What Society is It is the fate of philosophers to be trying always to catch up with themselves.

Their thinking unavoidably includes semiotic principles, which, unlike the formal axioms and vocabularies inherited from philosophys history, are not always explicitly defined, but which function more topographically. Just as watercourses follow determinate trajectories, thinking exhibits a kind of inexorability that the consciousness of philosophers is not always able to grasp - on the way past, so to speak. It is not the most profound of insights to note that an individual philosopher is not a repository of thoughts, but a witness to thinking. Whether they like it or not, philosophers inhabit societies, they experience events and participate in history; both the thoughts to which they are subject and their efforts to express these, employ concepts of which they are not always fully conscious. Of course philosophers - or, at least, good philosophers - are aware of this, and understand that it is in fact these very concepts that are most interesting. For these outline what society is now, the difference between what has been and what will become, the forces that power the trajectories underway. There are periods therefore in the lives of philosophers when they really are (as opposed to only appearing to be) entirely self-absorbed, focusing completely on some element of their labours, working out what it is they really mean by a particular word or phrase, in an effort to be able to make explicit as much of the thinking to which they have been witness as possible. For the most part, this labour produces some expression in the private language of the philosopher in question - in the form of an aphorism or axiom or definition or sense or feeling or mental image or geometrical form, or description of conditions or states of affairs - by which the meaning in question is clarified. There are nevertheless

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concepts, which, while retaining their semiotic function, and while continuing to operate topographically, remain recalcitrant, like the word on the tip of the tongue. Although the bulk of interpretative work in philosophy is reading the texts of philosophers, either living or dead - in order more fully to understand, to make explicit and to clarify the concepts these texts embody and the thinking that is being expressed, when this work is reflexive, special difficulties arise. Most prominently, that philosophers too often express not only their thoughts but also the thinking of their thoughts - thereby rendering what it is they are trying to tell the world, just that little bit more incomprehensible and obscure. Straightforward differences between languages of thinking and those most usefully employed to communicate thinking do not however exist: there are certainly moments when thought best speaks for itself, when no effort is made by the writer to find languages that pay respect to any universal reader, nor to place the thinking in question in the position of object - in relation to a place that is already able to see the world aright; but rather to let thinking think, to allow it to leave behind the words that it has used along the way. There are nevertheless just as many moments when that which is clear and distinct cannot be expressed with any kind of language at all. Notwithstanding ordinary everyday discourse on matters of moment, the state of the world and what then is to be done, the creative and productive work of philosophy is almost entirely an amalgam of reflection and writing - usually privately, sometimes in collaboration, and very often within ancient, male dominated institutions, the architectures and procedures of which segregate their inhabitants from the rest of society, and demand of them adherence to a code of ethics that they work in accordance with principles. Both the raw

