John Zerzan, Primitivism, and the Value of Culture
Autor: Rodrigo Guim | Publicado: 2017-01-28T17:33:00-08:00






John
Zerzan, Primitivism, and the Value of Culture 



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Rodrigo Gomes Guimarães<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]-->







Abstract



&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This essay
discusses primitivism as presented by John Zerzan, its most reported author on
the subject at the moment.&nbsp; It seeks to
show how primitivism as proposed by Zerzan cannot stand up to its own critiques
to culture, agriculture, technology, time and civilization, besides others. The
concepts of the “primitive” and of the “hunter-gatherer” are also scrutinized
as to their use in academia today, a use that forbids any facile generalization
by primitivists or others.&nbsp; It provides
an analysis of how Zerzan’s primitivism deals with power relations, understood
through the writings of two thinkers (Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault),
and anarchist authors. The essay shows how primitivism cannot escape being a
struggle for power.&nbsp; Primitivism is also
analyzed as a cultural discourse, (re)productive of the values and ways of
thinking of dominant culture, no matter how it may be also resistant to these
same values and ways of thinking.&nbsp; The
essay questions the assumption of anarchism as lodged “in the bones”, which
characterizes primitivism but also many other anarchist claims. It points to
cultural traditions of thought and their effects, especially those pertaining
to the analysis of primitivism and anarchism, such as the primacy of human
interiority over action in the world, a very specific Western cultural
construct.&nbsp; More generally, the essay
questions primitivism as anarchist and debases its claims to a total radical
thought by showing its forms of reproduction of dominant Western culture.&nbsp; Finally, it argues that John Zerzan and
primitivism in his manner need to be radically shifted to think from real life
instead of from Utopia, since today his ideas spring more from resentment and
bad conscience than from active engagement with the problems – social, cultural
and environmental – of the world today.















To sow and to harvest in personal deficiencies. - Men as
Rousseau know how to use their weaknesses, gaps and vices as manure for their
talent, so to speak. When he laments the corruption and degeneration of society
as a sad consequence of culture, this has at its base the personal experience;
the bitterness of that provides sharpness to his general conviction and poisons
the arrows that he shoots; he un-oppresses himself initially as an individual,
and thinks about searching a remedy that is useful directly for society, but
also indirectly, by the way of it, for himself.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Friedrich Nietzsche,
1886.



What Primitivism?

This essay will contest primitivism on the foundations it set for itself
by one of its major proponents, John Zerzan, as well as analyze it as cultural
discourse.&nbsp; It will do this by appealing
to different social thinkers: Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and
anarchist authors.&nbsp; It will also rely on
primitivist texts and its own internal contradictions.&nbsp; It will begin by presenting John Zerzan.

Zerzan was born in Salem, Oregon.&nbsp;
He pursued an academic career for a long while, obtaining an
undergraduate degree from Stanford University, a master degree from San
Francisco State University, and dropped out of University of Southern
California before completing his doctoral dissertation.&nbsp; He participated of the 60’s hippie and counter-cultural
movement in San Francisco, having been willingly arrested for protesting
against the Vietnam war.&nbsp; This was an
experience he never again got involved in, which he regretted.&nbsp; In that same decade he also helped organize a
worker’s union, to which he was elected vice-president and later,
president.&nbsp; During this period he was
called a “leftist bureaucrat” by a Situationism-inspired group and later became
himself a thorough reader of the Situationists.&nbsp;
Years later he came in contact with the work of Fredy Perlman, David
Watson and others.&nbsp; He was in a move to
have his whole past renounced: his belief in academic life, in union struggles
and leftist movements in general.&nbsp; The political
trajectory of John Zerzan is a progressive negation, a progressive renunciation
of his own past, his own life.&nbsp; Deeply
frustrated with his own political actions and the responses he received, he
found in primitivism a site to negate everything, and this is exactly what he
has preached, as we will see. 

Over the last 20 years, primitivism came to be explored with enthusiasm
by Zerzan.&nbsp; He found places to divulge
this enthusiasm in journals from the United States such as Green Anarchy, Anarchy: A
Journal of Desire Armed,
and Fifth Estate.&nbsp;&nbsp; He has been part of the Green Anarchy Collective, based in Eugene, Oregon, where he
currently lives.&nbsp; His major influences
include Anthropology and Archaeology, choosing among from many of its different
and even contradictory studies the ones that suit his theories.&nbsp;&nbsp; He was also very influenced by the Luddites
in their struggle against unemployment and their practice of machine-wrecking.&nbsp;&nbsp; His other major influences include Marxist
and anarchist analysis, Western critiques of capitalism, ecological concerns,
indigenous cultures, Deep Ecology; we have no space to describe all here.&nbsp; There is also a major influence on
primitivism, from the so-called green anarchy, which really is an overall label
for various tendencies.&nbsp; It is widely
argued that primitivism is a form of green anarchy, primitivism being the more
“radical” wing because of its more wide-range negation of human culture in
general, with the exception of foragers or other few indigenous cultures.&nbsp; However, this assertion is contested by many
green anarchists and primitivists, who each argue that their own current of
thought and action has little to do with the other’s, so they should be
considered apart.

Naturism, vegetarianism, nature cults, all have been recurrent as
lifestyle, identity politics in Western societies in the 20th
century.&nbsp; In the United States, the West
Coast has been the greatest harbinger of such forms of culture.&nbsp; In this vein, primitivism has been able to
flourish.&nbsp; Anarchism, traditionally a
worker’s political movement, has been co-opted by lifestylists for quite some
time, at least since the early 20th century, in their claim for
representing True anarchism.&nbsp;
Primitivists today may be found abiding to these same lifestyle choices,
though sometimes they may be unrecognizable, by their partaking of all the
privileges of the American way of life.&nbsp;
That is why here I will focus on primitivism according to John Zerzan,
because to write about primitivism in the US for example, we need to take into
account lifestyle anarchists and their claim as primitivists, besides all other
competing claims to primitivism in writing: that would be a huge research in
itself.&nbsp; 

The global justice movement (or anti-corporate globalization movement if
you wish) has brought about a renewed interest in anarchism.&nbsp; For one, this has happened due to anarchists
having been appearing – sometimes in awful ways, such as the killing of an
Italian anarchist in Genova, in 2001 – more and more in the media
worldwide.&nbsp; In the United States,
particularly in the West Coast, where traditionally the environmental movement
and lifestyle forms of resistance has dominated within white middle- and
upper-class people, the acts of resistance against corporate and state power
have brought a falsely divulged notion that anarchism is against everything,
that it is for wholesale chaos, a notion deeply embedded in dominant society. 

Primitivism
as proposed by John Zerzan can be explained as the rejection of everything but Nature.
Michael Albert, an American anarchist and proponent of Parecon,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]-->
sums up the principles of Zerzan’s primitivism and reasons why it has attracted
so much attention: 

“Terminating just short of
this species suicide, Zerzan’s agenda, or hope, seems to me to be that we
should end divisions of labor, reject technology, discard institutions, silence
language, eliminate numbers, reject time, and perhaps dispense
consciousness--though not reproduction--returning to prehistoric relations. And
the mainstream media says Zerzan is an exemplar of anarchism. No wonder.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--> 



The perspectives brought to bear on primitivism in this article pay
homage to the traditions of resistance within anarchism, particularly to the
last two centuries of its history.&nbsp; I
contest primitivism here through the lens of a thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche,
who Zerzan likes very much but that he, like the Nazis, has been using out of
context and without reference to the vastness of his work, selecting small
phrases that fit his dogma. The funny thing is that this is being done with one
of the most anti-dogmatic thinkers that we know of.&nbsp; This is no surprise, though, for as even
Nietzsche recognized, truth has to be violently obtained.&nbsp; I will also contest Zerzan based on Michel
Foucault, who he outrightly rejects, and anarchist authors such as Mikhail
Bakunin, with whom he has a contradictory relationship, agreeing to the
principle of the rejection of authoritarianism, but disagreeing on most other
issues, such as the relationship to specialized knowledge, to nature and
freedom.&nbsp; 

Author David Watson has written on how Zerzan became more “radical” with
time.&nbsp; We should note that radicalism has
no one single definition; because it is a political term it is doomed to be
politically situated and contested.&nbsp;
Watson means that Zerzan and other authors such as John Moore have
defined primitivism in ways that create a false total coherence for that
current of thought.&nbsp; In an essay where he
distanced himself from primitivism a la
Zerzan and John Moore titled “Swamp Fever”, Watson wrote; “Phrases like
“From the perspective of anarcho-primitivism” and “according to
anarcho-primitivists” abound. Moore also marginalizes crucial, definitive
differences between ostensible members of this apocryphal school.”

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Primitivism has championed in
gathering attention as media representative of anarchism, particularly after
Ted Kaczynsky - “the Unabomber” - was publicly supported in his actions by John
Zerzan in a piece that appeared in The
New York Times.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Zerzan likes media attention because, as many
Western metaphysicians like himself, he believes that when Truth appears, there
is nothing to keep it from progressively taking over.&nbsp;&nbsp; If Truth appears through destruction, so be
it.&nbsp; If people are killed in the process,
what a shame!&nbsp; The objective of history,
though, is higher than these occasional misfires (any semblance to discourses
of the American government on “collateral damage” is not occasional here).&nbsp; Zerzan expresses in many of his writings the
conviction that history is a progression towards primitivism.&nbsp; So any time primitivism is being discussed is
for him a sign towards this future.&nbsp;
Those who already know primitivism will have perceived irony here, since
the words just used to explain it, such as history, progression, time and sign,
are some of the things Zerzan wishes to abolish in total for primitivism to
flourish.&nbsp; However, the only things he
has been able to co-opt, maybe misdirect, are serious discussions on anarchism
and its different legacies.&nbsp; The various
forms of media, when discussing anarchism, have tended to rely on
long-established prejudices and misconceptions, taking one branch of self-named
anarchism for anarchism as a whole.&nbsp; The
same piece in The New York Times came
to define what they called “the anarchist movement” as “a small and obscure
network of intellectuals, labor organizers and political idealists who share a
darkly apocalyptic view of Western civilization.”&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 

