Black Clad Guru: Barbarist in his own words.

[Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I post this not to defend, but to give some background to the debate on
the "Black Clad Messengers", who are messed up, but from what I saw, I
don't think they are cops.

They just took Luxemburg's "Socialism or Barbarism" literally and opted
for the Barbaric. We know most Anarchists are notoriously anti-
communist.

******************
John Zerzan
POB 11331
Eugene, OR 97440

AGE OF GRIEF
by John Zerzan
A pervasive sense of loss and unease envelops us, a cultural sadness
that can justly be compared to the individual who suffers a personal
bereavement.

A hyper-technologized late capitalism is steadily effacing the living
texture of existence, as the world's biggest die-off in 50 million
years proceeds apace: 50,000 plant and animal species disappear each
year (World Wildlife Fund, 1996).

Our grieving takes the form of postmodern exhaustion, with its wasting
diet of an anxious, ever-shifting relativism, and that attachment to
surface that fears connecting with the fact of staggering loss. The
fatal emptiness of ironized consumerism is marked by a loss of energy,
difficulty in concentrating, feelings of apathy, social withdrawal;
precisely those enumerated in the psychological literature of mourning.

The falsity of postmodernism consists in its denial of loss, the
refusal to mourn. Devoid of hope or vision for the future, the reigning
zeitgeist also cuts off, very explicitly, an understanding of what has
happened and why. There is a ban on thinking about origins, which is
companion to an insistence on the superficial, the fleeting, the
ungrounded.

Parallels between individual grief and a desolate, grieving common
sphere are often striking. Consider the following from therapist
Kenneth Doka (1989): "Disenfranchised grief can be defined as the grief
that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be
openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported." Denial
on an individual level provides an inescapable metaphor for denial at
large; personal denial, so often thoroughly understandable, introduces
the question of refusal to come to grips with the crisis occurring at
every level.

Ushering in the millennium are voices whose trademark is opposition to
narrative itself, escape from any kind of closure. The modernist
project at least made room for the apocalyptic; now we are expected to
hover forever in a world of surfaces and simulation that ensure
the "erasure" of the real world and the dispersal of both the self and
the social. Baudrillard is of course emblematic of the "end of the
end," based on his prefigured "extermination of meaning."

We may turn again to the psychological literature for apt description.
Deutsch (1937) examined the absence of expressions of grief that occur
following some bereavements and considered this a defensive attempt of
the ego to preserve itself in the face of overwhelming anxiety.
Fenichel (1945) observed that grief is at first experienced only in
very small doses; if it were released full-strength, the subject would
feel overwhelming despair. Similarly, Grimspoon (1964) noted
that "people cannot risk being overwhelmed by the anxiety which might
accompany a full cognitive and affective grasp of the present world
situation and its implications for the future."

With these counsels and cautions in mind, it is nonetheless obvious
that loss must be faced. All the more so in the realm of social
existence, where in distinction to, say, the death of a loved one, a
crisis of monumental proportions might be turned toward a
transformative solution, if no longer denied. Repression, most clearly
and presently practised via postmodern fragmentation and
superficiality. does not extinguish the problem. "The repressed,"
according to Bollas (1995) "signifies the preserved: hidden away in the
organized tensions of the unconscious, wishes and their memories are
ceaselessly struggling to find some way into gratification in the
present -- desire refutes annihilation."

Grief is the thwarting and deadening of desire and very much resembles
depression; in fact, many depressions are precipitated by losses
(Klerman, 1981). Both grief and depression may have anger at their
root; consider, for example, the cultural association of black with
grief and mourning and with anger, as in "black rage."

Traditionally, grief has been seen as giving rise to cancer. A
contemporary variation on this thesis is Norman Mailer's notion that
cancer is the unhealthiness of a deranged society, turned inward,
bridging the personal and public spheres. Again, a likely connection
among grief, depression, and anger -- and testimony, I think, to
massive repression. Signs abound concerning weakening immune defenses;
along with increasing material toxins, there seems to be a rising level
of grief and its concomitants. When meaning and desire are too painful,
too unpromising to admit or pursue, the accumulating results only add
to the catastrophe now unfolding.

To look at narcissism, today's bellwether profile of character, is to
see suffering as an ensemble of more and more closely related aspects.
Lasch (1979) wrote of such characteristic traits of the narcissistic
personality as an inability to feel, protective shallowness, increased
repressed hostility, and a sense of unreality and emptiness. Thus,
narcissism too could be subsumed under the heading of grief, and the
larger suggestion arises with perhaps greater force: there is something
profoundly wrong, something at the heart of all this sorrow, however
much it is commonly labelled under various separate categories.

In a 1917 exploration, "Mourning and Melancholia," a puzzled Freud
asked why the memory of "each single one of the memories and hopes"
that is connected to the lost loved one "should be so extraordinarily
painful." But tears of grief, it is said, are at base tears for
oneself. The intense sorrow at a personal loss, tragic and difficult as
it most certainly is, may be in some way also a vulnerability to sorrow
over a more general, trans-species loss.

Walter Benjamin wrote his "Theses on History" a few months before his
premature death in 1940 at a sealed frontier that prevented escape from
the Nazis. Breaking the constraints of marxism and literariness,
Benjamin achieved a high point of critical thinking. He saw that
civilization, from its origin, is that storm evacuating Eden, saw that
progress is an single, ongoing catastrophe.

Alienation and anguish were once largely, if not entirely, unknown.
Today the rate of serious depression, for example, doubles roughly
every ten years in the developed nations (Wright, 1995).

