Celui qui est soumis à un champ de visibilité, et qui le sait, reprend à son compte les contraintes du pouvoir; il les fait jouer spontanément sur lui-même; il inscrit en soi le rapport de pouvoir dans lequel il joue simultanément les deux rôles; il devient le principe de son propre assujettissement. Du fait même le pouvoir externe, lui, peut s'alléger de ses pesanteurs physiques; il tend à l'incorporel; et plus il se rapproche de cette limite, plus ces effets sont constants, profonds, acquis une fois pour toutes, incessamment reconduits : perpétuelle victoire qui évite tout affrontement physique et qui est toujours jouée d'avance.
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound, and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance.
Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, §3.3
The much neglected work of the American psychologist, Julian Jaynes, is worth a first and second look. His book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, stands alone as a bold hypothesis in a morass of timid "scholarly consensus" that hides its sad torpor behind bushels of impenetrable cross reference, each work more of less than the last, each a paranoid academic fortress redundantly buttressed against the inevitable tide of irrelevant sectarian assaults launched out of restless vicious boredom and envy.
But Jaynes was somehow naïve and American enough to believe he could shine real light on a subject so important as the historical origin of consciousness. His theory is that at the beginning of the historical period, about 2000 BC in Mesopotamia, human beings were almost entirely unconscious, and are still largely so. Consciousness only arises as a response to stress and indecision. Egyptian and Sumerian theocratic civilizations of the period were characterized by longevity, stability, and relative peace. According to Jaynes, they thrived entirely without the aid or use of conscious thought: all decision and direction was authentically experienced as divine intervention, in the form of hallucinated voices. The gods were alive, active, and talkative. These gods were in fact hallucinatory aids in inspiring "bicameral" thinking, that is, the cooperative functioning of both hemispheres of the brain, while in particular the responses of the linguistic areas of the right hemisphere were experienced as an imperative voice: to hear was to obey. This is assumed to be the normal operation of the human species as neurologically determined by spoken language, especially before any civilizing influence. But due to the increasing complexity of antiquity, and especially the multicultural and multilingual contact climaxing around 1200 BC, these somewhat fragile autocracies crumbled, disintegrated by the proliferation of voices: the "Bronze Age collapse".
It is not entirely correct, and Jaynes is oftentimes just as obtuse and hamfisted as the rest of the Anglo-American psychologists, moreover he's obviously ignorant of Freud and everything else worthwhile in his own field - but despite all that, his theory is valuable. So much of what seems senseless in early historical record begins to make sense. Otherwise, the same people who invented writing, law, astronomy, arithmetic, the foundations of geometry, who knew the square root of 2 to 5 decimal places and the Pythagorean theorem, who constructed their temples according to musical ratios and devised multiple tuning systems to account for the Pythagorean comma - otherwise, these same people when they reported hearing the voice of their personal god telling them to do this or that concerning the most mundane things, were somehow much more insane than we believe ourselves to be. But mathematical precision and theosophic delusions are not at all incompatible, as the biography of Isaac Newton himself demonstrates. In fact what I find most suspect, is the general assumption that sometime between antiquity and now, we "woke up" out of the utterly convinced belief in our gods - that the proclivity for hallucination has somehow disappeared...
However there is a certain qualitative difference in the people of the earliest historical period, a difference in their mode of speaking, of thinking, of being. Anyone who does not feel this has probably not spent enough time among them and their remnants, does not read an ancient language, or lacks sufficient imagination - usually all at once. A sense for the difference of the ancient world is not to be found in the Anglo-American sphere: we are so sure of our bland Protestant common sense that anything else must be mere superstition, merely "native", merely not yet English. The men who have interpreted the most precious aspects of our civilized past are arrogant bores incapable of imagining anyone rational who was not also repressed and dour. It has not helped matters that the Egyptians and likely the Sumerians as well were, of all things - black people! Moreover, there's even ample evidence that the Sumerians enjoyed sex - lots of it, and without shame. Almost every modern intellectual is in the habit of assuming that the filthiest, most melancholic and draconian aspects of the Middle Ages simply extended out into the infinite past, growing ever more barbaric, stupid, fearful, and irrational. The Greek enlightenment is supposed to have been a "miracle", an island in a sea of stupidity: while it was in fact largely cultural piracy, which is something the Greeks were quite good at.
Let me paint a different landscape for you: imagine you stand at the entrance to an Egyptian temple made of polished limestone, with columns standing 60 feet tall; behind you is the blue sky of another cloudless day along the Nile, flocks of a million of this or that waterfowl flutter along its banks; stretching out hundreds of feet before you is a floor of the finest white marble, inset with jewels and mysterious motifs; wafting toward you in the crisp desert air is a blend of expensive incense - you detect myrrh, Lebanese cedar, and a hint of Cretian saffron; from within you hear the complex harmonies of the chanting priests, whose mathematical songs, designed to entwine the movements of the stars with the eternal ratios of sound, fill this temple without cease as they have for a thousand years; you see scribes and aristocrats and wealthy merchants stream by, all swathed in flawless gleaming linen, their chocolate skin having been bathed and anointed this morning with fine oils, faces painted in black and azure, hair elaborately coiffed, showing off gold and silver jewelry of the highest craftsmanship; ahead, concealed by shimmering veils of what might be fine muslin, you glimpse the enormous gilded and bejeweled images of Thoth, Horus, and Seth, glaring and towering over all the mortals assembled; you cannot help but swallow and tremble a little with awe, so overpowering is the combined effect of the rational and mysterious.