Primitivism
has a discursive force for it being a rejection of desires, and for this very
same reason, as Nietzsche has shown in the case of Christianity, it establishes
itself as a strong desire.&nbsp;&nbsp; It expresses
desires that are understood as shameful for dominant Western society today,
that is why it makes those who cling to it feel a real independence of
taste.&nbsp; To those that despise these
tastes – of Nature for example – primitivism reinforces their sensations of
moral superiority.&nbsp;&nbsp; This is one reason for
primitivism’s appeal to the media in general, which breeds on polemic and discord
of taste.&nbsp; Another reason this is done is
that primitivism establishes itself as oppositional, even though it has no
party or political organization besides journals and collectives.&nbsp; It also wishes to be a sectarian
representative of the total society, and in this way it reproduces partisan
ideology.&nbsp;&nbsp; There is no need to state here how partisan ideologies are manure
for media attention.&nbsp; One other point we
can make with relation to Zerzan and his relative success as a media
spokesperson is what he has in common with the Unabomber:&nbsp; they both write metanarratives.&nbsp; Society for them is a System, a whole
thing.&nbsp;&nbsp; Their idea of a System of
Society cannot be proved nor refuted, and from this it gathers its discursive
power in a culture that prizes metanarratives. With
media attention surviving on the spectacular, as even Zerzan agrees, it should
not surprise us that his call for an end to almost everything we know as social
life, gathers so much attention.&nbsp;
Anything that appears as total rejection is something to which the general
populace, through forms of dominant culture, readily understands: it is a
normalized, naturalized discourse.&nbsp;
Zerzan reduces postmodern critiques of forms of “opposition” as
excluding resistance.&nbsp; In fact, thinkers
as Nietzsche and Foucault – if one permits me to call them here postmodern to
respond to Zerzan – have stressed that political and cultural oppositions are
common things.&nbsp; However, they have also
showed how every resistance can carry new forms of domination.&nbsp;&nbsp; It is not that you cannot have a true
political or cultural opposition; you can and should oppose –in practice-
everything that oppresses you.&nbsp; Those
thinkers remind us that some forms of social discourse and action might seem to
be a total liberation when in fact many times it is exactly for this reason
that they blind its practitioners to their internal dynamics of power and
exclude possible alternatives of even better discourses and actions of freedom.

Zerzan
asserts that the “reigning culture (...) recognizes neither origins nor
estrangement,”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--> but I
contend that precisely because dominant culture is so enamored by stories of
origins and the erasure of all doubt that Primitivism can be heard as
representative of anarchism.&nbsp; He
critiques “postmodern” reflections on the notion of conceptual
foundations.&nbsp; However, he cannot decide
on foundations himself.&nbsp; Most of his work
is written to establish the foundations of “Civilization” as the origins of
world disgrace.&nbsp; He says that the major
problem in social life today, since the birth of Civilization, is alienation, a
Marxist-Hegelian category.&nbsp; Alienation
can be seen in “time, language, number, art, agriculture.”&nbsp; He also says, continuing:&nbsp; “On the other hand, maybe there are no
foundations of alienation to be found in these categories, or anywhere else.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Below, we will question these foundations a
bit further than Zerzan does.



Time as Refusal

John
Zerzan cannot decide himself on origins.&nbsp;
He says “the beginning of time – constitutes the Fall: the initiation of
alienation, of history.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; If alienation is the beginning of time, time
is also the beginning of alienation.&nbsp;
This is the circular reflection of Zerzan throughout all of his work.&nbsp; It searches for the foundations of
alienation, finds it in time as one of these, then finds alienation again,
besides many other things, where he looked for its foundation.&nbsp; He searches for the familiar, and finds
it.&nbsp; No wonder.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Yes, time is a cultural construct,
but nothing has impeded Anthropology for example to understand other cultures
as having their own time constructs, many of these more linked to natural,
seasonal events, but still a manner of understanding time, even as
cyclical.&nbsp; Even when what a culture has
is not “what” time it is, but “what kind” of time it is, we can understand
these as different constructs of time, and through this understanding have
better cultural dialogue and thereby better survival of cultural
diversity.&nbsp; But these are not Zerzan’s
preoccupations.

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We must recognize that many forms of
social domination occur by the control of time, as Zerzan does.&nbsp; Workers have had throughout the history of
capitalism to fight for reduction of work time.&nbsp;
Today most jobs prize time over worker health.&nbsp; Capitalism still prioritizes production and
profit over quality of life.&nbsp; There is
certainly a field of discourse and power over time.&nbsp; The problem lies when Zerzan equates time
with a specific cultural construction of time, and throws the baby out with the
bathwater: “The project of annulling time and history will have to be developed
as the only hope of human liberation.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Michael Albert<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]-->
asks: “Why throw out the baby of productivity and individuality/diversity with
the bathwater of alienation/hierarchy?”

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Zerzan critiques the notion of time
as progressive. However, he clings to this very notion when he says for
example: “Our time on earth, characterized by the very opposite of those
qualities [of primitive wholeness and grace], is in deepest need of a reversal
of the dialectic that stripped the wholeness from our life as a species.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Thus, a reversal of time is what he asks for,
even though he also wants to get rid of time.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Confused?

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Nietzsche shows how the rejection of
time is a fundamental characteristic of Christianity;&nbsp; He wrote: “The ‘hour of death’ is not a Christian concept – the ‘hour’,
time, physical life and its crises, simply do not exist for the teacher of the
‘glad tidings’.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--> The
rejection of time, thus, is not at all new, it has been preached by
Christianity as one of the ways by which the whole of reality was considered as
only apparent, not real. Time is a concept Zerzan uses that reproduces the
Christian belief in the opposition of the apparent to the real, one of the main
recreations of secular Christian culture, to which Zerzan belongs but does not
reflect upon.&nbsp; 

Time
must be critiqued, as when Zerzan critiques the introduction of the use of
clocks.&nbsp; Time as managed by clocks made
things possible, including very serious forms of domination like contracts and
production that are tied to the clock, and maybe not to social necessities and
people’s desires.&nbsp; 

If
“revolution can only be redefined against progress”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]-->
as he claims, he does this very well, although in a very reactive way, and
therefore reproductive of the very same power relations he critiques.&nbsp; He goes the other way, in a progressive
counter-manner.&nbsp; The reactive character
of this is to redefine revolution against progress only.&nbsp; Thus it is to forget to redefine it based on
social and environmental needs that change, as society and nature inexorably
do, from place to place, no matter how universal a struggle might be.&nbsp; &nbsp;Finally, why would it be that to be against
progress is to look for the liberatory actions needed only in the past (or in
the beyond, the future) and not in the present?&nbsp;
Why is there such an all-out negation of the present in John Zerzan’s
primitivism?&nbsp; 



The Real of Language

We
surely can agree with Nietzsche, as cited by Zerzan, that “words dilute and
brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common.”&nbsp; However, Nietzsche could very well have ended
his commentary with the saying: nevertheless, words are necessary, and violence
towards them is necessary to make them say what one wishes. 

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For Zerzan, language is falsehood,
it is “artificial communication.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Therefore why should we believe anything that
he writes?&nbsp; He writes that there are two
kinds of human experience: the immediate, non-separate reality, and separate,
mediated experience.&nbsp; He recognizes that
time and language are historical and cultural constructions, but does this in
order to claim a higher order of being where all forms of construction fade
away, all contingencies disappear.&nbsp; It is
reality as the natural, which must be actualized for him by the annihilation of
the unnatural.&nbsp; Language itself would be
cast aside for one natural universal communication, since all forms of language
are supposedly thought-controlling, domesticating, and leading to a “world of
unfreedom.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; The expectation of a “real”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]-->
language has certainly been a tradition within many anarchist circles
worldwide.&nbsp; In Brazil this expectation
has been thrust upon Esperanto, a language created in 1887 and planned as an
international language to be used for cross-cultural communication.&nbsp; Some anarchist circles in Brazil and other
countries have stated that the use of Esperanto somehow makes people more
free.&nbsp; It is a high expectation to be
thrust to language alone.&nbsp; Clearly, there
is here a preoccupation with how power and domination permeate and work through
language.&nbsp; However, the critique is taken
to a “total” sphere, creating many more problems than it wishes to solve, since
it becomes an instrument of domination over cultural difference, with
authoritarian characteristics, for example, in the hope that the whole world
should learn to speak a language.&nbsp; If
language grants a certain amount of power over things, naming all cultural
things “Civilization” as is done by primitivists should grant us a certain
amount of power over it, and this is what primitivism does in the words of
Zerzan. However, is not his goal to end all domination?&nbsp; Can we argue that he believes there is good
domination?&nbsp; But what about all the times
he says domination is what we should get rid of? He does not know the world
outside of language, but he imagines it exists.

The
thought of “mediation” as the problem of thought, language, culture, as
falsifying of the true essence of these, in Zerzan’s work, tries to save human
nature from critique.&nbsp; If the world
outside of the self is problematic, and if there are ways that this external
world obstructs the true vision and experience of the world, what we need to do
is to annihilate these external maladies and only the good human nature will
remain, “direct experience” would win over “mediated experience”.&nbsp; This possibility is founded on the belief in
continuous history, a “system of thought” explained by Foucault<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]-->:

“Continuous history is
the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the
guarantee that everything that has eluded him will be restored to him; the
certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a
reconstituted unity; the promise that one day the subject - in the form of
historical consciousness - will once again be able to appropriate, to bring
back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by
difference, and find in them what might be called his abode.&nbsp; Making historical analysis the discourse of
the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all
historical development and all actions are the two sides of the same system of
thought.&nbsp; In this system, time is
conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments
of consciousness.”



