“Sometimes in history things are reversed in a moment when the physical world intrudes enough to knock us off balance…The dogs in Pavlov’s laboratory had been conditioned for hundreds of hours. They were fully trained and domesticated. Then there was a flood in the basement. And you know what happened? They forgot all of their training in a blink of an eye. We should be able to do at least that well. I am staking my life on it, and it is toward this end that I devote my work.”
What if someone told you that language is not a tool for human communication and understanding, but an inherently imprecise system which obscures objective reality and furthers coercive ideologies? What if they also said that symbolic culture, with its mythic roles and figures, its ritual taboos and ceremonies, leads inevitably to a mutilated experience of reality and a hierarchical social dystopia? What if they also made it clear that a confused, mutilated existence mediated by language and symbolic culture is not inescapable, and made the claim that for most of our existence the human race maintained social cohesion, equality, and environmentally sustainable ways of life because their minds were not hindered by the subjective detachment and the contrived hierarchies of symbolic thought? And what if they concluded that this limitless pre-linguistic consciousness was not lost forever, but that it is always there under the surface of our domesticated minds, waiting for a moment of trauma when our hollow symbolic categories collapse and our perception is cleansed?
Such an analysis is very difficult to accept, or even to consider seriously. It seems to attack everything that human cultures consider sacred, and everything that social scientists consider natural. Yet these are the core ideas in the writings of John Zerzan, a contemporary American anarchist thinker. His work draws upon and/or bears similarity to that of other so-called anarcho-primitivist writers who have criticized scientific rationality and the ideal of technological progress as irreconcilable with autonomy and equality — writers like Fredy Perlman, Ted Kaczynski, John Moore, or David Watson. But Zerzan combines these insights with the poststructuralist understanding of language as a complex system of symbols that produces and constitutes the reality of those who use it. From Zerzan’s synthesis of these disparate theories comes the hypothesis that language and symbolic thought are the primary sources of social hierarchy and inequality. He contends that symbolic thought inevitably leads to complete objectification of the natural and social world — which means the conceptual transformation of all plants, animals and people from unique, dynamic lifeforms into manipulable objects. He also posits that dependence on symbolic thought requires dependence on the conceptual process of reification, by which the symbolic use values of objectified lifeforms are elevated to primary conceptual importance. Via the intellectual processes of objectification and reification, general symbolic categories based upon use value take primary social and psychological importance, ahead of all unique characteristics or individual circumstances.
Zerzan posits that once objectification and reification become socially ascendant, human alienation begins and social harmony ends. Symbolic thought causes these problems because it places artificial obstacles between the individual consciousness and the outside world, thereby destroying any possibilities for an understanding of the world based on interconnection and mutual benefit. Zerzan considers language and time consciousness as both the immediate signs of this initial alienation, and important devices for the spread and refinement of reified thought. He also attempts to show how, once symbolic thought is adopted to any degree, humans become increasingly dependent upon it because symbolic thought processes slowly make alternative ways of thinking impossible or undesirable. Therefore Zerzan labels symbolic thought inherently coercive and inegalitarian. In Zerzan’s model of human history myth, ritual, domestication, and shamanism are all early coercive devices developed for the purpose of maintaining symbolic thought. The widespread adoption of agriculture, written literature, art and other forms of symbolic culture allow relationships based on hierarchical control and dependence to become the rule, rather than the exception. In time these early, crude tools of alienation have become refined into scientific rationality and capitalism.
At first glance Zerzan’s condemnation and rejection of symbolic thought might sound like a childish and nihilistic rejection of reality, or an absurdly pessimistic opposition to everything that is. But this would be a very superficial dismissal of someone whose works go a long way towards establishing, through the use of anthropological evidence about various so-called primitive societies, a direct link between increased reliance upon symbolic thought and the presence of social hierarchy and inequality. Anthropological evidence about pre-historic humanity also serves as the basis of Zerzan’s hypothesis that throughout most of its history the human species did not utilize either language or symbolic thought. He argues that from an anti-authoritarian, anarchist viewpoint, pre-linguistic consciousness independent of symbolic thought would have been infinitely superior to current human consciousness because of its necessary basis in face-to-face interactions and the experience of the immediate moment. With firm roots in social sensitivity, emotional intelligence, heightened senses and possibly telepathic intuition, pre-linguistic thought would have been far less prone to the rigidification, coercion and inequality that plague human societies organized around the categories and hierarchies of symbolic culture. Prior to the ascendancy of symbolic thought, Zerzan believes that human life was materially prosperous, socially harmonious, and inconceivably fulfilling. Zerzan also feels that this Edenic grace can be regained. Significantly, his ideas are not pure conjecture, and are always at least partially grounded in interdisciplinary evidence from the academic fields of anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, and physics.
Yet there are deeply problematic and possibly flawed areas of Zerzan’s writings. To begin with, there is the question of the validity of much of the historical and anthropological evidence that he presents as fact. Beyond the problem of questionable facts, there are also the questionable assumptions upon which his writings are based: that humanity could return to a pre-linguistic, non-symbolic consciousness, and that this would actually be conducive to egalitarian social harmony. Finally, even if one accepts the bulk of Zerzan’s ideas, there is the question of how his understanding can be used to guide future efforts to oppose symbolic thought. Can we successfully create temporary autonomous zones, where we are momentarily freed from the traps of language or symbolic thought? Should we engage in certain forms of issue based activism because they are in conformity with the larger critique of civilization? How can a revolutionary pre-linguistic consciousness be advanced when the only tools that we have to work with are linguistic or symbolic? Can we make a conscious effort to escape symbolic thought, or can we overcome our 30,000 years of training only by accident? Zerzan often seems to support the latter view, and he boycotts most traditional anti-authoritarian activism while simultaneously making optimistic statements like: “Ten thousand years of captivity and darkness…will not withstand ten days of full out revolution” (Zerzan, “Transition”). But if humanity’s liberation must come through some sudden catastrophe or spontaneous revolution, what does this say about our ability to keep a newly established non-linguistic society from falling back into the prison of symbolic thought?
Though there may be flaws in Zerzan’s overall understanding of symbolic culture, his ideas merit serious attention because of the insights they offer into the nature of human thought and language, the extent of dependence and coercion in contemporary society, and the possibilities for future anarchist reform and revolution. My objective is to bring into better focus the basic ideas and logical steps at the center of Zerzan’s complex cultural critique.
When an interviewer asked him what he wanted from his own work and life, John Zerzan replied: “a face to face community, an intimate existence, where relations are not based on power…I would like to see an intact natural world, and I would like to live as a fully human being. I would like that for the people around me” (Jensen, 1998). As Zerzan’s own writings show, these seemingly humble aspirations are currently unattainable due to the intricate web of capitalist technology that shapes every aspect of modern life. For an individual to extricate themselves from this network, if it is possible at all, means choosing an isolationist lifestyle that leaves the rest of humanity to be destroyed and ravaged by culture and technology.
In the face of these obstacles, Zerzan does the best that he can. His world view has certainly changed since he matriculated at Stanford in the 1960s to study political science, with the goal of becoming a college professor. He now calls this move “a giant waste of time” (Noble, 1995). Upon finishing at Stanford, Zerzan moved to the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco. He experienced first hand the political and social upheaval of the youth and student movements underway in San Francisco and Berkeley in the late 1960s, and he reports that this experience gave him a sense of possibility and an optimism that has stayed with him “even though thirty years later things are frozen, and awful” (Jensen, 1998).
Zerzan went on to get a master’s degree in history at San Francisco State. He also spent three years in a Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California, but he never received his degree. He continued living in the Bay Area throughout much of the 1970s. For a time he worked as a labor organizer with what he has referred to as a “sort of do-it-yourself union” in San Francisco that was set up to advance workers’ rights while avoiding the corruption and bureaucracy rampant in most American organized labor. The group was organized along libertarian guidelines, and “our general tactic was to help everybody with all of their issues, all of their grievances, defend everything, dispute everything” (Jensen, 1998). The group’s founding principle was a theory advanced in the 1960s called “The Long March Through the Institutions,” which held that the system could only be toppled by working inside existing rules and structures. During this period Zerzan also began writing political articles for publication, many of which dealt with labor issues and were published in the Detroit-based anarchist newspaper The Fifth Estate.