So what happens if we try on a new assumption, that perhaps the Egyptians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Indians and Chinese, knew what they were talking about? That when they spoke of their gods, there was a time when they meant something other than silly dismissible superstition entertained in bad faith, as our "religious" people mime for us today? Perhaps there was an entirely different psychology at work? Perhaps the fact that the gods were simultaneously the planets, the musical ratios, the principles of sound and syllable, the forces of justice and strife, and yet real personages with histories and intrigues and successes and failures - perhaps this kind of godhood has something to teach us? Perhaps this kind of godhood has never left us, but we no longer call it by that name?
Jaynes is not quite correct, but he's on to something. He overreached, and made a typical error: he assumes linear progress, he assumes that evolution means improvement, he assumes historical coherence. First of many prejudices regarding consciousness that must be overcome, is that it is always more advantageous than unconsciousness - when in reality, the opposite is almost always true. Secondly that consciousness is a source any kind of significant agency: while Jaynes understands to some degree how little consciousness is essential to humanity or necessary for culture, he still fails to conceive of consciousness as a symptom. Taking these fresh perspectives into account, we come up with a very different picture: the self-aware human being comes and goes, the underlying causes of consciousness rise and fall, and the whole waveform seems to be associated with cultural crisis. My theory is that self-awareness has peaked and receded many times even within historical record: in late Bronze Age Babylon, in Axial Age China and India, in Hellenized Rome of late antiquity, and again in our own time. Therefore the question becomes: what are the underlying causes of the symptom we call consciousness?
There is a crucial correction I would make to Jaynes' theory. Jaynes believed he was discovering the historical origin of consciousness, while he was actually tracing the origin of the conscience. The two are nearly synonymous in the early stages, but quickly take different trajectories. Most psychologists make an unfounded assumption I would like to correct: that consciousness precedes conscience. My theory is that it is the other way round: it is the sting of conscience, linguistically determined and driven, which heightens consciousness and gives it its own life and history. Without the discomfort and desirous unease inflicted by a punitive, admonishing hallucinated voice, the ceaseless internal dialogue we call consciousness has no consistent impetus, and merely rises momentarily and falls away quickly - as it does in a fully relaxed subject who feels at home and without shame, like a musician or dancer absorbed in their craft, something some of us are not familiar with at all and perhaps believe is impossible. Anyone who has seriously attempted meditative discipline, anyone who has taken up the daily challenge of the cushion, will have an inkling of what I'm talking about: thinking is not voluntary, so much so that thinking and compulsion are almost inseparable.
When a learned authority on early civilization, such as the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro, tells us casually that morality and conscience did not exist among the Sumerians, is such a thing believed? If the statement is not nonsense, what then? Either the Sumerians were too "primitive" to know better, or Jean doesn't know how to read his sources. In Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, he says the Sumerian attitude is this:
If I am in trouble, it is because I am punished. If I am punished, it is because I must have forgotten some obligation or have violated some divine prohibition. §III.11
That may sound like a conscience to anyone who has not thought about these things carefully, but it is not. Nowhere is there the impetus to moral reasoning: anything unfavorable is punishment, and any punishment has its necessary cause. Without the possibility of true innocence in the face of unjust punishment, there is not yet true guilt in the face of unjust leniency, and hence not yet morality. What's remarkable, is that this attitude is in fact identical with the attitudes prevalent among much less civilized people: the anthropologist will tell you this formula is quite common.
When Lévi-Strauss emphasizes the prevalence of strict causative thinking in primitive systems of thought, he outlines precisely this type of premoral reasoning - from the first chapter of La Pensée Sauvage: "magical thought ... can be distinguished from science not so much by any ignorance or contempt of determinism but by a more imperious and uncompromising demand for it". In magical thinking, witchcraft and the agency of spirits is not invoked in all cases, only where there is a kind of suspicious gap - the gap of "accident". If a man is bitten by a snake, they say the cause of the bite was both the snake and witchcraft. Magic did not cause the snake to bite, but it caused that man in particular to be its victim. In primitive thought there is no accident.
Such "unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism" seems also familiar to the psychoanalyst, who in any "accident" suspects something unconsciously determined. Magical thought has always therefore seemed to me to be closer to the truth of subjective experience: everything happens for a reason, and often, multiple reasons. Overdetermination is one of the great truths of unconscious thinking, and if we sat with it, probably much closer to the scientific truth as well. On the other hand, moral reasoning demands unique causes because it demands unique responsibility, and therefore moral reasoning implies distortion: the uncanny becomes the "accidental", and from this point on we begin to lose our sense for the suspicious in all merely convenient things, and our appreciation for the power of fate dwindles as well.
No free will and yet responsible: I assert this formula against the assumptions every modern philosopher makes on this question. This is what the ancients called "fate". The necessity of justice takes no leave from the mythology of choice: willed, unwilled, conscious, unconscious - the clearest heads on these questions used to see all action as a form of necessity, along with the resulting justice. And not only "action": the old way was to reward and punish you for what you are, not what you "choose". Agency and choice are not synonymous. "Could have done otherwise" is never true. And yet community and its order of privileges cannot survive without a justice that is, according to the modern mythology of responsibility as choice, unjust.
