Obituary

JOHN MOORE October 2002 Anarcho-Primitivist Theorist and Poet JOHN MOORE died just 12 days after the London Anarchist Bookfair, at the end of October 2002. John was the author of Anarchy and Ecstasy, Love Bite, The Primitivist Primer, and The Book of Levelling. His Poetry, Revolt, Renewal featured in the anarchist bookfair. During the 1980s, John worked at the Kingston Upon Thames Polytechnic, and then latterly at the University of Luton. He was a member of the editorial board of the Anarchist Studies journal. John Moore's tragic and sudden early death at the age of 44, has left the anarchist movement that much poorer, and made many of us ponder our own mortality. John Moore's best known work is perhaps Anarchy and Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Days [1]. His work here is a fusion of anthropology, with poetic myth-making, interpreted and reinterpreted within a framework informed by, and thoroughly infused with contemporary critical theory. Nietzsche was one influence. Beyond this, Fredy Perlman [2] and the anarcho-primitivism of the early 1980s Fifth Estate newspaper from Detroit were also formative. John Moore sought to recast anarchism in a spiritual dimension, and therein lay the nub of his problem. In his essay on Milton and the expulsion from paradise, he said "Religious issues constitute a vacuum at the centre of anarchism which limits its appeal and cogency" [3]. Moore calls for anarchists to reclaim spirituality. This is, to put it mildly, a problematic direction. In Eversion Mysteries he writes of the Mysteries, ancient religious rites. Zen was interesting, hallucinogenics, kundalini, tantra. Perhaps the clearest statement of his overall position is found in his Bewilderness essay. Wilderness, "self-willed land" is set in dialectical opposition to the order and control enforced in civilization. Moore challenges the value judgement which equates wilderness with evil. Instead, he suggests that it is numinous. Wilderness is both a location, and a condition, "a state inhabited by willful, uncontrollable natural energies. In such states, humans surrendered their individuality, renounced personal volition to the will-of-the-land, and merged individuated desire with the expansive needs of the wild" [4]. Thus, the New Age would make a strong claim of influence on him. I venture to suggest that this aspect of John Moore's work will not wear well with the passage of time. Even in his own day, it proved a barrier to the acceptance of his writing. There is a sense in which this wilderness stuff is sinking in nothingness, or as some would respond to it, like "knitting with lentils". Were he to stand on top of the remotest part of Saddleworth Moor, or alone on the deck of a ship in mid Atlantic, his point of view would probably change on this. This points us towards the weakness of Primitivism, its unreality. We value our warm coats, central heating and the distinctive places we visit too much to reject them. It is not a live option, nor is it a productive way of thinking. In Lovebite: Mythography and the Semiotics of Culture (1990) John Moore uses the fairy story of Little Red Riding Hood to invert the patrician, authoritarian myth making of Freud's Primal Scene, in Totem and Taboo. Instead, he posits matriarchy. From this he moves on to the myth of the "Cannibal Monster" as disclosed by Tenskwatawa in 1813. Part of what Moore is about relates to the matter of alienation. 'Liberal' and 'reformist' were two of his bogey words. Some of this turns back inwards against himself, on his own activity as a thinker and writer. Along with the later Lewis Mumford of The Pentagon of Power [5] and of course, Perlman, we find that, according to Moore the poetic register, within civilization, has become atrophied. Language itself has turned to machinery. "The mechanical style, which began in the counting house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines". This is an illuminating point of view for an academic to express. It would be interesting to know which of the academics and divines he refers to here, but it is part of the measure of Moore that he does not go on to name names. Much of Moore's intellectual adulation was directed towards the North American continent, but as is so often the case with these things, his love was not reciprocated. Exhibit One here was the hostile review of Lovebite written by one "Debye Highmountain", published in Fifth Estate, Summer 1991. Moore's response to this [6] exposed the essentially Postmodern core to his thinking: "Here's the real source of my disappointment with the review: It doesn't notice what I'm trying to do with form, style, and language". As with Lovebite itself, it is all about language: 'I'm trying to push back the boundaries of what constitutes anarchic textuality". Somewhat floundering in his Postmodernism, Moore appealed to the sages: "Foregrounding the constructed nature of the text exposes the artificial nature of all ideological representation and liberates those suppressed energies delimited by Barthes, Derrida and Kristeva". John Moore then went on to lay his full Postmodern orthodoxy on the line: "Unlike many Fifth Estate writers, I don't believe that one can unproblematically engage with primal lifeways through (anthropological or any other) discourse. Due to the self-reflexive nature of