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On the Transition
Postscript to Future Primitve
by John Zerzan
"Yeah, the critique is impressive and everything, but just how might we
actually get from this ghastly world to some healed, whole existence?''
I think we should not doubt that such a journey is possible, nor that the
explosion necessary to begin it may be approaching.
The thought of the dominant culture has, of course, always told us that
alienated life is inescapable. In fact, culture or civilization itself
expresses this essential dogma: the civilizing process, as Freud noted, is
the forcible trading of a free, natural life for one of unceasing
repression.
Today culture is in a dispirited, used-up state wherever one looks. More
important than the entropy afflicting the logic of culture, however, is what
seems to be the active, if inchoate resistance to it. This is the ray of
hope that disturbs the otherwise all-too-depressing race we witness to
determine whether total alienation or the destruction of the biomass will
happen first.
People are being stretched and beaten on the rack of everyday emptiness, and
the spell of civilization is fading. Lasch referred to a near-universal rage
abroad in society, just under the surface. It is growing and its symptoms
are legion, amounting to a refusal to leave this earth unsatisfied.
Adorno asked, ``What would happiness be that was not measured by the
immeasurable grief at what is?'' Certainly, the condition of life has become
nightmarish enough to justify such a question, and perhaps also to suggest
that something started to go deeply wrong a very long time back. At least it
ought to be demonstrating, moving on toward specifics, that the means of
reproducing the prevailing Death Ship (e.g. its technology) cannot be used
to fashion a liberated world.
Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler wondered, ``What is `common' about the common
life? What if some genius were to do with `common life' what Einstein did
with `matter'? Finding its energetics, uncovering its radiance.'' Of course,
we must all be that `Einstein', which is exactly what will unleash a
creative energy sufficient to utterly refashion the conditions of human
existence. Ten thousand years of captivity and darkness, to paraphrase
Vaneigem, will not withstand ten days of full-out revolution, which will
include the simultaneous reconstruction of our inner selves. Who doesn't
hate modern life? Can what conditioning that remains survive such an
explosion of life, one that ruthlessly removes the sources of such
conditioning?
We are obviously being held hostage by capital and its technology, made to
feel dependent, even helpless, by the sheer weight of it all, the massive
inertia of centuries of alienated categories, patterns, values. What could
be dispensed with immediately? Borders, governments, hierarchy....What else?
How fast could more deep-seated forms of authority and separation be
dissolved, such as that of division of labor? I assert, and not, I hope, in
the spirit of wishing to derive blueprints from abstract principle, that I
can see no ultimate freedom or wholeness without the dissolution of the
inherent power of specialists of every kind.
Many say that millions would die if the present techno-global fealty to work
and the commodity were scrapped. But this overlooks many potentialities. For
example, consider the vast numbers of people who would be freed from
manipulative, parasitic, destructive pursuits for those of creativity,
health, and liberty. At present, in fact, very few contribute in any way to
satisfying authentic needs.
Transporting food thousands of miles, not an atypical pursuit today, is an
instance of pointless activity, as is producing countless tons of herbicide
and pesticide poisons. The picture of humanity starving if a transformation
were attempted may be brought into perspective by reference to a few other
agricultural specifics, of a more positive nature. It is perfectly feasible,
generally speaking, that we grow our own food. There are simple approaches,
involving no division of labor, to large yields in small spaces.
Agriculture itself must be overcome, as domestication, and because it
removes more organic matter from the soil than it puts back. Permaculture is
a technique that seems to attempt an agriculture that develops or reproduces
itself and thus tends toward nature and away from domestication. It is one
example of promising interim ways to survive while moving away from
civilization. Cultivation within the cities is another aspect of practical
transition, and a further step toward superseding domestication would be a
more or less random propagation of plants, a la Johnny Appleseed.
Regarding urban life, any steps toward autonomy and self-help should be
realized, beginning now, so that cities may be all the more quickly
abandoned later. Created out of capital's need to centralize control of
property transactions, religion, and political domination, cities remain as
extended life-destroying monuments to the same basic needs of capital.
Something on the order of what we know now as museums might be a good idea
so that post-upheaval generations could know how grotesque our species'
existence became. Moveable celebration sites may be the nearest
configuration to cities that disalienated life will express.
Along with the movement out of cities, paralleling it, one might likely see
a movement from colder climes to warmer ones. The heating of living space in
northern areas constitutes an absurd effort of energy, resources, and time.
When humans become once again intimate with the earth, healthier and more
robust, these zones would probably be peopled again, in altogether different
ways.
As for population itself, its growth is no more a natural or neutral
phenomenon than its technology. When life is fatally out of balance, the
urge to reproduce appears as compensation for im- poverishment, as with the
non-civilized gatherer-hunters surviving today, population levels would be
relatively quite low.
Enrico Guidoni pointed out that architectural structures necessarily reveal
a great deal about their social context. Similarly, the isolation and
sterility of shelter in class society is hardly accidental, and deserves to
be scrapped in toto. Rudofsky's Architecture Without Architects deals with
some examples of shelter produced not by specialists, but by spontaneous and
evolving communal activity. Imagine the inviting richness of dwellings, each
unique not mass produced, and a part of a serene mutuality that one might
expect to emerge from the collapse of boundaries and artificial scarcities,
material and emotional.
Probably `health' in a new world will be a matter even less recognizable
than the question of shelter The dehumanized industrial `medicine' of today
is totally complicitous with the overall processes of society which rob us
of life and vitality. Of countless examples of the criminality of the
present, direct profiting from human misery must rank near the top.
Alternative healing practices are already challenging the dominant mode, but
the only real solution is the abolition of a setup that by its very nature
spawns an incredible range of physical and psychic immiseration. From Reich
to Mailer, for example, cancer is recognized as the growth of a general
madness blocked and denied. Before civilization disease was generally
nonexistent. How could it have been otherwise? Where else do degenerative
and infectious diseases, emotional maladies, and all the rest issue if not
from work, toxicity, cities, estrangement, fear, unfulfilled lives - the
whole canvas of damaged, alienated reality? Destroying the sources will
eradicate the suffering. Minor exigencies would be treated by herbs and the
like, not to mention a diet of pure, non-processed food.
It seems evident that industrialization and the factories could not be
gotten rid of instantly, but equally clear that their liquidation must be
pursued with all the vigor behind the rush of break-out. Such enslavement of
people and nature must disappear forever, so that words like production and
economy will have no meaning. A graffito from the rising in France in '68
was simply `Quick!' Those partisans apparently realized the need to move
rapidly forward all the way, with no temporizing or compromise with the old
world. Half a revolution would only preserve domination and cement its hold
over us.
A qualitatively different life would entail abolishing exchange, in every
form, in favor of the gift and the spirit of play. Instead of the coercion
of work -- and how much of the present could continue without precisely that
coercion? -- an existence without constraints is an immediate, central
objective. Unfettered pleasure, creative endeavor along the lines of
Fourier: according to the passions of the individual and in a context of
complete equality.
What would we keep? ``Labor-saving devices''? Unless they involve no
division of labor (e.g. a lever or incline), this concept is a fiction;
behind the `saving' is hidden the congealed drudgery of many and the
despoliation of the natural world. As the Parisian group Interrogations put
it: ``Today's riches are not human riches; they are riches for capitalism
which correspond to a need to sell and stupefy. The products we manufacture,
distribute, and administer are the material expressions of our alienation.''
Every kind of fear and doubt is cultivated against the prospect or
possibility of transforming life, including the moment of its beginning.
``Wouldn't revolt mean mayhem, hoarding, survivalist violence, etc.?'' But
popular uprisings seem to embody strong feelings of joy, unity, and
generosity. Considering the most recent U.S. examples, the urban
insurrections of the '60s, New York City '77, and Los Angeles '92 -- one is
struck overall by the spontaneous sharing, the sharp drop in interracial
violence and violence against women, and even a sense of festival.
Our biggest obstacle lies in forgetting the primacy of the negative.
Hesitation, peaceful coexistence -- this deficiency of desire will prove
fatal if allowed to be ascendent. The truly humanitarian and pacific impulse
is that which is committed to relentlessly destroying the malignant dynamic
known as civilization, including its roots. Time is a stunting, confining
imposition of culture, naming is a domination, like counting, an aspect of
the distancing of language. In the horrible extremity of today we can see
the need to return all the way to the earth, to the multi-sensual intimacy
of nature that obtained before symbolization made living a reified,
separated caricature of itself. Enchantment might be savored even more
brightly this time, for knowing what our ancestors didn't realize must be
avoided.
Tearing up the concrete could begin immediately, as my late friend Bob
Brubaker once counseled. Literally, under the pavement, it's the beach!
(John Zerzan's essay, ``Future Primitive,'' appeared in Anarchy: a journal
of desire armed #33/Summer '92. He is also the author of Elements of Refusal
[Left Bank Books, 4142 Brooklyn NE, Seattle, WA. 98105, 1988.)
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