Contents

T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6
7

Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism

Chaos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetic Terrorism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Amour Fou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wild Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paganism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art Sabotage The Assassins Pyrotechnics ......................................... ........................................ .........................................

8
10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 29 31 33 35

Chaos Myths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pornography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Crime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sorcery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Advertisement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy

Communique #1 (spring 1986) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I. Slogans & Mottos for Subway Grati & Other Purposes . . . . . II. Some Poetic-Terrorist Ideas Still Sadly Languishing in the Realm of Conceptual Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #2: The Kallikak Memorial Bolo & Chaos Ashram: A Proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #3: Haymarket Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

36
37 37 37 40 42

Communique #4: The End of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #5: Intellectual S/M Is the Fascism of the Eighties The Avant-Garde Eats Shit and Likes It . . . . . . . . . Communique #6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I. Salon Apocalypse: Secret Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. Murder War Famine Greed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #7: Psychic Paleolithism & High Technology: A Position Paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #8: Chaos Theory & the Nuclear Family . . . . . . . Communique #9: Double-Dip Denunciations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I. Xtianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. Abortionists & Anti-abortionists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #10: Plenary Session Issues New Denunciations Purges Expected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Communique #11: Special Holiday Season Food Issue Rant: Turn O the Lite! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Special Halloween Communique: Black Magic as Revolutionary Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Special communique: A.O.A. Announces Purges in Chaos Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-Anarchism Anarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Black Crown & Black Rose: Anarcho-Monarchism & Anarcho-Mysticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Instructions for the Kali Yuga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Against the Reproduction of Death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ringing Denunciation of Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For a Congress of Weird Religions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hollow Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nietzsche & the Dervishes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Resolution for the 1990s: Boycott Cop Culture! . . . . . . . . . . . 2

44 46 49 49 50 53 57 59 59 60 61 64 67 70 72 76 83 86 89 91 95 97 100

The Temporary Autonomous Zone

Pirate Utopias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Waiting for the Revolution The Net and the Web ............................ The Psychotopology of Everyday Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ................................. Gone to Croatan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Music as an Organizational Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Will to Power as Disappearance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ratholes in the Babylon of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

104
106 108 111 116 124 132 136 141

Appendix
Appendix A: Chaos Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix B: Applied Hedonics ......................... Appendix C: Extra Quotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pirate Rant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dinner Party . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

144
145 147 148 149 150

Post-Anarchism Anarchy An esoteric interpretation of the I.W.W. preamble The Lemonade Ocean & Modern Times
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. One More River to Cross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maximizing Marx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lemonade Ocean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Convivial Individualist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Universal Pantarchy & North American Phalanx . . . . . . . . . .

152 157 162

163 163 164 166 167

Permanent TAZs
THE QUESTION OF PUBLICITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ACCESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE EMERGENCE OF A GENUINELY ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE WORLD CAME TO AN END IN 1972 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

169
171 172 172 173

FESTIVALS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE LIVING EARTH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PAZ TYPOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

173 174 174

Millennium Part 1. Interview with Hakim Bey Part 2. Millennium

1. JIHAD ........................................... ....................................... 2. SAMENESS

176 177 190

191 192 193 195 196 198 200 201 202 203 205 206 208

3. MANAGEMENT OF DESIRES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. GREEN SHADE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. CASH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. ASSAULT ON THE SCREEN ......................... 7. THE MORALITY OF VIOLENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. FIN DE SIECLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9. THE REVOLT OF ISLAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. VOLKWAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11. REVOLUTIONARY SOTERIOLOGY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. THE HIDDEN IMAM 13. CALL & RESPONSE .............................. ...............................

Part 3. For and Against Interpretation Part 4. Religion and Revolution Part 5. Note on Nationalism Crisis of Meaning Jihad Revisited Against Legalization NoGoZone

211 218 229 239 243 249 255

The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory

Heres a hypothesis: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

263
267

The Periodic Autonomous Zone Primitives and Extropians Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory: Anarchist Meditations on N. Herberts Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

269 276

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Hakim Bey

T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

1985

Acknowledgments
Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism was rst published in 1985 by Grim Reaper Press of Weehawken, New Jersey; a later re-issue was published in Providence, Rhode Island, and this edition was pirated in Boulder, Colorado. Another edition was released by Verlag Golem of Providence in 1990, and pirated in Santa Cruz, California, by We Press. The Temporary Autonomous Zone was performed at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, and on WBAI-FM in New York City, in 1990. Thanx to the following publications, current and defunct, in which some of these pieces appeared (no doubt Ive lost or forgotten many sorry!): KAOS (London); Ganymede (London); Pan (Amsterdam); Popular Reality; Exquisite Corpse (also Stiest of the Corpse, City Lights); Anarchy (Columbia, MO); Factsheet Five; Dharma Combat; OVO; City Lights Review; Rants and Incendiary Tracts (Amok); Apocalypse Culture (Amok); Mondo 2000; The Sporadical; Black Eye; Moorish Science Monitor; FEH!; Fag Rag; The Storm!; Panic (Chicago); Bolo Log (Zurich); Anathema; Seditious Delicious; Minor Problems (London); AQUA; Prakilpana. Also, thanx to the following individuals: Jim Fleming; James Koehnline; Sue Ann Harkey; Sharon Gannon; Dave Mandl; Bob Black; Robert Anton Wilson; William Burroughs; P.M.; Joel Birroco; Adam Parfrey; Brett Rutherford; Jake Rabinowitz; Allen Ginsberg; Anne Waldman; Frank Torey; Andr Codrescu; Dave Crowbar; Ivan Stang; Nathaniel Tarn; Chris Funkhauser; Steve Englander; Alex Trotter. March, 1991

Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism

(Dedicated to Ustad Mahmud Ali Abd al-Khabir)

Chaos
Chaos never died. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undierentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, its neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & dene every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds. Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, theres absolutely nothing to worry about. 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 youre 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. To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever. Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain. 10

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither seless nor selsh, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like owers, pirates of all signs & meanings. Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut o from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs. The last possible deed is that which denes perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here theyd call it an act of terrorism so lets take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.

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Poetic Terrorism
Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them theyre the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence. Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fullling sexual experience, etc. Go 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. Gratti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public momuments PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement . . . The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is signed or anonymous, if it does not change someones life (aside from the artist) it fails. PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption

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(galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now. An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a condence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE. Dont do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, dont stick around to argue, dont be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives but dont 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 dont get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

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Amour Fou
Amour fou is not a Social Democracy, it is not a Parliament of Two. The minutes of its secret meetings deal with meanings too enormous but too precise for prose. Not this, not that its Book of Emblems trembles in your hand. Naturally it shits on schoolmasters & police, but it sneers at liberationists & ideologues as well it is not a clean well-lit room. A topological charlatan laid out its corridors & abandoned parks, its ambush-decor of luminous black & membranous maniacal red. Each of us owns half the map like two renaissance potentates we dene a new culture with our anathematized mingling of bodies, merging of liquids the Imaginal seams of our City-state blur in our sweat. Ontological anarchism never came back from its last shing trip. So long as no one squeals to the FBI, CHAOS cares nothing for the future of civilization. Amour fou breeds only by accident its primary goal is ingestion of the Galaxy. A conspiracy of transmutation. Its only concern for the Family lies in the possibility of incest (Grow your own! Every human a Pharoah!) O most sincere of readers, my semblance, my brother/sister! & in the masturbation of a child it nds concealed (like a japanese-paper-ower-pill) the image of the crumbling of the State. Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back. The Surrealists disgraced themselves by selling amour fou to the ghost-machine of Abstraction they sought in their unconsciousness only power over others, & in this they followed de Sade (who wanted freedom only for grown-up whitemen to eviscerate women & children). Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it lls itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels clocks, it is not a t fate for commissars & shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selshness of obsession. Amour fou involves non-ordinary sexuality the way sorcery demands non-ordinary consciousness. The anglo-saxon post-Protestant world

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channels all its suppressed sensuality into advertising & splits itself into clashing mobs: hysterical prudes vs promiscuous clones & former-ex-singles. AF doesnt want to join anyones 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 doesnt complain, doesnt explain, never votes & never pays taxes. AF would like to see every bastard (lovechild) come to term & birthed AF thrives on anti-entropic devices AF loves to be molested by children AF is better than prayer, better than sinsemilla AF takes its own palmtrees & moon wherever it goes. AF admires tropicalismo, sabotage, break-dancing, Layla & Majnun, the smells of gunpowder & sperm. AF is always illegal, whether its disguised as a marriage or a boyscout troop always drunk, whether on the wine of its own secretions or the smoke of its own polymorphous virtues. It is not the derangement of the senses but rather their apotheosis not the result of freedom but rather its precondition. Lux et voluptas.

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Wild Children
The full moons unfathomable light-path mid-May midnight in some State that starts with I, so two-dimensional it can scarcely be said to possess any geography at all the beams so urgent & tangible you must draw the shades in order to think in words. No question of writing to Wild Children. They think in images prose is for them a code not yet fully digested & ossied, just as for us never fully trusted. You may write about them, so that others who have lost the silver chain may follow. Or write for them, making of STORY & EMBLEM a process of seduction into your own paleolithic memories, a barbaric enticement to liberty (chaos as CHAOS understands it). For this otherworld species or third sex, les enfants sauvages, fancy & Imagination are still undierentiated. Unbridled PLAY: at one & the same time the source of our Art & of all the races rarest eros. To embrace disorder both as wellspring of style & voluptuous storehouse, a fundamental of our alien & occult civilization, our conspiratorial esthetic, our lunatic espionage this is the action (lets face it) either of an artist of some sort, or of a tenor thirteen-year-old. Children whose claried senses betray them into a brilliant sorcery of beautiful pleasure reect something feral & smutty in the nature of reality itself: natural ontological anarchists, angels of chaos their gestures & body odors broadcast around them a jungle of presence, a forest of prescience complete with snakes, ninja weapons, turtles, futuristic shamanism, incredible mess, piss, ghosts, sunlight, jerking o, birds nests & eggs gleeful aggression against the groan-ups of those Lower Planes so powerless to englobe either destructive epiphanies or creation in the form of antics fragile but sharp enough to slice moonlight. 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

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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. Too young for Harley choppers unk-outs, break-dancers, scarcely pubescent poets of at lost railroad towns a million sparks falling from the skyrockets of Rimbaud & Mowgli slender terrorists whose gaudy bombs are compacted of polymorphous love & the precious shards of popular culture punk gunslingers dreaming of piercing their ears, animist bicyclists gliding in the pewter dusk through Welfare streets of accidental owers out-of-season gypsy skinny-dippers, smiling sideways-glancing thieves of power-totems, small change & pantherbladed knives we sense them everywhere we publish this oer to trade the corruption of our own lux et gaudium for their perfect gentle lth. 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 denes 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.

