Within You Without You

Perhaps there had been a moment in the career of the human animal at which something like self-consciousness became a possibility, and a complex of notions clustering round a blank centre called ‘man’ began to perpetuate themselves. Some people would like to believe that the moment was strongly linked to a specific cerebral mutation or the elaboration of a mental ‘module’ (species-recognition, over to you). Others, me included, stick to the idea that what happened must have been the emergence of a new pattern of cognition directed and deformed by an ongoing symbolic sociality. Maybe it will turn out that the argument here is over-polarised. But Rousseau suggests, and I think the Ice Age material backs him, that whatever its neural or social mechanics, the moment of self-consciousness was inseparable from one of distanciation and self-loss: from seeing oneself as Other, as not known, as threatened or threatening, as ‘taboo’. The true cognitive depth to the palaeolithic sculptures – their challenge, ultimately, to our anthropological schema – seems to me the way they suggest how self-loss and self-consciousness were intertwined.