Greasing the Rails to a Cyborg FutureBy John Zerzan

From Adbusters #35

When I sat down with the Adbusters Cyborg Manifesto at home in Eugene, Oregon, I read it as intended: as a hoax. Not a cruel prank on the unsuspecting reader, but a tool for drawing out our varying faiths in and sympathies for the ideological project of shifting human culture, with finality, from the real and concrete to the virtual and technological.

If many failed to see through the hoax or, more frighteningly, recognized it but still gave it conditional support, then the reason lies in the reigning cultural ethos of our times: postmodernism.

With its sharply narrowed ambitions concerning thought, its tendency to shade into the cynical, postmodernism has become a term both pervasive and faceless. But it does have a face. The theory of postmodernism began in large part as French reaction against the grand and total claims of Marxism. Emerging and spreading about 20 years ago, in a period of reaction with almost no social movements, postmodernism bears the imprint of conservatism and lowered expectations. It has also risen in lockstep with the unfolding logic of an increasingly technological "cyborg" society.

Postmodernism tells us that we can’t grasp the whole, indeed that the desire for an overview of what’s going on out there is unhealthy and suspect, even totalitarian. We have seen, after all, how grand systems – "metanarratives," as they are fashionably referred to – have proven oppressive. Having hit on this epiphany, the pomo troops were quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Skeptical about the claims and results of previous systems of thought, postmodernism has in fact jettisoned nearly all desire or hope of making sense of what we experience. It abandons the "arrogance" of trying to figure out the origins, logic, causality, or structure of the world we live in.

Instead, postmodernists focus on surfaces, fragments, margins. Reality is too shifting, complex, and indeterminate to decipher or judge. Too "messy," too "interesting" to allow for fixed conclusions, as Donna Haraway puts it in her own well-known "Cyborg Manifesto."

The postmodern style is notorious for its dense language and games of contradiction. In Haraway’s manifesto, for example, she concedes that "the main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism" – but that in no way dims her enthusiasm for a part human, part machine, high-tech future!

In a technified society, we are increasingly "connected" from isolation, our experiences filtered through the Internet, television, and the spectacles of consumer culture. Shared and direct experience, which once helped us understand the meaning and texture of life, are two major casualties of this cyborg imperative. Things grow stark and menacing in every sphere, and still Haraway and the postmodern crowd insist that conclusions be avoided. Of course, once one renounces any attempt to comprehend the overall situation, it’s easy to embrace the endless complex of piecemeal "solutions" offered by technology and capital.

Postmodernism celebrates evanescent flows, a state of no boundaries, the transgressive. If this sounds familiar, it's because these values are shared by the most ardent architects of both consumerism and capitalist globalization. As the dimensions of personal sovereignty and community steadily erode, along with meaning and value, a consumer society in cyberspace becomes the uncontested next stage of human existence.

Division of labor, structures of control, the nature of technology – not to mention less abstract factors like drudgery, toxicity, the steady destruction of nature – are integral to the high-tech trajectory. They are also of no concern, evidently, to postmodernists, who continue to cling to the subtle, the tentative, the narrowly focused. Virtual reality mirrors the postmodern fascination with surfaces, explicitly rejoicing in its own depthlessness – one obvious way in which the postmodernists are the accomplices of the Brave New World. As we reject any possibility of understanding shared or even personal experience, no challenge to that experience seems plausible. The political counterpart of postmodernism is pragmatism; we find ways of accommodating ourselves to the debased norm.

The decay of meaning, passion, and inner vibrancy has been going on for a while. Today it is a juggernaut, in the face of which postmodernism is the culture of no resistance. The good news is that there are signs of life, signs that folks in various places are beginning to suspect our culture’s greatest hoax.

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John Zerzan

Rank-and-File Radicalism within the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

In the following article are presented some unusual features of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the only period in which the KKK was a mass movement. In no way should this essay be interpreted as an endorsement of any aspect of this version of the Klan or of any other parts of Klan activity. Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and ideology of the Klan itself.

In the U.S. at least, racism is certainly one of the most crudely reified phenomena. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s is one of the two or three most important — and most ignored — social movements of 20th century America. These two data are the essential preface to this essay.

Writing at the beginning of 1924, Stanley Frost accurately surveyed the Klan at the crest of its power: “The Ku Klux Klan has become the most vigorous, active and effective organization in American life outside business.”[1] Depending on one’s choice of sources, KKK membership in 1924 can be estimated at anywhere between two and eight million.[2]

And yet, the nature of this movement has been largely unexplored or misunderstood. In the fairly thin literature on the subject, the Klan phenomenon is usually described simply as ‘nativism’. A favorite in the lexicon of orthodox historians, the term refers to an irrationality, racism, and backwardness supposedly endemic to the poorer and less-educated classes, and tending to break out in episodic bouts of violently-expressed prejudice. Emerson Loucks’ The Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania: A Study of Nativism is a typical example. Its preface begins with, “The revived KKK and its stormy career is but one chapter in the history of American nativism,” the first chapter is entitled, “Some Beginnings of Nativism,” and in the book’s concluding paragraph we learn that “Nativism has shown itself to be a perennial.”[3]

Kenneth Jackson, with his The Ku Klux Klan in the City, has been one of a very few commentators to go beyond the amorphous ‘nativism’ thesis and also challenge several of the prevailing ste- reotypes of the Klan. He argues forcefully that “the Invisible Empire of the 1920s was neither predominantly southern, nor rural, nor white supremacist, nor violent.”[4] Carl Degler’s succinct comments corroborate the non-southern characterization quite ably: “Significantly, the single piece of indisputable Klan legislation enacted anywhere was the school law in Oregon; the state most thoroughly controlled by the Klan was Indiana; and the largest Klan membership in any state was that in Ohio. On the other hand, several southern states

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like Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina hardly saw the Klan or felt its influence.”[5] Jackson’s statistics show clearly the Klan’s northern base, with only one southern state, Texas, among the eight states with the largest membership.[6] It would be difficult to even begin to cite Jackson’s evidence in favor of terming the Klan an urban phenomenon, inasmuch as his whole book testifies to this characterization. It may be interesting to note, however, the ten urban areas with the most Klansmen. Principally industrial and all but one of them outside the South, they are, in descending order: Chicago, Indianapolis, Philadelphia-Camden, Detroit, Denver, Portland, Atlanta, Los Angeles-Long Beach, Youngstown-Warren, and Pittsburgh-Carnegie.[7]

The notion of the KKK as an essentially racist organization is similarly challenged by Jackson. As Robert Moats Miller put it, “in great areas of the country where the Klan was powerful the Negro population was insignificant, and in fact, it is probable that had not a single Negro lived in the United States, a Klan-type order would have emerged.”[8] And Robert Duffus, writing for the June 1923 World’s Week, conceded: “while the racial situation contributed to a state of mind favorable to Ku Kluxism, curiously it did not figure prominently in the Klan’s career.”[9] The Klan in fact tried to organize “colored divisions” in Indiana and other states, to the amazement of historian Kathleen Blee.[10] Deg- ler, who wrongly considered vigilantism to be the core trait of the Klan, admitted that such violence as there was “was directed against white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants rather than against the minorities.”[11]

Which brings us to the fourth and last point of Jackson’s thesis, that the KKK was not predominantly violent. Again, his conclusions seem valid despite the widespread image of a lynch-mad, terroristic Klan. The post-war race riots of 1919 in Washington, Chicago, and East St. Louis, for example, occurred before there were any Klansmen in those cities,[12] and in the 1920s, when the Klan grew to its great strength, the number of lynchings in the U.S. dropped to less than half the annual average of pre-war years[13] and a far smaller fraction than that by comparison with the immediately post-war years. In the words of Preston Slosson, “By a curious anomaly, in spite of...the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the old American custom of lynch law fell into almost complete disuse.”[14]

A survey of Literary Digest (conservative) and The Nation (liberal) for 1922–1923 reveals several reported instances in which the Klan was blamed for violence it did not perpetrate and unfairly deprived of its rights.[15] Its enemies frequently included local or state establishments, and were generally far from being meek and powerless victims.

If the Ku Klux Klan, then, was not predominantly southern, rural, racist, or violent, just what was the nature of this strange force which grew to such power so rapidly and spontaneously in the early-middle ’20s — and declined at least as quickly by 1925? The orthodox ‘nativism’ answer asserts that it was just another of the periodic, unthinking and reactionary efforts of the ignorant to turn back the clock, and therefore futile and short-lived. A post-Jackson, ‘neo-nativist’ position might even concede the points about racism and violence not being determinant, and still essentially maintain this point of view, of recurrent, blind efforts to restore an inchoate but rightist version of the past.

But a very strong pattern regarding the Klan introduces doubts about this outlook, namely, that militantly progressive or radical activities have often closely preceded, coincided with, or closely followed strong KKK efforts, and have involved the same

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participants. Oklahoma, for example, experienced in a mere ten years the growth and decline of the largest state branch of the Socialist Party, and the rise of one of the strongest Klan movements.[16] In Williamson County, Illinois, an interracial crowd of union coal miners stormed a mine being worked by strike-breakers and killed twenty of them. The community supported the miners’ action and refused to convict any of the participants in this so-called Herrin Massacre of 1922, which had captured the nation’s attention. Within two years, Herrin and the rest of Williamson County backed one of the very strongest local Klan organizations in the country.[17] The violently suppressed strikes of the southern Appalachian Piedmont textile workers in 1929, among the most bitterly fought in twentieth century labor history,[18] took place at the time of or immediately following great Klan strength in many of the same mill towns. The rubber workers of the huge tire-building plants of Akron, the first to widely employ the effective sit-down strike weapon in the early 1930s, formed a large part of that city’s very sizeable Klan membership,[19] or had come from Appalachian regions where the KKK was also strong. In 1934, the very militant and interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union was formed, and would face the flight of its leaders, the indifference of organized labor, and the machine-guns of the large landholders. Many of its active members were former Klansmen.[20] And observers of the United Auto Workers have claimed that some of the most militant activists in auto were former Klansmen.[21]

The key to all these examples of apparently disparate loyalties is a simple one. As I will show, not only did some Klansmen hold relatively radical opinions while members of the Invisible Order, but in fact used the Klan, on occasion, as a vehicle for radical social change. The record in this area, though not inaccessible, has remained completely undeveloped.

The rise of the Klan began with the sharp economic depression that struck in the fall of 1920. In the South, desperate farmers organized under the Klan banner in an effort to force up the price of cotton by restricting its sale. “All throughout the fall and winter of 1920–22 masked bands roamed the countryside warning ginneries and warehouses to close until prices advanced. Sometimes they set fire to establishments that defied their edict.”[22] It was from this start that the Klan really began to grow and to spread to the North, crossing the Mason-Dixon line in the winter of 1920–21.[23]

The KKK leadership “disavowed and apparently disapproved of”[24] this aggressive economic activism, and it is important to note that more often than not there was tension or opposition between officials and members, a point I will return to later. In a southern union hall in 1933, Sherwood Anderson queried a local reporter about the use of the Klan for economic struggles: “This particular hall had formerly been used by a Ku Klux Klan organization and I asked the newspaper man, ‘How many of these people [textile workers] were in on that?’ ‘A good many,’ he said. He thought the Ku Klux Klan had been rather an outlet for the workers when America was outwardly so prosperous. ‘The boom market never got down to these,’ he said, making a sweeping movement with his arm.”[25] Klan officials never spoke in favor of such uses of the Klan, but it was the economic and social needs that often drew people to the Klan, rather than religious, patriotic, or strictly fraternal ones.[26]

This is not to say that there wasn’t a multiplicity of contributing factors usually present as the new Klan rose to prominence. There was a widespread feeling that the “Glorious Crusade” of World War I had been a swindle. There was the desperate boredom and monotony of regimented work-lives. To this latter frustration, a KKK

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newspaper appealed for new members with the banner, “JUST TO PEP UP THE GAME. THIS SLOW LIFE IS KILLING ME.”[27] And with these feelings, too, it is quite easy to imagine a form of progressive social or political activism being the result. As Stanley Frost commented in 1924, “the Klan movement seems to be another expression of the general unrest and dissatisfaction with both local and national conditions — the high cost of living, social injustice, inequality....”[28] Or, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. offhandedly revealed in a comment about Huey Long, “despite his poor white sympathies, he did not, like Hugo Black in Alabama, join the Klan.”[29]

The activities of the Klan have very commonly been referred to as “moral reform,” and certainly this kind of effort was common. Articles such as, “Behind the White Hoods: The Regeneration of Oklahoma,” and “Night-Riding Reformers,” from Fall 1923 issues of The Outlook bespeak this side of Klan motivation.[30] They tell how the Klan cleaned up gangs of organized crime and combated vice and political corruption in Oklahoma and Indiana, apparently with a minimum of violence or vigilantism. Also widespread were Klan attempts to put bootleggers out of business, though we might recall here that prohibition has frequently been endorsed by labor partisans, from the opinion that the often high alcohol consumption rates among workers weakened the labor movement. In fact, the Klan not infrequently attacked liquor and saloon interests explicitly as forces that kept working people down.

It is on the plane of ‘moral’ issues, furthermore, that another stereotype regarding the KKK — that of its total moral intolerance — dissolves at least somewhat under scrutiny. Charles Bowles, the almost successful write-in Klan candidate in the 1924 Detroit may- oralty race, was a divorce lawyer (as well as being pro-public works).It cannot be denied that anti-Catholicism was a major plank of Klan appeal in many places, such as Oregon. But at least part of this attitude stemmed from a “belief that the Catholic Church was a major obstacle in the struggle for women’s suffrage and equality.”[31]

Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, gave a lecture to Klanswomen in Silver Lake, New Jersey, a speaking engagement she accepted with no little trepidation. She feared that if she “ut- tered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria.” Actually, a real rapport was established and the evening was a great success. “A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were profferred. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.”[32]

At any rate, a connection can be argued between ‘moral’ reform and more fundamental reform attempts. “I wonder if anybody could ever find any connection between this town’s evident immoralities and some of the plant’s evident dissatisfaction?”[33] pondered Whiting Williams in 1921. He decided in the affirmative, that vice in the community is the result of anger in the mill or factory. And Klan members often showed an interest in also combating what they saw as the causes of ‘immoralities’ rather than simply their manifestations.

Hiram Evans, a head of the Klan, admitted in a rare interview in 1923 that “There has been a widespread feeling among Klansmen that in the last few years the operation of the National Government has shown weakness indicating a possible need of rather fundamental reform.”[34] A 1923 letter to the editor of The New Republic details this awareness of the need for deep-seated changes. Written by an opponent of the Klan, the passage expresses “The Why of the Klan”:

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“First: Throughout all classes there is a growing skepticism of democracy, especially of the current American brand. Many Americans believe there is little even-handed justice administered in the courts; that a poor man has little chance against a rich one; that many judges practically buy their places on the bench or are put there by powerful interests. The strong, able young man comes out of college ready to do his part in politics, but with the settled conviction that unless he can give full time there is no use ‘bucking up against the machine.’ Furthermore he believes the machines to be equally corrupt. The miner in West Virginia sees the power of the state enlisted on the side of the mine owner.”[35]

Throughout the literature there is a strongly prevailing tendency to deal with the social composition of Klan membership by ignoring it altogether, or, more commonly, by referring to it in passing as “middle class.” This approach enabled John Mecklin, whose The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (1924) is regarded as a classic, to say that “The average Klansman is far more in sympathy with capital than with labor.”[36]In large part this stems from looking at the top Klan officials, rather than at the rank and file members. William Simmons, D.C. Stephenson, and Hiram Evans, the men who presided over the Klan in the ’20s had been, respectively, a minister, a coal dealer, and a dentist. But the membership defi- nitely did not share this wholly “middle class” makeup.

Kenneth Jackson only partially avoids the error by terming the Klan a “lower middle-class movement,”[37] a vague appellation which he corrects shortly thereafter: “The greatest source of Klan support came from rank and file non-union, blue-collar employees of large businesses and factories.”[38]

Returning to the subject of socio-political attitudes of Klan members, available evidence strikingly confirms my contention of a sometimes quite radical frame of mind. In the spring of 1924, The Outlook magazine conducted a “Platform of the People” poll by mail. When it was found that an organizational request for ten thousand ballots came from the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Ku Klux Klan, pink ballots were supplied so that they could be separately tabulated. To quote the article, “Pink Ballots for the Ku Klux Klan”: “The ballots returned all came from towns and small cities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Of the total of 1,139 voters, 490 listed themselves as Republicans, only 97 as Democrats, and 552 as Independents. Among them are 243 women.”[39] Approximately two-thirds (over 700) responded regarding their occupations. “The largest single group (209) is that of skilled workmen; the next (115) is of laborers.” The rest includes workers (e.g. “railway men”) and farmers, plus a scattering of professionals and merchants. The women who listed their occupations were mainly housewives.