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Paganism
Constellations by which to steer the barque of the soul. If the moslem understood Islam he would become an idol-worshipper. Mahmud Shabestari Eleggua, ugly opener of doors with a hook in his head & cowrie shells for eyes, black santeria cigar & glass of rum same as Ganesh, elephant-head fat boy of Beginnings who rides a mouse. The organ which senses the numinous atrophies with the senses. Those who cannot feel baraka cannot know the caress of the world. Hermes Poimandres taught the animation of eidolons, the magic in-dwelling of icons by spirits but those who cannot perform this rite on themselves & on the whole palpable fabric of material being will inherit only blues, rubbish, decay. The pagan body becomes a Court of Angels who all perceive this place this very grove as paradise (If there is a paradise, surely it is here! inscription on a Mughal garden gate).. But ontological anarchism is too paleolithic for eschatology things are real, sorcery works, bush-spirits one with the Imagination, death an unpleasant vagueness the plot of Ovids Metamorphoses an epic of mutability. The personal mythscape. 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. Food money sex sleep sun sand & sinsemilla love truth peace freedom & justice. Beauty. Dionysus the drunk boy on a panther rank adolescent sweat Pan goatman slogs through the solid earth up to his waist as if it were the sea, his skin crusted with moss & lichen Eros multiplies himself into a dozen pastoral naked Iowa farm boys with muddy feet & pond-scum on their thighs. Raven, the potlatch trickster, sometimes a boy, old woman, bird who stole the Moon, pine needles oating on a pond, Heckle/Jeckle totempolehead, chorus-line of crows with silver eyes dancing on the woodpile same as Semar the hunchback albino hermaphrodite shadow-puppet patron of the Javanese revolution.

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Yemaya, bluestar sea-goddess & patroness of queers same as Tara, bluegrey aspect of Kali, necklace of skulls, dancing on Shivas sti lingam, licking monsoon clouds with her yard-long tongue same as Loro Kidul, jasper-green Javanese sea-goddess who bestows the power of invulnerability on sultans by tantrik intercourse in magic towers & caves. From one point of view ontological anarchism is extremely bare, stripped of all qualities & possessions, poor as CHAOS itself but from another point of view it pullulates with baroqueness like the FuckingTemples of Kathmandu or an alchemical emblem book it sprawls on its divan eating loukoum & entertaining heretical notions, one hand inside its baggy trousers. The hulls of its pirate ships are lacquered black, the lateen sails are red, black banners with the device of a winged hourglass. A South China Sea of the mind, o a jungle-at coast of palms, rotten gold temples to unknown bestiary gods, island after island, the breeze like wet yellow silk on naked skin, navigating by pantheistic stars, hierophany on hierophany, light upon light against the luminous & chaotic dark.

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Art Sabotage
Art sabotage strives to be perfectly exemplary but at the same time retain an element of opacity not propaganda but aesthetic shock apallingly direct yet also subtly angled action-as-metaphor. Art Sabotage is the dark side of Poetic Terrorism creation-throughdestruction 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. A-S goes beyond paranoia, beyond deconstruction the ultimate criticism physical attack on oensive art aesthetic jihad. The slightest taint of petty ego-icity or even of personal taste spoils its purity & vitiates its force. A-S can never seek power only release it. Individual artworks (even the worst) are largely irrelevant A-S seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & prot by delusion. This or that poet or painter cannot be condemned for lack of vision but malign Ideas can be assaulted through the artifacts they generate. MUZAK is designed to hypnotize & control its machinery can be smashed. Public book burnings why should rednecks & Customs ocials monopolize this weapon? Novels about children possessed by demons; the New York Times bestseller list; feminist tracts against pornography; schoolbooks (especially Social Studies, Civics, Health); piles of New York Post , Village Voice & other supermarket papers; choice gleanings of Xtian publishers; a few Harlequin Romances a festive atmosphere, wine-bottles & joints passed around on a clear autumn afternoon. To throw money away at the Stock Exchange was pretty decent Poetic Terrorism but to destroy the money would have been good Art Sabotage. To seize TV transmission & broadcast a few pirated minutes of incendiary Chaote art would constitute a feat of PT but simply to blow up the transmission tower would be perfectly adequate Art Sabotage. If certain galleries & museums deserve an occasional brick through their windows

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 not destruction, but a jolt to complacency then what about BANKS? Galleries turn beauty into a commodity but banks transmute Imagination into feces and debt. Wouldnt the world gain a degree of beauty with each bank that could be made to tremble . . . or fall? But how? Art Sabotage should probably stay away from politics (its so boring) but not from banks. Dont picket vandalize. Dont protest deface. 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 hearts longing for grace.

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The Assassins
Across the luster of the desert & into the polychrome hills, hairless & ochre violet dun & umber, at the top of a dessicate blue valley travelers nd an articial oasis, a fortied castle in saracenic style enclosing a hidden garden. As guests of the Old Man of the Mountain Hassan-i Sabbah they climb rock-cut steps to the castle. Here the Day of Resurrection has already come & gone those within live outside profane Time, which they hold at bay with daggers & poisons. Behind crenellations & slit-windowed towers scholars & fedayeen wake in narrow monolithic cells. Star-maps, astrolabes, alembics & retorts, piles of open books in a shaft of morning sunlight an unsheathed scimitar. Each of those who enter the realm of the Imam-of-ones-own-being becomes a sultan of inverted revelation, a monarch of abrogation & apostasy. In a central chamber scalloped with light and hung with tapestried arabesques they lean on bolsters & smoke long chibouks of haschisch scented with opium & amber. For them the hierarchy of being has compacted to a dimensionless punctum of the real for them the chains of Law have been broken they end their fasting with wine. For them the outside of everything is its inside, its true face shines through direct. But the garden gates are camouaged with terrorism, mirrors, rumors of assassination, trompe loeil, legends. Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, sti shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes a willow, a stream with watercress a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage water, greenery, beautiful faces. By night Hassan-i Sabbah like a civilized wolf in a turban stretches out on a parapet above the garden & glares at the sky, conning the asterisms 22

of heresy in the mindless cool desert air. True, in this myth some aspirant disciples may be ordered to ing themselves o the ramparts into the black but also true that some of them will learn to y like sorcerers. The emblem of Alamut holds in the mind, a mandals or magic circle lost to history but embedded or imprinted in consciousness. The Old Man its like a ghost into tents of kings & bedrooms of theologians, past all locks & guards with forgotten moslem/ninja techniques, leaves behind bad dreams, stilettos on pillows, puissant bribes. The attar of his propaganda seeps into the criminal dreams of ontological anarchism, the heraldry of our obsessions displays the luminous black outlaw banners of the Assassins . . . all of them pretenders to the throne of an Imaginal Egypt, an occult space/light continuum consumed by still-unimagined liberties.

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Pyrotechnics
Invented by the chinese but never developed for war a ne example of Poetic Terrorism a weapon used to trigger aesthetic shock rather than kill the Chinese hated war & used to go into mourning when armies were raised gunpowder more useful to frighten malign demons, delight children, ll the air with brave & risky-smelling haze. Class C Thunder Bombs from Kwantung, bottlerockets, butteries, M-80s, sunowers, A Forest In Springtime revolution weather light your cigarette from the sizzling fuse of a Haymarket-black bomb imagine the air full of lamiae & succubi, oppressive spirits, police-ghosts. Call some kid with a smouldering punk or kitchen match shamanapostle of summer gunpowder plots shatter the heavy night with pinched stars & pumped stars, arsenic & antimony, sodium & calomel, a blitz of magnesium & shrill picrate of potash. Spur-re (lampblack & saltpetre) portre & iron lings attack your local bank or ugly church with roman candles & purple-gold skyrockets, impromptu & anonymous (perhaps launch from back of pick-up truck..) Build frame-lattice lancework set-pieces on the roofs of insurance buildings or schools a kundalini-snake or Chaos-dragon coiled bariumgreen against a background of sodium-oxalate yellow Dont Tread On Me or copulating monsters shooting wads of jizm-re at a Baptists old folks home. Cloud-sculpture, smoke sculpture & ags = Air Art. Earthworks. Fountains = Water Art. And Fireworks. Dont perform with Rockefeller grants & police permits for audiences of culture-lovers. Evanescent incendiary mind-bombs, scary mandalas aring up on smug suburban nights, alien green thunderheads of emotional plague blasted by orgone-blue vajrarays of lasered feux dartice. Comets that explode with the odor of hashish & radioactive charcoal swampghouls & will-o-the-wisps haunting public parks fake St. Elmos re ickering over the architecture of the bourgeoisie strings of lady-ngers falling on the Legislature oor salamander-elementals attack well-known moral reformers.

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Blazing shellac, sugar of milk, strontium, pitch, gum water, gerbs of chinese re for a few moments the air is ozone-sharp drifting opal cloud of pungent dragon/phoenix smoke. For an instant the Empire falls, its princes & governors ee to their stygian muck, plumes of sulphur from elf-amethrowers burning their pinched asses as they retreat. The Assassin-child, psyche of re, holds sway for one brief dogstar-hot night.

