since Descartes until today. In order to play the game of the humansciences today, in order for knowledge to be recognized as legitimate, it hasto speak in terms of the dualisms of innatevs. acquired, nature vs. culture,heredity vs. upbringing, etc., andthus reproduce doctrines. Changescan and do occur for sure in cultural matters. But to claim and position oneself as a state of purity reactivelycomposed against a discourse such as Western dualist discourse, is to reproducethis same discourse and its practices. When he states that his thought is a better configuration of Westerndualistic interpretations of the world, he only rearranges this discourse,still embedded in it. Holistic or totalrepresentations of reality, when departing from Western dualisms, from itsmetaphysics, and doing only that, can only promise to keep dualisms alive, indiscourse and in practical life. It isin practice that the problems posed by dualisms must be challenged, aspractical problems, not as problems of language.Zerzanscritiques go very much hand in hand with what he critiques. Post-structuralist - or postmodern as helikes - thought has critiqued time, space, culture, language, etc. in humanlife as stable things, declaring them contingent. However, Zerzan cannot live in anuncomfortable world, where things are contingent, not just true or false, whichis a sort of comfort. He wants a newcozy theory, sounding like a very capitalist enterprise. This explains in great part why he willprobably have ever more success at presenting himself and his ideas. He says the origin of all symbolizing isalienation.[19] He denies all symbolic culture, and throughthis fails to perceive how symbolism is exactly part of the reason why some cultureshave tended to reverence natural ecosystems and take relative care of them,consciously or not. As Brian OliverSheppard[20]cunningly noted, Zerzans assertion that language is a form of alienation, inthe end tries to alienate every response to this very claim. Zerzan wishes to deny language, whileplaying with it, because he fears being reputed, and that is why he wants dodenigrate reason, in order to cling to his convictions. To cling to convictions, as Nietzsche shows,is to believe to possess absolute truth, and to provoke violence as an effect.[21] To consider culture as only symbolic is tobelieve in the cultural universal, it is not to understand cultures as composedof social practice, complex and irreducible to a unified narrative. It is to do metaphysics, a very specific Western - cultural practice that seeks to speak for all, therefore the violenceto cultural difference.On the PrimitiveThediscourse on the primitive relies on Western perceptions of itself in orderto define, to construct its Other, the primitive.[22] The notion of the Primitive is a culturalbias, with its origins in Western colonization and social sciences, thatrenders images and thoughts of the primitive as wholly oppositional to theWest. By this discourse, a self isconstructed for the primitive and by an oppositional, dualistic metaphysicallogic, another one is constructed for the Westerner, who many times is theoccult subject, or logic, in narratives. This logic functioned not only in the construction of the primitive,but of the Oriental[23]as well, besides many other constructions of identities. The whole is anassumption of human experience, the oceanic,[24] adiscourse