@book{bey2003t,
title={T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism},
author={Bey, H.},
isbn={9781570271519},
lccn={93207439},
series={Autonomedia New Autonomy Series},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=6nRhsgf8FU0C},
year={2003},
publisher={Autonomedia}
}
In open library.
Content warning: pederasty.
My highlights:
Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.
Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.
There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin — your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.
Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Naked for a sign. Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
If it does not change someone’s life (aside from the artist) it fails. The Poetic Terrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don’t stick around to argue, don’t be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives — but don’t be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don’t get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
AmourFou doesn’t want to join anyone’s army, it takes no part in the Gender Wars, it is bored by equal opportunity employment (in fact it refuses to work for a living), it doesn’t complain, doesn’t explain, never votes & never pays taxes.
No question of writing to Wild Children. They think in images — prose is for them a code not yet fully digested & ossified, just as for us never fully trusted. And yet the denizens of these inferior jerkwater dimensions truly believe they control the destinies of Wild Children — & down here, such vicious beliefs actually sculpt most of the substance of happenstance. The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing are the same act — these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.
So get this: our realization, our liberation depends on theirs — not because we ape the Family, those “misers of love” who hold hostages for a banal future, nor the State which schools us all to sink beneath the event-horizon of a tedious “usefulness” — no — but because we & they, the wild ones, are images of each other, linked & bordered by that silver chain which defines the pale of sensuality, transgression & vision.
We share the same enemies & our means of triumphant escape are also the same: a delirious & obsessive play, powered by the spectral brilliance of the wolves & their children.
Those who cannot feel baraka cannot know the caress of the world.
The pagan body becomes a Court of Angels who all perceive this place — this very grove — as paradise. Paganism has not yet invented laws — only virtues. No priestcraft, no theology or metaphysics or morality — but a universal shamanism in which no one attains real humanity without a vision.
From one point of view ontological anarchism is extremely bare, stripped of all qualities & possessions, poor as CHAOS itself.
Sabotage is the dark side of Poetic Terrorism — creation-through-destruction — but it cannot serve any Party, nor any nihilism, nor even art itself. Just as the banishment of illusion enhances awareness, so the demolition of aesthetic blight sweetens the air of the world of discourse, of the Other. Art Sabotage serves only consciousness, attentiveness, awakeness. Seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & profit by delusion. Malign Ideas can be assaulted through the artifacts they generate.
To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent Poetic Terrorism — but to destroy the money would have been good Art Sabotage. Galleries turn beauty into a commodity but banks transmute Imagination into feces and debt. Wouldn’t the world gain a degree of beauty with each bank that could be made to tremble…or fall?
When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart’s longing for grace.
Pyrotechnics: Invented by the chinese but never developed for war — a fine example of Poetic Terrorism. A weapon used to trigger aesthetic shock rather than kill. Gunpowder more useful to frighten malign demons, delight children, fill the air with brave & risky-smelling haze.
Chaos is Hun Tun, Emperor of the Center. One day the South Sea, Emperor Shu, & the North Sea, Emperor Hu (shu hu = lightning) paid a visit to Hun Tun, who always treated them well. Wishing to repay his kindness they said, “All beings have seven orifices for seeing, hearing, eating, shitting, etc. — but poor old Hun Tun has none! Let’s drill some into him!” So they did — one orifice a day — till on the seventh day, Chaos died.
But…Chaos is also an enormous chicken’s egg. Inside it P’an-Ku is born & grows for 18,000 years — at last the egg opens up, splits into sky & earth, yang & yin. Now P’an-Ku grows into a column that holds up the universe — or else he becomes the universe (breath ⇒wind, eyes ⇒sun & moon, blood & humors ⇒rivers & seas, hair & lashes ⇒stars & planets, sperm ⇒pearls, marrow ⇒jade, his fleas ⇒human beings, etc.)
Things are what they are spontaneously, not caused by something else. Everything is natural & does not know why it is so. “Heaven and Earth,” says Chuang Tzu, “were born at the same time I was, & the 10,000 things are one with me.” Chaos never died.
For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era — we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all — a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence — shadow-realm of print, or of abstract thought — world without risk or eros. If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. Not stupid libertinage but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes for love. America has freedom of speech because all words are considered equally vapid.
As soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you — so don’t play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr — accept the fact that you’re a criminal & be prepared to act like one.
