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8/12/2019 Váden Anarchist Theory Language http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/vaden-anarchist-theory-language 1/25 Anarist Developments in Cultural Studies Ten Years Aer 9/11: An Anarist Evaluation 2011.1 Notes on an Anarist eory of Language, or, A Sympathetic Critique of Zerzan’s Primitivist Refusal of Symbolic Language Tere Vadén * Abstract e ana r cho -pri mitivi st r ef usal o f s ymbo lic l anguage is ty pica lly pr e- sented in writing or in speech. i s obvious paradox can be alleviated by adopting a notion of language that is both more naturalistic and more phenomenological than the one included in the primitivist cri- tique. From the primitivist point of view, a positive consequence is the possibility of a non-hierarchical theory of experience and language, one in which the cut between the two is erased. At the same time, this asubjective theory of experience and language means that the critique of techno logy and civilisation can no t be based on the notions of sub j ectivity and i nd ividua lity; a consequence tha t does not sit well with all of the tenets of anarcho-primitivist thought. * Tere Vadén teaches philosophy and interactive media in the University of Tampere, Finland. He is also an editor of the Finnish philosophical journal niin & näin .

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Page 1: Váden Anarchist Theory Language

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Anar ist Developments in Cultural Studies Ten Years A er 9/11: An Anar ist Evaluation2011.1

Notes on an Anar ist eoryof Language, or, A SympatheticCritique of Zerzan’s Primitivist

Refusal of Symbolic LanguageTere Vadén

*

Abstracte anarcho-primitivist ref usal of symbolic language is typically pre-

sented in writing or in speech . i s obvious paradox can be alleviatedby adopting a notion of language that is both more naturalistic andmore phenomenological than the one included in the primitivist cri-tique. From the primitivist point of view, a positive consequence is thepossibility of a non-hierarchical theory of experience and language,one in which the cut between the two is erased. At the same time,this asubjective theory of experience and language means that thecritique of technology and civilisation can not be based on the notions

of sub jectivity and individuality; a consequence that does not sit wellwith all of the tenets of anarcho-primitivist thought.

*

Tere Vadén teaches philosophy and interactive media in the University of Tampere,Finland. He is also an editor of the Finnish philosophical journal niin & näin .

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242 Tere Vadén

e Problem: Primitivist Paradox

In Fragments of an Anar ist Anthropology (2004: 15) anthropolo-gist David Graeber credits author and poet Robert Graves with the(most recent) “invention” of two major intellectual traditions: theidea of a Great Goddess (Mother Earth, Gaia) and a rejection of in-dustrial civilisation. Graeber goes on to say that while pagans haveadopted the rst idea, a group of primitivists with John Zerzan asthe most famous proponent, have taken the rejection of civilisation

and hope of its collapse even f urther by suggesting that the adop-tion of agriculture was a Big Mistake.1 Graeber agrees with one of the central claims of primitivist theory: there have been and stillare societies (peoples, groups, bands) that display very li le of thehierarchical and violent traits of modernity. is is something thatthe anthropological record is clear on, and while Graeber relies alsoon contemporary work (partly his own) on contemporary societies,the l ocus c l ass i cus of primitivism, Zerzan’s essay “Future Primitive”

(1994), credits the seminal work of anthropologists like MarshallSahlin and Richard Lee. Another common belief f or Graeber andZerzan is that the study of these (typically non-Western) non-hierar-chical societies may yield fruitful experiences and knowledge abouthow to overcome the current unsus tainable practices — socially, eco-logically, politically, spiritually.2

What does the an thropological record tell, then , according to Grae-ber, Zerzan and others? Both the examples we have and a theoreticalanalysis of the reasons of why they are good examples point to thecovariant absence of violence and alienation with the absence of agriculture, division of labour and symbolic culture. ese threecharacteristics — agriculture/domestication, division of labour andsymbolic culture — form an interweaving common target for prim-itivist critique. ey are not only historically linked in that theyseem to arise in human evolution roughly simultaneously, but arealso conceptually connected, in that agriculture demands d ivision of labour and symbolic culture, without which it would be impossible

1 Zerzan (1994: 42) sees the idea of the Mother Earth as a feature of agricultural societies.2 See also Douglas P. Fry’s path-breaking e Human Potential for Peace: An Anthro-

pological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence (2005). Fry shows thataggression and wa r are not “natural” to human soc ieties. On the other hand , he doesnd both agricultural and gatherer-hunter societies that have a culture of peaceful-ness.

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 243

in any large scale. As Zerzan (1999: 41) points out, writing arisesas accounting; it is a tool of hierarchy from its very inception: “ eearliest writings are records of taxes, laws, terms of labor servitude.”Zerzan sees that even if these three and other interconnected phe-nomena — such as hierarchy, gender systems, organised violence,etc. — could in abstract thought be picked apart and analysed inseparation, such an analysis is not helpful as it loses the integrallive phenomenon: “Self-domestication through language, art, andritual inspired the taming of animals and plants that f ollowed” (ibid.:28). One important consequence to remember is that f or Zerzan, the

progress of domestication implies the increase of violence — contraryto the received understanding of the meaning of the term.ese two anarchists, Graeber and Zerzan, part ways in suggest-

ing the lessons of the anthropological observations. While Zerzanthinks that only primitive conditions may provide f or f ull human re-alisation, Graeber (2004: 16) does see something quixotic in ana rcho-primitivism, comparing it again to Graeves’ work: “[ . . .] it is reallyimpossible to know on what level one is supposed to read it. It’s

both ridiculous self-parody, and terribly serious, at the same time.”ough Graeber does not elaborate, one can guess that one supposed

element of self-parody in primitivism is the fact that primitivists’texts, including Zerzan’s o en erudite and richly sourced essays,read a lot like highly civilised treatises, thus in a way taking partin the specialised, mediated and symbolic culture they at the sametime ref use. Zerzan himself notes the paradox at the end of the essay“Language : Origin and Mean ing” (in Zerzan 1999), but goes on to saythat he has to use words in order to speak. Indeed , we might want toaccept Zerzan’s primitivist analysis of the “Big Mistake” only to endup with a conund rum: if symbolic though t is necessary to reication,objectication and alienation, how is it possible to work against itin words, by writing and speaking? One of the things that makeswriting and speaking about primitivism “ridiculous” is, presumably,precisely this strict impossibility of practising what one preaches— an impossibility that is in a sense as troubling as the practicalimpossibility of gatherer-hunter livelihoods on the contemporarydepleted and overpopulated planet.

