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Title: Spectacle of the Symbolic Author: Kevin Tucker Language: en Topics: anti-civ Source: Retrieved on February 20th, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/spectacle.htm Notes: from Species Traitor 3
Life is an interconnected web of beings. This is existence, this is
life. Without that web we are all nothing. Take a look around your
Reality and try to find what is necessary to your existence, what will
you die without? This isnât like playing the game of our Culture, the
Culture of Commodification, where we ask what we would die for, what
would we kill for (overlooking all the things we are killing for).
Instead, this question is an honest search for what we need in life.
The focus here will be on the way symbolic culture, the mentality of
civilization, has invaded our consciousness. The kind of power relations
needed for governments to exist rests on our recognition of that power.
While not believing in their power wonât make civilization just go away,
the realization that life exists beyond the survival that weâve had to
deal with. Recognizing our own potential is one step in reclaiming our
lives.
Before we begin talking of civilization, we must understand what we are
talking about. Civilization moves off power yet no where on Earth does
power truly exist. Power is not a thing, but a relation of domination
and ownership, an idea. Power is the product of property, be it place,
person or what have you. In a world of limited wants and unlimited
means, ownership (which can not exist without property) is useless. The
world of the forager must be one that can follow the migrations of herds
or adapt to the seasonal availability of plants, insects, and any other
flora that makes up the majority of the diet and such a world has no
place for âpossessionsâ.
A nomad is limited by what they can move with, although this is hardly a
limitation. The creation of âpropertyâ is the product of being sedentary
or staying places for longer periods of time. The more attached you are
to a particular area the more able you are to keep things you would
normally have to move with regularly. What we have learned from
anthropology and the failures of domestication is that our way of
survival is very recent. We have seen qualitative differences between
the spiritual wealth of foragers, which anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
has called the âoriginal affluent societyâ, and the poverty of our
materialistic âwealthâ addictions.
As anarchists, the most important difference here refers to autonomy.
Power is the result of institutionalized specialization. Foragers
recognize those who tend to excel in one particular area of life, a role
which we commonly misperceive as âleadersâ. However, as anthropologist
Pierre Clastres points out in his book Societies Against the State,
foraging societies are not just stateless (as if the state just hasnât
happened yet), but âsocieties against the stateâ, meaning they had no
will to give up their autonomy or recognize that any particular person
should control the lives of others. So in âprimitiveâ societies across
the world, you see social taboos that keep any individual from acquiring
power.
This has been recognized in foragers like the !Kung of the Kalahari who
will insult or chop down the hunter/s who brings in a lot of meat. To an
outsider this would be considered deeply offensive, but the point is to
keep the people all at one level so no individual can have a big ego.
Customs like this are nearly universal, and they signify the conscious
recognition that power over others doesnât benefit the rest of the
peoples.
What has been further studied by Clastres and others is that while
certain individuals are acknowledged as being particularly good at
certain activities, there is no institutionalization of their role.
Although they are recognized as more able or useful during certain
periods (i.e., hunts, battles, or medicine), that role dies with them.
When a particularly good hunter passes on, there are no elections to
âfill that slotâ, because no real âslotâ ever existed.
What this signifies is the kind of flexibility that foraging existence
allows. It is recognized that there is typically a sexual division of
labor in âprimitiveâ societies, but again the people are autonomous in
the sense that positions are not institutionalized, meaning there is no
systemic ruling that men will do this or women do that (foragers donât
apply sexist standards or values). In every sense of the word, these
peoples live in anarchy, a life devoid of power relations and offering
full autonomy.
These kinds of specifics are not the focus here because they are rather
well covered elsewhere and I canât recommend enough that people seek
this knowledge out. What is important here is an understanding that life
exists beyond the sacrificial order of civilization, and that things
such as âpowerâ can only be maintained so long as their role is upheld.
A revolt against the power/civilized mentality is a big step towards
taking down this beast.
