anarcho-primitivism - 2006 - Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization

Derrick Jensen

Seven Stories Press

2006

498 pages

I had written this response to reading Derrick Jensen’s Endgame Vol I: The Problem of Civilization when I first began the blog. I forgot about this post because I wanted to hunt down a reference from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, something else interfered and then I forgot about this entirely until the recent upset about Jensen’s Deep Green Resistance movement’s transphobic organization policies.

Derrick Jensen is an environmental activist, and anarchist, who also teaches creative writing to inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California.  He has written a number of books containing his reflections on activism, society, the state of the environment, the human imagination, and violence.  The two Endgame books comprise a magnum opus of Jensen’s ideas and they have earned their author a number of accolades. In 2006 the online activist publication, Press Action, has named Jensen the ‘person of the year’(the website also called Endgame as the most important book of the decade).  Also in November 2008, Utne Reader named Jensen one of it’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.”

Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization is divided up into over thirty chapters, each of which contains Jensen’s musings on the problems contemporary civilization presents to the environment.  Jensen’s text is built upon a series of premises, 20 in total, which he argues the validity of largely through personal reflection and anecdote. Endgame begins by stating, rather flatly, that all writing is propaganda, which is not true, but is probably started as a rhetorical strategic grounding upon which Jensen can issue his other premises and convince a reader to accept his particular brand of poorly formed argumentation. Over the course of 30+ chapters, Jensen argues why civilization is horrible, why its collapse is inevitable, and why his readers should work as agents to hasten its collapse.

Considering the laurels he has received, Jensen is arguably the best known anti-civilization/environmentalist writer of the present scene. The difference in his approach to forming argument from others such as those already discussed on this blog (John Zerzan and Murray Bookchin) is probably significant to his appeal. Zerzan, a genuine anarcho-primitivist, writes essays in which he takes a cultural form (such as ‘numbers’) that is so deeply embedded into how we see our world that it appears natural and then explore the history of that form with regard to how it has contributed to the apparati of control that civilization imposes on its subjects. Bookchin, not a primitivist, but rather a philosopher who brought ecological concerns to the anarchist milieu, shows the history of human subjugation of man in precedent of human subjection of nature through a detailed analysis of political history in the West. Zerzan and Bookchin’s work is based on intellectual rigor and scholarship. Neither Zerzan or Bookchin actually call for the dissolution of civilization in their writing (at least not in the writing that I have read), but rather call upon the historical record to challenge contemporary assumptions held about modern society by the general populace, and other activists.

Jensen, who demonstrates a condescending contempt for intellectuals, argues for the collapse of civilization through a number of flawed approaches. Many of his arguments are targeted at aspects of contemporary civilization that aggravate him, however are not an intrinsic part of civilization. Civilization (which I feel absurd referring to as a unified monolith repeatedly) may reform in a manner that removes everything that Jensen finds so objectionable, without entering a freefall collapse.  Another issue is that Jensen sets up numerous strawman arguments, often even using himself as the strawman.  An example is his lamentation of the fact that he knows so many details about the life of boring celebrities such as Angelina Jolie. While he considers this to be something done to him, and attempts to figure out what it means, he also projects this conundrum onto civilized humanity at large, assuming that we all have an equally high investment in the lives of celebrities, which of course, is not true.

Furthermore, many of Jensen’s arguments are based on personal anecdotes and feelings.  Almost all of Jensen’s stories revolve around him getting into an argument with someone that pertains to his anti-civilization ideas in some way. These stories usually end with Jensen getting the better of his adversary in a verbal argument. Much of Endgame are these transcriptions of arguments Jensen had with friends where he won and his friend acknowledged that he won.  This particularly obnoxious form of presenting ideas may create the effect that Jensen is adept at proving his point and asserting the rightness of his ideas because they have been tested against the rhetorical skills of another.

I hate making Hitler comparisons and everything but really Jensen’s text of musings and feelings about the end of civilization put his work into contact with another, Mein Kampf.  He offers his book as propaganda, rather than philosophy, as though an idea as extreme as the destruction of civilization does not need good ideas behind it, merely the right kind of feelings.  He describes the collapse of civilization as a holocaust that will inevitably result in innumerable deaths, yet he also calls for acts of violence to hasten its fall.  Jensen’s assertion that the collapse is a natural, inevitable event, is similar to the assumptions and assertions made by totalitarian governments of the past. In her 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, German political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that one of the premises of the Third Reich was that humanity was naturally progressing towards the formation of a master race, and the NSDAP was simply accelerating that process. Similarly, under Stalin, the violent purges were merely the acceleration of the natural progress of history towards a classless society. Jensen’s call for violence in order to advance the cause of an inevitable end to civilization is ideologically similar, as well as philosophically blank.