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materials and the products of philosophy have from the first aphorisms of antiquity been languages, and these have been developed to do the work of philosophy at a distance and in the exclusive company of men. It is here then that we will find what it is we mean by what we have said. Which is not to say that philosophy must always take a distance from affairs and be conducted exclusively by men, nor that philosophy cannot be and has not been expressed in many cultural forms - from the visual arts and sculpture to music and dance, nor that it is impossible that philosophy be expressed non linguistically - with pheromones or ultrasonic vibrations, or by using any of the myriad other changing energy fields to which living beings have intimate perceptual access. Dolphins, for example, can sculpt air underwater into toroidal rings, which they move about, transform and offer to each other. There is no reason to suppose that this activity has no philosophical content - we can call it play for as long as we like, but we really have absolutely no idea at all of what these things mean to the dolphins, what it is they are expressing. We do not even know which of the qualities of these rings is significant to the dolphins: is it their speed, their shape, their longevity, the vibrations they set forth in the water, how they degrade? Douglas Adams made this general point most profoundly with his characterisation of dolphin intelligence in the story of how the dolphins had been trying for years without success to warn human beings about the impending destruction of planet earth by performing intricate pirouettes and summersaults and leaping through hoops while chirping happily in response to dead fish. When the time came however, and human beings still had not got the message, the dolphins left the planet, but before doing so, they fashioned a crystal goblet using ultrasonic vibrations, engraved with a simple symbol meaning: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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When I reflect on the conditions within which I find myself, the events that occur in the world around me and in the stream of my consciousness, I use the word society with a quite specific edge. The meaning is clear and distinct. There is a concept and a referent, a word and a thing. There is a moral as well as a purely analytical element to its sense. It is connected in a quite consistent and logical fashion to a number of other important concepts - like history, language, civilisation, reason, and so forth. And yet there is something about it that remains on the tip of my tongue. Of course, general consciousness and ordinary opinion suffer from a much more substantial, structural blind spot in this regard. Although populations act in their billions in accordance with the norms, values and expectations of whatever society they happen to live in, what that society is on the other hand, what are the material relations and powers that make it so, does not make it into common consciousness at all. The question of what society is remains in fact unarticulated. Society is nevertheless already certain of its own righteousness and all of its members grow up to learn this. How each individual member of society responds to the assorted borders and limits encountered on this journey is unique. Individuals are, to this extent, trajectories - quite specific products of their societies. Societies cannot therefore have been formed by a coming together of freely acting individuals in some sort of primordial social contract that has been handed down through the ages. Yet this is more or less what society would like its members to grow up to believe, that we learn to agree that this is what society is, even if it does not actually make any sense. When Plato put the rhetorical question in the mouth of the arch-dialectician Socrates, asking Phaedrus what is good and what is not good, and whether we need ask these things of anybody, not only did he do Phaedrus a great disservice by not

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allowing him to articulate the only sensible response - to wit, that no indeed we do not need to ask anybody these things, and yet that is precisely what we nonetheless do, he also predeconstructed the history of philosophy and laid down the schism that forms the foundation of both society and consciousness as such - for it is the silence of Phaedrus that has permitted the good always to have already remained unchallenged, to be that about which we have no need to ask, and to have become the value favoured by the voice of an authority acting in defiance of its own principles; by valuing dialectic above rhetoric while winning arguments with rhetorical questions, excluding by silence, thereby bringing forth a barrage of double standards, antitheses, hierarchies and arbitrary limits, and forever subjecting discursive reason to the exigencies and violence of power. All philosophy, it has been said, is footnotes to Plato, and here perhaps is the fundamental tension that makes it so. The moment of thought that has so persistently evaded the grasp of philosophers - on the way past, the fundamental reason why in their reflections they can only with great difficulty repair from the societies within which they find themselves to see the world aright, and perforce to see what society is. Of all philosophers, Nietzsche most relentlessly exposed the schism at philosophys core: Ich frchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben ... [Nietzsche, Gotzen Dammerung] The quest to kill God turns out of course to be much less straightforward than simply switching off belief, or of having been persuaded during the course of rational discourse that the existence of God is no longer self-evident. For if God has indeed been omnipotent and omniscient, his presence will be discovered everywhere. Even in language, where it is grammar that regulates and oversees. Even in this language, here and

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now, the grammar of which is, at the same time, something in which it is possible to believe, immediately undermining its necessity, doubting its universality, making possible the thought that languages might not be in need of regulation by grammar at all, awaking the possibility of languages, the grammars of which are not subservient to reason; for it is here that God will be always lurking - both in the positive value with which from its inception to the present, reason has always endowed itself, as well as in its determination to bring everything under its power, to give everything a name, to be able to describe, to express, to articulate everything. It would perhaps be nave then to oppose every role for reason in grammar - and thus language - or to undermine its efforts to totalise, by simply creating languages that are uncoupled from reason (whatever this may turn out to be), that only make sense in the places they are produced, whose grammar is entirely a function of the parameters of this specific situation, and which from any other, uninvolved, point of view would thus be strictly incomprehensible. (Even though, it might not be such a bad start - a step perhaps in the right direction.) Language as such and reason as such are in any case always already tied together in a very complex knot wrapped intricately round the social body, which is itself riven with other axiologies and sustained by an assortment of other more systemic totalising powers. Society, reason and God it turns out are rather similar. Nietzsche knew this, and also how to overcome it, and on the way past demonstrated precisely what society is. Whether or not he himself was able to lead the life in question is a moot point and of only biographical significance, he did however pithily describe the issues at stake. To give men back the courage of their natural drives To check their self-underestimation (not that of man as individual, but that of man as nature - )

