An epoch is drawing to a close. Soon we will no longer have Aaron Shakra’s biweekly attempts to alert us to the insidious evils of a media-dominated culture through the medium of a column in the newspaper. He’s leaving us with a treat, though: a meeting of minds (given his incongruous affection for Star Trek, I should probably say “melding”) with local nutjob, green anarchist, and professional babysitter John Zerzan. Interview here.

The questions are mostly softballs (“Do you feel that art in popular culture is a tool of social control?”) but we learn that Zerzan’s principal objection is, in fact, to symbolic representation of all types:

It’s representation, most basically. That urge or desire to represent reality. Art is just part of the symbolic culture, symbolic communication.

So: speech, gestures, sketches on cocktail napkins, the Mona Lisa, and Green Anarchy magazine. Best to cast a wide net, I suppose. And what’s the alternative?

For example, one thing that really struck me, is some of the anthropological data, for example that we were cooking with fire almost 2 million years ago, and doing other interesting things. Another recent thing is, they’ve determined that humans were able to navigate on the open sea 800,000 years ago. And yet, art is very recent. Art is only like 30,000 years old. So people were obviously intelligent for a couple of million years, and they didn’t seem to need art.

Always good for a laugh, that guy. And he’s right: why bother doing anything? Art, communication, technology, anything to improve the lot of his fellow man strikes Zerzan as a further estrangement from our natural state of poverty, disease and squalor – a state in which people evidently once thrived. Or, to put it another way: “Apparently, people were satisfied with just digging nature…”

The philosophy of Zerzan (and Shakra, for that matter) is a weird kind of solipsism in which society’s perceived indifference to them must be cast in terms of being “cut off from nature” for maximum rhetorical heft. As you can tell, I’m a big fan.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 at 13:12 by olly and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.