Before there were gods, there were ancestors. The ancestral relationship seems to be modeled on the relationship to one's grandparents: grandfather fire, grandmother earth. In some cases there is a kind of identification that skips generations: among the Huichol, a grandson calls his grandfather by a peer kinship term, as though they were of the same generation, or even the same person.
In the Levant, the slow evolution from ancestor to god is most clearly documented. In Jericho, Tell Qaramel, and Tell Aswad there is evidence of a widespread cult of the dead: the head of the recently deceased was cut off, cleaned, and painted with a face. As gruesome as this may seem to us, this was the original form of the "idol". Sometimes it seems the skull was allowed to dry out, and a new face was modeled onto the bone with plaster. Jaynes gives a detailed account of the gradual transition from this form of ancestral preservation, to the idols of the Sumerian gods: these idols were no mere symbol, they were aids to the hallucination of voices. Jaynes' theory is that the hallucinated voice of the recently deceased was considered divine, and preserving the head of the dead also preserved and canonized its voice. The Japanese still make shrines to their dead, and honor them regularly with incense and prayer. Many widows speak to their dead husbands daily. Speaking to the grave of a lost beloved, is still considered quite sane in most cultures.
In fact it's in east Asia that we find reverence for the dead most well developed and unchanged through millennia. All Western terminology along the lines of "worship" and "religion" are stupid prejudices: we must not obscure the past with Judeo-Christian issues of "belief". For the ancients, these rituals were much more immediate, much more obvious, and required no "faith". One's ancestors once lived and prospered, and now that they don't, they require attention in order to continue their benevolent influence. The "proof" of this is in both one's own prosperity and the presence of the ancestors in one's emotional life: this is the core of the Asian conscience, and why 孝, "filial piety", is almost the definition of morality for the Chinese, even today.
The consensus throughout most of the world was that nothing ever really dies, it only transitions to another form, perhaps a shadowy one. Where older cultures are divided is in whether an individual spirit is to be forgotten and the name of the deceased never mentioned again, or whether it should be honored and given regular attention: either way, there is a kind of danger involved. And in ancestor reverence there is perhaps the same taboo at work: the reverence is merely the obverse of the fear of the dead.
We will probably never know whether Jaynes' theory is correct, but there is something about it that is much truer than its subsequent dismissal allows. We don't want to know how much we talk to ourselves. We don't want to admit how much we hear voices, argue with voices, are merely voices. Neurologists and psychologists get very nervous in this territory, and it takes the frankness and humility of an Oliver Sacks to document just how frequent, commonplace, and almost trite the ubiquity of hallucination among us really is. We are the hallucinating apes: every time we speak, we induce hallucinations in each other - that is the function of speaking, what linguists call the "displacement" of information. Analogously, every time we think, we induce hallucinations in ourselves: that is the true power of thought, so abused and overused it is now, that we've even come to believe that this hallucinated voice constitutes the core of our being. Cogito ergo sum - but what insane creature first of all questions whether or not he is, and secondly what insane creature settles the question with the authority of a hallucinated voice?
The eyes. Jaynes often mentions the big, staring eyes so common in the divine idols of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Especially in the figurines of the personal household god, the eyes tend to be oversized and take up most of the face. What effect does this have? Firstly, for all of us cephalized creatures there is no face without eyes: the camouflage of butterflies and many other creatures tells us that. Moreover, prolonged eye contact is so important to the human infant - after suckling, it is the first social bond. The eagerness with which babies make eye contact and hold it, mesmerized and mesmerizing: is an idol that sees you in this way, meant to instigate a kind of regression? Were the ancients, who so often spoke of their gods as their parents, seeking to kindle and rekindle that relationship in as real a way as possible?
I don't like resorting to a Lacanian concept - because I object to his methods among other things - but there is something compelling and useful for us in his conception of le regard, "the Gaze". What does the Gaze do? It reflects the act of seeing, it "hypostatizes" the subject in a subjective relation: one is seen as though from the outside, one becomes a whole, a unit, another "other". Without becoming lost in Lacanian mystification, it does seem obvious that the staring image of the god was meant to induce a kind of trance of self-awareness - we could even compare it to the response of any prey animal: it freezes, it is almost a kind of embarrassment, it is a sudden assessment of one's situation to find the escape. Perhaps the prey response is the origin of shame; it seems also at work in all social hierarchy. Lacan constantly emphasized that to be a subject is to be subject to: to be "captured" by the image, and "enter into the symbolic" as though a formerly broad and ambiguous experience were severely narrowed, channeled, exploited. It's always implied in such philosophy that the "subjective relation" entails essential falsehood, an "as if", a servitude to an imperious and "Apollonian" afterimage of Truth with a Capital T.
And what is the quality of all "true" behavior if not precisely this multivalence peeking through the veil of shallow simplicity that constitutes all behavior as such? Isn't this what the Daoist masters taught, with their surprising reversals and subtle ambiguities? Confucius himself was frequently overawed by such men - derisive hermits, haughty recluses, and wise madmen for whom the bureaucratic scholars and ritualized conformists served as foils. It is no accident the "way of the moon" served as the principal metaphor for inner truth: the inconstant, feeble moon, always falling behind, always obscure, opposed to the bright and "obvious" way of the sun.