The
world is, for primitivists, one of choices between continuous possibilities of
life. These continuous possibilities exist in a culture that possesses a
“system of thought” in which life appears as primarily defined by
consciousness.&nbsp; There is humanity that
chooses domestication, division of labor, technology, and thereby chooses the
False path, and another humanity that refuses these continuous possibilities,
choosing for itself the True and restoring its original purity.&nbsp; This is, I shall call here, “The Great
Division” of primitivism.&nbsp; It is based on
a cultural characteristic of Western culture, its fundamental duality.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Dualist discourse, so pervasive in Western
society, is where Zerzan starts from.&nbsp;
Because he speaks from within it, from a cultural discursive practice,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]-->
he is legitimated by it, becoming believable thus.&nbsp; He reproduces the very dimensions of reality
he critiques, something that we are all, precisely because there is not a
possibility of having this discussion outside of language, destined to do.&nbsp; By critiquing the fundamental dualism of
Descartes’ mind/body split, Zerzan shows his own alliance to this tradition,
his continuation of it.&nbsp; He and many
other primitivists fail to reflect upon their own cultural upbringing.&nbsp; For them, the human being is born natural,
and from childhood suffers an abandonment of the natural path of life, diverts
from what supposedly should have been.&nbsp;
All that is recognized by Zerzan as “the right way to live” is declared
instinctual, while all that is not is artificial.&nbsp; Thus he plays right into the most fundamental
dualisms of modern philosophy, from at least since Descartes until today.&nbsp; In order to play the game of the human
sciences today, in order for knowledge to be recognized as legitimate, it has
to speak in terms of the dualisms of innate
vs. acquired, nature vs. culture,
heredity vs. upbringing, etc., and
thus reproduce doctrines.&nbsp; 

Changes
can and do occur for sure in cultural matters.&nbsp;
But to claim and position oneself as a state of purity reactively
composed against a discourse such as Western dualist discourse, is to reproduce
this same discourse and its practices.&nbsp;
When he states that his thought is a better configuration of Western
dualistic interpretations of the world, he only rearranges this discourse,
still embedded in it.&nbsp; Holistic or total
representations of reality, when departing from Western dualisms, from its
metaphysics, and doing only that, can only promise to keep dualisms alive, in
discourse and in practical life.&nbsp; It is
in practice that the problems posed by dualisms must be challenged, as
practical problems, not as problems of language.

Zerzan’s
critiques go very much hand in hand with what he critiques.&nbsp; Post-structuralist - or postmodern as he
likes - thought has critiqued time, space, culture, language, etc. in human
life as stable things, declaring them contingent.&nbsp; However, Zerzan cannot live in an
uncomfortable world, where things are contingent, not just true or false, which
is a sort of comfort.&nbsp; He wants a new
cozy theory, sounding like a very capitalist enterprise.&nbsp; This explains in great part why he will
probably have ever more success at presenting himself and his ideas.&nbsp; He says “the origin of all symbolizing is
alienation.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[19]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; He denies all symbolic culture, and through
this fails to perceive how symbolism is exactly part of the reason why some cultures
have tended to reverence natural ecosystems and take relative care of them,
consciously or not.&nbsp; As Brian Oliver
Sheppard<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[20]<!--[endif]-->
cunningly noted, Zerzan’s assertion that language is a form of alienation, in
the end tries to alienate every response to this very claim.&nbsp;&nbsp; Zerzan wishes to deny language, while
playing with it, because he fears being reputed, and that is why he wants do
denigrate reason, in order to cling to his convictions.&nbsp; To cling to convictions, as Nietzsche shows,
is to believe to possess absolute truth, and to provoke violence as an effect.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[21]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; To consider culture as only symbolic is to
believe in the cultural universal, it is not to understand cultures as composed
of social practice, complex and irreducible to a unified narrative.&nbsp; It is to do metaphysics, a very specific –
Western - cultural practice that seeks to speak for all, therefore the violence
to cultural difference.



On the “Primitive”

The
discourse on the “primitive” relies on Western perceptions of itself in order
to define, to construct its Other, the “primitive.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[22]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; The notion of the “Primitive” is a cultural
bias, with its origins in Western colonization and social sciences, that
renders images and thoughts of the “primitive” as wholly oppositional to the
West.&nbsp; By this discourse, a self is
constructed for the “primitive” and by an oppositional, dualistic metaphysical
logic, another one is constructed for the Westerner, who many times is the
occult subject, or logic, in narratives.&nbsp;
This logic functioned not only in the construction of the “primitive”,
but of the “Oriental”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[23]<!--[endif]-->
as well, besides many other constructions of identities. The “whole” is an
assumption of human experience, the “oceanic,”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[24]<!--[endif]--> a
discourse that is very present in New Age, mostly white-privileged culture.

Zerzan
uses the concept “primitive” – a big bulk to put wholly different ethnicities
and cultures inside – in opposition to “Civilization”.&nbsp; This is a discourse that dominated until the
1970’s, that has become replaced both in Anthropology and Archaeology by particular
regional, ethnic, and cultural studies.&nbsp;
Zerzan thus brings to the 21st century a discourse now
overdue, with its roots in late 19th century colonialism. 

Primitivism
cannot accomplish its vision of a total turn to a life in Nature because it
does not come to terms – and could not, really, in order to remain dogmatic -
with the pleasure involved for many people, especially the socially and
economically privileged, in living in so-called “Civilization”.&nbsp; It must come to terms with its own
contradiction towards life today, when “play, freedom, affluence”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[25]<!--[endif]-->
are far from surreal aspects of a Paradise Lost, they are real in many ways for
many people, however small this group might be compared to the majority of the
people of the world.&nbsp; The lack of this
realization, or we should say, its denial, is fundamental for primitivism to
continue to believe in itself as true in every way. 



Hunter-Gatherers or Gatherer-Hunters?

Sure,
we want more play, joy, nature, many of us at least do.&nbsp; And sure, the images of a very different form
of life refresh our imagination, have done so maybe since the first encounters
between different cultures. Sure, we can learn a lot form other cultures: how
to think, to live, to relate to nature, and that is why, after graduating with an
Ecology degree I went on to study Anthropology, which Zerzan likes very much,
despite his guilt for it having to be written in “civilized” language.&nbsp; Anthropology, maybe more than any other
academic discipline, has taught us to understand difference in complex
ways.&nbsp; It has taught us that any name we
may give to a certain group, any attempt to label or describe human groups and
communities always fails to accomplish its task satisfactorily.&nbsp;&nbsp; Human cultures are internally divergent, and
many cultures or societies that look, sound, have customs alike may diverge
radically on specific points.&nbsp; This is
why the task of the anthropologist nowadays has become extremely difficult and
problematic, and has been revalued in many ways.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[26]<!--[endif]-->

Within
the current discussions of Anthropology, it is not wholly acceptable to say
that “forager band and agriculturalist village are opposed societies with
opposed values.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[27]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; This is to disregard cultural variety, since
many other cultural forms exist, and resource use is not the only possible
characterization of societies.&nbsp; Many
societies were and are real hunter-gatherers, with the importance put on
hunting, such as the Shavante, with whom I lived between 1999 and 2000.&nbsp; This culture, however marginalized by
Brazilian society and made sedentary by force at least from the 1960’s,
maintains a tradition of hunting since time unknown.&nbsp; In the 1950’s, when the Shavante were still a
nomadic people, anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[28]<!--[endif]-->
noted: “I have never met a Shavante who would not drop everything to go after
wildpig and Pahiriwa was no exception.”&nbsp;
The Shavante are also a very war-geared people, they have managed to
survive until this day with a considerable population (more than ten thousand
people) in great part because of their fierceness.&nbsp; 

Life
with the Shavante is hard.&nbsp; Today,
everything is changing, with all the ills that come from culture not surviving
changes coming or even imposed by interethnic contact.&nbsp; Maybury-Lewis<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[29]<!--[endif]-->
describes his experience: 

“I sometimes felt, when I was
alone with the Shavante encampment, like a limpet on a rock.&nbsp; The whole universe seemed to be made up of
hardness.&nbsp; The ground we slept on was
hard.&nbsp; The food we ate was hard and had
to be torn apart by fierce teeth or held captive in the mouth and sawn off with
a knife.&nbsp; The glare was hard by day and
the cold was hard by night.&nbsp; The ways
were hard to travel, hard underfoot as we approached high summer and hard to
tear a path through.”



Compare
the fieldwork of anthropologists with the imagination of Zerzan, which follows
another path: “Eden was clearly the home of the hunter-gatherers and the
yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that of
disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative
ease.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[30]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Zerzan wants us to believe that foragers
always lived peaceful lives, with no war or struggles for foraging territories
or group conflicts, plus a life of comfort.&nbsp;
Nevertheless, conflict in hunter-gatherer societies not only has existed
between different ethnicities, but also, and sometimes mainly, between
political/familial groups of the same ethnicity.&nbsp; Maybury-Lewis - and myself as well during my
stay with the Shavante - witnessed conflict between different families of the
same ethnic group.&nbsp;&nbsp; A major anthropological
work on the subject of tribal wars was written by Lawrence H. Keeley, who
affirms: “Even today, most views concerning prehistoric (and tribal) war and
peace reflect two ancient and enduring myths: progress and the golden age.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[31]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Zerzan harshly critiques the former, only to
embrace the latter myth.&nbsp; The myth of
progress is the belief that in the primitive condition, violence, war, and
ignorance prevailed.&nbsp; It is the belief of
Hobbes.&nbsp; On the other hand, the myth of
the golden age presupposes a Fall from natural grace.&nbsp; It is the myth of Montaigne, Rousseau, and
present-day romantics such as Zerzan.&nbsp;
They can be precisely defined as myths if by this we mean a full-blown
exaggeration suited to a particular tradition (of thought in those
examples).&nbsp; For us not to enter into
details here as to the relationships between these myths, suffice it to say
here that Rousseau’s Noble Savage was a direct, reactive response to
Hobbes.&nbsp; It was created as an
oppositional myth.&nbsp; If Hobbes contended
that humans are naturally cruel, Rousseau responded that at base, in its
natural state, the human being is gentle.&nbsp;
As Keeley showed, peaceful societies cannot be claimed to having been
the norm in human history.&nbsp; Perhaps quite
the contrary is true.&nbsp; Even the !Kung
bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, much acclaimed by Zerzan as a peaceful people,
had “homicide rate from 1920 to 1955 [that] was four times that of the United
States and twenty to eighty times that of major industrial nations during the
1950s and 1960s.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[32]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Between war and peace there is much
variation, it is hard to define when one begins and the other ends in many
cases, particularly with regards to people that don’t exist anymore and that
left almost nothing – sometimes nothing – of vestige.&nbsp; 

In
a book that covers current anthropological knowledge on hunter-gatherer
societies, the academic awareness of the problematic of such an object of
knowledge – the “hunter-gatherers” – came to the fore.&nbsp; The discussion is far from the level of
abstraction that Zerzan uses.&nbsp; Many academics
have come to the conclusion regarding “hunter-gatherers” that “there remains a
consensus that such an invented category
has produced sufficient insights for CHAGS<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[33]<!--[endif]-->
conferences to continue!”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[34]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; In fact, if the category “hunter-gatherers”
has provided any benefit at all, it is with respect to actions taking place
towards these societies thus labeled, most of all research and forums of
discussion that have taken place.&nbsp; There
is no consensus on what constitutes a “hunter-gatherer society” within academia,
there is only a discourse produced around it, (re)producing institutions and
social action towards the people thus labeled.&nbsp;


The
same book brings an article by Mark Pluciennik in which he shows how the
interest in “subsistence-based societies” has been pervasive in European
culture and not in other cultures, and how this has to do precisely with
European myths of progress and salvation.&nbsp;
Other cultures in Asia for example did not necessarily believe in a
unilinear, progressive history.&nbsp; The high
interest in “hunter-gatherer societies” as symbolic of an Other began with
European discourses on progress.&nbsp; It is
tainted with this origin and so today, every time one discusses those societies
as examples, a whole history of images of economic production or the lack of it
come to life again; that is, everything that so-called hunter-gatherers have
been used to stand for or against come to life when they are discussed.&nbsp; Thus, by calling another society – even if a
non-existent one – “gatherer-hunter”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[35]<!--[endif]-->
an example for the world, is actually a discourse that can have power only in
cultures where the preconditions for this belief already exist.&nbsp; Capitalist, Western societies are
particularly prone to the images of “hunter-gatherers” or “gatherer-hunters”,
because economic development has helped define their identities.&nbsp; Non-Western and semi-Westernized societies
with less economic development will pretty much ignore primitivism thus, as
they have. 

