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Title: Seize the Day Author: John Zerzan Date: 2006 Language: en Topics: alienation, anti-civ Source: Retrieved on March 19th, 2009 from http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/seize-the-day.html
The rapidly mounting toll of modern life is worse than we could have
imagined. A metamorphosis rushes onward, changing the texture of living,
the whole feel of things. In the not-so-distant past this was still only
a partial modification; now the Machine converges on us, penetrating
more and more to the core of our lives, promising no escape from its
logic.
The only stable continuity has been that of the body, and that has
become vulnerable in unprecedented ways. We now inhabit a culture,
according to Furedi (1997), of high anxiety that borders on a state of
outright panic. Postmodern discourse suppresses articulations of
suffering, a facet of its accommodation to the inevitability of further,
systematic desolation. The prominence of chronic degenerative diseases
makes a chilling parallel with the permanent erosion of all that is
healthy and life-affirming inside industrial culture. That is, maybe the
disease can be slowed a bit in its progression, but no overall cure is
imaginable in this context — which created the condition in the first
place.
As much as we yearn for community, it is all but dead. McPherson,
Smith-Lovin and Brashears (American Sociological Review 2006) tell us
that 19 years ago, the typical American had three close friends; now the
number is two. Their national study also reveals that over this period
of time, the number of people without one friend or confidant has
tripled. Census figures show a correspondingly sharp rise in
single-person households, as the technoculture — with its vaunted
“connectivity” — grows steadily more isolating, lonely and empty.
In Japan “people simply aren’t having sex” (Kitamura 2006) and the
suicide rate has been rising rapidly. Hikikimori, or self-isolation,
finds over a million young people staying in their rooms for years.
Where the technoculture is most developed, levels of stress, depression
and anxiety are highest.
Questions and ideas can only become currents in the world insofar as
reality, external and internal, makes that possible. Our present state,
devolving toward catastrophe, displays a reality in unmistakable terms.
We are bound for a head-on collision between urgent new questions and a
totality — global civilization — that can provide no answers. A world
that offers no future, but shows no signs of admitting this fact,
imperils its own future along with the life, health, and freedom of all
beings on the planet. Civilization’s rulers have always squandered
whatever remote chances they had to prepare for the end of life as they
know it, by choosing to ride the crest of domination, in all its forms.
It has become clear to some that the depth of the expanding crisis,
which is as massively dehumanizing as it is ecocidal, stems from the
cardinal institutions of civilization itself. The discredited promises
of Enlightenment and modernity represent the pinnacle of the grave
mistake known as civilization. There is no prospect that this Order will
renounce that which has defined and maintained it, and apparently little
likelihood that its various ideological supporters can face the facts.
If civilization’s collapse has already begun, a process now unofficially
but widely assumed, there may be grounds for a widespread refusal or
abandonment of the reigning totality. Indeed, its rigidity and denial
may be setting the stage for a cultural shift on an unprecedented scale,
which could unfold rapidly.
Of course, a paradigm shift away from this entrenched, but vulnerable
and fatally flawed system is far from unavoidable. The other main
possibility is that too many people, for the usual reasons (fear,
inertia, manufactured incapacity, etc.) will passively accept reality as
it is, until it’s too late to do anything but try to deal with collapse.
It’s noteworthy that a growing awareness that things are going wrong,
however inchoate and individualized, is fuelled by a deep, visceral
unease and in many cases, acute suffering. This is where opportunity
resides. From this new perspective that is certainly growing, we find
the work of confronting what faces us as a species, and removing the
barriers to planetary survival. The time has come for a wholesale
indictment of civilization and mass society. It is at least possible
that, in various modes, such a judgment can undo the death-machine
before destruction and domestication inundate everything.
Although what’s gone before helps us understand our current plight, we
now live in obvious subjection, on a plainly greater scale than
heretofore. The enveloping techno-world that is spreading so rapidly
suggests movement toward even deeper control of every aspect of our
lives. Adorno’s assessment in the 1960s is proving valid today:
“Eventually the system will reach a point — the word that provides the
social cue is ‘integration’ — where the universal dependence of all
moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is
idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic
society. Only that society itself remains the cause.” (Negative
Dialectics, p. 267).
