damnit! John Zerzan is in town. Speaking on the campus, and i know shit about the campus.
tomorrow night.
he i should really read him now, because my frame of mind is starting to be in tune with his. sorta. maybe a cross between him and Buddha.
FYI: John Zerzan is an anti-civilization/anarchist philosopher(???) You may recall the WTO protests in Seattle in 99. The "Black Bloc" contingent of anarchists, tend towards his thought processes. He's maintained a friendship with Ted Kaczynski for a while.
I'm just trying to put my latest views into context. I don't know much of the writing in this vein of thinking. I know some from reading Anarchy magazine, but that's not the real deep parts of the philosophy.
I guess I plan on reading "Elements of Refusal" as one of my next projects.
Oh, am I weird for not really being a fan of fiction? I feel like I'm some sort of freak, since most people I know really love fiction. HHGTTG is pretty much the main fiction book that I've really enjoyed. OK, wait... Encyclopedia Brown rocked! As did Brer Rabbit and Frog'n'Toad. But apart from that... eh...
OK, behind cut is some text and links to sites...
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http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/notaprimitivist.htmThere are several strands of development which seem to have more or less coalesced to form the current primitivist mélange of theories and practices, at least within North America (I'm not as familiar with British primitivism). But two or three strands stand out as the most influential and important: (1) the strand growing out of Detroit's anarcho-Marxist Black & Red and the anarchists contributing to the Fifth Estate, including for awhile (2) John Zerzan, although he and the FE eventually parted ways over disagreements about the status and interpretation of agriculture, culture and domestication. Thirdly (3) some activists coming out of the Earth First! milieu, often influenced by deep ecologists, promote a "Back to the Pleistocene" perspective (the Pleistocene, being the geologic period during which the human species emerged).
Fredy Perlman and the Fifth Estate
Although there have been hints of radical primitivism within--and even before the advent of--the modern anarchist movement, contemporary primitivism owes most to Fredy Perlman and the Detroit Black & Red collective through which his work was published, beginning in the 1960s. Most influential of all has been his visionary reconstruction of the origins and development of civilization, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan published in 1983. In this work, Perlman suggested that civilization originated due to the relatively harsh living conditions (in one place and time) which were seen by the tribal elite to require the development of a system of public waterways. The successful building of this system of public waterways required the actions of many individuals in the manner of a social machine under the direction of the tribal elite. And the social machine that was born became the first Leviathan, the first civilization, which grew and reproduced through wars, enslavement and the creation of ever greater social machinery. The situation we now face is a world in which the progeny of that original civilization have now successfully taken over the globe and conquered nearly all human communities. But, as Perlman points out, though almost all humanity is now trapped within civilizations, within Leviathans, there is still resistance. And, in fact, the development of civilizations from their beginnings on has always faced resistance from every non-civilized, free human community. History is the story of early civilizations destroying the relatively freer communities around them, incorporating them or exterminating them, and the succeeding story of civilizations wrestling with each other, civilizations exterminating, incorporating or subjugating other civilizations, up to the present day. Yet resistance is still possible, and we can all trace our ancestral lineages to people who were once stateless, moneyless and in some profound sense more free.
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John Zerzan, probably now the most well-known torch-bearer for primitivism in North America, started questioning the origins of social alienation in a series of essays also published in the Fifth Estate throughout the '80s. These essays eventually found their way into his collection Elements of Refusal (1988, and a second edition in 1999). They included extreme critiques of central aspects of human culture--time, language, number and art--and an influential critique of agriculture, the watershed change in human society which Zerzan calls "the basis of civilization." (1999, p.73) However, while these "origins" essays, as they are often called, were published in the Fifth Estate, they were not always welcomed. And, in fact, each issue of FE in which they appeared usually included commentaries rejecting his conclusions in no uncertain terms. Eventually, when the Fifth Estate collective tired of publishing his originary essays, and when Zerzan was finding it harder and harder to endure the FE's obvious distaste for his line of investigation, Zerzan turned to other venues for publication, including this magazine, Anarchy, Michael William's short-lived Demolition Derby, and ultimately England's Green Anarchist as well, among others. A second collection of his essays, Future Primitive and Other Essays, was co-published by Anarchy/C.A.L. Press in association with Autonomedia in 1994. And, additionally, he has edited two important primitivist anthologies, Questioning Technology (co-edited by Alice Carnes, 1988, with a second edition published in 1991) and most recently Against Civilization (1999).
John Zerzan may be most notorious for the blunt, no-nonsense conclusions of his originary critiques. In these essays, and in his subsequent writings--which will be familiar to readers of Anarchy magazine, he ultimately rejects all symbolic culture as alienation and a fall from a pre-civilized, pre-domesticated, pre-division-of-labor, primitive state of human nature. He has also become notorious in some circles for his embrace of the Unabomber, to whom he dedicated the second edition of Elements of Refusal, indicating for those who might have been unsure, that he really is serious about his critiques and our need to develop a fundamentally critical, uncompromising practice.
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For John Zerzan, primitivism is first and foremost a stance demanding an end to all possible symbolic alienations and all division of labor in order that we experience the world as a reclaimed unity of experience without need for religion, art or other symbolic compensations. ---
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