Beyond Symbolic Thought
A Brief Interview with John Zerzan
By Kevin Tucker, Species Traitor #3, Spring 2003.

It seems that no other anarchist has shown as much interest in the concept of symbolic thought as John Zerzan. For the past decades, John has devoted his work to a thorough critique of the totality of civilization, from symbolic thought to the day-to-day misery of this way of life and into the failures of the Left. His essays on the origin of civilization have been collected in Elements of Refusal, Future Primitive and most recently in Running on Emptiness: the Failure of Symbolic Thought. He edited Against Civilization, and is co-editor of Questioning Technology.

Kevin Tucker: How would you distinguish symbolic culture and symbolic thought, and what is their relation to civilization?

John Zerzan: What followed after the species began to symbolize constitutes symbolic culture. This ethos has come to define what thinking is, and the sensual part of experience has to greatly given way to symbolic experience; that is, direct experience is being reduced toward zero point.
This narrowed and engineered cultural mode is directly related to civilization, which is the product of continuing control viz. domestication.
Symbolic culture in the forms of art and religion, for example, involve re-presented reality being thus processed as substitute for direct experience. They emerge as societies being to develop inequalities that express themselves in specialized roles and realms of separate authority.
The symbolic may be seen as itself a technology, in that it works upon reality as a force for domination. A similar perspective is Horkheimer and Adorno’s “instrumental reason”, meaning that civilization comes to infuse or deform rationality itself into patterns of the logic of control.
Freud saw that civilization is that condition necessary for work and culture to triumph; namely, the forcible renunciation of instinctual freedom and Eros. Understood in this sense, it becomes easier to grasp the inner connection between symbolic culture and civilization.

Kevin Tucker: How far back should we be looking with a critique of civilization and why? What is the significance of tracing back so far?

John Zerzan: I don’t think it’s possible to plumb the depths or origins of civilization without critically examining division of labor or specialization. In the effective power of specialists – possibly the shaman as first case in point – lies the beginning of inequality in human societies. An institution this basic has, of course, been largely overlooked. How can one possibly have modern life without division of labor? But certainly this is just what we are putting into question! Modernity is now seen as increasingly untenable and we are led to wonder at the roots of the extremity of “advanced” society. What propels this trajectory?
Division of labor leads to mass production, even in ancient times, and this requires coordination and justification. Chiefs, bosses, priests flow from this. And the at-first gradual and unnoticed and then rapid development of specialization lays the groundwork for domestication, civilization’s defining basis.
Control/ containment takes its next step with private property, but surely the will to dominate animals and plants (domestication) bring civilization rather swiftly, in relative terms. And the nascent elites that are spawned by increasing division of labor provided a stepping-stone to that definitive turn which is domestication.

Kevin Tucker: In your eyes, how does the scientific studies/ research associated with anthropology and archeology weigh compared to what we know now, from ourselves or from the remaining tribes/ bands of various levels of civilized existence?

John Zerzan: I agree with those who say that consulting our own lives is more to the point, more potent than considering the anthropological/ archeological literature. But I think it’s also valid to consider evidence from the past that demonstrates an actual state of “natural anarchy” that obtained for such a very long time. Such a picture is an inspiration to me, the realization of the prevalence of non-hierarchical life-ways that constituted the only successful, sustainable adaptation to the world our species has known. Our vision, our critique of civilization is not dependent on such a picture or record, but can draw strength from it.
Most of us are significantly further removed from domesticated existence than any surviving indigenous people. Thus it is important to green anarchy types like myself to learn from them and support their struggles.

Kevin Tucker: How would you know where is something like language took shape? Do you think that the move from language and art necessary brings us to agriculture or is there some middle point of mediation in which we are still embodied by the “other” (wildness)?

John Zerzan: No one knows when language originated. (Speech, that is; we can date written language because of artifactual evidence.) It’s one of the most interesting mysteries of all, I’d say. There really are only guesses with some saying it is rather recent (e.g., emerging in the Upper Paleolithic, say, contemporaneously with the earliest cave paintings of about 35,000 years ago) and others figuring that human speech more likely began on the order of a million years back.
If language and art appear more or less together fairly recently virtually on the eve of agriculture then a strong link to domestication is suggested. And obviously if there’s a very long time span between their origins, then only art would seem to be linked to domestication.
But it seems quite possible to me that there is a connection – again, at least, in terms of art and agriculture. They are pretty closely related in time, after all.
If speech is very old – and we may never know – then maybe the “middle point of mediation” is that period after speech but before art. That long period when division of labor did not advance and symbolic culture as we know it did not exist.

Kevin Tucker: How do you see the future of civilization and where can a critique of symbolic thought take us?

John Zerzan: Technological civilization is realizing the elimination of the natural world and ever-new depths of individual and social estrangement. It is consuming, impoverishing and destroying its host planet, as everyone can see. It has no future.
A critique of symbolic thought reveals how this malignant virus originated and therefore to what lengths we’ll likely have to go to avoid replicating civilization after it falls.

Kevin Tucker: Do you feel that there could be a conscious turn against symbolism and/ or civilization? Or do you feel that the totality of civilization has created dependency relationship that the domesticated will hold strongly to? Do you see anarchy as being brought abut by the domesticated or by those who have turned against their domestication revolting against the agents of civilization?

John Zerzan: There must be a conscious turn against the symbolic and civilization, and I think it has already begun. Antipathy to these dimensions, in fact, is always present, has been present all along, and now it’s growing as the generalized crisis deepens.
A “dependency relationship” does obtain, in my opinion, or it could just as easily be called “being held hostage”. We will all have to unlearn domestication, and the radical break with domestication in society will most likely occur, I’d say, when it becomes clear that civilization is more of a liability than an asset. When personal immiseration and ecological devastation, for example, reach a certain level and at the same time a viable alternative can be seen as more pleasurable, safe, reasonable.

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