Despite the generally high percentages of abstention on most of the issues, the results on the following selected topics show clearly radical leanings:[40]

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Percent Approved: Ignored: Condemned: “Compulsory freight reduction” 30 77 3 “Nationalization of the railroads with cooperative administration by workers, shippers, and public”

24 72 4

“Federal Aid for Farmers” Co-operatives” 30 68 2 “Federal purchase of wheat” 20 68 2 “Price fixing of staple farm products” 23 75 5 “Further extension of farm credit” 32 67 1 “Equal social, legal, and industrial rights for women”

41 56 3

“Amendment enabling Congress to prevent exploitation of children in industry”

45 54 1

“Federal Anti-Lynching Law” 38 60 2 “Establish Federal Employment Bureau” 37 60 3 “Extension of principle of Federal aid for education”

91 9 0

“Abolition of injunctions in labor disputes” 20 73 7 “Nationalization, and democratic administration by technicians, workers, and consumers, of coal mines”

23 72 5

“Government control and distribution of high-power transmission”

33 64 3

Also favored were immigration restriction and prohibition. The Outlook, obviously displeased with the response, categorized the Klan participants as “more inclined to accept panaceas at face value, willing to go farther. In general,” they concluded, “this leads to greater radicalism, or ‘progressivism.’”[41] The Klan movement declined rapidly within a year of the poll, and research substantiates the enduring validity of The Outlook editors’ claim that “The present table provides the only analysis that has ever been made of the political views of members of the Ku Klux Klan.”[42]

With this kind of data, it is less surprising to find, for example, that the Socialist Party and the Klan formed a 1924 electoral alliance in Milwaukee to elect John Kleist, a Socialist and a Klansman, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.[43] Robert O. Nesbitt perceived, in Wisconsin, a “tendency for German Socialists, whose most conspicuous opponents were Catholic clergy, to join the Klan.”[44] The economic populist Walter Pierce was elected governor in Oregon in 1922 by a strong agricultural protest vote, including the endorsement of the Klan and the Socialist Party. Klan candidates promised to cut taxes in half, reduce phone rates, and give aid to distressed farmers.[45] A recent study of the Klan in LaGrande, Oregon revealed that it “played a substantial role in supporting the strikers” during the nationwide railworkers’ strike of 1922.[46]

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In fact, the KKK appealed not infrequently to militant workers, despite the persistent stereotype of the Klan’s anti-labor bent. An August 1923 World’s Work article described strong worker support for the Klan in Kansas; during the state-wide railroad strike there in 1922, the strikers “actually did flock into the Klan in what seems to have been large numbers.”[47]

Charles Alexander, who wrote the highly regarded The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest, though generally subscribing to the anti-labor Klan reputation, confessed his own inability to confirm this image. Referring to himself, he said, “the writer has come across only two instances of direct conflict between southwestern Klansmen and union organizers, one in Arkansas and one in Louisiana.”[48] Writing of Oklahoma, Carter Blue Clark judged that “violence against the International (sic) Workers of the World and radical farm and labor groups was rare...”[49] He found sixty-eight incidents of Klan-related violence between 1921 and 1925, only two of which belonged to the “Unionization/Radicalism” category.[50]

Goldberg’s study of the KKK in Colorado found that “despite coal strikes in 1921, 1922, and 1927, which primarily involved foreign — born miners, the Klan never resorted to the language of the Red Scare.” During the Wobbly-led strike of 1927, in fact, the Canon City Klan formed an alliance with the IWW against their common enemy, the ruling elite.[51]

Virginia Durr, who was Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party running mate in 1948, gives us a picture of the Klan of the ’20s and labor in the Birmingham area:

“The unions were broken...So, the Ku Klux Klan was formed at that point as a kind of underground union and unless you were there and knew it, nobody will believe it. They will say, ‘Oh, but the Klan was against the unions.’ Well, it wasn’t.”[52]

Gerald Dunne found that “ninety percent of Birmingham’s union members were also involved with the Klan,”[53] and that the Klan in the state at large attacked the Alabama Power Company and the influence of the ruling Bankhead family while campaigning for pub- lic control of the Muscle Shoals dam project and government medical insurance.[54]

In the ’20s the corrupt and inert officialdom of the United Mine Workers was presided over by the autocratic John L. Lewis. Ku Kluxers in the union, though they had been officially barred from membership in 1921, formed a coalition with leftists at the 1924 convention in a fight for union democracy: “Then the radical- s...combined with the sympathizers of the hooded order to strip Mr. Lewis of the power to appoint organizers.”[55] Though this combination was narrowly defeated, “Lewis was outvoted in a first test of the question as to whether local executives and organizers should be appointed by the national officials or by the rank and file. The insurgents, headed by the deposed Alexander Howat and spurred on by the members of the Ku Klux Klan, who exerted a lobbying influence from the convention doorways, combined to carry the first vote.”[56] Though officially denied membership, strongly pro-UMW sources have admitted that, in fact, a great many union members were Klansmen. McDonald and Lynch, for example, estimated that in 1924 eighty percent of UMW District 11 (Indiana) members were enrolled in the KKK[57]. An examination of the Proceedings of the 1924 union convention supports this point; areas of Klan strength, such as Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania voted very decisively against Lewis, in favor of the election of organizers by the rank and file.[58]

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A New Republic article in March, 1924 told of the strength of the Klan in Williamson County, Illinois, scene of the “Herrin Massacre” referred to above. The anti-Klan piece sadly shook its head at this turn of events in an area of “one hundred percent unionism.”[59] Buried in the middle of the account is the key to the situation, an accurate if grudging concession that “the inaction of their local labor leaders gave to the Ku Klux Klan a following among the miners.”[60]

The following oral history account by Aaron Barkham, a West Virginia miner, is a perfect illustration of the Klan as a vehicle of class struggle — and of the reason for its official denunciation by the UMW. It is worth quoting at length:

“About that time 1929, in Logan County, West Virginia, a bunch of strike-breakers come in with shotguns and axe handles. Tried to break up union meetings. The UMW deteriorated and went back to almost no existence. It didn’t particularly get full strength till about 1949. And it don’t much today in West Virginia. So most people ganged up and formed the Ku Kluck Klan.”

The Ku Klux was the real controllin’ factor in the community. It was the law. It was in power to about 1932. My dad was one of the leaders til he died. The company called in the army to get the Ku Klux out, but it didn’t work. The union and the Ku Klux was about the same thing.”

The superintendent of the mine got the big idea of makin’ it rougher than it was. They hauled him off in a meat wagon, and about ten more of the company officials. Had the mine shut down. They didn’t kill ‘em, but they didn’t come back. They whipped one of the foremen and got him out of the county. They gave him twelve hours to get out, get his family out.”

The UMW had a field representative, he was a lawyer. They tarred and feathered ‘im for tryin’ to edge in with the company. He come around, got mad, tryin’ to tell us we were wrong, when we called a wildcat. He was takin’ the side of the company. I used a stick to help tar ‘im. And it wasn’t the first time.”

The Ku Klux was formed on behalf of people that wanted a decent living, both black and white. Half the coal camp was colored. It wasn’t anti-colored. The black people had the same responsibilities as the white. Their lawn was just as green as the white man’s. They got the same rate of pay. There was two colored who belonged to it. I remember those two niggers comin’ around my father and askin’ questions about it. They joined. The pastor of our community church was a colored man. He was Ku Klux. It was the only protection the workin’ man had.”

Sure, the company tried to play one agin’ the other. But it didn’t work. The colored and the whites lived side by side. It was somethin’ like a checkerboard. There’d be a white family and a colored family. No sir, there was no racial problem. Yeah, they had a certain feelin’ about the colored. They sure did. And they had a certain feelin’ about the white, too. Anyone come into the com- munity had unsatisfactory dealin’s, if it was colored or white, he didn’t stay.”[61]

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Why have the few, standard accounts of the Klan been seemingly so far off? Principally because they have failed to look at the Klan phenomenon “from the bottom up,” to see KKK participants as historical subjects. One result of this is to have overlooked much material altogether. As most labor attention focuses on the unions at the expense of the individual workers, so has the Klan been ig- nored as a movement relevant to the history of working people. The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933, by Irving Bernstein, is widely regarded as the best treatment of labor in the 1920s. It does not mention the Ku Klux Klan. Similarly, the Lynds’ Middletown, that premier sociological study of Muncie, Indiana in the ’20s, barely mentions the Klan[62] and then only in terms of a most marginal area, religious preference.[63]

Certainly no one would seriously maintain that the KKK of the ’20s was free from bigotry or injustice. There is truth in the charac- terization of the Klan as a moment of soured populism, fermented of post-war disillusion. But it is also true that when large numbers of people, feeling “a sense of defeat”[64] in an increasingly urban South, or their northern counterparts, “conscious of their growing inferiority,”[65] turned to the Klan, they did not necessarily enact some kind of sick, racist savagery. On occasion, they even turned, as we have seen, to a fairly radical activism — to the chagrin of their corrupt and conservative leadership.

In fact, it was internal dissension — plus, to a lesser extent, the return of relative prosperity in 1925[66] — that brought about the precipitous decline of the Klan. Donald Crownover’s study of the KKK in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania discussed some of the abortive efforts to form state and even national organizations alternative to the vice and autocracy prevailing at the top of the Invisible Empire.[67] “Revolt from within, not criticism from without, broke the Klan.”[68] More fundamentally, the mid-1920s, against the background of a decisive deformation provided by World War I,[69] saw the real arrival of the consumer society and the cultural displacement of militancy it represented.[70]

The above research, limited and unsystematic as it is, would seem to raise more questions than it answers. Nonetheless, it may be possible to discern here something of relevance concerning racism, spontaneity and popular values in the context of a very important social movement.[71]

[1] Stanley Frost, The Challenge of the Klan (New York, 1969), p.1.

[2] Between five and six million is probably the soundest figure. Morrison and Commager found “garnered in the Northeast and Midwest an all-time peak of six million members.” The Growth of the American Republic (New York, 1950), vol. II, p.556. Jonathon Daniels estimated that “the supposedly Southern organization had sprawled continentally from beginnings in Atlanta in 1915, up from 100,000 members in 1921 to 5,000,000 in 1924.” The Time Between the Wars (Garden City, New York, 1966), p. 108.

[3] Emerson Loucks, The Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania: A Study of Nativism (New York, 1936), pp. vi, 1, 198.

[4] Kenneth Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York, 1967), p. xi.

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[5] Carl Degler, “A Century of the Klans: A Review Article,” Journal of Southern History (November 1965), pp. 442–443.

[6] Jackson, op.cit., p. 237.

[7] Ibid., p. 239.

[8] Robert Moats Miller, “The Ku Klux Klan,” from The Twenties: Change and Continuity, John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner and David Brody, eds. (Columbus, 1968), p. 218.

[9] Robert L. Duffus, “How the Ku Klux Klan Sells Hate,” World’s Week (June, 1923), p. 179.

[10] Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley, 1991), p. 169.

[11] Degler, op.cit., p. 437.

[12] William Simmons, head of the Klan in 1921, testified — without challenge — that the post-war race riots in Washington, East St. Louis and Chicago took place before there were any Klan members in those cities. See Hearings Before the Committee on Rules: House of Representatives, Sixty-Seventh Congress (Washington, 1921), p. 75.

[13] Daniel Snowman, USA: The Twenties to Viet Nam (London, 1968), p.37.

[14] Preston W. Slosson, The Great Crusade and After (New York, 1930), p. 258.

[15] See Literary Digest: “Quaint Customs and Methods of the KKK,” (August 5, 1922) A Defense of the Ku Klux Klan,” (January 20, 1923), esp. pp. 18–19; “The Klan as the Victim of Mob Violence,” (September 8, 1923), p. 12; The Nation: “Even the Klan Has Rights,” (December 13, 1922), p. 654.

[16] See Garin Burban’s “Agrarian Radicals and Their Opponents: Political Conflicts in Southern Oklahoma, 1910–1924,” Journal of American History (June 1971). Burbank argues that the Socialist Party and the Klan had different constituencies in Oklahoma, but much of his own data contradicts this conclusion. Esp. pp. 20–21.

[17] See Paul M. Angle’s Bloody Williamson(New York, 1952), esp. pp. 4, 210 28–29, 137–138.

[18] See Irving Bernstein’s The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Baltimore, 1966), pp. 1–43.

[19] Jackson, op.cit, p. 239. Akron had the eighth largest member- ship of U.S. cities.

[20] See Thomas R. Brooks’ Toil and Trouble (New York, 1971), p. 368, and Jerold S. Auerbach’s Labor and Liberty: The LaFollette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis, 1966), p. 38.

[21] Irving Howe and B.J. Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther (New York, 1949), p. 9.

[22] John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York, 1968), pp. 289- 290.

[23] Donald A. Crownover, “The Ku Klux Klan in Lancaster County, 1923–1924,” Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society (1964, No.2), p. 64.

[24] Higham, op.cit, p. 290.

[25] Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York, 1935), p. 114.

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[26] Neill Herring, a veteran progressive and scholar from Atlanta, has testified to this kind of utilization of Klan organization as enabled by a structure that “left a fair measure of local indepen- dence of action.” Letter to author, March 25, 1975.

[27] Miller, op.cit., p. 224.

[28] Frost, op.cit., p. 270.

[29] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston, 1960), p. 45.

[30] Stanley Frost, “Night-Riding Reformers,” The Outlook (November 14, 1923); Frost “Behind the White Hoods; The Regeneration of Oklahoma,” The Outlook (November 21, 1923).

[31] Robert Klan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana, 1981), p. 23.

[32] Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York, 1938), pp. 366- 367.

[33] Frost, op.cit., p. 86.

[34] Frost, op.cit., p. 86.

[35] Mary H. Herring, “the Why of the Klan,” (Correspondence) The New Republic (February 23, 1923), p. 289.

[36] John Moffat Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind (New York, 1924), p. 98.

[37] Jackson, op.cit., p. 240.

[38] Ibid., p. 241.

[39] “Pink Ballots for the Ku Klux Klan,” The Outlook (June 25, 1924), pp. 306–307.

[40] Ibid., p. 307–308. My percentages involve slight approxima- tions; they are based on averaging the percentages given for Republicans, Democrats, and Independents proportionally.

[41] Ibid., p. 306.

[42] Ibid., p. 308.

[43] Jackson, op.cit., p. 162.

[44] Robert O. Nesbitt, Wisconsin: A History (Madison, 1973), p. 467.

[45] George S. Turnbull, An Oregon Crusader (Portland, 1955), p. 150. “Promises and Lies,” (editorial) Capital Journal (Salem, October 31, 1922).

[46] David A. Horowitz, “The Ku Klux Klan in LaGrande, Oregon,” The Invisible Empire in the West, ed. Shawn Lay (Urbana, 1992), p. 195.

[47] Robert L. Duffus, “The Ku Klux Klan in the Middle West,” World’s Work (August, 1923), p. 365.

[48] Charles Alexander, The Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest (Louis- ville, 1965), p. 25.

[49] Carter Blue Clark, A History of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma. Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Oklahoma, 1976), p. 115.

[50] Ibid., p. 147.

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[51] Goldberg, op.cit., pp. 122, 146.

[52] Virginia Durr, Interview (conducted by Susan Thrasher and Jacque Hall, May 13–15, 1975), University of North Carolina Oral History project.

[53] Gerald T. Dunne, Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution (New York, 1977), p. 114.

[54] Ibid., pp. 116, 118, 121.

[55] Cecil Carnes, John L. Lewis (New York, 1936), p. 116.

[56] Ibid., p. 114.

[57] David J. McDonald and Edward A. Lynch, Coal and Unionism (Silver Spring, Md, 1939), p. 161.

[58] United Mine Workers of America, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Consecutive and Sixth Biennial Convention (Indianapolis, 1924), p. 686.

[59] “Ku Kluxing in the Miners’ Country,” The New Republic (March 26, 1924), p. 123.

[60] Ibid., p. 124.

[61] Studs Terkel, Hard Times (New York, 1970), pp. 229–230.

[62] Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (New York, 1929). pp. 333, 364–366, 479.

[63] George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1967), p. 196: “careful historians have found that neither the major church bodies and periodicals nor fundamentalist leaders ever worked closely with the Klan.” There seems to have been even less of a connection between the churches and the Klan in the North.

[64] Ibid, p. 191.

[65] George E. Mowry, The Urban Nation (New York, 1965), p. 34.

[66] Degler, op.cit., p. 441.

[67] Crownover, op. cit., pp. 69–70.

[68] Loucks, op.cit., p. 165.

[69] Zerzan, “Origins and Meaning of World War I,” Telos 49, esp. pp. 107–108.

[70] Stewart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Roots of the Consumer Society (New York, 1977). For example, pp. 189–190, 201.

