Reification

In the essay That Thing We Do JZ takes to task another evil of the empire, reification and objectification. Akin to symbolisation of course.

What makes Zerzan's writing interesting is the unusual and uncomprising stance he takes. What he fails to do is to really reveal his position. He mentions his Future Primitive once in this essay, and closes it off by mentioning - as he is wont to do - the prehistoric period in which reification was apparently an unknown. The rest of the piece is filled with references that support the attack on reification. Forgive my scepticism, but if your position is based on a myth of wholeness - at the very least, something that was in the past - , and you proceed to attack the very foundation of culture, philosophy, and such in order to get back to it, then you'd better have something available in its stead.

A quick look tells me that what he leaves us with is a non-linguistic, non-symbolising, entirely desirous human with no technology and no divisions of tasks. What does that remind you of? Something that happens during the night, doesn't it? That's right, dreams. Now I wouldn't be too concerned about Zerzan's stance if it wasn't for the fact that a large part of 20th century philosophical thought was spent hacking at the assumptions of Western thought. To my mind it all starts with Nietzsche, who anticipated much of the following century. In fact, much of the 20th century project looks like annotation to the different directions of his thought. But maybe that's just me. He saw that the whole was fragmenting, dispersing. Values were crumbling all around him, meaning was already on its last leg - he just made sure everybody starts to understand what the world has come to. Who can blame him for going crazy? He had no peers to lean on for support.

Anyway, before I wax lyrical ... given a century of effort in this department, it's really up to Zerzan to come forward with a viable alternative. So Nietzsche spoke about the re-evaluation of all values, new values to be sure. But he was too far ahead of his time, it wasn't his destiny to complete the task he and a few others were starting to undertake. But the twentieth century has fallen into a sort of "oh dear, well, it's all relative you know, it's all the same" attitude that investigated the symbolic world to smithereens but preferred not to make any too extreme claims. Those who do are endearing folk or fundamentalist and crazy. So what Zerzan does is perhaps to push the goal post to the point where this postmodernist view cannot exist, cannot think itself legitimate: a world where symbols are bunk. He is demarcating, even to the largest possible area, where the problem likely lies. And he says it's civilisation itself. In a word, he is radical and, together with his otherwise insightful but as-abstract-as-any-other arguments against civilisation, he is letting the ghost of the past (prehistory of the Noble Savages) tempt us into thinking better than the present. Which is better than nothing. And let's be clear, it's nothing - Nothingness - that rules, that makes this relativism possible. But it's not a step forward, it's not a step beyond. It's another step not beyond ... un pas au dela.

Anyway, to give a brief overview of his attacks on reification, the main thing to know is that reification - which literally means to treat an abstraction as if it is real - in combination with objectification, which refers to objectifying a living thing, has caused man (and woman, I am sure) to become an object and part of the external world which (s)he reifies. So you have this abstract world that maps to objects, and among these objects are humans. And by engaging in this abstract and objectified worlds people are manipulated via their abstractions.

He notes Adorno as resigning himself to seeing reification and objectification as working together and no longer separable (they are different technically, as described above, but he saw that in culture they had all but conflated). Zerzan talks about "the reign of things over life", to indicate that what the reified world in effect does is to dominate nature including humans. We are not exempt from our project of domestication. It is also important to see that symbolisation is slightly different - symbols are substitutive (think math or programming, eg. a = b). Reification is a by-product of symbolisation.

Especially in postmodernism, symbolic mediation exhausts life and there is ultimately nothing left but language, the "universal currency" of reification. And we know that the investigation of language has been a major theme in the 20th century. As part of the reified world, language is precisely the problem. "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees", Zerzan quotes Paul Valery to support the idea that direct perception happens without words (and by implication without any reification - a conclusion that I find too extreme).

Regarding ritual and religion he says "to deify is to reify". He calls rituals objectified schemas of action, which makes sense if it is taken into account that in religious ritual the participant is often not an individual but rather in relation to the deity, who is more important, and where the deity is already reified the ritual enaction is entirely symbolic (reification being the accepted by-product). Art is the other important objectifier. Zerzan asks whether it is accidental that in art the senses of smell, touch, and taste are omitted, when in lieu of Freud it would seem that their omission points to a turning away from sensual love (the three senses are those important in sensual love, according to him - and what does he know, really? It's first in the mind :-) Yes, I think I'll rephrase the old empiricist truism: "There is nothing desired that was not first in the mind". Tasty like jam.)

JZ calls for a "future primitive" where a "living involvement with the world, and fluid, intimate participation in nature will replace the thingified reign of symbolic civilization".