The Failure of Symbolic Thought

[Chive Mynde]

running on emptiness
the failure of symbolic thought

by John Zerzan

"If we do not 'come to our senses' soon, we will have permanently
forfeited the chance of constructing any meaningful alternatives to
the pseudo-existence which passes for life in our current
'Civilization of the Image.'" David Howes
To what degree can it be said that we are really living? As the
substance of culture seems to shrivel and offer less balm to troubled
lives, we are led to look more deeply at our barren times. And to the
place of culture itself in all this.

An anguished Ted Sloan asks (1996), "What is the problem with
modernity? Why do modern societies have such a hard time producing
adults capable of intimacy, work, enjoyment, and ethical living? Why
is it that signs of damaged life are so prevalent?" According to David
Morris (l994), "Chronic pain and depression, often linked and
occasionally even regarded as a single disorder, constitute an immense
crisis at the center of postmodern life." We have cyberspace and
virtual reality, instant computerized communication in the global
village; and yet have we ever felt so impoverished and isolated?

Just as Freud predicted that the fullness of civilization would mean
universal neurotic unhappiness, anti-civilization currents are growing
in response to the psychic immiseration that envelops us. Thus
symbolic life, essence of civilization, now comes under fire.

It may still be said that this most familiar, if artificial, element
is the least understood, but felt necessity drives critique, and many
of us feel driven to get to the bottom of a steadily worsening mode of
existence. Out of a sense of being trapped and limited by symbols
comes the thesis that the extent to which thought and emotion are tied
to symbolism is the measure by which absence fills the inner world and
destroys the outer world.

We seem to have experienced a fall into representation, whose depths
and consequences are only now being fully plumbed. In a fundamental
sort of falsification, symbols at first mediated reality and then
replaced it. At present we live within symbols to a greater degree
than we do within our bodily selves or directly with each other.

The more involved this internal representational system is, the more
distanced we are from the reality around us. Other connections, other
cognitive perspectives are inhibited, to say the least, as symbolic
communication and its myriad representational devices have
accomplished an alienation from and betrayal of reality.

This coming between and concomitant distortion and distancing is
ideological in a primary and original sense; every subsequent ideology
is an echo of this one. Debord depicted contemporary society as
exerting a ban on living in favor of its representation: images now in
the saddle, riding life. But this is anything but a new problem. There
is an imperialism or expansionism of culture from the beginning. And
how much does it conquer? Philosophy today says that it is language
that thinks and talks. But how much has this always been the case?
Symbolizing is linear, successive, substitutive; it cannot be open to
its whole object simultaneously. Its instrumental reason is just that:
manipulative and seeking dominance. Its approach is "let a stand for
b" instead of "let a be b." Language has its basis in the effort to
conceptualize and equalize the unequal, thus bypassing the essence and
diversity of a varied, variable richness.

Symbolism is an extensive and profound empire, which reflects and
makes coherent a world view, and is itself a world view based upon
withdrawal from immediate and intelligible human meaning.

James Shreeve, at the end of his Neanderthal Enigma (l995), provides a
beautiful illustration of an alternative to symbolic being. Meditating
upon what an earlier, non-symbolic consciousness might have been like,
he calls forth important distinctions and possibilities:

...where the modern's gods might inhabit the land, the buffalo, or the
blade of grass, the Neanderthal's spirit was the animal or the grass
blade, the thing and its soul perceived as a single vital force, with
no need to distinguish them with separate names. Similarly, the
absence of artistic expression does not preclude the apprehension of
what is artful about the world. Neanderthals did not paint their caves
with the images of animals. But perhaps they had no need to distill
life into representations, because its essences were already revealed
to their senses. The sight of a running herd was enough to inspire a
surging sense of beauty. They had no drums or bone flutes, but they
could listen to the booming rhythms of the wind, the earth, and each
other's heartbeats, and be transported."

Rather than celebrate the cognitive communion with the world that
Shreeve suggests we once enjoyed, much less embark on the project of
seeking to recover it, the use of symbols is of course widely
considered the hallmark of human cognition. Goethe said, "Everything
is a symbol," as industrial capitalism, milestone of mediation and
alienation, took off. At about the same time Kant decided that the key
to philosophy lies in the answer to the question, "What is the ground
of the relation of that in us which we call 'representation' to the
object?" Unfortunately, he divined for modern thought an ahistorical
and fundamentally inadequate answer, namely that we are simply not
constituted so as to be able to understand reality directly. Two
centuries later (1981), Emmanuel Levinas came much closer to the mark
with "Philosophy, in its very diachrony, is the consciousness of the
breakup of consciousness."

