💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › john-filiss-interview-with-john-moore.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:15:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Interview with John Moore Author: John Filiss Language: en Topics: anti-civ, insurrection, interview, primitivism Source: Retrieved on 25 May 2010 from http://www.primitivism.com/moore.htm
An important essayist and author of four short books — Anarchy and
Ecstasy, The Primitivist Primer, Lovebite and Book of Levelling — John
Moore stands out for his observations on primitivism as social theory.
Though his books unfortunately see little distribution in North America,
John’s excellent writings frequently appear in Green Anarchist, (BCM
1715, London, WC1N 3XX, U.K.).
Could you give a basic definition of “primitivism.”
In ‘A Primitivist Primer’ I define primitivism as ‘a shorthand term for
a radical current that critiques the totality of civilisation from an
anarchist perspective, and seeks to initiate a comprehensive
transformation of human life’, and as ‘a convenient label used to
characterise diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of
all power relations — e.g., the structures of control, coercion,
domination, and exploitation — and the creation of a form of community
that excludes all such relations’. I’m not sure now whether ‘current’ is
the right word. Certainly primitivism is a position within the broad
spectrum of anarchism. I’m also more critical of using the concept
‘community’ now. But these caveats aside, I’m happy enough with my
formulation.
How comfortable are primitivists in general with the term and label
“primitivist?”
I’ve no idea. I can only speak for myself. Personally, I find it very
restrictive and these days try to avoid using it whenever possible, for
a number of reasons. First, it’s a very ambiguous term because — like
its counterpart, civilisation — it has many meanings, and as a result
it’s easily misunderstood or caricatured. Second, there’s always the
danger — as witnessed recently in Fifth Estate, for example — where
hostile commentators can twist your words so that it looks as if you are
constructing a primitivist ideology and setting up a primitivist
political movement, even when you state exactly the contrary.
As I said just now, in the ‘Primer’ I refer to the word ‘primitivism’ as
‘a shorthand term’ and ‘a convenient label’, and to me that’s all it
ever can be. There’s a certain idealism floating around that makes a
fetish out of avoiding labels, and of course if we lived in an ideal
world such labels might be meaningless. But we don’t live in an ideal
world (assuming that it’s desirable to want to do so!). The situationist
position on this issue seems to me much more sensible. Asked why they
considered it necessary to call themselves situationists, they replied:
‘In the existing order, where things have taken the place of people, any
label is compromising ... For the moment, however ridiculous a label may
be, ours has the merit of trenchantly drawing a line between the
previous incoherence and a new rigorousness. What thought has lacked
above all over the last few decades is precisely this trenchancy’. Using
labels unfortunately excludes some people and closes some paths, but
refusing to use labels to define positions leads to fuzziness and
confusion — in other words, just those conditions where reformists can
undermine anarchist revolutionary practice.
It’s important that people don’t get hung up on labels, but recognise
them for what they are — tools for creating clarity — and then move on
to forwarding anarchist projects. In the ‘Primer’ I said that
‘primitivism’ is merely a convenient label. But for me, anyway, it has
lost its convenience: not that it has become inconvenient, but rather
that it now strikes me as a disenabling rather than an enabling term. In
a recent issue of Social Anarchism I have tried to outline my current
perspectives in an essay entitled ‘Maximalist Anarchism/Anarchist
Maximalism’. I am not recanting on primitivist or anti-civilisation
positions, but attempting to recast them in a different and more
explicitly insurrectionalist terminology and set of references. And one
that hopefully avoids the restrictions and failures of ‘primitivism’.
How would you contrast primitivism with environmentalism?
Environmentalism has a single focus: the environment. From this
perspective, social critiques of varying degrees are launched. Often
these critiques are partial critiques and not necessarily either
anarchist or revolutionary. In contrast, ‘primitivism’ (for want of a
better word) critiques the totality of civilisation from an anarchist
perspective and seeks the abolition of all power relations. This is a
massive contrast. Further, like leftists who worship the abstraction
called ‘the proletariat’, environmentalists often subordinate themselves
to the abstraction called ‘the earth’. The name of the group Earth
First! illustrates this point perfectly. Such a perspective remains
alien to a project seeking the dismantlement of what I call the control
complex. The historical agent in the revolution of everyday life can
only be the impassioned free individual, grounded firmly in his/her will
to rebellion, not some vague and potentially totalitarian abstraction
such as ‘the earth’.
