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Title: Why Primitivism?
Author: John Zerzan
Date: 2002
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, primitivist
Source: Retrieved on March 19th, 2009 from http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/why-primitivism.html

John Zerzan

Why Primitivism?

Debord biographer Anselm Giap[1] referred to the puzzle of the present,

“where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity

itself,” recalling a question posed nearly 50 years ago by Joseph Wood

Krutch: “What has become of that opportunity to become more fully human

that the ‘control of nature’ was to provide?”[2]

The general crisis is rapidly deepening in every sphere of life. On the

biospheric level, this reality is so well-known that it could be termed

banal, if it weren’t so horrifying. Increasing rates of species

extinctions, proliferating dead zones in the world’s oceans, ozone

holes, disappearing rainforests, global warming, the pervasive poisoning

of air, water, and soil, to name a few realities.

A grisly link to the social world is widespread pharmaceutical

contamination of watersheds.[3] In this case, destruction of the natural

world is driven by massive alienation, masked by drugs. In the U.S.,

life-threatening obesity is sharply rising, and tens of millions suffer

from serious depression and/or anxiety.[4] There are frequent eruptions

of multiple homicides in homes, schools, and workplaces, while the

suicide rate among young people has tripled in recent decades.[5]

Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other

“mystery”/psychosomatic illnesses have multiplied, vying with the

emergence of new diseases with known physiological origins: Ebola, Lassa

fever, AIDS, Legionnaires’ disease. The illusion of technological

mastery is mocked by the antibiotic-resistant return of TB and malaria,

not to mention outbreaks of E coli, mad cow disease, West Nile virus,

etc. Even a cursory survey of contemporary psychic immiseration would

require many pages. Barely suppressed anger, a sense of emptiness,

corrosion of belief in institutions across the board, high stress

levels, all contribute to what Kornoouh has called “the growing fracture

of the social bond.”[6]

Today’s reality keeps underlining the inadequacy of current theory and

its overall retreat from any redemptive project. It seems undeniable

that’s what’s left of life on earth is being taken from us. Where is the

depth of analysis and vision to match the extremity of the human

condition and the fragility of our planet’s future? Are we simply only

with a totalizing current of degradation and loss?

The crisis is diffuse, but at the same time it is starkly visible on

every level. One comes to agree with Ulrich Beck that “people have begun

to question modernity...its premises have begun to wobble. Many people

are deeply upset over the house-of-cards character of

superindustrialism.”[7] Agnes Heller observed that our condition becomes

less stable and more chaos-prone the further we move away from nature,

contrary to the dominant ideology of progress and development.[8] With

disenchantment comes a growing sense that something different is

urgently needed.

For a new orientation the challenge is at a depth that theorists have

almost entirely avoided. To go beyond the prospectless malaise, the

collapse of social confidence so devastatingly expressed in Les

Particules élémentaires (Michel Houlebecq’s end-of-the-millennium

novel),[9] the analytical perspective simply must shift in a basic way.

This consists, for openers, in refusing Foucault’s conclusion that human

capacities and relations are inescapably technologized.[10]

As Eric Vogelin put it, “The death of the spirit is the price of

progress.”[11] But if the progress of nihilism is identical to the

nihilism of progress, whence comes the rupture, the caesura? How to pose

a radical break from the totality of progress, technology, modernity?

A quick scan of recent academic fads shows precisely where such a

perspective has not been found. Frederic Jameson’s apt formulation

introduces the subject for us: “Postmodernism is what you have when the

modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”[12]

Postmodernism is the mirror of an ethos of defeat and reaction, a

failure of will and intellect that has accommodated to new extremities

of estrangement and destructiveness.[13] For the postmodernists, almost

nothing can be opposed. Reality, after all, is so messy, shifting,

complex, indeterminate; and oppositions are, of course, just so many

false binarisms. Vacuous jargon and endless side-stepping transcend

passé dualisms. Daniel White, for example, prescribed “a

postmodern-ecological rubric that steps past the traditional either-or

of the Oppressor and Oppressed...”[14]

