From: BabblePreacher-AT-aol.com
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 04:34:38 -0400
Subject: Re : [postanarchism] Zerzan: Patriarchy, Civilization, and the Origins of Gender


Is this a joke? 

Anyway, this article by Zerzan moves from ideology to ideology with no effort of sleight-of-hand, and the ragged juxtapositions are so blatant and incompatible that the absurdity of the argument itself is nearly eclipsed.

The entire text is permeated by a nostalgic-utopian dribble that makes Plato look like a realist - for example, when Z. alludes to the Neolithic gender shift and domination of nature as diametrically opposed to "the previous two million years of non-dominating intelligence and intimacy with nature," or better yet, "in light of the globally metastasizing death-drive of technological civilization, if only we still lived in grass huts!" Yikes! He is constantly yearning for an intimacy that seems chimerical at best. Or, when he quotes a certain Meillasoux: "the sexual division of labor ... such institutions as marriage, conjugality or paternal filiation. All are imposed on women by constraint," we can be quite clear that his argument is not one which seeks an understanding, but furthers the contemporary tendancy to accusation – and not only this, but he is accusing exactly that which he is trying to denounce as an illusion! The male is a product of an imposed dichotomy, as well as the creation of this dichotomy – it is Aristotelian, even – that which has created itself, ie - the unmoved mover.

Or,

"By the Upper Paleolithic, that epoch immediately prior to the Neolithic Revolution of domestication and civilization, the gender revolution had won the day. Masculine and feminine signs are present in the first cave art, about 35,000 years ago. Gender consciousness arises as an all-encompassing ensemble of dualities, a specter of divided society. In the new polarization activity becomes gender-related, gender-defined. The role of hunter, for example, develops into association with males, its requirements attributed to the male gender as desired traits."
 
Paragraphs such as this are laughable. And that he adopts a tone which implies empirical evidence, as if Mr Zerzan had witnessed this "revolution" himself. If this were even to achieve the level of conjecture, I believe we would already be lending it too much – maybe parody, if it didn’t take itself so seriously. And then the phrases such as "in the new polarization activity becomes..." which may be as readily found amidst mass-market, sci-fi paperbacks as a highly technical journal describing the nucleal habitation patterns of single cell amoebae [?] But in an attempt to psychoanalyze historical subjects who are as near to us as the surface of the sun, all the while attempting to dismiss, outright, the practices of this very procedure – can it be anything but absurd? 

I think Zerzan goes so far that his own arguments turns on him – in reference to "gendered society", for exaple, which is a part of a "severely dichotomized cosmos", he says, "the which-came-first question introduces itself and is difficult to resolve" (as if it is no longer chicken and egg, but man – falsely en-gendered construct – and woman – forced gender role – on which we base our futile binary debate - as if this is even a question worth pondering!). Aside from the almost comic-relief aspect of this interjection amidst such ‘wannabe’ Marxist phrases as "specter of divided society" or the postmodern glop of "ensemble of dualities" or even the 'look-I-read-some-Lacan' use of the "symbolic" makes me wonder which Marx he was so desperately trying to mimic (not too mention his historical materialism utterly devoid of material - he mentions matriarchy, but I think this is all). But also, that he attempts to posit, as a central point to his argument [!], that a "gender revolution" took place some 40,000 years ago, and that it is because of this (and not because of basic physiological difference) that cavemen went to the trouble of etching human anatomy on their walls - his "which-came-first question" becomes, then, a cannonball pulling a u-turn in mid-air and crashing back into the pitiful, flimsy façade of this pseudo-feminist, post-everything finger-pointing. Sure, let's play - #1. Which came first: a) the Penis, b) Oppression? #2. Which came first: a) Recognition of difference, b) Difference? #3 ......

And how can Zerzan call for the end of gender (as construct), thus the *absence* of division, all the while heralding the virtue of the female in opposition to the evil of the male? 

And so we can see the complete incapatibility of his conclusion: "Without a deeply radical women’s liberation we are consigned to the deadly swindle and mutilation now dealing out a fearful toll everywhere. The wholeness of original genderlessness may be a prescription for our redemption."

Liberation produces difference - "-lessness" implies identity.

And how can any of these arguments stand if they try to denounce that which produced the very forms of thought employed? Not too mention the eerie tendancy of this type of argumentation towards a pacification of guilt (refer simply to the last word of this text - "redemption"). Is it even possible to be anti-civilization while *writing* an *essay* (a form created by a man by the way)? 

Do we really believe that there is a male (engendered) force whose sole purpose is the oppression of women and the domination of nature, and that this has always been this way, and that it is only this? Please, please say no!