Zerzan left the union and withdrew from political organizing in general when he decided that working to help people with their individual problems only because it fit into your larger political theories was ultimately manipulative and dishonest. He moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1981, fleeing from the skyrocketing cost of living in the Bay Area. In the calmer sphere of Oregonian life he found that he could focus on his intellectual work with fewer distractions. Since then he has turned out dozens of critical studies dealing with different aspects of contemporary Western society, civilization, and symbolic thought. His articles have been most often published in the Fifth Estate and the quarterly magazine Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed (to which he is a contributing editor). His works have also been occasionally featured in other libertarian, anti-authoritarian and leftist publications. In 1988 he published his first book, a collection of essays entitled Elements of Refusal (newly available from C.A.L. Press). His second book, Future Primitive, was published in 1994 by Autonomedia. He has also edited two volumes: Questioning Technology: A Critical Anthology (with Alice Carnes, London: Freedom Press, 1998, also Philadelphia: New Society Press, 1991) and Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (Eugene: Uncivilized Books, 1999). Since most of his work is published by non-profit collectives, Zerzan’s cultural critique has no financial motivation or pay off. He has testified that since moving to Eugene, “in terms of income I do mostly child care and yard work to survive; I don’t get any money from books, and I probably won’t ever get any money from the books” (Noble, 1995).
For many years this way of life has brought Zerzan little recognition outside extreme leftist, Luddite and anarchist circles. It took the intrigue of terrorism for his ideas to gain mainstream media attention. In 1995, when the Unabomber case was still unsolved and a financially solvent investment for the capitalist press, The New York Times considered Zerzan worthy of a medium size article. Describing him as “an unpretentious and faintly melancholic man” and “a guru of sorts for anti-technology leftists,” the article dealt briefly with the similarities between Zerzan and the bomber’s views. It also pointed out how the Unabomber’s terrorist activities had given anti-technology ideas wider exposure (Noble, 1995).
In the last half of 1999, the efforts of the mainstream media have made John Zerzan possibly the most well known anarchist in America (the only other contender would be with Noam Chomsky). This process began when the June 18th Reclaim The Streets demonstration in Eugene was spiced up with tactical property destruction against banks and corporate storefronts, followed by brutal attacks by rampaging riot police. These so-called “riots” had several notable results: intensified police repression against anarchists and others in Eugene; the mobilization of the entire state of Oregon’s legal resource to scapegoat one Latino anarchist protester from out of town for the “riots” (Rob Thaxton AKA Rob Los Ricos is currently serving a 7 and a half year prison sentence for daring to defend himself against a rampaging riot cop); and a spate of media coverage in major west coast newspapers about the “new anarchists.” On the whole these articles painted a ludicrous picture of John Zerzan as some kind of cult leader of a group of violent anarchist youths in training in the isolated college town of Eugene. But this mainstream media coverage was only the prelude to what followed the November 30th demonstrations in Seattle, where anarchists and others took a largely symbolic protest against the WTO to a new level by successfully creating a temporary autonomous zone in downtown Seattle where they smashed in the storefronts of corporations, occupied downtown Seattle streets, and built barricades out of dumpsters and newspaper boxes in order to temporarily repel the Seattle police. Much of the media coverage immediately following the events rabidly and ridiculously attempted to blame all property destruction that took place on “anarchists from Eugene,” for whom John Zerzan was represented as either a real or a philosophical leader. This fabrication was repeated so often that some participants in the property destruction on November 30th found it necessary to state in their explanative communique about the action that: “While some of us may appreciate [Zerzan’s] writings and analyses, he is in no sense our leader, directly, indirectly, philosophically or otherwise” (Acme Collective, 1999) The less frenetic follow-up coverage in the weeks following November 30th also tried to play up the spurious idea that most or all radical anarchists who attended the November 30th protest hailed from or were somehow connected with John Zerzan and the Eugene anarchist community (not to mention that all anarchists were portrayed as “anti-technology”). The December 13th issue of Newsweek magazine featured an article about the “New Radicals,” which contained a sidebar on the “New Anarchism” with a collage including a picture of Zerzan and a short identification of him (it also included Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman and the lead singer from the highly political but extraordinarily commercialized rock group Rage Against the Machine). More notably, on Tuesday, December 14th the CBS news program “60 Minutes II” also had an entire segment about the “Eugene anarchists” which included long interview segments with John Zerzan along with other members of the Eugene anarchist community.
Though he may be scapegoated for fomenting violence, Zerzan is not routinely involved in any form of property destruction, violence or armed revolutionary struggle. Talking about the largely intellectual role that he has taken in the revolutionary movement, Zerzan once remarked: “I’ve thought a lot about how I can best serve — and I realize that at least part of this answer is based on class privilege, on a wider set of options being open to me than to many others.” This wider set of options means that as an educated first-worlder, it is not strategic or necessary that Zerzan immediately take up arms in order to bring about humanity’s liberation. The system of divided labor has shaped things so that, “For me, words are a better weapon to bring down the system than a gun would be. This is to say nothing of anybody else’s choice of weapons, only my own…. But my words are nothing but a weapon” (Jensen, 1998).
As anarchist cultural critique, John Zerzan’s writings are partly concerned with finding and analyzing models of human society that have workably approximated egalitarian anarchy. Like many contemporary anarchists, he finds affirmation of libertarian ideals in the historical examples of primitive foraging societies. In the last few decades serious anthropological research has brought to light the fact that a collectivist, state-less, non-coercive and relatively egalitarian social structure was the rule among primitive foraging societies. Dozens of anthropological studies have established egalitarian food-sharing as a dominant characteristic of both modern and pre-historic foragers, while division of labor or unequal distribution of resources are almost completely unknown among them (Barclay, 1996). At the same time, anthropologists have documented that active, extreme anti-authoritarian attitudes are an essential component of many extant hunter-gatherer societies (Zerzan, 1994; p. 35)
Often foraging societies encourage equality by actively discouraging sex and age discrimination (Barclay, 1996, p. 49). Division of labor based upon gender differences seems to be at a minimum among extant foragers, and Zerzan points out that women maintain autonomy and equal social status in primitive society partly because they engage regularly in the central eco nomic activity of hunting for needed dietary protein. Other signs pointing to minimal patriarchy and sexism among primitive hunter-gatherers include attitudes about sexual intercourse, marriage and menstruation (Zerzan, 1994; p. 40–1) The mass of anthropological data seems to show that foraging societies in general are set up to afford women greater autonomy and higher social status than any other model of social organization.
All of these discoveries about the social structures of primitive foragers have come into acceptance alongside new ideas about their general material condition. The anthropological theory of “primitive affluence,” increasingly accepted since the 1960s, supports the conclusion that primitive foragers labor much less in order to live much healthier lives than the average resident of an early agricultural society, or possibly even a modern industrial one. The lives of primitive foraging peoples, though they may be shorter on the average compared to our own (and this is still a point of contention), are not nasty or brutish, and their hand-to-mouth existence is not particularly stressful or labor intensive.
This all begs the question: if primitive societies require less labor in order to maintain affluent, healthy societies with greater equality and autonomy than our own, what are the positive attributes of modern industrial society that provide compensation for what we have given up? One plausible benefit would be the accomplishments of modern science in improving the quality of human life — specifically the modifications of the food supply made possible through widespread factory farming, and Western medicine’s constant advances at prolonging human life. Zerzan addresses this issue several times in different writings. Dealing with the modern versus primitive food supply, he feels that the primitives win hands down. Compared to the average modern resident of a first world country, the diets of contemporary foragers (many of whom, like the San bushmen of the Kalahari, have been forced into arid and infertile foraging grounds) are far more diverse and they consume far fewer foods likely to lead to diseases or disorder (Zerzan, 1994; p. 32). Also the diets of foraging people are certainly better in every way than those of third world peoples impoverished through their slavery to first world economic powers. As to the issue of quantity of food, famine is much more a problem in early agricultural societies than in foraging ones, for reasons that will become clear.