Eli Sagan (1985) spoke for countless others in declaring that the need
to symbolize and live in a symbolic world is, like aggression, a human
need so basic that "it can be denied only at the cost of severe
psychic disorder." The need for symbols — and violence - did not
always obtain, however. Rather, they have their origins in the
thwarting and fragmenting of an earlier wholeness, in the process of
domestication from which civilization issued. Apparently driven
forward by a gradually quickening growth in the division of labor that
began to take hold in the Upper Paleolithic, culture emerged as time,
language, art, number, and then agriculture.

The word culture derives from the Latin cultura, referring to
cultivation of the soil; that is, to the domestication of plants and
animals—and of ourselves in the bargain. A restless spirit of
innovation and anxiety has largely been with us ever since, as
continually changing symbolic modes seek to fix what cannot be
redressed without rejecting the symbolic and its estranged world.

Following Durkheim, Leslie White (1949) wrote, "Human behavior is
symbolic behavior; symbolic behavior is human behavior. The symbol is
the universe of humanity." It is past time to see such pronouncements
as ideology, serving to shore up the elemental falsification
underneath a virtually all-encompassing false consciousness. But if a
fully developed symbolic world is not, in Northrop Frye's bald claim
(1981), in sum "the charter of our freedom," anthropologist Clifford
Geertz (1965) comes closer to the truth in saying that we are
generally dependent on "the guidance provided by systems of
significant symbols." Closer yet is Cohen (1974), who observed that
"symbols are essential for the development and maintenance of social
order." The ensemble of symbols represents the social order and the
individual's place in it, a formulation that always leaves the genesis
of this arrangement unquestioned. How did our behavior come to be
aligned by symbolization?

Culture arose and flourished via domination of nature, its growth a
measure of that progressive mastery that unfolded with ever greater
division of labor. Malinowski (1962) understood symbolism as the soul
of civilization, chiefly in the form of language as a means of
coordinating action or of standardizing technique, and providing rules
for social, ritual, and industrial behavior.

It is our fall from a simplicity and fullness of life directly
experienced, from the sensuous moment of knowing, which leaves a gap
that the symbolic can never bridge. This is what is always being
covered over by layers of cultural consolations, civilized detouring
that never recovers lost wholeness. In a very deep sense, only what is
repressed is symbolized, because only what is repressed needs to be
symbolized. The magnitude of symbolization testifies to how much has
been repressed; buried, but possibly still recoverable.

Imperceptibly for a long while, most likely, division of labor very
slowly advanced and eventually began to erode the autonomy of the
individual and a face-to-face mode of social existence. The virus
destined to become full-blown as civilization began in this way: a
tentative thesis supported by all that victimizes us now. From initial
alienation to advanced civilization, the course is marked by more and
more reification, dependence, bureaucratization, spiritual desolation,
and barren technicization.

Little wonder that the question of the origin of symbolic thought, the
very air of civilization, arises with some force. Why culture should
exist in the first place appears, increasingly, a more apt way to put
it. Especially given the enormous antiquity of human intelligence now
established, chiefy from Thomas Wynn's persuasive demonstration (1989)
of what it took to fashion the stone tools of about a million years
ago. There was a very evident gap between established human capability
and the initiation of symbolic culture, with many thousands of
generations intervening between the two.

Culture is a fairly recent affair. The oldest cave art, for example,
is in the neighborhood of 30,000 years old, and agriculture only got
underway about 10,000 years ago. The missing element during the vast
interval between the time when I.Q. was available to enable
symbolizing, and its realization, was a shift in our relationship to
nature. It seems plausible to see in this interval, on some level that
we will perhaps never fathom, a refusal to strive for mastery of
nature. It may be that only when this striving for mastery was
introduced, probably non-consciously, via a very gradual division of
labor, did the symbolizing of experiences begin to take hold.

