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Title: To Love The Inhuman
Author: Bellamy Fitzpatrick
Date: 2016
Language: en
Topics: review, anarcho-primitivism, animals, morality, civilization, anti-civ, Return Fire, Manichaeism
Source: reprinted in Return Fire vol.4
Notes: To read the articles referenced throughout this text in [square brackets], PDFs of Return Fire and related publications can be read, downloaded and printed by searching actforfree.nostate.net for "Return Fire", or emailing returnfire@riseup.net

Bellamy Fitzpatrick

To Love The Inhuman

“Faced with the meaninglessness of the world – the real[...] the

individual most often quakes and turns away. The experience of the real

is literally unbearable, and philosophy has traditionally come to the

rescue to save humanity from meaninglessness, to create the illusion of

a truth...”

– David F. Bell, introduction to

Joyful Cruelty by Clément Rosset

Anarcho-Primitivist[1] John Zerzan’s thinking exemplifies just such an

attempt at rescue, one not only unnecessary, but in fact unwanted, for

an anti-civilization critique lived as a joyful life. This essay

examines John Zerzan’s recent “Animal Dreams”, first situating it in a

typical anarchist critique motivated through the enshrinement of

particular reifications, then exploring how such action leads to

Manichaean thinking [ed. – i.e. that breaks everything down into good or

evil, light or dark, or love and hate (named after an Iranian prophet

Mani): essentially, dualistic thinking], and finally challenging

specific claims made within his essay. An alternative mode of relating

to the nonhuman closes the piece.

Tenacious Spectres: Morality & Nature

Radicalization, that is, the development of one's critical theory, can

be understood largely in terms of dispossession by reification[2]; as

one's critique grows sharper, one increasingly liberates one’s life from

these enslaving concepts. All anarchists worth the name have dispelled

themselves of State, most have excised Capitalism and God, and many have

also banished such subtle ghosts as Family and Production – but some, as

a result of their radicalization, not only fail to dispel, but actually

enshrine all the more fiercely, Morality and Nature.

Moral socialization is an odd, dissonant thing in the dominant culture.

Children are taught at an early age to share, to treat others as they

would like to be treated (the Golden Rule), to believe everyone's

opinions are of value, and similar maxims according to the altruistic

paradigm generally descended from Christian and Enlightenment [ed. – see

'A Profound Dis-ease'] beliefs, even if those value tables are never

explicitly cited during this socialization. Simultaneous to this

inculcation is children’s experience of realities often at odds with the

prescriptions they receive: they see not only the concerted exploitation

of the majority by the few, but also commonplace avarice among the many;

they see the obvious destitution of some, often disproportionately along

visually recognizable demographic lines; and they see women's opinions

more or less subtly devalued in quotidian conversation. This dissonance

stirs feelings of moral distress that need some form of catharsis. For

some, this release is a naturalization of perceived evils, perhaps via

an unknowable divine plan, a misanthropic dismissal of humanity as

essentially flawed, or a self-identification with Social Darwinism.

Others, though, balk at the horrorshow, as their rationalization of the

dissonance is that Morality's normative purchase is genuine and reality

is simply out of step with it; they demand either a sweeping change or

annihilation of the status quo and the earthly manifestation of heaven.

Pyotr Kropotkin[3], an inspirational figure to many radicals, preaches

with precisely this kind of moral indignation: “Our principles of

morality say: "Love your neighbour as yourself"; but let a child follow

this principle and take off his coat to give it to the shivering pauper,

and his mother will tell him that he must never understand moral

principles in their direct sense. If he lives according to them, he will

go barefoot, without alleviating the misery around him! Morality is good

on the lips, not in deeds.”

Thus, the process of radicalization for many is the moral impugnment of

the world. Though I am unaware of any empirical study, it has been my

own experience (and, I suspect, that of most readers) that the vast

majority of radicals born into the dominant culture were at least

initially radicalized in this manner, typically as especially indignant

progressive liberals, and the majority of this set still occupy that

analytical space, having only clarified their morality. Morality's

ontological status is never called into question; indeed, in its

besiegement by either the openly immoral or the falsely moral – i.e.,

greed is good or people need authority or we would have the war of all

against all – amidst an obviously bleak culture, it is all the more

vindicated as the Real, the Good, and the True.

