The Poetic Terrorist

Notes on the Temporary Autonomous Zone

[ these notes have been extrapolated and expanded upon, the source is Hakim Bey's writings on the TAZ ]

“The New Autonomy will either infiltrate the media and subvert ‘it’ from within — or else never be “seen” at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to SEE.”

The TAZ must be understood in action.

Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap op. The first step is somewhat akin to satori – the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.

TAZ rises up from insurrection, from within.

TAZ is a not a new frontier, because there is no more terra incognita. TAZ has to do with a 1:1 mapping, a level at which the state system has a hard time keeping an eye on.

The map is closed but the TAZ is open. It unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the carography of Control. It is psychotopographical (and psychotemporal.)

Psychotopology/Psychotopography as an alternative science to that of the State’s surveying, mapmaking, psychic imperialism. Psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps and carry out actions that cannot be an item of surveillance.

Psychotopology is the art of ‘dowsing’ for potential TAZs, for flowering zones, spaces, which for a time have escaped notice by the map makers, or has been neglected by the State.

Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to “manifest” a TAZ. An uprising must be for something as well.

The band is an affinity group sworn to a bond of love. Hakim Bey is not talking about a cult! He is suggesting a re-tribalization, no less than McLuhan was predicting that the world was becoming retribalized
as an inevitability.

The use of time by the state: psychotemporal oppression.

‘Science’ of psychotopology indicates “flows of forces” and “spots of power” (borrowed occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ in space time.

Vital to shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (rootless cosmopolitanism). Our minds are not grounded in any one belief or source, a consequence of our access to culture and lore from all parts of the world. We are able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

Psychic nomadism as a tactic. They are apaches (“enemies”) of the old Consensus. There is a need and desire for TAZ.

Terms below do not define areas but suggest tendencies:

• Net: totality of all information and communication transfer.
• Web: the alternate horizontal open structure of info-exchange, non-hierarchic network
• Counter-Net: clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web.

The TAZ tends to ignore production altogether and simply picks up what it can use. (Collaborative, remix, piracy, bootstrapping)

The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. The Web provides logistical support for the TAZ, it helps to bring it into being, but is not itself the TAZ.

The TAZ ‘exists’ in information-space as well as in the ‘real world’. The Web informs the TAZ, so as to compensate for its lack of duration.

The Web is 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. The web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved but the openness and horizontality of the structure.

If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe (sorely needed for restorative global action)

“Reality Hacking” plays a major role in the creation of TAZs.

Data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. Chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.

The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation. It wants to experience its existence as immediate, not filtered through Simulation (see Immediatism). Breast-to-breast, face-to-face.

TAZ wants to live in this world, not just an idea of another world, or some visionary world.

TAZ 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. (What I refer to as “The Weave“.)

The patterns of force which bring the TAZ into being have something in common with those chaotic “Strange Attractors” which exist, so to speak, between the dimensions.

Above all, TAZ will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology.

TAZ is an intensification, a surplus, life spending itself in living rather than merely surviving.

The TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. These connections and the different information that flows among and between them will form ‘power outlets’ for the coming into being of the TAZ itself.

The TAZ has occured, is occuring, and will occur with or without the computer.

Becoming ‘wild’ is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness, exposure, vulnerability.

Escapist communes become less possible the stronger the cartography of the state. Do cults qualify amongst these communes? Surely the state must frown deeply on it in any form.

TAZ can manifest as an interzone which opens up in the midst or wake of war and revolution. Meanwhile, keep on the move and live intensely.

Pirate economies: Living high off the surplus of social overproduction, a shared air of impermanence, of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re-locate to other places or planes of reality.

“The Will to Disappearance” – TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. Disappearance is not necessarily a ‘catastrophe’.

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 empty-headed shit-for-brains who’ve inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons.

Disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time. Strategies in the always-ongoing “revolution of everyday life”: the struggle that cannot cease even with the last failure of political or social revolution because nothing except the end of the world can bring an end to everyday life, nor to our aspirations for the good things. Nietzsche said, if the world could come to an end, logically it would have done so; it has not, so it does not. (Concentrate much more on the day to day of the individual/community than on long term global circumstances, though clearly the planetary stage is forever contextual to all our efforts.)

Hacking is another form of “education” with certain features of “invisibility” (I am very interested in developing some understanding on reality hacking. What is it? How does one go about hacking reality?) (The Hacker Ethic)

Refusal of work as a new mode of rebellion: self-employment, emerges out of the Hacker Ethic.