But, it is so often argued, the violence of primitives - human
sacrifice, cannibalism, head-hunting, slavery, etc. — can only be
tamed by symbolic culture/civilization. The simple answer to this
stereotype of the primitive is that organized violence was not ended
by culture, but in fact commenced with it. William J. Perry (1927)
studied various New World peoples and noted a striking contrast
between an agricultural group and a nondomesticated group. He found
the latter "greatly inferior in culture, but lacking [the former's]
hideous customs." While virtually every society that adopted a
domesticated relationship to nature, all over the globe, became
subject to violent practices, the non-agricultural knew no organized
violence. Anthropologists have long focused on the Northwest Coast
Indians as a rare exception to this rule of thumb. Although
essentially a fishing people, at a certain point they took slaves and
established a very hierarchical society. Even here, however,
domestication was present, in the form of tame dogs and tobacco as a
minor crop.

We succumb to objectification and let a web of culture control us and
tell us how to live, as if this were a natural development. It is
anything but that, and we should be clear about what
culture/civilization has in fact given us, and what it has taken away.

The philosopher Richard Rorty (1979) described culture as the
assemblage of claims to knowledge. In the realm of symbolic being the
senses are depreciated, because of their systematic separation and
atrophy under civilization. The sensual is not considered a legitimate
source of claims to truth.

We humans once allowed a full and appreciative reception to the total
sensory input, what is called in German umwelt, or the world around
us. Heinz Werner (1940, 1963) argued that originally a single sense
obtained, before divisions in society ruptured sensory unity.
Surviving non-agricultural peoples often exhibit, in the interplay and
interpenetration of the senses, a very much greater sensory awareness
and involvement than do domesticated individuals (E. Carpenter 1980).
Striking examples abound, such as the Bushmen, who can see four moons
of Jupiter with the unaided eye and can hear a single-engine light
plane seventy miles away (Farb 1978).

Symbolic culture inhibits human communication by blocking and
otherwise suppressing channels of sensory awareness. An increasingly
technological existence compels us to tune out most of what we could
experience. The William Blake declaration comes to mind:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to
man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, 'till he sees
all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

Laurens van der Post (1958) described telepathic communication among
the Kung in Africa, prompting Richard Coan (1987) to characterize such
modes as "representing an alternative, rather than a prelude to the
kind of civilization in which we live."

In 1623 William Drummond wrote, "What sweet contentments doth the soul
enjoy by the senses. They are the gates and windows of its knowledge,
the organs of its delight." In fact, the "I," if not the "soul,"
doesn't exist in the absence of bodily sensations; there are no
non-sensory conscious states. But it is all too evident how our senses
have been domesticated in a symbolic cultural atmosphere: tamed,
separated, arranged in a revealing hierarchy. Vision, under the sign
of modern linear perspective, reigns because it is the least proximal,
most distancing of the senses. It has been the means by which the
individual has been transformed into a spectator, the world into a
spectacle, and the body an object or specimen. The primacy of the
visual is no accident, for an undue elevation of sight not only
situates the viewer outside what he or she sees, but enables the
principle of control or domination at base. Sound or hearing as the
acme of the senses would be much less adequate to domestication
because it surrounds and penetrates the speaker as well as the
listener.

Other sensual faculties are discounted far more. Smell, which loses
its importance only when suppressed by culture, was once a vital means
of connection with the world. The literature on cognition almost
completely ignores the sense of smell, just as its role is now so
circumscribed among humans. It is, after all, of little use for
purposes of domination; considering how smell can so directly trigger
even very distant memories, perhaps it is even a kind of
anti-domination faculty. Lewis Thomas (1983) remarked that "The act of
smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking
itself." And if it isn't it very likely used to be and should be
again.

Tactile experiences or practices are another sensual area we have been
expected to relinquish in favor of compensatory symbolic substitutes.
The sense of touch has indeed been diminished in a synthetic,
work-occupied, long-distance existence. There is little time for or
emphasis on tactile stimulation or communication, even though such
deprivation causes clearly negative outcomes. Nuances of sensitivity
and tenderness become lost, and it is well known that infants and
children who are seldom touched, carried and caressed are slow to
develop and are often emotionally stunted.

Touching by definition involves feeling; to be "touched" is to feel
emotionally moved, a reminder of the earlier potency of the tactile
sense, as in the expression "keep in touch." The lessening of this
category of sensuousness, among the rest, has had momentous
consequences. Its renewal, in a re-sensitized, reunited world, will
bring a likewise momentous improvement in living. As Tommy cried out,
in The Who's rock opera of the same name, "See me, feel me, touch me,
heal me...."

