MODERN PRIMITIVES  "Modern Primitives": The Accelerating Collision of Past and Future in the Postmodern Era Today, largely thanks to publishers such as Re/Search andLoompanics, Autonomedia, and Amok Press, many people are familiar today withthe "modern primitive" movement. They know that it involves some sort ofstrange juxtaposition of high technology and "low" tribalism, animism, and bodymodification - a kind of 'Technoshamanism,' if you will, at once possessiontrance and kinetic dance. In books like William Gibson's Count Zero ,ultracomplex Artificial Intelligences (AIs) take on the personality of HaitianVoudoun deities, seizing the minds of initiates through neural networks,creating an ersatz technoreligion. The idea of the "primitive" is of course one from anthropology'sabandoned socioevolutionary past. While invented to simply function as adescriptive for temporal phases, it inevitably also functioned as an evaluativeterm, suggesting that those societies to which it was applied were inferior interms of literacy, knowledge, technology, social organization, or moraljudgement - in a word, they lacked 'civilization.' The notion was of courseinescapably ethnocentric, since it assumed that all societies on the planetwere on an undeviating climb toward the standards of Western culture withregards to religion (monotheism), marriage practices (monogramy), economics(the free market), governance (representative democracy), etc. The 'primitive'was at once reviled and romanticized, especially by Romantic artists fascinatedwith the taboo and the exotic, and philosophers swayed by the image of theunfettered Noble Savage. While a more culturally relativist anthropology has sought to cleansethe perjorative ideas associated with 'primitivism,' preferring to describeidiographically rather than evolutionarily the less 'advanced,' pre-modern,indigenous societies of the planet, the notion of the "primitive" remained apowerful one in Western culture, which internalized representations of"primitives" from both within (the Native Americans) and without (Oceanians,Africans, etc.) To many people within Western civilization's orbit, (whichincreasingly encompasses the entire planet), the "primitive" still signifies apremodern, "untainted" alternative to industrialization, capitalism, and theEuropean Enlightenment. It represents a preferred "Golden Age" past, of thingsleft aside in the march of "progress", to which might be juxtaposed a dystopiantechnological future. And, then, of course, there is modernity. What it means to be a modernis still being argued about, as well as whether we have left the condition ofmodernity behind. If anything, modernity was probably the vision that thefuture would be radically different (and most likely better) than the present.Certainly, in the arts, modernity was associated with Futurism, involving apenchant for action, speed, power, abstraction, and change, as well as othermovements in the avant-garde - Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, etc.Modernity basically meant experimentation to many people; a refusal to befettered by conventions of the past, and a demand to shock the morals andtraditions of the bourgeouisie. New territories - the unconscious mind, forexample - were being opened to investigation and creation. Postmodernism, if anything, is in essence a combination of modernityand the premodern - a genre blurring of the abandoned and the untried.In a world where the old (tradition, superstition, folk beliefs, etc.) isincreasingly being abandoned, there can be nothing more new and avant-gardethen to reintroduce it once more... thus the ironic state of postmodernity.There can be no more postmodern movement than that of the "modern primitives,"determined to follow the simultaneous tracks of the past and the future towardtheir inevitable collision. Having at once embraced a mythical "low-tech" pastand a mythical "high-tech" future, the "modern primitives" are preeminentdenizens of the postmodern, cyclical-time era... The "modern primitives" like Stelarc and Fakir Mustafar are perhapsbest known for their use of body distortion, modification (elongation,coloration, etc.), and piercing. Many moderns were familiar (from visualanthropology) with the practices found in less 'civilized' cultures such asfootbinding, elongating the neck or skull, or ritual incision. Bodymanipulation is not anything alien to modernity, with its use of moreantiseptic and clinical plastic surgery, but then neither is tatooing orpiercing either. Moderns never gave up the urge to inscribe and mark the body,or to alter and distort its features... indeed, Foucault's biopolitics suggeststhat a preeminent feature of modernity was the pursuit