And what is the origin of deceptive behavior but precisely the capacity for social behavior? To be seen is to wear a false and shallow skin. Ravens, for example, are capable of intentional deception. When caching food, if they believe they are being watched by a rival, they will sometimes pretend to cache something, but leave nothing in order to thwart theft. But they will only misdirect like this once they themselves have been thieves.
And isn't all social behavior fundamentally imitative? To be social means to play witness to witnessed behavior. From the most cynical and apesick perspective I have, I'll say that we learn not to imitate genuine behavior, we learn to imitate imitative behavior. This is why autistic children do not easily "socialize": because they think and perceive so rigorously and "literally". In any given behavior the autistic child expects to find the blueprint, the original, the keystone, where there is none. Social behavior is simulacra.
What I'm driving at is that consciousness such as we know it - modern talkative internal dialogue, the "analog I" - is from this perspective a side-effect of a burgeoning conscience. The conscientia, the act before a witness, the consequence of internal conflict between competing drives, is much older, much more primal, much more important.
First, conscience simulates the ability to see oneself from the outside: resolving internal conflict and calculating maximum social advantage requires running scenarios in which we are "seen", we become a "You". Conscience uses the "You" register: I mean second-person in the fullest linguistic sense, as linguistically determinative. Or perhaps the neurologists will discover one day that this psycholinguistic You is rather the manifestation of virtual reward calculation - for now it doesn't matter. Within this theoretical You register the witness which "sees" and constitutes the You is only implied.
But consciousness is a kind of doubling of this representation: both the represented self as "You" and its implied witness are themselves witnessed. Conscious thinking therefore reifies the first implied witness as the ego, the "I", while implying yet another unnamed one: the third element some used to call "ātman", or the "soul", or as is so in vogue now, the supposed "consciousness" itself. If your head is spinning, dear reader, please continue on and I promise not to leave this so obscure...
The proto-conscience as the voice of the ancestor-god is not possible without this You. The You register creates a diorama, a mise-en-scène, a form of address. What we must imagine is the presence of the You without the immediate translation into I: one is addressed as You, one thinks You, one is You. This is not actually so difficult: we practice this daily, almost in every moment we quietly address ourselves as You, without significant presence of any I. Contrary to all common assumption, the I register is relatively rare, belonging to louder, more self-conscious, more constipated and antagonistic forms of internal dialogue: it appears when we look for "thought itself", it appears most clearly and "self-evidently" when people think intentionally, that is when a philosophic mood strikes and they sit down and "think" before themselves like the practiced clowns they are. The reason we believe the I register is so dominant and independent is largely a question of amplitude: there are no louder thoughts, than the thoughts of the I. But we are ashamed of our actual forms of thinking and seek to hide it from each other and ourselves. We employ "It" and "You" registers much more frequently than we know: schizo-paranoid types reveal this behavior not as distortion of consciousness, but as its substratum. The man who yells to himself on the street not only frightens because he's different, but because he is all too familiar.
I assert, along with good philosophical company, that language is not merely the tool by which we express some imagined meta-language of thought: language as the medium of thought becomes determinative of possible thought - that's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis at work, that's also one of the fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis and all good psychology since Nietzsche, whether anyone knows it or not. The problem is that the opponents of "linguistic determinism" don't know what they mean by thinking: sometimes they mean affect, sometimes they mean apperception, sometimes they mean visualization, sometimes they mean memory, sometimes they seem not to know about the predominance of linguistically structured unconscious thinking and mistake this for something else - no one uses the inherited vocabulary of psychology so sloppily as contemporary neurologists - shouldn't that alone tell us something important? Almost everyone is committed to the notion of meta-thought and is insulted by the suggestion that they cannot think without language: show me this pure thought, show it once to me. By what means do you show it? Language. Believe for once an experienced poet: before structured thought comes not meta-thought but proto-thought, which is an urge, a whispering, a submerged chorus, a pregnancy, a vision, a need. This is not yet thinking, it is the father of thinking, and language is the matrix.
Most of my hypothetical reading audience will not believe me, when I say that thinking is a form of self-induced auditory hallucination. An education in meditative discipline - Zen, Dhyana, Vipassana or whatever - will help greatly, but even a simple appeal to the accompanying physiological facts suffices. How often in a day do you catch yourself having an imaginary conversation - or more likely a rematch of a lost argument, or even more likely of an argument that should have happened but didn't? Do you sometimes gesticulate? Do you sometimes hiss a few words under your breath as you take out the trash? Do you have elaborate fantasies of some amour perdu as you mow the lawn? Have you had more than one breathy squelched argument in the car with someone who is not there? Is your heart rate and blood pressure elevated, your muscles tensed, a few hits of adrenaline making their rounds? That is hallucination, by all standards. Just because you believe you "know" none of it is real - makes no difference. Firstly because you do not know it in the way you believe, and secondly because this kind of accompanying knowledge of the illusion is the normal state of hallucination.
A few of the less repressed might be willing to admit to a few slips and lapses into fantasy here and there - but unless you've plummeted through that gaping hole called a psychotic break and emerged with shattering clarity, or dedicated at least a decade to stilling of the mind on the merciless cushion, and preferably both, take all estimates of your indulgence in fantasy and multiply them by a thousand, at least. The frequency of nagging thoughts, curses, stresses, insults and worries is so great in a modern urban type that in the space of a few seconds there might be a dozen of such malformed "thoughts" bubbling and thrashing in this foamy brew, just below the smooth skin of mendacious placidity called "consciousness".