As with animals and plants, the land, the rivers, and human emotions,
the senses come to be isolated and subdued. Aristotle's notion of a
"proper" plan of the universe dictated that "each sense has its proper
sphere."

Freud, Marcuse and others saw that civilization demands the
sublimation or repression of the pleasures of the proximity senses so
that the individual can be thus converted to an instrument of labor.
Social control, via the network of the symbolic, very deliberately
disempowers the body. An alienated counter-world, driven on to greater
estrangement by ever-greater division of labor, humbles one's own
somatic sensations and fundamentally distracts from the basic rhythms
of one's life.

The definitive mind-body split, ascribed to Descartes' 17th century
formulations, is the very hallmark of modern society. What has been
referred to as the great "Cartesian anxiety" over the specter of
intellectual and moral chaos, was resolved in favor of suppression of
the sensual and passionate dimension of human existence. Again we see
the domesticating urge underlying culture, the fear of not being in
control, now indicting the senses with a vengeance. Henceforth science
and technology have a theoretic license to proceed without limits,
sensual knowledge having been effectively eradicated in terms of
claims to truth or understanding.

Seeing what this bargain has wrought, a deep-seated reaction is
dawning against the vast symbolic enterprise that weighs us down and
invades every part of us. "If we do not 'come to our senses' soon," as
David Howes (1991) judged, "we will have permanently forfeited the
chance of constructing any meaningful alternatives to the
pseudoexistence which passes for life in our current 'Civilization of
the Image."' The task of critique may be, most centrally, to help us
see what it will take to reach a place in which we are truly present
to each other and to the world.

The first separation seems to have been the sense of time which brings
a loss of being present to ourselves. The growth of this sense is all
but indistinguishable from that of alienation itself. If, as
Levi-Strauss put it, "the characteristic feature of the savage mind is
its timelessness," living in the here and now becomes lost through the
mediation of cultural interventions. Presentness is deferred by the
symbolic, and this refusal of the contingent instant is the birth of
time. We fall under the spell of what Eliade called the "terror of
history" as representations effectively oppose the pull of immediate
perceptual experience.

Mircea Eliade's Myth of the Eternal Return (1954) stresses the fear
that all primitive societies have had of history, the passing of time.
On the other hand, voices of civilization have tried to celebrate our
immersion in this most basic cultural construct. Leroi-Gourhan (1964),
for instance, saw in time orientation "perhaps the human act par
excellence." Our perceptions have become so time-governed and time
saturated that it is hard to imagine time's general absence: for the
same reasons it is so difficult to see, at this point, a
non-alienated, non-symbolic, undivided social existence.

History, according to Peterson and Goodall (1993), is marked by an
amnesia about where we came from. Their stimulating Visions of Caliban
also pointed out that our great forgetting may well have begun with
language, the originating device of the symbolic world. Comparative
linguist Mary LeCron Foster (1978, 1980) believes that language is
perhaps less than 50,000 years old and arose with the first impulses
toward art, ritual and social differentiation. Verbal symbolizing is
the principal means of establishing, defining, and maintaining the
cultural world and of structuring our very thinking.

As Hegel said somewhere, to question language is to question being. It
is very important, however, to resist such overstatements and see the
distinction, for one thing, between the cultural importance of
language and its inherent limitations. To hold that we and the world
are but linguistic creations is just another way of saying how
pervasive and controlling is symbolic culture. But Hegel's claim goes
much too far, and George Herbert Mead's assertion (1934) that to have
a mind one must have a language is similarly hyperbolic and false.

Language transforms meaning and commumcation but is not synonymous
with them. Thought, as Vendler (1967) understood, is essentially
independent of language. Studies of patients and others lacking all
aspects of speech and language demonstrate that the intellect remains
powerful even in the absence of those elements (Lecours and Joanette
1980; Donald 1991). The claim that language greatly facilitates
thought is likewise questionable, inasmuch as formal experiments with
children and adults have not demonstrated it (G. Cohen 1977). Language
is clearly not a necessary condition for thinking (see Kertesz 1988,
Jansons 1988).

Verbal communication is part of the movement away from a face-to-face
social reality, making feasible physical separateness. The word always
stands between people who wish to connect with each other,
facilitating the diminution of what need not be spoken to be said.
That we have declined from a non-linguistic state begins to appear a
sane point of view. This intuition may lie behind George W. Morgan's
1968 judgment that "Nothing, indeed, is more subject to depreciation
and suspicion in our disenchanted world than the word."