i s paradox might also be at the hea rt of a curious passage in aninterview of Zerzan by Derrick J ensen . e context is a discussion onviolence and wo rds as weapons . J ensen is frustrated by the f act thatwhile talking is being done , the wo rld deteriorates f urther and na tureis being destroyed. Jensen (2000) says: “Or to take another example,

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244 Tere Vadén

I recently read that Gandhi wrote a le er to Hitler appealing to hisconscience, and was amazed that it didn’t work.” Here is Zerzan’sanswer: “Gandhi’s failure doesn’t mean words must always fail.He was obviously directing his words at the wrong place. Had hespoken mo re radical and eff ective words to his f ellow Indians, thingsmight be different there now.” is is a relatively surprising answer,compared, for instance, with the blanket statement: “Along theselines, in terms of structure, it is evident that ‘freedom of speech’ doesnot exist; grammar is the invisible ‘thought control’ of our invisibleprison. With language we have already accommodated ourselves

to a world of unfreedom” (Zerzan 1999: 34). Do or do not wordsalways fail? Or, to put it in another way, where does the — obvious— liberating and healing power of language stem from?

To answer these questions we have to look closely at Zerzan’scritique of symbolic culture and language, at the same time remem-bering that these a re not tobeseparated from the larger phenomenonof which they are parts. Hopef ully, this way we might be able toalleviate the paradox without throwing the baby out with the bath-

water; that is, without losing the overall critical analysis of civilisa-tion and the Big Mistake.

What is Wrong with Language?

e quote above already locates the crux of the critique: languageis a structure set upon more amorphous and free experience. Moreparticularly, “Symbolising is linear, successive, substitutive; it canno tbe open to its whole object simultaneously. Its instrumental reasonis just that: manipulative and seeking domination. Its approach is‘let a stand for b’ instead of ‘let a be a.‘ Language has its basis inthe eff ort to conceptualize and equa lize the unequa l, thus bypassingthe essence and diversity of a varied, variable richness” (Zerzan2002: 2). e claim that symbols and language have a petrifyingeffect is, as such, a relatively well-known theme even in standardWestern philosophy of language3 and philosophical anthropology,

3 For instance, the anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend devoted his posthumouslypublished work Conques t o f Abundance . A T a l e o f Abs tr ac ti on v e r sus t he R i ness o f Being (1999) to the theme of how Western philosophy has been obsessed with a trendof oversimplication and a habit of glorifying the oversimplied.

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 245

as Zerzan demons trates with ample quotations in “Language : Originand Meaning.”

Tobesure, most contemporary philosoph ical though t on languageagreeswith Zerzan that symbolisation in somesense obs tructs or con-structs experience. ere are some schools in the so-called analytictradition of philosophy of language , where though t (proposition) andlanguage (representation) are seen as independent. Consequently,the dependence of thought on language (i.e., linguistic relativism) isdenied, and the u ltimate freedom of symbolic though t asserted. How-ever, already Bertrand Russell (2002: 218), a classic of the analytic

tradition, saw a connection between grammar and philosophicalthough t. In J ense it s v on Gu t und Böse Nietzsche f amous ly speculatedon the inuence o f Indo-European g ramma r on Wes tern me taphysicsand the diff erence in comparison to Uralic-Altaic languages (Niet-zsche 1999). Since Nietzsche, the idea that language somehow f orcesits stamp on thought and experience in spite of the wish or will of the experiencing sub ject has been a mainstay of many schools of continen tal though t. In f act, one of the main themes of 20th century

phenomenology in Germany (Heidegger) and France (Sartre) is thedescription of how language — widely understood — f orms that verysub jectivity and the social structures around it. An extreme exampleis the thought of Jacques Lacan, where the introduction of the in-fant to the symbolic universe is the founding gesture of subjectivity(see, e.g., Žižek 1996; interestingly, Žižek (2008: 52) agrees on theviolent nature of symbolisation: “there is something violent in thevery symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortication”).

Corresponding to this idea of language as an oppressive lteron experience is both the philosophical and artistic craving for af orm of experience (and possibly expression) that would be freeof ossied linguistic structures. As an example one can mentionSchopenhauer’s notion of music as the direct life of W ill e , withoutthe practical and symbolic —and theref ore servile —sides of all otherforms of art. One form of this craving is the (romantic) ideal of art-f or-art’s-sake, art without any ulterior motives that would demandstructures on experience.

e insistence on non -symbolic experience is o en seen as na ïve.Many schools of philosophy otherwise sympathetic to the ideas of liberation and emancipation point out that pure or unmediated ex-perience does not exist. O en this claim of non-existence is takenfurther by claiming that, consequently, a search for pure experienceis not only empirically misguided but also ethically dubious. For