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Chaos Myths
Unseen Chaos (po-te-kitea) Unpossessed, Unpassing Chaos of utter darkness Untouched & untouchable Maori Chant Chaos perches on a sky-mountain: a huge bird like a yellow bag or red reball, with six feet & four wings has no face but dances & sings. Or Chaos is a black longhaired dog, blind & deaf, lacking the ve viscera. Chaos the Abyss comes rst, then Earth/Gaia, then Desire/Eros. From these three proceed two pairs Erebus & old Night, Aether & Daylight. Neither Being nor Non-being neither air nor earth nor space: what was enclosed? where? under whose protection? What was water, deep, unfathomable? Neither death nor immortality, day nor night but ONE breathed by itself with no wind. Nothing else. Darkness swathed in darkness, unmanifest water. The ONE, hidden by void, felt the generation of heat, came into being as Desire, rst seed of Mind . . . Was there an up or down? There were casters of seed, there were powers: 26

energy underneath, impulse above. But who knows for sure? Rg Veda Tiamat the Chaos-Ocean slowly drops from her womb Silt & Slime, the Horizons, Sky and watery Wisdom. These ospring grow noisy & bumptious she considers their destruction. But Marduk the wargod of Babylon rises in rebellion against the Old Hag & her Chaos-monsters, chthonic totems Worm, Female Ogre, Great Lion, Mad Dog, Scorpion Man, Howling Storm dragons wearing their glory like gods & Tiamat herself a great sea-serpent. Marduk accuses her of causing sons to rebel against fathers she loves Mist & Cloud, principles of disorder. Marduk will be the rst to rule, to invent government. In battle he slays Tiamat & from her body orders the material universe. He inaugurates the Babylonian Empire then from gibbets & bloody entrails of Tiamats incestuous son he creates the human race to serve forever the comfort of gods & their high priests & anointed kings. Father Zeus & the Olympians wage war against Mother Gaia & the Titans, those partisans of Chaos, the old ways of hunting & gathering, of aimless wandering, androgyny & the license of beasts. Amon-Ra (Being) sits alone in the primordial Chaos-Ocean of NUN creating all the other gods by jerking o but Chaos also manifests as the dragon Apophis whom Ra must destroy (along with his state of glory, his shadow & his magic) in order that the Pharoah may safely rule a victory ritually re-created daily in Imperial temples to confound the enemies of the State, of cosmic Order. 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 orices for seeing, hearing, eating, shitting, etc. but poor old Hun Tun has none! Lets drill some into him! So they did one orice a day till on the seventh day, Chaos died.

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But . . . Chaos is also an enormous chickens egg. Inside it Pan-Ku is born & grows for 18,000 years at last the egg opens up, splits into sky & earth, yang & yin. Now Pan-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 eas human beings, etc.) Or else he becomes the man/monster Yellow Emperor. Or else he becomes Lao Tzu, prophet of Tao. In fact, poor old Hun Tun is the Tao itself. Natures music has no existence outside things. The various apertures, pipes, utes, all living beings together make up nature. The I cannot produce things & things cannot produce the I, which is self-existent. Things are what they are spontaneously, not caused by something else. Everything is natural & does not know why it is so. The 10,000 things have 10,000 dierent states, all in motion as if there were a True Lord to move them but if we search for evidence of this Lord we fail to nd any. (Kuo Hsiang) Every realized consciousness is an emperor whose sole form of rule is to do nothing to disturb the spontaneity of nature, the Tao. The sage is not Chaos itself, but rather a loyal child of Chaos one of Pan-Kus eas, a fragment of esh of Tiamats monstrous son. Heaven and Earth, says Chuang Tzu, were born at the same time I was, & the 10,000 things are one with me. Ontological Anarchism tends to disagree only with the Taoists total quietism. In our world Chaos has been overthrown by younger gods, moralists, phallocrats, banker-priests, t lords for serfs. If rebellion proves impossible then at least a kind of clandestine spiritual jihad might be launched. Let it follow the war-banners of the anarchist black dragon, Tiamat, Hun Tun. Chaos never died.

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Pornography
In persia I saw that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung for one reason alone because it works. A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, ts of dancing measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era we read under the inuence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas. In N. India even non-musical recitation provokes noise & motion, each good couplet applauded, Wa! Wa! with elegant hand-jive, tossing of rupees whereas we listen to poetry like some SciFi brain in a jar at best a wry chuckle or grimace, vestige of simian rictus the rest of the body o on some other planet. In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all a sort of punishment in eect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence shadow-realm of print, or of abstract thought world without risk or eros. So poetry is dead again & even if the mumia from its corpse retains some healing properties, auto-resurrection isnt one of them. 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. At any cost re-connect poetry to the body. Not crimes against bodies, but against Ideas (& Ideas-in-things) which are deadly & suocating. Not stupid libertinage but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes for love. In England some pornographic books are still banned. Pornography has a measurable physical eect on its readers. Like propaganda it sometimes changes lives because it uncovers true desires. Our culture produces most of its porn out of body-hatred but erotic art in itself makes a better vehicle for enhancement of being/consciousness/bliss as in certain oriental works. A sort of Western tantrik porn

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might help galvanize the corpse, make it shine with some of the glamor of crime. America has freedom of speech because all words are considered equally vapid. Only images count the censors love snaps of death & mutilation but recoil in horror at the sight of a child masturbating apparently they experience this as an invasion of their existential validity, their identication with the Empire & its subtlest gestures. No doubt even the most poetic porn would never revive the faceless corpse to dance & sing (like the Chinese Chaos-bird) but . . . imagine a script for a three-minute lm set on a mythical isle of runaway children who inhabit ruins of old castles or build totem-huts & junk-assemblage nests mixture of animation, special-eects, compugraphix & color tape edited tight as a fastfood commercial . . . . . . but weird & naked, feathers & bones, tents sewn with crystal, black dogs, pigeon-blood ashes of amber limbs tangled in sheets faces in starry masks kissing soft creases of skin androgynous pirates, castaway faces of columbines sleeping on thigh-white owers nasty hilarious piss jokes, pet lizards lapping spilt milk nude break-dancing victorian bathtub with rubber ducks & pink boners Alice on ganja . . . . . . atonal punk reggae scored for gamelan, synthesizer, saxophones & drums electric boogie lyrics sung by aetherial childrens choir ontological anarchist lyrics, cross between Hafez & Pancho Villa, Li Po & Bakunin, Kabir & Tzara call it CHAOS the Rock Video! No . . . probably just a dream. Too expensive to produce, & besides, who would see it? Not the kids it was meant to seduce. Pirate TV is a futile fantasy, rock merely another commodity forget the slick gesamtkunstwerk, then. Leaet a playground with inammatory smutty feuilletons pornopropaganda, crackpot samizdat to unchain Desire from its bondage.

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Crime
Justice cannot be obtained under any Law action in accord with spontaneous nature, action which is just, cannot be dened by dogma. The crimes advocated in these broadsheets cannot be committed against self or other but only against the mordant crystallization of Ideas into structures of poisonous Thrones & Dominations. That is, not crimes against nature or humanity but crimes by legal at. Sooner or later the uncovering & unveiling of self/nature transmogries a person into a brigand like stepping into another world then returning to this one to discover youve been declared a traitor, heretic, exile. The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul dierent from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you so dont play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr accept the fact that youre 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 completely dierent from the carrion pyramids of sultans, muftis, cadis & grinning executioners. After Chaos comes Eros the principle of order implicit in the nothingness of the unqualied One. Love is structure, system, the only code untainted by slavery & drugged sleep. We must become crooks & conmen to protect its spiritual beauty in a bezel of clandestinity, a hidden garden of espionage. Dont just survive while waiting for someones revolution to clear your head, dont sign up for the armies of anorexia or bulimia act as if you were already free, calculate the odds, step out, remember the Code Duello Smoke Pot/Eat Chicken/Drink Tea. Every man his own vine & gtree (Circle Seven Koran, Noble Drew Ali) carry your Moorish passport with pride, dont get caught in the crossre, keep your back covered but take the risk, dance before you calcify. The natural social model for ontological anarchism is the child-gang or the bank-robbers-band. Money is a lie this adventure must be

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feasible without it booty & pillage should be spent before it turns back into dust. Today is Resurrection Day money wasted on beauty will be alchemically transmuted into elixir. As my uncle Melvin used to say, stolen watermelon tastes sweeter. The world is already re-made according to the hearts desire but civilization owns all the leases & most of the guns. Our feral angels demand we trespass, for they manifest themselves only on forbidden grounds. High Way Man. The yoga of stealth, the lightning raid, the enjoyment of treasure.

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Sorcery
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 mens eyes. Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or nonordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results. The incremental openings of perception gradually banish the false selves, our cacophonous ghosts the black magic of envy & vendetta backres because Desire cannot be forced. Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins. No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or makebelieve shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass if its mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stu, banking, politics, social science not that weak blavatskian crap. 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) the archetypes supply a vocabulary for this process & therefore are treated as if they were both real & unreal, like words. Imaginal Yoga. The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real but then so must consciousness be real since its eects are so tangible. The dullard nds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception denes the world of intoxication but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this ow priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web. 33

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. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence. Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space. The tactics of ontological anarchism are rooted in this secret Art the goals of ontological anarchism appear in its owering. Chaos hexes its enemies & rewards its devotees . . . this strange yellowing pamphlet, pseudonymous & dust-stained, reveals all . . . send away for one split second of eternity.

