June 13th, 2011
by Rubus
Taken all that is known about the world, taking down civilization is the noblest goal of them all. That this goal incites near reflexive revulsion amongst the vast majority of the civilized speaks volumes as to the magnitude of the task before us.
And the devil is in the details. In this case, what intricate details and what a fiendish devil. An ill-conceived anti-civilization outcome could easily be every bit as bad as the genocidal denunciations lobbed at the anti-civ crowd by its fiercest ideological enemies.
And yet, doing nothing and letting civilization reach one of its logically-expected conclusions would be far worse. Who would want to live in a techno-fascist dystopia of total control, or be compelled by circumstance to eke out a miserable existence in the barely-habitable remains of the ecosphere?
As to the latter outcome, those living in the original stone age at least had a clean planet, free from widespread contamination (be it chemical, radiological or genetic) to live on. If our endeavor fails, our progeny might not be so lucky.
I write this sitting on a decaying old-growth spruce log in the coastal rain forest of the Pacific Northwest, looking through an opening in the trees to the ocean below. From that log grow hemlock trees, some of considerable size, but all leaning and fated to topple as the substrate they grow from further decays. It is, I think, an apt metaphor for the struggle before us.
Doubtless what we construct to replace industrial civilization will itself not stand the test of time. For one, the clock is ticking and there is a loaded gun to our heads. We do not have the time for the sort of slow, incremental experimentation that constricts the most durable systems.
Yet tear down and build anew we must. Whatever hardships our inevitable errors create, the far greater error of failing to end civilization will create far greater hardship. And like the leaning hemlocks with their intricate feathery foliage, what we create will have a beauty of its own while it lasts.
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August 13th, 2010
Anarchism versus Civilization
In his 2003 polemic Anarchism versus Primitivism, Brian Oliver Sheppard makes the case that primitivism is inherently in contradiction with anarchism.
Much can be inferred from his tone, which is openly mocking. He makes references to how “[u]nfortunately for anarchists, plunging into the primitivist miasma has become necessary,” openly condescending to engage the primitivists at all. But his arguments are mired in absurdities: he mocks primitivists as hypocrites for engaging in technological practices while ignoring the fact that nearly every anarchist of any stripe in capitalist and statist society is not living as she or he preaches.
The core of his argument is that primitivism is authoritarian and therefore irreconcilable with anarchism. But the anarchism he promotes is rather clearly a simplistic and “classical” one, a red anarchism that argues for worker control of a stateless society. He argues that primitivists are stuck in an illusory past that cannot be supported by evidence, yet never acknowledges his complicity in the same behavior; here is a man arguing that anarchism has always been about worker control and communistic ideas, completely ignoring the heterogeneous past and present of anarchism. The individualists, the anarchists-without-adjectives, the mutualists… these people simply never existed, if one is to infer from Brian’s1 piece.
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Tags: Margaret Killjoy
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August 7th, 2010
Blogger Alex Bradshaw has written an excellent article Social Anarchism, Techno-Pessimism, and Primitivism. It explores the usefulness of the anti-civilized (but not necessarily primitivist) critique from the point of view of social anarchism.
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July 18th, 2010
Last week I had the privilege to witness (and photograph) the first sailing of The Silakka (silakka is Finnish for “baltic herring”), a boat built almost entirely from scavenged materials. Only the rope and some of the screws and bolts were purchased. The pontoons are made from empty drums, the platform is woven with firehouses. The frame is scrap metal and wood, the mast and sail are secondhand. And of course, it’s powered by the wind. They aim to prove it seaworthy this summer (though I believe their plans are sea-, not ocean-, worthy).
These same people built a river raft entirely out of debris in the past, in Lithuania. They collected empty plastic bottles into wooden crates to provide buoyancy. And that journey was photographed by an intensely capable artist.
Lest you think that they are doing this purely for fun, the Silakka’s mission statement will clear everything up for you in a rather surrealist way:
Unreasonably cheap energy is running out, climate conditions are changing radically, paradoxical economy of constant growth will bankrupt itself, governmental fascism will be declared, racial breeding is practiced to embryos, genetic manipulation will get out of hand, Coup d´état of racistic red necks will happen in the name of revolution, the language loses its meaning, virtual schizophrenia is getting pandemic among the Internet users, obsessed disciples of Tony Robins will get at each other´s throats in the search of lost childhood, fourth world war is waiting at the gates, psychedelic-communistic revolution will fly in the ring like a freshly whiten towel in a heavy weight boxing match while the master is beating the breath out of his competition, heavenly escalator is transporting Jesus down in between the supermarkets while aliens will return to planet earth to complete their work of creation, dystopies and utopies will shake hands, up and down will change the place, emerged birds will withdraw back to the shells. Shit is about to hit the fan, even though a good life needs just bearable conditions and a hand full of material mixed with a drop of good will. We are living strange times – are we? But why?