Paradox: to embrace Chaos is not to slide toward entropy but to emerge into an energy like stars, a pattern of instantaneous grace — a spontaneous organic order. Chaos comes Eros — the principle of order implicit in the nothingness of the unqualified One. Love is structure, system, the only code untainted by slavery & drugged sleep. Take the risk, dance before you calcify.
Money is a lie — this adventure must be feasible without it. Booty & pillage should be spent before it turns back into dust. Money wasted on beauty will be alchemically transmuted into elixir. Stolen watermelon tastes sweeter.
The universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity — those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity — those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men’s eyes. Incremental openings of perception gradually banish the false selves.
Sorcery works at creating around itself a psychic/physical space or openings into a space of untrammeled expression — the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic sphere. This involves the manipulation of symbols (which are also things) & of people (who are also symbolic). Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa — but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature — it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. Where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
The A.O.A. declares itself officially bored with the End of the World. The canonical version has been used since 1945 to keep us cowering in fear of Mutual Assured Destruction & in snivelling servitude to our super-hero politicians. What does it mean that we have invented a way to destroy all life on Earth? Nothing much. We have dreamed this as an escape from the contemplation of our own individual deaths.
Remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos identifies with tao, beyond both yin-as-entropy & yang-as-energy, more a principle of continual creation than of any nihil, void in the sense of potentia, not exhaustion. (Chaos as the “sum of all orders.”).
Self-mutilating “performance” artists strike us as banal & stupid — their art makes everyone more unhappy. What kind of cockroach-brained Art creeps cooked up this apocalypse stew?
All the faculties, all the senses belong to us as our property — both heart & head, intellect & spirit, body & soul. Ours is no art of mutilation but of excess, superabundance, amazement.
(Criticism becomes direct action in an anarchist context.)
I want no mundane police — I want no cosmic axe-murderers either; no TV chainsaw massacres, no sensitive poststructuralist novels about necrophilia. We support artists who use terrifying material in some “higher cause” — who use loving/sexual material of any kind, however shocking or illegal — who use their anger & disgust & their true desires to lurch toward self-realization & beauty & adventure. Even if it’s violent & abrasive, anyone with a vestigial 3rd eye can see the differences between revolutionary pro-life art & reactionary pro-death art.
The man who invented aikido was a samurai who became a pacifist & refused to fight for Japanese imperialism. He became a hermit, lived on a mountain sitting under a tree. One day a former fellow-officer came to visit him & accused him of betrayal, cowardice, etc. The hermit said nothing, but kept on sitting — & the officer fell into a rage, drew his sword, & struck. Spontaneously the unarmed master disarmed the officer & returned his sword. Again & again the officer tried to kill, using every subtle kata in his repertoire — but out of his empty mind the hermit each time invented a new way to disarm him. The officer of course became his first disciple. Later, they learned how to dodge bullets. A totally non-violent way of fighting — war without murder, “the sword of life” rather than death.
Conspiracy of artists, anonymous as any mad bombers, but aimed toward an act of gratuitous generosity rather than violence — at the millennium rather than the apocalypse — or rather, aimed at a present moment of aesthetic shock in the service of realization & liberation. Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.
The Gnostic perfecti (radical dualists) starved themselves to death to escape the body & return to the pleroma of pure light. To evade the evils of the flesh — murder, war, famine, greed — paradoxically only one path remains: murder of one’s own body, war on the flesh, famine unto death, greed for salvation. The radical monists however (Ismailis, Ranters, Antinomians) consider that body & spirit are one, that the same spirit which pervades a black stone also infuses the flesh with its light; that all lives & all is life. Paradoxically, the monist path also cannot be followed without some sort of “murder, war, famine, greed”: the transformation of death into life (food, negentropy) — war against the Empire of Lies — “fasting of the soul,” or renunciation of the Lie, of all that is not life — & greed for life itself, the absolute power of desire.
Give each of these four terms a different mask of language. Masked, ritualized, realized as art, the terms take on their dark beauty, their “Black Light.” Instead of murder say the hunt, both the killing & eating of flesh & the way of Venus, of desire. Instead of war say insurrection, the eternal rebel, the dark one who uncovers light. Instead of greed say yearning, unconquerable desire, mad love. Instead of famine speak of wholeness, plenty, superabundance, generosity of the self which spirals outward toward the Other.
The oldest mythology makes Eros the firstborn of Chaos.