The area of “catastrophe” where the breakdown of the system can equal enlightenment (does global communication breakdown promise some form of TAZ\enlightenment? The Web appears neutral to the activities of TAZ and Control, thus the constant flux.)

If the TAZ can exist, it does exist. But perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far have not learned to perceive clearly.

The New Autonomy will either infiltrate the media and subvert ‘it’ from within — or else never be “seen” at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State’s ability to SEE.

Psychological Liberation:

• Create moments and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual.
• Know ways in which we are genuinely oppressed — also Shadow, self-repression and fantasy.
• Combat alienation. 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.

We do not live in cyberspace; to dream that we do is to fall into CyberGnosis (McLuhan called it disincarnate existence), the false transcendence of the body.

The TAZ is a physical place and we are either in it or not. As power disappears, our will to power must be disappearance.

Liberation is realized struggle.

The TAZ offers a kind of ferality, a growth from tameness to wilderness, a return which is also a step forward. An acceptance of violence as actual and a release from the non-actual ideal of non-violence, of ‘peace’ may be essential (J. Krishnamurti)

The Yoga of Chaos

The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild but gentle — a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.

Notes on Ontological Anarchy & Immedatism

[ these notes have been extrapolated and expanded upon, the source is Hakim Bey's writings on the the subject of Ontological Anarchism and Immediatism ]

“The practice of immediatism will release within us vast storehouses of forgotten power, which will not only transform our lives through the secret realization of unmediated play, but will also inescapably well up & burst out & permeate the other art we create, the more public & mediated art.” [ ... ]

ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY IN A NUTSHELL (notes)

Out of nothing we will imagine our values and by this act of invention we shall live.

Of course, illusions can kill. Images of punishment haunt the sleep of Order. Ontological Anarchy proposes that we wake up, and create our own day — even in the shadow of the State, that pustulant giant who sleeps, and whose dreams of Order metastasize as spasms of spectacular violence

Chaos Linguistics?

All forms of communicativeness should be angelic — language itself should be angelic — a kind of divine chaos.

Self and Other complement and complete one another. (They are not opposing polarities but a system of expressions.)

“Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill” – not an abstract noun. A process (praxis), not a “state” — a movement, not a form of governance. A kind of critical theory which no mere practical politics nor systematic philosophy can hope to evolve.

The greater the portion of my life that can be wrenched from the Work/Consume/Die cycle, and (re)turned over to the economy of the “bee”, the greater my chance for pleasure. One runs a certain risk in thus thwarting the vampiric energies of institutions.

IMMEDIATISM (notes)

And we should like to remember a certain psychic martial art which stresses the realization that the body itself is the least mediated of all media.

Publicly we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio, printing, music, etc. but privately we will create something else, something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives

Game:

Rule: All spectators must also be performers.

[our games] will tend toward immediate techniques involving physical presence, direct communication and the senses.

An obvious matrix for Immediatism is the party… [ or dinner party ]

Awareness of the practice of immediatism as a response to the sorrows of alienation.

We wish to take the motives and discoveries of these earlier movements to their logical conclusion in an art which banishes all meditation and alienation, at least to the extent that the human condition allows.

Immediatism is not condemned to powerlessness in the world, simply because it avoids the publicity of the marketplace. “Poetic Terrorism” & “Art Sabotage” are quite logical manifestations of immediatism.

The practice of immediatism will release within us vast storehouses of forgotten power, which will not only transform our lives through the secret realization of unmediated play, but will also inescapably well up & burst out & permeate the other art we create, the more public & mediated art.

AN IMMEDIATIST POTLACH

[ see Game details http://www.left-bank.org/bey/imm_potl.htm ]

THE TONGS (notes)

The mandarins draw their power from the law;
the people, from the secret societies.
(Chinese saying)

I argued that secret societies are once again a valid possibility for groups seeking autonomy & individual realization.

He proposed instead that the establishment of multi-purpose neighborhood centers, with expenses to be shared by various special-interest groups & small-entrepeneurial concerns.

Most modern people seem unable to believe in the reality of something they never see on television — therefore to escape being televisualized is already to be quasi-invisible.

There’s no reason [an immediatist secret society] can’t be choosy. Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the dubious principle of open membership, which frequently leads to a preponderance of assholes, yahoos, spoilers, whining neurotics and police agents.

The “secret” purpose of conviviality in the secret society then becomes the self-structuring & auto-valorization of free time.

The principle of the thing: secrets should be respected. Not everyone needs to know everything!