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Advertisement
What this tells you is not prose. It may be pinned to the board but its still alive & wriggling. It does not want to seduce you unless youre extremely young & good-looking (enclose recent photo). Hakim Bey lives in a seedy Chinese hotel where the proprietor nods out over newspaper & scratchy broadcasts of Peking Opera. The ceiling fan turns like a sluggish dervish sweat falls on the page the poets kaftan is rusty, his ovals spill ash on the rug his monologues seem disjointed & slightly sinister outside shuttered windows the barrio fades into palmtrees, the naive blue ocean, the philosophy of tropicalismo. Along a highway somewhere east of Baltimore you pass an Airstream trailer with a big sign on the lawn SPIRITUAL READINGS & the image of a crude black hand on a red background. Inside you notice a display of dream-books, numbers-books, pamphlets on HooDoo and Santeria, dusty old nudist magazines, a pile of Boys Life, treatises on ghtingcocks . . . & this book, Chaos. Like words spoken in a dream, portentous, evanescent, changing into perfumes, birds, colors, forgotten music. This book distances itself by a certain impassibility of surface, almost a glassiness. It doesnt wag its tail & it doesnt snarl but it bites & humps the furniture. It doesnt have an ISBN number & it doesnt want you for a disciple but it might kidnap your children. This book is nervous like coee or malaria it sets up a network of cut-outs & safe drops between itself & its readers but its so baldfaced & literal-minded it practically encodes itself it smokes itself into a stupor. A mask, an automythology, a map without placenames sti as an egyptian wallpainting nevertheless it reaches to caress someones face & suddenly nds itself out in the street, in a body, embodied in light, walking, awake, almost satised. NYC, May 1-July 4, 1984

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Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy

Communique #1 (spring 1986)

I. Slogans & Mottos for Subway Grati & Other Purposes
ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITANISM POETIC TERRORISM (for scrawling or rubberstamping on advertisements:) THIS IS YOUR TRUE DESIRE MARXISM-STIRNERISM STRIKE FOR INDOLENCE & SPIRITUAL BEAUTY YOUNG CHILDREN HAVE BEAUTIFUL FEET THE CHAINS OF LAW HAVE BEEN BROKEN TANTRIK PORNOGRAPHY RADICAL ARISTOCRATISM KIDS LIB URBAN GUERILLAS IMAGINARY SHIITE FANATICS BOLOBOLO GAY ZIONISM (SODOM FOR THE SODOMITES) PIRATE UTOPIAS CHAOS NEVER DIED Some of these are sincere slogans of the A.O.A. others are meant to rouse public apprehension & misgivings but were not sure which is which. Thanx to Stalin, Anon., Bob Black, Pir Hassan (upon his mention be peace), F. Nietzsche, Hank Purcell Jr., P.M., & Bro. Abu Jehad al-Salah of the Moorish Temple of Dagon.

II. Some Poetic-Terrorist Ideas Still Sadly Languishing in the Realm of Conceptual Art

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1. Walk into Citibank or Chembank computer customer service area during busy period, take a shit on the oor, & leave. 2. Chicago May Day 86: organize religious procession for Haymarket Martyrs huge banners with sentimental portraits, wreathed in owers & streaming with tinsel & ribbon, borne by penitenti in black KKKatholic-style hooded gowns outrageous campy TV acolytes with incense & holy water sprinkle the crowd anarchists w/ashsmeared faces beat themselves with little ails & whips a Pope in black robes blesses tiny symbolic cons reverently carried to Cemetery by weeping punks. Such a spectacle ought to oend nearly everyone. 3. Paste up in public places a xerox yer, photo of a beautiful twelveyear-old boy, naked and masturbating, clearly titled: THE FACE OF GOD. 4. Mail elaborate & exquisite magickal blessings anonymously to people or groups you admire, e.g. for their politics or spirituality or physical beauty or success in crime, etc. Follow the same general procedure as outlined in Section 5 below, but utilize an aesthetic of good fortune, bliss or love, as appropriate. 5. Invoke a terrible curse on a malign institution, such as the New York Post or the MUZAK company. A technique adapted from Malaysian sorcerers: send the Company a package containing a bottle, corked and sealed with black wax. Inside: dead insects, scorpions, lizards or the like; a bag containing graveyard dirt (gris-gris in American HooDoo terminology) along with other noxious substances; an egg, pierced with iron nails and pins; and a scroll on which an emblem is drawn (see p. 57). (This yantra or veve invokes the Black Djinn, the Selfs dark shadow. Full details obtainable from the A.O.A.) An accompanying note explains that the hex is sent against the institution & not against individuals but unless the institution itself ceases to be malign, the curse (like a

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mirror) will begin to infect the premises with noxious fortune, a miasma of negativity. Prepare a news release explaining the curse & taking credit for it in the name of the American Poetry Society. Mail copies of this text to all employees of the institution & to selected media. The night before these letters arrive, wheatpaste the institutional premises with xerox copies of the Black Djinns emblem, where they will be seen by all employees arriving for work next morning. (Thanx to Abu Jehad again, & to Sri Anamananda the Moorish Castellan of Belvedere Weather Tower & other comrades of the Central Park Autonomous Zone, & Brooklyn Temple Number 1)

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Communique #2: The Kallikak Memorial Bolo & Chaos Ashram: A Proposal
Nursing an obsession for Airstream trailers those classic miniature dirigibles on wheels & also the New Jersey Pine Barrens, huge lost backlands of sandy creeks & tar pines, cranberry bogs & ghost towns, population around 14 per sq. mile, dirt roads overgrown with fern, brokenspine cabins & isolated rusty mobile homes with burnt-out cars in the front yards land of the mythical Kallikaks Piney families studied by eugenicists in the 1920s to justify sterilization of rural poor. Some Kallikaks married well, prospered, & waxed bourgeois thanx to good genes others however never worked real jobs but lived o the woods incest, sodomy, mental deciencies galore photos touched up to make them look vacant & morose descended from rogue Indians, Hessian mercenaries, rum smugglers, deserters Lovecraftian degenerates come to think of it the Kallikaks might well have produced secret Chaotes, precursor sex radicals, Zerowork prophets. Like other monotone landscapes (desert, sea, swamp), the Barrens seem infused with erotic power not vril or orgone so much as a languid disorder, almost a sluttishness of Nature, as if the very ground & water were formed of sexual esh, membranes, spongy erectile tissue. We want to squat there, maybe an abandoned hunting/shing lodge with old woodstove & privy or decaying Vacation Cabins on some disused County Highway or just a woodlot where we park 2 or 3 Airstreams hidden back in the pines near creek or swimming hole. Were the Kallikaks onto something good? Well nd out somewhere boys dream that extraterrestrials will come to rescue them from their families, perhaps vaporizing the parents with some alien ray in the process. Oh well. Space Pirate Kidnap Plot Uncovered Alien Unmasked As Shiite Fanatic Queer Poet UFOs Seen Over Pine Barrens

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 Lost Boys Will Leave Earth, Claims So-Called Prophet Of Chaos Hakim Bey runaway boys, mess & disorder, ecstasy & sloth, skinny-dipping, childhood as permanent insurrection collections of frogs, snails, leaves pissing in the moonlight 11, 12, 13 old enough to seize back control of ones own history from parents, school, Welfare, TV Come live with us in the Barrens well cultivate a local brand of seedless rope to nance our luxuries & contemplation of summers alchemy & otherwise produce nothing but artifacts of Poetic Terrorism & mementos of our pleasures going for aimless rides in the old pickup, shing & gathering, lying around in the shade reading comics & eating grapes this is our economy. The suchness of things when unchained from the Law, each molecule an orchid, each atom a pearl to the attentive consciousness this is our cult. The Airstream is draped with Persian rugs, the lawn is profuse with satised weeds the treehouse becomes a wooden spaceship in the nakedness of July & midnight, half-open to the stars, warm with epicurean sweat, rushed & then hushed by the breathing of the Pines. (Dear Bolo Log: You asked for a practical & feasible utopia here it is, no mere post-holocaust fantasy, no castles on the moon of Jupiter a scheme we could start up tomorrow except that every single aspect of it breaks some law, reveals some absolute taboo in U.S. society, threatens the very fabric of etc., etc. Too bad. This is our true desire, & to attain it we must contemplate not only a life of pure art but also pure crime, pure insurrection. Amen.) (Thanx to the Grim Reaper & other members of the Si Fan Temple of Providence for YALU, GANO, SILA, & ideas)

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Communique #3: Haymarket Issue

I need only mention in passing that there is a curious reappearance of the Catsh tradition in the popular Godzilla cycle of lms which arose after the nuclear chaos unleashed upon Japan. In fact, the symbolic details in the evolution of Godzilla lmic poplore parallel in a quite surprising way the traditional Japanese and Chinese mythological and folkloric themes of combat with an ambivalent chaos creature (some of the lms, like Mothra, directly recalling the ancient motifs of the cosmic egg/gourd/cocoon) that is usually tamed, after the failure of the civilizational order, through the special and indirect agency of children. Girardot, Myth & Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-tun) In some old Moorish Science Temple (in Chicago or Baltimore) a friend claimed to have seen a secret altar on which rested a matched pair of six shooters (in velvet-lined case) & a black fez. Supposedly initiation to the inner circle required the neophyte Moor to assassinate at least one cop. /// What about Louis Lingg? Was he a precursor of Ontological Anarchism? I despise you one cant help but admiring such sentiments. But the man dynamited himself aged 22 to cheat the gallows . . . this is not exactly our chosen path. /// The IDEA of the POLICE like hydra grows 100 new heads for each one cut o and all these heads are live cops. Slicing o heads gains us nothing, but only enhances the beasts power till it swallows us. /// First murder the IDEA blow up the monument inside us & then perhaps . . . the balance of power will shift. When the last cop in our brain is gunned down by the last unfullled desire perhaps even the landscape around us will begin to change . . . /// Poetic Terrorism proposes this sabotage of archetypes as the only practical insurrectionary tactic for the present. But as Shiite Extremists eager for the overthrow (by any means) of all police, ayatollahs, bankers, executioners, priests, etc., we reserve the option of venerating even the failures of radical excess. /// A few days unchained from the Empire of Lies might well be worth considerable sacrice; a moment of exalted realization may outweigh a lifetime of 42

microcephalic boredom & work. /// But this moment must become ours and our ownership of it is seriously compromised if we must commit suicide to preserve its integrity. So we mix our veneration with irony its not martyrdom itself we propose, but the courage of the dynamiter, the self-possession of a Chaos-monster, the attainment of criminal & illegal pleasures.

