Materialism is for Monkeys

A friend on facebook asked the question "what does it mean to be human?" I've modified and expanded the answer I gave, so as to show the direction my thought has gone since I started reading a Thousand Plateaus. This hypothesis is very important, and research to this effect will probably be what guides my thinking from here on out. This is apparent when considering that this finding can reposition my entire work in Westfir into a materialist description of spatialized time, which can be described as a particular event, using sources from evolutionary biology, geology, and other disciplines. Its not meant to be an argument so much as a direction that an argument might be able to proceed upon. An intuition or sketch.

A humanoid is a monkey whose brain is on the extreme end of a trajectory of primate development consisting in the unpairing of sense from stimulus. The human brain, in its evolutionary history, has undergone successive deterritorializations from spatial processing in the forest milieu (that is to say, the ad hoc tracking of multiple levels of activity and possible sites of motion,) to a flat, grounded existence in the vast, largely empty shrub-steppe biome. This occurred as a cycle that repeated many times as the rainfall patterns changed in Africa due to periods of global warming and cooling, though at each successive stage the primates on this trajectory retained more and more of the steppe in them as they returned to the forest, becoming more grounded.

There is a tremendous amount of spatial processing power that is used in the forest that is useless most of the time in the steppe. Simultaneously there is tremendous evolutionary pressure on the disenfranchised monkeys to form a collective, nomadic organization that can retain cohesion in scarce times, while tracking behind weather patterns, game, and seasons in an environment that is not spatially, but rather temporally, complicated. It is not surprising, therefore, that the logic of spatial processing would become reinvested into social forms, as well as creating a understanding of temporality, which is stressed as something that the Neanderthals, for instance, lacked.

This logic of space is abstracted by the brain and repeated so as to form an "inner space." And also an "upper space" that always superimposes, a priori, above any appearance (stratification.) These are the poles represented in religion as the soul and God. This excess of spatial processing, and its splitting into multiple regimes, reterritorializes in constructing an abstract map of vegetation patterns, seasons of time, trajectories of game, spiritual sites (a close analog might be stations in the aboriginal walkabout,) water sources etc. It also fuses not just individuals, but a group, to a course on that map by effecting synchronization of speeds and symbiosis of motions for larger numbers of men and women. This tracking is effected through kinship bonds operating by lines of descent, and also by pairing. both operate in hierarchical levels that cause both to support each other by the common notion of descent.

There is nothing ontologically significant about this--it is simply a navigation system whose resources for spatial processing have been reapplied to the task of an inward organization first of the native sensations of the body, along the lines of opposition. But then, through these, all other sensation become collated to facets of the spatial logic, through identification with the other bodily systematizations. The native sensations of the body are the Freudian anal and oral stages, genital sexuality, as well as others such as breathing and the hand. These are organized by inner space, but are also transferred to outer space as well, becoming the aspects of deity and world, effecting a symbolic exchange between outer space and inner space that serves to infect outer space by lodging bodily sensations at the margins where spatial logic drops off into antimony or nonsense. It is in this way that we can deal with the external world symbolically: because it is first connected to facets of our bodily life, which are in turn organized by inner space.

A human is a monkey who has entered the autistic spectrum. That is, he has entered into a state of organization that is what Ortega calls Alteración, or "otheration" which is the repetition of space (along the same lines as above) to form an inner site of appearance "the open region where things show up," or a point of reference beside sensation and feeling, versus an outer space that serves as an opposite side in which sense is positioned between. In this we become other than the world, and the world becomes other than us.

A monkey is frantically absorbed in his environment, being bombarded with sense information that his brain races to process, all while moving in patterns and algorithms that incorporate the information and turn it into a path that it navigates. His ability to project possibilities of motion always flows from the environment, and is immediately cashed out in a reaction of the body. But, in creating the rudiments of society that can take over, for instance, the constant absorption in identifying potential vulnerabilities to predators these resources are freed up to construct possibilities in thought, and a whole space that moves even as we close our eyes and standstill. possibilities can proceed out of the body, as choices. Reaction can proceed out of the world, creating a matter acted on by will; the loop is closed by, then, controlling the stimulus we see by causing certain reactions.

The simplified setting also disenfranchised the primates' ability to track multiple objects in their environment, from its locus or "center of gravity" in the horizon immediate horizon. Possibility comes at us from the hole at the far side of vision, from whence the world and power flows. The horizon in the forest is very close and small, and imbued with nearby objects; the forest itself is a very close enclosure. But in the steppe, the enclosure is grandiose, far off from any immediacy, and instead fused to the movements of the sky, trailing off into infinity. Also, more importantly, these multiple objects and trajectories can shift their "center of gravity" from the horizon and to the blank spot behind our vision. This is what we call subjectivity, which arrays various choices, and enchains desire within a projective schema that can be implanted and controlled--one can control what possibility others see.

This is what we call power. Furthermore, this structuring cannot be content with simply applying itself to constructing possibilities for desire to chose from. It must also impose itself on desire, first by assimilating all other bodily organizations, making them work within the gradients of abstracted opposition, and in turn turning them into strata; and specifically by impressing sexuality into a schema of fullness and lack, pegging this to the sexual difference of male and female, and creating systems of pairing and descent. Volumes could be written on just this, but suffice to say that Freud's intuition of oedipal organization arising from an event in the "primal horde" was quite right. The only thing that must be shown is how the oedipal is contingent on a prior organization of fullness and lack, and is just the particular manifestation of this schema of bodily organization that applies to the severed pair of the penis and vagina. (This is the true castration--why both men and women can be castrated.) This allows us to replace the tenuous narrative of Totem and Taboo, which ultimately begged the question by making the father already operate on oedipal lines, with the hypothesis of hominid evolution arising out of cycles of de/re-forestation in Africa, while still preserving its basic critical and explanatory functions.