In the same vein is the burgeoning anti-civilization anarchist who sees,

on the one hand, the culture in which they are forcibly immersed, with

its multifarious horrors of dehumanization, objectification, wilted

affect, wanton waste, variegated and abundant interhuman oppression, and

denuding of the Biosphere; and then sees, seemingly diametrically

opposed, the nonhuman world with its vivaciousness, intimacy, immediacy

of experience, nutrient and energy cycles in which nothing is wasted or

wanted but the energy that the Sun or hydrothermal vents replace,

various niches through which all lifeways are valuable, and species

interactions in which, even as one kills another, one seemingly never

acts against Life itself. It is a small leap, then, to see the Culture

as the Evil against Nature, the Good.

Which Side Are You On?

Being a radical thus comes to mean taking a position on the Manichaean

battlefield, fighting for and alongside Nature. Theoretically, it may

mean embodying Nature or restoring an essential substance of wildness

within oneself, as the battlefield may be not only material but also

spiritual. Actionably, it may realize itself as protecting Nature via

stopping particular non-human organisms from being killed, stopping

industrial development in particular places perceived as wild or sacred,

or attacking persons or infrastructure associated with Civilization; as

well as aligning oneself personally with Nature via learning primitive

[sic] skills, eating a particular diet, or adopting certain spiritual

beliefs.

Again, these sentiments are eminently understandable and the actions may

or may not be well placed, as what is beautiful in the organic, our

habitat as human organisms, is being despoiled horribly by Civilization.

The globalized, industrialized, spectacle-commodity culture is

destroying kinds of beings at a rate one thousand times faster than they

would normally go extinct, and huge portions of wildlife have been

destroyed just in recent decades as the process accelerates, reaching

such a rate as to prompt the creation of a neologism, “defaunation”.

Meanwhile, the always-present thinness of such efforts as conservation,

sustainable agriculture, and green technology becomes an increasingly

revolting joke, recently exemplified by the ridiculous efforts this past

year of endangered species translocation[4] and the attempted

displacement of indigenous populations in Alvaro Obregon for the

construction of a wind power farm[5] [ed. – including the 3rd largest in

Latin America, after a 'wind-rush' for industry; see Return Fire vol.3

pg39].

Considering all of this horror, it is not especially poetically

adventurous to describe the culture as a death engine, essentially

inimical to the organic. And emotionally intense or poetic writing can

be a useful tool and a breath of relief amidst a general bleachedness,

so long as it avoids obfuscation by being clear about how, when, and why

it is doing so. As a perhaps unfortunate linguistic consequence, calling

oneself anti-civilization might leave one feeling obligated to be for

something else that is similarly grand in scope, something bigger than

our immediate lives and relations. But while Civilization is a kind of

useful shorthand that can be quite clearly defined[6], the abundant

references to Nature, animality, and wildness coloring

anti-civilization/anti-industrial literature, speech, and thinking are

misleading vagaries at best and phantoms at worst.

Civilization, itself a set of overlapping and mutually reinforcing

reifications and their corresponding material infrastructure, is

characterized and reproduced by exactly this kind of absolutist,

dualistic, universalizing thought. Abstract and transcendental values

are themselves intrinsically authoritarian and antithetical to embodied

and vivacious life, even if they are posited for ostensibly liberatory

purposes, as I have written of elsewhere[7]. To reiterate briefly, to

compartmentalize one’s raw, lived-and-felt, moment-to-moment experience

in order to render it, to self-alienate it, into such categories as

Nature or wildness is itself an act of separation. Insofar as our loving

gaze assigns to our lover fantasies of perfection, mutilating them into

a quasi-divine being into which we can dissolve our inadequacies and

disappointments, thus completing ourselves, we have betrayed anything

worth the name of love and entered into the realm of religion.

Anarcho-Primitivism (AP, whether the nouns or the adjective) is thus,

ironically, the stuff of civilized thinking, a pattern of thought that

mourns for an imagined reunion with a de-anthropomorphized, but

nonetheless extant, divinity.

To elaborate this point, I will unpack “Animal Dreams”, a recent essay

by John Zerzan that appeared in the first issue of the biannual green

anarchist journal Black Seed, as I find the AP analysis to be one of the

most interesting ones with which I disagree because of something like

convergent evolution: I arrive at superficially similar conclusions to

the APs, but with a fundamentally different analysis.