of unnattainable somaticnorms, especially for women. Still, many people see body marking (tatooing) astransgressive, exotic, and 'primitive,' and this is one reason why modernprimitivies embrace it as a custom. What does make the modern primitive movement unusual is its pursuit ofsensation. Borrowing from the S & M sexual subculture, the modernprimitives suggest that one of the effects of modernization andindustrialization has been psychic numbing. People no longer know eitherauthentic pleasure or pain, and have forgotten the curious neurochemical waysin which they are interwoven. Piercing is more than just inscription; piercingof the genitals or other sensitive areas of the body means pain,especially during sexual intercourse... but it is a pain that becomes part ofthe ecstasy for ModPrims... there is this idea of a knowing throughpain which modernity has forgotten. When Mustafar or Stelarc hang themselves from hooks, or piercethemselves with sharp painful implements, they are only duplicating a practicefound all over the world. It is a key ritual for many "primitive" and othersocieties for the person to go into trance and to demonstrate their"absorbtion" by the divine through the negation of pain and injury. TheModPrims claim that their performances are a pursuit of transcendence, provingthe ability of the mind to go beyond the taxings and limitations of the body.Stelarc calls himself a "Cyberhuman," pointing to his belief that the future ofhuman evolution toward a greater interconnection of men and machines willrequire humankind's mastery over (rather than suppression of) passion,suffering, and pain. Futher, within the ModPrim movement, there is this sort of obsessionover technological invasion of the body, through prosthetics, geneticmodification, implants, and so on. This bodily invasion is at once feared (as acolonization by capital) and desired (by permitting people to directly neurallylink into the "consensual hallucination" of Gibson's Virtual Reality.) The bodyis seen as information (DNA provides the 'code') and its invasion as either'scrambling' (through viruses, cancer, etc.) or 'purification' (by removing'noise' or 'distortion.') The technological modification of the body is seen asa reworking of the shamanic 'deconstruction' of a past era, where the shaman istorn apart by the gods of his tribe, and then his bones and flesh are replacedwith quartz or fire or something else... The limitations of the body need not be obeyed. It can be made tolive longer, or be healthier, through artificial organs and nanotech 'magicbullets.' It can be made stronger and more dextrous through steroids andenhancing nervous signal transmission. The mind can be extended as well, itsmemory or perceptions or intelligence increased. The "primitive man's" desireto imitate and become like his gods can be met. But ModPrims also know thatthere is the danger of forgetting the body as well - that in cyberspace, peoplewill no longer be "in tune" with their tangible physicality... thus they pushfor ways in which the "feedback" from the Matrix will be at once tactile andvisual... ModPrims also embrace the rave as a sign of the uniting of past andfuture. The rave is at once 'primitive,' with its gathering of 'tribes' ofyoung people for the experience of Levy-Bruhl 'participation mystique' throughkinetics and MDMA (Ecstasy), and 'futuristic' (or modern) with its use ofdigitally sampled and remixed music, laser and light effects, and multimediaexpositions. Ravers at once dress in way that signifies past and future -piercing their ears with computer chips, wearing 70s (or earlier) clothes withfuturistic hologram jewelry, combining the fashion of folk and punk. Theyconsider themselves the heirs of the 60s counterculture, and also itsantithesis, since they reject its anti-technology, pro-natural, 'peace andharmony,' and idealist emphases for a more pragmatist, aggressive, andtechno-positive viewpoint... to the raver, whether a drug is synthetic ororganic is besides the point. Besides raves and piercing, ModPrims are perhaps best known for theirattempts at juxtaposing magick and science. Publications like Virus 23 juxtapose Crowleyan occultism with chaos theory, Neo-Paganism & Wicca withmemetics and information theory, and use of ancient hallucinogens with thelatest findings in neuroscience. Shamanism is shown to have a basis in quantummechanics, and Hermeticism in astrophysical cosmology. Fringe sciencepublications, full of diagrams of Tesla machines, antigravity motors, UFOpropulsion systems, free energy devices, perpetual motion machines, andradionic/psychotronic boxes, combine at once the impossible fascinations ofpast eras with the latest technological