Communication outside civilization involved all the senses, a
condition linked to the key gatherer-hunter traits of openness and
sharing. Literacy ushered us into the society of divided and reduced
senses, and we take this sensory deprivation for granted as if it were
a natural state, just as we take literacy for granted.

Culture and technology exist because of language. Many have seen
speech, in turn. as a means of coordinating labor, that is, as an
essential part of the technique of production. Language is critical
for the formation of the rules of work and exchange accompanying
division of labor, with the specializations and standardizations of
nascent economy paralleling those of language. Now guided by
symbolization, a new kind of thinking takes over, which realizes
itself in culture and technology. The interdependence of language and
technology is at least as obvious as that of language and culture, and
results in an accelerating mastery over the natural world
intrinsically similar to the control introduced over the once
autonomous and sensuous individual.

Noam Chomsky, chief language theorist, commits a grave and reactionary
error by portraying language as a "natural" aspect of "essential human
nature," innate and independent of culture (1966b, 1992). His
Cartesian perspective sees the mind as an abstract machine which is
simply destined to turn out strings of symbols and manipulate them.
Concepts like origins or alienation have no place in this barren
techno-schema. Lieberman (1975) provides a concise and fundamental
correction: "Human language could have evolved only in relation to the
total human condition."

The original sense of the word define is, from Latin, to limit or
bring to an end. Language seems often to close an experience, not to
help ourselves be open to experience. When we dream, what happens is
not expressed in words, just as those in love communicate most deeply
without verbal symbolizing. What has been advanced by language that
has really advanced the human spirit? In 1976, von Glasersfeld
wondered "whether, at some future time, it will still seem so obvious
that language has enhanced the survival of life on this planet."

Numerical symbolism is also of fundamental importance to the
development of a cultural world. In many primitive societies it was
and is considered unlucky to count living creatures, an
anti-reification attitude related to the common primitive notion that
to name another is to gain power over that person. Counting, like
naming, is part of the domestication process. Division of labor lends
itself to the quantifiable, as opposed to what is whole in itself,
unique, not fragmented. Number is also necessary for the abstraction
inherent in the exchange of commodities and is prerequisite to the
take-off of science and technology. The urge to measure involves a
deformed kind of knowledge that seeks control of its object, not
understanding.

The sentiment that "the only way we truly apprehend things is through
art" is a commonplace opinion, one which underlines our dependence on
symbols and representation. "The fact that originally all art was
'sacred"' (Eliade, 1985), that is, belonging to a separate sphere,
testifies to its original status or function.

Art is among the earliest forms of ideological and ritual
expressiveness, developed along with religious observances designed to
hold together a communal life that was beginning to fragment. It was a
key means of facilitating social integration and economic
differentiation (Dickson, 1990), probably by encoding information to
register membership, status, and position (Lumsden and Wilson 1983).
Prior to this time, somewhere during the Upper Paleolithic, devices
for social cohesion were unnecessary; division of labor, separate
roles, and territoriality seem to have been largely non-existent. As
tensions and anxieties started to emerge in social life, art and the
rest of culture arose with them in answer to their disturbing
presence.

Art, like religion, arose from the original sense of disquiet, no
doubt subtly but powerfully disturbing in its newness and its
encroaching gradualness. In 1900 Hirn wrote of an early
dissatisfaction that motivated the artistic search for a "fuller and
deeper expression" as "compensation for new deficiencies of life."
Cultural solutions, however, do not address the deeper dislocations
that cultural "solutions" are themselves part of. Conversely, as
commentators as diverse as Henry Miller and Theodor Adorno have
concluded, there would be no need of art in a disalienated world. What
art has ineffectively striven to capture and express would once again
be a reality, the false antidote of culture forgotten.

Art is a language and so, evidently, is ritual, among the earliest
cultural and symbolic institutions. Julia Kristeva (1989) commented on
"the close relation of grammar to ritual," and Frits Staal's studies
of Vedic ritual (1982,1986,1988) demonstrated to him that syntax can
completely explain the form and meaning of ritual. As Chris Knight
(1996) noted, speech and ritual are "interdependent aspects of one and
the same symbolic domain."

Essential for the breakthrough of the cultural in human affairs,
ritual is not only a means of aligning or prescribing emotions; it is
also a formalization that is intimately linked with hierarchies and
formal rule over individuals. All known tribal societies and early
civilizations had hierarchical organizations built on or bound up with
a ritual structure and matching conceptual system.