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Communique #4: The End of the World

The A.O.A. declares itself ocially 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 (the only ones capable of handling deadly Green Kryptonite) . . . 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. We have made an emblem to serve as the mirror-image of a discarded immortality. Like demented dictators we swoon at the thought of taking it all down with us into the Abyss. The unocial version of the Apocalypse involves a lascivious yearning for the End, & for a post-Holocaust Eden where the Survivalists (or the 144,000 Elect of Revelations) can indulge themselves in orgies of Dualist hysteria, endless nal confrontations with a seductive evil . . . We have seen the ghost of Rene Guenon, cadaverous & topped with a fez (like Boris Karlo as Ardis Bey in The Mummy) leading a funereal No Wave Industrial-Noise rock band in loud buzzing blacky-chants for the death of Culture & Cosmos: the elitist fetishism of pathetic nihilists, the Gnostic self-disgust of post-sexual intellectoids. Are these dreary ballads not simply mirror-images of all those lies & platitudes about Progress & the Future, beamed from every loudspeaker, zapped like paranoid brain-waves from every schoolbook & TV in the world of the Consensus? The thanatosis of the Hip Millenarians extrudes itself like pus from the false health of the Consumers & Workers Paradises. Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petried past imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb a present in

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which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture. The normative past or the future heat-death of the universe mean as little to us as last years GNP or the withering away of the State. All Ideal pasts, all futures which have not yet come to pass, simply obstruct our consciousness of total vivid presence. Certain sects believe that the world (or a world) has already come to an end. For Jehovahs Witnesses it happened in 1914 (yes folks, we are living in the Book of Revelations now). For certain oriental occultists, it occurred during the Major Conjunction of the Planets in 1962. Joachim of Fiore proclaimed the Third Age, that of the Holy Spirit, which replaced those of Father & Son. Hassan II of Alamut proclaimed the Great Resurrection, the immanentization of the eschaton, paradise on earth. Profane time came to an end somewhere in the late Middle Ages. Since then weve been living angelic time only most of us dont know it. Or to take an even more Radical Monist stance: Time never started at all. Chaos never died. The Empire was never founded. We are not now & never have been slaves to the past or hostages to the future. We suggest that the End of the World be declared a fait accompli; the exact date is unimportant. The ranters in 1650 knew that the Millenium comes now into each soul that wakes to itself, to its own centrality & divinity. Rejoice, fellow creature, was their greeting. All is ours! I want no part of any other End of the World. A boy smiles at me in the street. A black crow sits in a pink magnolia tree, cawing as orgone accumulates & discharges in a split second over the city . . . summer begins. I may be your lover . . . but I spit on your Millenium.

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Communique #5: Intellectual S/M Is the Fascism of the Eighties The Avant-Garde Eats Shit and Likes It
COMRADES! Recently some confusion about Chaos has plagued the A.O.A. from certain revanchist quarters, forcing us (who despise polemics) at last to indulge in a Plenary Session devoted to denunciations ex cathedra, portentous as hell; our faces burn red with rhetoric, spit ies from our lips, neck veins bulge with pulpit fervor. We must at last descend to ying banners with angry slogans (in 1930s type faces) declaring what Ontological Anarchy is not. Remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos identies 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.) From this alchemy we quintessentialize an aesthetic theory. Chaote art may act terrifying, it may even act grand guignol, but it can never allow itself to be drenched in putrid negativity, thanatosis, schadenfreude (delight in the misery of others), crooning over Nazi memorabilia & serial murders. Ontological Anarchy collects no snu lms & is bored to tears with dominatrices who spout french philosophy. (Everything is hopeless & I knew it before you did, asshole. Nyahh!) Wilhelm Reich was driven half mad & killed by agents of the Emotional Plague; maybe half his work derived from sheer paranoia (UFO conspiracies, homophobia, even his orgasm theory), BUT on one point we agree wholeheartedly sexpol: sexual repression breeds death obsession, which leads to bad politics. A great deal of avant-garde Art is saturated with Deadly Orgone Rays (DOR). Ontological Anarchy aims to build aesthetic cloud-busters (OR-guns) to disperse the miasma of cerebral sado-masochism which now passes for slick, hip, new, fashionable. Self-mutilating performance artists strike us as banal & stupid 46

their art makes everyone more unhappy. What kind of two-bit conniving horseshit . . . what kind of cockroach-brained Art creeps cooked up this apocalypse stew? Of course the avant-garde seems smart so did Marinetti & the Futurists, so did Pound & Celine. Compared to that kind of intelligence wed choose real stupidity, bucolic New Age blissed-out inanity wed rather be pinheads than queer for death. But luckily we dont have to scoop out our brains to attain our own queer brand of satori. 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. The purveyors of pointless gloom are the Death Squads of contemporary aesthetics & we are the disappeared ones. Their make-believe ballroom of occult 3 rd-Reich bric-a-brac & child murder attracts the manipulators of the Spectacle death looks better on TV than life & we Chaotes, who preach an insurrectionary joy, are edged out towards silence. Needless to say we reject all censorship by Church & State but after the revolution we would be willing to take individual & personal responsibility for burning all the Death Squad snu-art crap & running them out of town on a rail. (Criticism becomes direct action in an anarchist context.) My space has room neither for Jesus & his lords of the ies nor for Chas. Manson & his literary admirers. I want no mundane police I want no cosmic axe-murderers either; no TV chainsaw massacres, no sensitive poststructuralist novels about necrophilia. As it happens, the A.O.A. can scarcely hope to sabotage the suocating mechanisms of the State & its ghostly circuitry but we just might happen to nd ourselves in a position to do something about lesser manifestations of the DOR plague such as the Corpse-Eaters of the Lower East Side & other Art scum. 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. Social Nihilism, yes but not the dead nihilism of gnostic self-disgust. Even if its violent & abrasive, anyone with a vestigial 3 rd eye can see the dierences between revolutionary pro-life art & reactionary pro-death

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art. DOR stinks, & the chaote nose can sni it out just as it knows the perfume of spiritual/sexual joy, however buried or masked by other darker scents. Even the Radical Right, for all its horror of esh & the senses, occasionally comes up with a moment of perception & consciousness-enhancement but the Death Squads, for all their tired lip service to fashionable revolutionary abstractions, oer us about as much true libertarian energy as the FBI, FDA, or the double-dip Baptists. We live in a society which advertises its costliest commodities with images of death & mutilation, beaming them direct to the reptilian backbrain of the millions thru alpha-wave-generating carcinogenic realitywarping devices while certain images of life (such as our favorite, a child masturbating) are banned & punished with incredible ferocity. It takes no guts at all to be an Art Sadist, for salacious death lies at the aesthetic center of our Consensus Paradigm. Leftists who like to dress up & play Police-&-Victim, people who jerk o to atrocity photos, people who like to think & intellectualize about splatter art & highfalutin hopelessness & groovy ghoulishness & other peoples misery such artists are nothing but police-without-power (a perfect denition for many revolutionaries too). We have a black bomb for these aesthetic fascists it explodes with sperm & recrackers, raucous weeds & piracy, weird Shiite heresies & bubbling paradise-fountains, complex rhythms, pulsations of life, all shapeless & exquisite. Wake up! Breathe! Feel the worlds breath against your skin! Seize the day! Breathe! Breathe! (Thanx to J. Manders Four Arguments for the Abolition of Television; Adam Exit; & the Moorish Cosmopolitan of Williamsburg)

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Communique #6
I. Salon Apocalypse: Secret Theater
As long as no Stalin breathes down our necks, why not make some art in the service of . . . an insurrection? Never mind if its impossible. What else can we hope to attain but the impossible? Should we wait for someone else to reveal our true desires? If art has died, or the audience has withered away, then we nd ourselves free of two dead weights. Potentially, everyone is now some kind of artist & potentially every audience has regained its innocence, its ability to become the art that it experiences. Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols (in this case, the images weve been given by the organizers of this salon murder, war, famine, & greed). We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or cruelty, as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than prot, joy rather than fear. Poetic Terrorism. Our chosen images have the potency of darkness but all images are masks, & behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light & pleasure. For example, the man who invented aikido was a samurai who became a pacist & refused to ght for Japanese imperialism. He became a hermit, lived on a mountain sitting under a tree.. One day a former fellow-ocer came to visit him & accused him of betrayal, cowardice, etc. The hermit said nothing, but kept on sitting & the ocer fell into a rage, drew his sword, & struck. Spontaneously the unarmed master disarmed the ocer & returned his sword. Again & again the ocer tried to kill, using every subtle kata in his repertoire

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but out of his empty mind the hermit each time invented a new way to disarm him. The ocer of course became his rst disciple. Later, they learned how to dodge bullets. We might contemplate some form of metadrama meant to capture a taste of this performance, which gave rise to a wholly new art, a totally non-violent way of ghting war without murder, the sword of life rather than death. A 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. Is it possible to create a SECRET THEATER in which both artist & audience have completely disappeared only to re-appear on another plane, where life & art have become the same thing, the pure giving of gifts? (Note: The Salon Apocalypse was organized by Sharon Gannon in July, 1986.)

II. Murder War Famine Greed

The manichees & cathars believed that the body can be spiritualized or rather, that the body merely contaminates pure spirit & must be utterly rejected. The Gnostic perfecti (radical dualists) starved themselves to death to escape the body & return to the pleroma of pure light. So: to evade the evils of the esh murder, war, famine, greed paradoxically only one path remains: murder of ones own body, war on the esh, 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 esh with its light; that all lives & all is life. Things are what they are spontaneously . . . everything is natural . . . all in motion as if there were a True Lord to move them but if we seek for evidence of this lord we fail to nd any. (Kuo Hsiang) 50

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. Even more: without knowledge of the darkness (carnal knowledge) there can exist no knowledge of the light (gnosis). The two knowledges are not merely complementary: say rather identical, like the same note played in dierent octaves. Heraclitus claims that reality persists in a state of war. Only clashing notes can make harmony. (Chaos is the sum of all orders.) Give each of these four terms a dierent mask of language (to call the Furies The Kindly Ones is not mere euphemism but a way of uncovering yet more meaning). Masked, ritualized, realized as art, the terms take on their dark beauty, their Black Light. Instead of murder say the hunt, the pure paleolithic economy of all archaic and non-authoritarian tribal society venery, both the killing & eating of esh & the way of Venus, of desire. Instead of war say insurrection, not the revolution of classes & powers but of the eternal rebel, the dark one who uncovers light. Instead of greed say yearning, unconquerable desire, mad love. And then instead of famine, which is a kind of mutilation, speak of wholeness, plenty, superabundance, generosity of the self which spirals outward toward the Other. Without this dance of masks, nothing will be created. The oldest mythology makes Eros the rstborn of Chaos. Eros, the wild one who tames, is the door through which the artist returns to Chaos, the One, and then re-returns, comes back again, bearing one of the patterns of beauty. The artist, the hunter, the warrior: one who is both passionate and balanced, both greedy & altruistic to the utmost extreme. We must be saved from all salvations which save us from ourselves, from our animal which is also our anima, our very lifeforce, as well as our animus, our animating self-empowerment, which may even manifest as anger & greed. BABYLON has told us that our esh is lth with this device & the promise of salvation it enslaved us. But if the esh is already saved, already light if even consciousness itself is a kind of esh, a palpable & simultaneous living aether then we need no power to intercede for us. The wilderness, as Omar says, is paradise even now.