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Primitivists argue that prehistoric
cultures represent anarchy, meaning that they are examples of anarchism in
practice, not to be copied, only to inspire.&nbsp;
Primitivist John Moore for example says: “Although primitive cultures
provide intimations of the future, and that future may well incorporate
elements derived from those cultures, an anarcho-primitivist world would likely
be quite different from previous forms of anarchy.”&nbsp; Primitivism is not wholly flawed in its
romanticism about prehistoric or native cultures.&nbsp; With the wish to look to indigenous cultures
for examples, there is not only a critique of cultures - particularly those
geared to capitalism - that need change to make life better for more people,
but also a preoccupation for cultural diversity survival that is genuine, for
their own right to exist, as well as their mode of subsistence to endure,
which, compared to capitalist societies, is usually more respectful of
nature.&nbsp;&nbsp; However, there is also an
outright disrespect for cultural diversity, in the claim to knowledge of “the
right way to live”, of the “true human being” that is particularly violent in
Zerzan’s morality and dogma.&nbsp; A dogma of
cultural disintegration.



Civilization and Industrialism

On the critique of industrialism, Zerzan matched his ideas with Derrick
Jensen’s. &nbsp;Jensen has been very
influential for primitivist ideas.&nbsp;
Zerzan also imitates Jensen’s writing style, which interweaves different
ideas and speculations about aspects of Western culture, bringing in indigenous
life as an opposite to it, for its supposedly direct experience of natural truth.&nbsp; One could also say here that Zerzan bought
into a relatively successful discursive mode, and imitated it to his
advantage.&nbsp; This mode is that of a going
around in circles, deriving one formulation from another he had already
made.&nbsp; This gives his texts a semblance
of coherence, stopping short of it though, for the attentive reader. His
imitation of Jensen brought him to the critique of Civilization.

Zerzan,
to say the least, uses Civilization as an all-encompassing, catch-all term for
all that he thinks is disposable, false, or dominating.&nbsp; By doing this, also to say the least, he
fails to specify practices with relation to their cultural field.&nbsp; Therefore, when he says that “Nietzsche saw
the training of memory, especially the memory of obligations, as the beginning
of civilized morality,” he forgets – better – he denies naming this morality
for its proper category, Christian morality, and thus is violent to Nietzsche
and to non-Christian cultures.&nbsp; Again, it
could not be otherwise, since he is not preoccupied with cultural difference.

Feral
Faun, a primitivist author, describes Civilization as “everything that comes
between us and the direct, participatory experience of the wild world.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[36]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; For him, Civilization impedes “a life filled
with intense pleasure and wild adventure”. In order to affirm this, one has to
disregard that capitalism does not impede this totally.&nbsp; It even encourages these very images, showing
how many people regard themselves as living exactly by these standards (such as
TV hosts of tourism, adventure, or other shows).&nbsp; Movies push these buttons all the time.&nbsp; Primitivists will argue here that these are
the false versions of pleasure and adventure.&nbsp;
By this they fail to recognize that the sense of pleasure and adventure,
however different let us say, from a hunt of a wild boar, is also there within
capitalism.&nbsp;&nbsp; Therefore, primitivist
images of wild life are not much of a different discourse from capitalist
culture: sometimes not different at all.&nbsp;
Their claim to truth about wild life remains vague because most people
in the world will not have the same images of a life filled with pleasure and
adventure that primitivists have.&nbsp; In
large part, we need to ask how much of the wish for these things was instigated
by capitalism itself, for the same people that argue for primitivism have for
the most part very pleasurable, at least privileged, lives.

David Watson,
a primitivist author turned critical of it, wrote:

“opposition to civilization’s
“totality,” by the way, self-righteous high-decibel neo-situationist
fulminations against the entirety of daily life under capitalism forget that an
enormous part of life is spent nurturing children, engaging in acts of mutual
aid, trying to be understood or to understand what others are saying, cooperating
in common projects and sometimes even subversive activities, etc.—a few
examples of what I have elsewhere described as living both within and against
mass society.”



The
negative use of the term civilization is a reactive response to its traditional
use as an index of all that was considered by European elites as positive, at
least since the end of the 18th century.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[37]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; It originally used to refer to the positive
aspects of European life, and was constructed as an opposition to barbarism or
savagery, which were supposedly negative and inferior.&nbsp; What primitivism does is to use this
discourse, constructed by European colonialism, and invert it.&nbsp;&nbsp; This inversion, in Nietzsche’s account, is
an aspect of “slave morality”.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[38]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; It is simple reactionary force.&nbsp; In this manner, it does not revaluate the
values of colonialism and European culture; it simply uses them somewhat
differently.&nbsp; Primitivism does not
reflect on its cultural origins. As a distinguished Brazilian thinker, Paulo
Freire, would say: “those who don’t reflect, repeat.”

Zerzan shows
he cannot sustain any foundation to sustain Civilization as equal to
domination.&nbsp; He claims a foundation, only
to claim later that there is another foundation: 

“There
hasn’t been unanimity as to civilization’s most salient characteristic (…) But
domestication stands behind all these manifestations, and not just the taming
of animals and plants, but also the taming of human instincts and freedoms (…)
To name, to number, to time, to represent – symbolic culture is that array of
masteries upon which all subsequent hierarchies and confinements rest.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[39]<!--[endif]-->




Since
his mission is to destroy domination, and he cannot find adequate singular
foundations for it, his way out has been to call every semi- or part-foundation
a part of Civilization, the object par
excellence that is the claim to foundations while he has not been able to
find one.

Within
actions proposed against Civilization, the revolt against industrialism is a
must for primitivists.&nbsp; This was better
represented for Zerzan with the Luddites.&nbsp;
They were “groups of English workers that, between 1811 and 1816,
rebelled and destroyed textile machines, for they believed that they were
responsible for unemployment.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[40]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; However, Zerzan asserts, that the resistance
to work was also resistance to discipline, to the control of time and
spontaneity.&nbsp; The Luddites knew unionism
already, but many rejected it.&nbsp; Their
“machine-breaking of this period cannot be viewed as the despairing outburst of
workers having no other outlet.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[41]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; For Zerzan, the Luddites serve as an example
of “calling the whole of capitalism into question.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[42]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp;&nbsp; Is this a surplus claim with regard to the
Luddites?&nbsp; The Luddites represented, for
Zerzan, the negation of centralized organization and resistance.&nbsp; However, there is little evidence today that
can confer this to be true, for a reason similar to the problem of the
hunter-gatherers Zerzan likes: they are all dead, cannot speak for themselves,
cannot be interviewed for example.&nbsp; By his
rejection of command, Zerzan can be called a proper 21st century
anarchist, since much of anarchist discourse today, especially in the United
States, is centered on “spontaneous organization”. It is the politics of This
versus That, of Spontaneity versus Command.&nbsp;
This politics certainly has its important effects, but also its limits
of action, as any politics.&nbsp; More
importantly for our analysis of Zerzan’s discourse here though, is the fact
that to vow for spontaneity is a political discourse, so his claim to the
dissolution of politics cannot be sustained in his own social practice.

Murray
Bookchin, expressing a major problem within anarchism today said: “I have seen
anarchists disrupt meetings and even break them up because they objected to
orderly discussion.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[43]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Lifestyle anarchists are against any
organization (but many still organize collectives, journals and websites)
because they cannot stand to bear their own hypocrisy of egotistic
non-participation.&nbsp; Primitivism argues
for no work as a means to justify its apathy and disengagement from the
problems of actual communities and social groups that need active alliances,
participatory ones.