If psychotic breakdown is the deconstruction of the ego, the weakening of the egoic méconnaissance, and the discovery of the "supersane", what then is the conscious conscience? It is the collective méconnaissance, the collective egoic fabrications, the collective defense, the "language game" in which the winner earns superficial and cognitively dissonant sanity. Morality is a kind of burlesque parody, a grotesque "grand ol' opry", a kind of decrepit Broadway as in John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves with good conscience. It is our chastity belt protecting us against the vicissitudes of a life freed from instinct. It is a homemade straightjacket, it is the castration carried out by a crazed man in a manic fever.
Why is vanity so important and apparently adaptive for simians? Even Koko the gorilla was known to call herself "Queen". Nietzsche says, "vanity is the skin of the soul". Is nascent linguistic capacity a kind of nascent madness which must be wrapped in skin?
Capuchin monkeys, for example, may lie somewhere within a liminal zone in primate subjectivity. They were given the mirror test - that is testing self-recognition - by contrasting three scenarios: the sight of a familiar monkey, an unfamiliar monkey, and their own reflection. With the familiar monkey, nothing much happened. With the unfamiliar monkey, the females became anxious and avoided eye-contact, while the males reacted with threat displays: all expected so far. But with the mirror image, the females gazed into their own eyes and smacked their lips and swayed: neither fear nor indifference, but some kind of exaggerated infatuation ritual. This becomes clearer with the males: they seemed to experience a kind of nervous breakdown hovering precariously between rivalry and identity - they screamed, they curled up on the floor, they tried to escape. Vanity is a kind of lifejacket in the open sea of identity, which preserves the sense that one's self is an object to be desired and seduced: while true subjectivity is a recursive nightmare of rivalry and possession when experienced in the raw, as infants and psychotics do. Modern civilized human beings are so inured to this nightmare and so well-dressed in their emperor's clothes, draped in certainties, personalities, habits, repetitive thoughts and half-dead bodies, that not only do they rarely remember their nightly dreams, but they are ignorant of their daily incessant dreaming, their monotonous chanting and the apotropaic magic they wield at almost every moment.
There is a topology present in this theory, an ahistorical psycholinguistic hierarchy by which I perhaps curse myself to eternal misunderstanding and strawman showmanship - but in the name of science let us for once take on this burden knowingly and give the critics a bone to chew on, a baton de commandement to wave around and misinterpret:
- The It register: forms the core of unconscious language.
- The You register: constitutive of conscientious language.
- The I register: the primary illusion at work in conscious language.
The debt to Freud is obvious, but I insist on that important substitution to his topology: das Überich, the superego, is not a product of the ego's frustrations, as though it stood over the ego authoritatively... For all his acuity Freud never properly understood the importance of the paranoid to all egoic experience: the I does not come first in mythopoetic spacetime, rather the You precedes and constitutes the very heart of what it means to be "I". One is only I by virtue of this "introjected You".
The primacy of deixis. Deixis, meaning "pointing", is one of the core functions of language and one of the first necessities in communication. Very old ways of thinking have left very deep lines in our collective psycholinguistics, and one of these glacial valleys is the evolution of the deictic center: from where does one speak? Tracing the evolution of deixis provides another angle of attack for understanding how we talk to ourselves - that is, how we "think".
As Nietzsche says, "Das Du ist älter als das Ich." Following that principle, the You must be earlier in the strata of deictic categories. At the lower strata, the egoic center is weakly implied, anaphoric, rarely spoken: just as it was in ancient Chinese.
All current linguistic thinking about this exhibits the characteristic modern prejudice: that the "I" must be the default deictic center, and any deviation must fall back to this center with a gravitational necessity. Oftentimes I feel like a heliocentrist in an age of geocentrism - what is unthinkable to "common sense" seems obvious to me: we are animals first, tribal animals second, and "persons" last. The "I" deictic center is superficially applied to these much older and more primary layers. The I is a puppet regime, largely a matter of defensive posturing.
- It: the default object of attention, in which all other relation is implied.
- You: the first "subjective turn", the confrontation. The voice of the tribe.
- I: the It that is not You, or the You of You.
Mythopoetically, we can say that the voice of imperative instinct is always: "It shall". When conscience and the battles of redirected instinct occur, it speaks a "You shall". And much later, consciousness says: "I shall".
This starting to sound too Hegelian - and I fear the insatiable metaphysical addiction is already settling down to a fine meal... The principal thing I want the reader to understand, is that the I does not come first. There is no essential subject-object binary, and as much as what I'm saying may sound Lacanian, actually I dislike the mystification of "Other" - everything is other, and thus there is no primal experience of "otherness". The reason the Lacanian mystique appeals to modern ears is because of the fundamentally alienating conditions of modern life: we wish to be excused for our weaknesses.
Consequences of this perspective:
The "You" is the real innovation: the supposition that "being a subject" comes prior to acknowledgment of You, is false and a prejudice typical of self-absorbed modernity.
Speech that centers itself in the "You" outlasts the speech of the "I". It's important to have spent some real time with schizophrenics: the durability and power of the paranoid You is an overwhelming tide compared the fragility of any "ego". We are all much nearer to insanity than we know. The You is not only more powerful but more sane. It's not the You that makes us crazy, it's the half-dissolved and half-formed I.