In regards to the gifts of modern medicine, most primitives just don’t seem to need them. Barring accidental injuries — which are extremely rare when you don’t have automobiles, firearms, explosives, plains, trains, or large-scale warfare — foragers seem to have very few health problems. Among the few extant foraging societies, anthropologists have documented extraordinarily low rates of degenerative and mental diseases, not to mention cases of immunity to malaria, childbirth without pain, or skin so elastic that it doesn’t wrinkle with age (Zerzan, 1994; p. 32–3). These findings fit in with some anthropologists’ conclusions that the move from nomadic foraging to agriculture created most infectious diseases and led to a general decline in the quality of human health and the length of human life spans (Zerzan, 1994; p. 28) It also fits in with Zerzan’s own assertion that “nearly all diseases are diseases either of civilization, alienation, or gross habitat destruction” (Jensen, 1998).
Besides a material technology whose only positive effect seems to be putting band-aids on the cancers that it has created, the other seemingly positive contribution of civilization would have to be symbolic culture: the stockpile of recorded knowledge that includes art, literature, science, mathematics, mythology and religion. In addressing this issue, Zerzan’s writings make a break from other anarcho-primitivists. Many of these other theorists deal with the idea that scientific rationality and technology are far from neutral tools, and that hierarchy and coercion cannot be escaped if our current systems of technology are retained. But much of Zerzan’s work is based upon the assumption that symbolic culture is also non-neutral — he attempts to show that symbolic thought is just as inherently coercive as technology, and just as antithetical to harmonious anarchist society.
Zerzan’s definition of the process of “reification” is central to his argument that symbolic thought unavoidably encourages domination and coercion. Reification is the process of conceptually elevating an abstract mental construct so that it is considered just as important and just as objectively real as actual living beings or material elements of the world. In Zerzan’s model, the process of reification works hand in hand with objectification to produce symbolic culture. Together these processes facilitate the manipulation of material elements as objects, but only at the loss of a more interactive and dynamic understanding of the objective world. Zerzan shows that once objectification and reification have become strong habits embedded in an individual or a society’s consciousness, these processes are applied to more than just inanimate objects, so that eventually plants, animals and even people are dealt with as reified symbols. In the case of other humans, reification has the frightening effect of allowing symbolic categories such as race, gender, or occupation to take primary importance in our social interactions, completely subordinating unique individual traits. But, as he shows, this de-humanizing effect is not an accident: it is a central aim of symbolic thought, and the basis of civilization.
Zerzan argues that any amount of dependence on reified symbols will ultimately preclude conceiving of the world in non-reified terms. Eventually all interactions with other objects or organisms are modelled on control and coercion, rather than any kind of mutually beneficial, interactive relationship. This causes the exchange of a pure perception of reality for a conception in which the world around us is immediately categorized in terms of symbols representing different categories of manipulable objects. Or, to put it more simply, “symbols at first mediated reality and then replaced it” (Zerzan, 1997). As one’s objectified view is narrowed by symbolic categories, one even loses awareness of the different possible ways to manipulate objects. One’s way of life becomes centered around certain objects and certain uses for these objects that have been placed at central importance by one’s symbolic conception. Other objects become useless, and other uses become unimaginable.
For example, even taking for granted a subject-object viewpoint of the food chain, where some things eat and others are eaten (ignoring the massive webs of cyclical energy sharing involved), a hungry modern American cannot immediately satisfy his or her hunger with whatever is immediately edible in his or her environment. For such an individual food is a very distinct category of cultivated, prepared, and often pre-packaged products. Food does not conceptually include anything that could be immediately foraged in the natural environment, and most human environments have been artificially modified so that very little that is edible grows or lives in them anyway. Even inside this strictly limited reified category of “food” there are other symbolic concepts that interfere with the ability to eat freely. Food must be obtained by shopping at a supermarket with money. The ritualistic activity of shopping, the controlled space of the supermarket, and the symbolic economic concept of money are all highly reified and rigid social constructs to which people must pay obeisance prior to being able to even eat. Then there are the origins of most modern food in factory farms, whose existence rests upon the reified justifications that individual humans can be used specialized tools in a system of divided labor, and that other plants and animals are only objects for human consumption.
Zerzan contends that human society was not always so totally immersed in reification. He holds that there are two forms of reification that have been crucial to the overall spread and advancement of symbolic thought: language and time. Not only were language and time the earliest by-products of humanity’s alienation, they have also been highly effective tools for its propagation.
Zerzan’s opinions on language are partially based on studies of humans lacking the ability to speak due to physical problems or brain damage. These studies show that language is not necessary or inherent in advanced, complex human thought (Zerzan, 1997). Zerzan also hypothesizes from anthropological evidence that the tool-making skills utilized by primitive humans to maintain material prosperity were best taught by example (Zerzan, 1988; p. 28). Therefore he feels that the symbolic language upon which civilized humans are completely dependent is not necessary for a society living in harmonious anarchy or primitive affluence. From here he develops an argument that language is not only unnecessary for social harmony and equality, but that it is actually an impediment to maintaining a society predicated on egalitarian, face-to-face relations and concerned with immediate physical/material reality rather than inaccurate, mystifying symbols.
At several points Zerzan hypothesizes that the use of language initiated a conception of the individual subject whose interests were separate from the social collective or from nature. Speech, he suggests, is directly tied in with the distinct subject-object differentiation that is part of objectification. It also creates the possibility of communicating wholly without actual physical contact, which he conceives as a direct threat to a society predicated upon intimate, face-to-face interactions (Zerzan, 1997).
Zerzan concludes that any advantages that language affords are gained only at the loss of an unfragmented, collective understanding of the world and our place in it. As language facilitates an objectified viewpoint, it also closes off to us an understanding of the world as a connected whole. Language has this effect partly because of its symbolic bias. Zerzan points out that “even in the most primitive languages, words rarely bear a recognizable similarity to what they denote: they are purely conventional” (Zerzan, 1988; p. 25). This is because representing a visual, tactile, or even cognitive sensation using spoken sounds can never be anything but crudely correlational, and under most circumstances is based only upon social convention. Since language is symbolic, it must be reified in order to gain acceptance as the most central form of human understanding. What this reification means is that language, like all symbolism, allows you to gain access to reality only through certain imprecise conceptual pathways. The word for a certain object may suggest the object in its entirety and its larger relationship to the world, but it almost never does all of these things at once. And a word’s strict dictionary denotation and usage conventions always limit it to defining only a tiny aspect of a culture’s larger understanding of what the word signifies. Even this cultural understanding of the object is a severely limited concept restricted by the culture’s own usage values. In this way Zerzan shows how words can never actually convey objective reality. Instead they use linguistic signifiers in attempts to convey symbolic representations, which are themselves only objectified perspectives on reality.
Because language is predicated upon symbolism, it is virtually impossible for a language to exist without having some kind of particular ideological assumptions guiding it. Zerzan characterizes ideology as “alienation’s armored way of seeing,” (Zerzan, 1988; p. 23) which limits our perception to particular reified lines of thought. Ideology and language work hand in hand to persuade the dominating and the dominated that their social roles are natural. They do this by creating “false separations and objectification…. This falsification is made possible by concealing, and ultimately vitiating, the participation of the subject in the physical world” (Zerzan, 1997).
Zerzan’s characterization of ideologies also seems an apt description of the symbolic manner in which language itself functions. This is because Zerzan contends that language has its own ideology, steeped in the alienating values of objectification and reification that required and facilitated the original invention of language. Since any ideology ultimately functions in order to stomp out dissent through intellectual coercion and domination, he concludes that language cannot avoid serving the purposes of reified symbolic thought. Through the imposition of false limitations on our consciousness, language trains us to conceive of the world only in terms of separate, detached subjects manipulating rigidly categorized objects. As this viewpoint stomps out all opposition, the inevitable result is a conception of the world in terms of “reduced, rigidified subjects and an equally objectified field of experience” (Zerzan, 1998, “That Thing,” p. 55).
