reification.
Kant was enraptured by the majestic spectacle of nature. This emotion
produced in him a kind of âmental agitation,â which he called âsublime.â
But this emotion is also the living experience of the dread that is
sublimated through art, the petrification of the natural spectacle of
the world. When art is an institution or a mere objectâsymbolic and
separated from lifeâit is converted into a symbol of the process of
reification. Sophisticated meta-art is nothing more than a symbol of the
symbol, a reification of reification. This process sharpens the
ideological mechanism of the reification of the subject itself, which,
when commodified, alienates itself from reality and loses perspective.
To replace instrumental reason with aesthetic reason does not mean
simply replacing the mechanisms of reification. Reification in art
exists because art symbolizes that which has been taken from lifeâthe
experience of beauty. Art and life have been divided into two separate
planes, without any real interconnection. This makes art an institution
of the sublime, while life is the praxis of enslavement. Art has been
the pressure release valve of alienation. Traditionally it has sheltered
those values and energies distanced from life, permitting the
maintenance throughout âhistoryâ of the illusion of humanity. The
separation between art and reality has created a situation in which both
planes of experience are lived as isolated spheres, without spirit or
emotion. Art becomes petrified in museums, in galleries, in salons and
libraries, while existence continues to the rhythm of the minute hand
that subjugates salaried work. There, beauty is suppressed, joy
domesticated, pleasure enslaved, and peculiarity made uniform. Art is
the negative mirror of reality that compensates for the miseries of life
with the illusion of liberty. To remove art from the sphere of the
institution means living art in life and vice versa. It means destroying
the alienation that implies the distinction between the artistic and
intellectual, and the vulgar and manual. It means beautifying life and
enlivening art, both as a unified and organic whole. It also means
creating a humanity of artists, and humanizing the artists who already
exist.
In every epoch militants have wondered what the revolution will be like
and what will happen after it comes to pass. Maybe this futureânear or
immediateâwill not be as bloody or implacable as some prophets have
visualized it. Maybe it will be as calm as a fertile and fresh stream,
as a meadow. Maybe it will be like a garden cultivated with patience and
hands that distinguish the peculiarity of every strain of plant.
The garden of peculiarities manifests itself in a way that some confuse
with identity. Identity conforms itself in a reflexive and reactive way
with relation to models that integrate dominant identifying categories.
These categories form parts of a map: the North-South axis, Latin
America, Africa, First World, etc. These are the symbolic categories of
civilizing order. In the same way, these categories are constructed
according to structural patterns. This is how standardization functions.
Identity then reflects a series of other identities that are erected as
paradigms, but which in practice are imposed on the subject without
prior warning: nationality, race, class, sexuality, ideology, language,
mother, father, etc. These notionsâgenerally taken for granted and which
the individual learns almost through osmosisâare the labels of
standardization.
Identity is the act of identifying with something, making oneself
identical, whether it be a type, model, norm, pattern, level, or
reference. Standardization adjusts itself to the model; it typifies.
Peculiarity, on the other hand, delves into those subjective zones that
situate the subject as a whole that inhabits totality and relates with
as many other subjects as there are peculiarities. The notion of
peculiarity dismantles the structure of power, which promotes
homogenization and authoritarianism because it does not fit in the
hierarchical order or the sickness of competition. The subject is
capable of relating to all of the other creatures of the planet without
the necessity of standardizing anyone. Recognizing peculiarity in other
creatures permits coexistence. It dispels the mental module molded by
the iron mask of instrumental reason. If one carefully observes the
peculiarity of another, the subject does not complete the process of
otherization because the understanding that the other is as peculiar as
oneself, who constitutes the subject and the totality, is revealed. To
recognize that the other is nothing more than an I, another peculiar
being that also exists in the world, is liberating.
Through otherization, the other is reified, whether a human, or the
environment. This mechanism of reification fragments the internal
subject, displaced from its totality since birth. When the self and
everything conform into one totality, reification disappears. Then, the
subject which constitutes the peculiarity of a beingâlearns the magic of
artistic appreciation. This substitutes the module of instrumental
reason and poses a new challenge: aesthetic reason.
This does not negate the necessity of creating identity blocks in order
to resist the cultural, economic, and military penetration of the
civilizing order. In factâ from a political point of viewâsubordinate
identities and liberation movements exist. Clear examples are the
movements of the ethnic minorities in the First World, the indigenous
movement in Latin America, movements for the liberty of sexual choice,
the feminist movement, the workers movement, separatist and
anti-neocolonial movements, the urban anarchist resistance, the
squatters movement, movements against neoliberal globalization, the
ecological and green movement, human rights organizations, artistic
movements, rebel movements, etc. In other words, problematizing identity
as a notion is arguable from the point of view of anti-authoritarian
movements that oppose resistance to the process of standardization.
However, from a political point of view as well, it is preferable to
understand these movements as constellations of peculiarities inhabiting
the garden of reality and resist the sorties of the instrumental
steamroller. The ideological machine of standardization homogenizes with
its titles of identity.
When the garden dismantles hierarchy, every aroma, every color, every
form, every taste and every ripple create a landscape whose unique and
unrepeatable drive opens the doors to appreciation of beauty. This
substitutes the module of instrumental reason for an aesthetic vision
that radically displaces the utilitarian and functional logic of the
system. It is the first step toward the peculiarization of the world.
And it not only opens the mind and disconnects the human brain from the
machine of ideology, but it also breaks the shop windows of all
commercial chains, negates authority and shouts with a clear and
pristine voice, ENOUGH!
The "instrumentum" is a mental device that modulates technological
thinking. It operates like a tool and makes possible the mechanisms of
technical operation. In Greek, the word âtechneâ has a double meaning:
manufacture and revelation. The latter is the capacity to make the
present apparent. For Heidegger, âtechneâ leads in two directions:
toward technology or toward âpoiesis.â Art also makes the present
apparent, but without the instrumental logic of efficiency, or the
economic ideology of competition and comparison, whose core is based on
transactions.
When art is removed from the institutional sphere to be reinstalled in
the praxis of life, there will no longer be a separation between life
and art. Of course, life should be lived as if it is a work of art. And
art should be experienced in life: not in salons, libraries, museums, or
the mausoleum-homes of the ultra rich. When art is practised in lifeâand
vice versaâthere is no need for developing a âsui generisâ art market
that promotes the mass production of art through mechanical means. Art
is realized in an artisanal form, and it implies a genuine aesthetic
appreciation. This appreciation is nothing more than the manifestation
of a mental module different from instrumentalization that, in a certain
sense, can still resuscitate the illusion of humanity. In the same way,
aesthetic reason can be a hope. Otherwise, every other pathâbe it the
freeways of instrumental reason or the prehistoric cavern birthplaces of
symbolic, representational artâleads to total destruction; avoiding
reification is desiring life. The representation of realityâas mediation
between nature and consciousnessâproduces a reifying effect. Total
reification occurs when this representation substitutes for reality. And
so initiates an infinitely reifying escalation that is only stopped by
death.
Symbolic art transformed artisanal aesthetic practice into a fetish,
creating distance between âpoiesisâ (the act of creation of the
appearance of the present) and life (where the creative act expresses
itself). By maintaining art and life in dissimilar spheres, instrumental
thinking divests life of certain basic values like solidarity,
integrity, dignity, tenderness, etc. In fact, sometimes it is only
possible to find said values in art or in the vital praxis of
unalienated life, fragmenting human life in a radical way and creating
the basis for the production of a lucrative artistic market. In this
way, the alienation of modern human life justifies itself and
denaturalizes everything that comes from nature, naturalizingâas a
counterpointâthe pipeline of alienation.
In order to deterritorialize the state it is imperative to oppose
militarism and its ideological baseâthe idea of the nation state. If it
were possible to suppress the imaginary of the imagined community, those
which exist in the diverse nation-building projects, community would
become a real group of people with faces and identifiable names. Its
daily interaction would be on a human scale, and the community would
truly exist. In this way the state would be deterritorialized.
The idea of the nation state is linked to the idea of race: the
foundation of xenophobia and racism. The state has never stopped being a
classist and racist instrument of control and oppression. Its
territorialization occurs through the movement and deployment of armed
forces. In order to dissolve the state it is necessary to dismantle
militarism and the arms industry. The state operates as if it were a
great national warehouse that invests in warlike exercises: wars. With
the dissolution of the state the nation is deterritorialized, and
borders lose their reality, becoming what they really are: artificial
limits constructed by the high priests of all kinds of nationalisms and
regionalisms. These limits are the political bonds imposed by the state
on its subjects. Nationalism continues to subjugate people through the
sedentary practices derived as much through urban control as through the
territorial economy of agriculture. The effect of these practices is
domiciliation, which attaches itself to the domesticating action of the
state. Notwithstanding, when the apparatus that promotes the concept of
national territory dissolves, one of the mechanisms of standardization
also stops functioning. To move freely from one zone to anotherâfrom
community to communityâwithout being subject to customs or police
controls, brings with it a freedom that is embodied in daily practice.
Constant movement is an uncontrollable force. Its libertarian character
is found in its capacity to abolish sedentarism and domiciliation,
destroying all state control. To displace oneself is to undomesticate
oneself. Going from one place to another, meeting people, learning their
languages and understanding different visions of the world is a
liberating praxis. This praxis sharpens peculiarity.
Fascism is fomented by nationalism: a feeling of national property
exacerbated by the possessing and monied classes. This feeling is
transferred to the dispossessed and poor of the cities through the
mechanisms of civic, official and national propaganda and
indoctrination. Some people, for example, repeat discourses that are
spread by ideology in the first person plural. The verb is conjugated as
âwe,â promoting an idiomatic control and reinforcing identifications
between country, flag, government and people. To say, for example, âwe
have a park, a mountain range, a good sports team, or a stable economy,â
implies a kind of linguistic acceptance of an imposed and/or assigned
collective national identity. This is the royal we, adapted to modern
times to make the people think that the government and its financial
institutions represent the common individual.
People speak of the actions of the government as if they have had some
participation in governmental decisions or in the use of military
repression. This is the nationalist alienation that facilitates the
appearance of fascism. Indoctrination is reproduced through schools,
sports, traditional values, rules, official narratives and means of
control. Propaganda is brought to life through luminous screens
(television, movies, information technology, etc.), the press, radio,
education, etc. Fascism is crystallized through the notion of nation.
Because of this, all assigned and/or imposed notions of community
identity tend to reinforce said notions: nationality, regionalism,
language, social role, professional relationships, religious beliefs,
familial clans, brotherhoods and orders, work relationships, job or
profession, etc.
Real community does not walk the path of these applied identities. Real
community has to do with camaraderie and friendship. And it isnât
difficult to imagine. Those who constitute it are those family and
friends we see daily and with whom we prefer to relate and enjoy every
day. There, everyday solidarity is experienced and the presence of the
state is negated. There, mutual recognition and true respect exist.
There also, borders are deterritorialized, and the torpid banners of
xenophobia are bravely repelled.
Drugs are the only taxonomy possible. There are two kinds of drugs:
chemical and natural. The former depend on mass industrial production.
The latter are part of nature. They are cultivated, harvested or found
in open country (plains, mountains or desert). Through the use of
natural drugs humans are able to revisit a time of ancestral wisdom when
natural and holistic medicine was practised Use of chemical drugs, on
the other hand, grew with the industrial revolution and with the ascent
of scientific medical doctors to power. This was beginning of the
tyranny of the men in white lab coats Chemical drugs control patience,
rhythm and passion. Their objective is to make sure that the
dysfunctional subject readjusts itself to the system in order to
continue producing submissively. If perchance the white-togaâd priests
fail in this attempt and lose control of the patient, their treatment of
last resort is to throw the patient into those ideological centers of
social reclusion: mental hospitals, hospices, shelters, old folksâ
homes, etc. These centers are the refuse dumps of terminal illness.
Legal chemical drugsâadministered by the state through its health
ministriesâhave as their twin illegal chemical drugs. Besides being a
lucrative business, these drugs allow the state to justify repression in
zones considered by the state to be out of control: urban ghettoes,
marginal neighbor hoods or the guerrillaâs jungle. In other cases,
illegal hard drugs are used as pretexts when âjusticeâ and its
Praetorian Guard pursue individuals who are subverting the dominant
order.
It is exactly the illegality of these drugs that generates large profits
and rationalizes authoritarianism.