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example, a Lacanian theorist would point out that human subjectiv-ity is formed by the structures of the symbolic universe so that ayearning f or pure experience is a yearning beyond no t only sub jectiv-ity but also humanity altogether. No doubt, many Lacanians wouldnd the idea of pure experience not so much a topic to be discussedbut a symptom to be diagnosed. Likewise, a postmodernist thinkerwould point out that “there is nothing beyond text”; all meaning isconstructed. If there is something beyond text then that somethingcan not by denition be mean ingf ul. i s Derridean po int is close toWi genstein’s (2001) argument against private language: meaning-

f ul language is by denition something shared and intersub jective.eref ore a language f ully liberated from the structures of grammar,ideology and so on would presumably lose its intelligibility — weget the paradox of primitivist texts in a new f orm. e problemis not only related to meaning and communication, but also social.For instance, a Foucaultian theorist would say that an insistenceon pure experience is a move in a game of power/knowledge withspecic effects and as such impotent to move outside the existing

co-ordinates of epistemologically relevant action.In sum, most of contemporary continental theory (as well as ana-

lytic philosophy, in its critique of the “myth of the given” (see Sellars1956), i.e., the myth of a theory-free — or symbol-free or interpreta-tion-free — experience) agrees that the structures of meaning andsubjectivity are the structures of language, understood in a widesense. us the eradication of language in favour of a non-inter-pretative, non-symbolic or direct experience is at best an illusion of pre-human existence and at worst a proto-authoritative quest forunproblematic and uncritical authenticity beyond both subjectiveand intersub jective criteria. Put briey, according to the critique,to insist on pure experience is to elevate something that can notbe discussed or criticised into a decisive role, thereby promoting aworld of might-makes-right.

To his credit Zerzan is willing to f ace the paradox and go all theway. If the intersubjectivity of social life and meaningful communi-cation are, indeed , dependen t on and cons tructedou t of symbolic lan-guage, and if the road to direct experience means languagelessness,then we ha ve to do withou t intersub jectivity and commun ication inthe senses given to them in the theories mentioned above: “And if timelessness resolves the split between spontaneity and conscious-ness, languagelessness may be equally necessary” (Zerzan 1999: 31).

at, most certainly, means doing withou t a civilisation recognisable

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 247

from a Lacanian, Derridean or Foucaultian perspective. Zerzan’sprimitivism accepts no half-measures here.

Getting Rid of Symbolic Language

However, there is a deeper problem at issue. Let us proceed byway of an ana logy. Anarcho-primitivism is not about survivalism orlife-boatism. It may be possible for a healthy young person to livein primitive conditions (say, in a f orest withou t modern techno logy):

however, that is not the interesting thing. e interesting problemis how to live without civilisation in larger, social groups consistingof several generations for long periods of time. Analogously, it mayvery well be possible to temporarily get rid of ossied symboliclanguage (say, in artistic or religious contexts), but that is not theinteresting problem. e interesting case is language that is social,multi-generational and non-alienating. Let us call this interestingcase that of “collective non-symbolic language.”

e anthropological record also tells us that egalitarian and non-alienated band-societies, including the classic case of !Kung Bush-men , o en rely on rich oral traditions and engage in story-t elling andother types of discussions on a daily basis (Lee 1968: 37).4 ere isno prima facie reason to think that this is “symbolic commun ication,”at least no be er reason than to think that primitive stone tools are“techno logy.” Indeed , one may off er the hypothesis that in both cases,i.e., in overgeneralising stone tools as technology and all languageas symbolic communication, the mistake is to take the self-under-standing and self-description of Western metaphysics at face value.Western metaphysical civilisation believes that all language is sym-bolic commun ication and that all engagemen t with the environmen tis techno logy. If these belief s were true, it would certainly make thecase f or civilisation much s tronger. ese belief s are also the drivingforce behind the critique according to which the abandonment of reason and communicative rationality means also the abandonmentof ethics in favour of authority and violence.

4 See also Graeber’s emphasis on the centrality of oral traditions in modern day “Provi-sional Autonomous Zones” in Madagascar ( Graeber 2007). e orality of the linguistictradition may be crucial here. As James C. Sco (2010) has argued, the state-evasivepractices of many peoples in upland Southeast Asia include the loss of literacy: inorder to live without state hierarchy certain groups have become effectively post-lit-erate.

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Here, it is important to note that the consistent refusal of inter-subjective communicative symbolic language by Zerzan does not,as such, answer to the criticism that at the same time meaningfulcriteria of ethics are lost, and that the search for immediacy andexperience happens in a vacuum where authority and force haveall the assets on their side. Two points have to be noted here. First,again to his credit, Zerzan does not brush the problem under thecarpet by claiming that experiential intensity or immediacy wouldsomehow guarantee non-authoritarian or non-hierarchical condi-tions. Experiential intensity and immediacy does have a part in

individual and collective oppression and murderousness. Second,this is where the anthropological observation that non-civilised andegalitarian societies do exist becomes crucial. Of course, it would inprinciple be possible to claim that given the f ailure of civilisation,the ref usal of the essential symbolic structures making civilisationpossible — and consequently the ref usal of civilisation — would beadvisable even if we had no examples of successf ul non-civilisedlife: the refusal would be a “jump into the abyss.” However, the in-creased division of labour, exploitation of nature, spiritual alienation,and so on, seem to go together (and, vi ce v e r sa , the f act that whenthese are decreased, we may come close to a f orm of hunter-gathereregalitarianism, sustainability and nonviolence) give the primitivistargument against symbolic structures the nature of a programmeand provide it with a direction (toward primitive’ conditions). How-ever, in order to answer to the ethical problem, this direction hasto be supplemented with an idea of how the slide down the slopeof intersubjective communicative symbolic language is to end in anegalitarian and anarchistic situation and not, say, in an experien-tially exited rabid nationalism or ethnicism. i s is the experientialside of the political problem of how the collapse of state power isto lead to a more egalitarian and anarchist society, and not to therule of warlords and Maa thugs (a problem that concerns Graeberin Possibilities (2007)).

