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John Moore: Anarchy and Ecstasy
The previous essay identified in Western creation myths an elementary paradigm which defined the structure of universal history. I now wish to focus upon one specific component of Judaeo-Christian cosmogony: the temptation. A plethora of political interpretations of this incident have been offered, but all necessarily overlook the crucial issues, which only become available through an antipolitical perspective. The narrative relates how the serpent successfully tempts humanity to obtain the capacity to discriminate between good and evil. Significantly, the humans respond to this acquisition by immediately concealing their nakedness: "and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (Genesis, 3:7). When God subsequently discovers their transgression, He expels them into a world of work, sin and mortality. Before doing so, however, the text notes that "Unto Adam also and to his wife did [He] make coats of skins, and clothed them" (Genesis, 3:21). The potency of Western cosmogony derives from its reduction of the multiplicity and diversity of life, the universal territory of anarchy, into the basic elements of a cuneal paradigm. The latter enforces the notion that the universe is comprised of three forces: God, the control force; Satan, the counter-control force; and humanity, the controlled. For Satan, who wishes to overthrow God and seize power for himself, the temptation constitutes an opportunity to subvert the controlling order. He attempts to disabuse humanity of its innocence (i.e., its unreflecting, naive allegiance to the control force), not in order to dissolve power, but to transfer their subordination from God to himself. Fully cognizant of the punishment likely to ensue, he cynically manipulates humanity, calculating that their penalization might elicit a resentment ultimately conducive to a transfer of dependency. But, in the short term, the temptation provides humanity with a sense of shame. Adam and Eve become ashamed of their naked subservience, their unwitting erotic investment of power, and hence cover their generative organs and erogenous zones. They symbolically refuse to reproduce their own domination, or to expose their pleasures to the all-seeing deity. But as indicated above, the covering process possesses two distinct stages -- the first autonomously directed, the second coerced. This differentiation remains crucial. In the first phase, the two humans fashion aprons out of fig leaves. In the second phase, God clothes them with coats made from animal skins. There are two important distinctions here. On the one hand, two different types of clothing are designated. An apron is a garment designed specifically for protection: it is worn on particular occasions for specific tasks, and its wearing here does not therefore imply any permanency. The coats enforced by God, however, are not worn for protection, nor specific tasks, but for general and hence permanent use. The voluntarily assumed apron can be easily divested, whereas the coat - imposed as part of a punishment - becomes an instrument for indefinite encasement in an unwanted and constraining integument. The primal humans - i.e., the first hominids to be dislocated from the "state of nature" and have their identities determined by the control force - are literally coated. On the other hand, an important difference in the clothing material becomes apparent. Humanity's use of a vegetable product, a renewable and regenerative resource, does not constitute a denudation of nature. But God's use of animal skins clearly implies an ecological - and ethical - infringement. This incident establishes that God, not Cain, committed the primal murder. (Genesis I: 29-30 indicates that prior to the Fall all creatures, including humans, were frugivores or herbivores, and hence presumably pacific.) The mythic origins of clothing can thus be discerned in the temptation narrative. But in considering this chronicle, the inevitable question arises of why the serpent was selected as the image of the tempter. Many explanations of this symbol have been advanced. But in the present context, only one connotation of the image remains significant. The key to the interchange between humanity and the serpent can be characterized as the issue of attire. Its central terms are exposure and covering. The serpent exposes the nakedness of humanity to itself, thus precipitating the act of covering. God subsequently regularizes this covering by making it a coating, and thus transforms humanity into the only species which attires itself with exogenous, manufactured apparel (in contrast to the endogenous integument - the organic pelt - developed by animals). But the creature which instigates this process also possesses a relevant and distinctive characteristic in this context. The serpent undergoes the process of ecdysis: it periodically sheds its skin for the purpose of growth. Of course, many creatures - often in conjunction with the seasons - cast or moult their skin, fur, feathers, and so on. But while other animals undergo these processes piecemeal and hence imperceptibly, the serpent sloughs its skin at one time and in one piece, leaving behind a visible husk. Furthermore, although this process facilitates growth, it does not involve a fundamental biological metamorphosis, such as the development of a chrysalis into a butterfly. The serpent maintains its original shape, but merely casts off the dead tissue from the living flesh, leaving a fresh and brightly-hued new skin. The central interchange of the Fall scenario can now be formulated. The serpent, a creature which periodically sloughs its skin, instigates a process wherein a glabrous humanity permanently covers its skin with clothing or, more accurately, keeps its skin continually covered with a succession of clothes. (The origins of fashion can be traced to this initial interchange. Continual sartorial modification compensates for the arrested development of integral creative potentials.) But note the crucial displacement at the centre of this transaction. Although God's enemy, Satan necessarily operates only with the tacit permission of the omniscient and omnipresent deity. And the guile of the latter becomes apparent in precisely this interchange. By allowing Satan to assume the serpent form, He effectively binds humanity more closely to His