Examples of the link between ritual and inequality, developing even
prior to agriculture, are widespread (Gans 1985, Conkey 1984). Rites
serve a safety valve function for the discharge of tensions generated
by emerging divisions in society and work to create and maintain
social cohesion. Earlier on there was no need of devices to unify what
was, in a non-division of labor context, still whole and unstratified.

It has often been said that the function of the symbol is to disclose
structures of the real that are inaccessible to empirical observation.
More to the point, in terms of the processes of culture and
civilization, however, is Abner Cohen's contention (1981, 1993) that
symbolism and ritual disguise, mystify and sanctify irksome duties and
roles and thus make them seem desirable. Or, as David Parkin (1992)
put it, the compulsory nature of ritual blunts the natural autonomy of
individuals by placing them at the service of authority.

Ostensibly opposed to estrangement, the counterworld of public rites
is arrayed against the current of historical direction. But, again,
this is a delusion, since ritual facilitates the establishment of the
cultural order, bedrock of alienated theory and practice. Ritual
authority structures play an important part in the organization of
production (division of labor) and actively further the coming of
domestication. Symbolic categories are set up to control the wild and
alien; thus the domination of women proceeds, a development brought to
full realization with agriculture, when women become essentially
beasts of burden and/or sexual objects. Part of this fundamental shift
is movement toward territorialism and warfare; Johnson and Earle
(1987) discussed the correspondence between this movement and the
increased importance of ceremonialism.

According to James Shreeve (1995), "In the ethnographic record,
wherever you get inequality, it is justified by invoking the sacred."
Relatedly, all symbolism, says Eliade (1985), was originally religious
symbolism. Social inequality seems to be accompanied by subjugation in
the non-human sphere. M. Reinach (quoted in Radin, 1927) said, "thanks
to magic, man takes the offensive against the objective world."
Cassirer (1955) phrased it this way: "Nature yields nothing without
ceremonies."

Out of ritual action arose the shaman, who was not only the first
specialist because of his or her role in this area, but the first
cultural practitioner in general. The earliest art was accomplished by
shamans, as they assumed ideological leadership and designed the
content of rituals.

This original specialist became the regulator of group emotions, and
as the shaman's potency increased, there was a corresponding decrease
in the psychic vitality of the rest of the group (Lommel, 1967).
Centralized authority, and most likely religion too, grew out of the
elevated position of the shaman. The specter of social complexity was
incarnated in this individual who wielded symbolic power. Every head
man and chief developed from the primacy of this figure in the lives
of others in the group.

Religion, like art, contributed to a common symbolic grammar needed by
the new social order and its fissures and anxieties. The word is based
on the Latin religare, to tie or bind, and a Greek verbal stem
denoting attentiveness to ritual, faithfulness to rules. Social
integration, required for the first time, is evident as impetus to
religion.

It is the answer to insecurities and tensions, promising resolution
and transcendence by means of the symbolic. Religion finds no basis
for its existence prior to the wrong turn taken toward culture and the
civilized (domesticated). The American philosopher George Santayana
summed it up well with, "Another world to live in is what we mean by
religion."

Since Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) we have understood that human
evolution greatly accelerated culturally at a time of insignificant
physiological change. Thus symbolic being did not depend on waiting
for the right gifts to evolve. We can now see, with Clive Gamble
(1994), that intention in human action did not arrive with
domestication/agriculture/civilization.

The native denizens of Africa's Kalahari Desert, as studied by Laurens
van der Post (1976), lived in "a state of complete trust, dependence
and interdependence with nature," which was "far kinder to them than
any civilization ever was." Egalitarianism and sharing were the
hallmark qualities of hunter-gatherer life (G. Isaac 1976, Ingold
1987, 1988, Erdal and Whiten 1992, etc.), which is more accurately
called gatherer-hunter life, or the foraging mode. In fact, the great
bulk of this diet consisted of plant material, and there is no
conclusive evidence for hunting at all prior to the Upper Paleolithic
(Binford 1984,1985).

An instructive look at contemporary primitive societies is Colin
Turnbull's work (1961, 1965) on pygmies of the Ituri forest and their
Bantu neighbors. The pygmies are foragers, living with no religion or
culture. They are seen as immoral and ignorant by the agriculturalist
Bantu, but enjoy much greater individualism and freedom. To the
annoyance of the Bantu, the pygmies irreverently mock the solemn rites
of the latter and their sense of sin. Rejecting territorialism, much
less private holdings, they "move freely in an uncharted,
unsystematized, unbounded social world," according to Mary Douglas
(1973).