It is just too bad he didn’t heed his own warning: "It is hazardous to extrapolate from the present to the remote past."

Why am I still writing on this...

 phil.

"We should be able also to stand above morality - and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling any moment, but also to float above it and play."  
        -Nietzsche


Dans un e-mail daté du Mar, 27 Avr 2004 10:57:58 PM Heure de Paris, "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com> a écrit :

>PATRIARCHY, CIVILIZATION, AND THE ORIGINS OF GENDER 
>
>(from Green Anarchy #16/Spring 2004) 
>
>By John Zerzan 
>
>Civilization, very fundamentally, is the history of
>the domination of nature and of women. Patriarchy
>means rule over women and nature. Are the two
>institutions at base synonymous? 
>
>Philosophy has mainly ignored the vast realm of
>suffering that has unfolded since it began, in
>division of labor, its long course. Hélène Cixous
>calls the history of philosophy a "chain of fathers."
>Women are as absent from it as suffering, and are
>certainly the closest of kin. 
>
>Camille Paglia, anti-feminist literary theorist,
>meditates thusly on civilization and women: 
>
>When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I
>pause in awe and reverence, as one would for a church
>procession. What power of conception: what
>grandiosity: these cranes tie us to ancient Egypt,
>where monumental architecture was first imagined and
>achieved. If civilization had been left in female
>hands, we would still be living in grass huts.1 
>
>The "glories" of civilization and women’s disinterest
>in them. To some of us the "grass huts" represent not
>taking the wrong path, that of oppression and
>destructiveness. In light of the globally
>metastasizing death-drive of technological
>civilization, if only we still lived in grass huts! 
>
>Women and nature are universally devalued by the
>dominant paradigm and who cannot see what this has
>wrought? Ursula Le Guin gives us a healthy corrective
>to Paglia’s dismissal of both: 
>
>Civilized Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the
>rest is other—outside, below, underneath, subservient.
>I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I
>do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for.
>I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness,
>to be used as I see fit.2 
>
>There are certainly many who believe that early
>civilizations existed that were matriarchal. But no
>anthropologists or archaeologists, feminists included,
>have found evidence of such societies. "The search for
>a genuinely egalitarian, let along matriarchal,
>culture has proved fruitless," concludes Sherry
>Ortner.3 
>
>There was, however, a long span of time when women
>were generally less subject to men, before
>male-defined culture became fixed or universal. Since
>the 1970s anthropologists such as Adrienne Zihlman,
>Nancy Tanner and Frances Dahlberg4 have corrected the
>earlier focus or stereotype of prehistoric "Man the
>Hunter" to that of "Woman the Gatherer." Key here is
>the datum that as a general average, pre-agricultural
>band societies received about 80 percent of their
>sustenance from gathering and 20 percent from hunting.
>It is possible to overstate the hunting/gathering
>distinction and to overlook those groups in which, to
>significant degrees, women have hunted and men have
>gathered.5 But women’s autonomy in foraging societies
>is rooted in the fact that material resources for
>subsistence are equally available to women and men in
>their respective spheres of activity. 
>
>In the context of the generally egalitarian ethos of
>hunter-gatherer or foraging societies, anthropologists
>like Eleanor Leacock, Patricia Draper and Mina
>Caulfield have described a generally equal
>relationship between men and women.6 In such settings
>where the person who procures something also
>distributes it and where women procure about 80
>percent of the sustenance, it is largely women who
>determine band society movements and camp locations.
>Similarly, evidence indicates that both women and men
>made the stone tools used by pre-agricultural
>peoples.7 
>
>With the matrilocal Pueblo, Iroquois, Crow, and other
>American Indian groups, women could terminate a
>marital relationship at any time. Overall, males and
>females in band society move freely and peacefully
>from one band to another as well as into or out of
>relationships.8 According to Rosalind Miles, the men
>not only do not command or exploit women’s labor,
>"they exert little or no control over women’s bodies
>or those of their children, making no fetish of
>virginity or chastity, and making no demands of
>women’s sexual exclusivity."9 Zubeeda Banu Quraishy
>provides an African example: "Mbuti gender
>associations were characterized by harmony and
>cooperation."10 
>
>And yet, one wonders, was the situation really ever
>quite this rosy? Given an apparently universal
>devaluation of women, which varies in its forms but
>not in its essence, the question of when and how it
>was basically otherwise persists. There is a
>fundamental division of social existence according to
>gender, and an obvious hierarchy to this divide. For
>philosopher Jane Flax, the most deep-seated dualisms,
>even including those of subject-object and mind-body,
>are a reflection of gender disunity.11 
>
>(the rest is at
>http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/04/26/4003193
>)