Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy means rule over women and nature. Are the two institutions at base synonymous?
Philosophy has mainly ignored the vast realm of suffering that has unfolded since it began, in division of labor, its long course. Hélène Cixous calls the history of philosophy a “chain of fathers.” Women are as absent from it as suffering, and are certainly the closest of kin.
Camille Paglia, anti-feminist literary theorist, meditates thusly on civilization and women:
“When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church procession. What power of concepti... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Fifth Estate Introduction
The following article, an attempt to come to grips with the implications of Karl Marx’s everyday life by long-time FE contributor John Zerzan, has stirred considerable controversy among those of us presently working on the paper and necessitates, we feel, a few brief introductory observations.
For some time, the issue of confluence (or lack of it) between the ideas we espouse and the activities of our daily lives has occupied a position of central importance with many of us. In addition to our desires to live lives as coherent as possible with our principles, we have been concerned with the obvious link between the ways in which we relate to others and the world around us and the kind of vision ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the following article are presented some unusual features of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the only period in which the KKK was a mass movement. In no way should this essay be interpreted as an endorsement of any aspect of this version of the Klan or of any other parts of Klan activity. Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and ideology of the Klan itself.
In the U.S. at least, racism is certainly one of the most crudely reified phenomena. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s is one of the two or three most important — and most ignored — social movements of 20th century America. These two data are the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “If we do not ‘come to our senses’ soon, we will have permanently forfeited the chance of constructing any meaningful alternatives to the pseudo-existence which passes for life in our current ‘Civilization of the Image.’” David Howes
To what degree can it be said that we are really living? As the substance of culture seems to shrivel and offer less balm to troubled lives, we are led to look more deeply at our barren times. And to the place of culture itself in all this.
An anguished Ted Sloan asks (1996), “What is the problem with modernity? Why do modern societies have such a hard time producing adults capable of intimacy, work, enjoyment, and ethical living? Why is it that signs ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Last remaining lair of unparalleled wildness. Too big to fail?
The whole world is being objectified, but Melville reminds us of all that remains. “There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea.”[1] What could be more tangible, more of a contrast with being lost in the digital world, where we feel we can never properly come to grips with anything.
Oceans are about time more than space, “as if there were a correlation between going deep and going back.”[2] The Deep is solemn; linking, in some way, all that has come before. Last things and first things. “Heaven,” by comparison, is thin and faintly unserious.
“Over All the Face of Earth Main Ocean Flowed,” announced ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Reams of empirical studies and a century or two of social theory have noticed that modernity produces increasingly shallow and instrumental relationships. Where bonds of mutuality, based on face-to-face connection, once survived, we now tend to exist in a depthless, dematerialized technoculture. This is the trajectory of industrial mass society, not transcending itself through technology, but instead becoming ever more fully realized.
In this context, it is striking to note that the original usage of “virtual” was as the adjectival form of “virtue”. Virtual reality is not only the creation of a narcissistic subculture; it represents a much wider loss of identity and reality. Its essential goal is the perfect i... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The rapidly mounting toll of modern life is worse than we could have imagined. A metamorphosis rushes onward, changing the texture of living, the whole feel of things. In the not-so-distant past this was still only a partial modification; now the Machine converges on us, penetrating more and more to the core of our lives, promising no escape from its logic.
The only stable continuity has been that of the body, and that has become vulnerable in unprecedented ways. We now inhabit a culture, according to Furedi (1997), of high anxiety that borders on a state of outright panic. Postmodern discourse suppresses articulations of suffering, a facet of its accommodation to the inevitability of further, systematic desolation. The prominence of... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Silence used to be, to varying degrees, a means of isolation. Now it is the absence of silence that works to render today’s world empty and isolating. Its reserves have been invaded and depleted. The Machine marches globally forward and silence is the dwindling place where noise has not yet penetrated.
Civilization is a conspiracy of noise, designed to cover up the uncomfortable silences. The silence-honoring Wittgenstein understood the loss of our relationship with it. The unsilent present is a time of evaporating attention spans, erosion of critical thinking, and a lessened capacity for deeply felt experiences. Silence, like darkness, is hard to come by; but mind and spirit need its sustenance.
