Running
on Emptiness
by
John Zerzan
Feral House / 2002 / $12
The Web
is, at the same time, both the best and worst medium to write about
John Zerzan's work—for the Internet, like Zerzan's
thinking itself, is based on symbols.
Symbols
control everything you are seeing now on your screen. Meaning-laden
electronic impulses stream over fiber-optic cables from my server
to your computer. The machine knows to display the letters of the
alphabet, which form signs called words, because it interprets these
impulses as a set of symbols called "ASCII" and "hypertext
markup language." The words themselves are each meaningless
on its own, but, given definitions by their relationships to the
other words of the English language and placed side by side in the
correct order, they trigger the neurons in your brain, releasing
a flood of memories and associations. Even the physical body of
the computer itself carries a logo such as "Intel Inside,"
a symbol for the company that made it—and a corporation could
not exist without being able to control symbols such as time and
money.
It was
somewhat appropriate that I was introduced to Zerzan's Running
on Emptiness on an airplane heading East over the
North Atlantic. Traveling to strange lands, where the language and
thus the symbols are different, has a way of shaking one loose from
one's usual way of thinking. Moreover, the purpose of my journey
was richly symbolic: I was attending a convocation of traditional
fencing masters, who pass on the signs and knowledge
from the past to the future (in this case, those relating to using
swords).
Zerzan's
arguments are as compelling as they are radical. Originally, he
writes, there were no signs. People lived without symbols, in a
Zen-like mindfulness, existing in the eternal present. As "primitive"
hunter-gatherers, we existed in a state of equality, mutual cooperation,
and harmony with nature. Then came agriculture and civilization,
and inevitably, some people became haves, and other became have-nots.
To justify this power imbalance, religion—the art of inventing
and manipulating symbols—was invented. All symbols, Zerzan
argues, come ultimately from religion, and they all exist to exert
power and justify imbalances: God loves me more, so I get all the
stuff. There can be no civilization without a priesthood.
Moreover,
Zerzan believes that civilization is a malignant virus, seeking
to fill any vacuum it might find by means of the techniques of religion
and capitalism—and, like a fever, it will burn itself out.
His solution to the problem is anarcho-primitivism, an apocalyptic
hoping for the end of civilization and return to a state of natural
grace, when people will live in small groups without any organized
government. While Zerzan's millennialist
vision may owe as much to his despised Book of Revelations as it
does to anthropology, his writing has also been enormously influential:
Some groups, such as Black Bloc anarchists, see his writings almost
as religious texts. It is also easy to critique Zerzan's Romantic
conception of early people as noble savages: Mass extinctions followed
the first Paleolithic incursions into North America, millennia before
any evidence of agriculture, and many scientists have argued convincingly
that differentiation in sex roles, has a biological, not a cultural,
basis. Even chimpanzees have their dominance hierarchies and restrict
each other's access to valuable resources, such as mates.
Still,
though Zerzan may not deal fully with the scientific record, many
of his ideas, particularly about power and its techniques, are utterly
compelling. If anything, the value of his work is that he articulates
the fact that, as our society has grown more complex, the ways in
which we subjugate each other to our own will have also grown more
artful—and being subjugated isn't much fun. In order to live
happy lives, we will need to redefine how we relate to power and
to one another. As such, it is highly recommended to all our fellow
corporate motherfuckers out there.
(Click
here to order Running on Emptiness from the Feral House Web
site.)
All
Luddites should e-mail editor@corporatemofo.com
Posted
April 29, 2003 12:09 AM
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