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John Zerzan, "Globalization and Its Apologists: An Abolitionist Perspective""Globalization and Its Apologists: An Abolitionist Perspective"
In its heyday in the American South, slavery never lacked for apologists. Writers, preachers, and planters chimed in to defend the peculiar institution as divinely ordained and justified by the racial superiority of whites over blacks. The Abolitionists, who burned the Constitution, hid fugitives, and attacked federal arsenals, were widely viewed as dangerous firebrands fit for prison or the gallows.In hindsight, the word “slavery” connotes a world of oppression, violence, degradation, and resistance. The vile, deluded racism of slavery’s 19th century apologists is unmistakable from our 21st century viewpoint, but how many see our century’s version of slavery in a similarly revealing light? In the name of progress, world development and empire are enslaving humankind and destroying nature, everywhere. The juggernaut known as globalization has absorbed nearly all opposition, overwhelming resistance by means of an implacable, universalizing system of capital and technology. A sense of futility that approaches nihilism is now accepted as an inevitable response to modernity: “Whatever….” The poverty of theory is starkly illuminated in this fatalistic atmosphere. Academic bookshelves are loaded with tomes that counsel surrender and accommodation to new realities. Other enthusiasts have climbed onto the globalization bandwagon, or more commonly, were never not on board. From an abolitionist perspective, the response of most intellectuals to a growing planetary crisis consists of apologia in endless variations. Patrick Brantlinger suggests, for example, that in the “post-historical” age we have lost the ability to explain social change. But the reasons behind global change become evident to those who are willing to examine fundamental assumptions. The debasing of life in all spheres, now proceeding at a quickening pace, stems from the dynamics of civilization itself. Domestication of animals and plants, a process only 10,000 years old, has penetrated every square inch of the planet. The result is the elimination of individual and community autonomy and health, as well as the rampant, accelerating destruction of the natural world. Morris Berman, Jerry Mander, and other critics have described the “disenchantment” of a world subordinated to technological development. Civilization substitutes mediation for direct experience, distancing people from their natural surroundings and from each other. Ever greater anomie, dispersal, and loneliness pervade our lives. A parallel instrumentalism is at work in our ecosystems, transforming them into resources to be mined, and imperiling the entire biosphere. At base, globalization is nothing new. Division of labor, urbanization, conquest, dispossession, and diasporas have been part and parcel of the human condition since the beginning of civilization. Yet globalization takes the domesticating process to new levels. World capital now aims to exploit all available life; this is a defining and original trait of globalization. Early 20th century observers (Tönnies and Durkheim among them) noted the instability and fragmentation that necessarily accompanied modernization. These are only more evident in this current, quite possibly terminal stage. The project of integration through world control causes disintegration everywhere: more rootlessness, withdrawal, pointlessness…none of which have arrived overnight. The world system has become a high-tech imperialism. The new frontier is cyberspace. In the language of perennial empire, global powers issue their crusading, adventurous call to tame and colonize (or recolonize). Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” concept is back in vogue, albeit with a clonal tinge to it, as everyone is designated to be part of a single global society. One interdependent McWorld, kept alive by the standardized sadness of a draining consumerism. It should be no surprise that among those who speak in the name of “anti-globalization” there are actually a growing number who in fact oppose it, whose perspective is that of de-globalization, who realize that a far more thorough-going critique and vision is urgently needed.
According to Rob Shields’ chilling formulation, “the presence of absence is virtual.” “Community” is unlike any other in human memory; no real people are present and no real communication takes place. In convenient, disembodied virtual community, one shuts people off at the click of a mouse to “go” elsewhere. Pseudo-community moves forward on the ruins of what is left of actual connections. Senses and sensuality diminish apace; “responsibility” is interred in the expanding postmodern Lost Words Museum. Shriveled opposition and fatalistic, resigned shirkers forget that anti-slavery abolitionists, once a tiny minority, refused to quit and eventually prevailed. Certainly none of this has happened overnight. The AT&T telephone commercial/exhortation of some years back, “Reach out and touch someone,” offered human contact but concealed the truth that such technology has in fact been crucial in taking us ever further from that contact. Direct experience is replaced by mediation and simulation. Digitized information supplants the basis of actual closeness and possible trust among interacting physical beings. According to Boris Groys, “We just have to deal with the fact that we can no longer believe our eyes, our ears. Everyone who has worked with a computer knows that.”
A state of growing passivity in everyday life is one of the most basic developments. Increasingly dependent—even infantilized—by a technological life-world, and under the ever-more complete effective control of specialized expertise, the fractionated subject is vitiated by division of labor. That most fundamental institution, which defines complexity and has driven domination forward ab origino. Source of all alienation, “the subdivision of labour is the assassination of a people.” Adam Smith in the 18th century has perhaps never been excelled in his eloquent portrait of its mutilating, deforming, immiserating nature. It was the prerequisite for domestication, and continues to be the motor of the Megamachine, to use Lewis Mumford’s term. Division of labor underlies the paradigmatic nature of modernity (technology) and its disastrous outcome.