[71] Special thanks to Neill Herring of Atlanta, Susan Thrasher of New Market, Tennessee, and Bob Hall of chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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SEIZE THE DAYby John Zerzan

The rapidly mounting toll of modern life is worse than we could have imagined. A metamorphosis rushes onward, changing the texture of living, the whole feel of things. In the not-so-distant past this was still only a partial modification; now the Machine converges on us, penetrating more and more to the core of our lives, promising no escape from its logic.

The only stable continuity has been that of the body, and that has become vulnerable in unprecedented ways. We now inhabit a culture, according to Furedi (1997), of high anxiety that borders on a state of outright panic. Postmodern discourse suppresses articulations of suffering, a facet of its accommodation to the inevitability of further, systematic desolation. The prominence of chronic degenerative diseases makes a chilling parallel with the permanent erosion of all that is healthy and life-affirming inside industrial culture. That is, maybe the disease can be slowed a bit in its progression, but no overall cure is imaginable in this context--which created the condition in the first place.

As much as we yearn for community, it is all but dead. McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears (American Sociological Review 2006) tell us that 19 years ago, the typical American had three close friends; now the number is two. Their national study also reveals that over this period of time, the number of people without one friend or confidant has tripled. Census figures show a correspondingly sharp rise in single-person households, as the technoculture -- with its vaunted "connectivity" -- grows steadily more isolating, lonely and empty.

In Japan "people simply aren't having sex" (Kitamura 2006) and the suicide rate has been rising rapidly. Hikikimori, or self-isolation, finds over a million young people staying in their rooms for years. Where the technoculture is most developed, levels of stress, depression and anxiety are highest.

Questions and ideas can only become currents in the world insofar as reality, external and internal, makes that possible. Our present state, devolving toward catastrophe, displays a reality in unmistakable terms. We are bound for a head-on collision between urgent new questions and a totality--global civilization--that can provide no answers. A world that offers no future, but shows no signs of admitting this fact, imperils its own future along with the life, health, and freedom of all beings on the planet. Civilization's rulers have always squandered whatever remote chances they had to prepare for the end of life as they know it, by choosing to ride the crest of domination, in all its forms.

It has become clear to some that the depth of the expanding crisis, which is as massively dehumanizing as it is ecocidal, stems from the cardinal institutions of civilization itself. The discredited promises of Enlightenment and modernity represent the pinnacle of the grave mistake known as civilization. There is no prospect that this Order will renounce that which has defined and maintained it, and apparently little likelihood that its various ideological supporters can face the facts. If civilization's collapse has already begun, a process now unofficially but widely assumed, there may

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be grounds for a widespread refusal or abandonment of the reigning totality. Indeed, its rigidity and denial may be setting the stage for a cultural shift on an unprecedented scale, which could unfold rapidly.

Of course, a paradigm shift away from this entrenched, but vulnerable and fatally flawed system is far from unavoidable. The other main possibility is that too many people, for the usual reasons (fear, inertia, manufactured incapacity, etc.) will passively accept reality as it is, until it's too late to do anything but try to deal with collapse. It's noteworthy that a growing awareness that things are going wrong, however inchoate and individualized, is fuelled by a deep, visceral unease and in many cases, acute suffering. This is where opportunity resides. From this new perspective that is certainly growing, we find the work of confronting what faces us as a species, and removing the barriers to planetary survival. The time has come for a wholesale indictment of civilization and mass society. It is at least possible that, in various modes, such a judgment can undo the death-machine before destruction and domestication inundate everything.

Although what's gone before helps us understand our current plight, we now live in obvious subjection, on a plainly greater scale than heretofore. The enveloping techno-world that is spreading so rapidly suggests movement toward even deeper control of every aspect of our lives. Adorno's assessment in the 1960s is proving valid today: "Eventually the system will reach a point--the word that provides the social cue is 'integration'--where the universal dependence of all moments on all other moments makes the talk of causality obsolete. It is idle to search for what might have been a cause within a monolithic society. Only that society itself remains the cause." (Negative Dialectics, p. 267).

A totality that absorbs every "alternative" and seems irreversible. Totalitarian. It is its own justification and ideology. Our refusal, our call to dismantle all this, is met with fewer and fewer countervailing protests or arguments. The bottom-line response is more along the lines of "Yes, your vision is good, true, valid; but this reality will never go away."

None of the supposed victories over inhumanity have made the world safer, not even just for our own species. All the revolutions have only tightened the hold of domination, by updating it. Despite the rise and fall of various political persuasions, it is always production that has won; technological systems never retreat, they only advance. We have been free or autonomous insofar as the Machine requires for its functioning.

Meanwhile, the usual idiotic judgments continue. "We should be free to use specific technologies as tools without adopting technology as lifestyle." (Valovic 2000). "The worlds created through digital technology are real to the extent that we choose to play their games." (Downs 2005).

Along with the chokehold of power, and some lingering illusions about how modernity works, the Machine is faced with worsening prospects. It is a striking fact that those who manage the dominant organization of life no longer even attempt answers or positive projections. The most pressing "issues" (e.g. Global Warming) are simply ignored, and propaganda about Community (the market plus isolation), Freedom (total surveillance society), the American Dream (!) is so false that it cannot be expected to be taken seriously.

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As Sahlins pointed out (1977), the more complex societies become, the less they are able to cope with challenges. The central concern of any state is to preserve predictability; as this capacity visibly fails, so do that state's chances of survival. When the promise of security wanes, so does the last real support. Many studies have concluded that various ecosystems are more likely to suffer sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than undergo steady, predictable degradation. The mechanisms of rule just might be subject to a parallel development.

In earlier times there was room to maneuver. Civilization's forward movement was accompanied by a safety valve: the frontier. Large-scale expansion of the Holy Roman Empire eastward during the 12th-14th centuries, the invasion of the New World after 1500, the Westward movement in North America through the end of the 19th century. But the system becomes "mortgaged to structures accumulated along the way" (Sahlins again). We are hostages, and so is the whole hierarchical ensemble. The whole system is busy, always in flux; transactions take place at an ever-accelerating rate. We have reached the stage where the structure relies almost wholly on the co-optation of forces that are more or less outside its control. A prime example is the actual assistance given by leftist regimes in South America. The issue is not so much that of the outcome of neo-liberal economics, but of the success of the left in power at furthering self-managed capital, and co-opting indigenous resistance into its orbit.

But these tactics do not outweigh the fact of an overall inner rigidity that puts the future of techno-capital at grave risk. The name of the crisis is modernity itself, its contingent, cumulative weight. Any regime today is in a situation where every "solution" only deepens the engulfing problems. More technology and more coercive force are the only resources to fall back on. The "dark side" of progress stands revealed as the definitive face of modern times.

Theorists such as Giddens and Beck admit that the outer limits of modernity have been reached, so that disaster is now the latent characteristic of society. And yet they hold out hope, without predicating basic change, that all will be well. Beck, for instance, calls for a democratization of industrialism and technological change -- carefully avoiding the question of why this has never happened.

There is no reconciliation, no happy ending within this totality, and it is transparently false to claim otherwise. History seems to have liquidated the possibility of redemption; its very course undoes what has been passing as critical thought. The lesson is to notice how much must change to establish a new and genuinely viable direction. There never was a moment of choosing; the field or ground of life shifts imperceptibly in a multitude of ways, without drama, but to vast effect. If the solution were sought in technology, that would of course only reinforce the rule of modern domination; this is a major part of the challenge that confronts us.

Modernity has reduced the scope allowed for ethical action, cutting off its potentially effective outlets. But reality, forcing itself upon us as the crisis mounts, is becoming proximal and insistent once again. Thinking gnaws away at everything, because this situation corrodes everything we have wanted. We realize that it is up to us. Even the likelihood of a collapse of the global techno-structure should not lure us away from acknowledgement of our decisive potential roles, our responsibility to stop the engine of destruction. Passivity, like a defeated attitude, will not bring forth deliverance.

We are all wounded, and paradoxically, this estrangement becomes the basis for communality. A gathering of the traumatized may be forming, a spiritual kinship demanding recovery. Because we can still feel acutely, our rulers can rest no more

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easily than we do. Our deep need for healing means that an overthrow must take place. That alone would constitute healing. Things "just go on", creating the catastrophe on every level. People are figuring it out: that things just go on is, in fact, the catastrophe.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson (The Place You Love is Gone 2006) expressed it this way: "Suddenly now it hits, bizarrely easy to grasp. We are inexorably heading for the Big Goodbye. It's official! The unthinkable is ready to be thought. It is finally in sight, after all of human history behind us. In the pit of what is left of your miserable soul you feel it coming, the definitive loss of home, bigger than the cause of one person's tears. Yours and mine, the private sob, will be joined by a mass crying..."

Misery. Immiseration. Time to get back to where we have never quite given up wanting to be. "Stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more," in Spengler's phrase.

Enlightenment thought, along with the Industrial Revolution, began in late 18th century Europe, inaugurating modernity. We were promised freedom based on conscious control over our destiny. But Enlightenment claims have not been realized, and the whole project has turned out to be self-defeating. Foundational elements including reason, universal rights and the laws of science were consciously designed to jettison pre-scientific, mystical sorts of knowledge. Diverse, communally sustained lifeways were sacrificed in the name of a unitary and uniform, law-enforced pattern of living. Kant's emphasis on freedom through moral action is rooted in this context, along with the French encyclopedists' program to replace traditional crafts with more up-to-date technological systems. Kant, by the way, for whom property was sanctified by no less than his categorical imperative, favorably compared the modern university to an industrial machine and its products.

Various Enlightenment figures debated the pros and cons of emerging modern developments, and these few words obviously cannot do justice to the topic of Enlightenment. However, it may be fruitful to keep this important historical conjunction in mind: the nearly simultaneous births of modern progressive thought and mass production. Apt in this regard is the perspective of Min Lin (2001): "Concealing the social origin of cognitive discourses and the idea of certainty is the inner requirement of modern Western ideology in order to justify or legitimate its position by universalizing its intellectual basis and creating a new sacred quasi-transcendance."

Modernity is always trying to go beyond itself to a different state, lurching forward as if to recover the equilibrium lost so long ago. It is bent on changing the future -- even its own --

With modernity's stress on freedom, modern enlightened institutions have in fact succeeded in nothing so much as conformity. Lyotard (1991) summed up the overall outcome: "A new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodeling of opinion by media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul." Massified, standardizing modes, in every area of life, relentlessly re-enact the actual control program of modernity.

"Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. Painstaking studies designed to prove the contrary have buried the obvious beneath tons of print." (Ellul 1964). Which is not in any way to deny the centrality of class rule, but to remind us that divided society began with division of labor. The divided self led directly to divided society.

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The division of labor is the labor of division. Understanding what characterizes modern life can never be far from the effort to understand technology's role in our everyday lives, just as it always has been. Lyotard (1991) judged that "technology wasn't invented by humans. Rather the other way around.

Goethe's Faust, the first tragedy about industrial development, depicted its deepest horrors as stemming from honorable aims. The superhuman developer Faust partakes of a drive endemic to modernization, one which is threatened by any trace of otherness/difference in its totalizing movement.

We function in an ever more homogeneous field, a ground always undergoing further uniformitization to promote a single, globalized techno-grid. Yet it is possible to avoid this conclusion by keeping one's focus on the surface, on what is permitted to exist on the margins. Thus some see Indymedia as a crucial triumph of decentralization, and free software as a radical demand. This attitude ignores the industrial basis of every high tech development and usage. All the "wondrous tools," including the ubiquitous and very toxic cell phone, are more related to eco-disastrous industrialization in China and India, for example, than to the clean, slick pages of Wired magazine. The salvationist claims of Wired are incredible in their disconnected, infantile fantasies. Its adherents can only maintain such gigantic delusions by means of deliberate blindness not only to technology's systematic destruction of nature, but to the global human cost involved: lives filled with toxicity, drudgery, and industrial accidents.

Now there are nascent protest phenomena against the all-encompassing universal system, such as "slow food," "slow cities," "slow roads". People would prefer that the juggernaut give pause and not devour the texture of life. But actual degradation is picking up speed, in its deworlding, disembedding course. Only a radical break will impede its trajectory. More missiles and more nukes in more countries is obviously another part of the general movement of the technological imperative. The specter of mass death is the crowning achievement, the condition of modernity, while the posthuman is the coming techno-condition of the subject. We are the vehicle of the Megamachine, not its beneficiary, held hostage to its every new leap forward. The technohuman condition looms, indeed. Nothing can change until the technological basis is changed, is erased.

Our condition is reinforced by those who insist -- in classic postmodern fashion -- that nature/culture is a false binarism. The natural world is evacuated, paved over, to the strains of the surrender-logic that nature has always been cultural, always available for subjugation. Koert van Mensvoort's "Exploring Next Nature" (2005) exposes the domination of nature logic, so popular in some quarters: "Our next nature will consist of what used to be cultural." Bye-bye, non-engineered reality. After all, he blithely proclaims, nature changes with us.

This is the loss of the concept of nature altogether -- and not just the concept! But the sign "nature" certainly enjoys popularity, as the substance is destroyed: "exotic" third world cultural products, natural ingredients in food, etc. Unfortunately, the nature of experience is linked to the experience of nature. When the latter is reduced to an insubstantial presence, the former is disfigured. Paul Berkett (2006) cites Marx and Engels to the effect that with communism people will "not only feel but also know their oneness with nature," that communism is "the unity of being of man with nature." Industrial-technological overcoming as its opposite--what blatant

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productionist rubbish. Leaving aside the communism orientation, however, how much of today's Left disagrees with the marxian ode to mass production?

A neglected insight in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents is the suggestion that a deep, unconscious "sense of guilt produced by civilization" causes a growing malaise and dissatisfaction. Adorno (1966) saw that relevant to "the catastrophe that impends is the supposition of an irrational catastrophe in the beginning. Today the thwarted possibility of something other has shrunk to that of averting catastrophe in spite of everything."

The original, qualitative, utter failure for life on this planet was the setting in motion of civilization. Enlightenment--like the Axial Age world religions 2000 years before--supplied transcendence for the next level of domination, an indispensable support for industrial modernity. But where would one now find the source of a transcending, justifying framework for new levels of rapacious development? What new realm of ideas and values can be conjured up to validate the all-encompassing ruin of late modernity? There is none. Only the system's own inertia; no answers, and no future.

Meanwhile our context is that of a sociability of uncertainty. The moorings of day-to-day stability are being unfastened, as the system begins to show multiple weaknesses. When it can no longer guarantee security, its end is near.

Ours is an incomparable historical vantage point. We can easily grasp the story of this universal civilization's malignancy. This understanding may be a signal strength for enabling a paradigm shift, the one that could do away with civilization and free us from the habitual will to dominate. A daunting challenge, to say the least; but recall the child who was moved to speak out in the face of collective denial. The Emperor was wearing nothing; the spell was broken.

2006

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The Imperialism of Everyday Life

By John Zerzan

Violence, even terror, always exists on the periphery of empire. They are the means by which empire is consolidated, defended, extended. Similarly, empire must respond to attack, or its basis is forfeit. All that is new about September 11 is that it didn’t occur on a distant horizon. It was as if Rome had been attacked 2,000 years ago, at the height of its power. The heartland of empire has a vast and ever-present meaning separable, and inseparable, from those twin towers in Manhattan. Everyday existence, under the sign of the capital and technology that the World Trade Center represented, also cries out.

We live in a culture of increasing emptiness; there is a vacuum at the heart of our empire. Epidemics of illegal drugs succeed one another, while tens of millions, including children as young as two, need antidepressants to get through the day. A great hunger exists for anesthesia in the face of emotional devastation and loss. Everyone knows that something is missing, that meaning and value are steadily being leached out of daily life, along with its very texture. "The less people really live - or perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they haven’t really lived - the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a terrible accident." Theodor Adorno’s observation of decades ago seems even more pertinent today. Exploding jetliners and anthrax can terrify; meanwhile a much deeper crisis triggers a far more pervasive and fundamental fear.

The empire is global. There is nowhere to go to escape its corrosive barrenness. Frederic Jameson reminded us that we live in the most standardized society that has ever existed. In Global Soul, the peripatetic Pico Iyer ups the ante, meditating on how the whole world now tends towards a universal sameness. A global unity of alienness, of disorientation and disconnection, destined to resemble a mall or an airport. People now dress alike in every major city in the world. They drink Coca-Cola, and watch many of the same TV shows.

The empire’s landscape of unreality and routinization grows steadily more pathological. Damage to nature and violence to the psyche compete in a postmodern culture of denial, punctuated by eruptions of the homicidal at work, at home, at school.

We can expect to hear more and more alarm bells that will wake us altogether. Peaceful slumber is unthinkable. Who doesn’t know, on some level, where this empire - this civilization - is taking us?

Our liberation movement needs to be qualitatively different from all the failed, limited approaches of the past. Everyday life is waiting - waiting to be truly lived.

