Gestures

The Gesture of Planting

98 the Gesture of Planting Contrary to superficial first impressions, we are dealing here with an unnatural gesture, “perverse” in a radical sense: for in it, being turns into its opposite. This perversity, and the way the so-called ecological movement has inverted it, effectively demands that we consider this gesture just after having examined the gesture of turning a mask around. The thesis I want to advance here is that the ecologists’ standpoint is the same one as the one from which one turns a mask around: a standpoint outside history. As with most of the gestures we encounter daily, there is no appropriate strategy for recognizing this gesture, for remembering it. For it is covered up by habit (although we city-dwellers hardly do any planting ourselves), and this familiarity blocks our memories’ access to the essential thing about the gesture. Another thing about planting is that it is laden with myths, allegories, and metaphors to a greater extent than other gestures are, so that familiarity is enveloped in “hyperfamiliarity,” hiding the essence of the gesture that much more effectively. So it is appropriate to try to enter into the conditions in which the gesture was new, to the situation of the Neolithic planter, not only because its contemporary novelty could reveal the essential thing about the gesture but also because this study’s thesis is that new gestures express a new form of being. There is hardly another critical point in history that could support this thesis as effectively as the emergence of the gesture of planting in the late Mesolithic. In trying to think oneself into the situation in which a hunter-gatherer decides to dig holes in the ground, to press grass seeds into them, to close up the holes again and then wait for months to see what happens, one can hardly grasp the perversity of this gesture. To have this experience, one the GestUre of PLantinG 99 must obviously try to forget what later “normalized” this gesture, that is, all of history. The perversity, the turning of existence into its opposite, can only be experienced by observing the gesture in its original context, by bracketing out all economic, social, and political explanations, by observing the gesture not from the twentieth-century point of view but from that of the Paleolithic. This is possible because a posthistorical standpoint, or more exactly, one of its aspects—the ecological standpoint—has now become accessible. The hunter-gatherer, as we encounter him in perhaps a decadent form in the Amazon region, and perhaps in a depressed form within ourselves, is a setter of traps, a “capturer.” He builds structures for containing ponies, reindeer, or primeval beasts and baskets for catching berries, roots, or eggs. Looking at this basic gesture more closely, it becomes clear that it is about weaving nets, for traps and baskets can be seen as stitches in a net that people cast about themselves. All other gestures of work, the making of weapons as much as the sharpening of flints, of painting as well as burying, can be understood as variations of net weaving, that is, hunting and gathering. The state of mind that underpins the form of existence expressed in this gesture is a lying in wait. Hunters, like gatherers, live on the run, poised to jump on their prey, and the difference between hunting and gathering, between the capturing of animals and the capturing of plants, which counts as the original division of labor between man and woman, appears to be a difference in the rhythm of waiting and acting. It important to keep in mind that humans stalk prey in a way exactly opposite to the way predatory animals do. The predator animal stalks its prey so as to surprise it. A human being sets a trap and lets himself be surprised by the prey. The predator waits in nature and as nature and waits, too, for human beings, because from its standpoint, humans are no different from any other prey. A human being waits for nature because he himself is not in it, and so, from outside it, as the traps are being set, distinguishes among deer and cows, berries and eggs. To set traps, that is, to exist, he must categorize, that is, “ex-ist.” Over almost the entire time people have been on earth, it has a been characteristic pattern for men to lie in wait, by category, for animals, and for women to lie in wait, by...