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Title: Civilization in Bulk Author: David Watson Date: 1991 Language: en Topics: anti-civ, anti-work, Fredy Perlman Source: Retrieved on July 26, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/civilizationinbulk.htm Notes: Footnotes available from Fifth Estate Summer 1991, pp. 40–4
Having had the privilege of living for a time among stone age peoples of
Brazil, a very civilized European of considerable erudition wrote
afterwards, “Civilization is no longer a fragile flower, to be carefully
preserved and reared with great difficulty here and there in sheltered
corners. All that is over: humanity has taken to monoculture, once and
for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk, as if it were
sugar-beet. The same dish will be served to us every day.”
Those words were written in 1955. Now that civilization is engulfing the
entire planet, the image of the fragile flower has largely wilted. Some
of civilization’s inmates are remembering that the image was always a
lie; other ways of seeing the world are being rediscovered.
Counter-traditions are being reexamined, escape routes devised, weapons
fashioned. To put it another way, a spectre haunts the heavy equipment
as it chugs deeper into the morass it has made: the spectre of the
primal world.
Devising escapes and weapons is no simple task: false starts and poor
materials. The old paths are paved and the materials that come from the
enemy’s arsenal tend to explode in our hands. Memory and desire have
been suppressed and deformed; we have all been inculcated in the
Official History. Its name is Progress, and the Dream of Progress
continues to fuel global civilization’s expansion everywhere, converting
human beings into mechanized, self-obliterating puppets, nature into
dead statuary.
The Official History can be found in every child’s official history
text: Before the genesis (which is to say, before civilization), there
was nothing but a vast, oceanic chaos, dark and terrible, brutish and
nomadic, a bloody struggle for existence. Eventually, through great
effort by a handful of men, some anonymous, some celebrated, humanity
emerged from the slime, from trees, caves, tents and endless wanderings
in a sparse and perilous desert to accomplish fantastic improvements in
life. Such improvements came through mastery of animals, plants and
minerals; the exploitation of hitherto neglected Resources; the fineries
of high culture and religion; and the miracles of technics in the
service of centralized authority.
This awe-inspiring panoply of marvels took shape under the aegis of the
city-state and behind its fortified walls. Through millenia,
civilization struggled to survive amid a storm of barbarism, resisting
being swallowed by the howling wilderness. Then another “Great Leap
Forward” occurred among certain elect and anointed kingdoms of what came
to be called “the West,” and the modern world was born: the
enlightenment of scientific reason ushered in exploration and discovery
of the wilderness, internal (psychic) and external (geographic). In the
kingdom’s official murals, the Discoverers appear at one end, standing
proudly on their ships, telescopes and sextants in their hands; at the
other end waits the world, a sleeping beauty ready to awake and join her
powerful husband in the marriage bed of nature and reason.
Finally come the offspring of this revolution: invention, mechanization,
industrialization, and ultimately scientific, social and political
maturity, a mass democratic society and mass-produced abundance.
Certainly, a few bugs remain to be worked out — ubiquitous
contamination, runaway technology, starvation and war (mostly at the
uncivilized “peripheries”), but civilization cherishes its challenges,
and expects all such aberrations to be brought under control,
rationalized through technique, redesigned to “serve human needs,”
forever and ever, amen. History is a gleaming locomotive running on
rails — albeit around precarious curves and through some foreboding
tunnels — to the Promised Land. And whatever the dangers, there can be
no turning back.
But now that several generations have been raised on monoculture’s
gruel, civilization is coming to be regarded not as a promise yet to be
fulfilled so much as a maladaption of the species, a false turn or a
kind of fever threatening the planetary web of life. As one of History’s
gentle rebels once remarked, “We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides
upon us.” The current crisis, occurring on every level, from the
ecospheric to the social to the personal, has become too manifest, too
grievous, to ignore. The spectre haunting modern civilization, once only
a sense of loss, now has open partisans who have undertaken the
theoretical and practical critique of civilization.
So we begin by reexamining our list of chapters not from the point of
view of the conquerors but the conquered: the slaves crushed under
temple construction sites or gassed in the trenches, the dredged and
shackled rivers, the flattened forests, the beings pinned to laboratory
tables. What voice can better speak for them than the primal? Such a
critique of “the modern world through Pleistocene eyes,” such a
“geological kind of perspective,” as the indigenous authors of the 1977
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) document, A Basic Call to Consciousness, put
it, immediately explodes the conquerors Big Lie about “underdevelopment”
and the “brutality” of primal society, their vilification of prehistory.