Endgame’s chapters are grouped into sections, the first of which is titled ‘Apocalypse.’  Endgame may be interpreted as a text in the tradition of apocalyptic prophecy that always find new ground upon which to be renewed. The last major apocalyptic prophecy pertained to Y2K, (2012?) which was rooted in fears about the potential consequences of computerization. Desire to escape civilization is not new, in fact John Zerzan has edited a volume titled Against Civilization, a reader of anti-civilization writings that includes Jensen was well as Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, and many others.  Endgame follows from a decade of public debate about climate change, and a sense that our acceleration of technology has resulted in such a strain on earth’s resources that the limit is just about met.  

Sixties - 2012 - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

Elissa Auther & Adam Lerner (eds.)

Lucy Lippard (foreword)

University of Minnesota Press

2012

388 pages

Considering that Sixties America is supposed to have been a special time of swift and turbulent change, the canon of American art history of that period reflects very little of that milieu.  Where it does, for example, make a critical statement of the times: in Andy Warhol’s disaster series, for example, it says something that had already been stated more artfully by some media guru or another.  Editors Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner have compiled this volume of twenty chapters, each on a separate art movement or artist of the 1960s/70s counterculture, as a companion to an exhibition of the same title, shown from November 2011 - February 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and from September 29, 2012 to January 6, 2013 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Johnny, by Roger Anderson - 1972

The book is varied in its approach to its subject matter, with chapters on topics such as Drop City (and later, Libre) two dome-based communes that update some of the 19th century utopian society ethos, a-la Brook Farm, with modern technology and the creative ethos of the 1960s at its centre, and Crossroads Community, a farm set up on the land under a highway interchange in San Francisco (recalling a greened and livable version of JG Ballard’s Concrete Island). The book has a number of different sections but the art movements and practices discussed in West of Centre can be broken down into discussions of creative communities that, in a sense, lived their art, including discussions of the above communities, and also Drag Collectives and various art-making workshops and retreats.  

The second overarching type of art discussed in the chapters of West of Center are the more traditional graphic arts movements of the 1960s counterculture. These mostly focused on those artists who illustrated the radical publications of various liberation movements, most notably Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party and the premiere illustrator of that organization’s weekly newspaper. Another, lesser known, graphic artist for a radical cultural newspaper was Yolanda Lopez, who contributed drawings and collages to La Basta newspaper, a radical Spanish newspaper for California’s various Chicano communities. Additionally, this book includes chapters on feminist and Gay liberation artists as well as subversive ‘detourned’ advertisements that address political issues of the time.  In brief, psychedelia and the accompanying 60s tradition of rock posters are also investigated with some awesome reproductions of posters by the great psychedelic artist, Rick Griffith, featured in full colour.

It should be noted, even though it may be obvious from the title, that West of Centre only focuses on countercultural art and communities from the Western United States. Nothing from the eastern hippie Mecca of New York City that provided the setting, for example, for the great Hippie musical and film, Hair, is included. Nothing focusing on the imagery produced on the periphery of the many hardcore radical movements like The White Panthers or The Motherfuckers that operated out of eastern or midwestern northern cities like Detroit or Chicago. Then again, the San Francisco Diggers weren’t mentioned either.... Anyways, the book offers plenty of information and full colour images of countercultural creative groups that have held little presence in the numerous texts of 60s nostalgia, and helps to broaden the retrospective image of 1960s art beyond the set boundaries of tie-dye clothing, Abbie Hoffman’s TV antics, and the San Francisco Oracle.

by Emory Douglas

Hunter S Thompson - 2008 - Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Gonzo: The Life and Works of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Alex Gibney

Jigsaw Productions

2008

Gonzo is a predictable look at the life of Hunter S. Thompson, the libidinal and anarchistic journalist best known for the hallucinatory travelog, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If anyone already knows anything about Thompson’s work (and really, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, in itself, a summary of pretty much everything he was about) then this documentary brings nothing new to the field. If, for some reason, one decided to skip the ubiquitously available Fear and Loathing... in film or print and decided to watch this documentary instead, then its a decent introduction to the first few years of Thompson’s literary/journalism career, with plenty of interviews with his friends and family in addition to quotations from his works, and images of his literary subjects.  

What interests me about Gonzo is how it operates as another contribution to the maintenance of 1960s America as *the* centre of all countercultural activity. In Gonzo, Thompson’s early life is glossed over and, with some brief references to F. Scott Fitzgerald, so are any mention of literary influences.  His early novels, Prince Jellyfish (never published) and The Rum Diary (finally published in 1998) and the years of literary failure were not mentioned.  Instead, the film moves right into his Hells Angels period and then dwells on the mid-late 1960s and early 1970s for almost the entire film. Once the discussion finally moves on from the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign (which Thomson covered for Rolling Stone magazine) there is a quick discussion of his contributions to the ‘76 Carter campaign and then nothing is said about anything after that until people start lamenting his 2005 suicide. His post-’72 career, 33 years of living and writing, is hardly discussed. It does not seem like its Hunter S Thompson’s biography being produced here but rather HST is used as another means of recreating the 1960s as an especially turbulent and fascinating time.  