Green Manichaeism: Anarcho-Primitivism as Cosmic Battlefield

Before examining “Animal Dreams” in particular, some context is in

order. I am not merely accusing: for Anarcho-Primitivists, the world is

avowedly a Manichaean battlefield. Zerzan has emphasized more than once

on his radio show Anarchy Radio, as well as in personal exchanges, that

he is dismissive of any anarchist analysis that does not regard a

Civilization/Nature dualism as metaphysically fundamental: Civilization

with its slavery, death, or undeath versus Nature with its freedom,

wildness, and life.

In “Animal Dreams”, Zerzan adds to the Good seemingly all non-human

animals, who apparently not only occupy the proper side of Mani’s ranks

but also serve as models for us to do the same. I will examine how

Zerzan assigns to various animals (predominantly charismatic megafauna)

humanistic and Christian virtues and how these characterizations are

either misleading (because they reflect only one or a few examples among

a great many) or simply wrong. Later, I will propose what I find to be a

more appropriate relationship to the nonhuman.

Couple Like a Goose; Love Like a Wolf

In sharp contradistinction to much of Zerzan’s writing that is, even

where I disagree, compelling and provocative, “Animal Dreams” reads

largely like a set of platitudes, some disturbingly normative for the

culture. I want nonetheless to briefly begin where it has merit.

From both the piece itself as well as personal conversations with its

author, it is clear that part of Zerzan’s goal was to repudiate the

dreadfully common and grotesquely speciesist [ed. – see Return Fire

vol.2 pg10] diminution of the inner lives/umwelts [ed. – environmental

factors collectively capable of affecting the behaviour of an

individual] / phenomenalities of nonhuman organisms. This goal is

certainly worthwhile and admirable, especially in light of

Behaviorist/Cartesian [ed. – see

'A Profound Dis-ease'] residues that linger in both popular and academic

cultures[8]. Zerzan aptly decries the allergy to so-called

anthropomorphism, more accurately described in this particular case as

qualitative inference to the presence of consciousness in nonhumans, an

act of the very same kind of abduction that nearly every human commits

with nearly every other human on an everyday basis[9].

The common critique that humans can report their mental states while

nonhumans cannot is laughable and evinces what a lack of understanding

there is about communication: the whine of a distressed dog, the

enticing change of color of a ripe fruit, the limb-waving and

stridulation of a threatening tarantula, and the garish and warning

colors of a toxic nudibranch [ed. – a type of poisonous sea-going slug]

are all communication. Almost any pet owner, forager, or anyone else who

has spent a good deal of time with nonhuman animals, including this

author, would readily say that nonhuman animals reasonably seem to have

an inner life that they are capable of communicating to a greater or

lesser extent depending on the particular case. I agree completely with

Zerzan that “It is not ‘anthropomorphic’ to recognize that animals

play”[10]; and that we also can only loosely speculate what these inner

lives are like, as “we do not know how to even comprehend

consciousnesses different from our own.”

Where Zerzan errs, heavily and repeatedly, is his flagrant and

nonsensical moralizing that dominates the piece. He seems to wish to

tell us, implicitly, the following: that we should value animals because

they exemplify our popularly held morals, as he lists a number of cases

of animals seemingly championing them; but also that we should view

animals as moral exemplars, models of behavior, as “we are lost, but

animals point to the right road.” Besides the odd circularity inherent

in this bifurcated claim that undermines its entire thrust (animals are

good because they follow moral X; moral X is good because animals follow

it), it is easy to find a number of counterexamples for every moral

example Zerzan deploys.

Though he acknowledges, seemingly anticipating a critique like mine,

that “All is not sweetness and light in the non-human realm,” he softens

this admittance by adding “especially in this shaken and disturbed

world”, as though the human, somehow causa sui, were perhaps really to

blame. He proceeds to make this caveat close to meaningless by using the

bulk of his essay to enumerate cases of non-human organisms exhibiting

behaviors in line with liberal humanism or Christian ethics.

Hierarchy & Domination in Non-Humans

As an anarchist, Zerzan of course desires a world without formal

hierarchy; he seeks to find animals, needlessly, to validate this desire

– as though it were not sufficient for him to simply desire it, but that

it instead needed to be written in the cosmos to be legitimate – and

thus offers a repudiation of the commonly held idea of animal pecking

order. It may indeed be the case that domestication induces hierarchy in

some animals in whom it does not exist in the wild, such as has been

recently observed with the behavior of wolves versus dogs. There are

nonetheless numerous cases of dominating behavior in wild organisms.