principles... Computer hackers often call themselves "wizards," for good reason.Abstruse computer programs are not all that dissimilar from blasphemousincantations; electrical logic diagrams often look like mystical Tables ofCorrespondences from olden times; complex systems are inevitably suspect to theinterference of unguessable entities variously called "bugs," "glitches," or"gremlins." The technoshaman/computer hacker knows that he is part of an elitewhose knowledge is mystifyingly undecipherable to the general public, and thatsociety has placed an almost religious faith in the power of computers to solvethe problems of society, from traffic routing and personal communications, topsychiatric diagnosis and aiding athletic performance... The ModPrims eagerly embrace technoshamans like Timothy Leary, JohnLilly, Terrence McKenna, and Jose Arguelles. The I Ching really becomes acomputer code, connected to the rhythms of history and the codons of the DNAsequence. The hallucinogenic mushroom really becomes an extraterrestrialcolonizing spore, seeking to link human consciousness with its cosmic roots.The use of mystical drugs like LSD really becomes a means to activate normallydormant "circuits" within the "biocomputer" known as the brain, thus making"metaprogramming" possible. Human-animal communication becomes at once atechnological duty, and a necessity for realizing the interconnectedness of"Gaia," or the collective identity created by organic life on the planet... The ModPrims themselves point to the collision of the past andfuture. Reading McKenna, they point to the cycles of history, and the way inwhich many linear trends (scientific invention, etc.) are reaching bottleneckpoints where they may accelerate exponentially (this being thought to be"TimeWave Zero," or the "Omega Point.") The Principia Cybernetica Newsletteradvances the idea that the new webs of telecommunications networks are creatinga "global brain" in which humans are the individual neurons. Others suggestthat the Human Genome project may unlock the means for humanity's next greatevolutionary advance. Many ModPrims think that we have passed out of linear,past-to-future, historical time, and entered some other new kind of cyclicaltime or maybe even the "end of history"... People interested in materialist analyses of culture wonder whetherthis efflorescence of modern primitivism, with its explicit rejection of oldernotions of linear progress and evolution, has anything to do with the changingmaterial basis of culture. Has the fact that we have entered a post-industrial,service/information economy, 'disconnected' from material production because ofautomation and other forces, similarly 'disconnected' people from the idea of arational, orderly march of time? Such a sense of time was essential toindustrialism, in which time was money and the Puritan criterion beyond allothers was time-efficiency, e.g. not 'slacking' or 'wasting time.' In his book "Time Wars," Jeremy Rifkin suggests that many of theconflicts between groups may have been over competing notions of time. Rifkinsees the conflict of our era as being between 'industrial' time, which isindividualistic, atomistic, quantitative, utilitarian, artificial(clock-based), centralized, and mechanistic; and what might be called'postindustrial' time, which is communitarian, participatory, qualitative,empathetic, rhythmic, cyclical, decentralized, and organic. From the'industrial' viewpoint, time is a resource for the progressive creation ofwealth, which is not to be squandered. Perhaps from the 'postindustrial'viewpoint, time is a resource for human lives and experiences... recognizingentropy, the person living in 'postindustrial' time knows that material'progress' is not indefinite or without external cost. I would suggest that the way ModPrims can perhaps best be understoodare as people living in a different time-order or time-value-system. Thisideological shift is partly due to the transition of people toward apost-industrial economy, where the previous system of linear industrial time nolonger makes sense. For them, there is no contradiction between past andfuture. If time is a circle, then of course past and future are heading towardtheir point of uniting. In the postmodern world of the ModPrims, the "moderns"have much to learn from the ecological sense of interconnectedness of the"primitives," and vice versa, the "prims" can learn from the experimentalsensibility of the "mods." Together, they can perhaps turn the spiral of timeback to its point of origin, at a higher level of existence. Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1) Return to CyberAnthropology |
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