The vast era prior to the coming of symbolic being is an enormously
prominent reality and a question mark to some. Commenting on this
"period spanning more than a million years," Tim Ingold (1993) called
it "one of the most profound enigmas known to archaeological science."
But the longevity of this stable, non-cultural epoch has a simple
explanation: as F. Goodman (1988) surmised, "It was such a harmonious
existence, and such a successful adaptation, that it did not
materially alter for many thousands of years."

Culture triumphed at last with domestication. The scope of life became
narrower, more specialized, forcibly divorced from its previous grace
and spontaneous liberty. The assault of a symbolic orientation upon
the natural also had immediate outward results. Early rock drawings,
found 125 miles from the nearest recorded trickle of water in the
Sahara, show people swimming. Elephants were still somewhat common in
some coastal Mediterranean zones in 500 B.C., wrote Herodotus.
Historian Clive Ponting (1992) has shown that every civilization has
diminished the health of its environment.

And cultivation definitely did not provide a higher-quality or more
reliable food base (M.N. Cohen 1989, Walker and Shipman 1996), though
it did introduce diseases of all kinds, almost completely unknown
outside civilization (Burkett 1978, Freund 1982), and sexual
inequality (M. Ehrenberg 1989b, A. Getty 1996). Frank Waters' Book of
the Hopi (1963) gives us a stunning picture of unchecked division of
labor and the poverty of the symbolic: "More and more they traded for
things they didn't need, and the more goods they got, the more they
wanted. This was very serious. For they did not realize they were
drawing away, step by step, from the good life given them."

A pertinent chapter from The Time Before History (1996) by Colin Tudge
bears a title that speaks volumes, "The End of Eden: Farming." Much of
an underlying epistemological distinction is revealed in this contrast
by Ingold (1993): "In short, whereas for farmers and herdsmen the tool
is an instrument of control, for hunters and gatherers it would better
be regarded as an instrument of revelation." And Horkheimer (1972)
bears quoting, in terms of the psychic cost of
domestication/domination of nature: "the destruction of the inner life
is the penalty man has to pay for having no respect for any life other
than his own." Violence directed outward is at the same time inflicted
spiritually, and the outside world becomes transformed, debased, as
surely as the perceptual field was subjected to fundamental
redefinition. Nature certainly did not ordain civilization; quite the
contrary.

Today it is fashionable, if not mandatory, to maintain that culture
always was and always will be. Even though it is demonstrably the case
that there was an extremely long non-symbolic human era, perhaps one
hundred times as long as that of civilization, and that culture has
gained only at the expense of nature, one has it from all sides that
the symbolic — like alienation — is eternal. Thus questions of origins
and destinations are meaningless. Nothing can be traced further than
the semiotic in which everything is trapped.

But the limits of the dominant rationality and the costs of
civilization are too starkly visible for us to accept this kind of
cop-out. Since the ascendance of the symbolic humans have been trying,
through participation in culture, to recover an authenticity we once
lived. The constant urge or quest for the transcendent testifies that
the hegemony of absence is a cultural constant. As Thomas McFarland
(1987) found, "culture primarily witnesses the absence of meaning, not
its presence."

Massive, unfulfilling consumption, within the dictates of production
and social control, reigns as the chief everyday consolation for this
absence of meaning, and culture is certainly itself a prime consumer
choice. At base, it is division of labor that ordains our false and
disabling symbolic totality. "The increase in specialization...,"
wrote Peter Lomas (1996), "undermines our confidence in our ordinary
capacity to live."

We are caught in the cultural logic of objectification and the
objectifying logic of culture, such that those who counsel new ritual
and other representational forms as the route to a re-enchanted
existence miss the point completely. More of what has failed for so
long can hardly be the answer. Levi-Strauss (1978) referred to "a kind
of wisdom [that primitive peoples] practiced spontaneously and the
rejection of which, by the modern world, is the real madness."

Either the non-symbolizing health that once obtained, in all its
dimensions, or, madness and death. Culture has led us to betray our
own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an everworsening realm of
synthetic, isolating, impoverished estrangement. Which is not to say
that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would lose
our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be
erased for our redemption.