Many parasitoids[11] seize control of their hosts’ bodies, ending their

reproductive possibilities through death or debilitation: barnacles of

the genus Sacculina castrate their crab hosts in order to hijack their

bodies, including their sex organs, for reproduction; the Gordian Worm

larva inhabits an arthropod host and, maturing, forces the host to drown

itself so that the adult worm may erupt from its dead body to reach an

aquatic habitat; and wasps of the genus Ichneumonidae inject their eggs

and symbiotic viruses into other insect larvae, restricting their

metamorphosis and creating abnormally large larvae that, like bloated

cattle, are gradually devoured alive by the maturing Ichneumon

larvae[12]. Similar behavior exists in diverse organisms, the behavior

having developed numerous times among creatures not closely related to

one another: mollusks, nematodes, flatworms, and so on, including

non-animals like fungi and viruses.

Besides the parasitic dimension, the social Hymenoptera (colonial bees,

wasps, and ants) exhibit caste societies with a rigid division of labor

and violent enforcement of hierarchy via physical mutilation, ritualized

dominance/submission social interactions, infanticide, and other forms

of what entymologists actually dub “policing”. Again, similar eusocial,

hierarchical behavior is exhibited by non-Hymenopteran insects like

termites as well as non-insects like certain crustaceans – creatures

that are not directly related evolutionarily – suggesting that, like

parasitoidalism, domination is a tendency that life produces again and

again, an eddy that the organic regularly recapitulates. There is thus

nothing to be gained from looking at animals in some generalized way in

order to legitimate our desires for anarchy.

Patriarchy, Sexuality, & Gender Relations in Non-Humans

Patriarchy is a repugnant aspect of the dominant culture that seems to

lie at the core of Civilization, perhaps being among the first forms of

alienation and generative of the compulsory division of labor[13] [ed. –

also see Return Fire vol.2 pg6]. Any thoroughgoing anarchist analysis

demands a critique of it, but Zerzan seems to think, again, that we need

to look to nonhumans to rationalize this critique – this venture is a

useless one, as gendered behavior among animals reveals itself to be a

riotous smorgasbord of possibilities.

Among our closest relatives, despite Zerzan’s highlighting of lioness

hunting and elk matriarchy, the overwhelming majority of mammals are

polygynous, often with harem-holding male dominance and sexual

dimorphism that leaves the male considerably larger, stronger, and more

aggressive. Perhaps the starkest example is that of the elephant seal,

in which males violently compete for harems of females numbering up to

the hundreds.

In a variety of invertebrates, again having evolved repeatedly in

diverse phyla, mating takes place through traumatic insemination, in

which a spined – literally weaponized – penis pierces the female’s body

to deliver sperm directly to her viscera. One theory for why this

vicious method evolved is to bypass mating plugs, an adhesive substance

secreted by penises to literally glue a female’s reproductive tract

closed after mating in order to block the sperm of competing males. I

thus shudder at the brazenly general sentiment that “animals[...] are

the right road.”

Moreover, even engaging in comparative gender relations among the

incomprehensible diversity of nonhumans is a close to useless endeavor

given the incommensurability of gender across species. In a great many

animals, particularly many arthropods but also certain vertebrates like

hyenas, females are physically larger and stronger, more socially and

sexually dominant, and longer-lived, inverting the physical and social

power relations characteristic of patriarchal humanity. And a good deal

of genderfucking is present with the abundance of hermaphroditism and

sex-changing among nonhuman animals – a huge diversity of animals are

capable of changing their sexual organs to make the best of their

conditions. One is moved to wonder what could possibly be gained by

making human value inferences from beings so different from ourselves,

most of whom are indifferent to these human values.

Coupled with Zerzan’s appeals to anti-patriarchy is a shockingly

Christian sentimentalism for monogamy, as he cites geese and gibbons

favorably for their long-term coupling. Why Zerzan is implicitly

praising a human institution so closely associated with patriarchy,

intimate abuse [ed. – see Return Fire vol.1 pg46], and commodity culture

is bemusing prima facie; but his information is also simply wrong, as

this proposition has been debunked along with so many others about

nonhuman monogamy: studies since the late 70s have found that, for the

goose, “promiscuity is a part of the repertoire of yet another seemingly

monogamous bird.” An estimated 95-97% of mammals are similarly

nonmonogamous. In contrast, ruffs, wetland birds in the sandpiper

family, mate in a manner resemblant of a queer bacchanal that, I must

say, were I ever to eschew my aversion to being prescriptive and morally

reifying nonhumans, would be what I wish more of us would consider to be

“the right road”: among these highly promiscuous birds, there are three

different male phenotypes, including a female-resembling male that the

very masculine, domineering male phenotype will mate with, both topping

and bottoming, seemingly because the homoeroticism attracts the

attention of observing females and entices them to join the orgy.

