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Title: From Thought into the unknown Author: Anonymous Language: en Topics: anti-civ, Killing King Abacus, primitivist Source: Retrieved on April 6th, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/THOUGHT.html
When we think of the imagination what comes to mind? We might think of
human creativity at its source, of a living and thinking person. We also
might think of the imaginary, a realm that is separate from this world
we live in, daydreams that are divorced from our lives: fantasies that
serve only as escape mechanisms, fantasies that are filled with mass
media produced images of other planets, green aliens with 14 fingers, or
sex with bionic humanoids with geometric silicone features. The word
imagination has been corroded along with its root word: the image. The
images that confront us everyday appear to have no human origin. They
are created for the market, and have the qualities of the market, they
leave little trace of their human creators. When we see an ad for Apple
computers we do not think of the person who put the advertising image
together. That person is probably thousands of miles away. That distant
worker expressed little of their personality in the image they created.
So, as was intended, we think only of apple computers. That image was
the expression of a thwarted and recuperated creative impulse of someone
sitting an office far away. Creativity that increases one’s own life
possibilities is now rarely respected. When someone comes up with a
particularly inventive idea, people have the gall to say, “you should
market that”. Capitalism is such an effective system because it so
effectively channels and uses human creativity for its own aims. In the
process, it reduces creativity to as colorless a process as the money
transaction. It reduces the individuality of creativity to a minimum.
This uniformity is also a result of the monotony of life in a society
filed with mass produced objects, images and spaces; as life becomes
more uniform thought follows closely behind.
The fact that the imaginary can be thought of as divorced from an
imagining subject reflects the degree to which the fragmentation we
experience in our daily lives has implanted itself in our very thought
process. When every creative impulse has been severed from its
subjective source and channeled into the markets of technological and
cultural production, when there is no one to share our insights with
because only marketed creativity is given a place to be seen or heard,
there is no need for censorship. This dismembering results in thoughts
that lead away from the subject, it crushes the will, produces atomized
desires for commodities, and results in actions that do not expand our
own lives but the life of the vampire that feeds upon us. Instead of
increasing our own power, our thoughts lead us to travel a straight line
between the place where we puke out fuel for the market, stop by
supermarket to buy its refuse, and go home where we eat its shit. In
order to interrupt this process it is necessary to change our very
thought process, we need to reconnect thought to its source: the
thinking subject. In order to do so we must expel the poltergeists that
haunt us, poltergeists that bear a suspicious resemblance to those in a
Steven Spielberg movie.
For thought to become an instrument to the expansion of one’s life
projectuality, it is helpful to find others with whom to speak a
language other than that of the market, with whom one can explore life’s
possibilities outside the limited choices offered by capital. If there
is no language with which to express ones thoughts, and no one to speak
to, thought will not be a sharpened tool but a dull implement. In this
society, one who along with a few likeminded companions aims to increase
life’s potential, will quickly run into obstacles in her path. This
society is a maze of barriers to anyone that wishes to function outside
of it, anyone who wishes to live by their own rhythm and not that of the
clock. To destroy the obstacles to our own expansion we need all of the
tools we can get; we need both ideas and fire.
To move towards the destruction of this society and the creation of new
relations, we need to have a clear conception of how to proceed from
here, but we do not need a concrete model of where we will end up.
Although any future world would contain traces or ruins of this society,
that world may be beyond our present capacity to imagine. It is
important to ask ourselves whether or not an idea increases or decreases
our possibilities. When does an idea become a fossilized model that
limits us? Utopian visions can be useful openings out of the present
order but they can also confine us. The Paleolithic has been a useful
reference because it breaks us out of the dominant idea that human
beings by nature need to create institutions of authority. Living hunter
gatherers have also shown us that anarchy is a real possibility, not
merely a utopian dream, and that in fact it is most probable that humans
lived in anarchy for most of their past. But when we begin to create a
utopian image on the specific practices of hunter-gatherers we are
creating a primitivist model with inherent limitations; such an image
limits our vision of what a future world could be. Besides, it is
improbable that people throughout the world during the Paleolithic
actually behaved predictably enough for any model to be based on such
multifarious relations. Living hunter-gatherers have a variety of types
of social relations. What these people have in common is the absence of
odious institutions of authority, the absence of exploitation. Beyond
that each group has its own characteristics, its own choice of social
relations. Perhaps the greatest lesson that living hunter-gatherers as a
whole teach us is found in their lack of predictability: a variety of
relations that cannot be contained in precise models.
The Machiguenga of the Peruvian amazon are unusual in their strong
preference against living in any community larger than the immediate
family. When outsiders visit the Machiguenga, it is common for them to
explain “no somos muy unidos aqui”. They expect outsiders to be
surprised that they prefer to live away from concentrated settlements.
The Machiguenga are settling in towns more and more often in order to
send their children to school and because they are becoming increasingly
dependent on iron tools which they need access to outside markets to
acquire. In the 70s interviews with Machiguengan town dwellers revealed
that most people begrudgingly made this change. Previously most
Machiguenga hunted, gathered and farmed with their immediate families.
They met up with nearby families for beer feasts and for fishing
expeditions. When asked why they preferred not to live in a community
they generally had two answers: they had greater access to forest
resources in smaller groups, and community living brought unwanted
restrictions. The Machiguenga language lacks terms for social
categories. Other Amazonian groups have complex political ranking
systems but the Machiguenga borrow social terms from nearby groups. They
have no term for family. There is a word for kin but only egocentric
kin, and they use a borrowed word noshanika or my people for those that
live nearby. Some anthropologists have suggested that the Machigenga
live in very small groups because of a dispersion that occurred after
the epidemics of colonial times. But their lack of social terms suggests
that this is not the case. There is no evidence that the Machiguenga
ever had political terminology.
The Machiguenga are not only hunter-gatherers (they also farm), and they
are certainly no longer “pristine” primitives, but this is not the
point. I am offering them as an example that primitive communism may
have existed during the Paleolithic but exclusively as an absence of
private property. Living peoples show us that in all probability
Paleolithic peoples lived in various types of social formations ranging
from the more communal to the more dispersed. This is of course all
speculation, but the case of the Machiguenga challenges the utopian
image of primitive communism, the idea that human beings naturally
prefer to live collectively. This idea is a reaction to the
fragmentation we experience in a society dominated by capital, we crave
the relations we lack and assume the opposite of capitalism is the
collective.
Let’s keep the utopian visions that expand our possibilities and discard
the rigid models that limit us. To proceed away from the established
into the unknown we must have a thought process which is expansive. We
must direct our thought back towards its subjective root and away from
the scarcity of options dished up for us by capital. To explore life’s
possibilities outside these narrow confines we need to have the courage
to discard impoverished visions of that which lies beyond the existent.