Zerzan
shares with Marx the assumption of division of labor as the fundamental aspect
of domination. He writes about the “inner logic of civilization, which is, at
bottom, division of labor.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[44]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Although Marx stressed this point to critique
class domination, and believed that division of labor would be washed away by
the progressive history of capitalist development, Zerzan on the other hand,
and perhaps reactively to Marx, thinks that more is not better.&nbsp; On this account, history has proven him at
least partially correct, since capitalist development has not led to more
workers’ organization and the appropriation of the means of production in any
international, sustainable way.&nbsp; Division
of labor, and its corollary, alienation, have brought about problems that
require change.&nbsp; This change certainly
does not have to be final, and it would be illusory to think that in human
matters anything is.&nbsp; We certainly do not
depend on any one social theory or class consciousness in order to act for
social change, though thinking is always necessary.&nbsp; Zerzan’s most scathing critique of Marx is
this: “Despite his analysis of alienated labor, much of the explicit core of his
philosophy is virtually a consecration of work as tyranny.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[45]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; According to him, division of labor makes the
worker weak, dependent and subordinate.&nbsp;
Anarchists can agree to this.&nbsp; But
anarchism also has shown that not all work is monotonous or assembly-line, as
Zerzan believes.&nbsp; This lack of
realization of the pleasure involved in work for many people – however few or
privileged, or however few examples of anarchist work we have – challenges any
critique to work as bad per se.&nbsp; To understand work without understanding the
pleasure involved for many is the same as trying to understand crime in
societies without understanding that there is also pleasure involved in many
crimes.&nbsp; 

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Another
major critique Zerzan makes of industrialism is when he echoes the ecological
movements in their critiques of the devastation of nature, of consumerism, of
production for its own sake.&nbsp; He shows
how consumerism and production are not advances of society, or progress in
itself: they were pursued consciously and instigated.&nbsp; Needs are fabricated, even the need for kinds
of food are instigated, promoted, and advertisers know this very well.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[46]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Industrialization creates its own markets.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[47]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; This is all well known by many
environmentalists.&nbsp; However, to deal with
the environmental problems of today, which are real, Zerzan has only one
solution: to go primitive – his one and only solution for everything.&nbsp;&nbsp; Since he sees the Problem as one thing,
Solution will also be one for each and every problem human societies have
created.&nbsp; To argue for a limit to profit,
to a negotiation on real people’s needs with regards to production, for
example, are actions which would be regarded by Zerzan as reform, not
revolutionary, therefore unworthy.&nbsp; On
this subject, it is worth citing his colleague Derrick Jensen: 

“The whole reform versus revolution question is just bullshit because if
we all sit around and wait and plan and get ready for the great warrior's
revolution there's going to be nothing left once we get there. At the same
time, if all we do is reform work there's nothing going to be left anyway.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[48]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; 



Art and religion

Desire,
in discourse is a claim that cannot be easily contested. That is, when talking
about desire, part of human interiority, we only have limited access to
it.&nbsp; Therefore, any claim made about
human desires is unfalsifiable, because, if we are to believe Freud, desire is
linked to unconscious elements and since the unconscious is unknowable, so is
desire. For Zerzan, we will have “art refused in favor of the real,”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[49]<!--[endif]-->
since for him art is a false relation to reality: nature is the domain of the
True, art is False.

Nietzsche,
one of Zerzan’s favorite thinkers, prefers art to truth claims.&nbsp;&nbsp; When Nietzsche says this, he means that
truth claims are dangerous and a will to power, primitivist claims to truth
included.&nbsp; Zerzan misreads Nietzsche for
his own ends, and this is why he says that art is a consolation that takes the
place of “the genuine article.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[50]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; However, Nietzsche’s view of art is as power
externalized, and that which makes something really genuine for someone is the
way it corresponds to one’s will to power.&nbsp;
Instead of asking “Is this true?” like all metaphysical culture has
done, Nietzsche asks “What is the value of this truth?”&nbsp; “Who speaks and what does it want from its
truth claim?”&nbsp; Art is certainly not
neutral, and speaking and writing are forms of art, in Nietzsche’s
understanding.&nbsp; Therefore, the will to
truth is will to power, in Zerzan’s work.&nbsp;
And power, as truth, has multiple and contradictory effects that are both
liberatory and dominating, as Foucault makes clear.&nbsp; Art is not, and cannot be by its nature,
simply dominating, as Zerzan claims.&nbsp;
That is why Nietzsche preferred the “artist” to the “man of
convictions.”

Zerzan
reactively inverts the value art has for today’s common Westerners. Art has
been traditionally discoursed in the West as opposed to science.&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus if science in the Western world has
spoken for absolute truth (and Zerzan likes this very much, especially when a
certain truth serves his taste), art has been speaking for deceit, ambiguity
and –what is reprehensible for Zerzan – it has symbolized various aspects of
life.&nbsp; In this symbolization, art has
helped to commoditize life, with its various effects, even the commoditizing of
culture, and in this regard Zerzan is somewhat coherent in his analysis when he
writes that “today culture is commodity and art perhaps the star commodity.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[51]<!--[endif]-->
One can hardly agree, if thinking from within anarchism, with his contention
that “the critique must be of culture itself, not of its alleged control”
(Idem).&nbsp;&nbsp; This, again, would be to throw
the baby (culture, including liberation within it) away with the bathwater
(forms of cultural domination).&nbsp; Art has
been responsible for enlivening liberatory movements worldwide, including the
hippie, anti-war movement Zerzan was a part of.&nbsp;
Art includes the power to represent, and therefore to represent
resistance, and to embody it in a collective force.

Zerzan
contrives art, religion, language and culture as “symbolization”.&nbsp; He does this because he says that they all
depart from reality, they miss it.&nbsp;
Actually, there are many understandings of symbol as referring directly
to reality.&nbsp; Zerzan wants to negate
symbols, but he has to say they exist to claim they must go.&nbsp; He makes no effort, however, to show what
thought or communication is without symbols or language, except when he refers
to telepathy as such an example.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Clearly, here is another pointer to the fact that Zerzan does not see
any allies to his call against symbolization, how he just thinks that ongoing
negatives toward everything Cultural is his proper activity.&nbsp; Derrick Jensen, at least, when pointing to
the root of all domination in culture, comes closer to specify Western culture
as posing the greatest threat worldwide to nature, and not Culture per se.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[52]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; To speak of Culture without defining it is to
make an abstraction ad absurdum.

The
undefinability of the concept of art is a very common contemporary
element.&nbsp; Art is not an object in the
sense of a definable social practice anymore, since the object of art can be
almost anything today, and almost any material can be made into an art
object.&nbsp; However, in order to make his
critique work, Zerzan needs to reactivate the sense and the creed on art as
object with definable characteristics.&nbsp;
To be able to critique art, postmodern artists sometimes even ignored
the concept altogether.&nbsp; Contrary to this
trend, Zerzan needs to believe in art as a universal in order to critique
it.&nbsp; He reproduces the very same notions
of art and culture as universals in his critiques of them.&nbsp; This is where he starts from in all his
critiques: at base culture, art, religion, language, etc. are universals that
enable his critique as such.&nbsp;&nbsp; His belief
in Utopia also stems from his universalism.&nbsp;
All kinds of Utopian myths or discourses are for him a sign to the same
needs and desires: a longing of a period of non-Civilization.&nbsp; That different cultures express these “places”
differently can be sidestepped for a universal longing.&nbsp; Differences in myths or in the ways that they
are differently used, for different purposes, never come to his
assertions.&nbsp; Clearly, if the longing of
different cultures for a better life appears to Zerzan as the same longing, he must
be indifferent to cultural difference as a whole.&nbsp; What if cultural difference was an
inextricable link to understanding ecological variation and the promotion of
biodiversity, as Ethnoecology has been claiming for decades now?&nbsp; Universalism is neither a base on which to
fully understand cultural desires for a better world, nor a way for different
cultures to have their survival and living strategies unmistakably respected.
Resistance always bearing the mark of universality is a creed of Enlightenment
heritage that today still proves its strengths and weaknesses in social
practices.&nbsp; Within anarchism, so-called
“post-anarchist” authors, with their own strengths and weaknesses, have
questioned the basis on which anarchism reproduces the subject of the Enlightenment
and its effects.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[53]<!--[endif]-->

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; There is clearly a problem with the
rush to so-called progress without environmental and social
accountability.&nbsp; Our industrial apparati have clearly been devastating
resources and lives of communities worldwide.&nbsp;
Technology has been claimed as a solution to everything.&nbsp; There certainly are forms of culture to
critique, within these preoccupations.&nbsp;
We may generalize in our critiques, and with this we will always be
putting different vegetables in the same bundle, some of them clean, some even
poisonous.&nbsp; Can alliance with people’s
concerns, care with people’s needs, and engagement with suffering, hardship,
day-to-day necessities exist within a renewed anarcho-primitivism?&nbsp; I believe it can only if anarcho-primitivism
is critically revised and starts its preoccupations with social change from
real life and not from Utopian futures, refusing to aggressively and
irresponsibly charge others, whose life maybe primitivists know nothing about,
with the toil of making life better.&nbsp; 

Primitivism
as it dominantly stands today could only have gained such voice and support
from California, one of the richest places in the world.&nbsp; It is only from a moral, privileged
standpoint, that a dominant primitivism can regard anarchy as living in our bones
and in the same line of reason – if this is possible – that we’ve been led
astray. The very Zerzanian critiques of Reason, Linear Time and Progress, by
producing a reactive account of human life and what is the “correct” way to
live, reproduces the very same actions in the world that it critiques.&nbsp; “Civilization is a huge target” say many
primitivists.&nbsp; That is all it really is,
nothing much.&nbsp; “Organic anarchy” is the
myth many want to put in place of Civilization by destruction.&nbsp; This includes the destruction of all forms of
culture, leaving the Noble Savage alone in his natural state.&nbsp; What makes this belief in a Savage living
despite of culture is, clearly, a cultural notion that culture does not exist
with less “civilized societies”, in this discourse.&nbsp; In Anthropology, this notion has for long now
been debased, since there is no conclusion as to when nature ceases and culture
begins in human action.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[54]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp;&nbsp; Perhaps we will never be able to be certain
about this split, or the lack of it, since all of our scientific exploration of
human behavior is intended with cultural and political consequences: no human
science is a neutral science, is always partially determined by social,
cultural, political and historical context, and thus irremediably problematic
in its claims.&nbsp; Zerzan is partially right
in saying: “’neutral’ universal principles came to the fore to justify
increased coercion. However, even “neutrality” is not a object with an
intentionality of its own: in itself it does not produce an automatic effect of
domination.&nbsp; Cultural, political,
historical contexts are important in defining the effects of knowledge, not one
cultural assertion – to neutrality o otherwise – can speak for itself.&nbsp; But this is to speak about the relative
unpredictability of the effects of social actions, something which Zerzan is
not very fond of.&nbsp; He likes full
predictability, like a metaphysician.&nbsp; 

&nbsp;Anthropology in particular, or the discourse
on cultural difference, cannot escape its impossible objectivity and inevitable
unpredictability.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[55]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; “Freedom” and “state of nature” are synonyms
for primitivists and this is their culturally established language for
things.&nbsp; They are not wrong, in the moral
sense.&nbsp; They are not right either, since
freedom and nature differ with culture, they have never been, and probably
never will be, defined or practiced in the same manner universally.&nbsp; This does not mean, though, that we do not
need to discuss the nature of freedom or of nature itself.&nbsp; Since they are never totally and finally
established (Mikhail Bakunin for example believed freedom was an ongoing
process), we will always have things to do, to struggle for, and that is for
many a blessing of life, not a curse of it, or of some Civilization.

