Twilight of the Machines Quotes

“God first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures--man, woman, beast, insect, bird, and fish--lived happily together with this silence until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased God deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. God cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence. --Marlene Nourbese Philip”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Clinging to politics is one way of avoiding the confrontation with the devouring logic of civilization, holding instead with the accepted assumptions and definitions. Leaving it all behind is the opposite: a truly qualitative change, a fundamental paradigm shift.
This change is not about:
• seeking "alternative" energy sources to power all the projects and systems that should never have been started up in the first place;
• being vaguely "post-Left", the disguise that some adopt while changing none of their (leftist) orientations;
• espousing an "anti-globalization" orientation that's anything but, given activists' near-universal embrace of the totalizing industrial world system;
• preserving the technological order, while ignoring the degradation of millions and the systematic destruction of the earth that undergird the existence of every part of the technoculture;
• claiming-as anarchists-to oppose the state, while ignoring the fact that this hypercomplex global setup couldn't function for a day without many levels of government.
The way is open for radical change. If complex society is itself the issue, if class society began with division of labor in the Neolithic, and if the Brave New World now moving forward was born with the shift to domesticated life, then all we've taken for granted is implicated. We are seeing more deeply, and the explorations must extend to include everyone. A daunting, but exciting opportunity!”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Ritual regulation
of production and belligerence means that domestication has become the decisive factor. "The emergence of systematic warfare, fortifications, and weapons of destruction," says Hassan, "follows the path of agriculture.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Language, and symbolism in general, are always substitutive, implying meanings that cannot be derived directly from experiential contexts. Here is the long-ago source of today's generalized crisis of
meaning. Language initiates and reproduces a distinction or separation that leads to ever-increasing place-lessness. Resistance to this impoverishing movement must lead to the problematization of language. Foucault noted that speech is not merely "a verbalization of conflicts and systems of domination, but... the very object of man's conflicts." He didn't develop this point, which is valid and deserves our attention and study. The roots of today's globalizing spiritual crisis lie in a movement away from immediacy; this is the hallmark of the symbolic.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“In Genesis, the Bible's first book, woman is born from the body of man. The Fall from Eden represents the demise of hunter-gatherer life, the expulsion into agriculture and hard labor. It is blamed on Eve, of course, who bears the stigma of the Fall. 1' Quite an irony, in that domestication is the fear and refusal of nature and woman, while the Garden myth blames the chief victim of its scenario, in reality.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Language is a productive force; like technology, it is not amenable to social control. In the postmodern era, both language and technology rule, but each shows signs of exhaustion. Today's symbolic reflects nothing much more than the habit of power behind it. Human connectedness and corporeal immediacy have been traded away for a fading sense of reality. The poverty and manipulation of mass communication is the postmodern version of culture. Here is the voice of industrial modernity as it goes cyber/digital/ virtual, mirroring its domesticated core, a facet of mass production.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Symbolic means sidestep reality; they are part of what is going wrong. Division of labor, for instance, eroded face-to-face interaction and eroded people's direct, intimate relationship with the natural world. The symbolic is complicit; it generates more and more mediations to accompany those created by social practices. Life becomes fragmented; connections to nature are obscured and dissolved. Instead of repairing the rupture, symbolic thought turns people in the wrong direction: toward abstraction. The "thirst for transcendence" is initiated, ignoring the shifting reality that created that desire in the first place. Language plays a key role here, re-ordering and subordinating natural systems that humankind was once attuned to. Symbolic culture demands that we reject our "animal nature" in favor of a symbolically defined "human nature".”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Marlene Nourbese Philip. She provides a wonderful metaphor of origins:
God first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures man, woman, beast, insect, bird and fish lived
happily together with this silence, until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased God deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. God cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence.”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines