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Interestingly, one very good way of losing the respect of the people you are talking to is to suggest that if they do not think as you do that they are somehow "reading it wrong". In a discussion about the meaninglessness of language, this is obviously extra funny.
So, reading the text or the author... I think in some cases it is useful to have the first idea about an author, where they are coming from and where their thinking tends when looking at a text. I'm not sure where you got this article from or how familiar you are with the Zerzan's work.
The most obvious difference< I think, between Zerzan's position and Hyatt or Crowley's is that Hyatt and Crowley are suggesting presumably, if their arguments mirror yours, that there are times when freeing oneself of the structures of language through ritualistic processes is useful, whereas Zerzan is denying the validity of writing, and of speech, as a worthwhile contributor to the discourses we should be having, which are (if you read a bit more Zerzan) concerned with the successful hunting and gathering of food. Thus:
Words bespeak a sadness; they are used to soak up the emptiness of unbridled time. We have all had that desire to go further, deeper than words, the feeling of wanting only to be done with all the talk, knowing that being allowed to live coherently erases the need to formulate coherence.
There is a profound truth to the notion that "lovers need no words." The point is that we must have a world of lovers, a world of the face-to-face, in which even names can be forgotten, a world which knows that enchantment is the opposite of ignorance. Only a politics that undoes language and time and is thus visionary to the point of voluptuousness has any meaning.
That is, *all* words are products of an unnatural and unreasonable desire to communicate about stuff that should not need communication about.
I'm not sure that's what you're aiming for. Then again, I'm pretty suspicious of your dualistic critique of "being" and "rationality":
they are teaching you to internalise your experience without soul without the alive feeling of being, reducing your humanity to mere rationality and intellectualism
Even Zerzan would, I think, agree that right at this moment in human history it is necessary to provide critique of reason in order ultimately to abolish it - and thus that self is at present tied _to_ reason. Mind you, he's a big fan of the political theory of the Unabomber as well, so who knows? Tell Crowley that he had to free himself of language and he might not unreasonably ask you what he would then produce and sell. You can't have averbal society with verbal mechanisms. |
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