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To remove antitheses from things after comprehending that we have projected them there To remove the idiosyncrasies of society from existence (guilt, punishment, justice, honesty, freedom, love, etc.) [Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle] On the face of it, this is a simple exhortation, to let men take courage from their natural drives, to remove all antitheses and allow the infinite diversity of things to be made apparent, while bringing forth a nature that has underestimated itself and overestimated its individuality. But this is after comprehending that antitheses have been a product, that antitheses are artefacts. Having understood that there is no hierarchy, no dialectic, no opposition save those arbitrarily injected into existence by society, by us, by our idiosyncrasies. Society must here be understood in the most rigorous and in the very strongest possible sense - that is, every item of our knowledge, our culture, our morality, our language, our consciousness. Even the very understanding by means of which we are able to come to this understanding. Which would seem suddenly to be less straightforward. Having been born, already somehow vaguely aware of these things, into a place where antitheses are the norm, and to have grown up intuitively reacting against those forces that perpetuate antitheses, coming to understand that said forces are very good at concealing themselves, and that they oppose in particular and with extreme prejudice - every doubt in regard to their authenticity. Having become thus an assemblage of living antitheses, enmeshed in numerous antithetical apparatuses, and to have been hereby subject to a salvo of emotional conditions, patterns of thinking and ways of experiencing that supress the nature of human existence. Having been thus deceived, deluded and utterly denatured, to then call forth natural drives? The mess of paradox brought forth here is considerable. The meanings and usage of words is unstable, sometimes

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referring to that which must be overcome, sometimes to the effects of that overcoming. Under these circumstances, it might be tempting to interpret the list of infinitives as an imperative to rediscover or remember the experience human beings enjoyed for the millennia before they started along the adventure of civilisation, before they wrote down their languages and before they lived in history. After all, human beings have been living on planet earth for a million years, but only within the last ten thousand is there any kind of external record or evidence of what that was like for them. Before this, only traces - an incomplete fossil record, some paintings in caves, remains of settlements and sporadic artefacts - no knowledge of how human beings tied together the moments and episodes of their experience, of what they did with their time here. Such a small amount of the duration of human existence has become an element of historical understanding, so there is perhaps an ordinary anthropological interpretation to the imperative. We still have a lot to learn about both having been and being human. This may well be so, and a thorough anthropology of this period of humanitys time here on planet earth would indeed be very interesting (although how precisely this would proceed is not immediately obvious), but to interpret the imperatives here as a manifesto for a specific research programme, is not only not terribly Nietzschean, it presupposes that during prehistory there was no society, that the arbitrary - and essentially methodological - distinction between history and prehistory coincides with the appearance of society on planet earth. That in the hundreds of thousands of years before the historical record to which we have access, human beings came together only accidentally, that they formed no relationships with their fellows, that they had no shared rituals, no ways of communicating with each other and had no common sense. Which does not seem likely.

