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.

animal liberation - film - 2011 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt

Twentieth Century Fox

2011

105 min

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably among the top movies of the last two years and it is undoubtedly better than all of the nominees for Best Picture for 2011,along with The Muppets. It was certainly better than The Artist. The film provides the backstory to the “classic” sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes which Rise also far outshines. It is essentially a story of animal evolution propelled by human technology, resulting in armed revolution by animals against humans.

The story begins with a research scientist who conducts studies on chimpanzees pertaining to an alzheimer's treatment that may not only restore the subject’s brain functioning but even increase intelligence. This scientist has an ailing father whose suffering drives his son’s urgency to achieve success in his research.  One of the first successful test subjects, a chimp called Bright Eyes by the research team, goes on a rampage in defense of her infant son, and is killed right at the moment when the scientist is presenting his research to a corporate board meeting. The scientist then takes care of the infant chimpanzee, whom he names Caesar, and subsequently realizes that this young ape had inherited the superior intelligence of his mother.

The scientist administers the chimp-tested treatments to his father, whose condition improves. The father, Cesaer’s adoptive grandfather, shows the most emotion and concern for Caesar, and his quality of life, out of all of the film’s human characters. The elder man and the young ape experience their life changes at the same time, and at the moment when the grandfather relapses into alzheimers, Caesar is put into an ape refuge, a moment that comes after Caesar had defended his elder from a bullying neighbor. The moment of the grandfather’s death is also the moment where Caesar becomes that refuge’s alpha male.  This kind of pattern is interesting as it also charts the rise of the ape - as, of course, Caesar inevitably becomes a leader of an ape uprising, first against their refuge handlers, and then against law enforcement - against the decline of man, who, by film’s end, die out as a virus that the apes are resistant to spreads across the world along international flightpaths.  

Earlier in this post I referred to The Artist, and I think it is important to note that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is just one example of a movie that effectively carries the silent film, in part, into the present era. Rather than being some corny pastiche of 1920s era Hollywood, Rise shows the animals behave in often intensely expressive ways without verbally communicating. The emotions and meanings expressed by the apes are clearly conveyed by facial and bodily gestures, and the actions of the apes are clear as well. Whole tracts of the film are gripping in their portrayal of animal suffering without any words being exchanged or even human characters present to speak on their behalf.  

The uprising of the ape’s is a great scene. First, it includes aspects of revolutionary activity which are often neglected in other representations. For example, the apes have a symbol for their movement, the design of the windowframe from the attic of the scientist’s house where Caesar grew up. There’s a whole motif of looking through windows and glass in this film that may provide the base material for a film studies student’s course paper someday! Furthermore, the apes in revolt almost immediately find a revolutionary hero-martyr in the gorilla of the refuge who hurled himself at a helicopter machine-gunner - bringing down the aircraft even though it killed him. Meanwhile, Caesar is the quintessential revolutionary leader (with strands from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces), who fearlessly fights his enemies with whatever means are at hand while unfolding brilliant strategies to defeat the San Francisco Police Department with limited manpower and weaponry. It seemed as though the apes won their fight against well armed and armoured men with few casualties and little effort. Finally, Caesar also feels intensely for his people, as shown when he cradles the body of the fallen gorilla after the battle had ended.  

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably the great film of animal liberation, imagining a fantasy of the animals liberating themselves at the same time that humanity falls, never to oppress or exploit apes again.

john zerzan, anarcho-primitivism - book - 1988 - Elements of Refusal

Elements of Refusal;
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.