Humans have spent over 99.9% of our existence on this planet as
foragers. Our food was scavenged, gathered or hunted. To exist this way
means that you must be an active member in the larger community of life:
the world around and of you, the state of wildness. If you cannot be a
part of this, then there will be nothing to sustain and support you:
when an animal is separated from their wildness, they become separated
from life. Itâs even simpler than this really, if you do not understand,
respect and place yourself in the world around you, you lose a place in
that reality, and because of this you canât take and give as one would
to survive. Our groundlessness and depression only feeds this reality.
The forager has nothing more than a completely intimate relationship
with their extended selves: the world around them. Civilized
understandings must misrepresent this so that it can continue to exist
and devour. To know the layers of growth and life in the world is more
than just a question of survival, but knowledge of the self, since it
gives placement and the knowledge of being within. The forager never
destroys this; it serves no purpose to exploit something that is a part
of you.
The Civilized being has devastated one of the most intimate aspects of
life: eating and fulfilling the needs of our bodies. When we are getting
food, we are buying pieces of our own death, wrapped in cellophane,
priced by the pound and canned. We have pieces of paper that represent
pieces of our lives sold off to someone who gets more use out of us as
machines than as beings. We exchange these two things as objects and the
whole process is burnt into our minds.
You see our separation: pieces of wildness, long since tamed and beaten
into the right packages, shined up and ready to be sold off. Each bit is
a replica of the shining, glorious product of years of mixing and
matching, of buffing and waxing the gene pool: throwing away millions of
years of adaptation and existence, taking and giving for whatever
immediate need there seems to be. Itâs all there before our eyes and
through our bodies, as seen on the charts or on the TV or in the
textbooks. These bits of our giant, decaying corpse are taken in, they
are symbols of parts of life, which has long since been chopped up and
served to us.
The food becomes a symbol for Nourishment; you have to eat according to
the planned pyramid scheme in order to stay afloat: which is represented
by the notion of Health. And itâs all a delusion, what weâre eating is
isolated death: warped shadows of our wild selves, sprayed, infested,
exploiting, shipped and handled, all removed from anything living and
sustaining. What we eat is no longer to be taken in and let out, in
order to continue the cycle of life. It is plastic, and it only sustains
an image, a giant Symbol, to be devoured, wrenched dry by the
suffocating innards to be thrown out and flushed off into the
nothingness that will only haunt the world as a symbol of the most
destructive epidemic to face this planet.
Inherent to the poverty of this way of survival is something so simple
that it can be frightening. All the drudgery and disgust of everyday
âlifeâ comes from the separation of ourselves from the rest of the
world. This isnât some quick solution or easy answer, but the reality of
our situation. What is making the distinction between us and everything
else is what we call symbolic culture.
So it seems right now might be the perfect time to kick it down a step,
take things back, especially when the words âsymbolic thoughtâ or
âsymbolic cultureâ alone are enough to bore someone either back to sleep
or just get some kind of disinterest in an intangible idea, but what is
going to be shown here is that this isnât anything like that. The
effects of symbolic culture come through in every aspect of daily life
and its side effects. So what the hell is all this anyways then? The
best way to look at it is back.
Human beings are animals, that is, you and I and every single person is
an animal. No matter how much we try and act like we arenât, and
especially when we kill off most of the planet to try and prove
otherwise, we are and always will be animals. The driving force behind
this supposed âProgressâ and actual Destruction comes from an ideology
that has been about 10,000 years in the making: symbolic culture.
As John Zerzan points out in âRunning on Emptinessâ, symbolic culture is
the outcome of excessive symbolization. It occurs when the senses have
been domesticated into a âsymbolic cultural atmosphereâ. What symbolic
culture is then is an institutionalization of symbols, removing them
from the direct senses into a single vision that becomes a basis for the
group/tribe/clan/empire. This is the dawn of Civilization.
Everything that we have come to accept as Reality and base our
perceptions on spreads off of the base of sedentary, intensive
agriculture: the great settling which gave rise to power. This isnât to
say that the first seed planted was some kind of fall from heaven.
