FROM REBEL TO LIBERAL, A CRITIQUE OF PRIMAL ANARCHY

Kevin Tucker's Primal Anarchy is up to the butcher table in Voice of Failure's new "From Rebel to Liberal", which critiques the deployment of Primal Anarchy by anarcho-primitivist's former "primary proponent."

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Below are selections from the

Introduction

… In a way, what follows is a sort of Mystery Science Theater-style critique. That is, I often let Tucker speak for himself and simply point out the thought you felt caught in your throat. I’m far less interested in developing any ideas here than I am in walking you through, hopefully with some chuckles, the menagerie of a moderately equipped thinker taking on a comprehensive encapsulation of all things.

Part 1

…Tucker spends some time on brain size, which is a real yawn since he only seeks to universalize even difference there. You have to understand that Tucker is an ideological egalitarian, everything must be of the same value. In his anthropology, he is searching for evenness. In his ecology he searches for similitude. For Tucker it will always be better to stretch the cognitive framework of value and utility across everything. Tucker hates uniqueness because he sees all difference as an offense to the equality which is in everything. Cultural materialism is comforting to him because it comprehends for him (through abstract objective measurements and base distortions) all the difference and equalizes it. This is essentially an enlightenment ideology, no matter the appearance of rebellion. It is the solidification of a primal essence that ultimately offends the primitive for taking its depth to be effable. Tucker couldn’t find solace in even wildness, needing to write a screed which clarifies and distills it….

Part 2

…The problem with accounting for our inability to receive messages by invoking alienation is that it overlooks the most blatant and fundamental part of any such alienation (if we are to call it that). It is not uncommon to find avowed “naturalists” and even “primitivists” who cannot be quiet in the woods, who miss basic features of an area, who stomp on mushrooms because they were invisible, who agonize over the pedantic features of some tree only to discover they missed the black snake stuck to the side of it. That is to say, if one problematizes alienation yet stays within a culture which must assign value to every God Damn Thing, the apparent value of all things now brought into view begins to flower before our eyes. Clearly, this value was not inherent, but the depth of conditioning allows one to immediately think that because one sees something for the first time it arrived for us -- that we can be the assigners of a novel value. They too can serve. In this way we become like minor gods who have no subjects but have divine power nonetheless. Here also lies the tragedy of ecological science but that will have to wait for another time. …

Part 3

Gilles Deleuze (I thought I’d bring him up just so Tucker could point out how “post-modern” his critic was) said of Michel Foucault that there were two Foucaults. There was the one who wrote and dedicated himself to an idiosyncratic accuracy, and another, one who spoke freely and politically in interviews often in seemingly contradictory terms. Tucker, I would guess but I don’t really know, doesn’t like Foucault (probably because human nature is only a punch line for Foucault). But perhaps Tucker inherited a bit of that critical theory lineage and devised for himself two theoretical images: The Legion and The Prophet. When Tucker is Legion, he is seemingly everywhere. Tucker hates the internet and wishes us off of it (see “The Suffocating Void”, Black and Green Review 1) but he believes in a homeopathic approach to this metaphorical ailment. Doses of Tucker’s reasoning must be proliferated across all social media platforms to bring people to their senses. Here he is legion: everywhere, consistently making sure he keeps up with “reality” and compensates his theory at pace with every development in the media and every evocation of new cultural topic. Then there is the contemplative Tucker, the experienced rewilder, the receiver of messages, the Prophet of redemption. Here Tucker makes the same kind of specious arguments but uses lots of quotes (a lot of which he seems to have not quite understood) and citations. But, most importantly, here he can let himself serve as the exception, he can let his personal experience fuel his unconsciously (?) egoistic approach and confirm as depth what is actually inevitable gaps in his comprehensive theory….

Part 4

…Tucker uses a white magic, a tautological illusion whereby all things lead to one core and thus all spirals are actually loops which always return to a fundamental which itself is nothing but a pathetic compensation that gives rebellion a utility. He seeks to develop a theory which captures all phenomena and forces them to nullity. Tragically, it is this force which is much closer to the imperative of civilizational spread than physical violence – this temptation to universal homogenization is the tautological spell of value cast across the world. It is why rebellion has been a failure. It is why revolution is nothing but a hidden confession in belief in this circular base theology. …

Source: From Rebel to Liberal, A Critique of Primal Anarchy | anarchistnews.org