BABYLON has told us that our flesh is filth — with this device & the promise of salvation it enslaved us. But — if the flesh is already “saved,” already light — if even consciousness itself is a kind of flesh, a palpable & simultaneous living aether — then we need no power to intercede for us. The artist possesses the dance of masks, the total radicalization of language, the invention of a “Poetic Terrorism” which will strike not at living beings but at malign ideas, dead-weights on the coffin-lid of our desires. The architecture of suffocation and paralysis will be blown up. only by our total celebration of everything — even darkness.
We have no quarrel with the concept of culture — including technology; for us the problem begins with civilization. What we like about Paleolithic life, the elegant laziness of hunter/gatherer society, the 2-hour workday, the obsession with art, dance, poetry & amorousness, the “democratization of shamanism,” the cultivation of perception — in short, culture. What we dislike about civilization “Agricultural Revolution”; the emergence of caste; the City & its cult of hieratic control (“Babylon”); slavery; dogma; imperialism (“Rome”). The suppression of sexuality in “work” under the aegis of “authority.” “The Empire never ended.
Post-agricultural, post-industrial, “Zerowork,” nomadic. All our pleasures & self-disciplines belong to us by Nature. These technologies in themselves provide no “determined” guarantee of their liberatory use.
Ontological Anarchy retains its affection for Luddism as a tactic: if a given technology, no matter how admirable in potentia (in the future), is used to oppress me here & now, then I must either wield the weapon of sabotage or else seize the means of production (or perhaps more importantly the means of communication). We’re slaves of neither our genes nor our machines. What is “natural” is what we imagine & create. “Nature has no Laws — only habits.” We demand decadence without sickness, & health without boredom!
A.O.A. gives unqualified support to all indigenous & tribal peoples in their struggle for complete autonomy. As Rootless Cosmopolitans we lay claim to all the beauties of the past, of the orient, of tribal societies — all this must & can be ours, even the treasuries of the Empire: ours to share. And at the same time we demand a technology which transcends agriculture, industry, even the simultaneity of electricity, a hardware that intersects with the wetware of consciousness, that embraces the power of quarks, of particles travelling backward in time, of quasars & parallel universes. Let a thousand flowers bloom — with no gardener to lop off weeds & sports according to some moralizing or eugenical scheme.
The only true conflict is that between the authority of the tyrant & the authority of the realized self — all else is illusion, psychological projection, wasted verbiage. Only insurrection will “solve” this paradox — only the uprising against false consciousness in both ourselves & others will sweep away the technology of oppression & the poverty of the Spectacle. In this battle a painted mask or shaman’s rattle may prove as vital as the seizing of a communications satellite or secret computer network. Our sole criterion for judging a weapon or a tool is its beauty.
Heretics & antinomian mystics of Orient & Occident have developed systems based on inner liberation. Whatever their flaws they possess certain magical weapons which anarchism sorely lacks: (1) A sense of the meta-rational (“metanoia”), ways to go beyond laminated thinking into smooth (or nomadic or “chaotic”) thinking & perception; (2) an actual definition of self-realized or liberated consciousness, a positive description of its structure, & techniques for approaching it; (3) a coherent archetypal view of epistemology — that is, a way of knowing (about history, for example) that utilizes hermeneutic phenomenology to uncover patterns of meaning (4) a teaching on sexuality (in the “tantrik” aspects of various Paths) that assigns value to pleasure rather than self-denial, not only for its own sake but as a vehicle of enhanced awareness or “liberation”; (5) an attitude of celebration, what might be called a “Jubilee concept,” a cancelling of psychic debt thru some inherent generosity in reality itself; (6) a language (including gesture, ritual, intentionality) with which to animate & communicate these five aspects of cognition; and (7) a silence.
Anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped. Help myself to anything not nailed down.
“Natural,” “organic,” “healthy” produce is designed for a market sector of mildly dissatisfied consumers with mild cases of future-shock & mild yearnings for a tepid authenticity. A niche has been prepared for you, softly illumined with the illusions of simplicity, cleanliness, thinness, a dash of asceticism & self-denial. Of course, it costs a little more…after all, LITEness was not designed for poor hungry primitivos who still think of food as nourishment rather than decor. It has to cost more — otherwise you wouldn’t buy it. We interest ourselves in life, not “lifestyles.” True lightness we adore, & rich heaviness delights us in its season. Excess suits us to perfection, moderation pleases us, & we have learned that.
Food belongs to the realm of everyday life, the primary arena for all insurrectionary self-empowerment, all spiritual self-enhancement, all seizing-back of pleasure, all revolt against the Planetary Work Machine & its imitation desires.