At the moment we are building a wind powered rescue boat out of waste that our contemporary lifestyle is producing. During the summer 2010 we will sail to Baltic sea and archipelago, far from rectangular conventions and dusty tasting logic of the mainland, to rescue some leftovers of endangered wisdom we are still able to rescue. Maybe we will find some time to think, maybe we will discover something that won´t leave us anything else to think about.
Tags: Finland Transportation
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July 13th, 2010
There are people who spend their time figuring out how to build dwellings out of living trees, houses that grow and shift with time, houses that are part of a permacultured solution to sedentary sustainability. I approve.
From what I can tell, the theoretical groundwork biotecture was laid in the 1960s by a man named Rudolf Doernach (who dropped the “civilization” word when he wrote about biotecture for permaculture and who also went off on this wingnut thing about how we can live when the ice-lands cometh, an article I would love to read).
Inhabitat.com has an interesting article from 2006 called grow your own treehouse that goes over a bit of biotecture, and the primary contemporary advocate is Mitchell Joachim, who I’m tempted to call an eco-techno-futurist. Joachim’s critique seems to be entirely ecological, lacking any discussion of the nature of civilization, division of labor, or the like, but his ideas on permacultured tree fab houses are the cutting edge of the field. The basic idea is to build houses with clay or plaster interior walls but incorporate living trees as the outer structure, and to build each house into a fairly self-contained permacultured system.
He did a fairly basic but interesting TED talk about growing houses that fairly quickly goes into satire about building houses out of meat. The above link is particularly funny because it is on a right-wing blog and there are lots and lots of comments that don’t get the satire and also make such useless observations as “never trust a man with waist-length dreadlocks.”
Tags: Housing
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July 7th, 2010
I ran across this today: Route Couture. (site is in Finnish, but there are two galleries of images: fashion photos and art photos. There is also an artist statement in English elsewhere.) Some Finnish radical fashion designers have created “high fashion” clothing out of roadkill. According to google translate, and confirmed by my Finnish friend sitting next to me:
The group seeks to comment on the works for the fashion industry, a market economy and human-animal relationship.
Tags: Fashion, Finland, Roadkill
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July 3rd, 2010
by Jason McQuinn
This article was not written specifically to identify with post-civilized theory, and in fact predates that name by a number of years. It appeared in issue #51 of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed in summer, 2001. While not an explicitly post-civilized text, the overlap is enormous and the article is remarkably useful.
The life ways of gatherer-hunter communities have become a central focus of study for many anarchists in recent years, for several good reasons. First of all, and most obviously, if we are to look at actually-existing anarchist societies, the prehistory of the species seems to have been a golden age of anarchy, community, human autonomy and freedom. Various forms of the state, enclosures of the social commons, and accumulations of dead labor (capital) have been the axiomatic organizing principles of civilized societies from the dawn of history. But, from all available evidence, they seem to have been entirely absent in the vast prehistory of the human species. The development of civilization has been the flipside of the steady erosion of both personal and communal autonomy and power within precivilized, anarchic societies and the remnant life ways still surviving from them.
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Tags: Anarchy Magazine, Jason McQuinn
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July 2nd, 2010
by Margaret Killjoy
This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #3, published in 2010.
“We have no more interest in repairing civilization than a scrapyard does in repairing cars. When you see a roadkill deer, you don’t attempt emergency breathing–you skin and eat it. Well, if you eat meat.”
–Sara Czolgosz
In the previous issue, I laid out the basics of post-civilization theory (affectionately referred to by most people I know as “post-civ”). The really, really short version of it is: we don’t like civilization, but we’re not primitivists either. Oh sure, we learned a lot from our relationship with civilization, but in the end, it was just too abusive. It’s time to break up, it’s time to move on.
In this issue, we’re going to take a close look at post-civilized approaches to production and highlight a possible way to undermine the capitalist economic system.
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Tags: Dodgem Logic, Margaret Killjoy
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July 2nd, 2010
an introduction to post-civilized theory
by Margaret Killjoy
This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #2 in 2010, and is essentially a slightly longer rewrite of post-civ!, a collaboratively written introduction published by Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness, published in 2008.
Well, that civilization thing was interesting, now wasn’t it? I mean, it certainly seemed worth a shot. We got a lot out of it: telescopes, wheelchairs, wikipedia. But we also just about took out the natural world. Science, agriculture, and specialization have done a lot for expanding cultural ideas and communication, but they’ve done even more for genocide and ecocide.
So it’s time we gave up the noble, failed experiment altogether and moved on to something new.
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Tags: Dodgem Logic, Margaret Killjoy
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February 25th, 2010
Fancy that, a website! We were intending to use postcivilized.net to host a print magazine, but that has been tabled at the moment. Instead, this site will be a hub for various post-civilized theory articles, as well as a general blog of things that interest us post-civ types. And for this, we are happily looking for content, and possibly even editors/posters. Anyone who is interested is encouraged to contact us at contribute@postcivilized.net.
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