A look at the structure of actual languages can show us how the ideology of reification has shaped them. If objectification begins with the practice of naming things, then perhaps reification first arrives with the invention of the pronoun, the linguistic device that allows unique individuals to become abstract entities denoted by their species or gender (Zerzan, 1998; p. 56). Some anthropologists have also concluded that early grammar and syntax were modeled upon the convention-based, reified social activities of religious ritual (Zerzan, 1997). Comparing different languages also yields insights. Zerzan argues that Sanskrit may be a less objectifying language in some respects because of the way in which it describes human consciousness. In modern English the totality of human consciousness is described either as an immobile “mind,” which is active only through the dominating control of “minding” oneself or others, or in terms of the anatomically detached “brain.” The term used in Sanskrit roughly translates as “working within” (Zerzan, 1988; p. 24). This implies a consciousness that is dynamic rather than static, and cooperative with the whole human being, rather than anatomically separated or hierarchically dominating. The language of the Navajo Native American tribes could also be seen as less alienated from material reality than modern European languages because most of its vocabulary centered around physical sensations and actions, rather than abstract concepts (Zerzan, 1988; p. 24).
As a language contains fewer words referring to actions and direct perceptions, and more referring to abstract concepts and rigid categorizations, it more completely reflects the ideology of symbolic thought. This is why abstract concepts and metaphors lend themselves to a loss of their original meaning, and to a reinterpretation based upon their use value to powerful social minorities. Language causes objective reality to be lost in a sea of words and reified symbols, and the history of change in language seems to suggest to Zerzan that we have been left “in an existence without vibrancy or meaning, [where] nothing is left but language” (Zerzan, 1998; p. 56). However, he feels that ultimately any attempts to address this problem through linguistic routes alone (he doesn’t even consider possibilities, but one can imagine attempts to create a language utilizing minimal metaphor and abstraction) will be doomed to failure. This is because all languages have their roots in the alienating processes of objectification and reification. Even if a few tribal societies here and there have managed to hold out in anarchic equality while simultaneously developing language and symbolic thought, the fact remains that humanity in general has used these abstract tools to create a hellish world of hierarchy and domination. Therefore Zerzan finds that language’s symbolic origins make it by nature an impediment to autonomy, equality and understanding.
Zerzan contends that the civilized concept of time, like the tool of language, is an individual instance of reification that is also essential to the maintenance and proliferation of symbolic thought. He contends that time, as “an abstract continuing ‘thread’ that unravels in an endless progression that links all events together while remaining independent of them,” (Jensen, 1998) is purely a product of human perception. Measured linear time, unlike material elements, is produced by its own measurement, which gains widespread acceptance only through coercive social elites who promote its importance (Zerzan, Winter 1994). Zerzan points out that even in the realm of science and physics irreversible time is understood to be not an absolute fact, but partially a product of human cognition — which Zerzan presents as skewed by alienation from objective reality (Zerzan, Winter 1994). Despite its minute and obsessive measurement, time remains an artificial and relative human concept. This reality, however, is directly contrary to the concept of time. Time is supposed to flow only with respect to itself and be utterly universal and independent of all individual perception.
To better understand this contradiction, it is necessary to look at the social purposes for which different concepts of time have been used. In 1944 the anarchist scholar and historian George Woodcock pointed out that in modern Western capitalist society, “The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas” (Woodcock, 1998). In Zerzan’s critique, the act of reifying time in order to maintain social control is charted back to the beginnings of symbolic thought.
Zerzan conceives of the period prior to divided labor and symbolic culture as an essentially timeless state. Pre-historic humans were primarily conscious of the possibilities of the immediate moment, and they adjusted to the sequences and rhythms of the natural world at an intuitive level, rather than struggling to consciously manipulate or control them. Zerzan imagines that after the loss of non-reified perception to symbolic concepts, early religious rituals arose as an attempt to regain a consciousness of the immediate moment, unburdened by an obsession with the passing of time (Zerzan, Winter 1994). But ritual fails in this respect because rituals themselves are abstractions that try to preserve events symbolically, thereby taking the participant further away from experiencing the immediate moment. Instead of allowing people access to the real immediate moment, rituals only allow them to live in a seemingly “timeless” space, which is detached from their actual surroundings in a distorted, reified manner. Zerzan points out that the detached “time-lessness” of ritual is similar to the detached nature of measured time, where individual circumstances in a period of time are subordinated to the rules of rational universal measurement.
Zerzan believes that “the rise of agriculture magnified the importance of time, and especially reified cyclical time” (Jensen, 1998). As domestication made the exact counting of plants, land, and animals of utmost importance, the minute tracking of time also took primary social importance. Such measurements were needed in order to schedule the intense divided labor of sowing and reaping needed to produce the highest possible yield. Zerzan points out that in these early agricultural societies social elites used time as a source of power: in early civilizations such as the Babylonians or the Mayans, priests ran the calendars, and the surplus of the harvest went to them (Jensen, 1998). In an agricultural society where the material surplus needed to feed religious elites was produced only through fastidious time-keeping by those same elites, centralized power and coercion were first justified as being necessary for the maintenance of an artificial religious order (Zerzan, Winter 1994). These early agricultural societies’ conceptions of time were reified in that symbolic representations of different aspects of the planting and harvesting cycle became elevated to primary social and cultural significance. However, early agriculture was not completely alienated because it “still maintained at least a bow toward the natural world with its connection to the rhythms of the days and seasons” (Jensen, 1998).
With the innovations of the clock and the concept of “historical time,” human alienation from nature went into overdrive. Historical time is the basis of culture; it is the idea of life not as a series of cycles, but as a distinct line of events. Certain events become reified into holidays or festivals, and take on an importance that outweighs both natural cycles and the experience of the immediate moment. People lead their lives constantly aware that what is happening now will never be as important as the events of some past time period, such as the birth and resurrection of Christ. Such events slowly replace natural pointers like solstices or equinoxes as the centers of perceived cyclical change. More important, the awareness of one’s location in a specific spot on a strand of linear time facilitates the construction of a massive canon of symbolical cultural records and practices, which in turn ask that the individual to forget their own circumstances in order to conceive of their actions and perceptions through pre-existing symbolic hierarchies. Historical time’s devaluation of the present moment also psychologically aids the deferment of pleasure and fulfillment. This mortgaging of the moment is at the core of every civilized religion that requires the sacrificing of pleasure in this life for rewards in the next. It also lies behind the modern notion of delaying immediate gratification in order to focus one’s energy into labor that will increase individual wealth and further “progress”—thereby helping to create a better world for people living at some distant point in the future. Thus Zerzan asserts that historic time is also the “most elemental aspect of culture” and posits that “Time awareness is what empowers us to deal with our environment symbolically” (Zerzan, Winter 1994).
As to clock time, Zerzan holds that “mathematically divisible time is necessary for the conquest of nature, and for even the rudiments of modern technology” (Zerzan, Winter 1994). The perfection of calendars and clocks is therefore synonymous with the escalation of coercion. Mechanical time seems to demand individual or coerced renunciation of pleasure for the purposes of greater precision. In this way it sacrifices an understanding of people and the world as dynamic, spontaneous and unpredictable. Obsession with time is always at dissonance with biological rhythms. Clock time also adds to the cultural burden of historical time the permutation that: “Even when nothing was happening, time did not cease to flow. Events…are put into this homogeneous, objectively measured, moving envelope” (Zerzan, Winter 1994). While historical time turned a cohesive experience of temporal life into jagged, separate symbolic moments, clock time seeks to put these moments back together again, but in a way that flattens them out so that all experience is conceived as identical seconds ticking off on a chronograph. While historical time aids in the conceptual elevation of symbols over reality which is necessary for reification, clock time is explicitly a tool for facilitating the control of the detached subject over the objective world.
Zerzan’s efforts to expose the alienating effects of symbolic thought are neither abstract nor ahistorical. As anarchist critique, Zerzan’s works have the very real objective of exposing and opposing human social arrangements based upon coercion and inequality. To this effect all of Zerzan’s writings attempt to show how his concepts of reification and alienation are based upon and clearly reflected in human history.
Zerzan never establishes the exact place or time when humans fell from grace and began to think symbolically. He posits that this process began somewhere hundreds of thousands of years ago, and slowly gathered steam until a virtual explosion in the manufacturing of symbolic culture took place around 30,000 years ago (Zerzan, 1988; p. 54). Prior to this time various human species had roamed the earth for several million years, creating complex tools and sailing between the islands of Micronesia without producing any material evidence of symbolic culture (Jensen, 1998). Zerzan contends that substantial differences in brain make-up were not behind the appearance of widespread symbolic culture, and bases this belief on archaeological evidence that humans 1.7 million years ago were able to produce tools that would require the same level of intelligence as modern humans. These early humans, who Zerzan believes were just as intelligent as modern people, were interconnected with each other and the natural world in a harmonious web of life that made fractured symbolic routes of understanding superfluous. This simple life of foraging continued unchanged for hundreds of millennia precisely because it could maintain harmonious inter-relation.
Such harmony could be maintained because prehistoric people didn’t conceive of them selves as separate consciousness, detached from the objective world. Zerzan believes that primitive people’s imminent awareness of interconnection allowed them to develop an understanding that made full use of the senses of touch, taste, smell, and hearing, which civilized humans almost completely subordinate to the detached experiences of sight and abstract intellectual understanding. In several of his works, Zerzan posits that civilized human social structures rely on a “hierarchy of the senses” (Zerzan, 1988; p. 54). Our alienated consciousness has constructed this hierarchy so that the physically detached and sensually uninvolved senses of vision and abstract intellectual understanding are of constant, crucial importance. They are ranked as slightly more important than hearing, which still allows a high level of detachment but can be sensed physically and can stimulate physical movement at an almost unconscious level. Hearing is, in turn, considered more important than taste and smell because they require physical proximity or contact. Finally, the intimate face-to-face contact of tactile sensation is given only minimal social importance in particular ritualized contexts, while being ignored or even demonized in all other non-controlled circumstances. Though Zerzan posits that this hierarchy is established due to a pre-existing state of detachment from the objective world, over time it is also a very important tool for maintaining and propagating this alienation.
Pre-historic humans may also have possessed some form of powerful intuitive communication, which a modern view might liken to telepathy or a sixth sense. Zerzan also proposes that the consciousness of unalienated pre-historic people could perpetuate harmony because of their different understanding of the dimension of time, which was rooted in the central importance of the immediate moment and the natural rhythms of organic life. This allowed for much more tolerant, open-minded, and spontaneous behavior than the civilized concepts of historic and linear time.
Yet at some point, through some kind of mistake or accident, certain humans became disconnected from this holistic understanding and interconnection with the rest of the natural world. Sometimes Zerzan posits that this may have come about through the invention of language, though at other times his understanding of the causal relationship between alienation and language is unclear. What is clear is that once the first humans broke their harmonious interconnection with the world as a whole, ripples of alienation spread out through the population. Feeling disconnected from the natural world, people began to conceive of themselves as distinctly separate entities with different interests from the larger social collective and natural world. They began to behave in a new way, objectifying material elements and even other life forms according to particular use values. This attitude eventually spread into their relations with other people.
Particular attitudes, concepts, and social institutions were crucial to the development of objectification as a social value. As I have already shown, language and time were essential intellectual tools in the increased prevalence of a symbolic understanding. Dependence upon language and time eventually produced the human institutions of mythology and ritual. Both are attempts to understand reality, but Zerzan contends that they are doomed to failure because of their own basis in inaccurate reified categories (Zerzan, Winter 1994). Sometimes myth and ritual attempt to justify aspects of a society which has lost its natural harmony due to its use of coercive, objectified ways of thinking. At other times myth and ritual function as safety valves, allowing respite from alienated life through a semblance of timeless communion or interconnection. But whether they apologize for or offer temporary respite from alienation, the ultimate objective of ritual and myth is always to allow people to continue living lives that are largely alienated.
Myth and ritual became necessary as a sense of material instability led to inequality and coercion in alienated human society. Objectifying individuals found themselves living in a natural world whose larger structures and cycles mystified them, and served their individual purposes only erratically. A feeling of instability developed due to these individuals’ inability to deal with situations spontaneously based on their various senses or their telepathic intuition. In response they created simple religions that attempted to explain the natural world, in the hope that this would give them a feeling of control over it. To facilitate this control they also began to systematically compile knowledge about the material world into abstract categories based upon increasingly rigid conceptions of use value. At first this way of thinking was only applied to plants and animals for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of foraging activities. But eventually the same strategy was applied to human beings. Gender differences became more exaggerated, leading to inequalities in social status based on gender, which needed to be justified in terms of myth and ritual. The same process was also applied to age difference, and age-based inequality and gerontocracy became entrenched, replacing previous social structures in which all members of the society were evaluated equally. All of these changes necessitated the initiation of myth and ritual in order to maintain social cohesion.
A crucial step in the process of alienation in pre-historic tribal societies came with the establishment of the first division of labor in the form of shamans. Though the attempts of tribal groups to re-connect harmoni ously through ritual and myth may have been only a hollow imitation of pre-linguistic consciousness, they still maintained the idea that such a collective escape from alienation was possible. With the ascendancy of shamans, this consciousness and the level of communication and power which it imbues became the possession of a limited group. Not only did the majority of humankind lose an understanding of the universe and their own lives as whole, they also became hostage to spiritual specialists (Zerzan, 1994; p. 26–7). The first seizures of power by shamans also meant the beginning of a system of divided labor, where particular tasks became the core of individuals’ identities, rather than aspects like age, gender, or even unique individual attributes. At the same time shamans were also the first distinct social caste with the potential to maintain an elevated social status through a monopoly on a particular resource, in this case a monopoly over spiritual understanding and mystical power. It is debatable whether this power dynamic was in all cases intentionally established by the shamans themselves, and whether they immediately took advantage of the opportunities it offered to advance their individual interests over those of the collective. In fact, the potential for corruption in their positions of power may have gone largely unchallenged by the rest of the tribe precisely because the changes came on slowly, and at the time seemed only reasonable rather than threatening and malicious. Unfortunately, Zerzan contends, history has proven that the divided labor and specialized power of shamans and all their ilk was a terrible blow to human society, and one from which it has not yet recovered. Elevating an individual to central social importance is the beginning of power, and all power corrupts.
With myth, ritual and shamanistic power firmly entrenched, objectification and reification were eventually applied to all areas of human society. Zerzan maintains that the process continued at a very slow pace, but reached a critical mass about 30,000 years ago. It was at this point that symbolic culture and domestication of nature began to become widespread, and Zerzan holds that these developments are intrinsically linked.
The domestication of plants and animals requires an extremely objectified view of other life forms. Domestication is based on the notion that it is acceptable to make another species completely dependent upon you ostensibly for the purposes of improving one’s own material conditions. However, current anthropological knowledge points to the fact that pre-agricultural foraging societies actually had a higher quality food supply than early agricultural ones. The food supply of foragers is also more stable than that of agricultural societies, since a diet based upon a wide variety of non-cultivated food sources is far less likely to be effected by the droughts, pestilence, or blights that cause crop failure and starvation in societies dependent on the cultivation of a select spectrum of plants. Dependence on agriculture also tends to destroy alternative food sources through material and conceptual routes: not only do the members of agricultural societies become conceptually blinded to the possibility of a varied, non-cultivated diet, but they also make irrevocable alterations to their environment that destroy non-cultivated food sources. This not only makes them more dependent on their own agricultural endeavors, but also on trade with other agricultural groups.
All of these facts lead Zerzan to conclude that the adoption of widespread domestication of animals and plants required the coercion of shamans or another elite minority in order to force it on the majority, for the reasons of maintaining religious power structures (Zerzan, 1988; p. 33). From historical and anthropological texts Zerzan uncovers evidence that animals (and possibly plants) were originally domesticated for purely ritual religious purposes. He supports this claim not only with direct evidence from ancient religious and other art and literature, but also from the simple fact that many long domesticated animals possessed in their original wild state few of the characteristics which now make them useful to humans for domestication: “Before they were domesticated sheep had no wool suitable for textile purposes … Wild cattle were fierce and dangerous; neither the docility of oxen nor the modified meat texture of such castrates could have been foreseen” (Zerzan, 1988; p. 70).
The advocacy of agriculture by higher social castes for non-ritualistic purposes was probably based upon the realization that the autonomy afforded by a traditional life of nomadic foraging by small tribes made it more difficult for them to consolidate and enlarge their own power. This may not even have been an opportunistic move, but simply another misguided attempt to restore social harmony. Zerzan holds that such failures, which ultimately have taken humanity further and further from the experience of life as whole and harmonious, have guided culture and civilization from the beginning. In this case intensified domestication of plants and animals would bring a tribe’s livelihood in line with inegalitarian social structures based upon obedience and dependence. This is due to the fact that domestication of plants and animals doesn’t just take away the autonomy and independence of the domesticated life forms. Just as abolitionists criticized American slavery for degrading slavemasters as well as slaves, Zerzan shows how humans who relied upon domestication of animal life were simultaneously indoctrinated into dependence and domestication themselves.
This early domestication of humanity at the behest of its early elites may have been accomplished through several different routes. Agriculture requires a large group of people coordinating their productive activities accord ing to strict schedules. It also requires much more intensive physical activity and a greater time commitment than foraging. Therefore it is likely that the only way elites could compel the larger tribe into such an undertaking would be through the manipulation of deeply entrenched ideas of symbolic power manifested in gods or abstract ideals of community. General acceptance of the division of labor (accomplished through millennia of escalating reification) also made people susceptible to the advice of social elites who had cultivated specialized spiritual, social or intellectual skills only at the sacrifice of these abilities among the general population. The acceptance of limited domestication of plants and animals for ritual purposes in tribal societies also played an important role in their acceptance of intensive agriculture: it made them much more likely to believe the lie that the dependent relationships of domestication are healthy and inevitable, rather than destructive and parasitic.
While Zerzan’s critique tries to show us just how far back the roots of coercion, bondage, and inequality in human society reach, he is still an anarchist who believes that uprooting them is always an imminent possibility. He holds that nearly everyone is aware of the hollowness of civilization at some level, and that the domestication of humanity itself is neither total nor complete (at least not yet). He also holds that people were just as imminently aware of this fact 30,000 years ago, when the parasitic nightmare of manipulating the natural world through intensified agriculture was fresh and new. Zerzan contends that the ascendancy of agriculture as a social form prompted a widespread dissonance between the memory of a life of natural harmony and an understanding of the coercive, painfully artificial world that was being created.
Unfortunately for humanity, this growing dissatisfaction was co-opted into the channels of symbolic culture. Using art and religion (which have been inextricable for almost their entire history) humanity made yet another misguided attempt at realizing harmony, doomed from the start due to its reliance on symbolic thought. This attempt was guided mainly by elites of differing levels who wanted to better control the lower ranks of specialized laborers. Yet it also had contributors and supporters from all areas and levels of society, who understood only that they were looking for a way to make their lives whole. Thus the archaeological record from this period reveals a massive escalation in the production of artifacts of symbolic culture — both an increase in pre-existing forms like simple religious iconography, and the appearance of new forms of symbolic culture such as complex architecture and written literature.
With the establishment of agriculture, humanity had reached a new level of dependence upon symbolic thought, which is still being refined today. The ascendancy in the last few centuries of a holy trinity of capitalism, technology, and scientific rationality simply represent a new development in this alienated process. Zerzan agrees with the playwright Max Frisch that technology is “the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it” (Zerzan, 1998; p. 54). Seen in this way the ideal of technological progress is simply an accelerated version of the millennia-old objectified viewpoint, in which the world is seen in terms of detached conceptions of manipulable objects, compiled into abstract categories. The obsession with control that this detached viewpoint fosters has finally brought humanity to dream and hope for a totally artificial world in which the coercion of nature has been perfected through scientific rationality. At the same time capitalism works over-time to simultaneously destroy older religious or aristocratic hierarchies of value, while reducing all aspects of life to its own mythic field of monetary evaluation. The fact that some aspects of capitalism and scientific rationality seem in conflict is less important to Zerzan because both of them are totally incompatible with a face-to-face existence free from symbolic representation. But at the same time he does not contend that the individual permutations of different systems of coercion should be ignored — in fact they must be carefully studied and understood in order to be effectively opposed.
In the last few decades of humanity’s alienated history there are two new developments that Zerzan considers significant. The first is a type of alienation that he feels may have revolutionary potential. This is manifested in high levels of popular first world cynicism and disenchantment with everything from electoral politics to high culture to everyday life. It can also be observed through constantly escalating levels of crime, chronic mental and physical illness, and other social problems that resist scientific efforts to coerce them out of existence. Zerzan believes that the desperation behind these new developments could mean that humanity is finally ready to accept the truth that has been there all along: that culture and society predicated on symbolic thought cannot escape coercion and alienation, and that time, language and all other symbolic tools must be abandoned in order to attain social and natural harmony.
Unfortunately, the other significant contemporary development that Zerzan notes is the co-opting of this widespread disenchantment into philosophies that pose no actual resistance to consumer capitalist society. This is especially true of poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers, who show how symbolic language is inherently incapable of providing coherent, non-ideological understanding, yet refuse to imagine any alternative. Though he draws upon their perceptive critiques, Zerzan condemns many of these thinkers for their own denial that any absolute, unmediated understanding of reality can exist free from the inaccurate representation of symbolic thought. I will cover this dispute in greater detail below.
Zerzan contends that technological, capitalist culture’s disenchantment with its own representation of the world is not due to the failure of its particular system of symbols. Capitalism’s brash and lewd monetary symbolism, or science’s honest but failed attempts at representing reality, have only made it undeniably clear that symbolic culture not only fails to deliver the fulfillment it promises, but that its claims are merely distractions intended to keep individuals in line with larger cultural structures of hierarchy and coercion. These problems cannot be repaired through a new and more equitable distribution of wealth and resources, or even by replacing hierarchical power structures with collective ones. Humanity can never regain full autonomy and social harmony until it has jettisoned all its objectifying practices, from the domestication of animals to the reliance upon symbolic thought and language. Any attempts at partial revolution will be doomed from the start.
Zerzan maintains that the mounting alienation of humanity is clearly manifested in the direction of philosophical thought in the twentieth century. His own ideas, of course, must be included in this. Even if his most often quoted and referenced thinkers are Freud, Nietzsche and Levi-Strauss, Zerzan’s theories about language and symbolic culture are clearly indebted to the entire body of twentieth century structuralist, poststructuralist and postmodernist thought. Zerzan acknowledges this, but, as I have indicated, he is extremely critical of certain elements in the works of these other contemporary thinkers.