If someone says, "You turn left", then the linguists will grudgingly acknowledge that the deictic center is this "second person". But I object to the way these "persons" are arranged: as usual we have it wrong way round. "It" is first person, "You" is second person, and "I" is the third person. The term "person" itself betrays the fundamental prejudice.
"Me" is not synonymous with "I". To say "Me" does not center the deixis around the "I": that's another seeming contradiction the linguists won't agree to, because they have no intuition and can only repeat what they are told. What is it like to say "Me"? Here's a very old sentence among primates: "Give it to me!" While it directs an action towards this "Me", it does not yet constitute the I register. The center is in fact still the "You", the locus of action. Should I coin an impressive terminology in order to achieve believability? Not origo but fons?
I hesitate to lay too much emphasis here, for fear of seeming to take this schema too seriously: but what is serious, is beginning to analyze how we talk to ourselves, daily, hourly, by the minute, every second. The Freudian "topological" theory goes awry the moment it becomes spatial. The nervous system is not a landscape, it is a resonance chamber. The "ego" is not a place, nor an organ, nor a membrane, nor a "person", nor an organism, nor an agent: it is a mode of speech, it is a technique of language, it is a skill. The "I" does not exist until spoken, and only then. It is like any other emergent dynamic: it has discernible properties, vectors, an intelligible physics - but it does not "exist" outside its functioning.
My point therefore, is that not only do we speak to ourselves with our "I", but also with our "You", and our "It".
Example internal dialogue: "It's not fair", we say to ourselves - meaning we hallucinate a voice saying this. "You should quit this job", we say to ourselves - meaning we hallucinate our own voice or often another's saying this. "But I can't quit!", we say to ourselves - meaning we hallucinate our own voice saying this. Each register carries its own valences, its own tone, its own implications, its own powers.
- It: observing, describing, analyzing.
- You: commanding, encouraging, blaming, cursing, including and excluding.
- I: complaining, boasting, scheming, lying.
They are more like colorbands within a spectrum, than "registers". Consider for example what it's like to think in Chinese, where pronouns play such a minimal role, can be omitted, and there is no inflection to indicate person or case or tense, only a very weak "aspect" marker and a few grammatical particles. Many sentences might translate into the "It" register even when referring to oneself: this is significant. But we're all becoming more similar, and have been doing so for millennia: modern Mandarin is much more like the Indo-European languages than ancient Chinese was.
Blame comes before guilt. As it happens, Jürgen Habermas developed a little schema very similar to this one - it can be no mere coincidence. In fleshing out his theory of "Communicative Rationality" with very large capital letters, he introduces three "validity dimensions" in which rationality expresses itself:
- It: theoretical truth
- We: normative rightness
- I: subjective truthfulness
I continually find that someone like Habermas is perfectly suited to expose the underbelly of modernity: he's intelligent and educated enough to understand where to lay emphasis; he's naïve and German enough to be incapable of any significant charm; he wants earnestly to be correct and moral; he is in fact a very responsible citizen - I believe he's very punctual and sorts his own recycling; yet he has a great deal to hide from himself and does so very well - I've lived in Bavaria and I know these types. I find the phrase "normative rightness" extremely illuminating: its association with "We" is perfect - actually he's right on the mark. Just a slight adjustment and we agree:
- The world: It
- The tribe: We and You
- The excluded: I
The "I" is always in a position of exclusion or the threat of exclusion: the I is taboo. The essence of modernity is therefore to live within a state of taboo: we are always in danger of exclusion from a tribe that doesn't exist. When the I speaks, the threat of exclusion permeates every word: making excuses, shifting blame, boasting, flattery, laying snares. We call it "subjective truthfulness": but what do I hear? Lying. Whenever someone clears his throat, makes a flourish, grows serious and puts on a "truthful" tone - I know that many falsehoods and clever distortions will soon appear like rabbits from a hat.
"It rains." Among most linguists there is the misunderstanding that because a "dummy subject" or "expletive pronoun" is syntactically required, it is somehow actually null and impotent. I assert something else: that the implications of syntax run much deeper, and constantly generate illusory entities so convincingly that we cannot think without them. What I find lacking in most linguistic theory - and especially in the Anglo-American sphere they are painfully slow to come around to 20th century insights - is the understanding that syntax fools us as much as it makes us gods: logic is nothing other than abstracted syntax, expressed with syntax, and understood via the magic of syntax.
Please take a moment to consult Zhuangzi and his famous dream of the butterfly. The story can be interpreted not merely as an exercise in solipsistic relativity to dream states, but as an illustrative juxtaposition of the conscious subjective I alongside the It register: to put it in familiar Freudian terms, I believe his subtler point is to show how the ego is enveloped within an unconscious projection of "the object", even in waking. In dreams, we generally do not dream in the first person precisely, we dream of a subject who may or may not be our usual self exactly, but we identify with that subject. Zhuangzi dreamt of the butterfly, in all its vivid detail, and knew it was him. He says: 栩栩然胡蝶也, 自喻適志與. 不知周也. Translated as literally as I can: "Vividly fluttering was butterfly, self-evidently following desire. Did not know Zhuangzi." The passage hinges on what this 自喻: "self-evident", could mean. 喻 has a cluster of meanings related to "explanation using analogy": 比喻 is literally "other explain", and translates as "metaphor"; 借喻 "borrow explain", is "metonym"; 逆喻 "oppose explain", is "oxymoron". Most translators more or less ignore the oddity of the phrase and treat it as an adverb only intensifying the "follow desire". But since Zhuangzi is no stranger to arcane literary puns, can we assume he was hinting at something like "self analogy"? A signifier that refers to itself? Is that the same as identification? That would be an apt description of the paradox of conscious subjectivity, wouldn't it?