control, even while imposing a punishment that seems more likely to precipitate revolt. In the serpent, with its sloughing capacity, humanity might have perceived a symbolic or analogical method of casting off their identities as God's creatures. But the temptation prevented - or at least postponed - this eventuality. The revelation of humanity's naked subservience was so shameful that its first response was not repudiation, but protection. And this defensive impulse became the lever God used to shift humanity even further away from authentic revolt (not the ersatz, condoned type practiced by Satan). For the control force ensured that the Fall would so distance the relationship between humanity and serpents, that the former could learn nothing from the latter. The deity informs the serpent: "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shall bruise his heel" (Genesis, 3:15). Satan only temporarily possessed the serpent for the purpose of temptation. Hence, this curse does not apply to him. Unwittingly, in his manoeuvre for the seizure of power, he has furthered and reinforced the interests of the entire control complex, both the forces of control and counter-control. Although God's absolute rule has been disrupted, the threat to the principle of governance has been contained and defused. In fact, humanity's distancing from the serpent - the natural creature, not the mythic worm - further alienates humans from authentic forms of insurgency. The legacy of the Fall scenario become increasingly apparent as the global megamachine of Western civilization plunges into further crisis. Much contemporary revolt remains determined and circumscribed by the paradigmatic temptation incident. Rather than shed the character armour, slough the itching and constricting Leviathanic integuments, many restlessly change the styles and fashions of clothing, while underneath the exacerbating dead tissue accumulates. Seasonal moults have degenerated into new "seasons" of fashion commodities that maintain no connexion with ecological cycles. And the central Western symbol of revolt - the black leather jacket - remains an ironic descendant of the original coat of animal skins inflicted by the control force. Other, seemingly more direct attempts at divestment are equally inauthentic; particularly given their delusory aura of defiance. Leaving aside psychic divestment, the contemporary proliferation of physical unveiling alone has been astonishing. And, moreover, from streaking to strippergrams, public disrobement is generally regarded as daringly defiant -- an attitude frequently promoted by regulatory or repressive legal measures. The stripper remains a central icon of the age. But economic considerations are not always primary here. Certainly, one can pay to witness a striptease or acquire photographs of naked individuals. But equally, one can appear nude in public with no economic motivation. The common element - whether in the participant or the spectator - remains the act of unfocussed revolt. The point here is neither to deprecate nudism, which has constituted a notable element of liberatory movements from the Adamites through the Spanish Anarchists and beyond, nor to repudiate clothing in climates and seasons where they are evidently necessary. The point remains to examine suich phenomena from an antipolitical perspective, and thus discover the nature of their relationship to the shift toward total anarchy. Current manifestations of nudity signify an urge to ecdysis, but one which remains inauthentic because entrapped within the parameters of the Fall scenario. Obviously, many of these manifestations are deliberately deformed to reinforce the sordid but profitable aims of domination and exploitation. But in every case, public disrobing is predicated upon a general and continued cowering. Stripping can continue to be regarded as defiant only so long as the stripper perpetually reclothes him- or herself, and only whilst public nudity remains a relative scarcity. As long as these conditions pertain, the public disclosure of nakedness can rarely be motivated by endogenous desire, but mainly by the exogenous and covertly coerced promptings of defiance. In actuality, such defiance constitutes a total conformism. Its actions never go beyond the boundaries delimited by the Fall. The control complex retains its authority. Dismantling this endlessly frustrating cycle has now become a primary requisite for the total transformation toward anarchy. The hideous contemporary alternatives make one's flesh creep: either peacefully submit to a mortification of the flesh, the hairshirt, the daily scarification, or be flayed alive by napalm and nuclear radiation. Either way it is difficult not to become one of the many complaisant scabs on the body of Leviathan. But there are ways out of this seeming impasse. And one of them remains the recovery of ecdysis. Nudism can only become an authentic praxis if it is informed by the latter. For the ecdysiast, the decision to dress or stay naked depends purely upon individual desire, but anyway a peripheral concern. The key issue remains the sloughing of dead tissue, the character armour, internalized authority, the Leviathanic integument -- and hence to the elimination of the entire control complex. Ecdysis thus becomes part of the wider psychosocial biodegradation process. Individually and collectively, people who reject the identities and postures assigned to them by the control force, begin to remerge in the positive anarchy or chaos which predates the creation. As advocates of anarchy, our task should be to discover techniques which facilitate, promote and generalize this process. In "Toward a Cultural Ecology of Anarchy," I made some provisional proposals in this area. These can now be related to the project of stimulating the kundalini, the latent spiritual energy which Vedantic writers symbolize as a coiled serpent. But this is not the place to reiterate or develop such ideas. We must remain eternally vigilant, and not allow tentative possibilities to solidify into prescriptive dogmas. Anarchy can be defined as maintaining a field of infinite potentialities. Additional explicitness here could initiate the forms of closure that are to be avoided. As Fredy Perlman has noted, "Theories of liberation are the clothes of dictators." And ecdysis demands a sloughing of these garments too. Next section: Bewilderness Back to contents |