As Peter Homans (1984) put it very ably, "Mourning does not destroy the
past -- it reopens relations with it and with the communities of the
past." Authentic grieving poses the opportunity to understand what has
been lost and why, also to demand the recovery of an innocent state of
being, wherein needless loss is banished.




**********
John Zerzan
POB 11331
Eugene, OR 97440

WHOSE UNABOMBER?
by John Zerzan
Technogogues and technopaths we have had with us for some time. The
Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, for instance, was well-
known in the early 1980s for his descriptions of the human brain as "a
3 pound computer made of meat." He was featured in the December 1983
issue of Psychology Today, occasioning the following letter:

Marvin Minsky:
With the wholly uncritical treatment -- nay, giddy embrace -- of high
technology, even to such excrescences as machine "emotions" which you
develop and promote, Psychology Today has at least made it publicly
plain what's intended for social life.
Your dehumanizing work is a prime contribution to high tech's
accelerating motion toward an ever more artificial, de- individualized,
empty landscape.
I believe I am not alone in the opinion that vermin such as you will
one day be considered among the worst criminals this century has
produced.
(Signed) In Revulsion, John Zerzan.
A dozen years later the number of those actively engaged in the
desolation of the soul and the murder of nature has probably risen; but
support for the entire framework of such activity has undoubtably
eroded.
Enter Unabomber (he/she/they) with a critique, in acts as well as
words, of our sad, perverse, and increasingly bereft technological
existence. Unabomber calls for a return to "wild nature" via
the "complete and permanent destruction of modern industrial society in
every part of the world," and the replacement of that impersonal,
unfree, and alienated society by that of small, face-to-face social
groupings. He has killed three and wounded 23 in the service of this
profoundly radical vision.

There are two somewhat obvious objections to this theory and practice.
For one thing, a return to undomesticated autonomous ways of living
would not be achieved by the removal of industrialism alone. Such
removal would still leave domination of nature, subjugation of women,
war, religion, the state, and division of labor, to cite some basic
social pathologies. It is civilization itself that must be undone to go
where Unabomber wants to go. In other words, the wrong turn for
humanity was the Agricultural Revolution, much more fundamentally than
the Industrial Revolution.

In terms of practice, the mailing of explosive devices intended for the
agents who are engineering the present catastrophe is too random.
Children, mail carriers and others could easily be killed. Even if one
granted the legitimacy of striking at the high-tech horror show by
terrorizing its indispensable architects, collateral harm is not
justifiable.

Meanwhile, Unabomber operates in a context of massive psychic
immiseration and loss of faith in all of the system's institutions. How
many moviegoers, to be more specific, took issue with Terminator 2 and
its equating of science and technology with death and destruction? Keay
Davidson's "A Rage Against Science" (San Francisco Examiner 4/30/95)
observed that Unabomber's "avowed hatred of science and technological
trends reflects growing popular disillusionment with science."

A noteworthy example of the resonance that his sweeping critique of the
modern world enjoys is "The Evolution of Despair" by Robert Wright,
cover story of Time for August 28, 1995. The article discusses
Unabomber's indictment soberly and sympathetically, in an effort to
plumb "the source of our pervasive sense of discontent."

At the same time, not surprisingly, other commentators have sought to
minimize the possible impact of such ideas. "Unabomber Manifesto Not
Particularly Unique" is the dismissive summary John Schwartz provided
for the August 20 Washington Post. Schwartz found professors who would
loftily attest to the unoriginality of fundamental questioning of
society, as if anything like that goes on in classrooms. Ellul,
Juenger, and others with a negative view of technology are far from old
hat; they are unknown, not part of accepted, respectable discourse. The
cowardice and dishonesty typical of professors and journalists could
hardly be more clearly represented.

Also easily predictable has been the antipathy to Unabomber-type ideas
from the liberal left. "Unabummer" was Alexander Cockburn's near-
hysterical denunciation in The Nation, August 28/September 4. This
pseudo-critic of U.S. capitalism rants about Unabomber's "homicidal
political nuttiness," the fruit of an "irrational" American anarchist
tradition. Cockburn says that Unabomber represents a "rotted-out
romanticism of the individual and nature," that nature is gone forever
and we'd better accept its extinction. In reply to this effort to
vilify and marginalize both Unabomber and anarchism, Bob Black points
out (unpublished letter to the editor) the worldwide resurgence of
anarchism and finds Unabomber expressing "the best and the predominant
thinking in contemporary North American anarchism, which has mostly
gotten over the workerism and productivism which it too often used to
share with Marxism."

In spring '95, Earth First!,/i> spokesperson Judy Bari labelled
Unabomber "a sociopath," going on to declare, definitively but
mistakenly, that "there is no one in the radical environmental movement
who is calling for violence." This is not the place to adequately
discuss the politics of radical environmentalism, but Bari's
pontificating sounds like the voice of the many anarcho-liberals and
anarcho-pacifists who wish to go no further in defense of the wild than
tired, ineffective civil disobedience, and who brandish such timid and
compromised slogans as "no deforestation without representation."

The summer '95 issue of Slingshot, tabloid of politically correct
Berkeley militants, contained a brief editorial trashing Unabomber for
creating "the real danger of government repression" of the radical
milieu. The fear that misplaces blame on Unabomber overlooks the simple
fact that any real blows against the Megamachine will invite responses
from our enemies. The spectre of repression is most effectively
banished by doing nothing.

**********


--
Macdonald Stainsby

check the "ten point platform" of Tao at: http://new.tao.ca

"To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a
pretty weak reason."
   Henry Kissinger, 1974
(former American Secretary of State)