With regard to the ethics of the issue, it is instructive to look atthe case of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose thoughtserves as a springboard f or nearly all contemporary continen tal andpostmodern ph ilosophy, including Derrida and Foucau lt. What doesHeidegger say about the relationship between symbolic languageand experience? e case of Heidegger is revealing because he hasbeen accused of making precisely the mistake of giving full reign tothe sea rch f or authen tic experience and thereby f alling into the allure

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 249

of Nazism (see Derrida 1991 and Žižek 1999). Heidegger’s philoso-phy presents humans rst and foremost as engaged and embodiedbeings that can under certain circumstances function as individ-ual sub jects. However, primordially and f or the most part humansare a “distributed” opening and experiencing of a shared always-already meaningf ul world to which they are thrown (this mode of ex-istence Heidegger calls Dasein). Heidegger criticises contemporarycivilisation for forge ing this fundamental human constitution andcovering it up by the object-like structures of subjectivity, science,rationality and so on. For Heidegger, the subject and the object are

both structures that are under certain conditions (those of Westernmetaphysics) built on a more primordial asubjective and aobjectivelevel of being-in-the-world (see Heidegger 1993 and the commen taryin Dreyfus 1990).

When Heidegger insists that losing oneself into the everyday av-erageness (das Man ) of what-everybody-says and what-everybody-wants can be countered by resolutely f acing mortality and anxietythat reveal a more authentic way of being, the danger of misusingthe notion of authenticity does, indeed, appear. For instance, it canbe claimed that this Heideggerian description leaves too much roomin terms of the content of authenticity: almost any resolute facingof death and anxiety will do.5 Accepting that human being is basedon nothing and that all meaning is going to die, and still resolutelypushing ahead and “choosing a hero in the generational ba le of apeople” (as Heidegger puts it in the end of Se i n und Ze it ) becomesa voluntaristic enterprise: national socialism will do, if it promisesa rooted and embodied stand in the face of nothingness. Losingoneself in the “authen tic” national (völkis ) experience, one loses allintersub jective or universal ethical criteria. Heidegger (1976) doesclaim, for instance, that the overcoming of Western metaphysics isa problem that can be encountered only in the German language; if Heidegger is right, wewhodono t speak Germanasana tive language just have to accept this claim without really being able to evaluateit. e same goes for national experience: we who do not belongto it, can not really criticise it or its authenticity either. However,from the anarcho-primitivist perspective the critique of Heideggershould not concentrate on the fact that Heidegger tries to under-mine the criteria of communicative rationality (a goal that anarcho-primitivism shares with Heidegger), but rather on the fact that he

5 See the analysis of Heidegger as a decisionist by Krockow (1990).

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did not radically enough question structures like division of labourand h ierarchy, both of which characterised his views on po litics andphilosophy.6

Language, Subjective and Asubjective

How does this ethical problem apply to a primitivist search f or im-mediate experience? We have to go back to Zerzan’s critique of lan-guage . In Zerzan’s account, language introduces a distance between

humans and nature and humans and their experience: “ oughlanguage, in its denitive features, seems to be complete from itsincep tion, its progress is marked by a steadily debasing process. ecarving up of nature, its reduction into concepts and equivalencies,occurs along lines laid down by the pa erns of language. And themore the mach inery of language , again paralleling ideology, sub jectsexistence to itself, the more blind its role in reproducing a societyof subjugation” (1999: 33). In this very basic sense, language is a

tool of alienation, when alienation is understood as explained byZerzan: “Marx dened alienation as being separated from the meansof production. Instead of producing things to use, we are used bythe system. I would take it a step f urther and say that to me it meansestranged from our own experiences , dislodged from a natural modeof being” (Zerzan in Jensen 2000).

To be sure, this tendency exists in language. Heidegger’s descrip-tion of the average everydayness of language and its way of levellingauthen tic existence p rovidesasimilar description. But is this all thereis to language?

To say that language is necessarily or only a tool of alienationseems strange given the f ull continuum o f language from the simplecries and calls of animals to full-edged human language. ereseems to be no clear-cut point where the “language” of animalsand babies (or, non-alienated, intoxicated, impaired, etc., humans)turns into the necessarily alienating symbolic structure (Zerzan)or the calculating, translatable and universalisable language of themarket place and the sciences (Heidegger). Indeed, given the richvariety of calls and cries in the animal world, it is li le wonder thatscientists widely agree that some animals do posses rudimentary

6 e ethical problem in Heidegger and his critique of technology is further discussedin Vadén (2004).

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 251

symbolic language . Consider the pu y-nosed monke y with its threedistinct warning calls, “predator-in-air,” “predator-in-tree,” “preda-tor-on-ground ” (Arnold, Pohlner, and Zuberbüh ler 2008, Arnold andZuberbühler 2008). ese calls do not work as reexes on visualor other sensory stimuli, but are generalised and contextualised,i.e. “symbolic.” Similar observations have been made with regard todolphin and whale “languages.”

Looking from the other end, it is obvious that human “language”is not always symbolic. e rst sounds made by a new-born canhardly be classied as language . However, at some point in the typi-

cal developmen t of a child a mature lingu istic prociency is acquired.is means that in nature symbolic language develops out of some-thing that is less-than -symbolic, whether we wan t to call it languageor not. Likewise, in naturalistic (and non-Chomskian) cognitivescience, it is usually thought that full-edged conceptual and repre-sentational structures emerge through processes of learning from amore primordial level of non-conceptual and non-representationalcontent.

It seems that Zerzan wou ld not like to call this less-than -symboliccontent linguistic. For him, language is in essence communicative,and communication is dened as the transmission of symbolic mes-sages. Or, to put i t inano ther way, language is the structured mediumthrough which experience may be communicated: “It is easier stillto begin to locate language in these terms if one takes up anotherdenition common to both ideology and language: namely, thateach is a system of distorted commun ication between two poles andpredicated upon symbolization” (1999: 32). Here communication isdened as a process where I rst experience something inside my-self, then code this something into the structures of language , whichare then pushed outside of myself by being spoken or wri en, a erwhich the receiver decodes the structures and arrives at some mentalcontent and possibly experiences . Again, this may well be a big partof language. It is o en taken to be the most important or essentialpart, as in the Wi gensteinian argument against a private language.According to this view, language as communication should be asclear and as unambiguous as possible; this forms the kernel of theview of language as representative counting and accounting thatHeidegger, among others, strongly criticises.