John Zerzan

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John Zerzan

The Left Today

Alas, still around to some degree, going through the motions and in some cases finding new ways to repackage the same old shit.

The eternally superficial liberal-left “progressives” are as transparently averse to liberation as are the few surviving leninoids.

The Social Forum, in its “Global” as well as more local forms, is a recent catch-all for leftists, including communists looking for a home in the post-Soviet Union era. At anti-G8 Genoa in 2001, Genoa Social Forum partisans did their best to deliver anarchists to the police and worked hard afterwards to spread lies about the Black Bloc effort in Genoa. At last year’s Global Social Forum in Porto Alegre these statists — or those in charge, anyway — spent their time praising Brazilian president Lula’s leftist regime and having anarchists physically attacked in the streets. Closet “anarchist” Noam Chomsky is one of the main Social Forum leaders.

The “anti-state communists” we still have with us, although they seem to be going nowhere. The term has appeal to some, but is meaningless and contradictory. The anti-state commies have yet to criticize mass production and global trade, because they apparently want to preserve all the techno-essentials of the modern setup. It is impossible to have global production and exchange without government — call it by any name you like — to coordinate and regulate any such mass system.

Michael Albert’s participatory economics (“parecon”) holds that the state function could be replaced by an enormous amount of meeting-hours by everyone, in order to set production and trade quotas, etc. If one’s priority is to run a world just like the one we now endure, I guess such an unappealing blueprint somehow makes sense.

A rather different phenomenon is the (largely European) “insurrectionalist” stance, which seems to be a kind of amorphous hybrid of several contradictory tenets. In order to maximize the unity required to achieve an insurrectionary condition, insurrectionalists find it useful to minimize a potentially non-unifying discussion of specifics. But this approach runs the risk of tending toward suppression of ideas. Meanwhile, insurrectionalist theorist Alfredo Bonanno can espouse national liberation fronts (states-in-waiting), while others in this camp are very lucidly anti-civilization (Bonanno, it should be added, has been prosecuted repeatedly and imprisoned in Italy for his courageous resistance over the years). Maybe insurrectionalism is less an ideology than an undefined tendency, part left and part anti-left but generally anarchist.

What all these left-leaners lack is a willingness to confront the basics of domination with the resolve and pointed questioning required if domination is to be erased.

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The Lines are Being Drawn

by John Zerzan

“Why are we so angry? You would do better to ask why there is so much anger and frustration in modern society generally.” - Unabomber

Surely the most shocking event of this century was the systematic murder of millions of Jews under German National Socialism. Fifty years on, we are witnessing a steadily accelerating extinction onslaught against most species of life on this planet. Barring some kind of overthrow of the present global system of techno-capital, the elimination of the last traces of free nature is inevitable.

And how much evidence is left, even now, of a healthy human species? Mass depression, widespread belief in bizarre occult notions, an ever-rising suicide rate among the young, almost universal drug use of one kind of another, increasingly common homicidal rampages. The symptoms of a malignant social order multiply and deepen to a chorus of pain and desolation.

Consider how debased the fabric of life has become in just the past couple of decades: from Jonestown to the Tokyo subways, not forgetting Bhopal, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, Waco, Oklahoma City, schoolyard massacres…such horrors seem to be multiplying, the convulsions of a terminally diseased landscape.

But the struggle for health and freedom goes on. Scobert Park and Warner Creek were vigorously defended, and a strong blow was struck with the torching of the Oakridge Ranger Station. The blacks of St. Petersburg repaid another murder by police with automatic weapons fire.

Meanwhile, the ‘96 electoral farce received its lowest turnout since 1924, as if our masters could have believed that the nothingness and denial of that long-running con game could go on fooling most people indefinitely.

How far is it justified to go when we know that voting and recycling change nothing? When we contemplate the vista of high-tech barrenness, the boom in prisons and homelessness, the fact that a growing economy means an even faster rate of destruction of the natural world…

Joan of Arc and the 19th century abolitionist John Brown employed violence and gave their lives in struggle. These visionaries were considered demented by their contemporaries but are now revered. It may be that the Unabomber will be looked upon similarly, as a kind of warrior-prophet who, as Arleen Davila wrote, “tried to save us.”

To un-learn our illusions is to begin to save ourselves.

Autonomous Anarchists AnonymousPO Box 11331Eugene, Oregon 97440

John Zerzan is the author of Future Primitive (1994, Autonomedia), Questioning Technology: A Critical Anthology (co-edited with Alice Carnes, Freedom Press) and his 1988 bestseller, Elements of Refusal will be re-released shortly by CAL Press. He

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has also written numerous essays, co-edits Anarchy Magazine, and is completing a book of new essays.

What ails us

John Zerzan

On the level of personal affliction or dis-ease, matters are steadily worsening. This situation corresponds to the deepening crisis at every level. At the same time, according to Michelle Mary Helvica, "we live in a society that seems increasingly numb to the causes and effects of human suffering." In this sphere as with every other, the promises/protections of technological civilization are failing on a grand scale.

Tuberculosis and malaria have grown resistant to modern antibiotics and other standard medicines. E-coli and West Nile virus outbreaks are now common in the U.S. Infectious diseases of all kinds, once declared conquered, are on the rise. They accompany the major degenerative illnesses that are a staple of civilized life. Rift Valley fever, mad cow disease, hanta virus, Ebola, cholera, etc. "At least 20 major maladies have reemerged in novel, more deadly, or drug-resistant forms in the past 25 years," pronounced the February 2002 National Geographic's "War on Disease" survey.

It is hardly surprising that industrialized medicine is unable to remedy the toll that is inherent in industrialized, standardized, estranged daily life. In fact, updating a point made by Ivan Illich decades ago, Michael J. Berens' investigations have revealed the extremely high levels of life-threatening infections produced by hospital environments and other aspects of the health care industry (3-part Chicago Tribune series, July 2002). Recent studies have shown that artificial light causes breast cancer, by superseding the natural light cycle. Food now contains only a small fraction of its former nutritional content, as packaging and appearance considerations dictate that nutrients be bred out of fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, health-threatening obesity, epidemic in the U.S., has become a global problem because of the increase in junk food and processed food.

More than 20 million Americans -- mostly women -- suffer from often devastating autoimmune disorders, such as lupus, Crohn's disease,

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multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Many afflictions attack women almost exclusively, notably anorexia and bulimia. Hilde Bruch finds that anorexia is typically about a young woman's "struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence and effectiveness."

A struggle within a patriarchal, male-defined culture that actively excludes her from all of those fundamental human dimensions. Michelle Mary Helvica's Starving for Salvation (1999) focuses on eating disorders as a yearning for meaning and wholeness in the context of how very much is missing, especially for women. J.A. Sours' Starving to Death in a Sea of Objects testifies, from its title onward, to the underlying deprivation or emptiness at the base of these life-threatening conditions. Margaret Talbot observed that physical incapacitation has been one of the few ways in which women could effectively absent themselves from their assigned duties and roles. Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome are among the illnesses, suffered by millions, that must be seen in light of women's basically unimproved condition in society.

Countless forms of suffering, from AIDS to cancer to depression, are experienced within the increasingly unhealthy regime of technology and capital. There can be no "cure" so long as we all must strive to endure the bludgeoning conditions of daily life. Rural America now resembles a constellation of meth labs and Oxycontin supply networks, while epidemic drug use varies only in terms of which narcotic is most popular in a given season. What kind of society is it in which the teen suicide rate has been climbing for decades and self-mutilation is commonplace? Male sexual function will become dependent on pharmaceuticals like Viagra, a development far less grotesque than the growing number of toddlers on anti-depressants. The techno-world serves up increasingly bizarre "solutions" to the problems it continues to create, not forgetting the rising levels of both climatic temperatures and environmental toxins. Pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer proclaims, "Life is our life's work," as if anyone needed a reminder of the genetic engineering and human cloning in our future to which cyber-leftists like Donna Haraway have no objections. An increasingly overworked populace labors in a more and more anxiety-prone, destabilized consumer void. The need to be diverted from a glaringly impoverished present and future is addressed in books like Neal Gabler's Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquers Reality (1998), a point explored in greater depth by writers such as Adorno and Debord, but accurate and

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timely all the same. And in just four years (New York Times, 8/4/02), Gabler says, this situation has become qualitatively much worse. We now get only short-hand, truncated versions of escape that he terms the illusion of entertainment. Ersatz or otherwise, entertainment is now quite possibly the primary value of modern life, precisely because reality has become unbearable.

But of course it is only "chemical imbalances" that are said to account for this massive immiseration. This reactionary and desperate claim responds to phenomena such as the fact that 2.8 million kids had what is euphemistically called a "runaway experience" in 1999, by diagnosing most of them with a pseudo-medical condition called "conduct disorder."

A mid-2002 survey conducted by the National Sleep Foundation showed that 69% of Americans experienced some insomnia after September 11. (Glaxco Wellcome, by the way, spent $16.5 million promoting Paxil in October 2001.) Even more noteworthy is their finding that 51% of the population were already insomniac during the previous year! What will new polls on sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, etc. reveal in light of more systemic bad news: revelations that corporations, science, the Red Cross, et al. are routinely fraudulent, that 90% of students cheat, that male athletes begin steroid use in adolescence, and so on and on..

David Barlow's Anxiety and its Disorders (2002) discusses the high prevalence and chronicity of a range of such conditions, like panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and various phobias. He concludes that the aggregate toll on social life "dwarfs even the most pessimistic estimates." Many have charted a steady rise of more serious mental illnesses that began with and correspond to the industrialization of society, as documented for example in The Invisible Plague: the Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, by Torrey and Miller (2001). The answer to this scourge is obviously deindustrialization, the undoing of the root cause of all this and other crises in physical and mental health.

Society is a racket, and its everyday practices are no longer hidden from us. Nonetheless, as everyday life becomes steadily more impoverished, cheapened, surveilled, standardized, and otherwise debased, the official version (in many more aspects than mentioned in this article) prevails, with its stark omissions and lies. As Derrick Jensen has it, it is

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truly a "culture of make believe." Marx inaccurately predicted that growing material poverty would bring revolution.

A more plausible forecast today is that growing psychic or emotional suffering may inform a widespread refusal of this no-future reality.

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Whose future? by John Zerzan

My advice or exhortation is the same to everyone, but especially to you who have the most to lose: Fight Back.

We're on a death march with the destination coming into clear view.

Bill Joy, founding CEO and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, says we have maybe thirty years before genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics become fully self-replicating. The high-tech Brave New World will then rule us directly.

One hundred species of plant and animal life go extinct every day, and that number continues to inch upward. The oceans are dying. Proliferating studies tell us that global warming, increasing steadily, will kill the biosphere within a few decades. Ozone holes get bigger, and cancer has become epidemic as air, water, and soil became increasingly toxic.

From the age of two children are now liable to be prescribed Ritalin and/or anti-depressants to drug them into compliance with an ever more empty, unhealthy life-world. Kids shooting kids at school has become almost a commonplace, joining the horror of multiple-homicide rampages at home, work, or Burger King. The teenage suicide rate has tripled over the past three decades, and forty to fifty million Americans are on Prozac. "Mystery" afflictions-for which there is no known cause-from chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia to False Memory Syndrome torture millions, as do eating disorders, health-threatening obesity, and a host of other kinds of immiseration. A sterile, isolating, technicized society, truly pathological in its engulfing impoverishment.

Resist. Break ranks. Trust your desires. It's not you who's fucked up.

The cancer-like domination of technology and capital must be stopped and dismantled.

After thirty years a current of radical opposition is developing and it needs you. The new movement is anarchy, which is about freedom, health, authenticity. Crossing the threshold into your adult years, how much freedom, health and authenticity do you think the Megamachine will make possible for you? Does it not offer, instead, a "life" of mediation, hierarchy, and isolation on a dying planet?

We humans didn't always live like this. Our ancestors, who used fire to cook fibrous vegetables 1.7 million years ago, had a qualitatively different existence until just 10,000 years ago. Our adoption of agriculture brought division of labor and domestication. Until then, humans lived in keeping with an egalitarian ethos with ample leisure time, gender equality, and no organized violence. Archeological studies in various parts of the world demonstrate this, our true history.

Unknown to most, this has been the mainstream view presented in anthropology and archeology textbooks for the past few decades. It sounds utopian, but it's now the generally accepted paradigm, and has had heartening implications for a growing

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number of us in the new culture of opposition. If we once-and for so long-lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history.

Check out your life, as sold to you by this lying system. For you, and for all of us, we must break the spell of denial and reclaim our birthright.

Come alive and fight!

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Worse & Worse

This article first appeared in Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #39, Winter '94. (Includes "Schiz-flux" by Julian Flowers, & "When Nationalist Frenzy Strikes" by Michael William).

The atrocities typical of advanced capitalism/advanced civilization seem as pronounced here in Eugene, Oregon, as elsewhere. ``Teenage Suicides Rocket'' proclaimed the local front page in September (1993), explaining that the rate of teen self-destruction in Oregon has increased 600% over the past 30 years. November found a man in the adjacent town of Springfield suffocating his toddler daughter, then burning himself to death with gasoline. He'd had a history of violence, but neighbors considered theirs a ``quiet, church-going family.''

Freud's prediction that in time everyone will be made neurotic by civilization's power to deny fulfillment is beginning to look like too rosy a take on the future. In society at large a breakdown can be seen unfolding in every area of life. The federal Education Department in September unveiled a study depicting almost half of all adults as functionally illiterate. As in cannot read or write, cannot cope with the minimum requirements of industrial life. This kind of fundamental turn-off makes the fact that now no-one puts any stock in politicians seem trivial.

Soon, apparently, a majority will be dependent on Prozac (``the hottest psychiatric drug in history'') or other anti-depressants, not to mention how widespread is the use of heroin and cocaine. River Phoenix died of too much of the latter drugs on Halloween, prompting his publicist to muse, ``It leaves you to question why are young people compelled to do this?''

Meanwhile, as if rehearsing for the growing mayhem at large, the video games to which pre-teen boys are addicted embody a noticeably escalating violence. At the end of October a score of devastating Southern California fires mostly the work of arsonists grabbed national headlines for several days. Two weeks later Clinton decried the ``great crisis of the spirit'' in America, in lamenting the war-zone nature of inner cities.

Science News for September 25 disclosed two studies linking workplace stress and cancer. There were 6,000 on-the-job fatalities in 1992, but the word is getting out that in fact work kills virtually everyone. An existence defined by working and paying has never produced such a sense of barrenness and even fear, for which the numbing sterility and homogeneity of consumer malls stand as perfect landmarks.

The generalized culture we label postmodern, with its trademark refusal to look at the whole of this horror show, reaches its appropriate level with the moronism of Beavis and Butthead. A cynical, know-nothing stance only prompts new levels of stupidity and denial. In this way the crisis of the education system and what stands behind it can be better understood: it is not so much the function of the totality to instill conformist convictions as it is to destroy the capacity to form any.

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Can everyday life really be enacted on this basis much longer? Support for such a ghastly, immiserating set-up is eroding, but not nearly fast enough.

Zerzan and Media: An Ignominious Tale

By John Zerzan

April 30 was a Saturday. It was raining in Eugene. What a surprise.

The phone rang and I thought, what an obvious way to have succumbed to technology. Interrupting my usual wakeup of coffee and toast, I walked over and picked up.

Voice claimed it was Ken Noble, L.A. Bureau Chief of the New York Times. Wanted to talk about Unabomber, as in where do such ideas come from. I showed some interest in the topic and he said he'd get a flight and be over that evening.Anyway, such was the opening to my Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, for which the reviews have been mixed. Just before this encounter, I'd been struck by the few lines I'd read that supposedly were at the heart of Unabomber's "anarchist" critique, namely his(?) desire for the erasure of industrial society in favor of radically decentralized modes of living. It was rather stunning to realize that in effect, everyone was hearing, at least minimally, what had heretofore been completely blocked from public awareness. The mere fact of this "mass breakthrough" of sorts, in the absence of any further information (concerning Unabomber's 35,000 word treatise, most notably), was of major significance to me, as well as raising several questions along the way.

Certainly, and explicitly, Unabomber's lethal strikes were the reason for the New York Times interest in me. Ken Noble's call came just a week or so after the death by package bomb of a top PR exec in charge of propaganda supporting the clear cutting of forests. Predating this knowledge by a few decades is my knowledge of the essential function of media. It is twofold: to maintain the general level of obliviousness created by more fundamental institutions like work and school, and to assist the circulation of commodities via advertising and other commercial information. It can be argued that Unabomber's acts of violence, especially as mediated by the nightly news, lend themselves to the stupefying role that media play. In the familiar Debordian construction, the "society of the spectacle" is that in which life as lived gives way to life as represented. The images of the Unabomber's vengeance are thus "spectacular," that is, objects of passive consumption or entertainment and hence part of the overall social confinement.