To what extent do you feel primitivists seek a literal return to
primitive lifeways, vis-a-vis the extent to which examples of primitive
life are simply a tool for social critique?
A difficult question to answer. I am sure there are people who seek a
literal return to primitive lifeways. I am not one of them. In fact, I
am not interested in a return to anything. My sense is that the future
which might emerge from the anti-civilisation anarchist project would be
sui generis. I am not interested in precedents. Of course one might see
premonitions of the future in moments of rebellion such as the Spanish
revolution or May 1968, or in some primitive lifeways. But the world I
envisage as emerging in an anarchist post-civilisation situation is, I
think, largely unimaginable, precisely because of the unprecedented
scope of its abolition of power relations.
What do you feel are the seminal primitivist texts?
For me personally, everything follows from Perlman’s Against His-story,
Against Leviathan!. Every time I re-read it I find something new in it —
it’s just sparkling with insights. But this isn’t to say that I regard
it as holy scripture. It has its flaws and faults, like every piece of
writing. Further, social processes have moved on since it was written,
as has the project of struggle against the totality, and so like any
text — however inspirational it might be — it cannot be the last word.
One apparent division within primitivism involves the center of
critique. Fredy Perlman and others disparage civilization, contrasting
it with the vitality and spontaneity of primitive cultures. John Zerzan,
however, goes further and critiques culture as such, with its
constituents art, language, and number. With respect for both sides, how
separate do you see this division?
Well, primitivism — if that’s a useful or valid word to use in this
context — isn’t a unitary project with a set ideology or ‘line’. If
people insist on using the word, then it might be more useful to speak
of primitivisms rather than primitivism as such. If anarchism contains a
spectrum of positions, so does ‘primitivism’. Marshall McLuhan — someone
who’s definitely not a primitivist! — once said that his texts didn’t
aim to provide answers, but rather to act as probes. And I think it
might be appropriate to think of the work of thinkers like Perlman and
Zerzan in this way too. I like to think of my work as anarchist
speculations, which I see as a synonym for probes in McLuhan’s sense of
the term. If we think of writers within the ‘primitivist’ or
anti-civilisation orbit in this light, the apparent division to which
you refer then appear to be merely shifts in emphasis or perspective, or
as proposals thrown out for others to consider, refine, revise and act
upon, rather than absolute truths.
In what countries or parts of the world does there appear to be the
greatest interest in primitivism?
At present, at least, the greatest interest seems to be in Britain and
the United States. The collision between Anglo-American ‘primitivism’
and continental European anarchism — which seems to me to be becoming
increasingly imminent — is likely to throw up some strange and beautiful
mutations. If ‘primitivism’ catches on in other parts of the world, the
outcomes are likely to be even more intriguing.
In response to an essay of yours published in Social Anarchism, Noam
Chomsky writes, “The idea that scarcity is a social category is of
course true, but not relevant to the real world, in my opinion.” And
later, he adds, “I can’t spend my time arguing about things that seem to
me hopelessly abstracted from human existence, now or in the foreseeable
future.” Do you feel that Chomsky’s own efforts are somehow more
relevant to human existence than the perspectives of primitivism?
If Chomsky’s books and the Manufacturing Consent film are indicative of
his ‘efforts’, then certainly not. Chomsky is basically a wealthy, mass
media star who addresses the concerns of American bourgeois liberals in
typical reformist rhetoric and mass formats. He is completely out of
touch with the trajectories of contemporary anarchist practice, which is
hardly surprising given, I understand, his failure to inhabit — or
situate his daily practice in — an anarchist milieu. Chomsky’s comment,
in the item to which you refer, that ‘The world I live in, and see
around me, has no resemblance to what Perlman writes about...’, speaks
volumes to me about his stance. Perlman was exemplary in the sense of
being an anarchist intellectual who inhabited an anarchist milieu.