Humans have been taking an active part in their surroundings for the
millions of years that we (and our predecessors) have existed. Growing
food was no new idea and living mainly this was hardly novel. What
separates this (horticulture) from sedentary agriculture (and thus
Civilization) is the point at which settlement becomes permanence.
This idea has much more behind it than one might think it could. The
difference between an Agricultural society and others who would grow
even large percentages of their own food is a mentality: a basic
sentiment of detachment. Maybe we should look back further.
âSome of the people who left the human communities remembered some of
the qualities. They remembered some of the joys of possessionânot
possession of things but possession of Being.â
âFredy Perlman. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
Those who have shaped our Reality (from the shaman on to the priest,
politician, scientist, and so on) would have us believe that what is
essential to life are âThings,â bits and pieces of a shattered world
replaced by objects that can be bought, sold, inherited or auctioned.
Understanding this only takes our search further back, but what is it
that we (as individuals) associate with? We see objects that reflect an
imaginary âcollective consciousnessâ (the âcollective consciousnessâ as
individuals associating their own abilities and actions with that of
some kind of âcollectiveâ with others they share some traits with, think
nation, race, culture, and so on), that is all the of us determined
consumers as individual versions of civilization, all of us as
proto-cyborgs (we are physically alive, but lack all qualities of
âlifeâ, and our interests are technologically driven): multi-functioning
parts of the giant Mega-Machine.
We might respond to such comments as absurd, surely there are people in
our lives that we value over things! Yet we lack the ability to separate
our relations with others any more than treating them as âthingsâ. Our
relationships are weighable by capitalist standards of what we can
âgainâ or may âloseâ from each situation. We have those that we are
âcloseâ to (perhaps we fall under the same âpersonalityâ type or have a
capitalist valuable relationship) and then there are those who just,
consequently, fall on the other side of the scale, just underneath those
shoes or cars we âhad to have.â
âPeople do not exploit a nature that speaks to them. But a nature that,
as two famous nineteenth-century ethnocentrics expressed it, âfaced
humans initially as an entirely foreign, all-powerful and unassailable
might, towards which they behaved as animals, and which they allowed to
lord it over them as if they were brutesâ; such a nature has no language
of its own any more, it is merely matter.
â...people do not exploit those they understand. But when out among
strangers, there is a tendency towards barricading oneself in ones
âsubjectivityâ much more even than at home, and what is strange is
alienated by blocked the avenues of trust.â
-Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness
and Civilization
It could be said that power was the origin of symbolic culture. The
ability to subject others is necessary to begin a system of pure
domination. The symbolic mediation of language was still capable of
keeping some attachment to the world. The language of foragers is tied
to that time and space. With civilization, there is conquest and
colonization, as uprooted people begin spreading. In order to grow, it
is required that you have standardization. Languages became universal
and the detachment completed, their use was removed from direct
experience to the realm of power relations.
It is important to understand that you canât just live within a
hierarchy, it must be internalized and the individuals must think,
breathe and speak it. This is the role of symbolic culture, to
internalize the will of the powerful. The world that we are a part of
has, since agriculture, become a thing. Our lives are removed from the
chaos of life in search of artificial order.
â[Writing] initiated what print and computers only continue, the
reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the
word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.â
-Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word
What Zerzan does in his essay âRunning on Emptinessâ is point to the
progression of symbolic thought as it not only mediates, but replaces
life. We are seeing the split of the wild and the tamed. The split
becomes more defined over time and the world we are of becomes another
object to fully subjugate. We unleash Reason upon the world, a system of
justification for our exploitation. Reason acts against its opposite
âinstinctâ, as it tries to move humans out of being animals (although it
begins at first along the lines of culture, race and sex).
The language of Reason is a pure symbolization. As we know it now, it is
the product of the âenlightenmentâ and comes from literacy. In his book,
Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong boasts of the joys of literacy while
doing us the service of charting its disruption to human consciousness.
Civilized oral (without writing) cultures were capable of creating
destructive ideologies, but writing perfected the process (see âWriting
our Fateâ). The deed essentially perfects systems of barter, but also
begins to remove itself fully from the present.
