| Book Review Archive 8/ 05.05.2002 [32] |
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The Pathology of Civilization by John Zerzan
Some of it is not easy reading, for as Chellis Glendinning says the book is, "brilliant, stark, challenging, timely - a deliberate and delicious foreplay to nothing less than the erasure of civilization itself".
Softcover jacket, Feral House, US
Zerzan commands a vast array of insight and references as he plows through chapters on The Failure of Symbolic Logic and Thought (the hopelessly inadequate way that we perceive and think), Time and Its Discontents (mesmerizing and easy to read - worth the price of the book alone), Against Technology, as well as chapters on Why I Hate Star Trek and Who is Chomsky?
Archeologist Teresa Kintz, a former long-term editor at the Earth First! Journal and Green Anarchy, gives an introduction that takes the reader into the context of Eugene, Oregon during the late 1980s to the mid-1990s when Zerzan's ideas came together and attracted enthusiasts. During this period the Eugene, Oregon activist and anarchist uprisings began to take root in the nearby forests and urban communities.
Warner Creek, China Left, Whiteaker were some of the early Free State squats and communities that went on to help organize protests from Black Bloc at the Seattle WTO, the anarchist forest defense of the Red Cloud Thunder-Winberry Tree Villages, the now-victorious Eagle Creek Treesit (three years), and riots and mayhem up and down the west coast of the US.
"Working as an archeologist for the last decade," writes Kintz, "I've observed first hand how 14,000 years of continuous Native American occupation left the scant legacy of ephemeral hearth features, delicate spear points and broken pieces of pottery prehistoric archeologists study. But what lies on the land now, after only a few hundred years since colonization and industrialization? ... superfund sites, nuclear warheads, factory farms, denuded forests, poisoned rivers and dying industrial towns with crumbling inner cities. Archeologists recognize how all this alteration of matter our society engages in now is unprecedented ... my academic colleagues are reluctant to engage in the kind of political debate Zerzan is trying to start, yet I know that none in the field could deny that all of the so-called achievements of man are only monuments to overwhelming pride and hubris. Everybody knows people managed to live perfectly fine for thousands of years without electricity or automobiles-what better evidence than that can you have that it is possible?"
The introduction by Kintz is a valuable summary of the key points and the argumentation of the book. "For 99 percent of human history people walked gently on the Earth," she writes, "lived daily lives using a stone, bone, wood technology. Running on Emptiness demands we consider why all artifacts have politics and how when we use tools they use us back. It requires we consider how human nature was originally one and part of a whole and now we lament that we are lost and alienated from one another."
Who decided we needed mechanization, electricity, nuclear power, automobiles or computer technology? Has one single man-made item been a necessary improvement on Earth? Why do we put the survival of all species in peril for our exclusive comfort and gratification? How did we come to dedicating our lives to maintaining this mad tangle of supply and demand that we call civilization? And finally what will it take for us to give up on the artificiality of our grim modern lives and cleave instead to what is natural? Kintz outlines how the book addresses these issues and she lauds anarcho-primitivism as arguing for going forward towards a future primitive - not for going backward.
"Prehistory is all around us, it is there for everyone to observe and contemplate," writes Kintz, "Don't believe me? Please get up now and go gaze out of the nearest window for a moment. Imagine the same landscape there before you 10,000 years ago and just think about what the lives of the people living there would have been like. Turn off the radio and television, unplug the computer and the telephone, look past the concrete, tune out the noise of the traffic and visualize what it must have been like living in an ecologically sustainable, socially harmonious world. Zerzan argues that in understanding the primitive past we take the first step toward rejecting the pathological present and actualizing a future primitive. It is a radical idea that certainly deserves our consideration."
Anarcho-primitivism (AP) is, she writes, "inspired equally by anti-authoritarian and radical green viewpoints. Society as we know it now in the industrialized world is pathological and the civilizing impulses of certain dominant groups and individuals are effectively to blame. Trends in communications toward acts of symbolic representation have obstructed human being's ability to directly experience one another socially, and alienated us from the rest of the natural world."
AP thought and action is intentionally provocative. While it aspires to inform and enlighten with regard to anthropological and archeological knowledge the primary purpose is to exhort and incite revolutionary social change. Kintz gives a rare and first hand account of how anarchists especially at the tree village camps near Eugene began to "excommunicate themselves from civilization and take up residence in communal social groups ... In the woodlands they came to identify completely with the landscape ... deliberately rewilding themselves thorough acts of confrontation and defiance, and fundamentally changing their lives."
