Globalization and Resistance: An Anarcho-Primitivist Perspective
Stellan Vinthagen April 26th, 2010
Extra seminar 3/5, kl. 13.15 – 15.00, Annedalsseminariet, Sal 204.
John Zerzan, lecture and discussion on the theme
Globalization and resistance – an anarcho-primitivist perspective.
John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some of his criticism has extended as far as challenging domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time. His five major books are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (2005) and Twilight of the Machines (2008). A collection of his most fundamental texts on the roots of civilization, “Origins” (2010), is currently being published by Black and Green Press and FC Press.
Zerzan’s theories draw on Theodor Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics to construct a theory of civilization as the cumulative construction of alienation. According to Zerzan, original human societies in paleolithic times, and similar societies today such as the !Kung, Bushmen and Mbuti, live a non-alienated and non-oppressive form of life based on primitive abundance and closeness to nature. Constructing such societies as a kind of political ideal, or at least an instructive comparison against which to denounce contemporary (especially industrial) societies, Zerzan uses anthropological studies from such societies as the basis for a wide-ranging critique of aspects of modern life. He portrays contemporary society as a world of misery built on the psychological production of a sense of scarcity and lack. The history of civilisation is the history of renunciation; what stands against this is not progress but rather the Utopia which arises from its negation.
- Resistance Studies , philosophy
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