Natural drugs, on the other hand, liberate because they allow one to see
in the darkness of alienation. They help the body. They are
biodegradable and are sources ofenergy. The hemp plant, for example, is
a source of rebellion against the very industries that exercise
ideological and energy control. The pharmacological industry imposes one
vision of reality. Then, the petroleum, mining and forestry
industriesâthe triumvirate of the society of production and mass
consumptionâcarry out the material concretization of this vision of
reality. Natural drugs, on the other hand, are curative. While any
alteration in consciousness in highly alienated societies pro vides an
escape hatch that allows individuals to appreciate nature, in primitive
societiesâneither alienated nor alienatingâ natural drugs are a
ratification of the fact that reality is not linear, nor does it
manifest itself on only one plane.
In effect, through natural drugs primitive communities have experienced
the multiple character of reality. As the earth is not fiat, neither is
reality singular. Rather it is populated by as many folds and
multiplicities as nature has peculiarities. The surrealists pointed out
that the dream world is also part of reality, just as much as the waking
world. The possibility that there are other worlds, without
three-dimensional linear logic, has been proven through the use of
psychedelics. The experts and doctorsâthose who work for the society of
production and mass consumptionâcall any attempt to alter the perception
of reality through natural drugs escapism. When the escape toward the
appreciation of nature becomes an energetic force, the experts and
doctors leave their work in the hands of the army or police. This is the
so-called war on drugs.
Natural drugs are highly subversive. Every leaf or blade that liberates
and alleviates already exists in the planetary garden. Thus, there is no
reason to manufacture them. It is a fact that ancestral wisdom is
related to natural medicine. Many women were accused of being witchesâby
the doctors and experts of their timesâand burned alive at the stakes of
the Catholic, Protestant and patriarchal Inquisition. Thatâs
civilization.
Eating, smoking, boiling and swallowing natural drugs are acts of shared
solidarity. The occurrence of these acts depends on the health of
people. When the rhythm of life is controlled by the automated tic-tac
of the standardizing machine, the general level of health is diminished.
Alienation and ideology are a sickness. Natural drugs weed the garden
and work the soil. Every time natural drugsâorganic like we areâare
ingested, we recuperate from the biological and social diseases produced
by alienation and ideology. Humanity needs to recover from the trauma of
civilization. For Chellis Glendinning, civilization is a state from
which one needs to get better. The trauma of the first day of classes,
the nervousness provoked by the threat of expulsion from school, stomach
pains, irrational punishments, or the impact of institutional repression
against the libertarian manifestation of the being that wants to flee
from alienation and ideology, are all consequences of a traumatic
experience that we try to ignore day in and clay out. Civilization is
the foundation of the forced training that privileges the symbolic over
the imaginary in order to break the state of natural âsavageryâ that we
all inhabit.
Natural drugs unfold the petals of the imagination. This might be the
effect we produce ourselves every time we interact organically with the
environment and we expand our universe toward that which we havenât yet
dreamed, but can imagine. Our presence has a hallucinogenic effect. We
are, in effect, a powerful drug that can illuminate everything we
imagine. And once we are liberated, there is no chemical drug, nor
screen, nor army that can stop the enticing and opiating effect of our
own presence. In order to construct a new world it is necessary to
imagine it. And to imagine it, it is necessary to liberate oneself. This
liberation entails the creation of a new humanity. This is the
importance of natural drugs.
The impact of human life on the planet and all other living creatures is
inescapable. The consequences of every single life are inevitable: we
walk and we destroy. The destructive effect produced by our existence is
amplified by instrumental reason. Instrumental reason is nothing less
than a mental module that operates like bewildering ideology: it permits
neither feeling nor understanding. Once entrapped in this framework,
consciousness rolls up like petrified tissue. In order to sensitize
oneself, it is necessary to explore the aesthetic. Art and poetry help
us to see in the midst of alienation. Abolishing instrumental reason
does not mean abolishing logical or analogical thinking, and even less
so intelligence and practical capability. Analogy and logic coexist in
nature and in the human mind as an inseparable whole. To associate, for
example, the chirping of crickets with the purring of nature, like a
happy and satisfied cat, is part of aesthetic thinking. Analogy is
manifested through logical, intellectual and linguistic procedures, but
its approach is aesthetic before it is instrumental, privileging the
appreciation of the natural world and its beauty instead of the
functionality of what can be extracted from nature. In order to abolish
instrumental reason it is necessary to de-alienate oneself and to
unlearn ideological and social training. This is a challenge that must
be focused on dismantling the tool that permits this training: the
language that constitutes the subject.
Without language the notion of the subject vanishes. Instrumental,
aesthetic and ethical reasonâdivided in separate spheres between
economics and politics, art and poetry, ethics and religionâpermitted
the appearance of language. Instrumental reason, however, took control
of language, thus generating the forms of exploitation of humans and
nature imposed by civilization through a sophisticated system of
division of labor. Anthropologists believe that that moment was the
beginning of history, of agriculture and sedentarism. It may also have
been the beginning of the slow process of the objectification of the
subject and the acceleration of the expansive motion of civilization
rationalized through the notion of progress. The Socratic maxim âknow
thyself caused the subject to philosophically reify itself in order to
transform itself into its own object of study. In addition, this meant
the dissection and separation of the subject from reality; it converted
itself into an entity apart, different and estranged from the whole
formed by nature.
John Zerzan argues that language appropriates reality in order to later
replace it. According to anarcho- primitivist thinking, the division of
labor produces a reifying sequence that ends with the creation of the
symbolic. For Zerzan, the symbolic not only represents reality, but also
replaces it. This substitution is a form of alienation and constitutes
the beginning of civilization, where instrumental reason amplifies the
mechanisms of control of language, standardardizing absolutely
everything and completely rejecting any peculiarity. In this way reality
is transformed into a set of objects, whereby the subject is one more
object that fits in the box of a category. Civilization and alienation
are then two cysts of the same nature that must be removed.
In 1987, J.A. Lagos Nilsson published in Buenos Aires the anarchist
manifesto âContracultura y provocatiĂłnâ (Counterculture and
Provocation), in opposition to the hackneyed terms culture and
civilization, terms which were utilized by the dictatorships of
Argentina and Chile to justify themselves and rationalize their
genocidal practices. For Lagos Nilsson, the cultural world is a model, a
pattern, a frame, or a reference: it is what standardizes. In this way,
standardizing culture and civilization are a product of the expansion of
instrumental reason, which is manifested psychologically as the
projection of the ego over nature. Alienation produces the estrangement
of the subject from the world, causing the subject to become strange to
the external world and to him or herself. This is the sickness that is
transmitted in the pipeline of ideology. In this whirlwind, only art and
poetry liberate and de-alienate. This liberating action is rooted in the
counterculture, which is nothing more than a form of a meaningful
provocation. For obvious reasons, the counterculture negates the
official culture and advocates for the right of peculiarity. Clearly
then, counterculture does not makes pacts or coexist with power,
although the latter tries to co-opt the former. If it achieves
co-option, counterculture becomes nothing more than a fetish of
consumption, or a museum piece that power hangs on the lapel of its
jacket like a military medal.
Power perpetuates itself through the practice of repression and the
sickness of alienation. If itâs true that alienation is a practice of
the symbolic, it still is not necessarily an expression of symbolic
culture. The distinction between the symbolic and symbolic culture
permits one to distinguish between representation and the reifying
substitution of reality, and the aesthetic manifestation of being.
Confusing civilization with culture means mixing two equidistant
manifestations. Civilization is the projection of instrumental reason.
Its most sublime expression is embedded in the cities, which,
legitimized as second nature, organize the process of ideological and
social training in modern subliminal concentration camps. Culture,
instead, when it emanates from the subject, is a form of being, or a
counterculture. Culture regulates itself through the interaction of
being. In civilization, on the other hand, whose game board of
interaction is the market, true self-regulating mechanisms do not exist,
since its base of support is utility, profit and usury. Civilization is,
therefore, one-dimensional. In contrast, culture is multiple, peculiar
and multifaceted. What orients the forms of cultural manifestation is
being. Doing relates to manipulation and production. And while this can
be a creative act, it is profoundly tied to instrumental functionality.
Being and creation interweave the thread of culture. Truly, we all have
culture, that is, a way of being. And if itâs true that culture mediates
our experience, then our being is cultural.
The struggles of the indigenous communities in Latin America are nothing
less than the battle for the defense of their culture against the
penetration of the civilizing machine and standardizing culture. The
culture of a community is the aesthetic manifestation of its
communitarian being. This is symbolic culture.
Neanderthal men and women, who disappeared approximately thirty thousand
years ago, created polished rock figurines and constructed flutes from
bear bones which were capable of playing as many as three musical notes:
do, re, mi. They also had a form of communication and spiritual and
artistic activities. Symbolic culture does not necessarily drive down a
civilizing highway with no exit. The Maya, for example, abandoned their
cities without any explanation. It is likely that they had understood in
some moment, that their civilization was not sustainable, although there
is no concrete proof of that. It is also possible that they had a clear
understanding that the technology that they would develop would be so
drastic that they would not be able to return to the earth what they had
taken from it. This cosmology of retribution still forms a part of the
symbolic culture of the Maya, whose understanding of nature easily
surpasses the modern western cosmologies.
In contrast with the Mayan culture, western civilization and its
replicas have provoked nothing but the accelerated destruction of
nature. When Marcuse proposes that history negates nature, he refers to
civilizing cultureâstandardizationâand not human culture as the
expression of being. The manifestation of being is aesthetic and
cultural. This manifestation turns radical when it becomes the peculiar
expression of being. For this reason, to negate a personâs way of being
is to colonize him or her. This practice reproduces the expansive
impulse of civilization, which is nothing more than the destruction of
nature and human beings.
Civilization, therefore, colonizes and domesticates culture, reducing it
to a standard categoryâthe official culture. To not recognize that every
creature on the planet has a manner of beingâevery cat, bird, plant,
flower, ourselvesâis to negate the peculiarity of nature. To negate
culture is to standardize. Human beings have different ways of being.
Everyone sees, feels and appreciates the world culturally. Every culture
is peculiar. Constellations ofpeculiarities are cultural forms that turn
into the idiosyncrasies of subjects.
The genocides and ecocides of the North and South American continents
have moved in one main direction: to negate indigenous culture. Culture,
indeed, is counter to civilization. They are not synonymous, but
distinct territories. Civilization implies standardization; culture,
peculiarity.
Language fulfills a double function: it standardizes and imposes
meaning, but it also liberates. Through language, the subject resists
the objectification produced by instrumental reason through its
standardizing practices: ideological categories, industrial monoculture,
ranching, etc.
Conversation de-alienates and congregates, dismantling the systemic
politics that tends toward individual isolation. Standardization, in
contrast, cretinizes. In order to do this, it simplifies language,
reducing our capacity to recognize reality. This simplification reduces
itself to the Orwellian newspeak, which reduces consciousness and
atrophies imagination. The subject is not consciousness in itself, just
as language is not in itself communication. If we trust the results of
science, it is possible to establish that writing appeared sixty
thousand or more years ago. The calcareous marks left by Australian
aborigines on rocks are proof of this.
Obviously, this is not western writing, but the marks are
meaning-carrying graphic inscriptions. It is also probable that language
has always accompanied human beings, whether it was a form of guttural
verbalization, which little by little became more clearly articulated,
or as simple gestural communication. Some anthropological texts argue
that language and symbolic thinking have existed for millions ofyears.
The stone tools, which can be dated at two and a half million years, are
evidence of the existence of rational mechanisms not only related to the
symbolic, but also to biped biological evolution, to the use of the
thumb and group organization. Marcel Griaule shows that for the members
of the African Dogon community, from Mali, the first word enunciated by
human beings was âbreath.â This suggests that the origin of language was
not articulation, but breath itself. In effect, the peculiarity of
speaking is characterized by the biorhythm of inhalation and exhalation
in every human body. Speaking is as proper to and unique as the accent
each one of us has in our own language.
The subject organizes its personality structurally. In this way the
subject annuls consciousness, although it can also amplify consciousness
through language. To create consciousness, therefore, means realizing
our existence in the totality of the cosmos. Through consciousness we
create the world. That is, we mark and point out events or issues which
otherwise would remain in darkness or silence. Alienation, on the
contrary, blinds, causing individuals to follow a track wearing blinders
or to be enclosed in cubicles.
