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Title: The Modern Anti-World Author: John Zerzan Date: 2004 Language: en Topics: Green Anarchy, Green Anarchy #18, modernity Source: Retrieved on July 22, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/antiworld.htm Notes: Taken from Green Anarchy #18. Winter 2004.
There now exists only one civilization, a single global domestication
machine. Modernity’s continuing efforts to disenchant and
instrumentalize the non-cultural, natural world have produced a reality
in which there is virtually nothing left outside the system. This
trajectory was already visible by the time of the first urbanites. Since
those Neolithic times we have moved ever closer to the complete
de-realization of nature, culminating in a state of world emergency
today. Approaching ruin is the commonplace vista, our obvious
non-future.
It’s hardly necessary to point out that none of the claims of
modernity/Enlightenment (regarding freedom, reason, the individual) are
valid. Modernity is inherently globalizing, massifying, standardizing.
The self-evident conclusion that an indefinite expansion of productive
forces will be fatal deals the final blow to belief in progress. As
China’s industrialization efforts go into hyper-drive, we have another
graphic case in point.
Since the Neolithic, there has been a steadily increasing dependence on
technology, civilization’s material culture. As Horkheimer and Adorno
pointed out, the history of civilization is the history of renunciation.
One gets less than one puts in. This is the fraud of technoculture, and
the hidden core of domestication: the growing impoverishment of self,
society, and Earth. Meanwhile, modern subjects hope that somehow the
promise of yet more modernity will heal the wounds that afflict them.
A defining feature of the present world is built-in disaster, now
announcing itself on a daily basis. But the crisis facing the biosphere
is arguably less noticeable and compelling, in the First World at least,
than everyday alienation, despair, and entrapment in a routinized,
meaningless control grid.
Influence over even the smallest event or circumstance drains steadily
away, as global systems of production and exchange destroy local
particularity, distinctiveness, and custom. Gone is an earlier
pre-eminence of place, increasingly replaced by what Pico Ayer calls
“airport culture” — rootless, urban, homogenized.
Modernity finds its original basis in colonialism, just as civilization
itself is founded on domination — at an ever more basic level. Some
would like to forget this pivotal element of conquest, or else
“transcend” it, as in Enrique Dussel’s facile “new trans-modernity”
pseudo-resolution (The Invention of the Americas, 1995). Scott Lash
employs somewhat similar sleight-of-hand in Another Modernity: A
Different Rationality (1999), a feeble nonsense title given his
affirmation of the world of technoculture. One more tortuous failure is
Alternative Modernity (1995), in which Andrew Feenberg sagely observes
that “technology is not a particular value one must choose for or
against, but a challenge to evolve and multiply worlds without end.” The
triumphant world of technicized civilization — known to us as
modernization, globalization, or capitalism — has nothing to fear from
such empty evasiveness.
Paradoxically, most contemporary works of social analysis provide
grounds for an indictment of the modern world, yet fail to confront the
consequences of the context they develop. David Abrams’ The Spell of the
Sensuous (1995), for example, provides a very critical overview of the
roots of the anti-life totality, only to conclude on an absurd note.
Ducking the logical conclusion of his entire book (which should be a
call to oppose the horrific contours of techno-civilization), Abrams
decides that this movement toward the abyss is, after all, earth-based
and “organic.” Thus “sooner or later [it] must accept the invitation of
gravity and settle back into the land.” An astoundingly irresponsible
way to conclude his analysis.
Richard Stivers has studied the dominant contemporary ethos of
loneliness, boredom, mental illness, etc., especially in his Shades of
Loneliness: Pathologies of Technological Society (1998). But this work
fizzles out into quietism, just as his critique in Technology as Magic
ends with a similar avoidance: “the struggle is not against technology,
which is a simplistic understanding of the problem, but against a
technological system that is now our life-milieu.”
The Enigma of Health (1996) by Hans Georg Gadamer advises us to bring
“the achievements of modern society, with all of its automated,
bureaucratic and technological apparatus, back into the service of that
fundamental rhythm which sustains the proper order of bodily life”. Nine
pages earlier, Gadamer observes that it is precisely this apparatus of
objectification that produces our “violent estrangement from ourselves.”
The list of examples could fill a small library — and the horror show
goes on. One datum among thousands is this society’s staggering level of
dependence on drug technology. Work, sleep, recreation,
non-anxiety/depression, sexual function, sports performance — what is
exempt? Anti-depressant use among preschoolers — preschoolers — is
surging, for example (New York Times, April 2, 2004).