Malay Black Djinn Curse
These premises have been cursed by black sorcery. The curse has been activated according to correct rituals. This institution is cursed because it has oppressed the Imagination & defiled the Intellect, degraded the arts toward stupefaction, spiritual slavery, propaganda for State & Capital, puritanical reaction, unjust profits, lies & aesthetic blight. The employees of this institution are now in danger. No individual has been cursed, but the place itself has been infected with ill fortune & malignancy. Those who do not wake up & quit, or begin sabotaging the workplace, will gradually fa ll under the effect of this sorcery. Removing or destroying the implement of sorcery will do no good. It has been seen i n this place, & this place is cursed. Reclaim your humanity & revolt in the name of the Imagination — or else be judged (in the mirror of this charm) an enemy of the human race.
We also suggest, in order to counter-balance the effect on yourself of calling up the personal black djinn, that you send a magical blessing to someone or some group you love &/or admire. Do this anonymously, & make the gift beautiful. No precise ritual need be followed, but the imagery should be allowed to spring from the well of consciousness in an intuitive/spontaneous meditational state. The Black Djinn Curse represents only a first step in the campaign of Poetic Terrorism which — we trust — will lead to other less subtle forms of insurrection.
Of course we have no objection to your giving us all your money, but we’ll tell you up front: we’ll use it to buy dope or fly to Morocco.
You can’t sell water by the river; Chaos is that materia of which the alchemists spoke, which fools value more highly than gold even tho it may be found on any dungheap.
Chaos is not entropy, Chaos is not death, Chaos is not a commodity. Chaos is continual creation. Chaos never died.
Between tragic Past & impossible Future, anarchism seems to lack a Present. The anarchist “movement” today contains virtually no Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans or children…even tho in theory such genuinely oppressed groups stand to gain the most from any anti-authoritarian revolt. Might it be that anarchISM offers no concrete program whereby the truly deprived might fulfill (or at least struggle realistically to fulfill) real needs & desires? Without “higher states of consciousness,” anarchism ends & dries itself up into a form of misery, a whining complaint. We need a practical kind of “mystical anarchism,” devoid of all New Age shit-&-shinola, & inexorably heretical & anti-clerical; avid for all new technologies of consciousness & metanoia — a democratization of shamanism, intoxicated & serene.
The question of land refuses to go away. How can we separate the concept of space from the mechanisms of control? The territorial gangsters, the Nation/States, have hogged the entire map. Who can invent for us a cartography of autonomy, who can draw a map that includes our desires?
In dream we are never ruled except by love or sorcery, which are the skills of chaotes & sultans.
Among a people who cannot create or play, but can only work, artists also know no choice but anarchy & monarchy.
Dies when treated “fairly.” It must enjoy a caveman’s wildness or else have its mouth filled with gold by some prince.
The dreamer, the artist, the anarchist — do they not share some tinge of cruel caprice with the most outrageous of moghuls? Can genuine life occur without some folly, some excess, some bouts of Heraclitan “strife”?
We do not rule — but we cannot & will not be ruled. The single absolute ruler acts metaphorically as a mirror for the unique and utter absoluteness of the self.
Among a people who cannot conceive human society without a monarch, the desires of radicals may be expressed in monarchical terms. Among a people who cannot conceive human existence without a religion, radical desires may speak the language of heresy.
Taoism rejected the whole of Confucian bureaucracy but retained the image of the Emperor-Sage, who would sit silent on his throne facing a propitious direction, doing absolutely nothing. In Islam the Ismailis took the idea of the Imam of the Prophet’s Household & metamorphosed it into the Imam-of-one’s-own-being, the perfected self who is beyond all Law & rule, who is atoned with the One.
If we are bound by any ethic or morality it must be one which we ourselves have imagined, fabulously more exalted & more liberating than the “moralic acid” of puritans & humanists. “Ye are as gods” — “Thou art That".
Many believe that mysticism “dissolves the ego.” Rubbish. Only death does that. Nor does mysticism destroy the “carnal” or “animal” self — which would also amount to suicide. What mysticism really tries to surmount is false consciousness, illusion, Consensus Reality, & all the failures of self that accompany these ills. True mysticism creates a “self at peace,” a self with power.
The Other mirrors the Self — the Other is our witness. The Other completes the Self — the Other gives us the key to the perception of oneness-of-being.