Language is, therefore, a tool of indoctrination, but also a weapon of
liberation. Under the present conditions of human, animal and ecological
domestication, the alienating separation of the subject from totality
can be seen as an irreversible process.
Returning to a primitive state prior to articulated language implies
unlearning languages (this is practically impossible without eliminating
human beings from the face of the planet). Abolishing the notion of
language, even without an exhaustive genocide of all humanity, is an
unrealizable and sinister project. Whatâs more, there is no guarantee
that the instrumental aspect of symbolic thinking would not reappear at
some moment in the development of life. And with it would resurge new
forms of alienation and functional domination over nature and the
normalizing control of human beings. Hoping for, thus, a Utopian,
synthetic construction of a primitive communist order based on hunting
and gathering, which by extension guarantees the survival of only the
strongest and replaces language with telepathy, also seems unlikely.
Life has lost its value through the symbolic control of instrumental
reason. In alienated and alienating societies, only art and poetry can
return the original value of life, given that the aesthetic sphere has
been separated from the range of the vital. This separation is
nothing-more than a strategy of compensation for what has been lost. In
order for art to give value back to life, it is necessary to destroy the
divisive line between symbolic creation and existence, mixing life and
the aesthetic in a single cycle.
Thus, combating the symbolic with the symbolic implies a contradiction,
but also the possibility of ideological emancipation and the abolition
of instrumental reason. Orienting human activities toward aesthetic
reason can correct the course of life across the planet and save many
creaturesâand ourselvesâfrom total extinction.
The Slovakian Slavoj Zizek states that every ecological project oriented
toward changing technology to improve the state of our natural
environment illegitimates itself, in as much as every initiative of this
kind trusts in the very source of the problemâthe technological mode of
relating ourselves to the other entities in our surroundings. This is
the same contradiction that is repeated in combating the symbolic with
the symbolic: writing, articulated thought, language. Both
contradictions, however, are false because they act as systemic traps
that promote inaction: silence in one case, complacency in the other.
Truly, the effects of human life on the planet are unavoidable: we walk
and we destroy, we breathe and we annihilate. This destructive impact is
amplified through instrumental reason: the technological mode of
relating ourselves to the other entities in our surroundings. And it is
multi plied by the mechanisms of mass production and mechanical
reproduction. Instrumental reason is, therefore, a functional and
bewildering ideology that uproots the aesthetic from life by virtue of
imposing a civilizing project on the planet. This project mediates
social, human and animal life through domestication. Instrumental reason
is an ideological taming that puts people to sleep, makes them
apathetic, erases the imagination and atrophies the senses. When wild
animals are tamed, they stop being animals and become domestic
beingsâpets. To be domesticated and dominated is to be imprisoned in the
domus: an architectural repetition that standardizes the landscape. The
domus of wild animals is the corral, ranch, stable, hog shed The human
domus is a solitary room or a set of rooms shared by room mates that
draws the gray panorama of the city.
Alienation in the citiesâsocial spaces on the verge of fatal
collapseâand the destruction engendered by mass production are defining
characteristics of life under the control of the domesticating action of
instrumental reason. Aesthetic reason does not propose human dominion
over nature. On the contrary, it foresees human existence in a mode that
is interdependent with and in nature, without any control. Life is a
flexible and organic net of daily events. Aesthetic reason broadens
consciousness, amplifies the imagination and promotes integrity and
responsibility as necessary ethics. It is a project that does not lack
elasticity, or practical sense, or intelligence. But it privileges the
artistic over the functional. Its purpose, then, is the radical
unfurling of all the anti-authoritarian peculiarities that inhabit the
planet.
A world oriented toward aesthetic reason suggests a communal and
artisanal lifestyle. The cosmovision that integrates such reason is
biocentric. It weeds out the anthropocentrism from the planetary garden
and deposits enlightened humanism in the compost bin. Biocentrism is
nothing more than the realization that life is the sphere that includes
reality, without discounting that other realities and perceptions of
reality exist. The garden of peculiarities is a project of humanity: to
build life in a planetary garden populated by non-hierarchical,
autonomous and libertarian communities that operate on the basis of
analogical and aesthetic thinking. Analogy permits the establishment of
associations and connections in simultaneous, multiple, flexible,
transparent and interdependent forms, dismantling linear logic and
isolationâall on the same flankâin order to combat all the per verse
forms of alienation. Maybe in this garden it will be possible to fully
communicate with each other by means of certain faculties that have been
lost through and atrophied by domestication. Maybe we will develop other
senses.
Hens, for example, are able to recognize up to fifty members of their
community. Their organizational system is based on mutual recognition.
In this way, they avoid any conflicts over feed and establish a social
dynamic based on empathy with other hens, giving preference to older
birds while pecking. With industrial domestication, chicken farms were
filled with hundreds of hens that were forced to forget their natural
wisdom and not recognize the other members of their species, awakening
violence, if not insanity. We human beings have lost and forgotten our
natural wisdom. The Australian aborigines that still walk about the
desert are able to communicate telepathically at distances of up to
several kilometers. When poetry and art become an a-systemic
counter-ideology, our faculties reawaken. Then we are able to create the
world and freely express the peculiarity that the system negates. Some
peculiarities have more open petals than others. This has no importance.
Equalizing standardization is a socioliberal trick that cynically denies
social egalitarianism, given that it exists by virtue of hierarchical
differences. What is important is that every petal opens, at its own
rhythm and under its own conditions, establishing an intimate
synchronicity with the world of living beings. The equalizing machine is
unjust to peculiarity. Life is an energy that permits the re-creation of
the world into different peculiar worlds. The free creation of
constellations of peculiaritiesâfree association, in socioliberal
parlanceâ is a notion that can help to better describe the conditions of
life under the influence of the organic movement of self-sufficient
communities. These communities flourish on gregarious living
togetherâsociality, in socio-liberal termsâand allow the peculiarity of
each creature to blossom. This flowering is the total and liberating
unfurling of our being, and permits an organic interaction between human
beings and the planet.
In the garden of peculiarities, flowers and plants realize the process
of photosynthesis to the rhythm of their own sap. No one stops them.
Nobody slows them down. Nobody speeds them up or controls them. Animals
and insects that sneak through the garden cross the ephemeral heartbeat
of the present. And so is the perpetual motion of the earth kept alive.
And so persists the planet: the astral domus that provides us shelter
and keeps us alive.
Were there anthropophagous practices during the hunting-gathering stage
of human development or even earlier? Has human meat been the
alimentation of other humans? Do we have a cannibal past? It seems that
the answer is yes, although we do not know if cannibalism has been
practised toward the end of human survival, or as a purely symbolic
practice.
The study of molars in human craniums and tooth marks on human bones
found in caves in Great Britain demonstrates that the ancestors of the
English were cannibals. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the
doctors at some European courts prescribed a diet of human organs to
cure certain diseases. Organ banks were not uncommon during that epoch,
and neither were the executions that were necessary to fill the
storehouses with kidneys, livers, intestines and other human parts
needed to satisfy the appetites of courtiers hungry to cure what ailed
them. The use of the guillotine slowed at the same moment when Europe
erased its anthropophagous history and began a new stage: attributing
cannibalism to conquered peoples, which were seen either as noble
savages or dangerous barbarian âman-eaters.â
In the novel El Entenado, based on the memories of the Spaniard
Francisco del Puerto (who arrived on the east coast of the Southern Cone
with the expedition of Diaz de Soils in 1516), Juan Jose Saer narrates
in beautiful prose the experience of a captive in Guarani territory.
Indo- American cannibalism was not sustained toward the necessity of
survival, but as a symbolic ritual: to distinguish the other from the
âweâ and so affirm the precarious order of the universe. Every time that
the Tupis Guaranis staged a âmeat festivalââor carnivalâthey reaffirmed
their role in the preservation of the fragile cosmic balance. This
ethnic and anthropocentric vision, filtered through cannibal practice,
had nothing more than a symbolic and ceremonial purposeâto assert that
the true people did not eat each other. Indeed, the cannibals only
tasted strangers or others who, in the eyes of the ethnocentric village,
did not exist or form part of the true people. The dialectic exercised
between cannibalism and group selfidentification, as a strategy of
identity construction, would have been the base of all symbolic
expression. The notion of âweâ is distinguished in this way from the
notion of âthem.â And this distinction is ratified in ritual through
cannibalistic practice. It is, in a certain light, a mythology that
explains the cosmos and fixes a conviction of belonging, which is
otherwise unarticulated. This might be what Francisco del Puerto
witnessed during the nearly ten years he spent in captivity. And this is
the reason why the Charruas (the Guarani) of the Plata River kept him in
captivity. A witness to the cannibalistic act was necessary to ratify
the existence of the Guaranis among the inhabitants of other villages.
But for the Spanish empire, cannibalism was used as an argument to
demonize indigenous cultures and so justify their blood-soaked genocide.
The notion of âweâ proceeds from another earlier notionâthe âI.â The
notion of the âIâ rises from the consciousness of our own mortal
condition, which foresees a hypothetical, future and dauntless
situationâdeath. That visualization of the future is that which
separates human consciousness from the survival instinct, or
hypersensitivity to risk, or any other animal consciousness.
When the Spanish soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo entered under orders
of Hernån Cortés into the city of Tenochtitlån, constructed on
LakeTexcoco, his amazement ofthe marked and imperial grandeur of the
Aztecs was diminished by the terror he felt in the presence of human
cadavers piled inside the Aztecsâ sacred temples. The Aztecs did not
only practice human sacrifices; they were also cannibals. In his
narrative, Bernal Diaz remembers when Moctezuma is served on his royal
plate tiny humans, nothing more than children and babies. In this way,
Bernal Diaz demonizes the other and scandalizes the Spanish, whose fear
finds voice in religious discourse. The distinction that the Europeans
made establishes the difference between âtheyâ and âwe.â That is,
between barbarityâatheist or possessed, fomenting anthropophagyâand
Catholic civilization, notwithstanding that Catholics also symbolically
eat and drink the body of Christ. This reasoning is utilized by the
empire to justify the genocide that occurred in the Americas and thus
reaffirm the supposed right of conquest. The Christian cross and the
liturgy are still symbolic forms of sacrifice and cannibalism. The
sacrifices and anthropophagous practices of the Aztecs were symbolic
forms of identity, culture and collective reaffirmation and were a
direct consequence of their cosmovision.
Other South American peoples also practised ritual sacrifices, although
it is still an open question whether or not they were cannibals. These
sacrifices were offerings to the Gods. Their objective was to give
sustenance to the spirit of the elements in return for protection. The
Mapuches of southern Chileâone of the few peoples not conquered by the
Spanishâsacrificed lambs in ritual healing ceremonies. The
witchdoctorâor machiâ extracted the heart of the animal and bathed in
its blood. This was nothing more than a symbolic act of redemption
before the forces of nature. The symbolic appears with the rise of
consciousness, represented by death. The recognition of our mortal
condition would be the generating impulse in the creation of our notion
of the human and the non-human, of the animate and the inanimate, of the
raw and cooked. In such a context, cannibalism and animal sacrifice were
the reaffirmation of the human. Eating the other, whether human or
animal, was to ratify the existence of a âweâ: the primitive horde or
the original tribe.
Freud suggests that civilization is based in the repressed, in the
taboos of cannibalism and incest. This repression is the origin of the
bases of western civilization. The civilized is the repressed. Culture
also represses, given that it must hide its anthropophagous character:
plagiarism, citation, and mere reference. Symbolically, culture swallows
itself in a net of connections that expand in a chain reaction.
Mercantile and enslaving vampirism is culturally based on a
cannibalistic drive whose most appropriate representation is found in
the popular expression, âsuck the blood of others,â that is, of the
dominated. Of course, when culture represents cannibalism, it does so
with the filter of the spectacle. It makes cannibalism into a caricature
or gives it aberrant characteristics. It is a ânaked tangoâ or the
distortion of an individual who has lost all sense of humanity. In the
first case, cannibalism is a spectacle that contradicts the dance of the
flesh. When the Guaranis staged their bacchanals, they did it to the
rhythm of dance and drums, and it was supposed to be a celebratory
remembrance of their own humanity. While Christians awaited Lent, they
staged a carnival, another form of âmeat festival,â but one that was
sublimated by the symbolic. The ânaked tangoâ is a stylized, but also
raw, drama of the anthropophagous act. It is manifested in fascism,
torture and humiliation. On the other hand, the image of the cannibal as
an individual aberration is an ideological trick that reinforces the
propaganda that fosters self-control, self-censorship, and oppressive
force. In both cases, it represses the multiple peculiarity that
inhabits nature. That is the veil that negates the origin of the idea of
humanity.