Aside from the double-talk of countless semi-critical “theorists”,
however, is the simple weight of unapologetic inertia: the countless
voices who counsel that modernity is simply inescapable and we should
desist from questioning it. It’s clear that there is no escaping
modernization anywhere in the world, they say, and that is unalterable.
Such fatalism is well captured by the title of Michel Dertourzos’ What
Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives (1997).
Small wonder that nostalgia is so prevalent, that passionate yearning
for all that has been stripped from our lives. Ubiquitous loss mounts,
along with protest against our uprootedness, and calls for a return
home. As ever, partisans of deepening domestication tell us to abandon
our desires and grow up. Norman Jacobson (“Escape from Alienation:
Challenges to the Nation-State,” Representations 84: 2004) warns that
nostalgia becomes dangerous, a hazard to the State, if it leaves the
world of art or legend. This craven leftist counsels “realism” not
fantasies: “Learning to live with alienation is the equivalent in the
political sphere of the relinquishment of the security blanket of our
infancy.”
Civilization, as Freud knew, must be defended against the individual;
all of its institutions are part of that defense.
But how do we get out of here — off this death ship? Nostalgia alone is
hardly adequate to the project of emancipation. The biggest obstacle to
taking the first step is as obvious as it is profound. If understanding
comes first, it should be clear that one cannot accept the totality and
also formulate an authentic critique and a qualitatively different
vision of that totality. This fundamental inconsistency results in the
glaring incoherence of some of the works cited above.
I return to Walter Benjamin’s striking allegory of the meaning of
modernity:
His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling ruin upon ruin and
hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the
angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before
him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (1940).
There was a time when this storm was not raging, when nature was not an
adversary to be conquered and tamed into everything that is barren and
ersatz. But we’ve been traveling at increasing speed, with rising gusts
of progress at our backs, to even further disenchantment, whose
impoverished totality now severely imperils both life and health.
Systematic complexity fragments, colonizes, debases daily life. Division
of labor, its motor, diminishes humanness in its very depths, dis-abling
and pacifying us. This de-skilling specialization, which gives us the
illusion of competence, is a key, enabling predicate of domestication.
Before domestication, Ernest Gellner (Sword, Plow and Book, 1989) noted,
“there simply was no possibility of a growth in scale and in complexity
of the division of labour and social differentiation.” Of course, there
is still an enforced consensus that a “regression” from civilization
would entail too high a cost — bolstered by fictitious scary scenarios,
most of them resembling nothing so much as the current products of
modernity.
People have begun to interrogate modernity. Already a specter is
haunting its now crumbling façade. In the 1980s, Jurgen Habermas feared
that the “ideas of antimodernity, together with an additional touch of
premodernity,” had already attained some popularity. A great tide of
such thinking seems all but inevitable, and is beginning to resonate in
popular films, novels, music, zines, TV shows, etc.
And it is also a sad fact that accumulated damage has caused a
widespread loss of optimism and hope. Refusal to break with the totality
crowns and solidifies this suicide-inducing pessimism. Only visions
completely undefined by the current reality constitute our first steps
to liberation. We cannot allow ourselves to continue to operate on the
enemy’s terms. (This position may appear extreme; 19^(th) century
abolitionism also appeared extreme when its adherents declared that only
an end to slavery was acceptable, and that reforms were pro-slavery.)
Marx understood modern society as a state of “permanent revolution,” in
perpetual, innovating movement. Postmodernity brings more of the same,
as accelerating change renders everything human (such as our closest
relationships) frail and undone. The reality of this motion and fluidity
has been raised to a virtue by postmodern thinkers, who celebrate
undecidability as a universal condition. All is in flux, and
context-free; every image or viewpoint is as ephemeral and as valid as
any other.
This outlook is the postmodern totality, the position from which
postmodernists condemn all other viewpoints. Postmodernism’s historic
ground is unknown to itself, because of a founding aversion to overviews
and totalities. Unaware of Kaczynski’s central idea (Industrial Society
and Its Future, 1996) that meaning and freedom are progressively
banished by modern technological society, postmodernists would be
equally uninterested in the fact that Max Weber wrote the same thing
almost a century before. Or that the movement of society, so described,
is the historical truth of what postmodernists analyze so abstractly, as
if it were a novelty they alone (partially) understand.
Shrinking from any grasp of the logic of the system as a whole, via a
host of forbidden areas of thought, the anti-totality stance of these
embarrassing frauds is ridiculed by a reality that is more totalized and
global than ever. The surrender of the postmodernists is an exact
reflection of feelings of helplessness that pervade the culture. Ethical
indifference and aesthetic self-absorption join hands with moral
paralysis, in the postmodern rejection of resistance. It is no surprise
that a non-Westerner such as Ziauddin Sardan (Postmodernism and the
Other, 1998) judges that postmodernism “preserves — indeed enhances —
all the classical and modern structures of oppression and domination.”
