Anthropologists, such as Jack Goody, or thinkers like John Zerzan or Walter Ong, have traced the development of written language to the beginnings of agricultural civilisation, which, in order to succeed in its premise of killing competition and of using the world and its inhabitants (plants, animals and humans) as resources and belongings, demanded new techniques (and technologies) to realise (i.e. make real and material) socio-economic inequalities. Writing down debts was the first revolutionary technology used to ensure that some will rise in power and riches over others. Literacy was thus imbued with authority to overpower the culture of mutual aid and freedom prevalent in the wild and among “savages” where everything belonged to all persons and species. Today, Ong says, literacy has become a structural element in the foundation of our knowledge, ingrained so deep that it has become impossible to view human relations with each other and the world outside of its prism. Even our relationship with our own children now takes place primarily through books and films (films are also based on the literate aspect of script-writing). Hence, there is an obsession with childhood literacy and the plethora of children’s books. In other words, at its root, literacy contains the seeds of violence and which, Zerzan, says can be traced back to the origins of symbolic thought which is necessarily based on separation or alienation of the subject from the real object and of the real object from its symbol.
I propose to discuss the structural violence of literate culture taking children’s books and their depiction of the “nature” of people and children, pedagogies, and familial relations, for example: in Caillou, Winnie the Pooh, Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, or Harry Potter and propose to examine whether it might be possible to use this, inherently violent, medium of writing and publishing to depict a peaceful world, such as the anarcho-primitivist Moomintroll Valley or a society based on mutual aid and cooperation such as Dunno and Friends.
I gave this talk on 1st October 2009 during the following course:
EDEC 249: Global Education and Social Justice (3 credits)
course description:
Curriculum and Instruction: A cross-curricular, interdisciplinary approach to teaching/creating learning experiences for students. It will foster critical thinking and nurture lifelong global understanding, active engagement and participation in relation to questions of social, economic, and environmental justice, by infusing these issues in the classroom.
Abstract for a paper presented at the Masking and Unmasking interdisciplinary conference, Duke University, 12th September 2008:
Architecture, or the modification of one’s environment to construct shelter, dwelling or home, is contingent on the philosophical position that ultimately reveals and/or conceals the knowledge that generates cultural dispositions. In this paper, I present three literary examples of how architecture can expose the paradigms for the organisation of living beings and space, which can reveal or conceal how a people define themselves and their resources.
Tove Jansson, a Swedish author from Finland, presents a wide range of interaction with the environment and, in the words of anthropologist Tim Ingold, ways of dwelling in the world rather than inhabiting a confined and privatised/divided space. In her Moomin books, architectural practice is not static but, like entropy, is subject to the evolution of living and non-living matter that may use other living or non-living matter to dwell with/in. A Soviet author, Nikolai Nosov, in his trilogy on Mites in a Flower Town, presents architecture as artistic, technological yet organic, which connects the private, social, and natural worlds and reveals their political/economic models: Soviet, capitalist, utopian. On the other hand, A.A.Milne’s use of space in “100 Aker Wood” reveals the underlying monarchical and imperialist social relations, distribution of resources and the organisation of private and public space.
The three examples of architecture point to the basic knowledge underlying the definitions of subject and object that children uncover in their books.
My poem was inspired by Elena Korniakova and Vesta Korniakova’s art. Elena found that the Native American legends on the birth of the world where a woman lands from the sky on a timeless turtle echoed the Ukrainian pagan myths about the birth, Mother Earth (BOGINYA-BEREGINYA), a magic tree, and seeds of life. When I met Lena, she had already meticulously constructed puppets from thread and lace, animated them, and worked out the music. I wrote the poems in Russian and English. Unfortunately, they had to be cut short because of the timeframe of the film. Artem Beketov provided his studio to record my reading of the poems and worked out the final sound editing. The film was chosen at the international film festival, EVORA-2005, in Portugal where it made its debut.
To John Zerzan, whose ability for empathy took him beyond the symbolic of children’s books and propaganda, who even as a child knew the pain endured by Thomas the Tank Engine as he was being domesticated, his will broken – I dedicate this translation to John and to all who have not wasted their spring, summer, or life.
John Zerzan is one of the most interesting contemporary thinkers in the United States, at least. Like everything else in life, in order to fully appreciate Zerzan’s contribution to epistemology or the philosophy of civilisation, first, one has to read his work and hear his conferences – for, here, I only present my personal interpretation of his theory – and second, consider the context through which his voice and energy resonate. His contribution becomes even more impressive in light of the processes of Western institutionalisation of Thought and commodification of Knowledge – a totalitarian context that tolerates no challenge (philosophical or otherwise) that would threaten “the American way of life”.
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BOOKS:
Children's Literature, Domestication, and Social Foundation:
Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness (Routledge, December 18th 2014)
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