Several are doing long prison sentences for Earth Liberation Front related arson attacks. Living, evolving classrooms of anarchist and anarcho-primitivism are teaching us much about living a future primitive and John Zerzan helped guide and document this phenomenon.
The first chapter on The Failure of Symbolic Thought is difficult reading that is best taken in modest bites. "Many of us feel driven to get to the bottom of a steadily worsening mode of existence," writes Zerzan. "Out of a sense of being trapped and limited by symbols comes the thesis that the extent to which thought and emotion are tied to symbolism is the measure by which absence fills the inner world and destroys the outer world."
As Kintz summarizes, "rethinking the characteristics of the categories of primitive vs. modern is one of the main themes of the opening essays of Running on Emptiness which address the failures of symbolic thought. As Zerzan argues, when we removed ourselves from direct experience of the sensual world [existence without a need for symbolic representation of anything] through reification [ascribing thing-ness to everything - acts, thoughts, feelings ...], time and language we became less stimulated by our senses. As we immerse ourselves in the world of objectification and abstraction [post-modern vapid delusions] we see the triumph of the symbols for reality over the reality of experience itself."
And he argues that the gap between a symbolic existence and what we have lost is so great that we are left unaware of the full extent of the thievery of modern life - and unaware of the robbers who have taken everything from us. "Just as Freud predicted that the fullness of civilization would mean universal neurotic unhappiness, anti-civilization currents are growing in response to the psychic immiseration that envelops us. Thus symbolic life, essence of civilization, comes under fire," writes Zerzan.
Chapter one goes on to blame language, art and religion (even Shamans) - indeed the whole concept of culture - for the pathology of human relations during the last 10,000 years. Anarchist disregard for democracy is held back until the final page of the book. Zerzan takes his first jab at Noam Chomsky saying, "this chief language theorist commits a grave and reactionary error by portraying language as a 'natural' aspect of 'essential human nature,' innate and independent of culture. His Cartesian perspective sees the mind as an abstract machine which is simply destined to turn to symbols and manipulate them."
This statement begs investigation, for along with Zerzan's rejection of any division of labor a number of people would disagree with the primacy of these statements. Physical and mental attributes would have always resulted in some specialization - the fastest runners, the best firemakers and the most lucid dreamers, etc. In Native American tribes it does not seem that shamans disrupted the egalitarian nature of the tribe and few of the tribes seemed to have moved much toward centralization or religion as we would define it. Trying to link this to the future couldn't we all be shamans?
Zerzan is masterful at finding interesting and appropriate sources that keep the reader engaged and convinced: "The American philosopher George Santayana summed it up well with, 'Another world to live in is what we mean by religion'.
"We are caught up in the cultural logic of objectification and the objectifying logic of culture, such that those who counsel new ritual and other representational forms as the route to re-enchanted existence miss the point completely. More of what has failed for so long can hardly be the answer ... Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would lose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption."
From page 65, That Thing We Do (our reified lives), "Until fairly recently - until civilization - nature was a subject, not an object. In hunter-gather societies no strict division or hierarchy existed between the human and the non-human. The participatory nature of this vanished connectedness has to be restored, that condition in which meaning was lived, not objectified into a grid (matrix?) of symbolic culture.
"There is nothing even remotely similar to time. It is unnatural and yet as universal as alienation. All ritual is an attempt, through symbolism, to return to the timeless state. Ritual is a gesture of abstraction from that state, however, a false step that only leads farther away."
Humans are unique in their ability to plan ahead - into a complex future. A million years ago humans were planning hunting trips and water stops days or weeks ahead - so, time as Zerzan discusses it is mostly accurate, but humans didn't live only in the now.
Several chapters deal with issues of technology, which weave along with the totality of symbolic existence throughout the book. He begins with the social implications of technology: "I live in Oregon, where the rate of suicide among 15- to 19-year-olds has increased 600 percent since 1961," he writes. "I find it hard to see this as other than youth getting to the threshold of adulthood and society and looking out, and what do they see? They see this bereft place ... We're seeing the crisis of inner nature, the prospects of complete dehumanization, linking up with the crisis of outer nature which is obviously ecological catastrophe ... accelerating extinction of species ... in Oregon, the natural original forest is virtually 100 percent gone; the salmon are on the verge of extinction ... and it's so greatly urged along by the movement of technology."