This prevailing fashion of culture may not enjoy much more of a shelf
life. It is, after all, only the latest retail offering in the
marketplace of representation. By its very nature, symbolic culture
generates distance and mediation, supposedly inescapable burdens of the
human condition. The self has always only been a trick of language, says
Althusser. We are sentenced to be no more than the modes through which
language autonomously passes, Derrida informs us.
The outcome of the imperialism of the symbolic is the sad commonplace
that human embodiment plays no essential role in the functions of mind
or reason. Conversely, it’s vital to rule out the possibility that
things have ever been different. Postmodernism resolutely bans the
subject of origins, the notion that we were not always defined and
reified by symbolic culture. Computer simulation is the latest advance
in representation, its disembodied power fantasies exactly paralleling
modernity’s central essence.
The postmodernist stance refuses to admit stark reality, with
discernible roots and essential dynamics. Benjamin’s “storm” of progress
is pressing forward on all fronts. Endless aesthetic-textual evasions
amount to rank cowardice. Thomas Lamarre serves up a typical postmodern
apologetic on the subject: “Modernity appears as a process or rupture
and reinscription; alternative modernities entail an opening of
otherness within Western modernity, in the very process of repeating or
reinscribing it. It is as if modernity itself is deconstruction.”
(Impacts of Modernities, 2004).
Except that it isn’t, as if anyone needed to point that out. Alas,
deconstruction and detotalization have nothing in common. Deconstruction
plays its role in keeping the whole system going, which is a real
catastrophe, the actual, ongoing one.
The era of virtual communication coincides with the postmodern
abdication, an age of enfeebled symbolic culture. Weakened and cheapened
connectivity finds its analogue in the fetishization of ever-shifting,
debased textual “meaning.” Swallowed in an environment that is more and
more one immense aggregate of symbols, deconstruction embraces this
prison and declares it to be the only possible world. But the
depreciation of the symbolic, including illiteracy and a cynicism about
narrative in general, may lead in the direction of bringing the whole
civilizational project into question. Civilization’s failure at this
most fundamental level is becoming as clear as its deadly and
multiplying personal, social, and environmental effects.
“Sentences will be confined to museums if the emptiness of writing
persists,” predicted Georges Bataille. Language and the symbolic are the
conditions for the possibility of knowledge, according to Derrida and
the rest. Yet we see at the same time an ever-diminishing vista of
understanding. The seeming paradox of an engulfing dimension of
representation and a shrinking amount of meaning finally causes the
former to become susceptible — first to doubt, then to subversion.
Husserl tried to establish an approach to meaning based on respecting
experience/ phenomena just as it is delivered to us, before it is
re-presented by the logic of symbolism. Small surprise that this effort
has been a central target of postmodernists, who have understood the
need to extirpate such a vision. Jean-Luc Nancy expresses this
opposition succinctly, decreeing that “We have no idea, no memory, no
presentiment of a world that holds man [sic] in its bosom” (The Birth to
Presence, 1993). How desperately do those who collaborate with the
reigning nightmare resist the fact that during the two million years
before civilization, this earth was precisely a place that did not
abandon us and did hold us to its bosom.
Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to
explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and
best thinking. Empty, homogenous, uniform time must give way to the
singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made
of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and
measuring life. The “time” of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow
each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and
re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time
and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight. Derrida,
sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on
the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history
cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end.
This auto-da-fé is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that
is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the
symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence.
It is language that speaks, in Heidegger’s phrase. But was it always so?
This world is over-full of images, simulations — a result of choices
that may seem irreversible. A species has, in a few thousand years,
destroyed community and created a ruin. A ruin called culture. The bonds
of closeness to the earth and to each other — outside of domestication,
cities, war, etc. — have been sundered, but can they not heal?
Under the sign of a unitary civilization, the possibly fatal onslaught
against anything alive and distinctive has been fully unleashed for all
to see. Globalization has in fact only intensified what was underway
well before modernity. The tirelessly systematized colonization and
uniformity, first set in motion by the decision to control and tame, now
has enemies who see it for what it is and for the ending it will surely
bring, unless it is defeated. The choice at the beginning of history
was, as now, that of presence versus representation.
Gadamer describes medicine as, at base, the restoration of what belongs
to nature. Healing as removing whatever works against life’s wonderful
capacity to renew itself. The spirit of anarchy, I believe, is similar.
Remove what blocks our way and it’s all there, waiting for us.