John Zerzan
C.A.L. Press 1999 (originally published in 1988)
308 Pages
John Zerzan is, along with Derrick Jensen and Theodore ‘UNABOM’ Kascynzki, one of the major critics of civilization, and one of the loudest voices to call for its collapse. Zerzan is an anarcho-primitivist, meaning that he advocates a return to primitive ways of life. He is possibly the chief theorist of that branch of anarchist thought, and he has waved his anti-civilization flag since the early 1980s: by writing books and magazine columns/articles, a weekly radio show (Anarchy Radio on KWVA 88.1 in Eugene, OR) and maintaining an extensive speaking schedule. Elements of Refusal was Zerzan’s first book. It was also one of the earliest books to carry an anti-civilization philosophy, and is perhaps one of the strongest collections of essays to advance such an idea.
Elements of Refusal is an anthology of Zerzan’s essays (some of which were also published in Adam Parfrey’s anthology of ‘forbidden knowledge’ titled Apocalypse Culture, some were published in far-left journals such as the Fifth Estate and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed). Some of Zerzan’s books primarily focus on the benefits of a primitive/paleolithic lifestyle, however Elements is more a negative critique of contemporary western civilization. Zerzan identified a series of cultural forms as the foundations of human subjugation and investigates how they arose to form the edifice of civilization. The first part of the collection focuses on numbers (and mathematics), agriculture, and art; the basis of scientific practice, sedent human habitation and symbolic thought. The second part of Elements collection focuses on relatively recent issues of labour and industrialization. The third part focuses on the period during which Zerzan was writing these pieces, particularly the 1980s. In this third part Zerzan describes western civilization as a world that is accelerating towards a painful collapse.
The most common criticism levelled against the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan has been that he is a technological determinist. This means that, according to Marshall McLuhan’s critics, McLuhan’s analysis of the use of media technology over the centuries amounts to describing how humans and societies are formed by such technology. Zerzan may be considered a technological determinist to an extreme, in that his anti-civilization theories chart a course between a cultural tool, the invention of numbers, for example, and a nightmarish view of western civilization. McLuhan’s theories were often connections between the adoption of a new medium or technology, and some cultural shift. Many of his theories are based upon quotations drawn from secondary sources, and many of his theories were purely speculative. Somewhat similarly, Zerzan’s strategy is to find a series of historical steps by which he can advance his idea. Through the genealogy Zerzan constructs for his object of study, he finds that their contribution to the rise of civilization as a contemporary apparatus for control was never an accident. The forms he discusses, such as agriculture or numbers, never took a wrong turn somewhere in their history. Actually, they were inevitably leading towards the modern world Zerzan loathes. Hence my consideration of Zerzan as a technological determinist to the absolute limit. Zerzan’s unspoken solution (unspoken in this text) is to return to the pre-numbers, pre-agriculture, pre-art world of the paleolithic.
Interestingly, in Zerzan’s preface to my copy, the second edition of Elements of Refusal, he ends the brief piece with a statement refuting Hakim Bey’s charge that he has had once written an essay against humour. I have read Bey’s Millennium, the text in which this essay is originally mentioned, and before reading Zerzan’s preface I was positive I had read this essay. It turns out that it does not exist and Zerzan’s ontological anarchist rival, Bey, invented it, probably to poke fun at the primitivist philosopher. Still, Elements of Refusal is an excellent primary source for anyone seeking research materials on anti-civilization thought, or a number of other countercultural fields of study.
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