Zerzan similarly cites examples of animal familiality, devotion, and

parental care – and, certainly, these exist, but only as some among a

great many. With parenting and devotion, there is the octopus mother who

starves herself, often fatally, vigilantly defending her young; all

around her are the numerous and variegated marine organisms –

cnidarians, mollusks, fish, crustaceans, etc. – engaging in the

zero-parenting that is broadcast fertilization, in which eggs and sperm

are both expelled into the water, the resultant zygotes carried away for

a planktonic larval existence in which many are sure to perish. As far

as familiality, we see on the one hand the whipspider mother who watches

over her eggs and then carries her young on her back while, strikingly

among arthropods, she seems to affectionately caress them. On the other

hand, we see the cannibalism among young sharks and strepsiptera

(parasitic insects who superficially resemble flies), who devour their

siblings before even leaving the egg or their mother’s body,

respectively; the incest among certain insects; and the parasitic

parenting of cuckoos and certain insects, whose parents leave their

offspring to be cared for by other species, as these host species

mistake them for their own young through cloaking mechanisms.

There is thus among the animals no model for egalitarian gender

relations and the ideal family. There is only an incredible variety of

genders, gendered behavior, and familial relations that highlight how

arbitrary human norms are at any particular time or place. If the world

offers us no model, why can we not choose our own without recourse to

it?

Mercy & Indifference

Continuing with Christian sentimentalism, Zerzan attempts to declaw the

wolf, and perhaps predators in general, by saying it may be the case

that “wolves only kill animals that are near their end anyway – the old,

sick, injured”. Though hedged as a supposition, it is difficult not to

see Zerzan attempting to soften predation into a world of mercy and

remorse. And, again, he cherry-picks his evidence to find the

conclusions he wants, ignoring readily available counter-examples. A

2009 observation of Canis Lupus[14] in a region in which they had a

variety of potential prey found, based on sampling the wolves’ scat,

that 96.4% of the scat held remains of either roe deer or wild boar,

thus indicating the wolves’ primary prey. Of the prey, 74.1% of the roe

deer and 84.2 % of the wild boar were juveniles, less than a year old.

Over time, the wolves took turns targeting the roe deer and the wild

boar, each during its birthing period, for the reasons one might expect:

“The positive selection of young roe deer and wild boar may be

considered opportunist behaviour, because the individuals of this age

class are easier to capture than adults due to their inexperience.”

Indeed, “Roe deer fawns are left alone by their mothers for long periods

of time, making them even more vulnerable to wolf predation[...]” Mercy,

it ain’t – babynapping, rather. The authors had occasion to cite six

previous studies, ranging from 1970 to 2004, that supported the

conclusion that wolves target vulnerable juveniles preferentially. One

might reasonably infer, as others have, that they might target the

elderly and ill for the same reasons – simple ease and opportunism. Far

from experiencing mercy or remorse, the manner in which wolf pups play

at hunting to gradually increase their skills suggests to me that the

wolf feels hunger, desire, joy, and exhilaration as it hunts and kills.

Of course, Zerzan is likely motivated by a desire to redeem the wolf

from its popular demonization as infinitely murderous, killing without

even the need to eat. To make such a case, I much prefer Farley Mowat,

who, besides indicting human civilization as being the real mindless

killer, writes at the conclusion of his loosely autobiographical novel

Never Cry Wolf, “Somewhere to the eastward a wolf howled[...] for me, it

was a voice which spoke of the lost world that was once ours, before we

chose the alien role, a world which I had glimpsed and almost

entered[...]” Mowat here redeems the besmirched wolf not by apologizing

for its killing, but rather by pointing at what seems a beautiful

intimacy between the wolf and its world. Similarly, in a theme exhibited

throughout his work, Nietzsche [ed. – see Return Fire vol.2 pg52] saw in

animality (including uncivilized humans) a kind of profound, child-like

innocence; not a moral innocence of being gentle, humble, and meek, all

of which he clearly despised, but an innocence of unmediated life in

which one is in tune with their senses, makes no apologies for their

instincts, and is unafraid to grasp immediate joy.