In fact, even more confounding than lack of interest in the roots and motive force undergirding the present desolation is the fairly widespread embrace of the prospect of more of the same. How is it possible to imagine good outcomes from what is clearly generating the opposite, in every sphere of life? Instead of a hideously cyborgian program delivering emptiness and dehumanization on a huge scale, Hayles, for instance, finds in the posthuman an “exhilarating prospect” of “opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means,” while high-tech “systems evolve toward an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability.” What’s happening is that a “what we have lost” sensibility is being overwhelmed by a “what have we got to lose/try anything” orientation. This shift testifies profoundly to the depth of loss and defeat that civilization/patriarchy/industrialism/modernity has engineered. The magnitude of the surrender of these intellectuals has nullified their capacity for analysis or vision. For example, “Increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for posthumanity is already here.”
With no ground from which to make judgments, the very viability of criteria dissolves; the postmodern thus becomes prey to every manner of preposterous and abject pronouncement. I. Bluhdorn, for example, simply waves the little matter of environmental catastrophe away: “To the extent that we manage to get used to (naturalize) the non-availability of universally valid normative standards, the ecological problem…simply dissolves.” The cynical acceptance of every continuing horror, clothed in aesthetized irony and implicit apathy. Downright bizarre is the incoherent celebration of the marriage of the postmodern and the technological, summed up in a title: The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium. According to authors Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “The postmodern adventure is just beginning and alternative futures unfold all around us.” To speak of defending the particular against universalizing tendencies is a postmodern commonplace, but this is mocked by the eager acceptance of the most universalizing force of all, the homogenization machine which is technology.
When the basics are ruled off-limits to contestation, the resulting evasion can have no liberatory consequence. Infatuation with surface, the marginal, the partial, etc. is typical. Postmodernism billed itself as subversive and destabilizing, but delivered only aesthetically. Emblematic of a period of defeat, the image consumes the event and we consume the images. The tone throughout Derrida’s work, for instance, seems never far from mourning. The abiding sadness of Blanchot is also to the point. The postmodern, according to Geoffrey Hartman, “suggests a disenchantment that is final, or self-perpetuating.” The subject, in the current ethos, is seen on the one hand as an unstable, fragmented collection of positions in discourse –– even as a mere effect of power, or of language –– and on the other hand as part of a positive, pluralist array of alternatives. By avoiding examination of the main lines of domination, however, postmodernists blind themselves to the actual, deforming characteristics of technology and consumerism. The forgetful self of technology, buffeted by the ever-shifting currents of commodified culture, is hard-pressed to form an enduring identity. There is, in fact, an increasing distance between dominant global forces and the endangered coherent individual.
Along with health-threatening obesity (largely due to the rapid spread of “fast food” and other processed foods), depression has become an international scourge. Among various consequences of development, depression testifies directly to the loss of deeply important ingredients of human happiness. But as Lyotard has it, “despair is taken as a disorder to control, never as the sign of an irremediable lack.” Already the fourth leading cause of disability in the U.S., depression is projected to take second place by 2020. Despite the general reactionary focus on genetics and chemical palliatives, depression has much more to do with the growing isolation of individuals within developed society. The figures about declining social and civic membership or affiliation are relevant; the rise of autism, binge drinking, and illiteracy betoken depression’s progress as an even more profound phenomenon. “At the time of the so-called triumph of the West, why do so many people feel so crappy, so lonely, so abandoned?” asks philosopher Bruce Wilshire.
An array of postmodernisms and fundamentalisms seems to have displaced belief in the future. Marcuse wondered whether narcissism’s yearning for completeness and perfection might not contain the germ of a different reality principle. Even whether, contra Hegel, reconciliation could only happen outside of historical time. Such “critics” as there be (Chomsky, Derrida, Ricoeur, Plumwood, for example) call for a global governance/planning apparatus –– under which, it must be said, the individual would have even less of a voice. Anti-totality Derrida wants a “New International,” apparently ignorant of the actual zero degree of “democracy” that obtains in the current political jurisdictions. Such superficiality, avoidance, and illusion surely constitutes acceptance of the ongoing devastation. Of course, if statist regulation could be an answer it would necessarily be totalitarian. And it would be partial at best, because it would never indict any of civilization’s motive forces, such as division of labor or domestication. What is clear to some of us is that a turn away from the virtual, global networks of power, unlimited media, and all the rest is a necessity. A break with this worsening world toward embeddedness, the face-to-face, non-domination of nature and each other.
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