Love the first god born after Chaos.
Here again the project begun by Individualism can be evolved & revivified by a graft with mysticism — specifically with tantra. As an esoteric technique divorced from orthodox Hinduism, tantra provides a symbolic framework (“Net of Jewels”) for the identification of sexual pleasure & non-ordinary consciousness.
We simply suggest that Individual Anarchism & Radical Monism are to be considered henceforth one and the same movement. “spiritual materialism,” this flux only the jiva mukti, or “liberated individual,” is self-realized, and thus monarch or owner of his perceptions and relations.
In this ceaseless flow only desire offers any principle of order, and thus the only possible society is that of lovers.
Monarchism too has something we want — a grace, an ease, a pride, a superabundance. We’ll take these, and dump the woes of authority & torture in history’s garbage bin. Mysticism has something we need — “self-overcoming,” exalted awareness, reservoirs of psychic potency. These we will expropriate in the name of our insurrection — and leave the woes of morality & religion to rot & decompose.
Paleolithic equals pre-Work (“original leisure society”). Post-Work (Zerowork) equals “Psychic Paleolithism.” Modern leisure, in turn, is simply a subset of Work (hence its commodification). It is no accident that when Surrealism closed up shop, the only customers at the garage sale were ad execs. It’s not the world coming to an end — only the empty husks of the social, catching fire & disappearing.
The Tramp, the victim with the sudden power of the pure heart — no longer has a place at the center of narrative. Once “we” were that hobo, that quasi-surrealist chaote hero who wins thru wu-wei over the ludicrous minions of a despised & irrelevant Order. Now “we” are reduced to the status of victims without power, or else criminals. “We” no longer occupy that central role; no longer the heros of our own stories, we’ve been marginalized & replaced by the Other, the Cop.
No more pirate islands! In the future the same technology — freed from all political control — could make possible an entire world of autonomous zones. But for now the concept remains precisely science fiction — pure speculation. Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? The TAZ is almost self-explanatory. If the phrase became current it would be understood without difficulty…understood in action.
If History IS “Time,” as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment that springs up and out of Time, violates the “law” of History. If the State IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an unforgivable denial of the dialectic — shimmying up the pole and out of the smokehole, a shaman’s maneuver carried out at an “impossible angle” to the universe.
History says the Revolution attains “permanence,” or at least duration, while the uprising is “temporary.” In this sense an uprising is like a “peak experience” as opposed to the standard of “ordinary” consciousness and experience. Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day — otherwise they would not be “nonordinary.” But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns — you can’t stay up on the roof forever — but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred — a difference is made. The vision comes to life in the moment of uprising — but as soon as “the Revolution” triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.
Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Getting the TAZ started may involve tactics of violence and defense, but its greatest strength lies in its invisibility — the State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it. Undefinable in terms of the Spectacle. The TAZ is thus a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.
In most cases the best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence, to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability” — an “occult” art within the martial arts. Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map cannot be accurate.
We concentrate our force on temporary “power surges,” avoiding all entanglements with “permanent solutions. The autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control. We are looking for “spaces” (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones — and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason.
Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to “manifest” a TAZ. An uprising must be for something as well. The nuclear family, appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the “agricultural revolution” with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The band is produced by abundance — and results in prodigality. The band is open — not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc.
The TAZ as festival. The dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration. The senses as the basis of social becoming.
Calendar reform. A mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival. The element of spontaneity is crucial.
“The death of God,” in some ways a de-centering of the entire “European” project, opened a multi-perspectived post-ideological worldview able to move “rootlessly” from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism — able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world. But this vision was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where speed and “commodity fetishism” have created a tyrannical false unity which tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality, so that “one place is as good as another.”
These nomads chart their courses by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics — and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.
The Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and communication transfer. For the most part the telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. There has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, the Web. The alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself. They blur into each other at innumerable points. The Net itself presents a pattern of changing/evolving relations between subjects (“users”) and objects (“data").
The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. Clearly it must also have “location” in the Web. We must consider the Web primarily as a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it “invisible” or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and portents.
The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth, mail, the marginal zine network, “phone trees,” and the like already suffice to construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the structure. The free flow of information can never be frozen. The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. BUT: the very essence of the Web is mediation. Machines here are our ambassadors — the flesh is irrelevant except as a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.
