Greek books were read in boustrophedon, which means ‘after the action of an oxen plowing a field’, each line progressing and then reversing back in a bi-directional motion, equating the patterns of informational technology with the golden gizmo of sedentary humanity. Division of labor lead to the great land enclosures and the dawn of the money form, nascent surplus-value with its classes of guardians, warriors, magistrates, clerics. The great farming apparatus of this era mirrored institutionalized ritual and the codes of orthodox magic, which are the ancestors of surveillance technology and remote control. With the epoch of History proper, beginning with the Neolithic, internal abstractions are projected outwards onto a terra nullius,a void now dedicated to the manufacture of first commodities, the domestication of animals and conflict management, in terror of the silences of a world made ancient by representation and signs. If agriculture was the original sin of History, the Fall was our descent into Symbolic forms which created a psychological removal best expressed by the use of artillery. Look for the assassin at the feet of the Angel of History. Who Killed Ned Ludd?, as the title of one of Zerzan’s best pieces asks. Martyrdom is the only acceptable elite in anarchism. But after the plowshare has been broken, dream-visions have usually been met with fixed bayonets from both sides. The anarchic idea is ageless and perfect,“an enthusiastic and Dionysian pessimism” as Novatore has it it is necessarily outside of history, close to the uncanny spheres of obsession and dream. The influence of utopians has always been an embarrassment, as if the inspired initial spark of a political project keeps raising its shrill orphan voice while the Parties have long since grown into maturity (or senility) and realpolitik(or compromise). Zerzan’s latest collection of essays is entitled A People’s History of Civilization and it will probably be met with the same derision from a self-satisfied Left which has dogged idealists even before Fourier. Wise children often ask their social science teachers: Why do I have to learn this junk that doesn’t matter? The teacher seldom has a good answer because the question is rarely understood: Why must I learn theirjunk, theirHistory that is, the ghostly lessons of theirwreckage. If Anarchist John Zerzan has one wish in his new book, it is that we might wake from this nightmare of myth and History. This is civilization – the old curse of Cain, first to till and kill, primal architect of cities, the father of that pathology known as ‘Progress’.
The plow marked the moment when History first entered into geological time and humankind, once a single creation out of many, began to transform the forces of general life.
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