The lie has most recently been eroded not only by greater access to the
views of primal peoples and their native descendants who are presently
fighting for survival, but by a more critical, non-eurocentric
anthropology willing to challenge its own history, premises and
privilege. Primal society, with its myriad variations, is the common
heritage of all peoples. From it, we can infer how human beings lived
some 99 percent of our existence as a species. (And even a large part of
that last one percent consists of the experience of tribal and other
vernacular communities that resist conquest and control in creative, if
idiosyncratic ways.)
Looking with new/old eyes on the primal world, we see a web of
autonomous societies, splendidly diverse but sharing certain
characteristics. Primal society has been called “the original affluent
society,” affluent because its needs are few, all its desires are easily
met. Its tool kit is elegant and lightweight, its outlook linguistically
complex and conceptually profound yet simple and accessible to all. Its
culture is expansive and ecstatic. It is propertyless and communal,
egalitarian and cooperative. Like nature, it is essentially leaderless:
neither patriarchal nor matriarchal, it is anarchic, which is to say
that no archon or ruler has built and occupied center stage. It is,
rather, an organic constellation of persons, each unique.
It is also a society free of work; it has no economy or production per
se, except for gift exchange and a kind of ritual play that also happen
to create subsistence (though it is a society capable of experiencing
occasional hunger without losing its spiritual bearings, even sometimes
choosing hunger to enhance interrelatedness, to play or to see visions).
The Haudenosaunee, for example, write that “[we] do not have specific
economic institutions, nor do we have specifically distinct political
institutions.” Furthermore, the subsistence activities of Haudenosaunee
society, “by our cultural definition, [are] not an economy at all.”
Hence, primal society’s plenitude resides in its many symbolic,
personal, and natural relationships, not in artifacts. It is a dancing
society, a singing society, a celebrating society, a dreaming society.
Its philosophy and practice of what is called animisma mythopoetic
articulation of the organic unity of life discovered only recently by
the West’s ecologists — protects the land by treating its multiplicity
of forms as sacred beings, each with its own integrity and subjectivity.
Primal society affirms community with all of the natural and social
world.
Somehow this primal world, a world (as Lewis Mumford has observed) more
or less corresponding to the ancient vision of the Golden Age, unravels
as the institutions of kingship and class society emerge. How it
happened remains unclear to us today. Perhaps we will never fully
understand the mystery of that original mutation from egalitarian to
state society. Certainly, no standard explanations are adequate. “That
radical discontinuity,” in the words of Pierre Clastres, “that
mysterious emergence — irreversible, fatal to primitive societies — of
the thing we know by the name of the State,” how does it occur?
Primal society maintained its equilibrium and its egalitarianism because
it refused power, refused property. Kingship could not have emerged from
the chief because the chief had no power over others. Clastres insists:
“Primitive society is the place where separate power is refused, because
the society itself, and not the chief, is the real locus of power.”
It is possible that we could approach this dissolution of original
community appropriately only by way of mythic language like the Old Ones
would have used. After all, only a poetic story could vividly express
such a tragic loss of equilibrium. The latent potentiality for power and
technique to emerge as separate domains had been previously kept at bay
by the gift cycle, “techniques of the sacred” and the high level of
individuation of society’s members.
Primal peoples, according to Clastres, “had a very early premonition
that power’s transcendence conceals a mortal risk for the group, that
the principle of an authority which is external and the creator of its
own legality is a challenge to culture itself. It is the intuition of
this threat that determined the depth of their political philosophy.
For, on discovering the great affinity of power and nature, as the
twofold limitation on the domain of culture, Indian societies were able
to create a means for neutralizing the virulence of political
authority.”
This, in effect, is the same process by which primal peoples neutralized
the potential virulence of technique: they minimized the relative weight
of instrumental or practical techniques and expanded the importance of
techniques of seeing: ecstatic techniques. The shaman is, in Jerome
Rotherberg’s words, a “technician” of ecstasy, a “protopoet” whose
“technique hinges on the creation of special linguistic circumstances,
i.e., of song and invocation.” Technology, like power, is in such a way
refused by the dynamic of primal social relations. But when technique
and power emerge as separate functions rather than as strands
inextricably woven into the fabric of society, everything starts to come
apart. “The unintended excressence that grows out of human communities
and then liquidates them,” as Fredy Perlman called it, makes its
appearance. A sorcery run amok, a golem-like thingness that outlives its
fabricators: somehow the gift cycle is ruptured; the hoop, the circle,
broken.