The TAZ agrees with the hackers because it wants to come into being — in part — through the Net, even through the mediation of the Net. Also agrees with the greens because it retains intense awareness of itself as body and feels only revulsion for CyberGnosis, the attempt to transcend the body through instantaneity and simulation. the Tech/anti-Tech dichotomy as misleading. The TAZ wants to live in this world, not in the idea of another world, some visionary world born of false unification (all green OR all metal). The TAZ is somewhere. It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. Some of them exist only “within” the Web, even though they also intersect with real times and places. These lines might better be studied in the light of chaos science than of sociology, statistics, economics, etc. Chaotic “Strange Attractors between the dimensions.
It will use the computer because the computer exists, but it will also use powers which are so completely unrelated to alienation or simulation that they guarantee a certain psychic paleolithism to the TAZ, a primordial-shamanic spirit which will “infect” even the Net itself (the true meaning of Cyberpunk as I read it). What is it for, this map which in a sense bears a 1:1 relation with a fractal dimension? What can one do with it, other than admire its psychedelic elegance? If we were to imagine an information map — a cartographic projection of the Net in its entirety — we would have to include in it the features of chaos, which have already begun to appear, for example, in the operations of complex parallel processing, telecommunications, transfers of electronic “money,” viruses, guerilla hacking and so on.
Whether through simple data-piracy, or else by a more complex development of actual rapport with chaos, the Web-hacker, the cybernetician of the TAZ, will find ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net (ways to make information out of “entropy". The TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. According to you, computers should already be quite capable of facilitating my desires for food, drugs, sex, tax evasion. So what’s the matter? Why isn’t it happening? The TAZ is interested in results, successful raids on consensus reality, breakthroughs into more intense and more abundant life. If the computer cannot be used in this project, then the computer will have to be overcome. My intuition however suggests that the counter-Net is already coming into being, perhaps already exists — but I cannot prove it.
Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism we’ll adopt a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses. Roanoke Colony. A feeling of yearning for its formless form which took the symbol of the “Indian” for its focus: “Man” in the state of nature, uncorrupted by “government.” The forest/animal/humans are invested from the very start with the magic power of the marginal, despised and outcaste. The first settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message “Gone To Croatan". Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. They’re still there, and they still call themselves Croatans. The very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became “Indians,” “went native,” opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London.
As America came into being where once there had been “Turtle Island,” Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed — and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes — all the burdens of civilization — and “go to Croatan” in some way or another. Buccaneers adopted Indian ways, intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to the “state of Nature. They were “social bandits,” although their base communities were not traditional peasant societies but “utopias” created almost ex nihilo in terra incognita, enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map.
The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting runaway slaves, functioning as a way station on the Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and ideological center for slave rebellions. The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey freed slaves of the Dutch poltroons, various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual “prostitutes,” the “Hessians” (a catch-phrase for lost British mercenaries, drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local bands of social bandits such as Claudius Smith. The Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18th century. The Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol, made their living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted their customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they built their houses on wheels.
In the 1970’s, inspired by the Native American renaissance, a number of groups — including the Moors and the Ramapaughs — applied to the B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official status. If they’d won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent for drop-outs of all sorts, from “white Peyotists” and hippies to black nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians — a “reservation” for anyone and everyone.
The “European Project” cannot recognize the existence of the Wild Man — green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial dream of order. If everyone who wished “to be an Indian” could accomplish this by an act of self-naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take place. The Margin takes on an aura of magic.
Before the whiteman, they were simply tribes of people — now, they are “guardians of Nature,” inhabitants of the “state of Nature.” Finally the colonist himself is seduced by this “myth.” Whenever an American wants to drop out or back into Nature, invariably he “becomes an Indian.”
From the Mountain Men to the Boy Scouts, the dream of “becoming an Indian” flows beneath myriad strands of American history, culture and consciousness. “Natives” of course are always immoral, but racial renegades and drop-outs must be downright polymorphous-perverse. Reverting to a “state of Nature” paradoxically seems to allow for the practice of every “unnatural” act; or so it would appear if we believe the Puritans and Eugenicists. Becoming “wild” is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness. When escape beyond the frontier proved impossible, the era of revolutionary urban Communes began in Europe.