Zerzan
preaches the immortality of freedom and of truth.&nbsp; This is one of the main foundations of
Christianity, the effect of which is a cult around him.&nbsp; The cult to his self, his “soul”, is the
effect of his demonizing of culture: “’Salvation of the soul’ – in plain words:
the world revolves around me.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[56]<!--[endif]-->





Agriculture and technology

Zerzan
wrote: “agriculture is the triumph of estrangement and the definite divide
between culture and nature and humans from each other,” it is “that duality
that cripples the soul of our being.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[57]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; For him, agriculture is at the origin of
culture as he understands it, as the domestication of animals and plants, which
progressed to a domestication of humans.&nbsp;
As I have argued above, following contemporary anthropological
knowledge, the divide between nature and culture is an abstraction, a tentative
grab of truth where nothing can be finally established.&nbsp; To state that agriculture is at the beginning
of culture is scientifically flawed and reductionist (remember that Zerzan
dislikes science but still uses it).&nbsp;
Culture cannot also be reduced to a Durkheimian discourse, as coercion
only (the old sociological perspective).&nbsp;
Surely, cultural acts have always had reasons of power, which does not
mean they have all been conscious to people, or that all reasons of power can
be.&nbsp; Would it be so, Zerzan would not
speak to, as he does many times, the contradiction of speaking against
technology, culture, language and industry, and still be using all of these to
make himself known.

But
Zerzan can’t really decide if time, language, number and art brought
agriculture about, or if agriculture brought them about.&nbsp; As with all of his arguments on origins, the
origin of agriculture is a mix-up of the origins of everything else he
critiques.&nbsp; His important and relevant
critiques for today are of conventional agriculture, however shallow they
are.&nbsp; The standardization of the
landscape, cutting off from it the biological diversity necessary for the
continuous flux of energy, material, and life, is now an established ecological
knowledge.&nbsp; The problem with caring for
the environment now has been mostly how to apply knowledge, how to propose
alternatives, and how to act on ecological problems that differ from place to
place and society to society.&nbsp; Clearly,
Zerzan wants nothing to do with this because he is too busy waiting for a
primitivist revolution that will never come.&nbsp;
With division of labor, certainly there were new forms of domination of
nature and of women.&nbsp; Modern farming
brought with it an unprecedented devastation of forest and green areas, soil
depletion, and pollution.&nbsp; Zerzan is
aware of this, but so are a great number of school children worldwide nowadays.

He
believes that technology supposedly began with
agriculture.&nbsp; He regards technology as
inherently oppressive.&nbsp; However, he also
contradicts himself when he accepts Permaculture for example as a collection of
“simple techniques” to live “as in a garden.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[58]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Surely there is somehow in Zerzan the sense
that humans might have a need for techniques to make life easier and better,
and Permaculture has certainly been proving worldwide that it is an interesting
and ecological conjunction of techniques.&nbsp; But most of the time he asserts that technology, and all forms of technique as
well, is perverse because it reproduces the values of society/culture.&nbsp; However, societies cannot refrain from
values.&nbsp; All societies have values, and
all technology is imbued with them, which does not mean that they always act
against life or in oppressive ways.&nbsp; Sure,
technology can be regarded as external to things and to people – at least there
is no magical way to impede this thought.&nbsp;
Sometimes this character of externality gets over-signified,
particularly when an authoritarian or problematic component is claimed to be
present in technology. Technological advancement is surely to blame for a great
part of environmental degradation, pollution, loss of contact with natural
surroundings in all urban centers of the globe. Zerzan does not exaggerate in
his analysis of environmental destruction.&nbsp;
The market, commoditization, the making of everything into a medium of
exchange: all enhance consumerism and production not based on actual needs of
people. Natural energy and material things are given quantitative and
utilitarian value.&nbsp; These problems surely
have to do with how technology has come to be produced, organized, and put to
work in capitalism especially, with a very low or absent consideration for the
environment or for people’s needs.&nbsp; The
critique is coherent and relevant.&nbsp; What
most people will hardly and most expectedly never agree with is what to do about
this, because there are not only two options: for or against technology.&nbsp; In fact, these options are irrelevant,
because to simply stand against technology would be to claim a power over
people’s actions in order to impede them from building technology.&nbsp; Or else, as we will discuss below, it is to
believe in the primacy of human interiority over the external world.&nbsp; 

Technology
is for Zerzan an expression of class domination. Surely, in capitalism it has
been geared towards making profit, and thus it does have a class rule
component.&nbsp; Depending on the technology
we can point to, such as agribusiness machines, certainly they have been built
on the basis of profit and class rule. Technology is not neutral, not merely a
tool.&nbsp; On this, anarchists will agree.&nbsp; Technology is not something one can have full
control of. Zerzan claims it can be controlled, although he watches television
because he needs to be narcotized, he says.



Zerzan and the Power-Vacuum: Anarchist?

Zerzan
clings to the notion of power as repression only.&nbsp; He writes that “quantity has been mastering
us,”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[59]<!--[endif]-->
thus showing how the subjective has no place in his understanding of
power.&nbsp; He shows how he is not free from
objectivism and the negation of subjectivity, a legacy he so repeatedly critiques
throughout his work.&nbsp; Actually, this
happens because in his thinking, subjectivity cannot be rejected, only
approved, since it is always in its essence true and positive.&nbsp; If something is to be rejected, it must have
come from the exteriority of subjectivity.&nbsp;
If something as an appreciation for a form of art exists, for Zerzan
this came from an imposition of Civilization, not from any interior human
instinct for art for example.&nbsp; In this
fashion, he negates everything that cannot fit his theory, which is that of a
human interiority devoid of instincts for language, culture, art, or any form
or craftsmanship.&nbsp; The latter, in his
theory, have all come from alienation.

Alienation
is certainly real, appears in most or all capitalist relationships, depending on
one’s situatedness and world view, besides one’s comprehension of freedom. It
is real, although it is not an explanation for everything, since its
understanding depends on situatedness of the subject within social, cultural,
historical, economic and political contexts.&nbsp;
Those labeled alienated have had no say in this labeling throughout many
liberatory discourses.&nbsp; Postmodern
thought has been, and Zerzan is right in saying this, in many ways a
continuation of alienation.&nbsp; With many
exceptions, though, and considering that alienation is a situation and a social
relation that depends on the subject’s experience as well, of feeling
alienated, as much as on social institutions. Having said this, we can state
again that postmodern thought has also reproduced alienation.&nbsp; One, because it does infuse specialization
linked to capitalist production with a new impetus.&nbsp; Particularly, it does this when it tries to
negate wants and desires of total understandings and practices towards life. We
must, I contend, when participating in current discussions on resistance and
identity for example, realize that people many times do need to assert their
totalizing views on resistance and identity however partial, problematic, and
even authoritarian these might be to other standpoints and realities.&nbsp; In order to defend what matters to people,
many groups and communities have constructed metanarratives on the way.&nbsp; In this essay, for example, I give myself
this permission by allowing it to say more than it should say for the sake of
difference and cultural understanding.&nbsp;
However, who first thought that cultural differences and their
encounters really need to always be gentle?&nbsp;
Colonization for example certainly has been thought as gentle before,
during, and after it happened and continued by other means in many cases.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[60]<!--[endif]-->

Zerzan
attacks Michel Foucault, as many contemporary scientists have done, for not
providing a macropolitical analysis or the correct path to resistance.&nbsp; In a somewhat anarchistic manner, Foucault
openly rejected such paths, which would have been easy and yet utterly
problematic.&nbsp; He respected the reader’s
ability to read and make his own path through the power relations he came to
analyze.&nbsp; But Foucault cannot be blamed
for the reification of “micropolitics” and the “decentered subject” that is
happening within postanarchism and postmodern thought.&nbsp; In another essay, I wrote:

“That
power is not formed by a simple opposition between rulers and ruled, that it
relates to other forms of sociability, and that it is always already historical
and therefore non-subjective in the sense of a subject as origin, are all
contributions made by Foucault to broader definitions of power.&nbsp;&nbsp; Postanarchist authors have regarded these
definitions as truly anarchist, as if
anarchism had been waiting for its own revelation in history of its true self.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[61]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; 



Foucault
was mostly preoccupied in destabilizing particular power relations, not in
providing a framework on which to criticize all power relations of all
institutions.&nbsp; He was geared, in great
part, to understand how specific forms of subjectivity are formed within power
relations and truth discourses. To be socialized into any act or form of
subjectivity is the greatest nightmare for Zerzan.&nbsp; The external world determining the internal:
that is his greatest fear, although he can do nothing about it, for the
external and the internal are not without relations.&nbsp; On the other hand, many primitivists tend to
recognize that domination does not amount to a center.&nbsp; They may be just showing they too contradict
themselves, like everyone else.&nbsp; Or they
may be recognizing the limits of discourse, their own included, in explaining
freedom.&nbsp; In this regard, Feral Faun<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[62]<!--[endif]-->
writes that there is “no single center that can be overthrown”, in consonance
with a Foucauldian view of domination and power relations, 

The
most funny aspect of Zerzan’s view of power, is that he fails to perceive, in
part because of his fixed definition of organization (as domination), that
primitivism, in order to cause a revolution, needs more organization (as
coherence in objectives and achievements) than has ever been thought by
radicals, with the exception maybe of those that propose total collective
suicide.&nbsp; This organization by Zerzan’s
primitivism is more radical than a normal collective organization in the sense
that it is self-organization, springing from individuals.&nbsp; However, for this reason it is dependent on a
spontaneity never seen in the world, through which the whole world would be
changed.&nbsp; Faun,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[63]<!--[endif]-->
in accordance with this view, says: “In a very general way, we know what we
want.&nbsp; We want to live as wild, free
beings in a world of wild, free beings.”&nbsp;
All we can say is Go Ahead!&nbsp;
However, these primitivists might claim that if a large part of the
world does not destroy industrialism, the revolution might amount to very
little, and they are right.&nbsp; They will
wait, then, until a large part of the world spontaneously, and without
considerable organization, decides to go primitive.&nbsp; They will wait until everyone acts on “feelings
and experiences,”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[64]<!--[endif]-->
oblivious to the fact that these same foundations of theirs are always
partially constructed by Civilization, or by any culture, and not solely givens
of a Nature with its own divine intentionality.&nbsp;
Zerzan prescribes the way to a primitivist revolution through “the
personal” which is for him, “of course the real terrain of revolutionary axis.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[65]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Zerzan thus believes in the primacy of human
interiority, a very Western cultural account of action in the world, one of the
main critiques made to this culture by Nietzsche.