In the consumerist realm of freedom, “this complex node, where

technologies are diffused, where technologies are chosen,” according to

Mike Michael,[15] who can say if anything is at all amiss? Iain Chambers

is an eloquent voice of postmodern abjectness, wondering whether

alienation is not simply an eternal given: “What if alienation is a

terrestrial constraint destined to frustrate the ‘progress’ introjected

in all teleologies?...Perhaps there is no separate, autonomous

alternative to the capitalist structuring of the present-day world.

Modernity, the westernization of the world, globalization, are the

labels of an economic, political and cultural order that is seemingly

installed for the foreseeable future.”[16]

The fixation on surface (depth is an illusion; so are presence and

immediacy), the ban on unifying narratives and inquiry into origins,

indifference to method and evidence, emphasis on effects and novelty,

all find their expression in postmodern culture at large. These

attitudes and practices spread everywhere, along with the technology it

embraces without reservation. At the same time, though, there are signs

that these trivializing and derivative recipes for “thought” may be

losing their appeal.[17] An antidote to postmodern surrender has been

made available, largely through what is known as the anti-globalization

movement.

Jean-François Lyotard, who once thought that technologized existence

offered options, has begun to write about the sinister development of a

neo-totalitarian, instrumentalist imprisonment. In earlier essays he

pointed to a loss of affect as part of the postmodern condition. More

recently he has attributed that loss to techno-scientific hegemony.

Crippled individuals are only part of the picture, as Lyotard portrays

social effects of what can only be called instrumental reason, in

pathological ascendance. And contra Habermas, this domination by

instrumental reason is in no way challenged by “communicative

action.”[18] Referring to global urban development, Lyotard stated, “We

inhabit the megalopolis only to the extent that we declare it

uninhabitable. Otherwise, we are just lodged there.” Also, “with the

megalopolis, what is called the West realizes and diffuses its nihilism.

It is called development.”[19]

In other words, there may be a way out of the postmodern cul-de-sac, at

least for some. Those still contained by the Left have a much different

legacy of failure to jettison — one that obviously transcends the

“merely” cultural. Discredited and dying as an actual alternative, this

perspective surely also needs to go.

Hardt and Negri’s Empire[20] will serve as a classic artifact of

leftism, a compendium of the worn-out and left-over. These

self-described communist militants have no notion whatsoever of the

enveloping crisis. Thus they continue to seek “alternatives within

modernity.” They locate the force behind their communist revolution in

“the new productive practices and the concentration of productive labor

on the plastic and fluid terrain of the new communicative, biological,

and mechanical technologies.”[21] The leftist analysis valiantly upholds

the heart of productionist marxism, in the face of ever-advancing,

standardizing, destructive technique. Small wonder Hardt and Negri fail

to consider the pulverization of indigenous cultures and the natural

world, or the steady worldwide movement toward complete dehumanization.

Claude Kornoouh considers monstrous “the idea that progress consists in

the total control of the genetic stock of all living beings.” For him,

this would amount to an unfreedom “that even the bloodiest

totalitarianism of the 20^(th) century was not able to accomplish.”[22]

Hardt and Negri would not shrink from such control, since they do not

question any of its premises, dynamics, or preconditions.

It is no small irony that the militants of Empire stand exposed for the

incomprehension of the trajectory of modernity by one of their opposite

number, Oswald Spengler. As nationalist and reactionary that Spengler

was, The Decline of the West is the great masterwork of world history,

and his grasp of Western civilization’s inner logic is uncanny in its

prescience.