However, it is harder to see the accompanying critique, if I understand it correctly, as just an image that serves media and its values and interests. There may be a curious minor irony, by the way, in the fact that it is journalists who have brought out the radical kernel of the Unahomber's ideas. (This would be especially ironic if it turns out that some of us have assumed a greater radical lucidity for his ideas than they actually possess.)

But I digress. Mindful of media's basic functions, I met with the Times' Noble, as agreed, and did so out of a desire to situate, amplify, and if possible deepen the critique of industrial society raised by Unabomber. I thought at the time, and still

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think, that to have declined to make use of the public space that had been opened would have been a failure on my part.

A few surprises were in store when the article appeared eight days later, on Sunday, May 8, 1995. For one thing, it had not occurred to me that the piece would take the form it did. The five column article, headlined "Prominent Anarchist Finds Ally in Serial Bomber," was cast as a profile of me, as much as a discussion of the whys and wherefores of a critique of industrial civilization. I suppose it should have come as no surprise that the press would rely, once again, on the manufacture of a spectacular image. By this justifying logic I was cast not only as "prominent" but also as something of a "guru," even an "idol," to those in radical, anti-tech circles. To tailor this image ever further, I became a shadowy figure, "rumpled" and ascetic, as befits, I suppose, the popular idea of a bearer of misfit ideas.

The piece was carried by other papers all over the country, and provoked angry reactions from some of them. The May 14 Omaha Sunday World HeraldThe next surprise was the huge amount of attention the Times article immediately engendered from other media, including television, talk radio, book publishers, and other newspaper reporters. Without having to consult more abstract criteria, it was fairly easy to reject the requests for TV appearances (e.g. "Good Morning America", "Dateline") due to the lack of time available for a minimally coherent presentation, and their nonsuitability for anything approaching a serious context. But I did participate in half a dozen talk radio programs, mainly out of New York (by telephone).

Yet another development that I should have anticipated, but didn't, was the negative reaction to my collaboration with the media. I began to get wind of this fairly early on, receiving a bit of vaguely articulated, but unmistakable opposition. Feeling a little hurt, I fired off an "open letter" of sorts to two dozen people in thc milieu, challenging possible nay-sayers to state their views. I hoped to bring us all further along through an exchange, but my effort fizzled; I got only a couple of responses. This article is a more public second effort.

The second objection, less weak, relates to media's role in spectacular society. It is evil and unclean, the argument runs, to have any dealings with mainstream media, on principle. But as Neal Keating points out, "the only way to avoid the media is by insulating yourself, forming some kind of specialized sub-elite, replete with publications."

We know that media are complicitous, part of the ensemble of modern domination; we are aware of the deformations that make up media's usual content. But if our movement is going anywhere, it is extremely unlikely that we could avoid media attention even if we wanted to. Keating suggests that it would be self-marginalizing to have no input, and the point, as I understand it, is contact and dialogue with all of our fellow inmates.

It is noteworthy that the critique is unevenly diffused. A number of columns have appeared in popular publications (e.g. "E Pluribus Unabomber," The New Yorker, August 15) noting that Unabomber's antipathy to the present industrial order finds considerable resonance in American society. Similarly, Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against the Future has made a large impact this year with its neo-luddite call for the overthrow of industrialism. Meanwhile, Anarchy and Fifth Estate, our own leading publications, now appear only once or twice a year, and in the pages of the latter's

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latest issue it was depressing to find two letters to the editor, by supposed anarchists, advocating the ballot.

I happen to be as involved as I have ever been with our media, with FE and Anarchy, and with other quality periodicals such as Extraphile and Kaspahraster. I am definitely not advocating switching to the mainstream. But maybe my particular experience with the media can give us all an excuse to pause and consider how to proceed, in the context of a failing dominant culture. Are we serious about mounting a real challenge to all that is? For some of us, this is not a game. By taking thought now, we can be better prepared for openings to come.

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Silence

Silence used to be, to varying degrees, a means of isolation. Now it is the absence of silence that works to render today's world empty and isolating. Its reserves have been invaded and depleted. The Machine marches globally forward and silence is the dwindling place where noise has not yet penetrated.

Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silences. The silence-honoring Wittgenstein understood the loss of our relationship with it. The unsilent present is a time of evaporating attention spans, erosion of critical thinking, and a lessened capacity for deeply felt experiences. Silence, like darkness, is hard to come by; but mind and spirit need its sustenance.

Certainly there are many and varied sides to silence. There are imposed or voluntary silences of fear, grief, conformity, complicity (e.g. the AIDS-awareness "Silence=Death" formulation), which are often interrelated states. And nature has been progressively silenced, as documented in Rachel Carson's prophetic Silent Spring. Nature cannot be definitively silenced, however, which perhaps goes a long way in explaining why some feel it must be destroyed. "There has been a silencing of nature, including our own nature," concluded Heidegger,[1] and we need to let this silence, as silence, speak. It still does so often, after all, speak louder than words.

There will be no liberation of humans without the resurrection of the natural world, and silence is very pertinent to this assertion. The great silence of the universe engenders a silent awe, which the Roman Lucretius meditated upon in the 1st century BCE: "First of all, contemplate the clear, pure color of the sky, and all it contains within it: the stars wandering everywhere, the moon, the sun and its light with its incomparable brilliance. If all these objects appeared to mortals today for the first time, if they appeared to their eyes suddenly and unexpectedly, what could one cite that would be more marvelous than this totality, and whose existence man's imagination would less have dared to conceive?"[2]

Down to earth, nature is filled with silences. The alternation of the seasons is the rhythm of silence; at night silence descends over the planet, though much less so now. The parts of nature resemble great reserves of silence. Max Picard's description is almost a poem: "The forest is like a great reservoir of silence out of which the silence trickles in a thin, slow stream and fills the air with its brightness. The mountain, the lake, the fields, the sky - they all seem to be waiting for a sign to empty their silence onto the things of noise in the cities of men."[3]

Silence is "not the mere absence of something else."[4] In fact, our longings turn toward that dimension, its associations and implications. Behind the appeals for silence lies the wish for a perceptual and cultural new beginning.

Zen teaches that "silence never varies...."[5] But our focus may be improved if we turn away from the universalizing placelessness of late modernity. Silence is no doubt culturally specific, and is thus experienced variously. Nevertheless, as Picard argues, it can confront us with the "original beginnings of all things,"[6] and presents objects

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to us directly and immediately. Silence is primary, summoning presence to itself; so it's a connection to the realm of origin.

In the industrially-based technosphere, the Machine has almost succeeded in banishing quietude. A natural history of silence is needed for this endangered species. Modernity deafens. The noise, like technology, must never retreat - and never does.

For Picard, nothing has changed human character so much as the loss of silence.[7] Thoreau called silence "our inviolable asylum," an indispensable refuge that must be defended.[8] Silence is necessary against the mounting sound. It's feared by manipulative mass culture, from which it remains apart, a means of resistance precisely because it does not belong to this world. Many things can still be heard against the background of silence; thus a way is opened, a way for autonomy and imagining.

"Sense opens up in silence," wrote Jean-Luc Nancy.[9] It is to be approached and experienced bodily, inseparably from the world, in the silent core of the self. It can highlight our embodiment, a qualitative step away from the hallmark machines that work so resolutely to disembody us. Silence can be a great aid in unblocking ourselves from the prevailing, addictive information sickness at loose in society.[10] It offers us the place to be present to ourselves, to come to grips with who we are. Present to the real depth of the world in an increasingly thin, flattened technoscape.

The record of philosophy vis-a-vis silence is generally dismal, as good a gauge as any to its overall failure. Socrates judged silence to be a realm of nonsense, while Aristotle claimed that being silent caused flatulence.[11] At the same time, however, Raoul Mortley could see a "growing dissatisfaction with the use of words," "an enormous increase in the language of silence" in classical Greece.[12]

Much later, Pascal was terrified by the "silence of the universe,"[13] and Hegel clearly felt that what could not be spoken was simply the untrue, that silence was a deficiency to be overcome. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both emphasized the prerequisite value of solitude, diverging from anti-silence Hegel, among others.

Deservedly well known is a commentary on Odysseus and the Sirens (from Homer's Odyssey) by Horkheimer and Adorno. They depict the Sirens" effort to sidetrack Odysseus from his journey as that of Eros trying to stay the forces of repressive civilization. Kafka felt that silence would have been a more irresistible means than singing.[14]

"Phenomenology begins in silence," according to Herbert Spiegelberg.[15] To put phenomena or objects somehow first, before ideational constructions, was its founding notion. Or as Heidegger had it, there is a thinking deeper and more rigorous than the conceptual, and part of this involves a primordial link between silence and understanding.[16] Postmodernism, and Derrida in particular, deny the widespread awareness of the inadequacy of language, asserting that gaps of silence in discourse, for example, are barriers to meaning and power. In fact, Derrida strongly castigates "the violence of primitive and prelogical silence," denouncing silence as a nihilist enemy of thought.[17] Such strenuous antipathy demonstrates Derrida's deafness to presence and grace, and the threat silence poses to someone for whom the symbolic is everything. Wittgenstein understood that something pervades everything sayable, something which is itself unsayable. This is the sense of his well-known last line of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "Of that which one cannot speak, one should remain silent."[18]

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Can silence be considered, approached, without reification, in the here and now? I think it can be an open, strengthening way of knowing, a generative condition. Silence can also be a dimension of fear, grief - even of madness and suicide. In fact, it is quite difficult to reify silence, to freeze it into any one non-living thing. At times the reality we interrogate is mute; an index of the depth of the still present silence? Wonder may be the question that best gives answers, silently and deeply.

"Silence is so accurate," said Mark Rothko,[19] a line that has intrigued me for years. Too often we disrupt silence, only to voice some detail that misses an overall sense of what we are part of, and how many ways there are to destroy it. In the Antarctica winter of 1933, Richard Byrd recorded: "Took my daily walk at 4PM... I paused to listen to the silence...the day was dying, the night being born - but with great peace. Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless."[20] How much is revealed in silence through the depths and mysteries of living nature. Annie Dillard also provides a fine response to the din: "At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, to the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening."[21]

It is not only the natural world that is accessible via silence. Cioran indicated the secrets in the silence of things, deciding that "All objects have a language which we can decipher only in total silence."[22] David Michael Levin's The Body's Recollection of Being counsels us to "learn to think through the body...we should listen in silence to our bodily felt experience."[23] And in the interpersonal sphere, silence is a result of empathy and being understood, without words much more profoundly than otherwise.

Native Americans seem to have always placed great value on silence and direct experience, and in indigenous cultures in general, silence denotes respect and self-effacement. It is at the core of the Vision Quest, the solitary period of fasting and closeness to the earth to discover one's life path and purpose. Inuit Norman Hallendy assigns more insight to the silent state of awareness called inuinaqtuk than to dreaming.[24] Native healers very often stress silence as an aid to serenity and hope, while stillness is required for success in the hunt. These needs for attentiveness and quiet may well have been key sources of indigenous appreciation of silence.

Silence reaches back to presence and original community, before the symbolic compromised both silence and presence. It predates what Levinas called "the unity of representation,"[25] that always works to silence the silence and replace it with the homelessness of symbolic structures. The Latin root for silence, silere, to say nothing, is related to sinere, to allow to be in a place. We are drawn to those places where language falls most often, and most crucially, silent. The later Heidegger appreciated the realm of silence, as did Holderlin, one of Heidegger's important reference points, especially in his Late Hymns.[26] The insatiable longing that Holderlin expressed so powerfully related not only to an original, silent wholeness, but also to his growing comprehension that language must always admit its origin in loss.

A century and a half later, Samuel Beckett made use of silence as an alternative to language. In Krapp's Last Tape and elsewhere, the idea that all language is an excess of language is strongly on offer. Beckett complains that "in the forest of symbols" there is never quiet, and longs to break through the veil of language to silence.[27] Northrup Frye found the purpose of Beckett's work "to lie in nothing other than the restoration of silence."[28]

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Our most embodied, alive-to-this-earth selves realize best the limits of language and indeed, the failure of the project of representation. In this state it is easiest to understand the exhaustion of language, and the fact that we are always a word's length from immediacy. Kafka commented on this in "In the Penal Colony," where the printing press doubled as an instrument of torture. For Thoreau, "as the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence."[29] Conversely, mass society banishes the chance of autonomy, just as it forecloses on silence.

Holderlin imagined that language draws us into time, but it is silence that holds out against it. Time increases in silence; it appears not to flow, but to abide. Various temporalities seem close to losing their barriers; past, present, future less divided. But silence is a variable fabric, not a uniformity or an abstraction. Its quality is never far from its context, just as it is the field of the non-mediated. Unlike time, which has for so long been a measure of estrangement, silence cannot be spatialized or converted into a medium of exchange. This is why it can be a refuge from time's incessancy. Gurnemanz, near the opening of Wagner's Parsifal, sings "Here time becomes space." Silence avoids this primary dynamic of domination.

So here we are, with the Machine engulfing us in its various assaults on silence and so much else, intruding deeply. The note North Americans spontaneously hum or sing is B-natural, which is the corresponding tone of our 60 cycles per second alternating current electricity. (In Europe, G-sharp is "naturally" sung, matching that continent's 50 cycles per second AC electricity.) In the globalizing, homogenizing Noise Zone we may soon be further harmonized. Pico Ayer refers to "my growing sense of a world that's singing the same song in a hundred accents all at once."[30]

We need a refusal of the roar of standardization, its information-noise and harried, surface "communication" modes. A No to the unrelenting, colonizing penetrability of non-silence, pushing into every non-place. The rising racket measures, by decibel up-ticks and its polluting reach, the degrading mass world - Don DeLillo's White Noise.

Silence is a rebuke to all this, and a zone for reconstituting ourselves. It gathers in nature, and can help us gather ourselves for the battles that will end debasement. Silence as a powerful tool of resistance, the unheard note that might precede insurrection. It was, for example, what slave masters feared most.[31] In various Asian spiritual traditions, the muni, vowed to silence, is the person of greatest capacity and independence - the one who does not need a master for enlightenment.[32]

The deepest passions are nurtured in silent ways and depths. How else is respect for the dead most signally expressed, intense love best transmitted, our profoundest thoughts and visions experienced, the unspoiled world most directly savored? In this grief-stricken world, according to Max Horkheimer, we "become more innocent" through grief.[33] And perhaps more open to silence - as comfort, ally, and stronghold.

Footnotes

[1]^ Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? (Chicago, Henry Regnery Company, 1967), p. 288.

[2]^ Quoted in Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis, translated by Michael Chan (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 2000), pp 212-213.

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[3]^ Max Picard, The World of Silence (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), p. 139.

[4]^ Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: the Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. vii.

[5]^ Chang Chung-Yuan, Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism (New York: Vintage, 1971), p. 12.

[6]^ Picard, op.cit., p. 22.

[7]^ Ibid., p. 221.

[8]^ Henry David Thoreau, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," in The Works of Thoreau, edited by Henry Seidel Canby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), p. 241.

[9]^ Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 26.

[10]^ I first encountered this term in Ted Mooney's novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1981).

[11]^ Aristotle, Works of Aristotle, translated by S. Forster, Vol. VII, Problemata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), p. 896, lines 20-26.

[12]^ Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence I (Bonn: Hanstein, 1986), p. 110.

[13]^ Blaise Pascal, Pensees, edited by Phillipe Seller (Paris: Bordas, 1991), p. 256.

[14]^ Franz Kafka, Parables, cited in George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 54.

[15]^ Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, Vol. Two (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 693.

[16]^ Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992), p. 258.

[17]^ Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 130.

[18]^ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 89.

[19]^ Quoted in James E. B. Breslin, Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 387.

[20]^ Quoted in Hannah Merker, Listening (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 127.

[21]^ Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: HarperPerennial, 1982), pp 89-90.

[22]^ E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 53.

[23]^ David Michael Levin, The Body's Recollection of Being (Boston: Routledge, 1985), pp 60-61.

[24]^ Norman Hallendy, Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2000), pp 84-85.

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[25]^ Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, translated by Michael B. Smith (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 4.

[26]^ Emery Edward George, Holderlin's "Ars Poetica": A Part-Rigorous Analysis of Information Structure in the Late Hymns (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp 308, 363, 367.

[27]^ Samuel Beckett, "German letter" dated 9 July 1937, in C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontorski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 221.

[28]^ Northrup Frye, "The Nightmare Life in Death," in J.D. O'Hara, editor, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 34.

[29]^ Thoreau, op.cit., p. 241.

[30]^ Pico Ayer, The Global Soul (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 271.

[31]^ Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press), p. 68. See also Thomas Merton, The Strange Islands (New York: New Directions, 1957); specifically, this passage from "The Tower of Babel: A Morality": Leader: Who is He? Captain: His name is Silence. Leader: Useless! Throw him out! Let Silence be crucified!

