Considering John Zerzan
Years ago, I mailed a copy of my small photocopied journal to Green Anarchy magazine. I addressed a short note to John Zerzan, an editor of the magazine whom I had met years before and found extraordinarily polite, a politeness at odds with the occasionally acerbic tone of his polemical writing and internet presence. My journal was divergent from the political and aesthetic choices of the late Green Anarchy magazine, but I hoped that John would offer a few choice criticisms, even a witty dismissal that highlighted my apparent failure to adequately criticize and reject what he may have called 'the totality of postmodern industrial civilization' or something along those lines.
Several weeks after sending the journal and the note, I received a short hand-written reply from John. It was written on the same piece of paper on which I penned my original note to him, with a line drawn between my short pleasantries and his curt dismissal. His note said, in so many words, that Green Anarchy was not interested in reviewing communist bullshit and that I was a leftist, to be cut off entirely from the anti-civilization discourse. I can only assume my journal made its way to the trash without being read.
On the one hand, his dismissal made sense. My journal was not an expression of anti-civilization anarchism, and my desire to see it reviewed in Green Anarchy was patronizing: I wanted to see what the crazies in Oregon had to say about my latest thing but had no intention of contributing to their project in any way. On the other hand, I expected at least some recognition of the brief but friendly encounter we had shared, and I was struck by the immediate falsity of his Zerzan's claim. At the time, Green Anarchy had just published a series of essays about Jacques Camatte, a French communist. I wrote him back expressing my confusion, but I never heard from him again.
I revisit this incident today to defend John Zerzan's legacy and to awkwardly and publicly extend a hand to him, after all these years, knowing that my extended hand ought not to be received, that what I am writing leaves no room for a friendship to come.
JOHN ZERZAN, IDIOT PROPHET
From my first encounter with his writing, I was always struck by his unreadability: the paucity of the prose, the overreliance on quotations, the repetition, the weaknesses and contradictions in argument, the self-serving selection of scientific and anthropological research, the barely masked personal grudges, and so on. John Zerzan's failures as a writer and thinker are innumerable, and many of these failures have been listed again and again by his enemies.
Let the lists grow longer.
These failures and weaknesses are, in fact, the greatest testament to Zerzan's power and importance. In spite of, or, perhaps, because of these shortcomings, John Zerzan, more than any other thinker, has profoundly influenced the trajectory and scope of radical theory. His unreadable books were not read; they were dissolved into the very core of the anarchist rejection of society. And despite the effort of every single anarchist political faction (including Zerzan himself), the bleak and hateful truth at the heart of his thinking remains, gnawing at us, cutting away at our steadiness, at our faiths and our nightmares.
The idiot prophet cannot become a king. He must remain a cancer, a Cassandra, salt in the cut.
Was he not right when pointed out the leftism at the heart of insurrectionary anarchism, an ideology that has excised the critique of technology from its discourse? Did he not earnestly articulate a spiritual turn today embraced by those who laughed at him at him then? To say that his criticisms were spoken in the voice of a shrill or bumbling fool says nothing of their truth; the idiot prophet cannot become a king. And so it was, again and again. And so it will be.
SILENCE
In my parting with him, Zerzan gave me a challenge I have not yet taken on. He set out a difficult and terrifying proposition that I still cannot accept, even if I know it is the only task remaining for me and all those who shackle themselves to a rejection of the world.
John Zerzan's words are an unheard note that might precede insurrection, a whisper warning us that insurrection is not what we presume it to be. As the lights turn on and the tempting hum and roar of this world drag us from bed, let us remember the one who brought us here, the one who may guide us in the days of true reckoning to come. Let us find the strength to live out his challenge.