However, again both a more empirical and naturalistic as wellas a more phenomenological look at language point out that thisis not all there is. Even in mainstream analytic philosophy, it has

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been observed that certain parts of natural languages do no t, in f act,possess well-dened intersubjective content. For instance, indexicalwords are meaningf ully used even though they do not systematicallyrepresent or symbolise, i.e., even though their content is non-con-ceptual (Peacocke 1995). Likewise, a Heidegger or a Bataille wouldinsist on the non -commun icative nature of language . For Heidegger(2007), language is rst and for the most part a way in which theworld opens itself to us in experience. i s opening-up is engaged,distributed and practical, and only under certain circums tances (likethe modern West) does the experience get articulated into sub jects

and ob jects and the linguistic structures that correspond to them.For Bataille (1988), language is not communication but rather com-munion, in which experiential energies are expanded and expendedas through wounds.

Let us imagine three concentric circles. ey could be a houseon a yard inside a forest.7 In the innermost circle, the house (theoikos ), things have their denite places and utilitarian functions. Or-der is established, and words, as names, can systematically refer to

objects needed. is circle is limited by the walls, oors and roof of the house, so that a relative stability of conditions guaranteesthe relative permanence of relationships and f unctions inside. ehouse is essentially a hub of control and permanence, and as a lim-ited economy it engages in import and export. Around the house isthe yard, with some cultivated patches, maybe buildings f or storageand work, and pathways between the various buildings. Here theorder and functionality already a ained in the house is challenged.

e wind may sweep away some spoken words, and make speechindistingu ishable from animal grun ts. e paths grow in un less used.Fences have to be erected, livestock protected from beasts. Anthro-pocentric areas have to be continually cultivated. e perimeter of this circle is more porous and therefore demands more upkeep thanthe perimeter of the house. Finally, there is the forest. Here there isno order or limit set by humans. e forest does not have to followany rules or laws, not even its own. Humans may visit the forestand the forest ultimately visits itself on the yard and house. elanguage o f the f orest is not the se ing-to-place and se ing-to-workof the house . But the f orest is not mute.8 e mean ingf ul processes in

7 Or, if one prefers an aquatic myth more in line with the Kantian-Schopenhauerianmetaphor of reason as ground/ship and experience as the sea: the house on an islandin the middle of the ocean.

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 253

the forest may be very long and sophisticated, spanning over manyhuman generations.

e rst circle corresponds to language-as-symbolic-communica-tion. In the house the circumstances for subjects and objects arepresen t. e sub ject and the ob ject are strictly correlative: there cannot be one without the other. However, the subject and the objectare something natural, too. is simply because there is nothingextra-natural. eref ore they are f orms that non-sub jective and non -ob jective experience may under certain circumstances assume : theycome later in the development, so they are dependent on the earlier,

not vice versa . e second circle is the area where sub jectivity is con-tested, where it is at times achieved and at times lost. Here languagetoo is more rudimentary; more like a tool or a process, torn betweenthe pressures and demands of the house and the forest. 9 Finally, theforest is an area of asubjective (meaning something that does notprivilege either the sub jective or the non -sub jective) experience andlanguage.

Typically, asub jective experience is described in “negative” terms;

such as, for instance, Heidegger’s notions of anxiety and nearness-

8 e Finn ish na tional epic, Ka l e v a l a , is based on a body of poems collected during the18th and 19th centuries. e poems were part of an oral tradition, where each singerof the poems remembered a set by heart. One of the major narrative tensions in thepoems is the partly friendly, partly rivalrous relationsh ip between two groups of peo-ple. Kaleva is the southern, sea-going, more agricultural and eventually Christianisedcommunity where most of the male heroes of the epic live. Poh jola is the Northern,

dark, primitive, gatherer-hunter community, which, crucially for the plot, has all theeligible maidens and is led by the matriarch Louhi. e focal thing in the poems iscalled Sampo, a mythical mill that without human intervention, effort or labour givesall wanted riches to its possessors. e Sampo is in Pohjola, and in the epic it getsrobbed and eventually destroyed by the Kaleva heroes. e tension between Kalevaand Poh jola can be interpreted as the tension between incipient agricultural societyand a gatherer-hunter society which under Western pressure insists on the “old”ways. (In the epic, this older conict is repeated in the inner conict that Kaleva facesthrough the process of Christianisation). In this interpretation, Sampo represents thekernel of Pohjola’s lifestyle — it represents the leisurely and easy life of gathering andhunting in Pohjola in the eyes of the toiling and more civilised Kaleva people. Withregard to the topic at hand, the poems say: “Sampo did not lack words, Louhi did notlack incantations.”; or in John Martin Crawford’s translation from 1888: “Incantationswere not wanting, Over Sampo and o’er Louh i, Sampo growing old in singing, Louhiceasing her enchantment.” (h p://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/kalec10.txt). Forthe interpretation in detail as well as the connection to Zerzan’s primitivism, seeVadén (2005).

9 Language in the second circle corresponds to Wi genstein’s (2001) description of language-games.

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254 Tere Vadén

of -death. e crucial thing about anxiety for Heidegger (1993) isprecisely that in anxiety there is no object of experience (unlikein fear, in which there is always the intentional structure of being“afraid-of-x”; consequently, f or Heidegger f ear is an emotion that asubject can have, while anxiety is an experience that Dasein under-goes) and no sub ject either: the sub ject is dissolved in anxiety — thisdissolution is a big part of the “negativity” of anxiety. Somebody likeBataille (1988) might turn his a ention to more “positive” cases of asub jective experience, such as sexual or religious enrapture. It maybe that a well-dened Western (adult) subject needs such “extreme”

f orms of experience f or the hold of the sub ject to loosen its grip, butotherwise we may well expect that there are less extreme and less“glorious” forms of asubjective experience. Again, the experience of young bab ies or very old persons , as well as experiences of prof oundboredom, intoxication, overjoy and so on may dissolve the subject/object distinction.