It is probable that symbolic culture and its reifying ramifications have
come from a first consciousness, the certainty of death. This certainty
generates, through the self-reflexive mechanisms of consciousness, the
recognition of our own existence. This carries with it a vision of an
âI-we,â in opposition to an âother-them.â In this sense, cannibalism was
the symbolic affirmation of the belligerent cosmovision between the
notions of âusâ and âthem.â
Selective anthropophagy (eating the stranger but not the neighbor) is
the primordial establishment of a differentiating and rationalized
self-conscious revulsion that mediates the notion of the human and
non-human It is not certain, in any case, that humans are carnivorous.
In fact, all indications point to the contrary. We are herbivorous,
vegetarian, or vegans who still eat meat or have barbecues as a form of
metabolic inertia owing to a diet imposed ancestrally for symbolic
reasons. When the eater eats non-human meat, the reward is the status of
human.
Geographic variants also have influenced regional diets. The food supply
of the Eskimos, for example, is nearly a hundred percent carnivorous.
However, their location in a region where survival is difficult is due
to a previous displacement, determining their diet. Many nomadic peoples
kept themselves in motion following the routes of buffaloes or other
animals. Maritime resources caused many tribal groups to settle in polar
areas and dedicate themselves to fishing as a prolongation of an older
carnivorous practice. This was also the case with the Alacalufes or
Selknam in South America. Today they have totally disappeared.
To assume our animal nature implies understanding that modern society is
reproducing an ancestral form of cannibalism. We are animals that eat
other animals. We are herbivorous animals that eat the meat of others.
Of course the hunting and fishing tribes of the Paleolithic and
Neolithic were meat eaters. But those societies had already worked and
polished stone, which implies the use of certain techno-instrumental
thinking in order to construct tools. It is also probable that this
incipient application of instrumental reason came after the appearance
of consciousnessâthe realization of our own death. It is also probable
that instrumentality came after the rise of the notions of a collective
âIâ and a collective âyou.â Said notions are the embryonic forms of
cannibalism, which is nothing more than a symbol of the ratification of
community identity in the primitive horde, in the clan and the tribe. In
this sense, it is probable that the consumption of non-human meat has
perpetuated a symbolic mechanism of self-affirmation that was imposing,
little by littleâand maybe for reasons of survivalâthe carnivorous diet
on beings with flat teeth and porous skin.
Physiologically, humans are herbivorous beings. We do not have claws,
and we perspire through poresâin contrast with carnivores, which
perspire through the tongueâand our small incisors are not sharp like
those of carnivorous animals. Whatâs more, we have flat molars for
chewing and grinding and our intestines are twelve times length than the
total of our body, similar to other herbivores, the longitude of whose
intestines fluctuates between ten and twelve times the body length. If
we compare this with the intestines of carnivores, the extension of
whose intestines is only three times the length of the bodyâwhich
permits the rapid processing of decomposing meat through the digestive
systemâand the presence of strong stomach acids that help to digest
meat, acids which are twenty times more potent that the acids present in
the stomachs of humans and herbivores, then we see that there are no
physiological reasons to suppose that humans need to eat meat. The
reasons for our carnivorism are ideological. And they tend to justify
human supremacy over the animal world.
Michael Klaper asserts that humans are not carnivores, either by anatomy
or nature. In one of his books on the vegan diet, he shows that human
beings cannot effectively eat raw meat with pleasureâin the case that we
would do thatâand he contrasts the pleasure of eating a raw apple,
watermelon or salad with the carnivorous act, which generally requires
seasoning and cooking in order to render it as far as possible from its
real nature: dead flesh and nerves. In this sense, the carnivorous diet
is a kind of necrophagy, which has been socially imposed, and which
derives from anthropophagous practice. Both diets are nothing more than
acts of symbolic ritual. Cannibalism served as a rite of distinction
between tribal identity and the identity of others while carnivorism was
a ceremony necessary to distance humans from animals. In effect, through
carnivorism, an anthropocentric vision that ideologically guarantees the
âsuperiorityâ of humans over animals and morally justifies human control
over nature has been perpetuated. In both cases what is eaten is
objectified. And in both cases there are symbols and reification.
Prehistoric hunting tribes expanded their territory looking for animals
to hunt. They chiselled and polished stones as weapons of defense and
attack. They designed stalking, territorial control and assault tactics.
This was the base of the development of the logic of instrumental
aggression that gave rise to combat and hoarding. But it wasnât a
homogeneous process. The Indians of the North American plains, for
example, respected the buffaloâwhich was sacred in their culturesâand
they did not mutilate it on a massive scale, nor did they domesticate
it. In carnivorous civilizations, however, this first expansive movement
still persists. It is a fact that hunting is one of the cornerstones
over which the foundations of carnivorous civilization were raised. The
murderous irrationality of civilization operates as a parallel with
human irrationality. In effect, we are the only species of animals that,
being herbivorous, prefer to nourish ourselves with dead creatures. This
is total madness.
Current science and the dominant cosmology not only look to totally
submergeâby representational meansâthe cannibalistic past of humans,
they also have an instrumentalizing functional ingredient. The use of
human embryos and fetuses in biogenetic medicine, the use of animal and
artificial organs in human implants, the âMcDonaldizingâ expansion of
the carnivorous diet, the biotechnological production of transgendered
foods, biopiracy, sport hunting, the buying and selling of newborns,
etc. are all ideological modes of the symbolic reconstruction of a new
notion of the subject: cyborgs.
Cyborgs are robotized beings that are connected for a greater part of
the day to different kinds of machines (computers, televisions, cell
phones, answering machines, cars, headphones, escalators, pacemakers,
clocks, alarms, etc.).
Cyborgs and automatons are a direct consequence of present-day science
and modern cosmology. They have no memory because their thinking follows
the route programmed by the idea of linear time. They lack spontaneity,
although they improvise. Spontaneity arrests their programming because
it prioritizes the organic and natural present. Thus, it foresees the
discourse of life.
Improvisation, on the other hand, is centered in immediate action and
does not anticipate the consequences. It is the lucrative logic,
cybernetic urgency, and desire for profit.
The cyborg is boring and insincere. It lacks transparency and
responsibility. Its food is based on the pure science that fabricates
genetically manipulated and modified organisms, hiding what they truly
are with their appearance: false legumes, vegetables that are no longer
vegetables, plastic foods, canned fruit, and so on. All this responds to
a strictly regulated plan for the future and life that accords with
models and goals that are also strictly designed. Along the same vein,
the cyborg is incapable of discerning the destructive and violent effect
of its actions. Rather, it denies it.
In the same way that the carnivorous diet and religion were naturalized
cultural interventionsâinterventions that symbolically represent a form
of repression caused by a civilizing action whose end is nothing less
than the construction of human identityâso also the sciences and modern
machines are naturalized cultural interventions that represent the
repression of the notion of humanity and whose end is nothing less than
the construction of a world of cyborgs. The cyborg is the model of
modern standardization. Its integrity is a double standard: it defends
the violence exercised by the oppressors, and it attacks the
self-defense of the oppressed. Its ideal diet consists of pills. And its
ideology is alienation.
Any attempt at standardization whatsoever is a form of domination
because it imposes a single mode of being over peculiarity. Every
value-driven or ideological matrix is an example of this domination,
given that the only possible integrity is connected to the multiple,
simultaneous and peculiar flowering of nature. Standardization is a form
of colonization that imposes a unifying pattern over the differences and
peculiarities of everyone. Every model hides a system of planning that
organizes the model itself. Every plan requires linear temporality in
order to âprogressâ and foster the motion of development. Present-day
science and modern dominant cosmology justify the colonization of the
peculiarity of natureâpeople, forests, plants, animals, birds, soil,
etc.âby way of the indexes of the so-called âstandard of living.â Those
who accustom themselves to the various standards of living become
automatons. The automaton stands in opposition to nature, losing its
humanityâmaybe constructed by cannibalism in the primitive hordeâand
winds its memory like a videotape to be re-programmed by the
standardizing machine. Later it survives by replaying the same tape.
This is boredom. In the same way, the automaton erases its past, is
blind to the present and loses its history, which would have been, in
other circumstances, ancestral, as it is with other humans. The
automaton values only what it remembers: its electronic passwords, its
license plate number, the code numbers and barcodes assigned to it by
the great machine-mother, etc. It lacks, therefore, history. This is its
pride and its perfidy.
In a place in the American Northwest, on the outskirts of Eugene,
Oregon, a hippie beanfest is celebrated annually. This fair is not quite
a quilombo, although it could be. Quilombos are disordered, rebellious,
turbulent and Dionysian. They permit peculiarities to meet in a natural
state of anarchy manifested in the perpetual present. Notwithstanding,
the beanfest of the Northwest induces every participant to highlight one
aspect of their individuality, normed by a varied gamut of previously
conformed cultural types: fashion, fetish, appearance. This standardizes
the revelry and impedes a true celebration, uniforming the fun. By
contrast, the true carnival is a ritual of remembrance, rings the
warning bells over our own reality and comprises a primordial
knowledgeâthat human beings are nothing but nature. Death is sufficient
demonstration of that. The fair, on the other hand, needs rules,
security systems, guards, undercover police, all of which go against
nature, the planet and the joyous expression of being. Today, for
example, it is illegal to smoke a joint in the fair. But it wasnât
always this way. In fact, the Oregon Country Fair began as a sixties
festival that wanted to emulate the carnivals of the Middle Ages and was
highly anti-establishment in the beginning. Hippies and flower people
from all over the world attended, unfolding their colors and rebel
smiles against uniformity.
The locals form musical combos, and they play a kind of long folksong
that is associated with country music. The curious thing is that they
sometimes sing songs that can appear to have too much in common with the
lives of their listeners. In reality, this is not strange. It is a
product of standardization. The heroes and characters of the songs
become stereotypes produced, massified and administrated by the symbolic
culture that reproduces control through the image. In this way,
standardization appropriates peculiarity and transforms it into a
recognizable typology: archetypes, types of physiologies, stereotypes,
etc.
Stereotypes are vulgar forms of understanding standardization and exist
only by virtue of it. For example, bus drivers always wave to each other
when they pass. This happens wherever civilization has had a uniforming
and homogenizing impact. The more stereotypes a society has, the higher
its level of standardization and alienation. The stereotype is an image
charged semiotically and semantically by categories. Its actionâwhich is
projected onto realityâis imposed over oppressed groups in the forms of
exoticism or demonization. The exotic is a category constructed by the
dominant order to infantilize the other and appropriate him or her.
Demonization provides self-justification for aggression against the
other.
Without categories, the typologies and collective images cannot be
widely recognized.
Stereotypes spectacularize uniformity. This is obvious in mass culture:
in the mass media culture of audiovisual communication or âmainstreamâ
American culture, for example. Its ideology is mediocrity, and its goal
is to make sure that all human beings fit like cogs in a big and
incomprehensible machine. Toward this end, standardization is a process
of human cretinization through the average, standard formats. These
formats contain the values of plutocratic democracy that hold the line
behind the gains of the âmediocracies.â That is to say, the
standardizing government and ideologies: democratic concepts that are
openly embodied by fascism. For the beanfest to again become some kind
of quilombo, it is imperative that all the wild feathers of peculiarity
be unfurled. If not, the party is transformed into a concentration camp
with confetti and balloons, but without sharing, or laughter, or
companionship. This is not very different from what happens at official
events, which are repeated over and over again in schools and public and
private institutions, labor ceremonies, and so on. Truly, the objective
of these pseudo-celebrations is to prepare the ideological and emotional
foundation for propagandistic indoctrination and repressive control: the
twin weapons that the system uses to maintain immobility. The quilombo,
on the other handâas a true carnivalâis a form of social staging of
consciousness, whose Dionysian practice liberates and separates the
reveller from the machine of training and conduct control. That which is
Dionysian, in this case, not only disrupts the culture of âreason,â by
antithetically opposing itself to the Apollonian, it also dissipates
instrumental norms by dismantling the duality between Bacchus and
Apollo, which fades away in the rebellious character of the celebration.