Especially relevant here are Spengler’s judgments, so many decades ago,

concerning technological development and its social, cultural, and

environmental impacts. He saw that the dynamic, promethean (“Faustian”)

nature of global civilization becomes fully realized as self-destructive

mass society and equally calamitous modern technology. The subjugation

of nature leads ineluctably to its destruction, and to the destruction

of civilization. “An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the

natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or

tries to do everything in mechanical terms.”[23] Civilized man is a

“petty creator against Nature.” “...This revolutionary in the world of

life...has become the slave of his creature. The Culture, the aggregate

of artificial, personal, self-made life-forms, develops into a

close-barred cage ... ”[24]

Whereas Marx viewed industrial civilization as both reason incarnate and

a permanent achievement, Spengler saw it as ultimately incompatible with

its physical environment, and therefore suicidally transitory. “Higher

Man is a tragedy. With his graves he leaves behind the earth a

battlefield and a wasteland. He has drawn plant and animal, the sea and

mountain into his decline. He has painted the face of the world with

blood, deformed and mutilated it.”[25] Spengler understood that “the

history of this technics is fast drawing to its inevitable close.”[26]

Theodor Adorno seemed to concur with elements of Spengler’s thinking:

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture

but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its

decline.”[27] Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment[28] has

a critique of civilization at its core, with its focal image of Odysseus

forcibly repressing the Sirens’ song of eros. Dialectic’s central thesis

is that “the history of civilization is... The history of

renunciation.”[29] As Albrecht Wellmer summed it up, “Dialectic of

Enlightenment is the theory of an irredeemably darkened modernity.”[30]

This perspective, now continually augmented by confirming data, tends to

render irrelevant both sources of theory and the logic of progress. If

there is no escape from a condition we can understand all too well, what

more is there to say?

Herbert Marcuse tried to lay out an escape route in Eros and

Civilization,[31] by attempting to uncouple civilization from modernity.

To preserve the “gains” of modernity, the solution is a “non-repressive”

civilization. Marcuse would dispense with “surplus repression,” implying

that repression itself is indispensable. Since modernity depends on

production, itself a repressive institution, redefining work as free

play can salvage both modernity and civilization. I find this an

implausible, even desperate defense of civilization. Marcuse fails to

refute Freud’s view that civilization cannot be reformed.

Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents that non-repressive

civilization is impossible, because the foundation of civilization is a

forcible ban on instinctual freedom and eros. To introduce work and

culture, the ban must be permanently imposed. Since this repression and

its constant maintenance are essential to civilization, universal

civilization brings universal neurosis.[32] Durkheim had already noted

that as humankind “advances” with civilization and the division of

labor, “the general happiness of society is decreasing.”[33]

As a good bourgeois, Freud justified civilization on the grounds that

work and culture are necessary and that civilization enables humans to

survive on a hostile planet. “The principal task of civilization, its

actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against nature.” And further, “But

how ungrateful, how short-sighted after all to strive for the abolition

of civilization! What would then remain would be a state of nature, and

that would be far harder to bear.”[34]

Possibly civilization’s most fundamental ideological underpinning is

Hobbes’ characterization of the pre-civilized state of nature as “nasty,

brutish, and short.” Freud subscribed to this view, of course, as did

Adorno and Horkheimer.

Since the mid-1960s there has been a paradigm shift in how

anthropologists understand prehistory, with profound implications for

theory. Based on a solid body of archaeological and ethnographic

research, mainstream anthropology has abandoned the Hobbesian

hypothesis. Life before or outside civilization is now defined more

specifically as social existence prior to domestication of animals and

plants. Mounting evidence demonstrates that before the Neolithic shift

from a foraging or gatherer-hunter mode of existence to an agricultural

lifeway, most people had ample free time, considerable gender autonomy

or equality, an ethos of egalitarianism and sharing, and no organized

violence.

A (misleadingly-named) “Man the Hunter” conference at the University of

Chicago in 1966 launched the reversal of the Hobbesian view, which for

centuries had provided ready justification for all the repressive

institutions of a complex, imperializing Western culture. Supporting

evidence for the new paradigm has come forth from archaeologists and

anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee, Adrienne

Zihlman, and many others;[35] these studies are widely available, and

now form the theoretical basis for everything from undergraduate courses

to field research.