It is important to notice that the diff erence between asub jectiveand subjective experience is not the same as the difference between

unconsc ious and consc ious experience.10 Asub jective experience canbeboth consc iousor unconsc ious. e same goes f or language . ereis no reason wh y asub jective experience cou ld not be lingu istic, couldnot be in language. What it can not be is the expression of innermental states in external symbols. i s does not mean that asub- jective language (language in the forest) is always or by its naturesomehow more simple, elementary or naïve compared to subjectivelanguage. e pre-conceptual language of inf ants is only one ex-ample; some forms of asubjective language may demand complex,subtle and sophisticated — if not Byzantine — skills, a long life of commi ed practice. Here one might think of certain communal (letus say the language used while walking in the forest by a group of villagers who have lived together all their lives) or artistic practices(let us say a group of surrealists practising automatic writing), or of oral traditions, in general.

What is asubjective language, then? Maybe an extreme exam-ple could be useful in showing the room for manoeuvre. In orderto be grammatical, sentences in Indo-European languages typicallyneed to have a subject. Even in the so-called passive voice with nodenite agent, a surrogate subject is used (“It is raining,” “Es reg-net”). is might lead one to believe that asubjective language is

10 For an elaboration of asubjectivity see Pylkkö (1998) and Vadén (2006).

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 255

an impossibility, since grammatical sentences (and, in consequence,communicative language) always have a subject, even if only a sur-rogate one. However, the passive form in, for instance, Finnish iscompletely sub jectless. It is also ob jectless as nothing is predicated(there is no X that is said to be Y, no “it” that is doing the raining orno “it” that has the property of raining). For example, let us considerthe Finnish verb “ajaa” (“to drive,” “to go a er,” “to hunt”). In therst person singu lar (“I drive”) the verb would be “Minä a jan.” Whenwe start diminishing the subjectivity of the sentence, an inexion(“-stu/sty, -utu/yty”) inside the verb can be used: “Minä a jaudun ” (“I

am being driven.”). Again, we need to note that the Finnish has noconnotation or implication that this “being driven” is being done bysomething or somebody; there is no agent structure of “driven-by-x.”

e inexion simply indicates that my ending up somewhere is notcontrolled by me and may be happening against my sub jective will.

e inexion indicates the dissolution of the subject, even if thesub ject is still present in the sentence. Further down the road isthe completely de-subjectivised passive voice, “A jetaan,” in which

there is no subject, surrogate or otherwise. Crucially, the passivevoice has no gender, no number, no sub ject and no ob ject. us,in translating it to English, one has to introduce these structures;“Driving is being done ,” “ ere is driving,” “Drivingness happens ,” orsomething similar.

e examples from Finnish are not presented in the sense thatasubjective language could be found only in exotic environmentsor languages. Asub jectivity may be eas i e r to nd in languages onthe fringes of Western colonisation and globalisation, as they mighthave preserved more of the linguistic traces that have already beenpruned from the core languages of techno-civilisation. However, itis entirely possible, indeed qu ite likely, that when properly a endedto, words like “death,” “mother,” “friend” do not permit a clear cutsubject-object distinction even when used in everyday English.

Here things turn metaphysical in a sense. Let us consider an ana l-ogy. If someone believes that all things are caused and determined,then it is impossible to empirically prove to her the opposite. If wepoint out that according to quan tum mechan ics, individual quan tumphenomena happen randomly (and that the randomness is ontolog-ical, not epistemological), she can retort that this is only becausethe causa l Grand Unifying eory that brings together quantum me-chanics and relativity theory has not been invented yet. e samegoes here. If someone believes that all language is communicative

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and symbolic, then it is impossible to empirically prove to her thatasubjective language exists. Given the examples above, she can in-sist that humans are born with an innate language, whose grammargoverns also cases like “A jetaan,” even if the structures can not besystematically identied from the surface morphology.11 is deaf-ness to asubjective language is quite consistent with the practiceof “discovering” a grammar in the non-European languages of colo-nialised peoples; f unn ily enough the grammars all tend to look a lotlike the grammar of Latin. Grammatical structures and conceptualcontent have been insisted upon also in the case of pidgin or Creole

languages , which are in a state of constant ux so that what was “cor-rect” or “grammatical” a decade ago has changed by now. However,any thinker that takes even a very rudimentary f orm of naturalismseriously has to take into account the continuum mentioned aboveas well as the f act that more recent and structured phenomena ha veto be explained in terms of older and less structured ones. Symboliclanguage, if anything, is a prime example of a relatively recent andstructured phenomenon. Consequently, it has to be explained in

terms of an older and less structured non-symbolic language.

How Can Words Not Fail?

It seems that Zerzan’s view of the essentially symbolic and alien-ating na ture of language has , so to speak, bought the propaganda o f the Western victors too totally. Indeed, both the belief that symbolsand numbers are essential structures of progress, and the mirroringbelief that they are essentially alienating, contain a dose of overcon-dence. For if it is the case that symbolic language is based on non-symbolic language, then symbolic language also always relapsesback to the non-symbolic and gets its live effect — the communion— from asubjective strata.

In “Language : Origin and Mean ing” Zerzan writes: “ e questionis how did words rst come to be accepted as signs at all? How did

11 e f act that these supposed ly universal structures and denitions correspond to theLatin-derived structures of the colonising Indo-European languages should give anyanarcho-primitivist pause. Chomskian linguistics notwithstanding, it is hard to seewhy an anarchist theory of language should insist on the universality of structuresthat are clearly culture-specic. is point is even more acute, if there is a linkbetween the grammar of a language and the metaphysical worldview that the nativespeakers of that language are inclined to learn.