[32]^ Alex Wayman, "Two traditions of India - truth and silence," Philosophy East and West 24 (October 1974), pp 389-403.

[33]^ Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969 (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 140.

39

John Zerzan

Anarchy After September 11

Every day it is clearer that the global cancer of capital and technology devours more of life in every sphere. More species, cultures, and ecosystems are under attack, at every level. The cancer of the megamachine is always at work, consuming its host. And if it ever stops expanding, economic alarm bells go off worldwide.

This relentless colonization/globalization has ignited resistance everywhere. In this painful twilight struggle, as the crisis deepens, some of this opposition has taken the desperate form of religious fundamentalism. From this desperation arises the ultimate gesture of suicidal violence, hopeless and indefensible on any level.

Novelist V.S. Naipal reminds us that “The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach.”

But as New York Times Magazine writer Joseph Lelyveld (10/28/01) discovered through interviews with families and supporters, suicide bombers are recruited by a promise with widespread appeal among disaffected youth: “better a meaningful death than a pointless life.”

Heidegger described our period of history as one of “consummate meaninglessness.” The loss of the possibility of personal fulfillment is hardly confined to the Third World. In fact, the standardized barrenness of the First World is quite as devastating, in its own way. In the postmodern void that is the United States today, tens of millions of all ages take anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. It’s not unimaginable that before long, psychotropic drugs will be routinely prescribed for everyone, beginning in infancy. And this is just one example in a list of well-known pathologies that bridge the personal and social spheres. Why are people willing, even eager, to accept a drug-induced state as normal in themselves and their children? Perhaps because of fear, more widespread lately. Adorno wrote penetratingly about the fear of death: “The less people really live or, perhaps more correctly, the more they become aware that they have not really lived the more abrupt and frightening death becomes for them, and the more it appears as a terrible accident.”

For those in the U.S. on the threshold of adult life, suicide is the third leading cause of death. For every two murders there are three suicides. Painful life pointless life.

Ignoring these omnipresent realities, the American Spectator (Sept 2001) focused on the anti-technology aspect of the 9/11 suicide hijackings. “Luddites Over Broadway” argues that only technology can save us, since “nature is brutal, deadly, and Darwinian.” Opposing “creativity” to the “Luddite” sensibility of the attackers, AS argues that creativity is our key endowment. Asserting that creativity flourishes only under capitalism, AS reveals what kind of “creativity” they’re talking about — fueled by instrumental reason, and grounded in domination.

In no way, in my opinion, does the anti-technological, Luddite, primitivist vision of anarchy have anything to do with the viciously misogynist and theocratic Bin Laden types. Which is not to say that the relentless technologizing of the world should not be indicted and reversed. As psychotherapist Robert Marchesani wrote recently, “The

40

more technology we have, the more we seem to be burdening people and dehumanizing them, perhaps making them into these pieces of technology themselves so that they can’t feel anything anymore.”

In Turkey, according to some anarchists there, a bridge from religious fundamentalism to primitivism has been built, at least by a few. They have traded the escapist (and therefore always reactionary) utopia of the afterlife for the effort to confront technology and capital in the here and now. A very hopeful, if so far inadequately discussed phenomenon.

About two years ago (Tikkun, Jan/Feb 1999), David Ehrenfeld predicted “The Coming Collapse of the Age of Technology.” His summary: “Techno-economic globalization is nearing its apogee; the system is self-destructing. There is only a short but very damaging period of expansion left.”

To redeem the collapse and avoid further victimization, we must find renewed resolve and solidarity. It’s crucial that we undertake the inevitable deconstruction of technology energetically and consciously. Those who elect to passively endure ever-worsening personal, social, and planetary conditions, or to flame out in suicidal acts of terror, are fundamentally powerless against a massively destructive system.

“No one could have believed that these massive towers could just come down like this,” declared an incredulous CNN reporter on September 11. They did fall, social systems and even civilizations fall, this order will fall. Creative resistance and resilience have never been so needed. Never has there been so much at stake; never has the prospect of liberation from the no-future death march of civilization been perhaps more feasible.

41

Levica danas

Dzon Zerzan

Green Anarchy #15, Winter 2004.

Avaj, jos uvek je tu, u izvesnoj meri, menjajuci se i ponekad uspevajuci da pronađe nacine kako da prepakuje isto, staro sranje.

Beskrajno povrsni levi, liberalni “progresivci” ocigledno nemaju nikakve veze sa oslobođenjem, bas kao i nekoliko prezivelh lenjinoidnih autoritaraca. Oni nisu vredni ni pomena. Ali, tu je nekoliko novijih manevara, koji mozda zasluzuju mali kriticki osvrt.

Socijalni forum, kako u svojim “globalnim”, tako i u svojim lokalnim oblicima, najnoviji je mamac za sve levicare, ukljucujuci i komuniste koji traze novo utociste u postsovjetskoj eri. Na demonstracijama protiv G-8, 2001. godine, sledbenici Socijalnog foruma dali su sve od sebe da anarhiste izruce policiji, a zatim vredno radili na sirenju lazi o ucinku Crnog bloka u Đenovi. Na proslogodisnjem skupu Globalnog Socijalnog foruma u Porto Alegreu (Brazil), ti etatisti – ili makar oni na duznosti – najveci deo vremena su proveli slaveci rezim brazilskog levicarskog presednika Lule i fizicki napadajuci anarhiste na ulicama. Naftalinski “anarhista” Noam Comski jedan je od glavnih lidera Socijalnog foruma.

S nama su i dalje “antietatisticki komunisti”, iako, po svemu sudeci, ne idu nigde. Taj pojam jos privlaci neke ljude, ali je besmislen i kontradiktoran. Antietatistickim komicima jos uvek ostaje da kritikuju masovnu proizvodnju i globalnu trgovinu, posto ocigledno nastoje da sacuvaju sve sustinske tehnoloske aspekte modernog poretka. Ali, nemoguce je imati globalnu proizvodnju i trgovinu bez vlasti – kako god je zvali – koja bi usklađivala taj masivni sistem i upravljala njime.

Participatorna ekonomija (“Parekon”) Majkla Alberta (Michael Albert, ZMag) tvrdi da funkciju drzave moze da preuzme ogroman iznos sastanaka-sati, u kojima bi ucestvovali svi ljudi, koji bi tako određivali proizvodne i trgovinske kvote, itd. Ako je nekome prioritet da upravlja svetom koji vec trpimo, onda ce mu ovi odbojni predlozi mozda izgledati razumno.

Prilicno drugaciji fenomen, uglavnom evropski, jeste “insurekcionisticki” pristup (insurekcija = pobuna; nap. prev.), koji izgleda predstavlja

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amorfni hibrid nekoliko kontradiktornih struja. U nastojanju da maksimalizuju jedinstvo neophodno za dostizanje stanja pobune, insurekcionisti kao da minimaliziju potencijalno neujedinjujuce rasprave o nekim specificnim pitanjima. Takav pristup rizikuje da u jednom trenutku pocne da potiskuje ideje. U međuvremenu, insurekcionisticki teoreticar Alfredo Bonano (Alfredo Bonanno) izlaze kritici pokrete za nacionalno oslobođenje (drzave u senci), dok drugi iz tog kampa razvijaju vrlo lucidnu kritiku civilizacije. (1) Treba reci i da je Bonano godinama bio proganjan i zatvaran od strane italijanskih vlasti zbog svog hrabrog suprotstavljanja. (2) Mozda je insurekcionizam vise nedefinisana tendencija nego ideologija, delimicno levicarska, delimicno antilevicarska, ali generalno anarhisticka.

Ono sto svim tim grupama i pojedincima koji naginju levici nedostaje jeste spremnost da se suoce s temeljima dominacije, sa odlucnoscu i fokusiranoscu nephodnim da bi se toj dominiciji stalo za vrat.

Green Anarchy #15, Winter 2004.

Napomene:

1. Videti sajt/ casopis Killing King Abacus, koji donosi veliki broj tekstova Alfreda Bonana, torinske grupe Diavolo in corpo i drugih “insurekcionista”. (nap. prev.)

2. Afredo Bonano se trenutno nalazi na odsluzenju sestogodisnje zatvorske kazne zbog pripadnosti “oruzanoj bandi” i “subverzivnoj organizaciji”.

Kontakt: Alfredo M. Bonanno, Via Papinano, 134133, Trieste, Italy.

Uprkos razilazenju sa “insurekcionistima” u nekim pitanjima, tekstovi A. Bonana, Sase K, Anona, Divolo in corpo, itd., i dalje spadaju u najcesce objavljivane i citirane materijale u “primitivistickim” publikacijama. Drugi veliki izvor nadahnuca i najveca zajednicka ljubav boraca iz ova dva tabora jesu situacionisti; istina, ta ljubav, u oba slucaja, nije idilicna, ali to je ono sto joj daje posebnu draz. Sto se tice upotrebe svih tih cudnih etiketa (insurek...– primiti...– situacionisti) mozda vredi pogledati kratak komentar Johna Moora. (nap. Prev.)

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Secanje na Fredija Perlmana

Dzon Zerzan

Sa Fredijem sam prvi put stupio u kontakt 1975. godine. Tada je u izdanju Black & Red pripremao zbirku tekstova pod nazivom Sindikati protiv revolucije, u koju je ukljucio i moj tekst Pobuna protiv rada, koji se nesto ranije pojavio u izdanju Telosa. U isto vreme, Fredi me je upoznao sa redakcijom radikalne detroitske publikacije Fifth Estate.

Nas jedini susret dogodio se godinu dana kasnije, u San Francisku. On i Lorejn su proveli kod mene nekoliko dana tokom svog putovanja kroz Kaliforniju.

Ono sto me je kod njega najvise zapanjilo bila je njegova energija, njegova zudnja za zivotom. Dok su se raspakivali, video sam kako iz torbe ispada bocica sa lekom koji je uzimao zbog srcanih problema. (Bio je to jedan “bapski lek”, jedini lek koji je pristao da uzima, ispricala nam je Lorejn; nap. izd.) Lorejn mi je rekla da se uopste ne obazire na lekarska uputstva, sto je bilo ocigledno, jer se nije odrekao jake, crne kafe i pusenja!

Secam se i jednog izleta tokom te posete. Fredi i ja smo imali raspravu o Hegelu. On je insistirao na sustinskom znacaju Hegela, kako sve pocinje sa Hegelom, dok sam mu ja govorio da zaboravi na Hegela. Bilo je to u vreme kada se pojavila njegova knjiga Letters of Insurgents; ta knjiga je izvrsila ogorman uticaj na ljude koje sam poznavao. Toliko sjajnih uvida, toliko izazovnih tvrdnji, posebno u odnosu na uobicajena levicarska dostignuca. Jedan prijatelj, koji je tada bio u zatvoru, a koji je knjigu procitao pre mene, rekao mi je: “Sledeci put dođi u posetu tek kada procitas tu knjigu!”

Fredi je bio covek tako zivog duha, a opet potpuno otvoren i srdacan. S njim je uvek bilo zabavno. Suvise kasno sam shvatio da nam se vise nece pruziti prilika da uzivamo u druzenju, kao sto je to bilo tokom te njihove posete.

Nastavili smo da se dopisujemo sve do njegove smrti 1985. godine. Od Fredija sam mnogo naucio; uzivao sam u njegovim tekstovima, u nacinu na koji je primenjivao najrazlicitija stilska resenja. Koliko god da je bio odmakao u kritici civilizacije, kao i u drugim istrazivanjima, siguran sam da bi otisao i dalje, da je mogao da sa nama ostane bar malo duze.

Judzin, Oregon, 15. decembar 2002.

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Situacionisticka internacionala: Kriticki uvod

Dzon Zerzan

Krajem 1950-tih, sacica avangardnih umetnika, zgađena impotencijom umetnosti, dosla je do zakljucka da je jedini pravi kreativni poduhvat potpuna promena zivota i sveta. Tako je, u par reci, nastala Situacionisticka internacionala (SI).

SI je odbacila celu drustvenu organizaciju zasnovanu na najamnom radu i robi, kao i svaki oblik hijerarhije, predstavljanja, zrtvovanja i posredovanja. Svi panduri modernog drustva – profesori, levicari, psihijatri, sindikalisti, ideolozi, eksperti – bili su razotkriveni i ismejani u ime zivota kao oblasti neogranicene zelje i neprekidnog zanosa.

Svoj antipoliticki program situacionisti su hranili najpoeticnijim i najspontanijim ostvarenjima utopista, anarhista, ludih pesnika, nihilista i drugih opasnih nezadovoljnika, racunajuci tu i doprinos njihove sopstvene “radikalne subjektivnosti”. Ali, ovi revolucionari su smatrali i da je potrebno razraditi mnogo prezicniji organizacioni program. Tako su izgradili svoju stratesku teoriju, u velikoj meri zasnovanu na Marksu. Glavni podsticaj bila su iskustva proleterskog samoupravljanja, to jest, “radnickih saveta” – od Rusije 1905, Kronstata 1921, Spanije krajem 1930-tih, do Mađarske 1956. Tako su u svoju teoriju situacionisti uneli kontradikciju koju nikada nisu uspeli da razrese.

S jedne strane, tvrdili su da je samo neposredna, eksperimentalna i strastvena aktivnost vredna zivota. Rad mora biti ukinut u korist slobodne, kreativne igre u kojoj ce sva pravila i oni koji ih donose takođe biti predmet igre. Upravo duz tog glavnog pravca svog delovanja, situacionisti su razvili kritiku levice kao dosadnog, irelevantnog nastavljaca starog sveta i njegove logike.

Ali, magicna moc subjektivnosti – tog soka kojim je ova grupa prodrmala celu Evropu i tako najavila pobunu iz maja 1968 – bila je prizemljena teskim balastom “sovjeta”.

“Apsolutna vlast” saveta je vise nego ocigledno protivrecila ideji o ukidanju vlasti. “Unitarna i globalna” koordinacija proizvodnje putem hipermoderne tehnologije – zbog svog masivnog karaktera i funkcije – takođe je bila u suprotnosti s apsolutno nedirigovanim, samooslobađajucim i nesputanim pojedincem.

Kako bi ta stvar sa savetima uopste funkcionisala? I zar na taj nacin, kroz sistem “transkontinentalnog svetskog planskog procesa”, ne afirmismimo

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specijalizaciju, za koju smo prethodno utvrdili da je nuzno autoritarna? Najzad, kako bi i preko koga ta “iskljuciva vlast saveta” bila “tehnicki sprovedena”?

Ipak, cak i uz sve unutrasnje konflikte, SI je dala neprocenjiv doprinos, između ostalog i zato sto je pokazala sta jedna sacica odlucnih ljudi moze da postigne. SI je pruzila veliki podsticaj mnogima koji su tada pokusavali da artikulisu svoju kritiku i krenu dalje. Zbog svega toga, i to treba reci, situacionisti su na sebe navukli mrznju svih branilaca proslosti, ukljucujuci tu i prakticno sve frakcije levice.*

Usavsi u fazu stagnacije pocetkom 1970-tih, SI je radije ukinula samu sebe nego da nastavi dalje kao puka senka nekada zive sile; sve veci broj njenih obozavalaca (“pro-situ”) bio je tako prepusten sopstvenim resursima. Ipak, svega nekoliko “prositua” bilo je ozbiljno privuceno popularnoscu SI koja je i dalje rasla u andergraund krugovima. Oni su se poistovetili sa situacionistickim idejama i nastavili da ih propagiraju (nigde tako intenzivno kao u Berkliju). Ali, vime je pocelo da se hladi; nigde visu nisu mogli da se cuju glasovi poput Deborovog ili Vanejgemovog. Ubrzo, u kratkom razmaku i sa svega nekoliko izuzetaka, ti okasneli situacionisti vratili su se u okrilje najtuplje levice, odakle su bukvalno svi i poticali.

Uprkos zalosnom padu tih pojedinaca, uglavnom iz oblasti San Franciska, u “ultralevicarsku” politiku, autenticni opozicioni pokret razvija se sirom zemlje, kao sto je to primetio Zak Elil (Jacques Ellul) u svom tekstu “Od 1970-tih do 1980-tih” (Society, 1980):

“Izgleda da između institucija i drustvenog tela postoji kontradikcija, koja se izrazava nezadovoljstvom radnika njihovim sindikatima, odbijanjem rada među omladinom, nepoverenjem levicara u njihove partije i građana u lokalne vlasti. Primecuju se opadanje i gubitak interesovanja, sto dovodi u pitanje legitimnost svih tih institucija.”

Preuzeto iz John Zerzan: Just another brick in the wall, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, br. 29/ 1991, broj posvecen SI. Prvi deo teksta je objavljen u okviru kritickog dodatka za Gi Debor: Drustvo spektakla, anarhija/ blok 45, Porodicna biblioteka br. 4, maj 2003.