Bookchin<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[66]<!--[endif]-->
stated: “Those who prescribe mystical neoprimitivism are less concerned about
changing society than in changing people’s inner lives.”&nbsp; The human sciences have straddled to find out
where culture ends and nature begins, and vice versa, for centuries now,
without ever completing this impossible task.&nbsp;
That is why we need to agree with Bookchin in stating that “human beings
are social beings”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[67]<!--[endif]-->
and therefore one cannot completely separate any human from its wholeness, of
being both natural and social/cultural.&nbsp;
I must assert here that this is only a predicament on the impossibility
of certain knowledge as final, not of absolute truth residing in a metaphysical
synthesis or holism whatsoever.&nbsp; 

For
primitivists, meaning can flow straight from Nature or from reality.&nbsp; Subjectivity has no place, at least a
subjectivity where human creativity does not have to be represented as
Natural.&nbsp; Therefore, the destruction of
symbolic culture preached by Zerzan is a form of representation represented as
non-representational; that is, a representation falsified as reality. In order
to clear ourselves from Civilization, or from symbolic culture for example, we
should develop a symbolic culture of this “freeing”.&nbsp; Zerzan recognizes this but fails – whenever
convenient, it seems – to actualize what this means for anarcho-primitivism as
well.&nbsp; If all symbolic culture is
corrupted, so is anarcho-primitivism.&nbsp; If
meaning can only come from Nature, the subject is already known, it knows itself
and the world, and does not create anything. 

Primitivism
for Zerzan is beyond all power relations.&nbsp;
It is supposedly more anarchist than any anarchism that ever existed,
since anarchism would be against power relations.&nbsp; Though anarchism may be interpreted as such,
it has not stood against power per se,
but against domination, a form of power.&nbsp;
This is because power relations are not a choice.&nbsp; If anything is inherent in social relations,
it is power.&nbsp; Primitivism understands
power reductively as domination, as power for domination and never as power of
freedom, therefore it is doomed to reproduce domination in the world, since it
will negate any assertion of difference (of way of life, of culture, of
opinion, etc.) as one’s will to dominate, when it can mean for that person or
group a will to be freer.&nbsp;&nbsp; Primitivism
can never be a radical alternative if it does not recognize its own limits and
how it needs to always revaluate alternatives.&nbsp;
This would be a type of&nbsp; anarchist
praxis, done in the collective, public sphere, not simply springing from a
fictive interior self.

Anarchism
has stood, at least since Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, for the
collectivization of decision-making and production.&nbsp; This in no way has meant that it has set up a
unique platform on which how to do this were finally settled.&nbsp; Exactly because it stands for these things,
it cannot offer these final solutions.&nbsp;
The anarchist tradition being thus, primitivism cannot be called
anarchist without any violence being done to its memory. The Green Anarchy
Collective has stated: “For anti-authoritarian transformation, many struggles
are necessary and need to be respected along with an awareness of the
underlying connectedness.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[68]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; What is missing here is that the
connectedness may not be readily and easily available to knowledge, it may not
be available at all. Anarchisms need, if they can survive it, to rethink the
cultural assumption that power can be completely known and discussed.&nbsp; This would mean, of course, a radical
reshifting of anarcho-primitivist Utopia to work from life as lived instead of
life as solely imagined.&nbsp; 

Zerzan
explains anarchy as “a rejection of government but of all other forms of
domination and power as well.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[69]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; According to Zerzan, it is possible to live
in a power vacuum.&nbsp;&nbsp; The idea that the
human world can function totally spontaneously is a direct, reactive response
to ideologies that have preached the correct ways to run the world.&nbsp; As a reactive response, it reproduces the
same universal command as to “the right way to live”, and nothing could be less
anarchic.&nbsp; Primitivism makes the dominant
power structures and culture an Other,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[70]<!--[endif]-->
and in this way reproduces the very same dominant.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[71]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp;&nbsp; The critique of state power, party politics,
of representation in general, are critiques made by many anarchists, from the
19th century to the present, even the current postmodern and poststructuralist
anarchists.&nbsp; Anarchism is not, and never
will be pure though.&nbsp; It cannot stand up
to its own principles and tradition if it declares itself final and the
solution to all social ills.&nbsp; Therefore,
as it stands, John Zerzan’s primitivism cannot be easily declared anarchist,
only hardly and primarily discursively so, by himself.&nbsp; 



In Closing

If
Civilization is the problem, how is it that civilized people can have the
solution?&nbsp; There is a fracture in the
acknowledgement of the problem, so there must be one regarding the solution as
well. Zerzan acknowledges that the problem of Civilization is not a
consensus.&nbsp; However, he clings to the
notion that the solution to it is – or needs to be in any case – a consensus gentium.&nbsp; This is in line with his view of Nature, as
one, unmistakable experience (maybe not in accordance with Nature itself).&nbsp; 

Primitivist
Richard Heinberg<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[72]<!--[endif]--> notes
that “it can be argued that civilization per
se is not at fault, that the problems we face have to do with unique
economic and historical circumstances.”&nbsp;
This is an important recognition of the complexity of social systems, of
their internal breaks and inconsistencies that permit even some primitivists to
argue that they speak from the “outside” of civilization, however impossible
this is to be proven.&nbsp; Heinberg continues
saying: “But we should at least consider the possibility that our modern
industrial system represents the flowering of tendencies that go back quite
far.”&nbsp; The problems of the industrial
system, its ecological, social and cultural effects, cannot be denied without
leaving us with many problems.&nbsp; We should
learn from these realities.&nbsp; What to do
with them, though, cannot be a final solution, which tends to transform itself
in history into another way for domination.&nbsp;
The anarcho-primitivist critique builds its own object of critique –
Civilization – from the standpoint of an “overall crisis.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[73]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; A total, coherent object of consensus gentium can only exist from a
standpoint of metaphysical culture.&nbsp; This
cultural discourse can and does produce violence.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[74]<!--[endif]-->

Civilization
is a way to nominate our present that so unclearly defines what we mean that
one can argue with Bookchin<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[75]<!--[endif]-->
and Sheppard<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[76]<!--[endif]--> for
example that the solution to social and political domination rest on people
being more, not less, civilized.&nbsp; This
denominates a belief in hidden or potential behavior that humans have not yet
engaged fully in the present.&nbsp; It is a
recurrent discourse of resistance traditions of the West, to claim civilization
a both a process and an outcome.&nbsp; It
reinstates a creed in human knowledge as governing the world, as “civilizing”
or “humanizing”.&nbsp; Anarchists such as
Bookchin<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[77]<!--[endif]--> have
also believed in knowledge as primary for an anarchist movement to flourish
when he wrote for example: “In short, we need criteria for determining what is
rational, in a logic of development whose internal consistency gives us the
basis for ethical behavior and an ethical direction toward which society should
advance.”&nbsp; This will to a higher order of
justice is not very different from what is desired by many primitivists such as
Zerzan.&nbsp; Bookchin, as much as Noam
Chomsky<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[78]<!--[endif]-->,
equates Reason with Liberty and Progress, likening themselves to a particular
Enlightenment tradition.&nbsp; Thus they
reproduce the creed, however they might speak to the contrary many times, in
liberation that comes from knowledge, primarily.&nbsp; In this respect, they might critique
primitivism as much as they want, but the claim that human interiority will
govern existence – however a controversial claim for a primitivist or an
anarchist to make – abounds in the discursive practice of the Final Revolution,
in which primitivists and many anarchists alike participate.&nbsp; 

All
of these will call me postmodern now, because I regard texts as action.&nbsp; I just want this to be a conversation with
anarchisms, in the plural.&nbsp; Power is
everywhere, yes, but not equally distributed, and not equally productive of
effects either.&nbsp; Such that anarchists may
claim to be social, but still rely on pillars of Western individualism like the
creed – and practice – of knowledge being at the origin of every human action.&nbsp; By this referent, we should wait until
further knowledge, The Program, or the full rejection of programs as well in
order to act.&nbsp; If postmodernism is the
rejection of all coherence, as Zerzan contends, then I am not a postmodernist,
since my thought is coherent in explaining the inactions and unaccomplished
ends of dominant political resistance discourse.&nbsp; I also do not accept capitalism’s
“fragmentation” – a concept used to describe postmodernism - if that means
social and political alienation.&nbsp; Surely,
this “fragmentation” has been interpreted by many as full irresponsibility and
political impossibility.&nbsp; Many
primitivists and anarchists, drawing on ideas such as “fragmentation”, have
emphasized the interpretation of “postmodernism” – another catch-all term – as
one singular tradition of thought, disregarding all that the thoughts of
various thinkers might point to, as points of possibility for difference,
liberation, or struggle.&nbsp; Even internal
differences within so-called postmodernism or post-structuralism have been
glossed over. That is because anarchism still begets to get rid of its
arrogance, its belief in itself as vanguard of all human liberation.&nbsp; If there are so-called postmodern thinkers
that fail to help us elucidate social and political problems, their thought
must be questioned.&nbsp; But they cannot be
judged from Platformist<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[79]<!--[endif]-->
standpoints, because this would be to say that everyone needs to have the same
goals in life, and that they must be languaged the same.&nbsp; We can critique each other as much as we
want, but to fail to see how our critiques always already come from our own
standpoints – and that they are not much more than this, standpoints – is
authoritarian.&nbsp; It seems like one of the
main problems of anarchism today remains that of the past: how to deal with its
own authoritarian views, values, and actions in the world.&nbsp; In order to debase capitalism, anarchism must
debase itself as the sole presumptuous promoter of freedom, justice, or
equality, whatever they might mean in practice.

John
Landau<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[80]<!--[endif]-->
explains Civilization for us, and he could well explain primitivism the same:
“Civilization is Envy, it hates itself, the other side is greener, we must have
it, the greed that comes from worthlessness, the desperate blotting out of the
whole, therefore the feigning of superiority to save face, whoever saves the
most face wins.”&nbsp;&nbsp; The “other side” here
could be the primitive; Civilization could be read as primitivism.&nbsp; If Primitivism is “the perennial belief in
the necessity of a return to origins,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[81]<!--[endif]-->
it is just another form of symbolic culture, fraught with potentials for
domination.&nbsp; If one single way of life,
“who now make up less than one hundredth of one percent of the world’s
population”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[82]<!--[endif]--> should
be the guide for the rest of the world, surely this ideology cannot be called
anarchist in the sense of the struggle for freedom and possibilities for
difference. To speak for the other is a dangerous thing.&nbsp; To deny that the other always speaks from a
certain cultural – and symbolic – context is to miss opportunities for
intervention. 