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There is in any case a general problem with examining putative states of affairs or conditions within which human beings once lived in order to answer questions that have arisen in the circumstances of the present. Not only does this endanger atavism and essentialism, it is an entirely circular exercise, and in the specific case here under consideration, misses the point; which is not about coming to know a prehistorical condition - whether or not this has anything to do with what we now understand to be society, but about creating a culture that expresses the nature of humankind - here and now and having understood that societies inject into existence idiosyncrasies that underestimate human nature, overestimate individualism and reproduce antitheses. That there a polemic against society is evident, less obvious is where the attack is coming from, what is being proposed and what is actually meant by society. Klossowski remarks that Nietzsche is undertaking here a combat on culture in the name of a culture of the affects, which is built on the ruins of the hypostases of consciousness and its antinomies, in so far as these are born from the guilt of consciousness towards itself. These two kinds of culture are less two different forms of sociality than they are descriptive of a tension within culture itself: between those powers which would form themselves, and everybody else, into a society in opposition to nature; and those powers which would form themselves naturally into cultures in keeping with the climatic and geographical circumstances within which they find themselves. There is after all no reason a priori to oppose culture and nature, and every reason to dismantle the opposition of social and natural that appears to have been holding together what we have been meaning throughout this meditation. What is at issue here is power specifically the powers by means of which we human beings organise our lives, and

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which determine what sort of individuals we become. It is the only power we have here within the infinitude of creation, how to relate to each other on a daily basis, how to organise our lives together, who we allow to be one of us, and who not. In very broad terms there are two different powers at work in the production of what is meant by culture and society; to put it another way, that to which these words refer are two different configurations of power, two different ways of living together. One is an inclusive power: of traditional wisdom, of high culture and the arts and sciences, which involves learning and sharing experience in such a way as to enable living together successfully within the natural cycles of the planet. And the other is an exclusive power: of society explicitly separated from nature, of collective stupidity, the blunt exercise of authority, faulty reasoning, antithetical morality, bad conscience, false consciousness and so forth. This inversion of the society/nature axiology forges in the first instance an analytical distinction between culture and society, which in turn throws into sharp focus the idea of barbarism, to which ideas of civilisation and society are very often opposed, and through which they have been thus defined. The barbaric practices of humanity are now irrevocably liberated from their status as manifestations of natures that have nothing to do with society, their deviance from the putative norm being no longer a result of faulty genes, or bad socialisation or incidental abuse or whatever, but an intrinsic element of the social body. Nature becomes much less scary. It is not a place where dogs eat dogs and every individual is only interested in its own immediate needs and basic impulses. Thus too, notions of violence, cruelty and indifference line up in a different way; for the history of humanity has been one of wars between and against dominating powers of one

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sort or another, during which time human beings have committed a staggering variety of acts of extreme violence against one another punishment, torture, genocide, rape, mass-murder, ritual sacrifice, pillage and plunder, slavery, forced labour, conscription, permanent incarceration, grinding discipline, precision bombing, carpet-bombing, suicide bombing - often with pleasure, and always with a moral force that renders these in some way acceptable. How a predator kills its prey before eating has absolutely nothing in common with the slaughter that takes place within human civilisation. How groups of animals compete to find ecological balance as the availability of resources fluctuates with planetary cycles of catastrophe and equilibrium has absolutely nothing in common with the insane levels of decimation, destruction and devastation that warfare produces. The so called diseases and pathologies of the mind that motivate individual human beings to engage happily in acts of cruelty against their fellows, to kill or rape or abuse or otherwise irreparably damage others bodies and lives, do not, on the whole, occur in communities of wolves or cattle, or anywhere else in nature these are all pathologies of civilisation, human civilisation. Society is not in any way a refuge from the barbarity of nature; rather the barbarism of human beings is something unnatural, a consequence of our having become denatured, of having grown up in societies explicitly differentiated from nature. Just as the Nietzschean imperative here at issue must not be construed as an appeal to investigate or remember any state of predenaturedness, it should not be understood as an exhortation to shun society, to celebrate absolute solitude, to retreat into the life of a hermit - either by actually going to live in a hut by Walden Pond, or by creating a phantasy universe within which to protect a chronically