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The true proprietorship of murder lies with the Empire, for only freedom is complete life. War is Babylonian as well no free person will die for anothers aggrandizement. Famine comes into existence only with the civilization of the saviors, the priest-kings wasnt it Joseph who taught Pharaoh to speculate in grain futures? Greed for land, for symbolic wealth, for power to deform others souls & bodies for their own salvation greed too arises not from Nature nature-ing, but from the damming up & canalization of all energies for the Empires Glory. Against all this, 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 conlid of our desires. The architecture of suocation and paralysis will be blown up. only by our total celebration of everything even darkness. Summer Solstice, 1986

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Communique #7: Psychic Paleolithism & High Technology: A Position Paper

Just because the A.O.A. talks about Paleolithism all the time, dont get the idea we intend to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age. We have no interest in going back to the land if the deal includes the boring life of a shit-kicking peasant nor do we want tribalism if it comes with taboos, fetishes & malnutrition. We have no quarrel with the concept of culture including technology; for us the problem begins with civilization. What we like about Paleolithic life has been summed up by the Peoples-Without-Authority School of anthropology: 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 can be deduced from the following progression: the 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. A psychic paleolithism based on High-Tech post-agricultural, postindustrial, Zerowork, nomadic (or Rootless Cosmopolitan) a Quantum Paradigm Society this constitutes the ideal vision of the future according to Chaos Theory as well as Futurology (in the Robert Anton Wilson-T. Leary sense of the term). As for the present: we reject all collaboration with the Civilization of Anorexia & Bulimia, with people so ashamed of never suering that they invent hair shirts for themselves & others or those who gorge without compassion & then spew the vomit of their suppressed guilt in great masochistic bouts of jogging & dieting. All our pleasures & selfdisciplines belong to us by Nature we never deny ourselves, we never give up anything; but some things have given up on us & left us, because we are too large for them. I am both caveman & starfaring mutant, conman & free prince. Once an Indian Chief was invited to the White House 53

for a banquet. As the food passed round, the Chief heaped his plate to the max, not once but three times. At last the honky sitting next to him says, Chief, heh-heh, dont you think thats a little too much? Ugh, the Chief replies, little too much just right for Chief! Nevertheless, certain doctrines of Futurology remain problematic. For example, even if we accept the liberatory potential of such new technologies as TV, computers, robotics, Space exploration, etc., we still see a gap between potentiality & actualization. The banalization of TV, the yuppication of computers & the militarization of Space suggest that these technologies in themselves provide no determined guarantee of their liberatory use. Even if we reject the Nuclear Holocaust as just another Spectacular Diversion orchestrated to distract our attention from real problems, we must still admit that Mutual Assured Destruction & Pure War tend to dampen our enthusiasm for certain aspects of the High-Tech Adventure. Ontological Anarchy retains its aection 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). There is no humanity without techne but there is no techne worth more than my humanity. We spurn knee-jerk anti-Tech anarchism for ourselves, at least (there exist some who enjoy farming, or so one hears) and we reject the concept of the Technological Fix as well. For us all forms of determinism appear equally vapid were slaves of neither our genes nor our machines. What is natural is what we imagine & create. Nature has no Laws only habits. Life for us belongs neither to the Past that land of famous ghosts hoarding their tarnished grave-goods nor to the Future, whose bulbbrained mutant citizens guard so jealously the secrets of immortality, faster-than-light ight, designer genes & the withering of the State. Aut nunc aut nihil. Each moment contains an eternity to be penetrated yet we lose ourselves in visions seen through corpses eyes, or in nostalgia for unborn perfections. The attainments of my ancestors & descendants are nothing more to me than an instructive or amusing tale I will never call them my

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betters, even to excuse my own smallness. I print for myself a license to steal from them whatever I need psychic paleolithism or high-tech or for that matter the gorgeous detritus of civilization itself, secrets of the Hidden Masters, pleasures of frivolous nobility & la vie boheme. La decadence, Nietzsche to the contrary notwithstanding, plays as deep a role in Ontological Anarchy as health we take what we want of each. Decadent aesthetes do not wage stupid wars nor submerge their consciousness in microcephalic greed & resentment. They seek adventure in artistic innovation & non-ordinary sexuality rather than in the misery of others. The A.O.A. admires & emulates their sloth, their disdain for the stupidity of normalcy, their expropriation of aristocratic sensibilities. For us these qualities harmonize paradoxically with those of the Old Stone Age & its overowing health, ignorance of hierarchy, cultivation of virtu rather than Law. We demand decadence without sickness, & health without boredom! Thus the A.O.A. gives unqualied support to all indigenous & tribal peoples in their struggle for complete autonomy & at the same time, to the wildest, most Spaced-out speculations & demands of the Futurologists. The paleolithism of the future (which for us, as mutants, already exists) will be achieved on a grand scale only through a massive technology of the Imagination, and a scientic paradigm which reaches beyond Quantum Mechanics into the realm of Chaos Theory & the hallucinations of Speculative Fiction. 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. The squabbling ideologues of anarchism & libertarianism each prescribe some utopia congenial to their various brands of tunnel-vision, ranging from the peasant commune to the L-5 Space City. We say, let a thousand owers bloom with no gardener to lop o weeds & sports according to some moralizing or eugenical scheme. The only true conict

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is that between the authority of the tyrant & the authority of the realized self all else is illusion, psychological projection, wasted verbiage. In one sense the sons & daughters of Gaia have never left the paleolithic; in another sense, all the perfections of the future are already ours. 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 shamans 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. The means already are the end, in a certain sense; the insurrection already is our adventure; Becoming IS Being. Past & future exist within us & for us, alpha & omega. There are no other gods before or after us. We are free in TIME and will be free in SPACE as well. (Thanx to Hagbard Celine the Sage of Howth & Environs)

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Communique #8: Chaos Theory & the Nuclear Family

Sunday in Riverside Park the Fathers x their sons in place, nailing them magically to the grass with baleful ensorcelling stares of milky camaraderie, & force them to throw baseballs back & forth for hours. The boys almost appear to be small St Sebastians pierced by arrows of boredom. The smug rituals of family fun turn each humid Summer meadow into a Theme Park, each son an unwitting allegory of Fathers wealth, a pale representation 2 or 3 times removed from reality: the Child as metaphor of Something-or-other. And here I come as dusk gathers, stoned on mushroom dust, half convinced that these hundreds of reies arise from my own consciousness Where have they been all these years? why so many so suddenly? each rising in the moment of its incandescence, describing quick arcs like abstract graphs of the energy in sperm. Families! misers of love! How I hate them! Baseballs y aimlessly in vesper light, catches are missed, voices rise in peevish exhaustion. The children feel sunset encrusting the last few hours of doled-out freedom, but still the Fathers insist on stretching the tepid postlude of their patriarchal sacrice till dinnertime, till shadows eat the grass. Among these sons of the gentry one locks gazes with me for a moment I transmit telepathically the image of sweet license, the smell of TIME unlocked from all grids of school, music lessons, summer camps, family evenings round the tube, Sundays in the Park with Dad authentic time, chaotic time. Now the family is leaving the Park, a little platoon of dissatisfaction. But that one turns & smiles back at me in complicity Message Received & dances away after a rey, buoyed up by my desire. The Father barks a mantra which dissipates my power. The moment passes. The boy is swallowed up in the pattern of the week vanishes like a bare-legged pirate or Indian taken prisoner by missionaries. The Park knows who I am, it stirs under me like a giant 57

jaguar about to wake for nocturnal meditation. Sadness still holds it back, but it remains untamed in its deepest essence: an exquisite disorder at the heart of the citys night.

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Communique #9: Double-Dip Denunciations

I. Xtianity
Again & again we hope that attitudinizing corpse has nally breathed its last rancorous sigh & oated o to its nal pumpkinication. Again & again we imagine the defeat of that obscene ayed death-trip bogey nailed to the walls of all our waiting rooms, never again to whine at us for our sins . . . but again & again it resurrects itself & comes creeping back to haunt us like the villain of some nth rate snu-porn splatter lm the thousandth re-make of Night of the Living Dead trailing its snail-track of whimpering humiliation . . . just when you thought it was safe in the unconscious . . . its JAWS for JESUS. Look out! Hardcore Chainsaw Baptists! and the Leftists, nostalgic for the Omega Point of their dialectical paradise, welcome each galvanized revival of the putrescent creed with coos of delight: Lets dance the tango with all those marxist bishops from Latin America croon a ballad for the pious Polish dockworkers hum spirituals for the latest afro-Methodist presidential hopeful from the Bible Belt . . . The A.O.A. denounces Liberation Theology as a conspiracy of stalinist nuns the Whore of Babylons secret scarlet deal with red fascism in the tropics. Solidarnosc? The Popes Own Labor Union backed by the AFL/CIO, the Vatican Bank, the Freemason Lodge Propaganda Due, and the Maa. And if we ever voted wed never waste that empty gesture on some Xtian dog, no matter what its breed or color. As for the real Xtians, those bored-again self-lobotomized bigots, those Mormon babykillers, those Star Warriors of the Slave Morality, televangelist blackshirts, zombie squads of the Blessed Virgin Mary (who hovers in a pink cloud over the Bronx spewing hatred, anathema, roses of vomit on the sexuality of children, pregnant teenagers & queers) . . .