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 257

the rst symbol originate? Contemporary linguists nd this ‘sucha serious problem that one may despair of nding a way out of itsdifficulties’” (1999: 35). e only naturalistic answer to this questionis that they never did, or at least, they are never completely able topersist as signs. 12 We may under favourable conditions pretend thatwords function as symbols and that we are able to communicate byusing them , but the cond itions do not have to deteriorate very much(chemically, physically, psychologically, socially) for the illusion todisappear. e functioning of words as symbols is something thatis socially produced, takes hard work and necessitates a pervasive

education. e structures of natural languages are connected to theways of life. If there are different ways of life, there are differentlinguistic (and cognitive) structures. If and when the structures of Indo-European grammar are universalised or globalised — as theproject of Western philosophy, academia and so on has been doingfor 2000 years — we get a stratum of language that is translatable.

Zerzan’s critique of the implied obscurantism and qu ietism of post-modernism is laudab le, but he skips too quickly over the (Derridean)

postmodern idea that language is never fully able to represent, tobecome symbolic, to let a stand f or b. ere is a kernel of truth inthis contention, moreover, a kernel that can be well connected tothe fact that language is a piece of nature. e realm of languageis a full continuum with no discrete jumps or transcendental areas.

is is exactly what one would expect in nature. e same goes forexperience. ere are no unquestionable areas of experience. ereis no transcenden tally pure human symbolic language that once andfor all separates us from animals, and there is no unquestionablyauthentic non-alienated linguistic experience (be it poetic, national,philosophical or whatever). is is the way we should interpret Fey-erabend’s dictum “every culture is potentially all cultures.” (1999: 33)

ere is no cultural or linguistic authenticity that could not be, inprinciple, criticised or reached from a diff erent starting point. eclaim of such authen ticity is always a metaphysical gesture of want-ing to step outside this world, outside the real-lif e negotiation andstruggle of inuence and effect. At the same time we have to notice

12 To put a poetic Heideggerian or “embodied cognition” spin on this conclusion, wecould say that the experiential origins of language tie it inexorably with our being inthe world; the root cause f or the ultimate f ailure of symbolic language is our mortality.

e formula “let a stand for b” never fully succeeds because ultimately, in dying, no“stand-for” or “stand-in” is allowed. If we were gods or immortal AIs, then puresymbolism might be possible.

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that actualising this potentiality is no minor task. Changing theways of lif e of a culture, and in that sense becoming ano ther culture,is not an easy and not a fast process — certainly it is not somethinga ainable by a person or sub ject at will or during one gene ration. Sothe experiences of things like techno logy in other cultures may be ina sense transcendent to us. We can not reach them in our lifetimes,or even if we could, it would mean that we would be transformedbeyond recognition. e change of a culture is, by denition, a socialand mu lti-generational enterprise, and as such belongs to the sphe reof asubjectivity, not subjective choices.

In the case of music, Zerzan allows a qualication: it is mainlytonal music that is a picture and element of hierarchy (1994: 75). Itseems that we need to do the same kind of adjustment in the caseof language: it is mainly symbolic, conceptual, sub ject/ob ject lan-guage that is a tool of alienation. But to claim that tonal music is allmusic or that symbolic language is all of language is naturalisticallyunacceptable.

ere is an interesting parallel in Zerzan’s notion of the subject

or self. Zerzan o en writes in a tone that suggests that currentindustrial civilisation leads to an underdeveloped or fragmentedsubjectivity, alienated from a natural fullness. However, as alreadyseen above, the subject is — in all the senses that Zerzan insists inthe case of language — a structure of hierarchy and servility. esub ject is a structure of repetition and predictability. What it meansto be a subject is to act and to think similarly — or at the very leastunderstandably — to other sub jects given the circumstances. Whatit means to be a subject is to perceive the world as objects. Again,learning to be a subject takes time and training. Moreover, it issomething that humans may f ail to achieve. All of this suggeststhe asubjective below the subjective. e subject is, by denition,hostile to the asub jective, since the asub jective means the dissolutionof the sub ject. i s dissolution is behind both the horror and theenthusiasm that the subject feels when confronted with asubjectiveexperiences. e function of the subject is to guarantee a senseof permanence, continuity and control amid the ux of experience.

e subject can never “asubjectify” itself; the dissolution has to beinitiated by something non-subjective, such as the forest.

i s structural and control-driven side of the sub ject is sometimesmade less clear by the other common usage of the term “subject”:in this other sense the subjective is the individual’s point of view,in contrast to the objective (or intersubjective) view. However, on

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 259

closer inspec tion the sub ject as idiosyncrasy f alls back to the sub jectas structure. e separation of experience into individuals withviewpo ints of their own open ing into an ob jective or common wo rldis already made from a position whe re the sub ject/ob ject distinctionis assumed. Correspondingly, individuality is a structure of controlby which common experience is domesticated by the rules of divide et impera .

In the case of a language like Finnish, the imperial nature of thesubject is clear. Like we saw above, when translated into Indo-Eu-ropean languages (such as the Swedish and the Russian of the his-

torical colonialists), the sub ject has to be introduced into the transla-tion. When Finn ish is taugh t at schools and un iversities, the sub jectis equally introduced through the theories of grammar, linguistics,philosophical logic and so on. Given enough time, this introductionturns into an occupation. A European subjectivity is formed andlives among the possible residues of asub jective experience still con-tained in Finn ish language and e xperience.13 A sentence of “Finn ish”may thus contain both elements of asubjective experience and the

metaphysics of subjectivity. e subject as an occupier is hostile tothe asub jective experience, which in turn f orms an anti-sub jectivetendency manifesting itself socially as mutism, suicide, alcoholism,hermetism and so on. ese traits as well as the peculiarities of the language are something that the Finns that aspire to European-ness and Western maturity feel as an embarrassment, something tobe eradicated, civilised. However, asubjective experience as suchis wholly indiff erent with regard to both the sub jective and anti-subjective tendencies of experience.