A totality that absorbs every “alternative” and seems irreversible.
Totalitarian. It is its own justification and ideology. Our refusal, our
call to dismantle all this, is met with fewer and fewer countervailing
protests or arguments. The bottom-line response is more along the lines
of “Yes, your vision is good, true, valid; but this reality will never
go away.”
None of the supposed victories over inhumanity have made the world
safer, not even just for our own species. All the revolutions have only
tightened the hold of domination, by updating it. Despite the rise and
fall of various political persuasions, it is always production that has
won; technological systems never retreat, they only advance. We have
been free or autonomous insofar as the Machine requires for its
functioning.
Meanwhile, the usual idiotic judgments continue. “We should be free to
use specific technologies as tools without adopting technology as
lifestyle.” (Valovic 2000). “The worlds created through digital
technology are real to the extent that we choose to play their games.”
(Downs 2005).
Along with the chokehold of power, and some lingering illusions about
how modernity works, the Machine is faced with worsening prospects. It
is a striking fact that those who manage the dominant organization of
life no longer even attempt answers or positive projections. The most
pressing “issues” (e.g. Global Warming) are simply ignored, and
propaganda about Community (the market plus isolation), Freedom (total
surveillance society), the American Dream (!) is so false that it cannot
be expected to be taken seriously.
As Sahlins pointed out (1977), the more complex societies become, the
less they are able to cope with challenges. The central concern of any
state is to preserve predictability; as this capacity visibly fails, so
do that state’s chances of survival. When the promise of security wanes,
so does the last real support. Many studies have concluded that various
ecosystems are more likely to suffer sudden catastrophic collapse,
rather than undergo steady, predictable degradation. The mechanisms of
rule just might be subject to a parallel development.
In earlier times there was room to maneuver. Civilization’s forward
movement was accompanied by a safety valve: the frontier. Large-scale
expansion of the Holy Roman Empire eastward during the 12^(th)-14^(th)
centuries, the invasion of the New World after 1500, the Westward
movement in North America through the end of the 19^(th) century. But
the system becomes “mortgaged to structures accumulated along the way”
(Sahlins again). We are hostages, and so is the whole hierarchical
ensemble. The whole system is busy, always in flux; transactions take
place at an ever-accelerating rate. We have reached the stage where the
structure relies almost wholly on the co-optation of forces that are
more or less outside its control. A prime example is the actual
assistance given by leftist regimes in South America. The issue is not
so much that of the outcome of neo-liberal economics, but of the success
of the left in power at furthering self-managed capital, and co-opting
indigenous resistance into its orbit.
But these tactics do not outweigh the fact of an overall inner rigidity
that puts the future of techno-capital at grave risk. The name of the
crisis is modernity itself, its contingent, cumulative weight. Any
regime today is in a situation where every “solution” only deepens the
engulfing problems. More technology and more coercive force are the only
resources to fall back on. The “dark side” of progress stands revealed
as the definitive face of modern times.
Theorists such as Giddens and Beck admit that the outer limits of
modernity have been reached, so that disaster is now the latent
characteristic of society. And yet they hold out hope, without
predicating basic change, that all will be well. Beck, for instance,
calls for a democratization of industrialism and technological change —
carefully avoiding the question of why this has never happened.
There is no reconciliation, no happy ending within this totality, and it
is transparently false to claim otherwise. History seems to have
liquidated the possibility of redemption; its very course undoes what
has been passing as critical thought. The lesson is to notice how much
must change to establish a new and genuinely viable direction. There
never was a moment of choosing; the field or ground of life shifts
imperceptibly in a multitude of ways, without drama, but to vast effect.
If the solution were sought in technology, that would of course only
reinforce the rule of modern domination; this is a major part of the
challenge that confronts us.
Modernity has reduced the scope allowed for ethical action, cutting off
its potentially effective outlets. But reality, forcing itself upon us
as the crisis mounts, is becoming proximal and insistent once again.