We are not interested in a return to the primitive but in a return OF the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the ‘repressed’.

In our times people are usually not kept apart by law but by mediation and alienation.

Simply to meet together face-to-face is already an action against the forces which oppress us by isolation, by loneliness, by the trance of media.

There are some people who do not need fifteen seconds on the Evening News to validate their existence.An

Elitist Attitude: a small group which exercises power over non-insiders for its own aggrandizement.

Immedtiatism does not concern itself with power-relations;– it desires neither to be ruled nor to rule.

It is a free association of individuals who have chosen each other as the subjects of the group’s generosity, its “expansiveness”… if this amounts to some kind of ‘elitism’ then so be it.

If immediatism begins with groups of friends trying not just to overcome isolation but also to enhance each other’s lives, soon it will want to take a more complex shape:– nuclei of mutually-self-chosen allies, working (playing) to occupy more & more time & space outside all mediated structure & control. Then it will want to become a horizontal network of such autonomous groups — then, a ‘tendency’ — then, a ‘movement’ — & then, a kinetic web of “temporary autonomous zones.” At last it will strive to become the kernel of a new society, giving birth to itself within the corrupt shell of the old.

For all these purposes the secret society promises to provide a useful framework of protective clandestinity — a cloak of invisibility that will have to be dropped only in the event of some final showdown with the Babylon of Mediation…

IMMEDIATISM vs CAPITALISM (notes)

Immediatism means to enhance individuals by providing a matrix of friendship, not to belittle them by sacrificing their ‘ownness’ to group-think, leftist self-abnegation, or New Age clone-values. What must be overcome is not individuality per se, but rather the addiction to bitter loneliness which characterizes consciousness in 20th century.

The first & most innocent-seeming obstacle to any immedatist project will be the ‘busyness’ or ‘need to make a living’ faced by each of its associates.

At the most mundane-seeming level, the group will fail to agree on a day of the week for meetings because everyone is ‘busy.’ But this is not mundane. It is sheer cosmic evil.

This monster called WORK remains the precise & exact target of our rebellious wrath, the one single most oppressive reality we face (& we must learn also to recognize Work when it’s disguised as “leisure” as would be described in The Hacker Ethic).

To be ‘too busy’ for the immedatist project is to miss the very essence of immediatism.

Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group which is not your spouse & kids, or the ‘guys from my job,’ or your 12-Step Program –& you have already achieved virtually everything immedatism yearns for. An actual project will arise almost spontaneously out of this successful slap-in-the-face of the social norm of alienated boredom.

We’re not kidding or indulging in hyperbole when we insist that meeting face-to-face is already “the revolution.”

Fight them– by meeting with friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship– & you will have triumphed (at least for the moment) over the most pernicious conspiracy in Euro-American society today.

If you are seen, you will be perceived as wrong, illegal, immortal — different.

And of course the chances are good that your immediatist group is engaged in something illegal (ie. these days, piracy of information and entertainment from the internet is common) — since almost everything enjoyable is in fact illegal.

Immediatism is the most natural path for free humans imaginable — & therefore the most unnatural abomination in the eyes of Capital, Control, Order, Simulation. Immediatism will triumph, but only through vigilance, self-organization of power, of clandestinity & of insurrection. Immediatism is our delight, immediatism is dangerous.

INVOLUTION (notes)

Consciousness in itself, as Nietzsche pointed out, plays a less significant role in life than power.

Immediatism remains for us more a game than “movement”.

Rule: It is produced for a group of friends; it is not produced for sale, nor is it sold, nor (ideally) is it allowed to slip out of the control of its producers in any way, shape or form. It is sacred and secret.

The best immediatist agitprop will leave no trace at all, except in the souls of those who are changed by it.

This is a game, not a movement; it has rules of play, but no laws. Immediatism would love it if everyone were an artist, but our goal is not mass conversion.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that suicide is not a ’solution’.

The Totality isolates individuals & renders them powerless by offering only illusory modes of social expression, modes which seem to promise liberation or self-fulfillment but in fact end by producing yet more mediation & alienation.

Simulation cannot reproduce the faint reflection of ‘aura’ which is allowed even to commodity-trash, its ‘utopian trace.’ Simulation cannot in fact reproduce or produce anything except desolation and misery. But since the Totality thrives on our misery, Simulation suits its purpose quite admirably.

People made to feel isolated, alienated, weird, queer, wrong, finally non-existent; people without voices; people without power.