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threatened ego or to manage a spoiled identity - no matter how loathsome society has become. Rather, it is a direct attack on a certain kind of morality, and then an exhortation to celebrate what it is that comes into existence (ontstaat) during the animation of that which was denatured. Not so much a recreation of what was lost, but the creation of that which is possible at the end of society, while no longer projecting dialogical abstractions onto existence, learning to know the differences between that which is essential and that which is but a reflection of society, an effect of the moment. Experiencing instead an innate intimate immanent connection with life, all of life, and the power to live it to the full. If there were ever to be a Nietzschean politics, its starting point would be here. Society has now become not so much the thing studied by sociologists and referred to by politicians, critics and other ideologists as the authentic manifestation of the social body, but that which comes into existence when people do not properly learn the differences between what is essential and what accidental, when their existence can be understood only in terms of axiology and abstraction, when they overestimate themselves as individuals while underestimating their nature. To put it another way, whatever it is to which sociologists and their ilk think they are referring when then talk about society, it is a manifestation of a fundamental delusion, a collection of bad habits, unhealthy practices and unnatural procedures, the common root of which is hierarchy; a kind of grammar that divides the world in two, giving one half a positive value, and the other a negative. At any given moment, society is simply that apparatus of power, which imposes dualistic moralities on existence at the expense of what is natural, and by which the very distinction between nature and society is reproduced and sustained. This has now become definitional. We can begin therefore to work in Duncan Spence 2012 12

the other direction. To encounter moments when dualistic morality asserts a power over events is to encounter society, to discover places where accidental idiosyncrasies have become universal is to discover traces of society, to see where so much that is essential has been denatured and destroyed is to see the effects of society. This dualism remains the most persistent of humanitys delusions. That what we have been able with our clever ideas and technology to create for ourselves has separated us from nature and allowed us to live in a place where there are different laws and processes at work from those to be found in nature. What was in the seventeenth century called mind is now just society. Society is as metaphysically incoherent today as mind was then. All efforts to bring society into existence in spite of this must therefore be doomed from the outset. The assemblage of economic relations, habits, practices, morals, discourses, procedures, apparatuses, architectures of surveillance, conveyance and environmental control that already exists under the name of society is the outcome of complex historical processes - the product of exclusive, hierarchical powers gaining hegemony. Within which the beings who are employed to operate it all become accustomed to schisms, to become literally schizoid, to separate their minds from their bodies, themselves from their own natures and from nature as such, their responsibilities from their rights, their freedoms from their duties, their labour from their leisure, and so forth, and to learn to give over their native powers to authority in the name of God, reason and society. All the while, their natural impulses and desires, the living, breathing, actually existing, human beings beneath are doing something else entirely - even if they are only dimly aware of this. How each body naturally reacts to the denaturing forces of society at whatever level will be as unique as the trajectories of individuals, but each will - in

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accordance with its nature - react in some way, to contain or to heal, or to succumb to make way for new life. There is in any event absolutely nothing necessary about society. Human beings are not excluded by their sheer existence from living together in such a way that society does not dominate their lives. We can live together without always believing in our innate righteousness, without being different from nature, without dividing stuff into ours and theirs, good and bad, and so forth, but by understanding stuff in its absolute infinitude, sharing the experience with every being we meet - human or otherwise. We are imprisoned within society only for as long as we allow it to be so, only for as long as we impose antitheses and our own idiosyncrasies on existence. If instead we were to take courage from our natural drives rather than undermining them, to actively unlearn our bad habits, and to sweep aside all antitheses, we would discover that there are other ways of living together, other ways of being alive in this magnificent universe, free of duality, unencumbered by languages and power, and we would see the beautiful complexity of things, the rarity and variety, the turn of events and the passage of moments for what they are. And it would not matter what society is.

References Adams, D., So long, and thanks for all the fish: Pan Books, 1984. Klossowski, P., Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle: Athlone, 1997. Nietzsche, F., Gotzen Dammerung: Project Guttenberg. Pirsig, R. M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: Corgi, 1974. Spence, D., If Spinoza were alive today: Scribd.com, 2010. Thoureau, H. D., Walden: Project Guttenberg. Duncan Spence 2012 14