Gaianismed. – see Invasive . & Misanthropy as Closeted Humanism &

Anthropocentrism

At times, Zerzan exhibits nothing so much as his apparent biological

ignorance. He writes, oddly misanthropically for someone who repudiates

misanthropy, “We are the top of the food chain, which makes us the only

animal nobody needs.” Besides the term food chain (Zerzan will later,

inexplicably, use this same term in sneer quotes, as though he finds it

unbelievable) being a bit of a misnomer – it is only one aspect of a

food web, used to organize organisms into trophic levels, that is

sometimes misleadingly employed to rank organisms in an Aristotelian

Great Chain of Being-esque manner[15] – one is moved by Zerzan’s

statement to ask whether he has ever heard of dust and face mites,

roundworms, flukes, or tapeworms, to name only a few and those very

broadly, or, if we extend beyond animals, any number of decomposers,

human gut flora, mitochondria, and so on ad nauseam. Zerzan is most

definitely aware of the evidence that North American Indians interacted

with their forest ecosystems so as to create pockets of sub-climax

forest succession zones that increased biodiversity in the forest as a

whole[16], so why is he playing these self-shaming rhetorical games?

What is such a misanthropy except another form of human exceptionalism,

another way of making the human the one and only Other who stands apart

from everything else? As the Invisible Committee notes, referencing the

anthropocentrism motivating the widespread move toward naming our era

the Anthropocene, “For the last time, [Man] assigns himself [sic] the

main role, even if it’s to accuse himself of having trashed everything –

the seas and the skies, the ground and what’s underground – even if it’s

to confess his guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and

animal species.”

Underlying all of the problems outlined so far, moreover, is the deeper

question of anthropomorphism that Zerzan uses to frame the entire piece.

Zerzan quotes Henry Beston's apt statement, “For the animal shall not be

measured by man”, but he seems not to take it to heart. Yes, of course

it is a mistake to have such an intense allergy to anthropomorphism that

one is averse to the abduction that nonhuman animals are conscious –

such an attitude suggests massive alienation. But Zerzan has tumbled

over the edge into an anthropocentrism that projects his own morality

onto the nonhuman world. As I write elsewhere of his friend and frequent

collaborator Kevin Tucker, Zerzan has committed the same error as the

ancient Stoics: he rejects anthropocentrism, but, in doing so, he is in

fact anthropocentric in a roundabout way.

Zerzan indicts others for projecting pecking order, Freudianism [ed. –

for example, in Animal Dreams, that “the fallacy that the Freudian

paradigm of murderous rivalry between fathers and sons represents the

state of nature”], and hierarchy onto the nonhuman world, but he does

the very same with his own values; once he has painted the nonhuman

biosphere a color of his liking, obscuring and pretending not to notice

its incredible variation, he swears his allegiance to it. He asks,

posing as the ingénue after his obfuscation, “Might it not be that

nature is for the happiness of all species, not just one?” I reply by

asking what is this “nature” that is somehow different than the gestalt

“of all species” and the world’s abiotic elements they inhabit and

cocreate; and what would it mean for this totality to be “for” anything,

as though the gestalt of innumerable valuing beings could somehow

emergently value something in and of itself or, even if it did, that we

could somehow comprehend this evaluation? Like Tucker, Zerzan has

regularly distanced himself from the Left and has written apt criticisms

of it[17], yet he is still operating on the same Manichaean logic that

has characterized most forms of anarchism and leftism since their

earliest days. Bakunin[18] saw human beings, originating in the

objective good of Nature, as essentially moral until they were corrupted

by the unnaturalness of the State; Zerzan extends this line of thinking

by exalting the as-yet-uncorrupted nonhuman animals as moral exemplars.

To Love the Inhuman

Since I was a very young child, for as long as I can remember, I have

been fascinated by nonhuman organisms. The stranger, the more inhuman a

creature was, the more I loved it – it fascinated me to know, for

example, that a creature like a schistosome (a blood fluke that

parasitizes first snails, then mammals during its lifecycle, eventually

inhabiting a blood capillary) has a life incomprehensibly different from

my own: sensing mostly through smell, metamorphosing multiple times,

living as though “a vein is a river”[19], and mating perpetually as an

adult. I am surrounded by aliens who are yet my kin, each enclosed in

its own umwelt, such that the world is a nigh-infinite array of mutually

mysterious yet mutually informing perceptual universes that are

constantly spilling into one another. To call that vast and mysterious

gestalt either good or bad, something to be either followed or rejected,

is the greatest philosophical impropriety, as it entails tremendously

overstepping what can be known or evaluated.

