81 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
81 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
FERAL
|
|
|
|
Fer-al adj. wild, or existing in a state of nature, as freely occurring
|
|
animals or plants; having reverted to the wild state from domestication.
|
|
|
|
We exist in a landscape of absence wherein real life is steadily being
|
|
drained out by debased work, the hollow cycle of consumerism and the
|
|
mediated emptiness of high-tech dependency. Today it is not only the
|
|
stereotypical yuppie workaholic who tries to cheat despair via activity,
|
|
preferring not to contemplate a fate no less sterile than that of the
|
|
planet and (domesticated) subjectivity in general. We are confronted,
|
|
nonetheless, by the ruins of nature and the ruin of our own nature, the
|
|
sheer enormity of the meaninglessness and the inauthentic amounting to a
|
|
weight of lies. It's still drudgery and toxicity for the vast majority,
|
|
while a poverty more absolute than financial renders more vacant the
|
|
universal Dead Zone of civilization. "Empowered" by computerization?
|
|
Infantilized, more like. An Information Age characterized by increased
|
|
communication? No, that would presuppose experience worth communicating.
|
|
A time of unprecedented respect for the individual? Translation:
|
|
wage-slavery needs the strategy of worker self-management at the point
|
|
of production to stave off the continuing productivity crisis, and
|
|
market research must target each "life-style" in the interest of a
|
|
maximized consumer culture.
|
|
|
|
In the upside-down society the solution to massive alienation-induced
|
|
drug use is a media barrage, with results as embarrassing as the
|
|
hundreds of millions futilely spent against declining voter turnout.
|
|
Meanwhile, TV, voice and soul of the modern world, dreams vainly of
|
|
arresting the growth of illiteracy and what is left of emotional health
|
|
by means of propaganda spots of thirty seconds or less. In the
|
|
industrialized culture of irreversible depression, isolation, and
|
|
cynicism, the spirit will die first, the death of the planet an
|
|
afterthought. That is, unless we erase this rotting order, all of its
|
|
categories and dynamics.
|
|
|
|
Meanwhile, the parade of partial (and for that reason false) oppositions
|
|
proceeds on its usual routes. There are the Greens and their like who
|
|
try to extend the life of the racket of electoralism, based on the lie
|
|
that there is validity in any person representing another; these types
|
|
would perpetuate just one more home for protest, in lieu of the real
|
|
thing. The peace "movement" exhibits, in its every (uniformly pathetic)
|
|
gesture, that it is the best friend of authority, property and
|
|
passivity. One illustration will suffice: in May 1989, on the 20th
|
|
anniversary of Berkeley's People's Park battle, a thousand people rose
|
|
up admirably, looting 28 businesses and injuring 15 cops; declared
|
|
peace-creep spokesperson Julia Talley, "These riots have no place in the
|
|
peace movement." Which brings to mind the fatally misguided students in
|
|
Tiananmen Square, after the June 3 massacre had begun, trying to prevent
|
|
workers from fighting the government troops. And the general truth that
|
|
the university is the number one source of that slow strangulation known
|
|
as reform, the refusal of a qualitative break with degradation. Earth
|
|
First! recognizes that domestication is the fundamental issue (e.g. that
|
|
agriculture itself is malignant) but many of its partisans cannot see
|
|
that our species could become wild.
|
|
|
|
Radical environmentalists appreciate that the turning of national
|
|
forests into tree farms is merely a part of the overall project that
|
|
also seeks their own suppression. But they will have to seek the wild
|
|
everywhere rather than merely in wilderness as a separate preserve.
|
|
|
|
Freud saw that there is no civilization without the forcible
|
|
renunciation of instincts, without monumental coercion. But, because the
|
|
masses are basically "lazy and unintelligent," civilization is
|
|
justified, he reasoned. This model or prescription was based on the idea
|
|
that pre-civilized life was brutal and deprived-a notion that has been,
|
|
amazingly, reversed in the past 20 years. Prior to agriculture, in other
|
|
words, humanity existed in a state of grace, ease and communion with
|
|
nature that we can barely comprehend today.
|
|
|
|
The vista of authenticity emerges as no less than a wholesale
|
|
dissolution of civilization's edifice of repression. which Freud, by the
|
|
way, described as "something which was imposed on a resisting majority
|
|
by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to
|
|
power and coercion." We can either passively continue on the road to
|
|
utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful
|
|
upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at
|
|
dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of
|
|
imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything
|
|
less than such a politics of rage and dreams?
|
|
|