The community, as Clastres puts it, “has ceased to exorcise the thing
that will be its ruin: power and respect for power.” A kind of
revolution, or counter-revolution, takes place: “When, in primitive
society, the economic dynamic lends itself to definition as a distinct
and autonomous domain, when the activity of production becomes
alienated, accountable labor, levied by men who will enjoy the fruits of
that labor, what has come to pass is that society has been divided into
rulers and ruled, masters and subjects. The political relation of power
precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Alienation is
political before it is economic; power precedes labor; the economic
derives from the political; the emergence of the State determines the
advent of classes.”
The emergence of authority, production and technology are all moments
within the same process. Previously, power resided in no separate
sphere, but rather within the circle — a circle that included the human
community and nature (nonhuman kin). “Production” and the “economic”
were undivided as well; they were embedded in the circle through gift
sharing which transcends and neutralizes the artifactuality or
“thingness” of the objects passing from person to person. (Animals,
plants and natural objects being persons, even kin, subsistence is
therefore neither work nor production, but rather gift, drama,
reverence, reverie.) Technique also had to be embedded in relations
between kin, and thus open, participatory, and accessible to all; or it
was entirely personal, singular, visionary, unique and untransferable.
The “great affinity of power and nature,” as Clastres puts it, explains
the deep cleft between them when power divides and polarizes the
community. For the primal community, to follow Mircea Eliade’s
reasoning, “The world is at once ‘open’ and mysterious. ‘Nature’ at once
unveils and ‘camouflages’ the ‘supernatural’ [which] constitutes the
basic and unfathomable mystery of the World.” Mythic consciousness
apprehends and intervenes in the world, participates in it, but this
does not necessitate a relation of domination; it “does not mean that
one has transformed [cosmic realities] into ‘objects of knowledge.’
These realities still keep their original ontological condition.”
The trauma of disequilibrium exploded what contemporary pagan feminists
have called “power within” and generated “power over.” What were once
mutualities became hierarchies. In this transformation, gift exchange
disappears; gift exchange with nature disappears with it. What was
shared is now hoarded: the mystery to which one once surrendered now
becomes a territory to be conquered. All stories of the origins become
histories of the origins of the Master. The origin of the World is
retold as the origin of the State.
Woman, who through the birth process exemplifies all of nature and who
maintains life processes through her daily activities of nurturance of
plants, animals and children, is suppressed by the new transformer-hero.
Male power, attempting to rival the fecundity of woman, simulates birth
and nature’s fecundity through the manufacture of artifacts and
monuments. The womb — a primordial container, a basket or bowl — is
reconstituted by power into the city walls.
“Thus,” as Frederick W. Turner puts it in Beyond Geography: The Western
Spirit Against the Wilderness, the “rise to civilization’ might be seen
not so much as the triumph of a progressive portion of the race over its
lowly, nature-bound origins as a severe, aggressive volte-face against
all unimproved nature, the echoes of which would still be sounding
millennia later when civilized men once again encountered the challenges
of the wilderness beyond their city walls.”
No explanation and no speculation can encompass the series of events
that burst community and generated class society and the state. But the
result is relatively clear: the institutionalization of hierarchic
elites and the drudgery of the dispossessed to support them, monoculture
to feed their armed gangs, the organization of society into work
battalions, hoarding, taxation and economic relations, and the reduction
of the organic community to lifeless resources to be mined and
manipulated by the archon and his institutions.
The “chief features” of this new state society, writes Mumford,
“constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the
centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the
lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the
magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak,
and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both
industrial and military purposes.” In other words, a megamachine made up
of two major arms, a labor machine and a military machine.
The crystallization of a fluid, organic community into a
pseudo-community, a giant machine, was in fact the first machine, the
standard definition of which, Mumford notes, is “a combination of
resistant parts, each specialized in function, operating under human
control, to utilize energy and perform work.” Thus, he argues, “The two
poles of civilization then, are mechanically-organized work and
mechanically-organized destruction and extermination. Roughly the same
forces and the same methods of operation [are] applicable to both
areas.” In Mumford’s view, the greatest legacy of this system has been
“the myth of the machine” — the belief that it is both irresistible and
ultimately beneficial. This mechanization of human beings, he writes,
“had long preceded the mechanization of their working instruments. But
once conceived, this new mechanism spread rapidly, not just by being
imitated in self-defense, but by being forcefully imposed.”
One can see the differences here between the kind of technics embedded
in an egalitarian society and technics-as-power or technology. As
Mumford argues, people “of ordinary capacity, relying on muscle power
and traditional skills alone, were capable of performing a wide variety
of tasks, including pottery and manufacture and weaving, without any
external direction or scientific guidance, beyond that available in the
tradition of the local community. Not so with the megamachine. Only
kings, aided by the discipline of astronomical science and supported by
the sanctions of religion, had the capacity of assembling and directing
the megamachine. This was an invisible structure composed of living, but
rigid, human parts, each assigned to his special office, role, and task,
to make possible the immense work-output and grand designs of this great
collective organization.”
