Precis on John Zerzan's "Agriculture"

We’re Not Part of the Problem. We Are the Problem.

The first thing to notice about John Zerzan’s piece on Agriculture is that it is subtitled “Demon Engine of Civilization,” which immediately conjures up an image of a man-made, energy-consuming piecemeal assembly-line prototype of carbon-pumping pistons that, for all intensive purposes, endlessly generate only fractions of the energy its inception depleted. The next thing to notice about the piece is, less hopefully, that our original sin was literally “ordering the world.” For me, it doesn’t translate that naming today as “Thursday” somehow robs the day of its day-likeness or that fixing a date for a ceremony somehow makes the ceremony less purposeful. But even if our name-giving and representation-making can reasonably be considered the moment that we fell from grace, whatever we learned in falling is crucial to our understanding of Zerzan’s argument as a legible one, and ultimately as one that has literally materialized as words on a page.

There is a Key Term in Every Word And The Lesson of Each is That It Should Be Unlearned

Of course there are buzzwords (like time, language, number, art, “and all the rest of culture”) but no one in particular demands our attention. It’s not because each is unsubstantial or unsubstantiated, it is instead because our attention is due more immediately to the fact that there are words to be concerned with at all. (Really, what else could an argument be constructed with other than words?) It’s certainly true in this piece, and I think it can be said of all anti anti-civilization discourses more generally, that if THE problem originated with the emergence of agriculture, then the root of the problem was with the topical application of language. When in doubt, it’s always safe to assume that behind every problem “artificiality and work” are to blame and that we’ve already cultivated out of life all that was worth living way, way before “we necessarily domesticated [ourselves].”

We learned in Green Precursors Week that “culture” arises from “cultivation.” All of the cultural projects and constructs and institutions to which Zerzan makes recourse, then, can be reconfigured metaphorically in ways that look a lot like what we’re doing when we cultivate a field. On a figurative level, though, this actually plays out when word-pairs like “technology” and “culture” or like “agriculture” and “production” become inexhaustibly interchangeable. Words are still always just weeds, though.

Who, Me?

If “culture” so-called is the crossroads at which language and signification meet, then what Zerzan is calling for is the undoing of a culture we ourselves have signified. This claim is totally and utterly insane, but at least it is self-consistent.

Zerzan does a smart thing when he doesn’t argue for civilizations to rid themselves of calendars. Surely even he realizes that an “industrial society [would] be impossible without time schedules.” So instead of arguing for a re-configuration of society as one that’s free from “formalized temporal reference points,” he just argues for the disavowal of civilization as we know it. This kind of call-to-action is as illogical as it is genocidal, and no number of sufficiently interested subscribers can ever ethically sympathize with genocide. If the magnitude of such a regression is seriously “unimaginable…for the modern mind,” then who on Earth is he possibly talking to?

As far as anti-civilizational writers go, Dale wasn’t kidding when he said Zerzan does it to the hilt. Perhaps the reason Zerzan’s ideas don’t seem outright dismissible, though, is because his arguments always seem just about half-right. Surely agriculture is a triumph, but it’s not a triumph of “estrangement.” Nobody’s going to argue against the fact that we humans are “less connected” than we once were, but that’s not necessarily to say alienation by agriculture is the reason.

Bat-Shit Crazy As the Wave of the Future

The conclusion posits something like “our decision to embrace agriculture was a catastrophic mistake.” Be that as it may, that Zerzan argues we had a CHOICE in the matter is, again, i-n-s-a-n-e. Even if it’s only through the dissolution of agriculture—and thereby everything else—we may then find our path to liberation, it is in making this claim that Zerzan resubstantiates the very civilizational set of symptoms which he claims 1) we, exclusively, have all been sickened by and 2) that he’s already rejected as problemetizing in the first place.

As if his fetishized and delusive pre-alienated state of nature could ever exist! There can be no such thing as a pre-technological humanity because technology has and will always footnote culture. Our self-consciousness depends for its intelligibility on our having been cultured, linguistic, and historicized from the beginning of time as we know it. In the meantime, then, we must then all of us be absolutely riven by this alienation from everything that was once good. If ticking clocks really are “a function of repression,” then we’re all unconsenting umpteenth-generation slaves to ourselves in a futureless now, and we don’t care.

If there can never be any trajectory from our world to Zerzan’s, then the space out of which his argument arises is altogether as uninhabitable as the Paleolithic terrain to which he looks for redemption.

By Lauren Klein