Archaeologists continue to uncover examples of how our Paleolithic

forbears led mainly peaceful, egalitarian, and healthy lives for about

two million years. The use of fire to cook tuberous vegetables as early

as 1.9 million years ago, and long distance sea travel 800,000 years

ago, are two findings among many that testify to an intelligence equal

to our own.[36]

Genetic engineering and imminent human cloning are just the most current

manifestations of a dynamic of control and domination of nature that

humans set in motion 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors began to

domesticate animals and plants. In the 400 generations of human

existence since then, all of natural life has been penetrated and

colonized at the deepest levels, paralleling the controls that have been

ever more thoroughly engineered at the social level. Now we can see this

trajectory for what it really is: a transformation that inevitably

brought all-enveloping destruction, that was in no way necessary.

Significantly, the worldwide archaeological record demonstrates that

many human groups tried agriculture and/or pastoralism and later gave

them up, falling back on more reliable foraging and hunting strategies.

Others refused for generations to adopt the domestication practices of

close neighbors.

It is here that a primitivist alternative has begun to emerge, in theory

and in practice.[37] To the question of technology must be added that of

civilization itself. Ever-growing documentation of human prehistory as a

very long period of largely non-alienated human life stands in stark

contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity.

In the context of his discussion of the limitations of Habermas, Joel

Whitebook wrote, “It may be that the scope of and depth of the social

and ecological crisis are so great that nothing short of an epochal

transformation of world views will be commensurate with them.”[38] Since

that time, Castoriadis concluded that a radical transformation will

“have to launch an attack on the division of labor in its hitherto known

forms.”[39] Division of labor, slowly emerging through prehistory, was

the foundation of domestication and continues to drive the technological

imperative forward.

The challenge is to disprove George Grant’s thesis that we live in “a

world where only catastrophe can slow the unfolding of the

potentialities of technique,”[40] and to actualize Claude Kornoouh’s

judgment that revolution can only be redefined against progress.[41]

[1] Anselm Giap, Guy Debord (Berkeley, 1999), p. 3.

[2] Joseph Wood Krutch, Human Nature and the Human Condition (New York,

1959), p. 192.

[3]

J. Raloff, “More Waters Test Positive for Drugs,” Science News 157

(April 1, 2000).

[4] The dramatic upsurge in health-threatening obesity has occasioned

many articles, but exact figures are elusive at this time. 27% of adult

Americans suffer depression or anxiety disorders. See “Recognizing the

Anxious Face of Depression,” G.S. Malhi et al, Journal of Nervous and

Mental Diseases 190, June 2002.

[5] S.K. Goldsmith, T.C. Pellner, A.M. Kleinman, W.E. Bunney, eds.,

Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative (Washington, D.C., 2002)

[6] Claude Kornoouh, “On Interculturalism and Multiculturalism,” TELOS

110 (Winter 1998), p. 133.

[7] Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the

Risk Society (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1995), p. 37.

[8] Agnes Heller, Can Modernity Survive? (Berkeley, 1990), p. 60.

[9] Michel Houlebecq, Les Particules élémentaires (Paris, 1998). More

prosaically, Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, 2000) and

Pierre Bordieu, Contre-feux: propos pour servira la résistance contre

l’invasion néo-libérale (Paris, 1998), especially p. 97, characterize

modern society along these lines.

[10] Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader,

ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), pp. 47–48.

[11] Eric Vogelin, The Collected Works of Eric Vogelin, vol. 5,

Modernity Without Restraint (Columbia, MO, 2000), p.105.

[12] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991), p. ix.

[13] John Zerzan, “The Catastrophe of Postmodernism,” Future Primitive

(New York, 1994).