Perlman lived and breathed in that milieu, whereas Chomsky’s natural
habitat appears to be the mass media, the auditorium, and the academy.
Chomsky voices a fairly common objection to primitivism when he states
that “going back to such a state would mean instant mass genocide on an
unimaginable scale.” For me, at least, it is easy to see that such
critics are imposing a time constraint (“instant,” in this case) on a
transition which would doubtless take generations to effect.
Your response to Chomsky’s comment seems reasonable to me. However, it
rests on the tacit notion that the transition to a post-civilised or
post-control complex situation can and should be equated with ‘going
back’. It may seem as if I’m trying to avoid answering the question
here, but as I said earlier, I am not interested in ‘going back’ to
anything. A transition from ‘here’ to ‘there’ or from ‘now’ to ‘then’ is
necessary. But, for me anyway, this transition isn’t a return, but a
moving forward which is simultaneously a coming home. And that process
is one that is lived by each anarchist individual at each moment. The
‘transition’, the revolution of everyday life, is an ongoing process.
Power is perpetually vulnerable because it has no guarantee that it will
continue from one moment to the next. Hence, anarchist spontaneism.
There’s no need to wait for ‘the historically appropriate moment for
revolution’. Individual and small-scale insurrections take place all the
time. When they combine and coincide, power is threatened and revolution
becomes possible. The pressing issue, it seems to me, is not to
speculate abstractly about the transition, but to work out projects
which forward the revolutionary process.
In that same essay of yours, you describe the first hierarchy as being
based on “subjugation of the female (and ultimately on the
gerontocracy’s subjugation of the young).” And yet most of the animal
kingdom tends to be either male or female dominant. E.g., our most
similar living relative, the bonobo, is female-dominant. Even positing
that our ancestors found a happy medium where neither sex held sway,
wouldn’t the beginnings of a hierarchy which ultimately gave rise to
civilization have found a more likely source in the movement away from
perceptual consciousness and towards systems of belief?
Again, I’m not trying to avoid answering the question, but this issue no
longer interests me. Figures such as Perlman and Zerzan have undertaken
some valuable work in discerning the origins of power and hierarchy, and
in no way do I want to disparage their work. I do feel, however, that
the issue of origins has become something of an obsession with some
people. Discerning origins is important in so far as one wishes to
become aware of the dimensions of power that need to be exposed,
challenged and abolished. After a certain point, however, no more can be
said about origins. No doubt some people will continue to work on
refining our understanding of the origins of power, but to my mind that
kind of investigation should now be considered peripheral to the main
concern of developing projects which furthers attacks on the control
complex.
Primitivism draws much of its useful insights from observation of
primitive tribes. Do you feel that we run into special difficulties in
even trying to describe their way of life as compared to ours? For
example, I have seen primitive tribes described as democratic in their
functioning. But in the modern world, democracy is a farcical term, used
by pundits from all sides, which has no direct correlation with freedom.
But among members of a small tribe, it can mean active input into any
form of group decision-making which affects the tribe as a whole.
As you rightly suggest, part of the problem is perceptual and
terminological. It’s a truism that different languages produce different
realities, and interpreting primitive peoples with hermeneutic codes
derived from the discourse of civilisation is inevitably going to result
in distorting characterisations of the primitive (for example, seeing
such peoples as ‘primitive’, with all the ideological weighting that
such a word carries). But the problem goes beyond a phenomenological
level, I think. Archaeological and anthropological endeavours are so
profoundly implicated in imperial and civilised projects of domination
and exploitation that I view them with deep suspicion. There is such a
high level of mediation in such disciplines that I sometimes think it is
rather ironic that their materials are appropriated to bolster a project
— ‘primitivism’ — which affirms the need for immediacy.