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As for the genuine death-cultists, ritual cannibals, Armageddon-freaks the Xtian Right we can only pray that the RAPTURE WILL COME & snatch them all up from behind the steering wheels of their cars, from their lukewarm game shows & chaste beds, take them all up into heaven & let us get on with human life.

II. Abortionists & Anti-abortionists

Rednecks who bomb abortion clinics belong in the same grotesque category of vicious stupidity as bishops who prattle Peace & yet condemn all human sexuality. Nature has no laws (only habits), & all law is unnatural. Everything belongs to the sphere of personal/imaginal morality even murder. However, according to Chaos Theory, it does not follow that we are obliged to like & approve of murder or abortion. Chaos would enjoy seeing every bastard love-child carried to term & birthed; sperm & egg alone are mere lovely secretions, but combined as DNA they become potential consciousness, negentropy, joy. If meat is murder! as the Vegans like to claim, what pray tell is abortion? Those totemists who danced to the animals they hunted, who meditated to become one with their living food & share its tragedy, demonstrated values far more humane than the average claque of proChoice feminoid liberals. In every single issue cooked up for debate in the patternbook of the Spectacle, both sides are invariably full of shit. The abortion issue is no exception..

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Communique #10: Plenary Session Issues New Denunciations Purges Expected

To oset any sticky karma we might have acquired thru our pulpitthumping sermonette against Xtians & other end-of-the-world creeps (see last ish) & just to set the record straight: the A.O.A. also denounces all born-again knee-jerk atheists & their frowsy late-Victorian luggage of scientistic vulgar materialism. ///// We applaud all anti-Xtian sentiment, of course & all attacks on all organized religions. But . . . to hear some anarchists talk youd think the sixties never happened and no one ever dropped LSD. ///// As for the scientists themselves, the Alice-like madnesses of Quantum & Chaos Theory have driven the best of them towards taoism & vedanta (not to mention dada) & yet if you read The Match or Freedom you might imagine science was embalmed with Prince Kropotkin & religion with Bishop Ussher. ///// Of course one despises the Aquarian brownshirts, the kind of gurus lauded recently in the New York Times for their contributions to Big Business, the franchisegranting yuppie zombie cults, the anorexic metaphysics of New Age banality . . . but OUR esotericism remains undeled by these mediocre money-changers & their braindead minions. ///// The heretics & antinomian mystics of Orient & Occident have developed systems based on inner liberation. Some of these systems are tainted with religious mysticism & even social reaction others seem more purely radical or psychological & some even crystallize into revolutionary movements (millenarian Levellers, Assassins, Yellow Turban Taoists, etc.) Whatever their aws 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 denition 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

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knowing (about history, for example) that utilizes hermeneutic phenomenology to uncover patterns of meaning (something like the Surrealists Paranoia Criticism); (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 ve aspects of cognition; and (7) a silence. ///// Its no surprise to discover how many anarchists are ex-Catholics, defrocked priests or nuns, former altar boys, lapsed born-again baptists or even ex-Shiite fanatics. Anarchism oers up a black (& red) Mass to de-ritualize all spook-haunted brains a secular exorcism but then betrays itself by cobbling together a High Church of its own, all cobwebby with Ethical Humanism, Free Thought, Muscular Atheism, & crude Fundamentalist Cartesian Logic. ///// Two decades ago we began the project of becoming Rootless Cosmopolitans, determined to sift the detritus of all tribes, cultures & civilizations (including our own) for viable fragments & to synthesize from this mess of potsherds a living system of our own lest (as Blake warned) we become slaves to someone elses. ///// If some Javanese sorcerer or Native American shaman possesses some precious fragment I need for my own medicine pouch, should I sneer & quote Bakunins line about stringing up priests with bankers guts? or should I remember that anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped & help myself to anything not nailed down? ///// The earliest denitions of anarchy are found in the Chuang Tzu & other taoist texts; mystical anarchism boasts a hoarier pedigree than the Greco-Rationalist variety. When Nietzsche spoke of the Hyperboreans I think he foretold us, who have gone beyond the death of God & the rebirth of the Goddess to a realm where spirit & matter are one. Every manifestation of that hierogamy, every material thing & every life, becomes not only sacred in itself but also symbolic of its own divine essence. ///// Atheism is nothing but the opiate of The Masses (or rather, their self-chosen champions) & not a very colorful or sexy drug. If we are to follow Baudelaires advice & be always intoxicated,

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the A.O.A. would prefer something more like mushrooms, thank you. Chaos is the oldest of the gods & Chaos never died.

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Communique #11: Special Holiday Season Food Issue Rant: Turn O the Lite!
The Association for Ontological Anarchy calls for a boycott of all products marketed under the Shibboleth of LITE beer, meat, lo-cal candy, cosmetics, music, pre-packaged lifestyles, whatever. The concept of LITE (in Situ-jargon) unfolds a complex of symbolism by which the Spectacle hopes to recuperate all revulsion against its commodication of desire. Natural, organic, healthy produce is designed for a market sector of mildly dissatised 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 wouldnt buy it. The American Middle Class (dont quibble; you know what I mean) falls naturally into opposite but complementary factions: the Armies of Anorexia & Bulimia. Clinical cases of these diseases represent only the psychosomatic froth on a wave of cultural pathology, deep, diused & largely unconscious. The Bulimics are those yupped-out gentry who gorge on margharitas & VCRs, then purge on LITE food, jogging, or (an)aerobic jiggling. The Anorexics are the lifestyle rebels, ultra-foodfaddists, eaters of algae, joyless, dispirited & wan but smug in their puritanical zeal & their designer hair-shirts. Grotesque junk food simply represents the ip-side of ghoulish health food: nothing tastes like anything but woodchips or additives its all either boring or carcinogenic or both & its all incredibly stupid. Food, cooked or raw, cannot escape from symbolism. It is, & also simultaneously represents that which it is. All food is soul food; to treat it otherwise is to court indigestion, both chronic & metaphysical.

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But in the airless vault of our civilization, where nearly every experience is mediated, where reality is strained through the deadening mesh of consensus-perception, we lose touch with food as nourishment; we begin to construct for ourselves personae based on what we consume, treating products as projections of our yearning for the authentic. The A.O.A. sometimes envisions CHAOS as a cornucopia of continual creation, as a sort of geyser of cosmic generosity; therefore we refrain from advocating any specic diet, lest we oend against the Sacred Multiplicity & the Divine Subjectivity. Were not about to hawk you yet another New Age prescription for perfect health (only the dead are perfectly healthy); 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 hunger can be the nest of all spices. Everything is light, & the lushest owers grow round the privy. We dream of phalanstery tables & bolobolo cafes where every festive collective of diners will share the individual genius of a Brillat-Savarin (that saint of taste). Shaykh Abu Said never saved money or even kept it overnight therefore, whenever some patron donated a heavy purse to his hospice, the dervishes celebrated with a gourmet feast; & on other days, all went hungry. The point was to enjoy both states, full & empty . . . LITE parodies spiritual emptiness & illumination, just as McDonalds travesties the imagery of fullness & celebration. The human spirit (not to mention hunger) can overcome & transcend all this fetishism joy can erupt even at Burger King, & even LITE beer may hide a dose of Dionysus. But why should we have to struggle against this garbagy tide of cheap rip-o ticky-tack, when we could be drinking the wine of paradise even now under our own vine & g tree? 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. Far be it from us to dogmatize; the Native American hunter might fuel his happiness with fried squirrel, the anarcho-taoist with a handful of dried apricots. Milarepa the Tibetan, after ten years of nettle-soup, ate a butter cake & achieved enlightenment. The dullard

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sees no eros in ne champagne; the sorcerer can fall intoxicated on a glass of water. Our culture, choking on its own pollutants, cries out (like the dying Goethe) for More LITE! as if these polyunsaturated euents could somehow assuage our misery, as if their bland weightless tasteless characterlessness could protect us from the gathering dark. No! This last illusion nally strikes us as too cruel. We are forced against our own slothful inclinations to take a stand & protest. Boycott! Boycott! TURN OFF THE LITE! Appendix: Menu For An Anarchist Black Banquet (veg & non-veg) Caviar & blinis; Hundred year old eggs; Squid & rice cooked in ink; Eggplants cooked in their skins with black pickled garlic; Wild rice with black walnuts & black mushrooms; Trues in black butter; Venison marinated in port, charcoal grilled, served on pumpernickel slices & garnished with roast chestnuts. Black Russians; Guiness-&-champagne; Chinese black tea. Dark chocolate mousse, Turkish coee, black grapes, plums, cherries, etc.

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Special Halloween Communique: Black Magic as Revolutionary Action

Prepare an ink of pure & genuine saron mixed with rose-water, adding if possible some blood from a black rooster. In a quiet room furnish an altar with a bowl of the ink, a pen with an iron nib, 7 black candles, an incense burner, & some benzoin. The charm may be written on virgin paper or parchment. Draw the diagram at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, facing North. Copy the 7-headed diagram (see illustration) without lifting the pen from the paper, in one smooth operation, holding your breath & pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth. This is the Barisan Laksamana, or King of the Djinn. Then draw the Solomons Seal (a star representing a 5-headed djinn) & other parts of the diagram. Above Solomons Seal write the name of the individual or institution to be cursed. Now hold the paper in the benzoin fumes, & invoke the white & black djinn within yourself: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim as-salaam alikum O White Djinn, Radiance of Mohammad king of all spirits within me O Black Djinn, shadow of myself AWAY, destroy my enemy and if you do not then be considered a traitor to Allah by virtue of the charm La illaha illAllah Mohammad ar-Rasul Allah If the curse is to be aimed at an individual oppressor, a wax doll may be prepared & the charm inserted (see illustration). Seven needles are then driven downward into the top of the head, thru the left & right armpits, left & right hips, & thru the lips or nostrils. Wrap the doll in a white shroud & bury it in the ground where the enemy is sure to walk over it, meanwhile enlisting the aid of local earth spirits: Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim 67

O Earth Djinn, Dirt-spirit O Black Djinn living underground listen, vampire of the soil I order you to mark & destroy the body & soul of _____________ Heed my orders for I am the true & original sorcerer by virtue of the charm la illaha illAllah Mohammad ar-Rasul Allah If however the curse is intended for an institution or company, assemble the following items: a hard-boiled egg, an iron nail, & 3 iron pins (stick nail & needles into egg); dried scorpion, lizard &/or beetles; a small chamois bag containing graveyard dirt, magnetized iron llings, asafoetida & sulphur, & tied with a red ribbon. Sew the charm into yellow silk & seal it with red wax. Place all these things in a wide-necked bottle, cork it, & seal it with wax. The bottle may now be carefully packaged & sent by mail to the target institution for example a Xtian televangelist show, the New York Post, the MUZAK company, a school or college along with a copy of the following statement (extra copies may be mailed to individual employees, &/or posted surreptitiously around the premises): 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 & deled the Intellect, degraded the arts toward stupefaction, spiritual slavery, propaganda for State & Capital, puritanical reaction, unjust prots, lies & aesthetic blight. The employees of this institution are now in danger. No ind ividual has been cursed, but the place itself has been infec ted with ill fortune & malignancy. Those who do not wake up & quit, or begin sabotaging the workplace, will gradually fa ll under the eect 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.