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John Zerzan

Životinjski snovi

„Da li nam je potrebno da znamo i da li uopšte možemo znati mnogo o drugim životinjama? Možda nam je najviše potrebno saznanje da bi trebalo da im se pridružimo u njihovoj nepripitomljenosti.“

„Nekada je postojao komunalni život organizama, unutar jedinstvenog ekosistema. Život se hranio životom, ali ne na destruktivan način. Čak ni danas ne bi trebalo da gubimo iz vida da je pobeda pripitomljavanja daleko od konačne. Mnoge vrste, iz različitih razloga, ostaju van njegove putanje. ’Krotitelj lavova zapravo ne kroti ništa’, podseća nas Džon Harington. On mora ostati u granicama koje su povukle mačke.“

* * *

Ovo je doba bestelesnosti, u kojem naše osećanje odvojenosti od zemlje postaje sve snažnije i u kojem se od nas očekuje da zaboravimo svoju animalnost. Ali, mi smo životinje i razvijali smo se, kao i one, u skladu s drugim telesnim formama i aspektima sveta. Um i čula se razvijaju kroz telo, što je način na koji i druge životinje prenose značenja – ili je tako bilo, do početka moderniteta

Nalazimo se na samom vrhu lanca ishrane, što od nas čini jedinu životinju koja nikome nije potrebna. Hamlet je bio daleko od istine kada je ljudska bića nazvao „lepotom sveta i uzorom za životinje“.[1] Mark Tven je bio mnogo bliže: „… jedina životinja koja crveni od stida. Ili ima tu potrebu.“[2] Oblik života koji je verovatno najslabije prilagođen stvarnosti, s najmanjim šansama za opstanak, među najmanje deset miliona životinjskih vrsta (od čega najveći broj čine insekti). Ljudska bića spadaju i među svega nekoliko vrsta sisara koje ubijaju svoje bližnje bez povoda ili zbog ekstremne gladi.

Ljudska vrsta je jedinstvena, ali to važi i za sve druge vrste. Ne razlikujemo se od ostalih, po svemu sudeći, ništa više nego što se ostale vrste razlikuju između sebe. Neljudske životinjske vrste se po pravilu odlikuju zadivljujućom sposobnošću za ponašanje na osnovu informacija koje dobijaju od svog okruženja. To su bića instinkta, ali to smo i mi. Džozef Vud Krač (Joseph Wood Krutch) se pitao, „ko je dublje upoznat

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sa svetom u kojem živi?“[3] Prilagođavanje na vlastiti svet je kognitivni proces. Ako se upitamo koja je vrsta najpametnija, najbolji odgovor, najverovatnije, glasi: sve.

Mislim da je Henri Beston to izrazio na divno podsticajan način: „Na njih gledamo s visine, zbog njihove nedovršenosti, zbog njihove tragične sudbine, koja im je dodelila oblik mnogo niži od našeg. I tu pravimo grešku, veliku grešku. Naime, životinje ne treba meriti po čoveku. One se kreću u svetu starijem i potpunijem od našeg, dovršene i celovite, obdarene rasponom čula koji smo mi ili izgubili ili ga nikada nismo ni stekli, živeći s glasovima koje mi nikada nećemo čuti.“[4]

Negde tokom osamdesetih, poznavao sam osobu koja je svoje izvanredne antiautoritarne tekstove i letke potpisivala sa „70 životinja“. Od tada, ta vrsta poistovećivanja nije prestala da me očarava. Dugo prisutna zabrana takvog čina, kao i onog najvećeg greha, antropomorfizma, nameće se u prilično drugačijem duhu. U nastojanju da se ta strašna greška ispravi, dolazimo do toga da „majmun ne može da pobesni: on ispoljava agresivnost. Ždral ne može da oseća naklonost; on pokazuje udvaračko ili roditeljsko ponašanje. Gepard se ne plaši lava; on pribegava bekstvu (flight behavior)“.[5] Zašto u tom reduktivnim pristupu ne bismo išli još dalje i prosto izbacili životinje iz svog rečnika? To se već dešava, ako je Oksfordski rečnik za mlade (Oxford Junior Dictionary) neki pokazatelj. Izdanje iz 2009. je donelo neke nove tehno-izraze, kao što su Twitter i mp3, dok su imena raznih životinja, vrsta drveća, itd., izbrisana.[6] Najzad, deca (i ostali) imaju sve manje dodira s prirodom.

Ali, nema zamene za direktan dodir sa živim svetom, ako još uvek treba da spoznamo šta znači biti živo biće. Naš svet se sužava i isušuje, odsečen od životinjske kulture, od oblasti tog zajednički usvajanog ponašanja. Od onoga što je Jakob fon Ikskul (Jacob von Uexküll, 1864–1944) nazvao Umwelt, univerzum znan svakoj vrsti. Trebalo bi da budemo otvoreni za zajedništvo naših korena, kao i za postojeći neljudski živi svet.

Amfibije postoje već 300 miliona godina; ptice nekih 150 miliona. Vilini konjici uzimaju od biosfere isto koliko i pre 100 miliona godina, dok vrstu Homo, koja ne postoji duže od 3 miliona godina, čine životinje koje – od početka pripitomljavanja i civilizacije – nikada nisu zadovoljne, koje stalno slede neke nove prohteve.

Zar priroda nije tu zbog sreće svih vrsta, a ne samo jedne?[7] Osećamo nešto slično tome, dok u vakuumu civilizacije tragamo za oazama divljine. „’Nada’ je stvorenje s krilima“, pisala je Emili Dikinson.[8]

Uglavnom smo izgubili osećaj za prisustvo ili auru životinja, za bića koja svoja tela ispunjavaju tako celovito, tako potpuno. Ljudi iz tradicionalnih,

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urođeničkih kultura nisu izgubili tu svest. Oni osećaju da su u srodstvu sa svime što je živo. Neke od tih veza ostale su i kod nas i mogu se prepoznati u nekim malim stvarima – na primer, u našoj instinktivnoj ljubavi prema pesmi ptica.

Nije sve med i mleko ni u neljudskom domenu, naročito u ovom uzdrmanom i poremećenom svetu. Silovanje je primećeno i kod orangutana, delfina, foka, muflona, divljih konja i nekih ptica, iako ni kod jedne od tih vrsta ono nije norma.[9] Ali čak i u životinjskim društvima s jasnom dominacijom mužjaka, ženke po pravilu ostaju samodovoljne i odgovorne za sopstveno izdržavanje, za razliku od većine ljudskih (pripitomljenih) društava. U stvari, u nekim grupama, ženke se staraju o svima. Na primer, lavice ponosno idu u lov.[10] Svako krdo losova predvodi neka ženka, obdarena mudrošću jednog kojota, vuka, risa, kuguara i ljudskog bića. Takođe, mnogi smatraju da se neljudska bića mogu pojedinačno razlikovati, kao i mi. Dilija Akeli je zaključila da „majmuni i čovekoliki majmuni variraju u svojim naravima isto koliko i ljudska bića“,[11] dok je Bari Lopez pisao o „upadljivo različitim individualnim osobinama“ vukova.[12] Ali, među mnogim nepripitomljenim životinjama primećuje se i odsustvo starih, onemoćalih i uginulih životinja. Pitamo se kako tu deluje „lanac ishrane“, da li to znači da vukovi ubijaju samo one životinje koje su ionako pri kraju – stare, bolesne, povređene? Prema Lopezu, to bi se moglo grubo zaključiti.[13]

Hijerarhija i dominacija među životinjama je stara pretpostavka, često potpuno neutemeljena. Na ideju da je među njima obično, ako ne i uvek, prisutan neki „hijerarhijski poredak“, došao je jedan norveški student zoologije, 1922 (Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, 1894–1976). Njegova teorija je nastala na osnovu posmatranja domaćih kokoški iz njegovog dvorišta, da bi se onda proširila u oblasti proučavanja životinja, kao zaraza. To je klasičan primer projekcije pripitomljenog ljudskog sveta, u kojem su hijerarhija i dominacija zaista pravilo. Ali njihovu navodnu univerzalnost obara činjenica da se „hijerarhijski poredak“ domaće živine ne sreće u divljim jatima.

Isto tako pogrešna bila je frojdovska paradigma o ubilačkom rivalstvu između očeva i sinova kao prirodnom stanju. Ona je problematična već u slučaju ljudi; još više, u odnosu na neljudska bića. Mason i Makarti (Masson i McCarthy) pišu da očevi među zebrama, kivijima, dabrovima, vukovima i mungosima prihvataju svoje potomstvo i pokazuju veliku naklonost prema njemu.[14] Južnoamerički vunasti majmuni pauci (muriqui), mužjaci i ženke, neagresivni su, tolerantni i kooperativni. Članak Stiva Kempera (Steve Kemper), „Zabranjen pristup alfa mužjacima“, bavi se istraživanjima majmuna paukova Karen Strier, koja

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podrivaju uvreženo viđenje muških primata.[15] Kod azijskih gibona, primata koji žive u parovima, mužjaci mogu ostati sa svojim partnerkama dugo posle završetka seksualne aktivnosti.[16]

Džon Mjur (John Muir) je opisao kako je jedna guska napala lovca da bi zaštitila svog ranjenog partnera: „Nikada ranije nisam pomislio da bi divlja guska mogla biti opasna ili sposobna za tako plemenitu, samopožrtvovanu odanost.“[17] Divlje guske se pare monogamno, tokom celog života.

Među ljudskim bićima široko su rasprostranjene društvene crte kao što su roditeljska briga, zajednička potraga za hranom i uzajamna dobrota ili uzajamna pomoć. Meri Midžli (Mary Midgely) uopšteno govori o „njihovoj prirodnoj sklonosti ka ljubavi i uzajamnom poverenju“.[18] Takođe, ka ljubavi i poverenju prema drugima, kao što su ljudska bića, do tačke da se ona i neguju. Žak Graven (Jacques Graven) iznosi zapanjujuće primere dece koju su usvojili vukovi, medvedi, gazele, svinje i ovce.[19]

U svojoj neodoljivoj knjizi Desert Solitaire, uvek svadljivi Edvard Ejbi pomišlja da žabe čiju je pesmu slušao, to rade iz raznih praktičnih razloga, „ali i iz spontane ljubavi i razdraganosti“.[20] N. Dž. Beril (Norman John Berrill) izjavljuje: „Biti ptica znači biti živ na intenzivniji način nego bilo koje drugo živo biće, uključujući i čoveka… one žive u svetu u kojem postoji samo sada i koji je najčešće ispunjen radošću.“[21] Džozef Vud Krač je smatrao da naša sposobnost za radost atrofira. Životinjama je, primećuje on, „radost mnogo važnija i pristupačnije nego nama.“[22]

Izgleda da u poslednje vreme razne vrste neljudske inteligencije počinju da se uvažavaju više nego ranije. Dokumentarni film Džona Hoptasa i Kristin Samjueslon (John Haptas, Kristine Samuelson), Tokyo Waka, iz 2013, posmatra snalažljive gradske vrane. Kako, na primer, koriste kljunove da bi grane oblikovale u kuke kojima skidaju larve s drveća. Godine 2002, jedna vrana iz Nove Kaledonije, po imenu Beti, bila je, prema jednom istraživaču sa Oksfordskog Univerziteta, proglašena za prvu životinju koja je napravila alatku za određeni zadatak, bez probe i greške, što primati očigledno tek treba da postignu. Prema Dž. H Vilijamsu (J. H. Williams), ponašanje slonova „uvek ukazuje na inteligenciju koja pronalazi odgovarajuća rešenja za teškoće“.[23]

Još više iznenađuju nova saznanja o onim životinjama za koje obično mislimo da se nalaze još niže u „lancu ishrane“. Katrin Harmon Keridž (Katherine Harmon Courage) je ukazala na do sada nepoznate sposobnosti oktopoda. „Može da pronađe izlaz iz lavirinta, da otvara tegle, koristi alatke. Izgleda da čak ima i neku vrstu sofisticiranog

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unutrašnjeg života.“ Keridž dalje izjavljuje da oktopod „ima mozak drugačiji od skoro svakog stvorenja koje bismo mogli smatrati inteligentnim“.[24] Odatle sve veće zanimanje za „hladnokrvnu inteligenciju“, s nedavnim istraživanjima koja su otkrila da mozak gmizavaca nije tako nerazvijen kao što smo mislili. Gušteri i kornjače, na primer, pokazuju zadivljujuću sposobnost za rešavanju problema.[25]

Žak Graven je bio zapanjen kada je shvatio da se metod za traženje izlaza iz lavirinta „jedne bubašvabe jedva razlikovao od metoda pacova“, i da se zadivljujuća dostignuća sisara „sreću ponovo, u skoro identičnom obliku, kod insekata“.[26] Kada je reč o lavirintima i sličnim „zadacima“, treba dodati da se u kontrolisanim, laboratorijskim eksperimentima, bez obzira o kojoj je vrsti reč, može doći do vrlo malo važnih istina.

Pamćenje je za mnoga živa bića važna pomoć u preživljavanju. Radovi zoologa Tecura Macuzave (Tetsuro Matzuawa) pokazuju da šimpanze imaju daleko bolje pamćenje od ljudi.[27] Zrikavci imaju slušni raspon mnogostruko veći od našeg. Pčele mogu da vide ultraljubičastu svetlost, koja je za nas nevidljiva. Parazitske osice (Ichneumonoidea) mogu da osete miris kroz čvrsto drvo. Monarh leptir (Danaus plexippus) ima čulo ukusa dvesta hiljada puta osetljivije od ljudskog jezika. Balegari se u svom kretanju orijentišu prema Mlečnom putu. Četvoronožne životinje, one bez potkovica, verovatno uspevaju da uhvate razna isijavanja i vibracije koje su za nas izgubljene. Šta je s psima i mačkama, kućnim ljubimcima, koji se nađu stotinama kilometara daleko od svojih domova, a opet nekako pronađu put do njih? U mnogim takvim slučajevima možemo se pozvati samo na neku vrstu telepatije.

Još mnogo toga bi se moglo reći o darovima životinja. Ili o njihovoj igri. Nema ničeg „antropomorfičnog“ u zapažanju da se životinje igraju. Pogledajmo samo udvaranje kod ptica. Jednom sam u zoru posmatrao predivni ples kanadskih ždralova. Njihov ples je nadahnuo bezbrojna ljudska društva. Šta je s divljim guskama, pred čijom nenadmašnom gracioznošću, elegancijom i posvećenošću mi, ljudska bića, možemo samo da se postidimo?

Pojedinačne životinje iz mnogih vrsta pokazuju svest o razlici između „sebe“ i „drugog“. Pripadnik jedne vrste uvek može da prepozna drugog pripadnika iste vrste. Ta vrsta samoprepoznavanja je očigledna. Drugi slučaj predstavljaju grizliji, koji se kriju od pogleda ljudi i drugih živih bića. Prisutna je svest da se celo telo – ili „sebstvo“, ako hoćete – mora sakriti.

Ali, da li neljudska bića shvataju da su „sebstva“? Da li su samosvesna na taj način da shvataju svoju smrtnost? Mnogi ukazuju na taj navodni nedostatak samorefleksije i od njega prave glavnu liniju podele između

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ljudi i ostalih životinja. Pčele koriste znake, ali nisu toga svesne. Međutim, na osnovu čega pretpostavljamo šta pčele ili druge životinje znaju ili ne znaju? Šimpanze i orangutani se prepoznaju u ogledalu, ali ne i gorile. Šta to tačno govori?

Ima mnogo nerešenih pitanja, u stvari, ne možemo da odgovorimo ni na pitane koliko je svesno ili nesvesno ljudsko ponašanje, naročito u svetlu činjenice da je svest kod nas nešto potpuno neuhvatljivo. Složeni, svestrani i adaptivni odgovori koje vidimo kao pravilo među živim bićima na ovoj planeti, mogu, ali i ne moraju biti vođeni samosvešću. Ali, samosvest verovatno nije isključiv fenomen, u smislu „sve ili ništa“. Razlike između ljudskih i ostalih živih bića nisu radikalne; one su verovatno više stvar stepena. Još važnije, mi čak ne možemo ni da pojmimo svesnost drugačiju od naše.

Naše shvatanje samosvesti, iako krajne maglovito, postalo je zlatno merilo za vrednovanje neljudskih bića. Drugi granični kriterijum je jezik: da li smo jedina vrsta koja ga poseduje? I te dve odrednice obično idu zajedno, kao pretpostavka da se svest može izraziti samo kroz jezik. U iskušenju smo da jezik vidimo kao objašnjenje svesti, da se pitamo da li se o svesti može govori samo kod bića koja se služe jezikom. Zaista je teško zamisliti stanje naših umova bez oslonca u jeziku. Ali, ako je jezik jedina osnova misaonog poretka, onda bi neljudske životinje živele u potpuno neuređenom svetu.