According to Kintz, "humanity basically took a wrong turn with the advent of animal domestication and sedentary agriculture, which laid the foundation for the exploitation of the Earth, facilitated the growth of hierarchical social structures and subsequently the ideological control of the many by the few. All technology [but perhaps knowledge is OK?] besides the stone-age techniques of hunter-gathers is inherently detrimental to social relations and set the stage for ecological catastrophe."
For Zerzan, post-modernism is the abdication of reason, antipathy to meta-narratives, the refusal to consider the totality, against origins, nature versus culture is a false notion, history is fiction, truth and meaning are nonsense, irony verging on cynicism, popular culture, an accomplice to technology and postmodernism is pervasive and yet few people know anything about it. Derrida, Virilio, Public Broadcasting, Bookchin, Fifth Estate, Slingshot, The Progressive, The Nation, Hakim Bey, Alexander Cockburn, Earth First!'s Judi Bari and Noam Chomsky get Zerzan's contempt for aiding post modernism or blocking the anarchist dialogue and the debate over Ted Kazinsky and his Unabomber Manifesto.
Chomsky is accused of being a liberal-leftist with a haphazard critique, a supporter of the state and reformism, a reactionary linguist, pro-advanced-technology and pro-automobiles. Whose Unabomber? Whose Enemy of the State? "We didn't make this culture. We didn't turn the world into the battleground and cemetery it has become. We didn't turn human relations into the parody they have become. But now it is our responsibility to overcome what our culture has created ... we must be what we must be to overcome it ... COULD YOU KILL SOMEBODY, IF YOU KNEW THAT TO DO SO WOULD SAVE OTHER LIVES?"
Ted Kazinsky (aka The Unabomber and FC) is mentioned frequently in the book, but most of his exposure is in regard to his trial and the non-support of many activists and anarchist publications for Kazinsky. Zerzan has been a long and loyal friend to Kazinsky, so it was a surprised to see: "There are two obvious objections to Kazinsky's theory and practice ... A return to undomesticated autonomous ways of living would not be achieved by the removal of industrialism alone. Such removal would still leave domination of nature, subjugation of women, war, religion, the state, and division of labor, to cite some basic social pathologies. It is civilization itself that must be undone ..."
A few people have tried to explain to Zerzan over the years that waiting for the perfect revolution is as much a part of the "society of the spectacle" as the Rainbow Family, New Agers or the Green Party. One would imagine anarchists encouraging people to follow their authentic feelings and to express their rage - it is unnatural to put up with the everyday terrorism of apathy in the face of the industrial system's growing power and destructiveness. "The irony, of course, is that lethal bombings were necessary for an alternative to planetary and individual destruction to be heard," writes Zerzan.
In several sections of the book we get to know John Zerzan the person through his brief autobiography and an interview with Derrick Jensen that appeared in The Sun, September 1998. There are short essays on Grief and Memory and a brilliantly laid out chapter on Art and the Abstract Expressionists, who tried so nobly to rescue and redeem art - and failed. In 214 pages he covers a wide swath of history and subject matter. As you get familiar with the terminology the reading gets easier, more compelling and draws one into reflection and discovery. These are the issues of our life and times. And they are the issues that are so hard to find information on, so hard to talk to anyone about.
Reading this book twice should earn one at least six college credits and it's even enjoyable - once you get beyond the utter gloom and your definitions of reality.
The chapter on art is easy to read and gives a powerful look into the art activist transition from the 1940s to the end of modernism with pop art's postmodern triumph in the 1960s. "Also known as Heroic Abstraction, the New York School, Gesture Painting and Action Painting, Abstract Expressionism was modernism's last, great assault on the dominant culture, the finale for painting as opposition or breakthrough." He details the emergence and works of Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, Still Smith, Newman and Rothko. He calls their attempt to transcend, "a romantic anti-capitalist hope, complete with weaknesses and contradictions, a hope that the values embodied in their art could supersede the artistic and transform society ... a radical art whose purpose was to venture rapidly into the unknown, to attempt painting as the yet indefinable. Key components were risk, passion and adventure. For such intensity of purpose against such great odds, only extremist need apply."