Zerzan’s analysis of language is explicitly based upon the work of structuralist Levi-Strauss, who established that humanity’s use of language consists of carving up the world based upon symbolic categories (Eagleton, 1996, p. 108). There are also clear parallels between structuralism’s understanding of human society as recurring instances of mythical roles and sequences of events, and Zerzan’s idea that alienated society relies upon individuals’ subordinating unique and spontaneous impulses to reified conceptual identities. But an essential breaking point can be identified in structuralism’s refusal to claim any ability to make value judgments, not even the judgment of which subjects’ are more worthy of close scrutiny and analysis (Eagleton, 1996, p. 122). Zerzan also attacks structuralism as amoral and apathetic for its flight from history and its complete denial of individual agency — instead it contends that mythological roles or the spirits of individual texts manifest themselves through the people who live or write them (Eagleton, 1996, p. 112). Lastly, Zerzan chastises structuralism for asserting that consciousness is completely prescribed by language, an idea that is also a convenient means of denying the validity of conflicting ideologies or dissatisfaction with a society’s dominant ideology (Zerzan, 1994; p. 104–5).
Many poststructuralist thinkers criticized structuralism along similar lines. Derrida proposed that both spoken and written language functioned through a process of differentiating and dividing, with the objective of establishing ideological hierarchies of meaning and value based upon polar opposites. He also showed how literature is not based upon set archetypes, because language is an unstable element that can never transmit or hold absolute meaning. Therefore any understanding, communication, or even identity predicated upon language can never be absolute, pure or permanent. Since he also sought to show how all human consciousness could be perceived as a language-based “text,” Derrida was forced to conclude that absolute reality and unmediated existence were impossible dreams.
While many of Zerzan’s ideas are distinctly similar and probably indebted to Derrida, he also questions central aspects of Derrida’s critique. Zerzan’s main criticisms of Derrida focus on his refusal to question humanity’s reliance on language for communication and understanding, and his refusal to consider the origins of language. Zerzan condemns this as an intellectual act of cowardice because “the essence of language, the primacy of the symbolic, are not really tackled, but are shown to be as inescapable as they are inadequate to fulfillment” (Zerzan, 1994; p. 116). He is also critical of Derrida’s seemingly abstract and ahistorical preoccupation with linguistics, which fails to acknowledge the material corollaries of the linguistic hierarchies that Derrida’s system of deconstruction was meant to overturn.
Zerzan’s criticism of other poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers follows a similar pattern. While he acknowledges the validity of their ideas within a certain intellectual sphere, he identifies a major failing in their refusal to form any cohesive theory or larger historical and social analysis that would put their particular area of expertise into context. This often noted problem with poststructuralism/postmodernism can be understood if we view these largely French strands of thought as responses to a particular historical situation: the failure of the 1968 Paris uprisings, following their co-optation by adherents of hierarchical Communist ideology (Eagleton, 1996, p. 142). In the disillusioned backlash to this turn of events, all complicated, well-articulated social and political theories became suspect as coercive or authoritarian. Social criticism became minutely focused on individual fields or problems, and large scale social analysis was neglected.
The events of 1968 may also have produced a cynicism in French thought, which is manifested in the poststructuralist/postmodernist tendency to downplay human agency, including both the agency of those elite groups who have primary responsibility in maintaining ideologies and social hierarchies, and the agency of those who seek to oppose it. Zerzan identifies this as a major problem and sometimes a major contradiction. In the case of Michel Foucault, Zerzan criticizes his vision of individuals as agency-less “subjects,” unable to objectively understand that their own actions are guided by relativistic values determined by the particular historical era or “episteme” in which they live. Zerzan argues that this vision of the individual subject would make Foucault’s own ostensibly ahistorical analysis impossible (Zerzan, 1994; p. 122). Zerzan also attacks the postmodernist belief that humans can never conceive of a natural world that exists separate from our own objectifying intentions. Zerzan finds that their refusal to look beyond what currently exists ultimately serves as an apology for coercion and hierarchy, and a means for perpetuating it. Zerzan points out that while older thinkers like Freud understood that humanity had made a clear choice between civilized or primitive ways of living and understanding (though Freud, unlike Zerzan, clearly valued the civilized over the primitive), in postmodern thought the alienating envelope of symbolic culture has become so refined and opaque that even well-read philosophers are unable to imagine a world without it. Zerzan concludes that these defeatist poststructuralism/postmodernism attitudes do not constitute a radical critique of society — in fact they are closer to an ostensibly “neutral” analysis that tacitly supports the coercive degradation of civilization through its detachment. All of this leads Zerzan to surmise that: “Postmodernism is apparently what we are left with when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good” (Zerzan, 1994; p. 119).
The postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers that Zerzan criticizes would probably label Zerzan’s own ideas as the daydreams of a misguided and rebellious child. Since poststructuralists largely ignore the question of origins, the majority of their works are predicated upon the idea that what currently exists always has existed. This makes the conception of a society free of symbolic thought or coercion impossible. If the nature of our reality is dictated by the nature of our discourse, then we cannot build a reality free from symbolic thought when we have only the tools of language and reified conceptions to work with. However, Zerzan says almost the same thing at many places in his writings, and by surveying his writings it becomes clear that he is not depending on a systematic effort to bring about the end of symbolic thought. Rather, he is expecting a massive, spontaneous shock to the system of alienated life that will awaken people to their currently degraded and debilitated state.
Even if one can conclude that the anthropological, psychological and sociological evidence upon which Zerzan’s ideas are based is all correct, there is still a major problem with his assumptions about prelinguistic human consciousness and prehistoric society. Under close scrutiny, seemingly endless questions arise. Was the seemingly stable harmony of ancient human society (that is the absence of organized violence and the extraordinarily slow rate of social change revealed by archaeological records) really due to a non-symbolic consciousness, in which the conceptual processes of objectification and reification did not arise? Did ancient humans really conceive of the world always in terms of an interconnected harmonious whole? Was objectification ever necessary? Was reification ever necessary? Zerzan rails more against the latter than the former, but it is difficult to tell whether his idealized prehistoric humans might have occasionally relied on either process. His argument that objectification and reification must inherently lead to alienation seems to testify against the possibility, yet it is hard to conceive of any human society that would not recognize the value of some amount of shared knowledge compiled into use-based categories. How else would people be able to pass on knowledge about efficient foraging techniques, predators and other natural threats, or simple herbal medicinal cures for those rare occasions when they were mildly ill? Or are we to believe that they had access to all of these things through a body of accumulated knowledge maintained telepathically rather than through spoken or written means? Can humanity really have a culture — that is a non-genetically transmitted body of knowledge — without using any symbolic tools of communicative understanding?
Though Zerzan might tell us that these questions only plague us because we have lost the ability to understand and conceive of the world as would a non-linguistic human, such an assertion seems problematically evasive in and of itself. As one dissenting contributor to Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed pointed out: “The purpose of analysis is, in every tradition I’ve encountered other than that of the Western intellectualism Zerzan decries (but in which he is hopelessly mired), to understand the natural order rather than to abstract it into something it isn’t, but which we wish it were, or think we can make it” (Jaimes, 1993). This critic perceived Zerzan’s writings to have the central argument that what humanity really needs to do in order to create a utopia is to immediately renounce all symbolic categories of thought and give up control of the objective world completely. Characterized in this way, Zerzan’s contentions seem just as ridiculous as the guiding principle of scientific rationality: that what humanity really needs to do in order to create a utopia is to symbolically categorize every aspect of the world in order to absolutely control it. As Derrida might point out, Zerzan’s ideas are based upon polar oppositions, and are therefore nothing but manipulative ideology.
Or are they? Zerzan is an anarchist who is relatively uninvolved in traditional activist circles, nor does he hold any apparent social power besides his unavoidable status as a white, male first-worlder. He has argued that writing is a less coercive form of communicating his political ideals than social activism, because nobody has to read his books. On the other hand, an anarchist who is actively involved in helping people with individual problems could conceivably use their positive influence to create support for anarchism which is based on misguided sentiment rather than real understanding and support for equality, autonomy, and collectivity. Yet this question of tactics seems to pose a dilemma, because Zerzan’s ideal, unalienated humans are characterized as active and emotional, rather than detached and rational. How are contemporary anarchists to avoid symbolic, emotional ideology without becoming imminently rational, and thereby losing the warmth and spontaneity necessary for the future revolution which Zerzan characterizes as a collective celebration?