[14] Daniel R. White, Postmodern Ecology (Albany, 1998), p. 198. Bordieu

referred to “the futility of the strident calls of ‘postmodern’

philosophers for the ‘suppression of dualism.’ These dualisms deeply

rooted in things (structures) and in bodies, do not spring from a simple

effect of verbal naming and cannot be abolished by an act of

performative magic ...” — Pierre Bordieu, Masculine Domination

(Stanford, 2001), p. 103.

[15] Mike Michael, Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature (London,

2000), p. 8. The title itself is testimony to the surrender to

domination.

[16] Iain Chambers, Culture After Humanism (London, 2002), pp. 122, 41.

[17] Recent titles in various fields indicate a shift. For example,

Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy After Postmodernity, eds.

Martin Beck Matustîc and William L. McBride (Evanston, IL, 2002) and

Family Therapy beyond Postmodernism by Carmel Flaskas (New York, 2002).

After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory,

eds. Tilottama Rajan and Michael J. Driscoll (Toronto, 2002) is haunted

by themes of origins and the primitive.

[18] Jean-François Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis” [which could

very legitimately have been called, in anti-postmodernist fashion, “From

Domus to the Megalopolis”] in The Inhuman: Reflections of Time

(Stanford, 1991), p. 200.

[19] Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 200, and Postmodern Fables (Minneapolis,

1997), p. 23.

[20] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000).

[21] Hardt and Negri, p. 218.

[22] Claude Kornoouh, “Heidegger on History and Politics as Events,”

TELOS 120 (Summer 2001), p. 126.

[23] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics (Munich, 1931), p. 94.

[24] Spengler, Man and Technics, p. 69

[25] Spengler, Früzeit der Weltgeschichte, #20, p. 9. Quoted in John

Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline (Baton Rouge, 2001), p. 224.

[26] Spengler, Man and Technics, p. 103.

[27] Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (London, 1967), p. 72.

[28] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New

York, 1947).

[29] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 55.

[30] Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames: the Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity

(Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 255.

[31] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955).

[32] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York, 1961).

[33] Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York, 1933),

p. 249.

[34] Sigmund Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” The Complete Works of

Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London, 1957), p. 15.

[35] Important texts include Eleanor Leacock and Richard B. Lee,

Politics and History in Band Societies (New York, 1982); Richard B. Lee

and Richard Daly, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers

(Cambridge, 1999); Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago,

1972); Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (New York, 1968); Adrienne

Zihlman, et.al., The Evolving Female (Princeton, 1997).

[36] M.J. Morwood, et. al., “Fission-track ages of stone tools and

fossils on the east Indonesian island of Flores,” Nature (12 March

1998), for example.

[37] This tendency within an increasingly anarchist-oriented

anti-globalization movement is in the ascendant in the U.S. Among a

growing number of periodicals are Anarchy, Disorderly Conduct, The Final

Days, Green Anarchy, Green Journal, and Species Traitor. Texts include

Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western

Civilization (Boston, 1994); Derrick Jensen, Culture of Make Believe

(New York, 2002); Daniel Quinn, Ishmael (New York, 1995); John Zerzan,

Running On Emptiness: the Pathology of Civilization (Los Angeles, 2002).

[38] Joel Whitebook, “The Problem of Nature in Habermas,” TELOS 40

(Summer, 1979), p. 69.

[39] Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA,

1984), p. 257. Also, Keekok Lee, “To De-Industrialize — Is It So

Irrational?” in The Politics of Nature, eds.. Andrew Dobson and Paul

Lucardie (London, 1993).

[40] George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto, 1969), p. 142. Of

course, the situation grows more and more grave, with sudden, dire

changes very possible. M. Sheffer, et. al., “Catastrophic Shifts in

Ecosystems,” Nature (11 October 2001); M. Manion and W.M. Evan on the

growing likelihood of disasters, “Technological Catastrophes: their

causes and preventions,” Technology in Society 24 (2002), pp. 207–224.

[41] Claude Kornoouh, “Technique et Destin,” Krisis 34 (Fall, 2000).