Like a rude storm the Abstract Expressions barged into the public art scene, the huge drip or poured canvases of Pollock, Rothko's fields of color or his aligned rectangles floating in layers of vibrant light and color ... the magnitude and intensity of Newman's colors and the turbulent, craggy fields of color in Still's works - these artist loathed the art world and painted from scratch, as if art and "painting were not only dead but had never existed," though Newman was influenced by Pisarro and Seurat. Depression, alcoholism and tragedy eventually caught up with many of these determined radicals. "Their desperate initiative was widely misunderstood and steadily assimilated into the prevailing cultural, political and social ethos. Nonetheless, Action painting was not only the evident end of formal development in art, it was the highest point of the whole modernist project. And because of what David Craven recognized as its 'unequivocal opposition to scientism, technologism, and wage labor alienation,' Abstract Expressionism superseded the non-radical Enlightenment belief in progress that is usually found near the heart of modernism."
Octavio Paz, described the successor to the Abstract Expressionists, Pop Art, in 1973, "Pop Art is not a figure in a vision, but a mannequin in a department store." The curtain closed on art and we had the triumph and unification of all things postmodern.
In Summary
This is an important book - a landmark in the Rebellion Against the Tyranny of Total Brainwashing (the culmination of 10,000 years of symbolically defined existence) - a book that opens a debate long in the waiting. Many of the essays are four to eight years old and yet they remain pertinent and unanswered. I agree with almost every detail that is said and every innuendo. Despite being the 'Prince of Pessimism' I was stunned by the "problems with everything" (including quotation 'marks') that Zerzan lays out so compellingly. He seamlessly blends Adorno, Marcuse and Freud with a touch of Lasch, Heidegger, Mumford, and a suggestion of Illich and Adbusters magazine (Situationists always!). My biggest question is: What good is it?
Living on Emptiness makes the possibility of real change seemingly impossible by definition, since to get all the way to a non-symbolic world is infinitely more difficult than to get to an ecologically sustainable world (be it socialist, agrarian or post-apocalyptic). While the goal of a non-symbolic primitive existence is ultimately worthy, the goal is no more the tactic in this scenario than it is with recycling or food coops - which are goals but lousy tactics for change (and apparently poor educational devices). Everywhere people hide in lifestyle delusions thinking that by living the world they want that somehow the "big change" will happen everywhere peacefully, with little suffering and not much effort.
There is little in this book (or any other), which is of use for the revolution that must happen. Nor is there enough on the transition to primitivism after the revolution (given our odds, these are the only two issues worth discussing until we win, debate anyone?). A short essay written in 1993 discusses "The Transition" (an issue that for ten years I have claimed no one has ever written a useful treatise on). Zerzan did not update it and much if it deals with the revolution and not the transition which is the period following a collapse, catastrophe or revolution when policies, guidelines or programs will be needed to keep the armed masses from destroying the environment faster than the industrialists did.
Fortunately, Zerzan's teacher/pupil Kazinsky is writing from prison with concrete discussions of strategy and the application of tactics against the vulnerable aspects of industrialism. In Hit Where It Hurts (Green Anarchy #8, 2002) Kazinsky theorizes (you can't advocate much from prison), "Technology, above all else, is responsible for the current condition of the world and will control its future development ... Many radicals are aware of this, but have paid little attention to the need to hit the system where it hurts. Smashing up McDonalds or Starbuck's is pointless ... As a means of weakening the techno-industrial system [animal liberation] is utterly useless. No one is foolish enough to mistake these for revolutionary activities or that they do anything to weaken the system.
He goes on to state that forest and wilderness defense are only marginally useful; ditto the struggles against racism, sexism, and sweatshops. Even globalization is seen as a poor target for determined revolutionaries because it is like a rubber ball - pliable and hard to smash. Vital targets are given as the electric-power industry, the communications industry, computers, the propaganda industry and biotechnology. He acknowledges the obvious primacy of electricity, but then develops a well-thought argument for retiring biotech engineers and executives as the best tactic for a strategy designed to take out the biotechnology industry and thus the industrial system.
With Zerzan's insightful motivation and Kazinsky's strategic lessons the future is a question mark - and the wilding wolves howl at the rusting gates of the citadel ...
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John Zerzan is the author of Elements of Refusal; Questioning Technology; Future Primitive and Other Essays, and the editor of Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections. He lives in the Whiteaker neighborhood, Eugene, Oregon. He is 59 years old.