Vukovi, psi, delfini, slonovi, kitovi, da navedem samo neke, imaju raspon glasovnih promena sličan ljudskom. „Pesme“ grbavih kitova su složene forme kulturnog izražavanja na velikim udaljenostima. U celini gledano, moguće je da je životinjski zov više stvar činjenja, a ne značenja.

Ako pogledamo simboliko značenje, koje se smatra karakterističnim za našu vrstu, videćemo da ono ne postoji među našim životinjskim saputnicima. U svom prirodnom stanju, papagaji nikada ne oponašaju ljudski glas; vrste za koje je primećeno da to rade u zatočeništvu, to nikada ne rade u divljini. Primati trenirani da koriste jezik nikada to ne rade kao ljudi. Herbert Teras (Terrace), nekada ubeđeni istraživač jezika čovekolikih majmuna, postao je jedan od najžešćih kritičara te pretpostavke. Pokušaj da se „izvuče nekoliko mrvica jezika od šimpanze koji očekuje nagradu“, ne donosi ništa naročito značajno, kaže Teras.[28]

Životinje ne rade ono što ljudi rade pomoću jezika, naime, ne prave simbole koji zamenjuju stvari.[29] Kao što kaže Tim Ingold, „one ne pokrivaju tok iskustva konceptualnom rešetkom i, samim tim, ne dešifruju to iskustvo u obliku simbola.“[30] Zadivljujuće bogatstvo signala, najrazličitijih vrsta, nije isto što i simbolizacija. Kada neko

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stvorenje pokazuje svoje namerne postupke, ono to čini bez potrebe da ih opisuje, da ih predstavlja.

Pesnik Ričard Grosman (Richard Grossman) je verovao je da je istina „put koji se sam otkriva“.[31] Žak Lakan je u orijentaciji prema predstavljanju video nedostatak; životinje ne pate od tog nedostatka, koji čini ljudski subjekt. U srcu prirode, pisao je Džozef Vud Krač, nalaze se vrednosti „koje jezik još nije dosegao“; dodao je i da se lepota ždralova nalazi „s one strane potrebe za rečima“.[32]

Dugo sam se pitao kako to da nas toliko mnogo životinja gleda u oči? Šta time hoće da kažu? Gavin Maksvel (Maxwell) je uživao u „začuđeno radoznalom“ pogledu kanadskog morskog praseta (porpoise; Phocoenidae),[33] dok je knjiga Dajen Fosi, Gorile u magli (Diane Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, 1983) puna primera gorila i ljudi koji zure jedni u druge s poverenjem. Džon Mjur je pisao o Stikinu, psu sa Aljaske, s kojim je preživeo jednu opasnu situaciju: „Snaga njegovog karaktera leži u očima. Izgledale su stare kao planine – i isto toliko mlade, isto toliko divlje.“[34] Džona Lejna (John Lane) su privukle oči aligatora, što je bilo „nezaboravno iskustvo. Njihove crne oči su bile mirne kao da zure kroz milione kilometara ili godina.“[35]

Možda se tu može naučiti još nešto, od tih direktnih prozora, od te otvorenosti i neposrednosti, umesto kroz verovatno nerešiva pitanja o svesti i jeziku. I kada bismo nekako mogli da gledamo tim očima, da li bismo onda zaista videli sebe?

Oči su ogledalo neposredne otvorenosti. Ovde možemo spomenuti i smrt, kao možda poslednje neposredno iskustvo ili svakako jedno od njih. Loren Ajzli (Loren Eiseley) je, kada se i sama bližila svom kraju, osetila da divlja bića umiru „bez pitanja, bez znanja o milosti univerzuma, znajući samo sebe i svoj vlastiti put ka kraju.“[36] U knjizi Ernesta Setona-Tompsona, Biografija jednog grizlija (E. Seton-Thompson, Biography of a Grizzly, 1901), rečeno je mnogo toga o smrti. Danas smo udaljeniji nego ikada od realnosti smrti – kao i od životinja. Kako se naši životi sužavaju, Toroove reči iz 1859. zvuče još istinitije: „Izgleda da u Americi još nijedan čovek nije umro; naime, da biste umrli, prvo morate živeti.“[37] Moglo bi se dodati da nisu ljudi ti koji znaju kako se umire, već životinje.

Kao da su svega toga bili svesni, ljudi su krenuli da se svete nekim probranim vrstama. Pripitomljavanje je vrsta smrti, svođenje životinjske vitalnosti na stanje potčinjenosti. Kada se životinje kolonizuju i prisvoje, i pripitomljeni i pripitomljivači prolaze kroz kvalitativnu redukciju. To je ona poslovična „najveća greška u ljudskoj istoriji“, za obe strane. Direktne žrtve, koje su nekada bile u stanju da se same staraju o sebi,

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gube na autonomiji, slobodi kretanja, veličini mozga i onome što je Krač nazvao „herojskim osobinama“.[38]

Domaća svinja je ljudska tvorevina skoro isto koliko i seljakov traktor. Samo je treba uporediti s divljom svinjom. Divlje znači slobodno. Prema Džonu Mjuru, divlje ovce predstavljaju stanje pre Pada; nasuprot tome, kaže on, „Ako je domaća ovca neki pokazatelj, onda je čovekovo delo bilo degradirajuće, kako za njega za samog, tako i za njegove podređene.“[39] Nivo savršenstva neke životinje, prema Ničeu, mogao se meriti time „koliko su bile divlje i snažne da se odupru pripitomljavanju“.[40] U kontekstu opšteg potčinjavanja, Dejvid Najbert naziva tu instituciju „domesekracijom“,[41] a ne iznenađuju ni primedbe zbog toga što se za divlje i domaće pripadnike neke vrste koriste iste reči.

Industrijalizam je, naravno, doneo daleko gori život, u masovnim razmerama, masovnu bedu, zbog ishrane masovnog društva. Zoološki vrtovi i morski parkovi su pokazatelji daljeg porobljavanja, pravi dodatak opštem zatočeništvu. Kako se nefabrikovani, nemasifikovani svet povlači, granica između pripitomljenog i nepripitomljenog se zamućuje. Skoro sve zahteva nekakvo upravljanje, sve do oksimorona kao što je „upravljanje divljinom“(wildlife management). Sada smo u stvari ušli u novo doba pripitomljavanja, uključujući i nezabeleženu eskalaciju kontrolisanog životinjskog razmnožavanja, u poslednjih nekoliko decenija.[42]

Potpuno nebiocentrični, humanistički mit o besmrtnosti deo je etosa pripitomljavanja; njegovi rituali su fokusirani na žrtvovanje, a ne na slobodu života pre pripitomljavanja. Frojdov edipovski model porodice plod je pripitomljavanja kroz koje su prošli i životinje i figura oca. Lakanove formulacije često dolaze iz zapažanja o zatočenim životinjama, kao što se i pojmovi „abjekta“[43] ili „stalne pretnje“ Julije Kristeve u osnovi pozivaju na čin pripitomljavanja. Ali, nepripitomljeni ne učestvuju u asimilaciji u pokorenu celinu, u frojdovskom ili nekom drugom smislu.

Nekada je postojao komunalni život organizama, unutar jedinstvenog ekosistema. Život se hranio životom, ali ne na destruktivan način. Čak ni danas ne bi trebalo da gubimo iz vida da je pobeda pripitomljavanja daleko od konačne. Mnoge vrste, iz različitih razloga, ostaju van njegove putanje. „Krotitelj lavova zapravo ne kroti ništa“, podseća nas Džon Harington.[44] On mora ostati u granicama koje su povukle mačke.

„Skoro sve u vezi s kitovima je opičinjavajuća misterija“, zaključila je Dajen Akerman (Diane Ackerman).[45] Vendel Beri (Wendell Berry) citira svoju kćerku u pesmi Neviđenoj životinji: „Nadam se da negde postoji neka životinja koju još niko nije video. I nadam se da je nikada niko neće ni videti.“[46] Da li nam je potrebno da znamo i da li uopšte možemo znati mnogo o drugim životinjama? Možda nam je najviše

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potrebno saznanje da bi trebalo da im se pridružimo u njihovoj nepripitomljenosti.

Kant je napravio strahovitu grešku kada je govorio o ljudskoj superiornosti. „Kao jedino biće na zemlji obdareno spoznajom, on svakako polaže pravo na titulu gospodara prirode.“[47] Volt Vitman je dao jednostavan odgovor: „Ne govorite za kornjaču da je bezvredna samo zato što nije nešto drugo.“[48] Važno je primetiti da su ženke te koje dominiraju onim što se naziva životinjskom etologijom (karakterologijom), kao i da su daleko manje sklone da slede Kanta u njegovoj nastranoj orijentaciji.

Iluzija o ljudskoj dominaciji prirodnim svetom poprima razne oblike. Jedan od njih je pretpostavka da nam naša domišljatost donosi dugoročnu sigurnost. Zaboravljamo da nas takva orijentacija, dugoročno gledano, može dovesti u opasnost. Naše izgubljene veze, naša izgubljena svest dovela nas je u doba užasa svih vrsta. Kao što je Olaus Mjuri (Murie) jednom rekao, „U evoluciji ljudskog duha, ljude može zadesiti nešto mnogo gore od gladi“.[49]

I Žak Derida je počeo da uviđa veliki značaj pitanja animalnosti za ljude, kao nečeg presudnog za „suštinu i budućnost čovečanstva“.[50] Slika slobodne životinje podstiče na sanjarenje, ona je snevačeva polazna tačka. U međuvremenu, živa stvarnost zajedništva među vrstama ipak opstaje. Ljudi iz naroda Inuipat i Gvičin (Gwich’in), koji i dalje putuje bez mapa i određuju pravac bez kompasa, znaju da irvasi nose u svojim srcima deo njih, kao što i oni u svojim srcima nose irvase.[51]

Vera u neposrednost, u direktne veze, nije zamrla. „Ali pitaj zvijeri, i poučit će te; ptice nebeske pitaj, i razjasnit će ti. Ili se razgovori sa zemljom, naučiće te, i ribe će ti morske pripovjediti.“ (Biblija, Jov 12: 7–8)[52] Za vreme boravka na Arktiku, Džonatan Voterman (Jonathan Waterman) je počeo da se udaljava od te odvojenosti, od pripitomljavanja: „Prvo sam skinuo sat. Moja sposobnost da osetim različite i nepoznate mirise postala je neverovatno uznemiravajuća. Izgleda da je i sluh počeo da mi se popravlja.“[53] Daleko od Arktika, ostaci te dimenzije uvek su mogli da se osete. Melvil je u prizoru ulješure video kolosalno postojanje bez kojeg ostajemo nepotpuni. Prisećamo se i Virdžinije Vulf i njenog pozivanja na životinjske vokabulare i odnose među vrstama.

Nešto celovito, nešto povezano, postojalo je milionima godina pre pojave vrste Homo. U nasleđe nam je preneto nešto što je Henri Beston Šijen (Sheahan) nazvao „životinjskom verom“, za koju je smatrao da je uništena s početkom Mehaničkog doba.[54] Izgubljeni smo, ali druge životinje nam pokazuju na pravi put. One su taj pravi put.

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Nedostaje nam to stanje blaženstva, ali ipak znamo koliko je toga ugroženo. Lori Olman (Laurie Allman), o pesmi jedne mičigenske ptice: „Odmah mogu da kažem da ne zna koliko je ugrožena. Zna samo da peva, danas, na vrhu jednog mladog kanadskog bora. Kljun joj je otvoren, pun neba koje se širi iza nje.“[55]

Evo i stihova Ričarda Grosmana, koji pozivaju na povratak drevnoj radosti:

Skovaćemonovi umi konačno shvatitida je duhživotinja.[56]

I dalje smo životinje, bića ove planete, sa svim njenim izvornim porukama koje čekaju u našem biću.

[1] Navedeno u Marc D. Hauser, Wild Minds (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), str. 70.

[2] Konrad Lorenz, The Waning of Humaneness (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1987), str. 70.

[3] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), str. 83.

[4] Henry Beston, The Outermost House (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), str. 25.

[5] Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson i Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), str. 34. Među delima koja ukazuju na pomak od anti-antropomorfizma nalaze se i Ruth Rudner, Ask Now the Beasts (New York: Marlowe & Company, 2006) i How Forests Think (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

[6] Eoin O’Carroll, „Oxford Junior Dictionary Dropping ’Nature’ Words“, Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 2009.

[7] Ružan primer suprotnog viđenja dolazi od komunistkinje Oksane Timofejeve (Oxana Timofeeva), History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), s predgovorom Slavoja Žižeka. Timofejeva osuđuje prirodu zbog otpora koji pruža tehnologiji, dok u sito vreme, bizarno, o životinjama govori kao o prirodnim komunistima! Videti str. 146–147.

[8] Navedeno u Susan Hanson, Icons of Loss and Grace (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2004), str. 182.

[9] Masson and McCarthy, op. cit., str. 140.

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[10] Barbara Noske, Humans and Other Animals (London: Pluto Press, 1989), str. 115.

[11] Vera Norwood, Made from this Earth (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), str. 235.

[12] Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner Classics, 2004), str. 18.

[13] Ibid., str. 55.

[14] Masson and McCarthy, op. cit., str. 72.

[15] Steve Kemp, „No Alpha Males Allowed“, Smithsonian, September 2013, str. 39–41.

[16] Noske, op. cit., str. 116.

[17] John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), str. 151.

[18] Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate (New York: Routledge, 1994), str. 131.

[19] Jacques Graven, Non-Human Thought (New York: Stein and Day, 1967), str. 68.

[20] Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), str. 157.

[21] Joseph Wood Krutch, The Great Chain of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), str. 224.

[22] Ibid., str. 227.

[23] J. H. Williams, Elephant Bill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), str. 58.

[24] Katherine Harmon Courage, „Alien Intelligence“, Wired, October 2013, str. 84.

[25] Emily Anthes, „Coldblooded Does Not Mean Stupid“, New York Times, November 19, 2013, str D1, D5.

[26] Graven, op. cit., str. 127.

[27] Justin McCurry, „Chimps Are Making Monkeys Out of Us“, The Observer, September 28, 2013.

[28] Navedeno u Stephen Budiansky, If a Lion Could Talk (New York: Free Press, 1998), str. 45.

[29] Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), str. 186.

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[30] Tim Ingold, Evolution and Social Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), str. 311.

[31] Richard Grossman, „The Truth“, Animals (Minneapolis: Zygote Press, 1983), str. 421.

[32] Leopold, op .cit., str. 102.

[33] Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 2011), str. 45

[34] Edwin Way Teale, The Wilderness World of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), str. 281.

[35] John Lane, Waist Deep in Black Water (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), str. 49.

[36] Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), str. 173.

[37] Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837–1861, ed. Damion Searls (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), str. 585 (beleška od 22. oktobra 1859).

[38] Krutch, op. cit., str. 102.

[39] Michael P. Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), str. 173, 176.

[40] Jennifer Ham, „Taming the Beast“, navedeno u Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, eds., Animal Acts (New York: Routledge, 1997), str. 158.

[41] David A. Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict, Columbia University Press, 2013. Domesecration: od domestication i desecration (skrnavljenje). „Domesekracija je sistematska praksa nasilja kojom se društvene životinje porobljuju i biološki menjaju, što za ishod ima postvarenje, potčinjavanje i ugnjetavanje.“ (D. A. Nibert)

[42] Clive Roots, Domestication (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), str. xii.

[43] Prelazno stanje između objekta i subjekta, u razvojnoj teoriji Julije Kristeve. Videti pojmove abject i abjection. (Prim. prev.)

[44] Navedeno u Lane, op. cit., str. 125.

[45] Diane Ackerman, The Moon by Whale Light (New York: Random House, 1991), str. 112.

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[46] Wendell Berry, „To the Unseeable Animal“, navedeno u Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, eds., The Ecopoetry Anthology (San Antonio TX: Trinity University Press, 2013), str. 178.

[47] Immanuel Kant, trans. J.C. Meredith, Critique of Judgement (Oxford University Press, 1952), Part 2, Section 431.

[48] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Library of America, 2011), section 13.

[49] Navedeno u Jonathan Waterman, Where Mountains are Nameless (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), str. 237.

[50] Navedeno u Leonard Lawlor, This is Not Sufficient (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), str. 7.

[51] Waterman, op. cit., str. 212.

[52] Početak prvog stiha je preuzet iz hrvatskog prevoda Jerusalimske Biblije, gde se eksplicitno govori o „zverima“, a ne o „stoci“, kao u prevodu Daničić-Karadžić ili u zvaničnom hrvatskom prevodu Biblije: „Zapitaj stoku, naučiće te“, itd. (Prim. prev.)

[53] Ibid., str. 10.

[54] John Nelson, „Henry Beston Sheahan“, Harvard Magazine, September-October 2013, str. 40.

[55] Laurie Allman, Far From Tame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), str. 73.

[56] Grossman, op. cit., „The New Art“, str. 2.

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