Primitivism
is a form of cultural resistance much
more than political resistance, even
when it claims to be against all forms of culture, as Zerzan does.&nbsp; It is thus because it determines the right
way to live, to live culturally without engaging in the change of power
relations.&nbsp; Cultural resistance is not at
all separate from political resistance: it affirms identity and community (only
what can be discoursed as “primitive”) although it does not engage in the
transformation of societies and forms of domination except through cultural
discourse.&nbsp; Zerzan recognizes resistance
in work relations.&nbsp; What if he recognized
resistance in cultural relations?&nbsp; Many
of his critiques could remain the same, such as that regarding the negativity
of environmental destruction.&nbsp; Others
would need a total change, such as the total destruction of symbolic culture he
preaches.&nbsp; More fundamentally, Zerzanian
primitivism as a doctrine could be thus radically revised.&nbsp; Civilization exists as cultural forms, which
can be changed from inside. Primitivism is this want of struggle, in particular
to change forms of domination, and any such want is laudable, but not when
disengaged from assessing its effects on particular lives as lived.&nbsp; 

Primitivism
according to Zerzan remains what it set itself to be.&nbsp; As a realization, it would like to be total,
that is, everything that it says would need to be actualized.&nbsp; It would be the actualization of the “spirit
of refusal.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[83]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Refusal would be its main camp, actually its
dominion, over which it would dominate. This way, Zerzan’s primitivism is not
totally different from the Civilization it argues against.&nbsp; It also wishes to dominate.&nbsp; Zerzan is against culture, against “human and
social creation, and deciding that this commonality somehow inevitably infects
them with harmful aspects.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[84]<!--[endif]-->&nbsp; Even though there exist needs of breaking up
with cultural values for many, one can only do this by means of a new culture.
The culture that primitivism is setting forth is the one of self-indulgence,
and it cannot do any different, since it does not discuss any collective
endeavor besides a call for destruction.&nbsp;&nbsp;
It is therefore highly asocial, therefore untenable, unrealizable, since
humans are social, as most of anarchist history recognizes.&nbsp; Also for this reason, it will unfortunately
continue to rouse attention, but for my part, this is the first and last time I
will act to respond to it, probably.

After
Nature, Culture could soon be the next thing to be highly valued in Western
societies’ liberation discourses.&nbsp; This
Zerzan’s primitivism has shown: by its negation of all culture, it will arouse,
like it has here, the defense against destruction of cultures much underway
under capitalism.&nbsp; The struggle for
Nature though, has dominated Western liberatory discourses.&nbsp; This domination has appeared gentle because
discoursed as love and respect for Nature, which supposedly represents
communion with real life more than any other thing.

For
Nietzsche, for example, moments of high communion with life are rare, if ever
they reach full expression.&nbsp; Real life
cannot be one of fullness and wholeness for all as Zerzan argues. His
contention cannot be proven totally wrong or right, however, because he was
witty enough to ascribe fullness and wholeness to human interiority, about
which not much can be ascertained.&nbsp; What
he wants is to have dominion, and by his persecution, to have pleasure in the
thought that, after all, as I have done here for example, he will be commented
upon and through this be engraved, however painfully, in history, which he
surreptitiously critiques.&nbsp; It is a
retarded action, but still nevertheless effective, for gaining power.&nbsp; The power he will gain is undesirable, he may
ascertain.&nbsp; However, not as intention,
but as effect of his actions, power –however limited – is what Zerzan, and
primitivism, strives for.

Zerzan
bashes all shamans and prophets of all cultures, but he executes practically
the same office he critiques and became one himself.&nbsp; What he does not want is for others to have
many things to say about him.&nbsp; Nietzsche
(1878) wrote:

“In plain nature. – We like to be in plain nature very much, because
it has no opinion about us.”



Last
of all, I wish to thank John Zerzan and all primitivists for inciting
opposition within anarchism, since this way anarchism might grow stronger
itself.&nbsp; If primitivism and anarchism
have anything in common, it is that they wish to show up as confrontations to
dominance, in its broadest possible sense. John
Zerzan and primitivism in his manner need to be radically shifted to think from
real life instead of from Utopia, since today his ideas spring more from
resentment and bad conscience than from active engagement with the problems –
social, cultural and environmental – of the world today. 



References



Albert, Michael.&nbsp; “Anarchism = Zerzan?”&nbsp; Avaliable at &lt;http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/albert.htm&gt;
Accessed on 02/18/2008.



____________.&nbsp; Moving Forward:
Program for a Participatory Economy.&nbsp; San
Francisco, CA: AK Press, 2000.&nbsp; 160p.



Barnard, Alan (Ed.).&nbsp; Hunter-Gatherers in History, Anthropology and
Archaeology: Introductory Essay.&nbsp; In
Barnard, Alan (Ed.).&nbsp; Hunter-Gatherers in History, Anthropology
and Archaeology. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004.&nbsp; 288p.



Bookchin, Murray.&nbsp; Anarchism,
Marxism, and the Future of the Left: Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998.&nbsp; San Francisco, CA:&nbsp; AK Press, 1999.&nbsp; 349p.



Chaterjee, Partha.
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<!--[endif]-->




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> Assistant Professor of Anthropology at São Paulo State
University.&nbsp; Has a B.A. in Ecology and a
M.A. in Anthropology, currently enrolled in the PhD program in Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San
Francisco, CA. Has been a researcher on many issues including anarchism, race
and racism, culture and identity, and discourse analysis.&nbsp; 




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]--> Parecon stands for
Participatory Economy and has been proposed by the author as a means of
reshifting power relations and production.&nbsp;
See Albert, 2000.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[3]<!--[endif]--> See Michael Albert,
“Anarchism = Zerzan?”




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[4]<!--[endif]--> On May 7, 1995.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[5]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999:7.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[6]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999:8.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[7]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999:15.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[8]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999:29.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[9]<!--[endif]--> Op. Cit.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[10]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999:31.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[11]<!--[endif]--> Nietzsche, 1990:159.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[12]<!--[endif]--> See Zerzan, “Why
Primitivism?” 




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[13]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:37.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[14]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:34.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[15]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:39.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[16]<!--[endif]--> 1972: 12.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[17]<!--[endif]--> See Foucault, “Revolutionary
Action: Until Now” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice.


<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[18]<!--[endif]--> Discursive practices, according to Foucault (1977) “are characterized by the delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories.&nbsp; Thus, each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that designate its exclusions and choices.”






<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[19]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:57.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[20]<!--[endif]--> 2003:7.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[21]<!--[endif]--> See Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, aphorism 630.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[22]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:31.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[23]<!--[endif]--> Said, 1978.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[24]<!--[endif]--> See Torgovnick, 1999.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[25]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:40.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[26]<!--[endif]--> See
Marcus &amp; Clifford (1986), also Gupta &amp; Ferguson (1997).




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[27]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1994:45.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[28]<!--[endif]--> 1965:184.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[29]<!--[endif]--> Op. Cit.: 185.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[30]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1994:83.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[31]<!--[endif]--> 1996:4.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[32]<!--[endif]--> 1996:29.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[33]<!--[endif]--> Conference on Hunting and
Gathering Societies.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[34]<!--[endif]--> [italics
mine] 2004:4.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[35]<!--[endif]--> See Zerzan, 1994.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[36]<!--[endif]--> Faun, 2005:227.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[37]<!--[endif]--> See Williams,
2007.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[38]<!--[endif]--> See Nietzsche, F. On The Genealogy of Morals.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[39]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
2005:3.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[40]<!--[endif]--> Hobsbawn,
1977:65.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[41]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:107.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[42]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:109.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[43]<!--[endif]--> Bookchin,
1999:127.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[44]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
2005:2.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[45]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:104.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[46]<!--[endif]--> See for example Melanie
Klein. No Logo. 




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[47]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:97. See also Hobsbawn, 1977.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[48]<!--[endif]--> See Interview with Derrick
Jensen (website).




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[49]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:71.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[50]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:67.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[51]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:68.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[52]<!--[endif]--> See Interview with Derrick
Jensen (website).




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[53]<!--[endif]--> I have written on this
subject in an article entitled “Anarchism after Metaphysics”, still
unpublished.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[54]<!--[endif]--> See Geertz, 1989.&nbsp; 




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[55]<!--[endif]--> See Marcus &amp; Fischer,
1986.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[56]<!--[endif]--> See Nietzsche, 1990:168.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[57]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999: 73.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[58]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:204.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[59]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:60.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[60]<!--[endif]--> See Chaterjee, 1993.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[61]<!--[endif]--> From Guimarães, “Anarchism
after Metaphysics” (unpublished).




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[62]<!--[endif]--> 2005:228.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[63]<!--[endif]--> Op. Cit.: 229.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[64]<!--[endif]--> Idem.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[65]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 1999:205.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[66]<!--[endif]--> 1999:121.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[67]<!--[endif]--> Idem. 




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[68]<!--[endif]--> From the Green Anarchy
Collective website.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[69]<!--[endif]--> [italics
mine] From Zerzan, “What is Anarchism?”




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[70]<!--[endif]--> See Derrida, 1978.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[71]<!--[endif]--> A point Richard Shapiro, a
professor of Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies,
consistently makes.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[72]<!--[endif]--> 2005:116.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[73]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan, 2005:1.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[74]<!--[endif]--> See Derrida, 1978.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[75]<!--[endif]--> 1999:130.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[76]<!--[endif]--> 2003.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[77]<!--[endif]--> 1999:140.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[78]<!--[endif]-->
From Chomsky, “Notes on Anarchism.”




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[79]<!--[endif]--> An anarchist Platform is
usually discoursed as “ideological unity, tactical unity, collective action and
discipline, and federalism.”&nbsp; See for example: &lt;http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Platformism&gt;




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[80]<!--[endif]--> 2005:111.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[81]<!--[endif]--> Heinberg,
2005:118.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[82]<!--[endif]--> Op. Cit.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[83]<!--[endif]--> Zerzan,
1999:131.




<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[84]<!--[endif]--> See Albert, “Anarchism =
Zerzan?”