discourse, it remains impossible to engage directly with referents ('the world out there') All we do is allow our texts to engage in an intertextual dialogue with one another. Meaning remains deferred. The referent always remains radically other" [7] Well enough, we see the weakness of Moore here. Postmodernism is a false position, for as Genoa and the 11th September indicate; life is for real and life is in earnest, 'the world out there' intrudes, in the form of events, conflicts, capitalism, government, food shortages, disaster, disease and injustice - it is our task to work at this, to knock up against them, to fight injustice, even dare, it be suggested, to try to change things for the better. We might not want to engage with 'referents', but these have a nasty habit of turning round and kicking us in the teeth. This 'world out there' is a cruel place, but one which the Postmodernist cannot ultimately evade with his or her textual games. Exhibit Two here is a more general dispute. After the transatlantic conflict in Fifth Estate, Moore and the leading American Primitivist John Zerzan differed over art; Moore believing it to be useful, Zerzan condemning it [8]. Thus Moore quarrelled with both strands of North American Primitivism, a fact which ensured his work was less well known than it deserved. Moore's poetry demonstrates his identification with aesthetics, his final position on art thus, indicative of his rejection of direct engagement in politics, and in my opinion a position of evasion: "And the discourses and practices of art, it seems to me, have potential in terms of developing such [anarchist] epistemologies, and far more possibilities for forwarding the anarchist struggle than political discourse" [9]. In the mid 1990s, Moore went on to write The Primitivist Primer [10] which is perhaps the best and clearest short outline of what anarcho-primitivism was. Even by this time, the cracks were starting to show. The Primitivist Network got lost somewhere in the primal mists. A Primitivist journal The Missing Link failed to take off. 'Primitivism', even as a label, was found to be 'inconvenient', and Moore found himself forever denying that he was making a call for a return to the stone age. He toyed with the idea of relaunching the brand as 'anarcho-futurism', taking up this theme found in his own work, that time is circular or cyclic, not linear. Towards the end of the decade, his interview with John Filis [9] shows Moore's frustration with this failure. "...this is not my project at all". This interview also reiterated his commitment to Postmodern orthodoxy. Setting aside the long running, but essentially cordial spat with Brian Morris about the Enlightenment, and the way he was attacked by the late Nicholas Walter, the last controversy John Moore was involved in which I wish to discuss here, and Exhibit Three, concerned the article Swamp Fever by David Watson [11]. Again, this was indicative of his unrequited love for the USA. Much of this article was useful analysis, but part of it a sectarian attack against Moore, denying that there ever was any coherent, organised Primitivist school or tendency based around Fifth Estate in Detroit during the Perlman years. Moore's Primitivist Primer was attacked for the crime of lese majesty, because it "borders on an attempt to codify a primitivist taxonomy". Watson accused Moore of trying to be the founder of a Primitivist movement. In my opinion, Watson was unfair on John Moore here. From this side of the Atlantic, this looked like sour grapes, yet another clash of the egos. It was unworthy of the rest of the Swamp Fever piece. Ironically, Watson's article is elsewhere [12] cited as marking the beginning of the decline of Primitivism. If origins are all important, and Primitivism, in its 'origins' did not, and never could hold together, then the raft breaks apart into disconnected straws mid Atlantic. So, how to sum up the work of John Moore? There seems a savage and distressing irony in Britain's leading Primitivist dying while running for a bus. I think we are to understand him as fundamentally a Postmodernist, a New-Ager, searching for a novel and distinctive mode of expressing himself. He did not find it, which leaves us with a sense of incompleteness when we think about him. This is a pity. - STEVE BOOTH REFERENCES [1] John Moore Anarchy and Ecstasy: Visions of Halcyon Days, Aporia Press, 1989. [2] Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story: Against Leviathan, Black and Red, Detroit, 1983. [3] Anarchy and Ecstasy, page 10. [4] ibid, page 21. [5] Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, Secker and Warburg, NY 1964, 1970 [6] Fifth Estate, Winter 1992, page 27. [7] For more discussion of John Moore, and the relationship between Primitivism and Postmodernism, see my Primitivism: An Illusion With No Future at http://www.greenanarchist.org.uk/Prim.htm & here on the Blue site [as "The Primitivist Illusion"]. [8] see John Zerzan, The Case Against Art eg. [9] Moore / John Filis interview at www.primitivism.com [10] John Moore, "Primitivist Primer", published in Green Anarchist 47 / 48, Summer 1997, and many other places, often on the internet. [11] David Watson, Fifth Estate, Autumn 1997, page 15 ff. [12] Jason McQuinn, "Why I Am Not A Primitivst", Anarchy A Journal Of Desire Armed, Spring / Summer 2001.