Another term commonly used to describe primitive tribes is
egalitarianism, which in our society carries a veneer of leftist spite
and envy, as well as Christian insipidness. But among primitives it is
merely a natural outcome of individuals self-actualizing outside the
specializations imposed by our artificial way of life.
Well, that’s another example of imposing categories on ‘the primitive’
which are ideologically loaded. Egalitarianism is a bourgeois ideal
because it merely means ‘equal before the law’. As anarchism wants to
abolish the law and the social contract upon which it supposedly rests,
egalitarianism has nothing to do with anarchism. The abolition of power
means maximising the possibilities for individuals to self-actualise
themselves, but has nothing to do with making people equal or
equivalents — an impossible and potentially totalitarian aim, in any
case. In this sense, one can discern a rough equivalence between primal
anarchy and post-civilisation anarchy, but nothing more.
On the other hand, do you feel that primitivists tend to present an
overly idyllic version of primitive life? Cannibalism, infanticide,
senilicide, head-hunting, and ritual torture are among the many
atrocities once seen among the pre-civilized of every continent,
including Europe.
The myth of the noble savage is always a temptation for those who see
themselves as primitivists. And it’s a convenient knee-jerk criticism
for those who are hostile to primitivism. That’s another reason why I
try to avoid using the term ‘primitivism’, and a good example of why
it’s a disenabling — rather than enabling — term. I get rather tired of
continually having to hack through the thickets of misconceptions that
come along with the word. And as most people seem to think that
primitivism means a desire to return to an idyllic version of primitive
life, and this is not my project at all, I don’t identify myself in this
way. As a result, I don’t feel the need to defend the practices of
non-civilised people. It’s more important to me to develop my own
practice. If this draws upon those elements of primitive lifeways that I
feel are sufficiently substantiated and congenial, then that’s my
concern. But in no way do I feel the need to take on board the whole kit
and caboodle of that range of diverse practices which are (rather
confusingly) lumped together under the heading of ‘the primitive’.
From what quarters on the political spectrum do you perceive the
greatest hostility towards primitivism? From where the greatest empathy?
At present, anti-civilisation anarchism unfortunately remains a rather
marginalised form of practice, and so hostility remains limited due to
ignorance of its existence. But, as the most advanced and radical form
or anarchism, the entirety of the political spectrum is its enemy. It
is, to appropriate the individualist anarchist slogan, the enemy of
society, and as such can expect nothing but hostility from the dominant
social order once the latter becomes aware of its existence.
At the moment, the greatest hostility comes from those who are aware of
its existence and are in immediate danger from it: i.e., the varieties
of classical, workerist and leftist anarchism. Anarcho-leftism rightly
fears that its antiquated ideologies are being superseded by
anti-civilisation anarchism in terms of its analyses and revolutionary
fervour, and hopefully soon by its insurrectionalist interventions.
What are some of your upcoming projects?
There is only one overwhelming project: the revolutionary and
comprehensive transformation of human life in an anarchist direction,
and the self-realisation of my individuality in conjunction with
generalised self-realisation through the destruction of power and the
construction of a free life. All of my personal projects are subsets of
this project. The one closest to my heart is developing my writing of
short fiction. In their different ways, Hakim Bey and Alfredo Bonanno
have drawn our attention to the importance of anarchist ontologies.
Within this framework, I am interested in fostering distinctively
anarchist epistemologies. And the discourses and practices of art, it
seems to me, have potential in terms of developing such epistemologies,
and far more possibilities for forwarding the anarchist struggle than
political discourses.
How do we make this world a better place?
The short answer to this question is: through anarchist revolution. But
the most urgent question, and the one with which I am primarily
interested, of how this is to brought about is the one that
‘primitivists’ have studiously ignored. Thankfully, however, others have
not. The ideas and activities of Alfredo Bonanno and the Italian
insurrectionalist anarchists strike me as key here. Studying, adopting
and innovating practices of attack along the lines developed by the
insurrectionalists, as well as cross-fertilising our ideas and
activities with theirs, seems to me the most important task now facing
anti-civilisation anarchists, and one that I intend to pursue.