During and after these years anarchists took up the practice of revolutionary nomadism, drifting from uprising to uprising, looking to keep alive in themselves the intensity of spirit they experienced in the moment of insurrection. They declared that if any socialist revolution succeeded, they’d be the first to turn against it. They declared that if any socialist revolution succeeded, they’d be the first to turn against it. Makhno’s Ukraine and anarchist Spain were meant to have duration, and despite the exigencies of continual war both succeeded to a certain extent: not that they lasted a “long time,” but they were successfully organized and could have persisted if not for outside aggression. The madcap Republic of Fiume was not meant to endure. Gabriele D’Annunzio, emerged from World War I as a hero with a small army at his beck and command: the “Arditi.” At a loss for adventure, he decided to capture the city of Fiume from Yugoslavia and give it to Italy. Italy turned down his generous offer. Annunzio decided to declare independence and see how long he could get away with it. He and one of his anarchist friends wrote the Constitution, which declared music to be the central principle of the State. Several rich Italian merchant vessels suddenly gave the Republic a future: money in the coffers! The party never stopped. Every morning D’Annunzio read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then fireworks. This made up the entire activity of the government. Eighteen months later, when the wine and money had run out and the Italian fleet finally showed up and lobbed a few shells at the Municipal Palace, no one had the energy to resist. Annunzio, like many Italian anarchists, later veered toward fascism.
The importance of aesthetic theory. “pirate economics,” iving high off the surplus of social overproduction — even the popularity of colorful military uniforms — and the concept of music as revolutionary social change — and finally their shared air of impermanence, of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re-locate to other universities, mountaintops, ghettos, factories, safe houses, abandoned farms — or even other planes of reality. No one was trying to impose yet another Revolutionary Dictatorship, either at Fiume, Paris, or Millbrook. Either the world would change, or it wouldn’t. Meanwhile keep on the move and live intensely.
TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. Why bother to confront a “power” which has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation? Such confrontations will only result in dangerous and ugly spasms of violence by the emptyheaded shit-for-brains who’ve inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons. Home-schooling and craft-apprenticeship, like truancy, result in an absence from the prison of school. Hacking is another form of “education” with certain features of “invisibility.” A mass-scale negative gesture against politics consists simply of not voting. Again, there are positive parallels: “networking” as an alternative to politics is practiced at many levels of society, and non-hierarchic organization has attained popularity even outside the anarchist movement, simply because it works.
Refusal of Work can take the forms of absenteeism, on-job drunkenness, sabotage, and sheer inattention — but it can also give rise to new modes of rebellion: more self-employment, participation in the “black” economy and “lavoro nero,” welfare scams and other criminal options, pot farming, etc. — all more or less “invisible” activities compared to traditional leftist confrontational tactics such as the general strike. Non-authoritarian forms of spirituality, from “unchurched” Christianity to neo-paganism. The “Free Religions” as I like to call them — small, self-created, half-serious/half-fun cults influenced by such currents as Discordianism and anarcho-Taoism — are to be found all over marginal America, and provide a growing “fourth way” outside the mainstream churches, the televangelical bigots, and New Age vapidity and consumerism. “homelessness” can in a sense be a virtue, an adventure — so it appears, at least, to the huge international movement of the squatters, our modern hobos. Life can be happier without the nuclear family, whereupon a hundred flowers bloom — from single parentage to group marriage to erotic affinity group.
Is it possible to imagine an aesthetics that does not engage, that removes itself from History and even from the Market? Replace representation with presence.
“Chaos Linguistics” traces a presence which is continually disappearing from all orderings of language and meaning-systems; an elusive presence, evanescent, the Strange Attractor around which memes accrue, chaotically forming new and spontaneous orders.
Here we have an aesthetics of the borderland between chaos and order, the margin, the area of “catastrophe” where the breakdown of the system can equal enlightenment. We can’t build an aesthetics, even an aesthetics of disappearance, on the simple act of never coming back. How to envision “everyday life” in Croatan? particularly if we cannot say that Croatan exists in Time (Stone Age or Post-Revolution) or Space, either as utopia or as some forgotten midwestern town or as Abyssinia? Psychological liberation. Realize (make real) the moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual. We must know in what ways we are genuinely oppressed, and also in what ways we are self-repressed or ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us. The TAZ must be the scene of our present autonomy, but it can only exist on the condition that we already know ourselves as free beings.
The counter-Net must expand. The TAZ is a physical place and we are either in it or not. All the senses must be involved. The Web is like a new sense in some ways, but it must be added to the others. The apparatus of Control — the “State” — must (or so we must assume) continue to deliquesce and petrify simultaneously, must progress on its present course in which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss of power. As power “disappears,” our will to power must be disappearance.
Wild but gentle.