Every revolution has reforms while, without revolution, reforms never
really take place. The means and the ends meet in a perpetual present in
which reality, imagination, desire and its realization, art, and life
coincide. In the same way, the dividing line that limits the imaginary
and the symbolic orders, the organic and the structured, the animated
and the totality is erased. This binary combination of different
subjectsâwhich generally impose a cover over the consciousness of the
understanding of the worldâfalls apart when one perceives the tactic of
immediacy as part of a global strategy. In the same way, the
comprehension of totality as an interdependent whole erases the dividing
line between liberty and fear, and chips away the shell that separates
human beings from the natural world.
The notion of liberty is found on the earth. And behind the steel bars
rises the unfortunate experience of the caged prisoner. The revolution
must transform daily events into a form of ethics realized in a
perennial present. This is a bit speculative, in that it is based in the
ethical urgency of transformation. Immobility, in any case, pays homage
to repression. Only movement liberates.
The standardizing system domesticates. Domestication is a form of
dominion that turns living creatures into homebodies that laze around in
their domus. In this way standardization forces domiciliation, whose
culminating expression is found in curfew. Like all systems, this
generates its antibodies: the unemployed, who act like a reserve labor
army and the homeless, whom the system throws away.
Mass production generates a crisis of overproduction and stagnation:
unemployment, poverty, social class distinctions, and so on. In
addition, it galvanizes the logic of accumulation and reifying
rationality by means of mass media control, producing as a consequence a
kind of massive added value of images that reinforce consumption and
accelerate accumulation itself.
To dismantle the standardizing system and mass industrial production it
is necessary to reconcile two radical points: the means of social
relations, and the forms of alimentation and production of necessary
items. Clearly, in order to construct a planetary garden, it is a
necessity to promote non-hierarchical forms of social relations that
spread organically like a net of constellations of peculiarities. That
is, as a set of communities or groupings similar to tribal bands.
The basis for a system of alimentation should be horticulture and
permaculture, practiced in self-sustainable community plots and
maintained only and exclusively for local and immediate satisfaction of
the community (not for sale, nor for the accumulation of goods or
money). It goes without saying that no one should regulate the work of
another and all decisions should be made as a group. Responsibility is a
conscious act of solidarity. Leisure time should be highly valued, as
well as the capacity to appreciate nature and the universe, which are,
after all, sources of vital energy. In effect, the heart of the planet
and of the cosmos deserve to be celebrated in the everyday as well as in
the collective. In this way leisure, the aesthetic, and social life can
be woven together outside of all hierarchy, constructing a politics
based on celebration and a carnivalesque, ritualistic coexistence.
Consumption can be mediated through a kind of cooperative in which the
members contribute as they can. Obviously, in the planetary garden there
wonât be money or any sort of commercial trading that will fuel the
value of exchange. Yet the production of manufactured articles is
inevitable. We human beings manipulate and make tools. This is the
nature of our opposable thumb. Thatâs how it was in the Paleolithic and
how it is today. The function of our capacity to grasp objects and
create beauty is represented in two vital practices: the gathering of
food and the sharing of love when we give and receive caresses. In this
sense, the utilization of appropriate technology independent of the
processes of mass industrial production could be key in the hour of
survival. Engineering based on the human heart, like bicycles or wind or
solar energy are concrete alternatives to industrial pollution. If
social life is visualized in open communitiesâin daily contact with
natureâthe risk of reification dissipates. Nature not only takes care of
us, it also frees us and makes us healthy, helping us avoid the traps of
alienation.
The word forest comes from the Latin âforis,â which means âgateway to
open air.â Undomestication implies the abandonment of the domus to go
deeply into the open airâinto the jungle or the forest. This abandonment
is the quintessence of all liberation. Thus, crossing the threshold from
immobility means breaking down the doors of the domus and sweeping away
all the driveways, eliminating the concrete. It also requires undoing
ourselves from all that ties us to the post of civilization, and that
not only negates human animality, but it also denies its pleasure-giving
and rebellious nature.
John Trudell proposes the distinction between authority and power to
allude to, on the one hand, the nature of the standardizing system
embodied in civilization and its domesticating practices, and, on the
other, the capacity for resistance against said system. In fact, all
authoritarian practice has its roots in the notion of authority, which
is nothing more than the exercise of power to subordinate and force
obedience to hierarchy. Power is a means of repression that perpetrates
authoritarianism.
Authority subdues through power. So authoritarian power is nothing more
than the force that deludedly tries to utilize vital energy against
life. Authority lacks power, but it utilizes force. Power, on the other
hand, can be either authoritarian or liberating.
The structure of power perpetuates authority and irremediably
neutralizes controls, tames and corrupts. Because of this, resistance
against power using the same mechanisms as power can be disastrous for
resistance movements. This has been the truthful and sad history of the
national revolutions of political, social, or economic independence.
Authority and power are locked in a vicious circle that snares every
attempt to make the passage into open air. Curiously, in the corruption
of power and loss of authority lies the force of energy. Corruption of
power permits resistance to break the bewildering fence of authority,
which is materialized through the arbitrariness of discourse, laws and
rules. Its lack of consistence is its weakness. Because of this, in a
liberated society the exercise of societal authority should be avoided
at all cost. Whichever punishment or sentence culminates in imprisonment
and deprivation of liberty of an individual tends to newly construct
that authoritarian fence that the standardizing system has perfected
through its ultrasophisticated repressive techniques and from which has
originated the present-day panoptic society of control.
In communitiesâor constellations of peculiaritiesâdispersed in the open
air, power dissipates in force, becoming a means to action and mobility.
This is the energy or black matter that, according to quantum physics,
does not emit any kind of radiation and is distributed in a similar way
to visible materialâeach one being aware of the presence of the other.
Power and authority are worthless in the face of this cosmic energy
force. The dilemma consists in not reproducing the dominant logic. Thus,
ostracism is a group defense that does not damage the integrity of the
free creation of constellations of peculiarities. The decision to expel
for a period or permanentlyâin the case of irresolvable conflictsâa
member of the community is much healthier and less threatening to the
vital praxis than any other kind of punishment. There is an obvious
contrast between ostracism and the aberration of executionsâa horrific
institutional practice of extermination, genocide and repression.
The means of action and mobility that the energy force is situated in
come from the vitality that emanates from the planet and living beings.
Their source is the very same nature that maintains all of the creatures
that inhabit the earth-garden. It is, whatâs more, a magnetic energy,
concentrated and indestructible, and it can dismantle authority and the
power structure without major effort. In the same way, thinking of the
system as something powerful is laughable. The capacity to depose it is
in our spirit. And not even all of its technical apparatus of
intimidation, control and death can stop the avalanche of energizing
force when it erupts. This is the true human power. It is needless to
say that before life on this planet is extinguished by way of pollution
and the irresponsibility of the present-day self-destructive model, all
human tracesâand certainly civilization itselfâwill disappear from the
face of the earth. This will happen inexorably if we do not correct with
absolute urgency the sinister direction assigned by the rudder of
standardization. Otherwise, nothing will remain except for a pair of
skulls in whose molars will be found an herbivorous nature with a
carnivorous past.
Not being civilized means being outside of standardization. For example,
to pronounce a word erroneously according to the dictionary, in
opposition to common sense and the phonetic rhythm of the language, or
to go against the given use of a particular linguistic community is to
throw a rock at the tyrannical minute hand of uniformity. Television has
been in the last forty years the sinister vehicle of standardization. It
has not only imposed a way of speaking, but also of seeing and of
dreaming. Uncivilizing oneself means breaking with mediacratic
homogeneity. To liberate oneself it is necessary to grasp the uniqueness
of each and every one, that which constitutes the innate peculiarity of
the being. The poverty of progress is a product of self-standardization.
Ideologically, self-standardization means successfully learning the
modern training in order to think during the entire course of a life in
linear and progressive terms.
This vision of time, which determines the modern perception of reality,
makes every subject live life according to planned goals and promises
that never end up happening. This generates anxiety: the first step
toward alienation and toward postmodern emptiness that launches itself
into the abyss of nonsense. Another form of self-standardization is to
internalize the control of authoritarian power through paranoid and
self-repressive behavior. This reinforces self-censorship and denies
spontaneity by classifying it as noxious and inconvenient. As
compensation, it offers improvisation, which is conduct that does not
ponder or weigh the effects of human action on the planet and all other
living beings, thus negating the eternal inhalation and exhalation of
the rhythm of life. âSavageryâ is liberating oneself from the poverty of
progress, which is nothing more than the symbiotic mix of âpovgress,â
the registered trademark of the civilizing product, whose postmark and
barcode have been stamped in the office of standardization. âSavageryâ
is, among other things, the only possible richness, because it brims
with peace, abounds in time, and has life and spontaneity to spare.
âSavageryâ enriches the spirit.
The world is the projection of consciousness; a world without
consciousness is one-dimensional. The standardizing machine tends to
homogenize consciousness in its attempt to wipe it away.
The automaton lacks consciousness because it lacks reality. When all
consciousnesses project their peculiarities on reality, the notion and
sensation of the world is created. Given that language configures
consciousness, consciousness projects itself through language. The
importance of language lies in its capacity to construct the world as
well as in its talent for verbalizing experience. Thus, it is useless to
argue against generative linguistics, which advocates a âdeep structureâ
in all languages in order to prove the existence ofan innate mechanism
in the human brain that permits each subject to learn languages and
create neologisms. Whether or not language is innate has no relevance.
What is important is that through language the subject can liberate
itself because in this way it is able to verbalize and construct its
experience in accordance with its image of the world. This text is proof
enough of that. Other texts that will refute it are also proof. The
opposite would be muteness, censorship, silencing, persecution and jail,
sufficient proof that true language challenges control.
When the standardizing machine enters into action, it imposes a language
without senseâthe Orwellian newspeakâand an unreal consciousness and
world. In this standardized reality, language as well as consciousness
and the world seem to be alienating entities and reflections of
standardization. This is the trap set by ideology. Its objective is to
keep us tense, nervous and insecure, as well as to deny us love and
hope. Thus, they will achieve their aim if they keep us mute and
incapable of articulating our experience. Self-censorship and the
tangled tongue, which stumbles in its ineloquence, both originate in the
action of control.
Words can be seriousâand also magicalâbecause they concentrate the
energy that permits the movement of the world, like the wind that dances
in the leaves of the trees. That is art and poetryâthe dance of
landscape that lights our eyes and ourselves when we dance in the
foliage.
If identity separates the subject from other subjects and nature,
consciousness reattaches it. Clearly, without consciousness, there is no
possible change. Clarity and good sense are acts of consciousness
because they permit a comprehension of existence itself within the frame
of the totality of life. Consciousness feeds the imagination that
operates under creative processes. Intelligence, on the other hand,
proceeds rationally in that it stores data, processes information,
establishes associations, is self-aware, problematizes and gives
answers. It also adapts, questions and fantasizes. Fantasy is the
product of a peculiar kind of creation: Alice in Wonderland, for
example. Imagination, however, opens the possibilities for the eternal
fan of creation.
Consciousness can also be self-destructive and lead to suicide. The
ending of oneâs life by motu proprio is only possible through an act of
consciousness. It is, according to Albert Camus, an act of absolute
freedom. This generally occurs when consciousness is paralyzed by the
standardizing action that dispels imagination. When consciousness does
not imagineâwhich is, after all, how it expresses itselfâit
self-destructs. Aesthetic manifestation of the being is impossible when
imagination is annulled.
Technological appliances seem neutral. But in reality they are not
because they have a purpose. In effect, if they are used, they make an
indelible impact on consciousness. Thus, they also make the user
dependent: dominated, cretinized, infantilized, and tied to the stake of
alienation. However, if appliances are not used, they deteriorate, rust,
are infested with ants, or otherwise simply disappear from
consciousness. In a similar sense, all technological artifacts divide
humans into users and non-users. Those who advocate their use will not
hesitate to use their technological weapons of destruction and war in
order to dominate those who have no contact with technology. That is how
it has been, and that is how it is now.
