Pop the Left Douglas Lain, Nicholas Pell, C Derick Varn

A discussion of Marx's notion of historical materialism spirals into depression.

(http://publish.blubrry.com/bdata/programs/poptheleft/attach/popleft5.jpg)
John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author.  He is a critic of civilization and especially agriculture and he wants to return to a more primitive collective life.  He advocates the nomadic life of prehistoric hunters and gatherers as a potential future.
Zerzan was the guest on Pop the Left #4 where we discussed the idea of reification and took a close look at Zerzan's own notion of nature.   This month on Pop the Left C Derick Varn and I speak briefly about the Zerzan interview.
Clips from an interview with Steven Vogel on the radio program Against the Grain, of George Bush singing an REM song, and from Monty Python's Life of Brian can be heard in this one, and Varn and I discuss potential future guests.
Nicholas Pell is again absent, but plans to return for a future episode wherein we'll discuss historical materialism.
You can now leave a voicemail message for Pop the Left and participate in the show.  Just head to speakpipe.com/poptheleft and leave us a message.

 

This month both C Derick Varn (skepoet.wordpress.com) and Nicholas Pell (http://nicholaspell.com/) are missing and instead there is a special guest. John Zerzan (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FJohn_Zerzan&ei=ORNKUYHIB6iEjAKznYCwCA&usg=AFQjCNG4hUUEyKkvsh2rNUtuwdood14rFw&bvm=bv.44158598,d.cGE) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author.  He's fairly well known, especially in the Pacific Northwest where I am, and his books about Green Anarchism have been influential.  But we don't really talk about the environment, agriculture, or civilization, but rather I try to explain what I think is Zerzan's conceptual or philosophical mistake.
For Zerzan civilized life is a mediated or alienated life that isn't worth living and his solution is to return to directly lived experience. What I try to point out in my conversation with him is that his solution is a part of the problem.  That is, while he wants to overcome the problem of reification his solution doesn't manage to avoid that mistake.
The word reification means to mistake an abstraction for a physical or empirical object. A reification is not when we see an example of an abstraction in the world, it's not when we take a rubber ball and think of it as an example of roundness, but rather when we take an abstraction to be its own example.  That is, when we think that an abstraction can exist on its own without an example.
There are many ideas that are founded on this mistake.  God, for instance, is the kind of idea that is a good example of a reification. Nature is, similarly, the same kind of idea.
Again, my conversation with John Zerzan wasn't about prehistory or hunters and gatherers or the current ecological problems that are facing us, but was aimed at his concepts.  It was aimed at his idea that we might be able to escape concepts, which I think is his fundamental mistake.

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