The only reaction that seems appropriate is something like Nietzsche’s

Dionysian Pessimism, “a general approbation of the real in all its

chaotic and cruel presence”[20], because it is strange and lovely,

awesome and ecstatic to be alive – one is moved to joy despite the

purposelessness and lack of objective value one readily perceives. I

relish that my body eats and shits, fucks and rots, pointlessly – that

it dissolves other creatures into it, annihilating their consciousnesses

even as a myriad of new bodies and minds erupt from my effluence and

will erupt from my dead flesh. I recall once when I, having just fucked

in the Hambacher Forest [ed. – see Rebels Behind Bars; Some Light on the

Investigation Leading to the Imprisonment of the Comrade Arrested on

April 13th], watched as several flies descended to start feeding on my

ejaculate within maybe ten seconds – that is Dionysian Pessimism. In

short, to love the inhuman, do not preach to it or of it – simply accept

it as such, and revel in that acceptance.

[1] ed. – Despite finding quite a bit of common ground with some who

describe themselves as “primitivists”, we have a strong dislike for the

terminology itself. The notion that the lifeways of pre-industrial

peoples were “primitive” is present-centric, reductionist, and (if we

measure 'complexity' in terms not defined by the dominant techno-logic

and recognise the depth of methods and rituals employed by such peoples)

simply inaccurate. Primitivists also often display a tendency to

cherry-pick the parts deemed 'relevant' (in a utilitarian sense) to an

anarcho-primitivist ideology while ignoring or underplaying the many

other parts which said cultures used to understand and navigate their

world; an operation more befitting colonialism and its particular

scientific gaze. Additionally, this framing runs into the immediate

problem of surviving cultures which are not civilised: “The use of the

term “primitive” – which means “first” or “early” – for societies that

have existed into modern times without developing civilization carries

some questionable assumptions. How can societies that exist now be

“first” or “early”? Did they just now appear? In a living world that is

in constant flux, have they somehow remained static and unchanging? Can

human development only happen one way – as the development of

civilization? Besides, which of these societies is the genuine

“primitive” one? They are certainly not all alike, or even all that

similar. Homogeneity is a trait of civilization, not of these other

social realities” (Wolfi Landstreicher).

[2] Reification is a term that has been used in closely related, but

nonetheless significantly different ways in the history of critical

theory. A particularly well-developed definition is articulated by Jason

McQuinn in his “Critical Self-Theory” essay in the third issue of Modern

Slavery, too lengthy to cite in its entirety here. Going beyond the

typical understanding of reification as the phenomenon in which an

abstract idea is concretized, McQuinn notes that reification “includes

two correlative moments[…] On the one side an activity is reduced to a

passive object, and on the other side the activity that is removed from

the then passively-constructed object is projected onto a symbolic

agent.”

[3] ed. – A renegade of Russian nobility born in the late 19th Century,

this anarchist was also a prominent naturalist scientist of the day,

author of the famous book 'Mutual Aid'. “Under the spell of [Charles]

Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Kropotkin has sought in vain across all

Siberia for keen competition between creatures of the same species. In

place of it, he has witnessed a thousand different manifestations of

mutual support; perhaps the latter is a more decisive factor in survival

than competition per se. The only exceptions he can think of are among

his own people: bureaucracies that resist improvement, regimes that

stifle their subjects, prisons that deform rather than reform”

(Anarchists Traveling Through History, Part II: Kropotkin Escapes). This

work he combined with his organising with secret councils of

revolutionaries (who later assassinated the Tsar of Russia), for which

he was imprisoned, before being broken out during a hospital stay and

escaping to England, where he continued his naturalism publishing.

[4] “Episode 61: Hail Satan; It’s a Beautiful World” and “Episode 66:

Make Total Destroy, and Bring Us the Champagne”, Free Radical Radio,

11/07/2014 and 12/10/2014

[5] “Alexander Dunlap on Alvaro Obregon”, Free Radical Radio, 06/07/2015

[6] Many discussions of civilization are hampered by a lack of a clear

definition of the subject. Briefly, by civilization, I mean a way of

human life characterized by the growth of cities, areas of urban

population sufficiently dense as to require the routine importation of

food from corresponding rural surroundings characterized by agriculture.