Technology also divides through its domesticating effect. People work in
order to buy electronic appliances or other articles that promote
technology, or simply to have access to the services offered by
technology that generally promise entertainment or comfort, as well as
increased capacity to perform certain actions (to fly, for example, from
one continent to another, to paste documents on a word processor, to use
a video camera to record daily events with or to document police
brutality in order to denounce it). Technology mediates human relations.
It drives to insanity, isolates or connects, giving a common cultural
reference to many people who talk, live and communicate by and through
technological culture. In this way, reality and the world homogenize
themselves in accordance with the different programs of the
standardizing agenda. This uniformity is reinforced by the clear-cutting
of forests, the construction of malls, racial profiling, and so on and
so forth. Technology intervenes in all of these processes, which would
not be possible without the accelerated destruction of the environment.
This seems inarguable: technology is an apparatus one uses, throws away,
forgets or never has access to. Technology alienates. Technology
consumes and mediates human life. But technology is also a form of
approximation of reality filtered by a functional mental module that
arises in ideology. This is technological reason.
The sieve that separates the subject from its surroundings and bursts
the cocoon of consciousness constructs human rationality. The stagnation
of reason in its instrumental practices develops the technological
filter. And this petrifies consciousness. Consciousness has an immediate
effect that affects other consciousnesses, producing a general or social
consciousness. In this way, there are no isolated consciousnesses,
because when one interacts with another, the consciousness of both is
modified, altering, at the same time, global consciousness.
Technological reason has made consciousness begin to standardize itself,
standardizing everything simultaneously. In order to
self-peculiarizeâand also peculiarize everythingâand to create a better
understanding of totality and the self, it is necessary to steer
consciousness toward aesthetic reason. In an aesthetic reality, all the
possibilities of the imagination would open, and social consciousness
would be created in a way that is distinct from the blind and
bewildering way it is stimulated by mass society. This would lead to the
re-establishment of social relationships by way of the logical and
analogical reasoning that already exists in every peculiarity of nature.
In order to do so, it is fundamental that we give loose rein to our
being and let it express itself in the perennial present as a simple
aesthetic expression. Every peculiarity shines with its own light in its
meeting with every other being that connects with all and with life.
All living creatures have an impact on nature, including the plants and
trees, which stay silent before the pendular night and day. Ants not
only affect nature, they also affect humans. Of the 7,600 classified
species, a small number cause an infinity of damage as much by their
biting, chewing and invading of human habitat as by their boring into
gardens, defoliating trees and plants, wrecking constructions, fabrics,
wood, electrical installations, appliances and so on.
Ants enslave other insects and violently attack their enemies. Every
anthill functions collectivelyâthe ants work in harmony, feeding the
queen ant and defending her against foreign aggression. The warlike
nature of ants is the product of a highly sophisticated organizational
structure which causes them to go so far as to wage wars against other
anthills. In the course of the antsâ waging of war, the worker ants
clear paths to allow the soldier ants passage, while the soldier ants
lift branches and twigs that interrupt the escape or triumphal return
with termites or other creatures that the ants store as a food or energy
source for the winter (when the ants hibernate). Some species of soldier
ants have a superior body size to the rest of the colony, which brings
about a clear division of functions and tasks. The caste system is
tremendously inflexible and efficiently rigid. There is no mobility. In
this way, the hierarchy begins with the ant-mother, whose matriarchy
rules over the workers and soldiers. The smallest and most agile ants
are normally the workers, and they do most of the work. In general, the
workers are atrophied females that on occasion grow larger-than-normal
mandibles and also dedicate themselves to the defense of the anthill.
Ants appeared in the Cretaceous period, more or less a hundred million
years ago. They inhabit every continent in the most diverse climactic
conditions. They are essentially social insects, and they communicate
with their fellow ants using pheromones This form of communicationâ or
information transferâwhich functions like language, is carried out
through the rubbing of their antennae or the exchange of food or other
objects. Touch is very important, given that the eyesight of ants is
limited. Their vision doesnât reach more than a few centimeters, but
their sense of smell is highly developed. According to entomologists,
the vocabulary of ants comprises up to ten or twenty chemical signs (the
pheromones). Using these signs, ants are able to distinguish their
fellowsâ castes, give warnings about danger, lead from one place to
another, maintain the unity of the colony and recognize enemies, food,
or unexpected situations. Many colonies of ants live in nests made of
earth or wood. In this way, they protect themselves from their enemies
and the inclemencies of the weather. Whatâs more, ants store food and
other energy resources, for example other insects that they capture and
maintain in captivity.
Thomas Belt studied a type of ant in Nicaragua that completely sacks
coffee plantations and orange groves. Other ants ferment leaves and
enclose aphids in corrals. This practice is the defining feature of
their civilization. According to Belt, âsome [ants] are in charge of
cutting pieces of leaves with their scissor-shaped, while others on the
ground transport the leaf fragments to the ant colony. But these leaf
fragments are not food for the ants; rather, they let them rot and
ferment to form a fertile base in which they carefully insert pieces of
mycelium fibers. In this way they cultivate the mushrooms that feed
them. But even more surprising is the case of the so-called rancher
ants. They take care of and guard aphid populations so that they
reproduce to dizzying rhythms until they entirely cover the plants to
which they have affixed themselves. The ants caress and fuss over the
aphids and are rewarded with a sweet liquid that is, for the ants, an
exquisite delicacy. Sometimes they even construct small corrals in the
ant colony where they fatten the aphids and their offspring, which they
watch with great care.â This practice is very similar to human
civilization.
Ants are predatory. Plagues of ants, for example, will attack any living
organisms they find in their path. Fire ants attack and kill other
insects or small animals and tend to feed on dead animals. There are
other ants that are nomads and inhabit the desert. In the forest,
species of gardener ants are found. In fact, half of the forests of the
American continent have been planted by these ants. They protect certain
plants and trees from certain harmful insects and diseases. On the
shores of the Amazon river, for example, the so-called hanging gardens
suspended in the branches of the trees are nothing more than a natural
wonder created entirely by gardener ants, which transport leaves and
flowers to the highest branches and trunks to construct their nests.
This modification of the landscape undoubtedly has a positive impact on
nature.
The domus of the ants is known as the anthill. Hundreds of thousands of
ants can live there. However, when two of them meet, they only need to
touch their antennae to identify one another. Ants accumulate eggs,
which the fertile ants put in a designated place within the anthill.
Some worker ants act as nursemaids, feeding larvae that weave a silk
covering around themselves in order to become nymphs and end their
development in complete immobility. When the nymphs break out of their
cocoons, they are already fully formed ants that in a few hours will
join the common and social work of the colony. The anthills are made up
of tunnels and passages that communicate with one another, indicating an
architectural consciousness that recalls human cities. If the anthill is
found in arid zones, some ants sacrifice themselves in the wet season,
bloating themselves on water. They thus maintainâfor months, even up to
a yearâthe water needs of the community. If their companions go in
search of water, they themselves gently serve it from mouth-to-mouth.
In a conference that took place in August, 2001 in South Africa, the
anthropologist Richard Leakey pointed out that the world is suffering
from the loss of anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand species every
year due to human activity, which seriously endangers the equilibrium of
the planetary ecosystem. This massive extinction is comparable to that
which affected the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Clearly, all
living creatures have an impact on nature, but the impact of human
civilization on the planet is highly destructive. It is calculated that
the weight of the ants on the planet equals the weight of the six
billion humans who also inhabit the earth. But the impact of human
civilization is radically distinct from the effect that ants produce. As
a matter of fact, if human beings disappeared from the planet at this
moment, it is likely that the ants and many other species that are wiped
out every year would survive.
On the other hand, if ants disappeared, life on earth would not be
possible. The activity of ants is essential for the health of the
planet. They not only work and aerate the soil, they also move it and
fertilize it, playing an even more important role than earthworms. Ants
can move up to twenty tons of soil during the entire lifespan of a
colony. In contrast, the insane, destructive and contaminating effects
of a single city in its total lifespan are still immeasurable.
Termitesâalso known as white antsâare the mortal enemies of ants. Ants
capture them and maintain a war to the death against them. Both species
compete for the same vital space. Termites gnaw wood and other organic
material. Ants can be carnivorous and will even eat others of their kind
if the need arises. During the summer, ants store grains and seed as
winter provisions.
Termites descend from a family distinct from that of the ants (termites
are distant relatives of the cockroach), but they have a system of
social organization that is very similar to that of their enemies. Both
species build nests to inhabit and develop modes of social life,
modifying nature. Some species of ants build their nests in tree trunks,
others by gathering and folding leaves to live inside. The majority of
ants excavate the soil to form galleries and rooms that are perfectly
organized. This is the modified land where they raise their
civilization. Termites also construct their coloniesâwhich are similar
to isotopic domiâin rafters or the soil. Termite colonies in the soil
are hillocks that can reach great heights and take forms that stimulate
the imagination. In fact, termite colonies seem artificial designs that
make one realize that the best landscape art is found in nature itself.
It is only necessary to learn to look.
This erases the dividing line between the world and art, a line created
early on by ideological instrumentalization and its taxonomic
methodologies. Nature is aesthetic in itself.
Let's speculate for a moment. In addition to the current hypothesis
about the extinction of the Neanderthals as a lineage separate from the
Sapiens about thirty thousand years ago, there are two other hypotheses.
One of them argues that in reality there was a process of mixed breeding
between the Neanderthals and the
Sapiens, which would have meant a gradual disappearance of the
Neanderthals due to a slow hybridism hegemonized by the Sapiens. The
other hypothesis, a little less optimistic, argues that the Neanderthals
disappeared when they were denied access to their traditional hunting
and gathering territories by human beings. It is possible that both
hypotheses are correct. In this day and age it is almost impossible to
sustain positions of racial or evolutionary purity of the humanoid
specimens that once inhabited the planet and that, it seems, appeared
with Australopithecus, who appeared five million years ago in Africa. It
is logical to think then that human beings are completely intermixed.
The face of a Neanderthal child, re-created as a computer model by the
paleo-anthropologists Marcia Ponce de Leon and Christoph Zollikofer at
the University of Zurich, illuminates some facts about this humanoid
species that it is supposed to have inhabited Northern Europe, the Near
East, Central Asia, and, in all likelihood, Western Siberia. The jaws of
the Neanderthalsâwhich had almost no chin and strong teeth and molars,
well equipped to rip meat and grind rootsâdemonstrate that the diet of
these humanoids was carnivorous. It is likely that, clue to their
maxillofacial characteristics, they did not have a rich verbal language,
but they did have other ways of communicating as well as spiritual and
artistic rituals. In contrast with the ants and termites, which maintain
an implacable war, or other belligerent species like blowflies, which
neglect sucking the nectar of flowers and pollinating in favor of
attacking bees and eating flowers, it is very possible that in effect
there was a sort of hybridism between Sapiens and Neanderthals.
It is also possible that this first mixing provoked a genetic
transformation that created a new group of hybrid beings that not only
adopted the carnivorous diet as a form of subsistence, but also played a
crucial role in the shift toward agriculture. We know that this meant
sedentarism and domestication, processes that later devolved into all of
the homogenizing forms of organization of collective life. And while
human beings are social beings, we also need solitude and leisure.
In contrast with ants and termites, the human world is not constructed
only in relation to work. Neither do we spend all of our time in search
of food. Instead, sometimes we rest, laugh, or play. We need fun, time
off, and idleness. In the hymenoptera world, by contrast, the rigid
caste system makes sure that each active member of the colony is always
performing its task: the queen-mother (like the machine-mother), the
workers, the soldiers and the slaves.
This ultra-hierarchical system of social organization is completely
lacking in imagination. And the inflexible and efficient societies of
standardization approximate it, making sure every memberâs assigned
labor maintains the life of the tremendous and incomprehensible gears.
There the machine-mother incubates her eggs and the system is
perpetuated.
For this reason, slogans like âImagination to power,â âImagine the
impossible,â or the Einsteinian maxim, âImagination is more important
than knowledge,â keep their validity even while ideological repression
and the control panel continue dominating the human race. Although,
clearly, this is pure speculation.
The bourgeois garden expanded like a plague under colonialism. Itâs
pretty, but fake. The scenarios installed by civilization, as artistic
as they are, lack reality. They require space and the eradication of
undesirable species, turning the living world into a backdrop over which
the garden can be imposed instantly, like a Polaroid.
The civilizing garden enslaves, torments, and sooner or later, will die.
