This work is what led me to seek out and start NeanderThin.  I am typing
it out because I believe it to be an invaluable tool in discussing our
odd eating habits.
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        Agriculture, the indispensable basis of civilization, was
originally encountered as time, language, number and art emerged.  As the
materialization of alienation, agriculture is the triumph of estrangement
and the definite divide between culture and nature and humans from each
other.

        Agriculture is the birth of production, complete and with it's
essential features and deformation of life and consciousness.  The land
itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet's species it's
objects.  Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples
the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, was
and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that
earlier oneness with nature.  The forced march of civilization, which
Adorno recognized as the "assumption of an irrational catastrophe at the
beginning of history," which Frued felt as "something imposed on a
resisting majority," of which Stanly Diamond found only "conscripts not
volunteers," was dictated by agriculture.  And Mircea Eliade was correct
to asses its coming as having "provoked upheavals and spiritual
breakdowns" whose magnitude the modern mind cannot imagine.

        "To level off, to standardize the human landscape, to efface its
irregularities and banish its surprises," these words of E. M. Cioran
apply perfectly to the logic of agriculture, the end of life as mainly
sensuous activity, the embodiment and generator of separated life.
Artificiality and work have stedily increased since its inception as
culture: in domesticating animals and plants man nescesarrily domesticated
himself.

        Historical time, like agriculture, is not inherent in social
reality but an imposition on it.  The dimension of time or history is a
function of repression, whose foundation is production or agriculture.
Hunter-gatherer life was anti-time in its simultaneous and spontaneous
openness; farming life generates a sense of time by successive-talk
narrowness, its directed routine.  As the variety of Paleolithic living
gave way to the literal enclosure of agriculture, time assumed power and
came to take on that character of an enclosed space.  Formalized temporal
reference points -- ceremonies with fixed dates, the naming of days, etc.
-- are crucial to the ordering of the world of production; as a schedule
of production; the calander is intergal in civilization.  Conversely, not
only would industrial society be impossible without time schedules, the
end of agriculture (basis of all production) would be the end of
historical time.

        Representation begins with language, a means of reining in desire.
By displacing autonomous images with verbal symbols, life is reduced and
brought under strict control all direct, unmediated experience is subsumed
by that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language.  Language cuts up
and organizes reality, as Benjamin Whorf put it, and this segmentation of
nature, an aspect of grammar, sets the stage for agriculture.  Julian
Jaynes, in fact, concluded that the new linguistic mentality led very
directly to agriculture.  Unquestionably, the crystalization of language
into writing, called forth mainly by the need for record-keeping of
agricultural transaction, is the signal that civilization has begun.

        In the non-commodified, egalitarian hunter-gatherer ethos, the
basis of which (as has been so often remarked) was sharing, number was not
wanted.  There was no ground for the urge to quantify, no reason to divide
what was whole.  Not until the domestication of animals and plants did
this cultural concept fully emerge.  Two of number's seminal figures
testify clearly to its alliance with separateness and property:
Pythagoras, center of a highly influential religious cult of number, and
Euclid, father of mathematics and science, whose geometry originated to
mesure fields for reasons of ownership, taxation and slave labor.  Once of
civilazation's early forms, chiefdomship, entails a linear rank order in
which each member is assinged an exact numerical place.  Soon, following
the antinatural linearity of plow culture, the inflexible 90-degree
gridiron plan of even earliest cities appeared.  Their insistent
regularity constitutes in itself a repressive ideology.  Culture, now
numbered, becomes more firmly bounded and lifeless.

        Art, too, in its relationship to agriculture, highlights both
institutions.  It begans as a means to interpret and subdue reality, to
rationalize nature, and conforms to the great turning point which is
agriculture in its basic features.  The pre-Neolithic cave paintings, for
example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and
freedom.  The Neolithic art of farmers and pastoralists, however, stiffens
into stylized forms; Franz Borkau typified its pottery as "narrow, timid
botching of materials and forms,"  With agriculture, art lost its variety
and became standardized into geometrical designs that tended to degenerate
into dull, patterned life.  And where there had been no representation in
Paleolithic art of men killing men, an obsession with depiction
confrontation between people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of
battles becoming common.

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Karl Alexis McKinnon|I live as the beasts in the fields, rejoicing in the
SP2                 |fleshly life. I favor the edible and curse the inedible.
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