Civilized life generally includes all of the following, to varying

degrees: collective activity tightly organized around a linear and

numerical conception of time; a high level of ritual and symbolic

culture; complex and explicit social hierarchy; political

representation; the formation of a State, which attempts to monopolize

the use of physical violence and delegitimize non-State violence;

bureaucracy; compulsory labor (work); and societal mores and ideology

rationalizing racial or cultural supremacy, dominance of Nature, and

social progress [ed. – see Return Fire vol.1 pg11]. Civilized persons

are characterized by highly reified thought, as Civilization itself is

largely a set of reifications intersubjectively constructed by persons

acting in social roles that create and maintain corresponding

infrastructure. To be anti-civilization, then, is to be

anti-reification; it thus is at least prima facie suspect to be in some

way for a different set of reifications.

[7] “Corrosive Consciousness, Part I: How One Might Profane Green

Platonism”, Black Seed, vol. 4, Spring 2015.

[8] The mere need for an international assembly of scientists in 2012 to

sign a document declaring that at least some nonhuman animals are in

fact conscious (“The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness”) is a

testament to this incredible alienation.

[9] The ancient Problem of Other Minds – the fact that we ultimately

have no way of knowing, of directly experiencing, the consciousness of

other beings – is ultimately indissoluble. A difference of species does

not change the problem fundamentally. Because we routinely assume other

humans are subjects of a life, it is just as reasonable to do the same

with at least some nonhumans.

[10] All unreferenced quotes following this one are from Zerzan’s

“Animal Dreams” piece.

[11] Parasitoids are organisms who, like parasites, spend a significant

portion of their life upon or within a host organism that they use for

some combination of food, shelter, and transportation. Unlike parasites,

parasitoids necessarily kill, devour, or sterilize their hosts to

complete their lifecycle. They are my favorite counterexample to the

moralization of nonhumans, due to the fact that their behavior is often

quite horrific from a Christian/humanist perspective - so much so, in

fact, that no less a figure than Charles Darwin was moved to write of

them to one of his colleagues: “I own that I cannot see as plainly as

others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and

beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the

world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God

would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express

intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars[…]”

Here we see Darwin resisting a metaphysical flight from the real that

David Bell describes in the epigraph.

[12] Interestingly, Zerzan brings up the ichneumon, referring to it

imprecisely as a fly [ichneumon are Hymenopterans, closely related to

other wasps, bees, sawflies, and ants; they are not Dipterans, the true

flies], in order to showcase its marvelous senses; he avoids bringing up

its reproductive cycle that might turn moralistic stomachs.

[13] The earliest known monument, Goebekli Tepe, depicts numerous erect

penises prominently, seemingly as signs of masculine power. Zerzan

himself has suggested that patriarchy may have generated the first

division of labor in his “Patriarchy, Civilization, and the Origins of

Gender”.

[14] Barja, Isabel. “Prey and prey-age preference by the Iberian wolf

Canis lupus signatus in a multiple-prey ecosystem” Wildlife Biology,

vol. 15

[15] ed. – Aristotle's hierarchical view of the universe was re-earthed

by Christian theologians during the Middle Ages, and remained

influential through to the birth of the modern era. God sits at the top

of this pyramid, followed by angels, then men, then women, then

'primitives', then animals, then plants, then rocks, then sand, then

soil etc. In the inherently body-hating tradition that Christian faith

coveys, those at the top are perfect, while those at the bottom are

imperfect (soil being all 'body' and no 'soul', whereas God is all soul

and no body). We could say that in secular modernity, now abstract

scientific law has replaced God at the top of this still-accepted

pyramid, and that machines (who live forever and don't make 'human

error') have replaced angels between God and 'men'...

[16] Jacke, Dave and Toensmeier, Eric. Edible Forest Gardens [ed. –

also, see Invasive].

[17] Consider his “The Left? No Thanks!” as well as his excellent

examinations of the historical role of unions in Elements of Refusal.

[18] ed. – Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, another influential 19th

Century anarchist from Russia and bitter foe of its imperialism in east

and central Europe (amongst that by other powers). Deported from France,

apprehended in Dresden for participation in a Czech rebellion of 1848,

and imprisoned in Russia before escaping to Japan, the U.S. and then

Europe, where he joined insurrections such as that in Lyon, France,

1870.

[19] The quote is taken from Zimmer, Carl. Parasite Rex.

[20] Bell, David F. Introduction to Joyful Cruelty by Clément Rosset.