Myth serves as memory for oral peoples. The myths could shape reality
and be shaped by events, positively or negatively. With writing, those
myths would be cut off from the fluidity of life. People become fixed to
what is âwritten in stoneâ. The great religious texts serve as witness
to this. The myths of the Old Testament are co-opted from pagan cultures
and others who recognized a fall from bliss but wouldnât turn back. It
seems that the power of the great monotheistic religions had to exploit
the world with such vigor came from the written âword of Godâ which was
frozen in time.
Writing perfects Reason as it extends justification away from the âreal
worldâ to the world of ideas. Our current epidemic needs no other
justification than the written decree of the âexpertsâ. In this way, we
can disregard our exploitation of the Earth because it has been written
otherwise. We keep our face in books and media as life is being killed
right before us. Symbolic culture is essentially what allows us to turn
our cheek as our lives have become fully mediated.
The processes of Science and Reason rationalize and suppress the chaos
of life. We categorize, therefore we are not: the foundation has been
laid to divide and conquer our world. Our world has become symbolic and
we are free to manipulate at our will. Without this alteration of
perception, we could have never done what we (the culture of cities:
Civilization, not individuals, or our âspeciesâ) have. Modern life is
symbolic culture spectacularized. Through our mega-technology weâve
succeeded in creating a candy-coated mediation.
Situationist Guy Debord noted the problem of symbolic culture in his
book the Society of the Spectacle: âAll that once was directly lived has
become mere representation.â Our world has been reduced, quantified and
qualified to the point where we are all just spectators to âan immense
accumulation of spectacles.â
Our religious/scientific rationality becomes tangible through the media.
Social critic Susan Sontag made the effects of visual media the focus of
her book On Photography. She recognized the issue of tangibility:
âPhotographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as
recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a
reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One
canât possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images...â
What Sontag is pointing to is this process of reification, basically the
process of turning reality into symbols, things.
At this point, aided by print and audio-visual recordings, symbolic
culture has become autonomous. While in the past symbolic culture
existed to mediate human relations to all life, it was still stuck in
that moment (although looking forward). With these new recording
technologies, the past becomes as real as the present. Time and space
become unimportant/indecipherable, and we are constantly reproducing a
reality.
Kurt Vonnegutâs novel, Slaughterhouse Five, comes to mind as we exist in
timelessness like his main character. With a recorded memory we are able
to put ourselves back into any time or situation recorded. We live in
virtual reality as this constant surreal world becomes our obsession.
The civilized seeks to absorb all experience so we flock to movies,
television, theme parks, malls (shopping for new identities), and the
internet. People pour into ânew and biggerâ possessions seeking new pain
killers and distractions searching for that pure experience. With our
minds turned towards the virtual reality, we only become absorbed and
forget to look outside the box-world for life.
What this âautonomous spectacleâ means is that it continues for its own
reasons. Our reality is becoming more and more groundless as our level
of technology soars past the amount of authentic experience.
Civilization seeks perfection for the sake of perfection. Suppose full
automation and simulation was possible, we have to ask ourselves if this
is what is desirable. We must ask, what does it mean to be human?
In his book Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Fredy Perlman
recognized how spectacularized, mega-technological civilization is
essentially devouring the entire world as it searches for more. The
deprivation is all around us:
âFrom the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to
battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having
swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its
own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and
wars on itself. It has reached the end of its progress, for there is
nothing left for it to progress against except itself.â
The spectacle of symbolic culture has essentially become a ârealityâ TV
show rerun. All is predictable and equitable as the media produce and
sell reality. We are consuming ourselves and our situation is sounding
like F.C. described it in âIndustrial Society and its Futureâ, that we
are only being formed into the technological system. I stand by that
conclusion that: âIt would be better to dump the whole stinking system
and take the consequences.â
Our current values are predetermined by Capitalist notions of what is
important and what it means to be a person. The Consumer takes their
value by their freedom to choose buying habits, and maintaining a
prescribed level of self determination, taking pride in the product
availability that colonization and exploitation have brought them.