This brings us directly into the question of what kind of anarchist tactics (revolutionary or otherwise) are supported by Zerzan’s critique of symbolic thought. Zerzan states that: “Tactics arise organically in large part from your starting position” (Jensen, 1998). But if your starting position is a wholesale rejection of symbolic thought and language as inherently coercive, and you live in a world wholly predicated upon these conceptual devices, where does that leave you? It would seem to leave you paralyzed over the question of how much you can compromise without being co-opted and eventually losing sight of what you were initially fighting for. An attack on symbolic culture rooted in written literature alone seems doomed to failure. But when asked once about the possibility of developing new, anarchist ways of life right now, inside of hierarchical society, Zerzan replied: “While some living arrangements or experiments are more pleasant than others, none escapes the defining hold of a world never more alienated than today’s. There is no place to hide, no way to pretend that life can coexist with the global contagion in health or fulfillment. To argue otherwise is to argue in favor of the system that degrades and destroys” (Zerzan, 1993). Again we see an intense reliance on polar opposites, which almost seems to create a paradox in Zerzan’s ideas. Real fulfillment and egalitarian society can only be experienced in the immediate moment — but it cannot be experienced in this immediate moment. Therefore Zerzan’s idea of anarchy has the potential to remain nothing but a concept of gratification endlessly deferred into the future, just like the religious ideals of heaven or the capitalist dreams of material security that he attacks.
Zerzan might plausibly argue that my interpretation of his idea of anarchy is so hopelessly mired in symbolic linguistics that it can only appear problematic and self-contradicting. If it did not seem that way it would be one of those symbols masquerading as natural that Barthes identified as the basis of authoritarian ideologies (Eagleton, 1996, p. 135). Ultimately Zerzan’s anarchy is not an abstract political concept embodied in the dead texts of nineteenth-century political thinkers, but a vibrant way of life that lives and breathes through the caring and cooperative interactions of humans living separately and/or opposed to hierarchical civilization. But doesn’t this mean that we are promoting harmonious anarchy any time that we alter our way of life in order to promote autonomy and equality without sacrificing mutually beneficial relationships and a sense of collectivity? Is this kind of compromise to the constraints of existing hierarchy comparable to using symbolic language in order to expose the coercion of symbolic thought? And are not both tactics attempts to “escape the defining hold of a world never more alienated,” without actually entirely destroying that world first?
Other anti-civilization anarchists have conceived of the problem in vastly different terms than Zerzan. Many of them reject the rational scientific viewpoint for an unselective embrace of spiritual systems of understanding. This tactic has its own problems: it rejects one way of thinking as inherently coercive, but embraces another general body of thought without thorough examination of the different types of relationships it encourages. There is no reason why a society based on a spiritual understanding of reality cannot be just as coercive as one based in scientific rationality. Zerzan tells us that this comes from the fact that all systems of understanding are coercive because they rely upon symbolic thought, and that we must reject them in order to embrace a more intuitive, emotional and sensual understanding.
The late Fredy Perlman, possibly the first and certainly one of the most outspoken anarcho-primitivists, had a different view on the possibilities of symbolic thought and culture. In his interpretive history of the world, Against His-story, Against Leviathan (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), Perlman contended that opposition to the hierarchy and inequality of civilization can be accomplished through an explicitly anti-authoritarian symbolic culture. One example that he uses is that of Native American tribes whose symbolic mythology encouraged individual autonomy rather than dependent social relationships (Perlman, 1983, p. 240–52). If he had known about them Perlman probably also might have brought up Zerzan’s own oft-touted example of the Mbuti pygmies of Zaire, an extant group of forager-hunters whose tribal custom encourages such anarchist ideals as gender equality and consensus-based decision making (Barclay, 1996, p. 47–9).
In response to Perlman, Zerzan might argue that autonomy predicated on symbolic culture never lasts. Symbolic thought is always trying to increase coercion and hierarchy, and only an impossible level of diligent human effort can even stall its progress. Zerzan observes that any level of reliance on symbolic thought creates a level of objectification and alienation that eventually corrupts all areas of human life, whether it is through religious dogma or capitalist economics. Yet the existence of any group which has simultaneously maintained harmonious anarchy and utilized symbolic thought casts a shadow of doubt over Zerzan’s wholesale rejection of all symbolic culture.
Perlman’s views, though no less based in polar opposites than Zerzan’s, also have the advantage of emphasizing the positive possibility that liberation is a constantly imminent possibility for all humanity. In Perlman’s perception, it might be possible for people to make use of the pre-existing tools of language, mythology, art, and literature in order to bring about revolution and anarchist society. Though Zerzan agrees that immediate revolution is possible, he feels that none of the devices which have historically maintained hierarchy and coercion can be drawn on in order to accomplish liberation. At base the difference between Zerzan and Perlman seems to be where they draw the line between coercive and non-coercive societies. While Perlman’s analysis at least leaves some known societies that can serve as examples for future efforts, Zerzan’s vision has no basis in any social situations that humanity has previously known — or at least in anything that we can remember, unless we accept Zerzan’s assertions that the biblical tale of Eden and other myths of a past Golden Age are alienated humanity’s only remaining memorials of pre-symbolic society.
What I hope to convey in this survey of John Zerzan’s ideas is an optimistic feeling of increased possibilities. At first this may seem contradictory to the content of his writings, which attempt to prove that the last 30,000 years of history have seen the continual coercion and domestication of the natural world and the human race. At times he even argues that our past mistakes have altered our way of thinking and our natural environment in order to make any return to innocence immensely difficult. Yet we must conclude that Zerzan would not still be writing (or breathing) unless he believed that such a return was still possible. Just the fact that we are able to read Zerzan’s writings about the failure of symbolic culture means either that symbolic thought is not entirely dominating, or that its attempts to limit our perception have not yet been totally successful. Either way, there seems to be hope. If we can be conscious of the nature of our own discourse, then we can formulate a coherent understanding of our situation. And if we can consciously criticize our own language, then it would seem possible to actively reject certain aspects of it. Though Zerzan’s writings may not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that all language is coercive, they do show in great detail how our current language and symbolic culture uphold the idea that objectification and hierarchy are normal and desirable. Therefore rejecting or altering aspects of our current language and culture are necessary in order to increase equality or social harmony. If we can consciously effect change in our language, then we can consciously effect change in our way of thinking as well.
With this in mind, the possibilities for experimentation in our social and intellectual lives become endless, rather than being fixed and set by coercive institutions of cultural power like the Church or the State. The bottom line must always be whether new arrangements of thought or society encourage healthy, mutually beneficial interaction, rather than parasitic dominance or dependence. This is because these are the goals of the anti-authoritarian anarchist mindset that makes an open field of human experimentation possible. What this non-coercive, collective anarchy also means is that no way of seeing, thinking, or being can ever become fully accepted unless it is actually acknowledged as equally valuable and fulfilling by all people. If such agreement is possible, and the conceptual arrangement of non-linguistic consciousness is universally agreed upon, then Zerzan’s specific vision of future anarchy may be realized. In the short term, his critique remains of crucial importance not because it leads us directly to a new absolute truth, but because it leads us to question institutions that have previously been taken as natural, unquestionable and unalterable: symbolic thought, symbolic culture, language, objectification, reification, and domestication. It is this questioning of seemingly sacred and natural institutions that has always been the defining characteristic of anarchist critique. Zerzan has pushed the limits that much further, with beneficial results for all who take the time to read his works, and hopefully even for those who do not.
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Written as an introduction to the anthology Chomsky on Anarchism, this brief glimpse into the relationship between Chomsky and the anarchist tradition portrays the famous linguist as a “fellow traveller,” but hardly a major contributor to the anarchist canon. Graham divorces Chomsky’s linguistic ideas from any relevance to political ideology, and argues that Chomsky’s depiction (with Edward Hermann) of the manipulation and manufacture of consent by political elites — itself not an explicitly anarchist critique — may nonetheless be his most significant contribution to anarchism.
Originally published in issue 39.