Thinking gnaws away at everything, because this situation corrodes
everything we have wanted. We realize that it is up to us. Even the
likelihood of a collapse of the global techno-structure should not lure
us away from acknowledgement of our decisive potential roles, our
responsibility to stop the engine of destruction. Passivity, like a
defeated attitude, will not bring forth deliverance.
We are all wounded, and paradoxically, this estrangement becomes the
basis for communality. A gathering of the traumatized may be forming, a
spiritual kinship demanding recovery. Because we can still feel acutely,
our rulers can rest no more easily than we do. Our deep need for healing
means that an overthrow must take place. That alone would constitute
healing. Things “just go on”, creating the catastrophe on every level.
People are figuring it out: that things just go on is, in fact, the
catastrophe.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson (The Place You Love is Gone 2006) expressed it
this way: “Suddenly now it hits, bizarrely easy to grasp. We are
inexorably heading for the Big Goodbye. It’s official! The unthinkable
is ready to be thought. It is finally in sight, after all of human
history behind us. In the pit of what is left of your miserable soul you
feel it coming, the definitive loss of home, bigger than the cause of
one person’s tears. Yours and mine, the private sob, will be joined by a
mass crying...”
Misery. Immiseration. Time to get back to where we have never quite
given up wanting to be. “Stretched and stretched again to the elastic
limit at which it will bear no more,” in Spengler’s phrase.
Enlightenment thought, along with the Industrial Revolution, began in
late 18^(th) century Europe, inaugurating modernity. We were promised
freedom based on conscious control over our destiny. But Enlightenment
claims have not been realized, and the whole project has turned out to
be self-defeating. Foundational elements including reason, universal
rights and the laws of science were consciously designed to jettison
pre-scientific, mystical sorts of knowledge. Diverse, communally
sustained lifeways were sacrificed in the name of a unitary and uniform,
law-enforced pattern of living. Kant’s emphasis on freedom through moral
action is rooted in this context, along with the French encyclopedists’
program to replace traditional crafts with more up-to-date technological
systems. Kant, by the way, for whom property was sanctified by no less
than his categorical imperative, favorably compared the modern
university to an industrial machine and its products.
Various Enlightenment figures debated the pros and cons of emerging
modern developments, and these few words obviously cannot do justice to
the topic of Enlightenment. However, it may be fruitful to keep this
important historical conjunction in mind: the nearly simultaneous births
of modern progressive thought and mass production. Apt in this regard is
the perspective of Min Lin (2001): “Concealing the social origin of
cognitive discourses and the idea of certainty is the inner requirement
of modern Western ideology in order to justify or legitimate its
position by universalizing its intellectual basis and creating a new
sacred quasi-transcendance.”
Modernity is always trying to go beyond itself to a different state,
lurching forward as if to recover the equilibrium lost so long ago. It
is bent on changing the future — even its own —
With modernity’s stress on freedom, modern enlightened institutions have
in fact succeeded in nothing so much as conformity. Lyotard (1991)
summed up the overall outcome: “A new barbarism, illiteracy and
impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion
by media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul.”
Massified, standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly
re-enact the actual control program of modernity.
“Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. Painstaking
studies designed to prove the contrary have buried the obvious beneath
tons of print.” (Ellul 1964). Which is not in any way to deny the
centrality of class rule, but to remind us that divided society began
with division of labor. The divided self led directly to divided
society. The division of labor is the labor of division. Understanding
what characterizes modern life can never be far from the effort to
understand technology’s role in our everyday lives, just as it always
has been. Lyotard (1991) judged that “technology wasn’t invented by
humans. Rather the other way around.
Goethe’s Faust, the first tragedy about industrial development, depicted
its deepest horrors as stemming from honorable aims. The superhuman
developer Faust partakes of a drive endemic to modernization, one which
is threatened by any trace of otherness/difference in its totalizing
movement.