The Consumer is the extension of the Worker identity, being pushed
further into the Consumer category in this Culture by the importance of
a stronger breed of people willing to fill their spiritual void with
more and more crap. The Worker is identified by their labor (âwhat do
you do for a living?â), this is what they have brought into existence.
We take pride in the fact that every thing we bring into existence makes
us just that much more similar to God, but the novelty is quickly
wearing.
The role of the Worker has lost itâs little bit of shimmer as the Worker
ends up being more and more a piece of the Machine itself. Capitalism
succeeds in making beings into nothing more than machines. We have
become proletarianized, that is we are worth no more what we can
âcontributeâ to the capitalist economy. Those who have no âvalueâ or
arenât worth being âaddedâ to the economy are considered obstacles to
the âinevitableâ Progress.
For those of us living within civilization this has meant a number of
things. The past ârevolutionaryâ movements have sought to reform the
means of production because they had completely internalized their worth
as âproletariansâ, as workers.
The Industrial Worker has been the extension of the Agricultural Worker,
someone who is directly connected to the âproductionâ of something
necessary to life. They are involved full time in alienation from the
way things are and will be, the connection is directly severed.
We see that this could go on and on even further into boredom, but there
is an initial problem here that keeps us going down the long, dark path
of separation and makes us isolated beings in a time of mass
overpopulation, crowding and high technology. Weâve become walking ads
for the life that is sold to us at an hourly wage, and yet we can be
âhappyâ about it while every single one of us requires some kind of drug
or escape to make it through each day (even though ways of dropping out
are becoming more deadly).
We have moved beyond proletarianization now in the first and second
worlds. There is hardly anything left to produce here outside of the
spectacle itself. Our purpose here is solely to ensure the âProgressâ of
civilization on its path to âperfectionâ. This is us, this is now: we
are homeless and soulless worldwide. Similar to the science fiction
movie the Matrix¸ we are becoming batteries for the machine to carry on
for its own sake. Where is the human in this?
So how does this all fit in with everyday life? All of these notions may
seem abstract or like a meaningless mind game, but the reality is that
these basic ideas shape our entire perception of the world. It is clear
that Civilization is more than just some âthingâ out there: a tangible
enemy to be dealt with in physical terms, but an entire system. It has
been brought into existence as ideas that have solidified in Symbolic
Culture and have become mentalities,
Ideology, an entire way of perceiving your Reality: it has become our
Reality itself. The concrete formulations can only have come into
existence through the spreading of this warped relation to each other
and the world: it has separated us from everything that we are, and this
is what we are up against when we talk about ending the death trip that
our culture has brought about.
For these reasons, it seems imperative that we address the issue
directly and try and find a way to overcome our complete alienation and
rediscover our being. Only when this is done can we come together as
complete beings and bring ourselves back to a complete world. But this
is all part of a great process, the only way to liberate ourselves from
our domestication is to understand what it is that is keeping us back,
and that digging will only come through revolt against the domesticating
force of Civilization, within ourselves and what is being imposed on us.
The true revolution begins with the insurrection against the mediation
and alienation of our being, and this is a battle to be fought on every
front. With this we seek to understand what we are up against.
So I ask again, what does it mean to be human? This is something that
can only be lived, not told. The greatest journey of life is to realize
your being. The answer comes in the form of experience which shows that
there are no answers. What we will find is that our questions are
over-looking the real world that lies before our eyes. The original
question posed here isnât rhetorical, nor is it a simple question, it is
a beginning point and all of us must start there if we hope to ever live
fully.
This is only one step in a long path. The institutions of power carry
much strength because they have possessed so many. In this late hour,
our options are becoming clearer. We can either accept full automation
and continue the symbolic life or we can try and find our way to an
unmediated reality. The implications of this are to be lived and the
revolt against Reason implants the seed of insurrection. Our option is
to fight against the system of domestication so that we may arise as
full beings. That choice is yours to enact upon.