This happens because the bourgeois garden standardizes the land, instead
of unfolding it in order to have an open and horizontal space. Whatâs
more, its objective is luxury, neglecting the edible and
self-sustainable garden.
The bourgeois garden is about enclosure. In addition, through the
illusion of illuminating civilized space, it kills the night. The garden
of peculiarities deterritorializes and topples hierarchies. That is its
nature. It allows the garden to grow, organically, under the concept of
mutual recognition between the gardener and garden. It doesnât try to
control the landscape by making it uniform.
On the contrary, the point is learning to live with nature and in the
midst of nature, orienting the human effect more toward aesthetic
practice than standardization. Such a lesson starts by recognizing the
otherness of nature as our own otherness. Only in this way is it
possible to dissipate the ego among the ever-growing foliage in search
of shelter rather than conquest.
The notion of peculiarity opposes standardization and dualism.
Standardization flattens and erases biodiversity. In the words of CĂ©sar
Vallejo, it is âLomismo [sameness] that suffers name.â Dualism in its
own right has sustained the genealogy of cognitive thinking that has
constructed disciplines and methodologies through the opposition of
terms that are apparently contradictory or equidistantly opposed from
one another: A or B, good or bad, light or dark, concrete or abstract,
general or particular, bourgeois or proletariat, barbarian or civilized,
etc.
Indeed, the role of dualism is to simplify, although none of its
oppositions can be considered completely true since they are mere,
abstract representations of bits of reality and of nature. In the same
way, there are no oppositions more radical than others, or less radical,
given that the rational procedure itself is an error from the beginning.
What do exist are oppositions that are clearer than others because they
help us to fully comprehend certain relatively complex processes.
According to the above and following the Lacanian dualist model, which
opposes the imaginary with the symbolic, that is to say, the
non-structured world of a child who projects images over realityâwhich
is a liberated universe that still hasnât been structured by the formal
process of repression of symbolsâit is possible to distinguish the
following path. Symbols follow from the symbolic, whose orbit includes
the civilized orderâthe patriarchal grammar imposed by society.
Following this parallel, images derive from the imaginary, the
projection of interiority onto the world. So, images lead to
imagination, and symbols lead to symbolization, which in turn manifests
itself in rites. The ritual instrumentalizes nature, in order to
dominate it via the medium of magic or representation. This
instrumentality is functional and coercive because it structures and
manipulates. In effect, the different instruments of the symbolic tend
to represent reality rather than allow it to be fully comprehended.
Images, on the other hand, create the perceptions of the world that are
expressed culturally through the aesthetic and underlie culture. When
this occurs, the being is manifested aesthetically and unfurls all of
its peculiarities. However, instrumentalization brings about
standardization, which hides in its innards a controlling beat that
categorizes everything through the varied methodologies of taxonomic
classification. This process of standardization produces fetish, which
is nothing more than a false consciousness of reality. This foundation
of false consciousness is the spectacularization of life as well as
alienation.
There are two distinct types of insanity. One is material and reduces
life to economic survival. The other is ideological and generates
dehumanization and roboticization in the subject. Under the spell of
automatism, the human being separates him/herself from nature and from
his/her own natural condition.With peculiarity, consciousness is
created, comprehensively rehumanizing and reconnecting human beings with
themselves and with nature. Consciousness is neither intelligence nor
knowledge. It is the recognition of the other, and the recognition that
the relationship to the other does not exist solely in exclusive,
Hegelian, dialectic terms of the master and slave. Recognition can also
be inclusive. Consciousness allows coexistence based on mutual respect
and reciprocal recognition of others, who are nothing less than our
counterparts: the environment and creatures that inhabit it and that
constitute totality. Coexistence is only possible through a
corresponding comprehension of the peculiarity of all beings in order to
establish a radical empathy for the right of all beings to life.
The image that our inferiority projects on the world maintains its
aesthetic character. The image that has been reflected reinforces the
process of reification. In and of themselves, all images that separate
us alienate us. Each image is an act of reification, given that these
images represent reality, establishing mediation among human beings and
between the subject and the natural surroundings. This mediation
replaces reality. When the prehistoric child saw its own face in the
waterâs reflectionâin a lake, a pool or the iceâit saw nothing but an
image. This equation led it to identify itself with what it was seeing,
thus awakening the notion of identity. This notion led to the separation
between the individual and nature and fed the fracture between the
subject and the objectâthe foundation of human consciousness. In this
way, consciousness gives rise to alienation, and becomes
meta-consciousness: self-reflection on itself. However, without
self-reflective consciousness, the human being is defenseless against
the imperial control of standardization and the propaganda machine that
falsifies reality and manufactures a false and ideological
consciousness.
Modern industrial alienation works by denying the present and forcing
the subject to live in a kind of virtual reality that goes by the name
of âfuture.â The modern mentality is characterized by planning for the
future. This notion pierces the human mind like a steel bar running
through a line of individuals working on the assembly line. The horizon
of the future is experienced as unlimited time that advances
progressively in a blind race with no meaning or end. For the
pre-modern, religious mentality, the future is finite and ends in the
final judgment or the ascension of the believer to whatever paradise
happens to be promoted by a particular mythical-religious narrative. In
this way, both the modern and the pre-modern fix a temporality that is
outside of the perpetual present, thus inscribing the human mentality in
the camp of domestication. Experiencing the present, in the here and
now, leads to a pre-domestic state and rebels against the ideas of
planning and development. The notion of the future is therefore an image
that reflects ideology. And itâs no mystery to anyone that the fruition
of the future inhabits the arena of the impossible although its arrival
may be inevitable.
Difference homogenizes and makes uniform experience in two blocks that
are supposedly different. This is part of dualism. Beta is different
from alpha and vice-versa. In accordance with this binomial practice,
difference determines identity. But this is the trap of categorization,
a strategy of the standardizing empire. Understanding identity in this
way is to conceive it in belligerent, antagonistic and opposing terms.
Thus the peculiarity of each being is denied. Each creature is peculiar
and different from all other creatures, who are peculiar and different
among themselves. Difference reduces identity to only two identifying
blocks: alpha or beta, gamma or epsilon or any other pair. The
peculiarity of the self unties binary binds and amplifies our
self-reflective consciousness, the bridge necessary for comprehending
the experience ofthe being in totality. This comprehension necessarily
requires a ânew humanity.â This is the ânew worldâ that we construct
every time we disconnect from the standardizing machines and live our
lives in a different way and more naturally in order to de-alienate
ourselves and cure ourselves from the sickness of ideology, injected by
the syringe of propaganda. And difference is one more trap of
propaganda.
Barbara Enrenreich proposes that wars, like ritual sacrifice, are
celebratory practices that reconstruct the transition of the human
animal from prey to predator. It may be that human violence is the
residual memory of the repressed experience of having been prey, our
original place in the food chain. Through socialization and cooperation,
primitive bands were able to survive the attacks of predators.
Notwithstanding, the weakest, slowest, and defenseless were given up for
the good of the entire primitive clan. As soon as the youngest and
healthiest members were able to flee, the beasts had a feast, devouring
those left behind. This awoke a sense of danger and terror that
engendered the consciousness of death. Sociability was a first step
toward survival, giving rise to feelings of solidarity and community
cooperation. The experience of being prey is before that of being
hunter. It was only the manufacture of tools and their manipulation that
permitted humans to hunt other animals for food and in self-defense. In
this way they also sharpened domesticating practices. The dog, for
example, was mastered primarily as an animal for the hunt. It is
probable, however, that humans first engaged in scavenging, which gave
rise to carnivorous practice. With the working and polishing of
stoneâthe fabrication of tools and weapons for huntingâhuman beings
derailed the course of nature and converted themselves into predators.
This originated warlike thinking, and at the same time lay the
foundation of the instrumental, evolving development of reasoning. In
this process, carnivorous animals were viewed as deities, represented
many times in prehistoric cave paintings and symbolic rites. This
representation is tied to the practice of sacrifice, which, for example,
the ancient Greeks transformed into hecatombs.
Wars are nothing more than bellicose rites of human sacrifice carried
out in the name of âpolitical fathersâ who have designed the
standardizing and stupefying megamachine. Wars re-enact the horror of
being prey and stimulate the adrenaline rush of fight or flight;
meanwhile, they also heighten the conquering spirit of the predator. In
modern societies, antidepressants have suppressed adrenaline, repressing
the capacity to experience risk and subsuming instinct in
self-repressive and stressful frustration. The megamachine cretinizes
the population, which becomes a group of superfluous individuals easily
manipulated by nationalistic slogans, derived perhaps from a socializing
and pristine original sentiment. Militarism drives soldiers to a modern
hecatomb, whose only effect is terror. In the face of this terror,
climbing trees to defend them from clearcutting, liberating animals from
their cages, letting deer graze peacefully, organizing communal meals,
hugging friends, etc., are acts of love that thwart the logic of the
hunted and hunter. War is the material and symbolic re-enactment of the
transition to predation, and it crystallizes in the âterroristâ reliving
of horror. The utmost respect for all living creatures is the only
possible ethic that can oppose depredating aggression. Survival is not
sustained in the art of killing, or in politics, or in war. On the
contrary, responsible cooperation and community are essential for human
and planetary coexistence. Predation, terror and war are the sanguine
trident of instrumental reason, and its self-rationalizing logic is the
foolishness that annihilates consciousness and steeps the imagination in
fear. In order to amplify the consciousness to the detriment of genetic
determinism, it is necessary to banish the paradigm of prey-predator.
Opposing war is a first step.
According to anarcho-primitivist thought, the division of labor produced
a reifying sequence that led to the construction of the symbolic with
all its ramifications: numeration, art, technology, agriculture,
language, culture, etc. Therefore, the symbol is the dividing line
between prehistoric life, full of sensual vitality, and current
historical life, mediated by reification and delirious with alienation.
According to Marxism, this division was produced when society was
stratified into classes that were cemented by the appropriation of land
and knowledge by a group of priests who unfurled the map of social
petrification into dominant and dominated classes: masters and slaves,
feudal lords and serfs, bourgeois and proletariat, etc. In either
interpretation, it is recognized that there was a fracture between
prehistoric and historic time: feral primitivism in contrast to
civilization and domestication, or primitive communism as opposed to the
society of classes and social exploitation. The precise dating of this
rupture varies according to the anthropological source consulted as well
as the perspectives of the different agendas subscribed to by believers
in âscience,â but it is generally agreed that the adoption of
agriculture was the crucial moment in the great turn toward sedentary,
hierarchical, and repressive life.
Notwithstanding, and in spite of the established consensus, it is much
more probable that the âexpulsionâ from the primitive paradise dates
back to an earlier moment than the data usually support. It was that
moment when we human beings began to distinguish ourselves from nature:
the point when consciousness, identity and language formed the triangle
that simultaneously severed us from the natural world and created the
notion of humanity.
Human consciousness arises precisely from its separation from the larger
consciousness of nature and the cosmos, to which animals, insects,
vegetables, are still connected. Our consciousness separates us from
nature, producing an unavoidable division. It arises from two processes
that have to do with identification and verbalization. The first refers
to the notion of identity produced by the recognition of oneâs own
death. Consciousness of oneâs own mortality generates the idea of an âIâ
formed in opposition to the identity of the other: everyone else,
nature, the animal world, etc. This basic opposition between interiority
and exteriority is made understandable through verbalization. The
subject enunciatesâmentally or phoneticallyâthe signified âIâ, and it
leads to the notion of the external and the otherâI am what the other is
not. This initiates early on subjection to a table of contents and
arbitrary signs that are represented a posteriori in the form of a
grammar and that tend to reveal the sense of an âIâ and a ânon-I,â the
psychological basis of the projection of self over nature. Such a
process of self-comprehension of identity through language leads to the
animist experience of nature. Therefore, a spirit or âanima,â which
inhabits all the elements in the world, can be perceived. It is likely
that at this moment humans were herbivorous gatherers whose slowly
developing processes of identification and verbalization caused them to
initiate cannibalistic practices, as a ritual ratification of their
collective identities, which were later transformed into carnivorism.
This is the age of hunting, fishing and gatheringâbesides the change in
our position on the food chain.