There are some languages in which personal pronouns never crystallized into the canonical, seemingly self-evident forms we take for granted in the Indo-European sphere. Even in modern Japanese, it's possible to trace very ancient ways of thinking about personhood. At one time, there was no standard means of saying "I", or "you", and even the modern watashi and anata have only weak roles as such. One was more likely to refer to oneself and others by social status, or title, or simply as "this one" or "over here", or often not at all. Almost every Japanese pronoun is in fact traceable to a kind of metonym: one refers to oneself by saying "our house", "this servant", or simply "this thing here". Despite recent foreign influence, the Japanese instinct for navigating complex and restrictive social hierarchy has tremendously deep roots and persists even now: they continue to invent new pronouns and usage changes rapidly. What this demonstrates as not only probable, but to my mind quite evident, is that in all languages every pronoun was once a metonym. The Japanese subjective orientation relative to the group, the prevalence of deictic demonstratives in such phrases as ano kata: あの方 (literally "that side", but meaning "he") - all this serves to illustrate the ancient mode of linguistically structured thinking: there are no atomistically discrete persons, but there are positions within the group, roles, nodes, directions, confrontations, intimacies and formalities.
One may ask whether Japanese isn't arbitrarily chosen as example, whether the rigors of inflection in Sanskrit or Greek couldn't just as easily prove the opposite. All I can say is that spending time in the company of ancient texts, and especially those outside the Indo-European family, will help alleviate the illusion of a monolithic perfection embodying "thought itself" our languages inspire. It is no accident that "Sanskrit" means "perfected work", nor that the Greeks articulated the laws of rhetoric: these languages were cultivated as the premier sign of nobility, back when one's manner of speech was a passport, an indelible mark of breeding. (For an illustration, ask Homer how Odysseus proves his pedigree to Nausicaä and his hosts, though he be naked, penniless, and swollen with the abuse of shipwreck.) The proliferation of cases and inflections in Indo-European languages along with their phonemic harmony was no doubt not only some natural genetic drift, but an actively encouraged and cultivated complexity in those oral cultures, where one memorized all knowledge in perfect verse. The old Sanskrit grammarians say just that, but our modern scholars with their democratic reflexes think they know better. Just as it was a mark of superiority in ancient China to say much with as few words as possible, preferably while making subtle reference to arcane texts, with insults folded within impeccable humility just as one's hands were hidden behind long sleeves, so it was a mark of education in India to say important things in an ecstatic hyperbolic recursive mode in imitation of the Vedic poets. We must unlearn linguistic prejudices, piece by piece, in order to understand their dominance. What Indo-European languages reify and hypostatize so effectively - the subject, the object, the unambiguous predicate relation, the highly redundant marking, the "thing in itself and its predicated attributes" - these are nothing less than the prerequisites to the Western scientific perspective: that is why they seem not only self-evident to us, but positively proven. Their worth as method is proven beyond all doubt: but not their primacy nor naturalness. Quite the opposite! Unambiguous language is a technology of dominance, and probably a fairly recently acquired one. All achievements in clarity and scientific rigor owe their origin to the possibility of unambiguous language: on the other hand, metaphysical buffoonery and a typical psychological naïveté are also the consequences of a linguistic thinking that has grown too confident, too sure of its possession of all possible means, too sure of its status as "perfected work" and mirror of reality: merely consult Kant or Hegel to see all of these symptoms at work. But it is surely the poets, those who strain against the limits of a language, who gain the clearest vista into the starry unknown above the fog of their native speech: "The rest is silence."
I do not know of any linguist who has ever internalized a simple and well-attested fact of the origin of language: song came first. Song as mnemonic, song as the warp through which the weft of culture is woven, song as the lockbox of secrets and ethnic identity, song as the riddlemaster of the learned, song as the original form of prayer, song as the first authoritative voice. Why does the call-and-response, verse-and-chorus structure work so well and have such longevity? Why is it that even in contemporary music the chorus naturally takes the role of the authoritative summary, the overarching narrative voice? My answer is that song precedes all other forms of discourse. I won't seek to prove this, because anyone who has not already grokked this, anyone who has never felt a song rise within the bosom like an unstoppable dawn, will not believe me no matter what tricks of prose and prosaic science I use: poesis is its own witness and guarantor.
The question arises, "what then is the meaning of Socrates and his δαιμόνιον - his forbidding inner voice?" Answer unclear. But one thing is certain to me: he was not alone. Socrates was unique not for his fundamental psychology and the unconscious forces at work in him, but for his remarkable conscious mind. Socrates was precociously and futuristically conscious: that was the strange leverage he wielded so skillfully over his largely unconscious neighbors. That he had identified and named his own hallucinated voice of oracular authority, is what is so unusual about him. But as usual, Socrates serves here also as an enigma and a bridge between two very different worlds: he is both ancient and modern, secure and anxious, deliciously amoral and pretentiously, even clownishly moral. Socrates the ironic - the self-deprecating satyr, the holy fool who by mocking the part of himself visible to us, mocks us at a much deeper level than we are prepared to grasp.