Of course, Gonzo, like almost all documentaries about the 1960s includes a standard montage of 1960s imagery. Vietnam napalm victims, US soldiers in various states of mind, anti-war and civil rights marchers, Nixon, hippies dancing, Timothy Leary doing something, John Lennon doing something. Maybe Gonzo merely has a variation on the images I’ve listed above, but some sequence containing most or all of what I just mentioned almost always appears at some moment where the narrator is talking about how the 1960s were “a different time” or some other cliched phrase used to refer to the era.

An endnote: this documentary isn’t that great (it works on a commemorative level), but its director, Alex Gibney, and his production company, Jigsaw Productions, have created many worthwhile documentaries such as Taxi to the Dark Side, Who Killed the Electric Car?, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Other films in Gibney’s filmography such as, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, and Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey and the trips he took on his bus Further) will be mandatory viewing for my ContraTexts project.

Surrealists - 1974 - The Surrealist Revolution in France

The Surrealist Revolution in France

Herbert S. Gershman

University of Michigan Press

1974

253 pages

This book is a survey of Surrealism in France that places a particular emphasis on defacto group-leader Andre Breton and his immediate circle (Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, etc) - in other words, the official members of the Surrealist group. Gershman writes in a dense poetic prose that may sometimes confound the reader although it makes his book a far less dry piece of academic writing than most treatments on Breton’s group.

The author looks to the Surrealists for their inspirations, leading him to discuss love, or mad love (amour fou), more than the Freudian theory that unquestionably had a role in the Surrealist emergence out of Dada. Gershman is priviledging the poetic aspect of Surrealism over even a basic discussion of their theoretical inspirations.  Love, of course, has to be the most widespread inspiration for poetry in history, and its difficult, as a reader, to accept that a movement such as the Surrealists, new in the twentieth century, were driven only by love and dreams. So were the New Kids on the Block.  

Gersham’s book is strong but it’s directed by concerns with the poetic rather than the aesthetic. it’s longest chapter is the chapter on surrealist poetry and literature, which is clearly Gershman’s chief interest with the movement while painting, the best known component of the Surrealist work, is much shorter and often focuses on the artist’s relationship to the writings of Surrealist poets.

Probably the best chapter of the book is the second last, Surrealism and Politics, which describes in detail Surrealism’s attempt to balance its own artistic worldview and its notions of revolution through realizing desire, with that of Moscow directed Communist orthodoxy.  

anarchism - book - 1998 - Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies

Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its Enemies

David Watson

Autonomedia

1998

334 pages

David Watson is one of the ‘lifestyle anarchists’ criticized by Murray Bookchin in his well known text, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism.  He is also one of the major voices for anarchism in the post-Bookchin era and the editor of a long running anarchist periodical titled Fifth Estate.He is also the author of his own book length critique of Bookchin titled Beyond Bookchin.  

Bookchin’s critique of the lifestyle anarchists can be summarized by his attack on was he viewed as Hakim Bey's, John Zerzan's, and David Watson's equation of the individual's pleasure-seeking tendencies with a realization of anarchist principles - and that their use of new-age esotericism or anti-civilization ideas allowed them to sidestep analysis contemporary society and its structures. I understand Bookchin’s arguments as they apply to Bey and Zerzan, however Watson, at least in his essays collected in Against the Megamachine, appears allied with Bookchin.

The overlap of Watson with Bookchin occurs particularly in Watson's his view that human exploitation and the exploitation of nature are interconnected (which was the thesis at the core of Bookchin’s Remaking Society). Watson appears to differ with Bookchin in his views on technology, whereas the elder social-ecologist argued in his text Post-Scarcity Anarchism, that technology may be put towards the labour-saving Utopian vision as it was once offered to the public, Watson repeats the position throughout this collection that technology directs its use and determines the society that uses it to the detriment of the actual people who use it.

Watson is essentially an anti-civilization anarchist, much like John Zerzan. Where Zerzan does tend, in his essays, to lament a loss of freedom to the individual imposed by civilization, Watson emphasizes a loss of connection to nature and, by extension, to one-another, in the social realm. Watson’s essays, rooted in an anarchist environmentalist pathos, give an anti-civilization voice to the ideas of Lewis Mumford (probably the most heavily cited author in Watson’s essays), Jacques Ellul, and to a lesser extent, Romanian scholar of religions, Mircea Eliade. Watson is always returning to these authors and drawing a huge amount of inspiration from them for his own ends. One interesting aspect of the so-called lifestyle anarchists attacked by Bookchin is that they all have very strong influences that, with perhaps the exception of the Situationist International influence on Hakim Bey, come from outside the Marxist/Anarchist cannon of radical political thought.