America is full to overflowing with people who feel that no matter what they say or do, no difference will be made; that no one is listening; that there is no one to listen.

Each group of artists or peace activists or whatever is also made to feel that no contact with other groups is possible.

The concept of ‘networking‘ began as a revolutionary strategy to bypass & overcome the Totality by setting up horizontal connections.

Communication technology may still prove to offer useful tools in this struggle, but by now it has become just as powerful a force for Simulation.

Notes on Silence and the Critique of the Listener

[ these notes have been extrapolated and expanded upon, the source is Hakim Bey's writings on the the subject of Raw Vision, Silence and the Critique of the Listener ]

Writing has taken us to the very edge beyond which writing may be impossible. Any texts which could survive the plunge over this edge– into whatever abyss or Abyssinia lies beyond–would have to be virtually self-created… the last screamed messages of a witch or heretic burning at the stake.

“RAW VISION” (notes)

It is meant only for the artist & the artist’s “immediate entourage” (friends family, neighbors, tribe); & it participates only in a “gift” economy of positive reciprocity.

The only fair way (or “beauty way,” as the Hopi say) to treat “outsider” art would seem to be to keep it “secret”–to refuse to define it–to pass it on as a secret, person-to-person, breast-to-breast–rather than pass it thru the paramedium (slick journals, quarterlies, galleries, museums, coffee-table books, MTV, etc.). Or even better:–to become “mad” & “innocent” ourselves–for so Babylon will label us when we neither worship nor criticize it anymore–when we have forgotten it (but not “forgiven” it!), & remembered our own prophetic selves, our bodies, our “true will.”

SILENCE

We hear not the language but the echo.

The organic is secretive–it secretes secrecy like sap. The inorganic is a demonic democracy–everything equal, but equally valueless.

Within the organic (“Nature,” “everyday life”) is embedded a kind of silence which is not just dumbness, an opacity which is not mere ignorance–a secrecy which is also an affirmation–a tact which knows how to act, how to change things, how to breathe into them.

An occultist would ask how to “work” this silence–but we’ d rather ask how to play it, like musicians, or like the playful boy of Heraclitus.

The Wonderful World of Knowledge has turned into some kind of PBS Special from Hell.

There are some things bureaucrats were not meant to know–& so there are some things which even artists should keep secret. This is not self-censorship nor self-ignorance. It is cosmic tact.

We’ll play with the silence & make it ours.

CRITIQUE OF THE LISTENER

To speak too much & not be heard–that’s sickening enough. But to acquire listeners–that could be worse. Listeners think that to listen suffices–as if their true desire were to hear with someone else’s ears, see through someone else’s eyes, feel with someone else’s skin . . . start with your own!!!

Don’t entertained too subtle an idea about magic. The crude truth is perhaps that texts can only change reality when they inspire readers to see & act, rather than merely see. (To know and to not do is to not know.)

Seeing, & the literature of seeing, is too easy. Enlightenment is easy. “It’s easy to be a sufi,” a Persian shaykh once told me. “What’s difficult is to be human.”

…the theories I’ve played with–are just that: theories, visions, ways of seeing.

But even more we would like to purge our lives of everything which obstructs or delays us from setting out… not to escape the world or to rule it–but to open ourselves to difference.

Enlightenment is all we have, & even that we’ve had to rip from the grasp of corrupt gurus & bumbling suicidal intellectuals.

Writing has taken us to the very edge beyond which writing may be impossible. Any texts which could survive the plunge over this edge– into whatever abyss or Abyssinia lies beyond–would have to be virtually self-created, like the miraculous hidden-treasure Dakini-scrolls of Tibet or the tadpole-script spirit-texts of Taoism–& absolutely incandescent, like the last screamed messages of a witch or heretic burning at the stake.

I can sense these texts trembling just beyond the veil.

What if the mood should strike us … to risk the abyss? What if no one followed? So much the better, perhaps– we might find our equals amongst the Hyperboreans. What if we went mad? Well–that’s the risk. What if we were bored? Ah . . .

It’s as if there were angels in the next room beyond thick walls– arguing? fucking? One can’t make out a single word.

Can we retrain ourselves at this late date to become Finders of hidden treasure?

Finally, however, it will become necessary to leave this city which hovers immobile on the edge of a sterile twilight, like Hamelin after all the children were lured away. Perhaps other cities exist, occupying the same space & time, but . . . different. And perhaps there exist jungles where mere enlightenment is outshadowed by the black light of jaguars. I have no idea– & I’m terrified.