Certainly there are many... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The dimension of time seems to be attracting great notice, to judge from the number of recent movies that focus on it, such as Back to the Future, Terminator, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1989) was a best-seller and became, even more surprisingly, a popular film. Remarkable, in addition to the number of books that deal with time, are the larger number which don’t, really, but which feature the word in their titles nonetheless, such as Virginia Spate’s The Color of Time: Claude Monet (1992). Such references have to do, albeit indirectly, with the sudden, panicky awareness of time, the frightening sense of our being tied to it. Time is increasingly a key manifestation of the estrange... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The defining of sentiments has always been a preoccupation of religions and governments. But for quite some time music, with its apparent indifference to external reality, has been developing an ideological power of expression hitherto unknown. Originally music was a utility to establish the rhythms of work, the rhythms of dances which were ritual observances. And we know that it was treated as a vital symbolic reinforcement of the “harmony” of ancient Chinese hierarchical society, just as to Plato and Aristotle it embodied key moral functions in the social order. The pythagorean belief that “the whole cosmos is a harmony and a number” leaped from the fact of natural sonic phenomena to an all-encompassing philosophic... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It wasn’t only radical intellectuals that found themselves unprepared for the end of the 60s. Change was simply no longer in the air and it fell to this intelligentsia, in the 70s increasingly part of the universities they once attacked, to explain “the 60s,” its swirling promise and its demise. Most of the professoriat who had come of age in the struggles before the “Me Decade” Ice Age found no new framework for understanding or reassessing their defeat circa 1970.
Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which appeared just before the upheavals, provided a rather pessimistic picture of consumption- oriented citizens caught in the chains of “repressive tolerance.” With the movements of b... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Noam Chomsky is probably the most well-known American anarchist, somewhat curious given the fact that he is a liberal-leftist politically, and downright reactionary in his academic specialty, linguistic theory. Chomsky is also, by all accounts, a generous, sincere, tireless activist — which does not, unfortunately, ensure his thinking has liberatory value.
Reading through his many books and interviews, one looks in vain for the anarchist, or for any thorough critique. When asked point-blank, “Are governments inherently bad?” his reply (28 January 1988) is no. He is critical of government policies, not government itself, motivated by his “duty as a citizen.” The constant refrain in his work is a plea for ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Debord biographer Anselm Giap[1] referred to the puzzle of the present, “where the results of human activity are so antagonistic to humanity itself,” recalling a question posed nearly 50 years ago by Joseph Wood Krutch: “What has become of that opportunity to become more fully human that the ‘control of nature’ was to provide?”[2]
The general crisis is rapidly deepening in every sphere of life. On the biospheric level, this reality is so well-known that it could be termed banal, if it weren’t so horrifying. Increasing rates of species extinctions, proliferating dead zones in the world’s oceans, ozone holes, disappearing rainforests, global warming, the pervasive poisoning of air, water,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) "Th-th-th-that's all folks!" Has the human race's grandest achievement--civilization--assured its collapse? It doesn't look good!"
Civilizations have come and gone over the past 6,000 years or so. Now, there’s just one—-various cultures, but a single, global civilization.
Collapse is in the air. We’ve already seen the failure, if not the collapse, of culture in the West. The Holocaust alone, in the most cultured country (philosophy, music, etc.), revealed culture’s impotence.
We have a better idea of what civilization is than we do of what collapse would mean. It’s the standard notion: domestication of plants and animals, soon followed by the early, major civilizations of Mesopotamia and Eg... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) After the anti-corporate globalization protests in Seattle took the world by surprise a year and a half ago, a number of mainstream journalists looked to a soft-spoken anarchist theorist from Eugene, Oregon, for answers.Indeed, John Zerzan, whose ideas were very influential with some of theyoung protesters, can now credibly claim the decidedly dubious honor of being America’s most famous anarchist. All the attention has done nothing to soften Zerzan’s view that modern society has subjugated the populace to the point that it no longer even sees the bars of its cage. In this interview, the 57-year-old radical explores the roots of domination, the subtle coercion of the clock, and his hope for a future without progress.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Among the young there are quite a few examples of a tendency to regress or turn back. Whether or not these phenomena are characteristic of something called “Generation X” we must leave for media to determine; after all, it’s their job to define and make intelligible social reality. That aside, I think there are aspects of regression that are noteworthy/possibly significant, and which need to be put in context.
Childhood was once a place of refuge, a secure zone of protection and innocence. For some time, however, as with every other part of life, the commodity and its attendant forms of violence have invaded this sphere. And yet it continues to represent a sort of haven, if some youth fashions are any indication. Th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)