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Future Primitive and Other Essays by John Zerzan Anti-Copyright Introduction Introduction Future Primitive and Other Essays By John Zerzan Anti-Copyright Introduction Introduction The Point of No Return for Everybody My personal introduction to the visions of John Zerzan came from exposure to the broadsides of Upshot, collaborations between John and Paula Zerzan—back in the San Francisco of the 1970s—that still retain their power. One of my favorites was (and still is) “The Point of No Return for Everybody.” This stark, but evocative portrait of contemporary social reality interrupted by sparks of disconnected resistance, is for me a hallmark of John Zerzan’s profound vision of a dying civilization and its inchoate discontents. After John left San Francisco for Oregon, “Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous” became the vehicle for a similar project infused with the same spirit. This project was also largely a collaboration— this time between John Zerzan and Dan Todd—and eventually a nicely done collection of some of its most subversive posters and flyers was published as Adventures in Subversion: Anti- Authoritarians Anonymous Flyers, 1981-1985. However, from the 1970s up to the present John has also been busy producing a regular stream of major essays appearing in many different periodicals, most significantly in the Fifth Estate and Telos earlier, and in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Demolition Derby of late. Taken together, these essays constitute a far-reaching and extreme critique of human civilization, along with the culture and technology which make it possible. In 1988 the first collection of these essays was published under the title Elements of Refusal by Left Bank Books in Seattle. In the introduction to Elements David Brown announced that “No less than as they appeared these essays are provocative and important..John’s writings have always contained that critical spirit which best characterized both the old ‘Frankfurt School’ and the Situationists-but are more radical, and without the debilitating despair of the former or the disgusting love affair with technology and ‘progress’ afflicting the latter.” John presses on with his critique where most others have feared to tread. Also in 1988, John Zerzan and Alice Carnes edited Questioning Technology, published by Freedom Press in London (and since republished by New Society Publishers). This anthology of essays by a variety of authors, from Morris Berman to Jacques Ellul, and from George Bradford to Russell Means, presented the other side of the technology question, the critical side that is rarely ever even formulated. And to bring things up to date, Future Primitive is the second collection-certainly not to be the last-of John Zerzan’s own writings, this time from 1988 to the present. For John, the demand for authentic life and the struggle against mere ‘survival’ are palpably and continually present throughout history. If we just look, we can’t miss the signs of this struggle. From the ‘fall’ into alienation, which he takes as the beginning of civilization, to the spasmodic episodes of release and repression represented in the bizarre litanies which constitute our daily news, we can hardly evade the signs of this perennial confrontation. Not that every modern institution isn’t deployed precisely to prevent this realization. State, economy, culture-all work overtime attempting to legitimate and bolster the cracking foundations of the machine of civilization. Ideologies, commodities, all the rituals of domination and alienation multiply as the machine continually contrives newer and ‘better’ pseudo-satisfactions for desires that by their nature must be left ultimately unfulfilled. How could the thirst for genuine community ever be quenched in a world where the typical ‘human’ relationships are buying and selling, order-giving and order-taking? How could our lust for sensual intercourse ever overcome our mutual isolation through technologies which demand that we travel at faster and faster speeds to destinations all equally devoid of real life? How could our desires for multi-dimensional and directly immediate personal communication ever be fulfilled by instruments of separation and deceit like the mass media and the proliferating networks of electronic information processing? John Zerzan not only presents us with irrefutable evidence of this ubiquitous and continuous confrontation between our primordial desires and their simulated satisfactions, but he has insisted over the years that everything is only getting worse. Our alienation is becoming more acute. Our appetites are becoming voracious and indiscriminate cravings. Our fantasies more violent, and our episodes of violence more fantastic. Part One of this volume is primarily made up of John’s most significant essays of the last few years, all appearing in Anarchy and Demolition Derby. “Future Primitive” takes recent anthropological and archaeological revisionism to an ultimate conclusion that “life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health.” If for millenia upon millenia human communities successfully refused descent into the traps of division of labor, domestication and symbolic reification, what does this say about the true situation of modern humanity? Does civilization represent only the recent, yet near total, degradation of human life? As more and more evidence mounts, it becomes harder for the apologists of repression and alienation to avoid this judgment. “The Mass Psychology of Misery” plumbs the massive psychic misery evident just under the surface of officially declared contentment. John asks, if “material immiseration” didn’t lead as Marx predicted to the downfall of capitalism, still might “psychic suffering” lead “to the reopening of revolt”? Along the way he presents a masterful demolition of the claims of psychology in its new role as “the predominant religion” marching forward employing “the therapeutic model of authority.” “Tonality and the Totality” recounts a detailed musical history which reveals a development in concert with the advance of civilization. According to this account, the domestication of humanity proceeded concurrently with the domestication of polyphonous voices. Despite its apolitical image, Zerzan warns us that “for quite some time music… has been developing an ideological power of expression hitherto unknown.” “The Catastrophe of Postmodernism” takes all the major hucksters of this academic literary fashion to task for their refusal of critical coherence. Mistaking language and text for their only realities, postmodernists devalue or ignore lived experience. In effect, they leave themselves no standpoint from which one could gain any grasp of the social totality. For John, “Postmodernism is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, ‘the new realism’. Signifying nothing and going nowhere, postmodernism is an inverted millenarianism....” Part Two of the present volume consists of the nine brief essays which, at least so far, make up the corpus of “The Nihilist’s Dictionary,” John’s column appearing in Anarchy magazine. Most of these short takes illuminate the other side of the dominant categories of contemporary ideology-technology, culture, division of labor, progress, community, society-with an acerbic abruptness that will unsettle those accustomed to their unquestioned celebration. While the opening piece on ‘Niceism’ takes up the often ignored complicity of the ‘nice’ with the false, “the passionate and feral embrace of wildness” is the ending theme of the most positive entry in this dictionary of negation. Two brief, but significant, reviews are appended to these essays to complete this volume. The reviews – of Murray Bookchin’s The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship and Jean Baudrillard’s America – quickly explode the pretensions of Bookchin’s ideology of “Libertarian Municipalism” and those of Baudrillard’s celebration of flashy incoherence. In each of his essays John Zerzan doesn’t just question authority, he settles for nothing less than its demolition. Shall we demand any less from ourselves? Lev Chernyi, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed Chapter 1: Future Primitive Division of labor, which has had so much to do with bringing us to the present global crisis, works daily to prevent our understanding the origins of this horrendous present. Mary Lecron Foster (1990) surely errs on the side of understatement in allowing that anthropology is today "in danger of serious and damaging fragmentation." Shanks and Tilley (1987b) voice a rare, related challenge: "The point of archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction in the present." Of course, the social sciences themselves work against the breadth and depth of vision necessary to such a reconstruction. In terms of human origins and development, the array of splintered fields and sub-fields- anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, ethnology, paleobotany, ethnoanthropology, etc., etc. - mirrors the narrowing, crippling effect that civilization has embodied from its very beginning. Nonetheless, the literature can provide highly useful assistance, if approached with an appropriate method and awareness and the desire to proceed past its limitations. In fact, the weakness of more or less orthodox modes of thinking can and does yield to the demands of an increasingly dissatisfied
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