An important corollary of the conclusion that sees the subject

13 Curiously, there is a symptomatic linguistic phenomenon on the idiosyncratic sideof subjectivity. In Finnish, the inexion of words is very common, e.g., genitive,accusative and so on are indicated by inexion. Even proper names inect. egenitive of the male name Ma i would be Matin, the family name Virtanen wouldbe Virtasen, and so on. Recently, a growing number of individuals have begunto omit this inexion from their names, and the habit is spreading to newspapersand the daily media. Presumably, the reason f or the omission is, on one hand, thepressure of the non-inecting Indo-European languages and, on the other hand, thefact that without the inexion the names are more recognisable and the possibility of mistakes is eliminated. Without the inexion the name becomes like a trademark, abrand, standing out from the text or the speech in the same format every time. enon-inected names literally show up as petrications amid the uidity of the rest of the language. us, the emphasis on subjectivity as individuality plays in the handsof European metaphysics of subjectivity.

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260 Tere Vadén

as an occupier with regard to asubjective experience is that primi-tivism can not be a philosophy of the subject. A primitivist can notbe a subjectivist in either of the two senses of the word “subject,”because the subject is one of the main structures of universalisationand hierarchy inside experience. e subject is the arbiter that al-ways pref ers the predictable, rational and controllable. As a wholeplethora of post-colonial critiques have shown, the Western notionof the sub ject that pretends to be universal and un iversally liberating,in fact contains a particular bias in favour of Western values.

Another important corollary is a way out of the paradox of “writ-

ing primitivism.” Language can be used in a acking civilisation, be-cause language does not belong to civilisation. Language was bornbefore civilisation and will outlast it. Even the most permanentsubjects and the most structural symbols are dependent on an asub- jective and non-symbolic layer of experience and can be affected orwounded by it. Words as symbols could not have any emotional orexperiential eff ect, unless an umbilical cord a ached the symbolicstrata to the asymbolic ones. Zerzan writes, “ ere is a profound

truth to the notion that ‘lovers need no words’” (1999: 43). is is,indeed, noteworthy. What if it was lovers who invented language?What if language in its innermost core is the intimate and non-me-diated communion of lovers? is language does not represent, itis an experience, unrepeatable and unique. e same can be said of much of everyday language w ith its ellipses, halts and stops, guresof speech, hesitations, novelties and ungrammatical structures, andso on. Symbolic language is only the tip of this iceberg, a tip thatemerges under very specic conditions and through a lot of effort.

ere is no private language, because (contr a Wi genstein) thereis no permanent subjectivity: language need not be the pushing of messages ou tside of my self, if my self is not a f ortress to begin with.

Subjective language is always also asubjective, if only minimallyin Western highly sub jectivised conditions. Asub jective languagecan have an effect on subjective language precisely because theyare cut from the same cloth, and separable only as abstractions, notin real life. is, simultaneously, is the reason why the ossicationof subject/object relationships can also spread further. Once begun,experiential inuences can propagate in any direction and there areno ultimate barriers that could absolutely stop them. is “democ-racy of experiences” applies also to the barriers that exist betweensubjects. ere is no a p ri o ri reason why the socially constructedboundaries of subjects could always act as the limits of experience.

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 261

Again, it is a commonplace that a new-born and her mother o enform an inseparable experiential eld. We noted Zerzan’s view of lovers, above. ere is no a priori reason to think that the new -born,the mother, the lovers would not speak . e human b rain is already awidely distributed system with centres, margins and dead -ends of itsown . It would be a miracle if it would not happen that areas of “my”brain wou ld sometimes be more closely connected to areas of “your”brain — or the non-human environment — than they are to someparts of itself. Asubjective experience by its nature is spread overseveral experiential centres, and in that sense is always collective

and sha red rather than individual and punc tual. e “small” distribu-tions of child-mother, lover-lover are one example, but dissolution inthe hunt or in national experience provide larger-scale examples of collective non-symbolic experience and the accompan ying collectivenon-symbolic language.

When Zerzan writes that “Civilization is o en thought of not asa forge ing but as a remembering, wherein language enables accu-mulated knowledge to be transmi ed forward, allowing us to prot

from other’s experiences as though they were our own. Perhapswha t is f orgo en is simply that other’s experiences are not our own,that the civilizing process is thus a vicarious and inauthentic one”(1999: 35); he is only partly right. Civilization indeed is a forge ing— i t is a f orge ing of the sha red asub jective experience. Furthermore,it is the compartmentalisation, individualisation and objecticationof that shared experience. Asubjective experience is not my “own”in any of the senses of the word: it is not owned (controlled, decidedover) by me, and it is not “inside” myself. ese two characteristicsalso provide the “uncanniness” of asubjective experience, and aretheref ore one ma jor reason why civilisation wants to f orget anddiscipline it (as Heidegger and Bataille, among others, suspected).Zerzan elaborates: “It has been asserted that reication is necessaryto mental f unctioning, that the f ormation of concepts which canthemselves be mistaken for living properties and relationships doesaway with the otherwise almost intolerable experience of relatingone experience to another” (1999: 34). We need to add: it does awaywith the otherwise almost intolerable experience of relating to eachother without the barriers of subjectivity. e subjectication of language is a way of forge ing about asubjective community andcommunion.

To be sure, civilisation is at its peak, and language is corruptedand technologised roughly to the same extent as life itself. Other

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ways of thinking and speaking demand other ways of life. uswe are back to the question of how to go about increasing experi-ential immediacy and intensity, decreasing division of labour andreication, withou t at the same time ending up in na tional socialism,heroic individual lif e-boatism or something similar. One of the beau-tiful features of Zen Buddhist practice, with regard to its promise of ge ing rid of individual subjectivity and of the mind altogether, isthe robustness of the tradition and the power of example. ere areno guarantees, no knock-down arguments, just a good track-recordand teache rs that are willing to show the way. Maybe this is the key

relevance of the anarcho-primitivist anthropological record: to setup the examples that can be taught and applied.

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Notes on an Anar ist eory of Language 263

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