Where does the "voice of authority" come from? This is almost equivalent to asking where instinct comes from: we have only the vaguest of ideas. Jaynes' attempt to locate the source of hallucinated voices in the right hemisphere Broca's area of the brain probably weakened the force of his otherwise skillful argument, based as it was in historical, philological, and archaeological evidence. I'll say it again: neurology is granted far too much prestige and a premature fiat power, given that it is a science in its infancy. We can say this or that lump of tissue seems to be involved with this weakly defined behavior - so what? Neurology as a branch of chemistry is overwhelmingly impressive, yet as the crown of psychology it is pathetic. Neurologists conspire to conceal their ignorance of even the most basic questions: how is information stored in the nervous system? What is memory? What is instinct? What is judgment? Dig deep, and all you will find is obfuscation, perambulation, naïveté, narrow goals within narrow gardens walled with impressive machinery and data which turns out no one as yet knows how to read.
We return to our question: why was ancient humanity, everywhere on planet earth in every culture, convinced of and concerned with imaginary gods? These are the same people who invented writing and mathematics: the tired old answer, "they were dumber than us" - is no longer convincing.
What sets us apart from the other animals more than anything else? Not intelligence, not reason, not even our technology, but our capacity for language. Our invention of complex syntax enabled us to combine unique vocalizations: the invention of words we cannot take credit for. This is a secret we're very reluctant to let out. Ravens and many other creatures use words. We are most comfortable with the idea when the animal is at least a primate: an experiment once recorded a chimp making a particular sound in response to grapes, other chimps upon hearing this sound pointed to an image of grapes. But we don't dare say this is use of words, we call it "referential vocal signaling" and feel our superiority is intact. One day this will seem as comical and obscenely arrogant to everyone else as it does to me, I hope.
But our mastery of language is a dangerous game. Auditory language among the other animals seems to fill a small communication niche: namely communication over distance without line of sight. Most communication happens chemically, visually, by touch, by various typified behavior, and as the ineffable sum total of all these media. The adaptive advantages of our spoken language must have been tremendous to have exerted so much selective pressure that we all learn it effortlessly. The efficiency and speed of spoken language must have made us much better hunters, craftsmen, and gatherers.
But with every mutation, there is a cost. Learning a spoken language until fluency, changes the brain. The infant undergoing language training is like pouring molten bronze into a mold: the fact that any healthy infant can master any language no matter how complex, is an unexplained marvel. What does it take to be able to converse about things which aren't remotely present? To conjure images and feelings at the mere sound of a few words? And conversely what does it take to be able to produce a convincing tale? To lie effectively? My answer: the proclivity to hallucinate. So what is the risk of this language capacity, this molten brain, alongside our deconstructed instincts? Insanity.
Therefore what was the ancient obsession with the hallucinated gods? The answer should be obvious: containment of the risk of insanity alongside continued enjoyment of the benefits of a complex culture made possible by dependence on the structuring power of language. The gods and the realm of gods were a means of hallucinating answers to the unanswerable, of shutting down the anxiety of conscious thought.
This brings us to another important correction to Jaynes' theory I need to mention. Jaynes is ignorant of prehistory and seems to assume that whatever psychological conditions prevailed at the beginning of history probably extended into the infinite past: we imagine that the obsession with gods and taboo is somehow inevitable in any "primitive" people. But this is not exactly what the anthropologists tell us. Many of the most primitive peoples, to return to Turnbull's Pygmies of the Congo for an example, are not as concerned with spirits and gods as we might presume: there is the Forest, and it is a kind of protector and god - but beyond that their world is relatively simple and straightforward. Turnbull says it's because they aren't afraid: the Pygmy sees the forest as relatively benign and easy to live in, and thus has no reason to find an agency to blame beyond their intimate and parental relationship with the great Forest and its provision of food and shelter. Therefore I believe it's important to understand that a people obsessed with gods and the agency of spirits and witchcraft, is to that degree a disturbed and unsettled people. Perhaps they have recently turned to agriculture and an urban life, as the Sumerians had, perhaps their environment is harsh, such as it is for the Inuit and the Aborigine... This is not a constant: when things are good and the game is plentiful, there's no need to address the spirits beyond the usual politeness. For example, why did the famous Ghost Dance spontaneously arise among the Lakota Sioux with such ferocity and urgency? Why did these once truly practical survivalists become obsessed with the invisible and a prophesy of the end times? Most casual observers assume that the "natives" were always so irrational and prone to meaningless superstition - but this is not true. The Ghost Dance was a kind of cultural immune response, a fever dream, and in fact very foreign to their previous ways and an analog of the conditions of early Christianity - because at the end of the 19th century the remaining Lakota people had been suddenly and forcefully initiated into the anxious misery of sedentary life. So was the overpowering concern for the gods in Sumeria and Babylon a symptom of some kind? If so, of what disease? And if our morality is descended from such neurotic concern with the spirits, what does that make it? My answer: morality is a kind of panic. "Moral panic" is the only kind of morality.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, get The Moral Disease.