The rite leads to the symbolic because through it the impulse to
dominate the âpowersâ of nature arises. This happens through the
ceremonial practices that are coded in symbolic acts with a ritualistic
origin. In the symbol is found the germ of all reifying practices that
derive from the divorce between the appreciation of nature and practical
coexistence within nature. This separation fosters the
instrumentalization of the environment whose first manifestation is
found in the shamanic magic that aspires to modify nature through
supernatural power. Shamanism is the practice of the invocation of the
spirit of the elementsâperceived in the animist phaseâso as to order the
course of nature according to the will of the shaman or witch. Thus
symbolic instrumentality represents the material world of nature, which,
little by little, is replaced by the symbol itself.
The Neanderthals developed figures and hunting and musical instruments
thirty thousand years ago, at the very least. And certain Australian
aboriginal groups developed symbolic ornaments more than fifty thousand
years ago. This mediation by symbolic instruments modified thinking and
imposed a rational, logical and functional mental module that expanded
unchecked over the intuitive and the aesthetic. This instrumental reason
generated technological thinking, which led to categorization, the base
ofall standardizing practice. Thus, the division oflabor became more
complex, giving origin to class societies and civilization: history.
Art, the state, language, economy, money, races, technology,
colonization, etc. are embedded there. Likewise, domestication also
began its ultimate realization in history, as much through agriculture
and symbolic culture as through ranching and the norming of wilderness,
which leads to clearcutting. Modern profit and alienation are forms of
social domestication on a massive scale through the expansion of the
production line. The instrumental therefore is the source of all
hierarchical and categorical entities, which are nothing more in
themselves than a set of ideas about reality accumulated over time.
These are the ideas that constitute the ideology of progress and
history. Indeed, this ideology has fed the empire of standardization and
dualistic thinking.
The notion of the peculiar radically dismantles dualism and
standardization in that it allows the human being to reconnect with the
natural world through appreciation of and aesthetic interaction with
nature. This not only debunks the false division between art and reality
that uproots all beauty from life, it also destroys instrumental reason,
which gives origin to all alienating notions that perpetuate the
symbolic. The appreciation of nature implies also its defense in the
course of an active practice of organic coexistence. This includes a
total respect for all the living creatures of the planet and a social
cohabitation that guarantees the ritual retribution of every primal
material extracted from the land and the forest.
Beginning today to cultivate oneâs own sustenance in organic gardens
that respect the ecosystem is a vital necessity. Community life
guarantees independence and autonomy from the corporate and state
system.
Community life values personal relationships without hierarchical or
bureaucratic mediation and stimulates camaraderie and brother and
sisterhood based on the principle of cooperation. Realizations of this
have been achieved in different communities around the globe, such as
Christiania (Denmark), Aprovecho and Alpha Farm (both in Oregon, USA),
Solentiname (Nicaragua), Gaviotas (Colombia), GAIA (Costa Rica), etc. In
North America alone there are around four thousand community
experiments, without counting the ancestral indigenous communities
throughout the Americas that continue to resist western colonizing
penetration.
The general solution with respect to industrial agriculture and
monoculture is permaculture, which does not squander natural resources
and permits sustainable ways of life in harmony with the environment and
its diverse micro-climates The planet is a constellation of
micro-climates or meteorological peculiarities where the flowering of
rotating and mobile human communities is possible. The notion of an
ideal and exclusive climate for survival is a sophism of
standardization. Just as humans are a peculiar genus of nature, so are
climates, valleys, mountains, coasts, forests, plains, etc. To feel in
order to understand is a tactic of self-sensitivization. Sensitivity
reconnects us to the earth and makes us wise. To live in a community
implies living in harmony with the soil on which we tread, the air we
breathe, the breeze that washes us, the forest that feeds us, the water
that gives us life, etc.
To live in community is to live with others. But it is also living
inside an environment and climate that are peculiar. To feel this
peculiarity is to guarantee survival.
Sabotage against the infantilizing machine and against the
agro-industrial complexâwhich profits at the expense of the health of
the soil and peopleâhas also been a tactic of present day self-defense
in some communities on the planet. Resistance against the penetration of
timber companies and against the construction of hydroelectric dams has
been the catalyst for a new biocentric consciousness. Take for example
the cases of Mapuche communities in southern Chile and green activists
in the Pacific Northwest who literally take to the treesâconstructing
platforms within the tree canopy itself to block clear cutting in
old-growth forests. These examples of integrity wake the sleeping
consciousness suppressed by the empire of standardization. When such
consciousness flowers, it opposes the monetarist agenda of the
oligopolies, thus reestablishing the imagination and opening the gates
to a new world.
The creative consciousness of the twenty-first century began to express
itself in 19.99 with the student strike at the National Autonomous
University in Mexico City and the struggle in Seat lie against the World
Trade Organization. In that same year, on the 18th of June, an anarchist
protest occurred in Eugene, Oregon. Meanwhile, peasant actions, notably
the attack in the south of France on a fast-food restaurant and another
against transnational sites producing genetically modified food in
Brazil, awakened the ecosocial creative consciousness to a greater range
of concerns. This has generated a resistance movement that has grown
organically at every protest against so-called globalization, obliging
corporate agents to barricade themselves inside the protective fences
erected and guarded by the praetorian battalions of the standardizing
empire. This happened in Prague, in Quebec, and in Genoa, and it will
continue to happen. It is precisely this walling in that isolates the
system and is causing it to topple under its own weight, leading toward
self-demolition. Thus, the destruction on September 11, 2001 of the
pillars of global capitalism, symbolized by the number eleven that
formed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, has opened
an irreparable tear in the plastic bubble of the empire of
standardization. This is the beginning of the end and inaugurates a new
era in the quest for the ancestral wisdom found in the garden of each
and every peculiarity.
When Columbus arrived on the âAmericanâ continent, the European
colonizing enterprise began its march, and with it, standardization. In
five hundred years, 75% of the native edible plants of the Americas have
disappearedâ among them many legumes with proteins similar to soy. As an
extension of the invadersâ genocide, many European plants were
transported to the continent, invading the soil and destroying the
biodiversity of the native ecosystems.
In truth, rational European knowledge was much more limited than the
ancestral knowledge of the native communities of the continent, who
understood much better natural cycles. In the fifteenth century,
Europeans knew only seventeen varieties of edible vegetables, while in
the fourth century, the Hohokamâ inhabitants of the region now
encompassed by New Mexico, cultivated around two hundred varieties of
vegetables. In South America, the Incas designed a system of terrace
cultivation that extended the length of the Andes and took advantage of
local micro-climates and varying humus qualities, harvesting something
like six hundred different varieties of potatoes. This proves that
horticulture has nothing to do with the standardizing drive of
civilization. Instead of trying to make all environments conform to a
standard medium, horticulture seeks to adapt to the peculiar
characteristics of the soil and micro-climate while maintaining intact
the ecosystem and biodiversity.
The aesthetic peculiarities ofdifferent kinds ofresistanceâ each
peculiar in and of itselfââhave uplifted the centuries- long battles of
indigenous communities, whose most eloquent forms of self-defense have
been manifested in the state of Chiapas (southern Mexico), in Araucaniaâ
Mapuche territory (southern Chile), in Salta (northern Argentina), as
well as Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and so on. The consciousness of the
human species awakens and begins to shake offinstrumental reason, all
the while finding a path toward the world of peculiarity, toward the
natural world itself. In contrast with the primitive consciousness that
provoked this fragmentation in the first place, present collective
consciousness searches for connection with the other by dispelling the
ego in the organic totality of the planet. The dilution of the âIâ in
the spirit of nature allows the being to fully manifest itself. This
manifestation is the aesthetic expression of peculiarity and through it
is created a culture that undoes standardization and tears away all of
the labels made by the system of categorization. Indeed, when the being
unfolds all the petals of its peculiarity to express itself
aesthetically, it is able to better itself as well as the world and
humanity This process nears authenticityâ the condition of the âgenuineâ
that in highly alienated and alienating societies is a privilege almost
entirely exclusive to artists and other personalities of exception. In
the same way, creative verbalization subverts dualism and reconstructs
the notion of humanity. And this is why real conversation is not welcome
in the robotic world of the postmodern paradigm of automatons. Hence,
expressions like âferalâ in English and âbarbaroâ in Spanish have
started to acquire positive connotations that dismember, via language,
the patriarchal model based on the dualistic system of savagery versus
civilization.
To think of a remodelled world that permits coexistence based on total
and mutual respect for all the creatures that inhabit the planet is
vital. Each peculiarity is a petal that is necessary to care for. A
horizontal and non-hierarchical model is crucial, since no one likes to
be ordered, controlled, or detained. On the contrary, these situations
appear to be a punishment. True liberty depends on the demolition of all
authority. The natural state of human beings is anarchy, which is
nothing more than an ample libertarian garden where the spirit expresses
itself. Against the control panel of the standardizing empire, the
garden of peculiarities stands healthy. And given that in the earth
resides true power, the challenge of this century is a return to daily
interaction with nature to heal from the trauma of civilization. That
is, to remodel ourselves toward the betterment of our human condition.
Only by constructing a new humanity will it be possible to inhabit a new
world, based on aesthetic reasoning and sensitivity. And while this is
only a point of departure, the rest remains a mystery. There is no
panacea for the future.
Just as in the last hundred years the global population has exploded at
a frightening rate, it can also decrease in a hundred years. A sensible
relationship with the earth that establishes the lost coherence between
our reproductive tendencies and the availability of local resources can
greatly reduce the number of human beings on the planet. And that can be
done without bloodthirsty plans.
To know where we are, how we live and how we survive will expand the
global consciousness. In addition, it makes us active and responsible
participants in the process of human continuity, returning to the people
their ancestral independenceâfreedom from both mass production and
industrial medicine. Toward the beginning and middle of the twentieth
century, couples generally had five or more children. In colonized
countries, and especially in the countryside and in other entirely
dispossessed zones, this tendency continues as a strategy for survival.
When clothing, food, and shelter are wrested from the monopoly control
of commercial chains and mass production and are returned to the hands
of the community, community responsibility and autonomy will transform
human consciousness into an integral consciousness, thus reuniting the
being with the community and the environment. And this will transform
present day reproductive tendencies. And it will ensure that in one or
two generations overpopulation will be nothing more than a âproblemâ
from the industrial past.
The garden of peculiarities is a project of humanity. Its visualization
consists of realizing the peculiarity of nature. If the original
consciousness grew as a result of the recognition of its own death,
liberating consciousness will grow as a result of the recognition of its
own peculiarity Life as we conceive of it today will not be erased from
the planet as long as we donât give respite to the empire of âsameness.â
The point is to learn to live in the planetary garden without control or
authority. And if life is a voyage, it is necessary to let ourselves be
carried along with the riverâs current without imposing a control to
stop it. The current of the river is the current of nature. The social
current, standardizing and âmediocratic,â is the electricity of control.
To continue in this vein is to die of stress, alienation, anxiety,
insanity, hunger, exploitation, repression, and misery. In order to run
the rapids it is necessary to learn to live.
When one follows the silvery movement of each tumultuous and savage drop
of water, one is creating contact with the rhythm of the natural world.
To follow this cadence, avoiding the rocks is a wise act. To fall from
the raft is evidence of discomfort. This discomfort is the
incompatibility between control and life. Control engenders fear and
impedes life. It unleashes paranoia. Life, on the other hand, offers
beauty and ingenuity as its native fruits. It depends on us to bite the
apple and to learn to dream.
The voyage to the garden of peculiarities is one without return. To
listen to the murmuring of civilization, once on the correct path, is to
fall into the trap of fear. It means losing oneâs way, because the only
exit is the escape hatch to the highway that leads to the asphalt of
standardization. And while every creature needs a dwelling, it need not
be made of concrete. The true human lair can be a cabin in the forest
that together with other cabins forms a community of peculiarities. Or
it can be a neighborhood that tears up the pavement of idiocy and
isolation while leaving one or two routes among other neighborhoods.
Each constellation of peculiarities will be a kind of commune that
guarantees the horizontal autonomy of each community. Only in this way
can hierarchy be abolished. And as social practice between social
beings, ritual festivities and community celebration will be an integral
part of the strategy to combat accumulation. In this way, all surplus
that will eventually be created will be enjoyed as a part of the
collective carnival.
The garden of peculiarities is a wager made for the conservation of the
environment and the survival of the human race. There intuition should
light the way. Not being sidetracked depends on us. There is only one
path that leads to the heart of life.