In his intuitive history of the megamachine, Fredy Perlman describes how
a Sumerian “Ensi” or overseer, lacking the rationalizations of the
ideology of Progress which are routinely used to vaccinate us against
our wildness, might see the newly issued colossus:
“He might think of it as a worm, a giant worm, not a living worm but a
carcass of a worm, a monstrous cadaver, its body consisting of numerous
segments, its skin pimpled with spears and wheels and other
technological implements. He knows from his own experience that the
entire carcass is brought to artificial life by the motions of the human
beings trapped inside, the zeks who operate the springs and wheels, just
as he knows that the cadaverous head is operated by a mere zek, the head
zek.”
It is no accident that Fredy chose the word zek, a word meaning gulag
prisoner that he found in Solzhenitsyn’s work. It was not only to
emphasize that civilization has been a labor camp from its origins, but
to illuminate the parallels between the ancient embryonic forms and the
modern global work machine presently suffocating the earth. While the
differences in magnitude and historical development are great enough to
account for significant contrasts, essential elements shared by both
systems — elements outlined above — position both civilizations in a
polarity with primal community. At one extreme stands organic community:
an organism, in the form of a circle, a web woven into the fabric of
nature. At the other is civilization: no longer an organism but organic
fragments reconstituted as a machine, an organization; no longer a
circle but a rigid pyramid of crushing hierarchies; not a web but a grid
expanding the territory of the inorganic.
According to official history, this grid is the natural outcome of an
inevitable evolution. Thus natural history is not a multiverse of
potentialities but rather a linear progression from Prometheus’ theft of
fire to the International Monetary Fund. A million and more years of
species life experienced in organic communities are dismissed as a kind
of waiting period in anticipation of the few thousand years of imperial
grandeur to follow. The remaining primal societies, even now being
dragged by the hair into civilization’s orbit along its blood-drenched
frontier, are dismissed as living fossils (“lacking in evolutionary
promise,” as one philosopher characterized them), awaiting their
glorious inscription into the wondrous machine.
Thus, as Fredy Perlman argued, imperialism is far from being the last
stage of civilization but is embedded in the earliest stages of the
state and class society. So there is always a brutal frontier where
there is empire and always empire where there is civilization. The
instability and rapidity of change as well as the violence and
destructiveness of the change both belie empire’s claim to natural
legitimacy, suggesting once more an evolutionary wrong turn, a
profoundly widening disequilibrium.
The frontier expands along two intersecting axes, centrifugal and
centripetal. In the words of Stanley Diamond, “Civilization originates
in conquest abroad and repression at home. Each is an aspect of the
other.” Thus outwardly, empire is expressed geographically (northern
Canada, Malaysia, the Amazon, etc.; the ocean bottoms, even outer space)
and biospherically (disruption of weather and climate, vast chemical
experiments on the air and water, elimination and simplification of
ecosystems, genetic manipulation).
But the process is replicated internally on the human spirit: every zek
finds an empire in miniature “wired” to the very nervous system.
So, too, is repression naturalized, the permanent crisis in character
and the authoritarian plague legitimated. It starts with frightened
obedience to the archon or patriarch, then moves by way of projection to
a violent, numbed refusal of the living subjectivity and integrity of
the other — whether found in nature, in woman, or in conquered peoples.
At one end of the hierarchic pyramid stands unmitigated power; at the
other, submission mingles with isolation, fragmentation and rage. All is
justified, by the ideology of Progress — conquest and subjugation of
peoples, ruin of lands and sacrifice zones for the empire,
self-repression, mass addiction to imperial spoils, the materialization
of culture. Ideology keeps the work and war machines operating.
Ultimately, this vortex brings about the complete objectification of
nature. Every relationship is increasingly instrumentalized and
technicized. Mechanization and industrialization have rapidly
transformed the planet, exploding ecosystems and human communities with
monoculture, industrial degradation and mass markets. The world now
corresponds more closely to the prophetic warnings of primal peoples
than to the hollow advertising claims of the industrial system: the
plants disappearing and the animals dying, the soils denuded along with
the human spirit, vast oceans poisoned, the very rain turned corrosive
and deadly, human communities at war with one another over diminishing
spoils — and all poised on the brink of an even greater annihilation at
the push of a few buttons within reach of stunted, half-dead head-zeks
in fortified bunkers. Civilization’s railroad leads not only to ecocide,
but to evolutionary suicide. Every empire lurches toward the oblivion it
fabricates and will eventually be covered with sand. Can a world worth
inhabiting survive the ruin that will be left?