Against technology

In Against Technology Zerzan moves away from time and tackles technology. This essay was reportedly a speech delivered to a university crowd in 1997.

The first useful point that he makes is to observe the concealed endorsement in the opinion that technology is an instrument and whether it is good or bad depends on how it is used. This fairly common claim implies that technology is neutral, but obviates the need to examine it more closely. He is on the side of Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic and Enlightenment who critiqued instrumental reason, arguing that reason is no more neutral than technology. In one part of their critique that Zerzan refers to sensuous desire, in the form of the sirens in the story of Odysseus, signifies a flipside to the project of civilisation. Reportedly Horkheimer and Adorno saw this as an early sign of the tension between the sensuous (pre-history, pre-technology) and foregoing its pleasure in favour of a project (which we might call civilisation in the present context, not least because The Odyssey is such a seminal text). In the Greek story, Odysseus asks to be tied to the mast with wax stopped in his ears so as not to be tempted astray by the sirens.

The latter idea even sounds a bit like Freud's sublimation, wherein "base" (primitive libidinous) impulses are channeled into society's scope of accepted learned behaviours. Anyway, even superficially it is easy to see the flaw in assuming that technology is neutral. It is increasingly immersive and continues to change our understanding and ways of perception. As soon as the realisation that technology is not neutral becomes obvious it becomes necessary to question it. Or so Zerzan implies, because he later challenges the still widely held belief attributable to the Second Law of Thermodynamics that all systems tend towards entropy and disorder and that this unidirection is irreversible. What he ultimately wants us to believe is that civilisation, including the proliferation of technology, is indeed reversible. He hasn't really explained how that can be done yet though.

Onward. He feels that Horkheimer and Adorno put an unnecessary limit on their critique by concluding that if not for the whole spiel of subordinating nature, we wouldn't be here today, most probably there would be no society to speak of, because nature would have subdued us in turn. Here I am with H & A, because the few Noble Savages who are left are on the brink of extinction, telling me that theirs was not the right strategy for survival after all. I don't think civilisation "took a wrong turn" with agriculture - more likely we were too vulnerable to survive in nature; but most likely, for better or for worse, a few bright sparks just got curious about all sorts of things, started building tools by accident and inventing the wheel and the rest is history. That is to say, given that we have a brain capable of symbolic thought some mutant strategy precipitated the rest and from there on some form of civilsation was all but inevitable. So - as Zerzan also says - it is all very well to criticise tehnology (and civilisation) but without it, where will we be? So the cliche that pops into my head, and with which many people will probably be happy to conclude this train of thought, is "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know". (I reckon that if there is anything beyond our current civilisation - and perhaps there is, and we're all starting to gear up towards it - then the last 10000 odd years has been a necessary phase. )

Zerzan wants us to consider an alternative rather than fall into the habit of thinking that nothing can be done, and that because nothing can be done that all analysis and critique is just pointless. So he directs our attention to what he knows, namely the progress made in recent decades in archaeology wherein Hobbes' view of life in prehistoric humans (who lived for nearly two million years before civilsation in the last 10000 years) as nasty, brutish, and short has been demonstrated to be incorrect. Don't take my word for it, but apparently in prehistory humans had as much intelligence as the average adult has today, lots of leisure time, did little work, were egalitarian and there was sexual equality and no organised violence. So it would seem that prehistory has that going for it.

Finally he makes a useful correction of postmodernism's general attitude in stating that the incredulity towards meta-narratives (he correctly traces this idea to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition) assumes that all ideas of totality are totalitarian and therefore to be held with suspicion. That's useful because it's probably true, i.e., that postmodernism's relativism is too sweeping and prevents the postmodernist from seeing true alternatives, hence becoming overly vulnerable to the advances and excesses of the age. The alternative - the wholeness of prehistoric humans - at this stage still looks a bit naive though, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he comes up with something a bit more concrete than stories about the prehistoric past.