We function in an ever more homogeneous field, a ground always
undergoing further uniformitization to promote a single, globalized
techno-grid. Yet it is possible to avoid this conclusion by keeping
one’s focus on the surface, on what is permitted to exist on the
margins. Thus some see Indymedia as a crucial triumph of
decentralization, and free software as a radical demand. This attitude
ignores the industrial basis of every high tech development and usage.
All the “wondrous tools,” including the ubiquitous and very toxic cell
phone, are more related to eco-disastrous industrialization in China and
India, for example, than to the clean, slick pages of Wired magazine.
The salvationist claims of Wired are incredible in their disconnected,
infantile fantasies. Its adherents can only maintain such gigantic
delusions by means of deliberate blindness not only to technology’s
systematic destruction of nature, but to the global human cost involved:
lives filled with toxicity, drudgery, and industrial accidents.
Now there are nascent protest phenomena against the all-encompassing
universal system, such as “slow food,” “slow cities,” “slow roads”.
People would prefer that the juggernaut give pause and not devour the
texture of life. But actual degradation is picking up speed, in its
deworlding, disembedding course. Only a radical break will impede its
trajectory. More missiles and more nukes in more countries is obviously
another part of the general movement of the technological imperative.
The specter of mass death is the crowning achievement, the condition of
modernity, while the posthuman is the coming techno-condition of the
subject. We are the vehicle of the Megamachine, not its beneficiary,
held hostage to its every new leap forward. The technohuman condition
looms, indeed. Nothing can change until the technological basis is
changed, is erased.
Our condition is reinforced by those who insist — in classic postmodern
fashion — that nature/culture is a false binarism. The natural world is
evacuated, paved over, to the strains of the surrender-logic that nature
has always been cultural, always available for subjugation. Koert van
Mensvoort’s “Exploring Next Nature” (2005) exposes the domination of
nature logic, so popular in some quarters: “Our next nature will consist
of what used to be cultural.” Bye-bye, non-engineered reality. After
all, he blithely proclaims, nature changes with us.
This is the loss of the concept of nature altogether — and not just the
concept! But the sign “nature” certainly enjoys popularity, as the
substance is destroyed: “exotic” third world cultural products, natural
ingredients in food, etc. Unfortunately, the nature of experience is
linked to the experience of nature. When the latter is reduced to an
insubstantial presence, the former is disfigured. Paul Berkett (2006)
cites Marx and Engels to the effect that with communism people will “not
only feel but also know their oneness with nature,” that communism is
“the unity of being of man with nature.” Industrial-technological
overcoming as its opposite — what blatant productionist rubbish. Leaving
aside the communism orientation, however, how much of today’s Left
disagrees with the marxian ode to mass production?
A neglected insight in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents is the
suggestion that a deep, unconscious “sense of guilt produced by
civilization” causes a growing malaise and dissatisfaction. Adorno
(1966) saw that relevant to “the catastrophe that impends is the
supposition of an irrational catastrophe in the beginning. Today the
thwarted possibility of something other has shrunk to that of averting
catastrophe in spite of everything.”
The original, qualitative, utter failure for life on this planet was the
setting in motion of civilization. Enlightenment — like the Axial Age
world religions 2000 years before — supplied transcendence for the next
level of domination, an indispensable support for industrial modernity.
But where would one now find the source of a transcending, justifying
framework for new levels of rapacious development? What new realm of
ideas and values can be conjured up to validate the all-encompassing
ruin of late modernity? There is none. Only the system’s own inertia; no
answers, and no future.
Meanwhile our context is that of a sociability of uncertainty. The
moorings of day-to-day stability are being unfastened, as the system
begins to show multiple weaknesses. When it can no longer guarantee
security, its end is near.
Ours is an incomparable historical vantage point. We can easily grasp
the story of this universal civilization’s malignancy. This
understanding may be a signal strength for enabling a paradigm shift,
the one that could do away with civilization and free us from the
habitual will to dominate. A daunting challenge, to say the least; but
recall the child who was moved to speak out in the face of collective
denial. The Emperor was wearing nothing; the spell was broken.