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We suggest taking credit for this action in the name of some other oensive cultural institution, such as the American Poetry Society or the Womens Anti-Porn Crusade (give full address). We also suggest, in order to counter-balance the eect 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. Use sweet incense, red & white candles, hard candy, wine, owers, etc. If possible include real silver, gold, or jewels in the gift. This how-to-do-it manual on the Malay Black Djinn Curse has been prepared according to authentic & complete ritual by the Cultural Terrorism Committee of the inner Adept Chamber of the HMOCA (Third Paradise). We are Nizari-Ismaili Esotericists; that is, Shiite heretics & fanatics who trace our spiritual line to Hassan-i Sabbah through Aladdin Mohammad III the Madman, seventh & last Pir of Alamut (& not through the line of the Aga Khans). We espouse radical monism & pure antinomianism, & oppose all forms of law & authority, in the name of Chaos. At present, for tactical reasons, we do not advocate violence or sorcery against individuals. We call for actions against institutions & ideas art-sabotage & clandestine propaganda (including ceremonial magic & tantrik pornography) and especially against the poisonous media of the Empire of Lies. The Black Djinn Curse represents only a rst step in the campaign of Poetic Terrorism which we trust will lead to other less subtle forms of insurrection.

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Special communique: A.O.A. Announces Purges in Chaos Movement

Chaos theory must of course ow impurely. Lazy yokel plows a crooked furrow. Any attempt to precipitate a crystal of ideology would result in awed rigidities, fossilizations, armorings & drynesses which we would like to renounce, along with all purity. Yes, Chaos revels in a certain abandoned formlessness not unlike the erotic messiness of those we love for their shattering of habit & their unveiling of mutability. Nevertheless this looseness does not imply that Chaos Theory must accept every leech that attempts to attach itself to our sacred membranes. Certain denitions or deformations of Chaos deserve denunciation, & our dedication to divine disorder need not deter us from trashing the traitors & rip-o artists & psychic vampires now buzzing around Chaos under the impression that its trendy. We propose not an Inquisition in the name of our denitions, but rather a duel, a brawl, an act of violence or emotional repugnance, an exorcism. First wed like to dene & even name our enemies. (1) All those death-heads & mutilation artists who associate Chaos exclusively with misery, negativity & a joyless pseudolibertinism those who think beyond good & evil means doing evil the S/M intellectuals, crooners of the apocalypse the new Gnostic Dualists, world-haters & ugly nihilists. (2) All those scientists selling Chaos either as a force for destruction (e.g. particle-beam weapons) or as a mechanism for enforcing order, as in the use of Chaos math in statistical sociology and mob control. An attempt will be made to discover names and addresses in this category. (3) All those who appropriate Chaos in the cause of some New Age scam. Of course we have no objection to your giving us all your money, but well tell you up front: well use it to buy dope or y to Morocco. You cant 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. The chief enemy in this category is Werner Erhardt, founder of est, who is now bottling Chaos & trying to franchise it to the Yuppoids. Second, we will list some of our friends, in order to give an idea of the disparate trends in Chaos 70

Theory we enjoy: Chaotica, the imaginal autonomous zone discovered by Feral Faun (a.k.a. Feral Ranter); the Academy of Chaotic Arts of Tundra Wind; Joel Birnocos magazine KAOS; Chaos Inc., a newsletter connected to the work of Ralph Abraham, a leading Chaos scientist; the Church of Eris; Discordian Zen; the Moorish Orthodox Church; certain clenches of the Church of the SubGenius; the Sacred Jihad of Our Lady of Perpetual Chaos; the writers associated with type-3 anarchism & journals like Popular Reality; etc. The battle lines are drawn. Chaos is not entropy, Chaos is not death, Chaos is not a commodity. Chaos is continual creation. Chaos never died.

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Post-Anarchism Anarchy
The Association for Ontological Anarchy gathers in conclave, black turbans & shimmering robes, sprawled on shirazi carpets sipping bitter coee, smoking long chibouk & sibsi. QUESTION: Whats our position on all these recent defections & desertions from anarchism (esp. in California-Land): condemn or condone? Purge them or hail them as advance-guard? Gnostic elite . . . or traitors? Actually, we have a lot of sympathy for the deserters & their various critiques of anarchISM. Like Sinbad & the Horrible Old Man, anarchism staggers around with the corpse of a Martyr magically stuck to its shoulders haunted by the legacy of failure & revolutionary masochism stagnant backwater of lost history. Between tragic Past & impossible Future, anarchism seems to lack a Present as if afraid to ask itself, here & now, WHAT ARE MY TRUE DESIRES? & what can I DO before its too late? . . . Yes, imagine yourself confronted by a sorcerer who stares you down balefully & demands, What is your True Desire? Do you hem & haw, stammer, take refuge in ideological platitudes? Do you possess both Imagination & Will, can you both dream & dare or are you the dupe of an impotent fantasy? Look in the mirror & try it . . . (for one of your masks is the face of a sorcerer) . . . 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 oers no concrete program whereby the truly deprived might fulll (or at least struggle realistically to fulll) real needs & desires? If so, then this failure would explain not only anarchisms lack of appeal to the poor & marginal, but also the disaection & desertions from within its own ranks. Demos, picket-lines & reprints of 19 th century classics dont add up to a vital, daring conspiracy of self-liberation. If the movement is to grow rather than shrink, a lot of deadwood will have to be jettisoned & some risky ideas embraced.

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The potential exists. Any day now, vast numbers of americans are going to realize theyre being force-fed a load of reactionary boring hysterical articially-avored crap. Vast chorus of groans, puking & retching . . . angry mobs roam the malls, smashing & looting . . . etc., etc. The Black Banner could provide a focus for the outrage & channel it into an insurrection of the Imagination. We could pick up the struggle where it was dropped by Situationism in 68 & Autonomia in the seventies, & carry it to the next stage. We could have revolt in our times & in the process, we could realize many of our True Desires, even if only for a season, a brief Pirate Utopia, a warped free-zone in the old Space/Time continuum. If the A.O.A. retains its aliation with the movement, we do so not merely out of a romantic predilection for lost causes or not entirely. Of all political systems, anarchism (despite its aws, & precisely because it is neither political nor a system) comes closest to our understanding of reality, ontology, the nature of being. As for the deserters . . . we agree with their critiques, but note that they seem to oer no new powerful alternatives. So for the time being we prefer to concentrate on changing anarchism from within. Heres our program, comrades: 1. Work on the realization that psychic racism has replaced overt discrimination as one of the most disgusting aspects of our society. Imaginative participation in other cultures, esp. those we live with. 2. Abandon all ideological purity. Embrace Type-3 anarchism (to use Bob Blacks pro-tem slogan): neither collectivist nor individualist. Cleanse the temple of vain idols, get rid of the Horrible Old Men, the relics & martyrologies. 3. Anti-work or Zerowork movement extremely important, including a radical & perhaps violent attack on Education & the serfdom of children. 4. Develop american samizdat network, replace outdated publishing/ propaganda tactics. Pornography & popular entertainment as vehicles for radical re-education.

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5. In music the hegemony of the 2/4 & 4/4 beat must be overthrown. We need a new music, totally insane but life-arming, rhythmically subtle yet powerful, & we need it NOW. 6. Anarchism must wean itself away from evangelical materialism & banal 2-dimensional 19 th century scientism. Higher states of consciousness are not mere SPOOKS invented by evil priests. The orient, the occult, the tribal cultures possess techniques which can be appropriated in true anarchist fashion. 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 & anticlerical; avid for all new technologies of consciousness & metanoia a democratization of shamanism, intoxicated & serene. 7. Sexuality is under assault, obviously from the Right, more subtly from the avant-pseud post-sexuality movement, & even more subtly by Spectacular Recuperation in media & advertising. Time for a major step forward in SexPol awareness, an explosive rearmation of the polymorphic eros (even & especially in the face of plague & gloom) a literal glorication of the senses, a doctrine of delight. Abandon all world-hatred & shame. 8. Experiment with new tactics to replace the outdated baggage of Leftism. Emphasize practical, material & personal benets of radical networking. The times do not appear propitious for violence or militancy, but surely a bit of sabotage & imaginative disruption is never out of place. Plot & conspire, dont bitch & moan. The Art World in particular deserves a dose of Poetic Terrorism. 9. The despatialization of post-Industrial society provides some benets (e.g. computer networking) but can also manifest as a form of oppression (homelessness, gentrication, architectural depersonalization, the erasure of Nature, etc.) The communes of the sixties tried to circumvent these forces but failed. The question of land refuses to go away. How can we separate the concept of space from the

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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? AnarchISM ultimately implies anarchy & anarchy is chaos. Chaos is the principle of continual creation . . . & Chaos never died. A.O.A. Plenary Session March 87, NYC

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Black Crown & Black Rose: AnarchoMonarchism & Anarcho-Mysticism

In sleep we dream of only two forms of government anarchy & monarchy. Primordial root consciousness understands no politics & never plays fair. A democratic dream? a socialist dream? Impossible. Whether my REMs bring verdical near-prophetic visions or mere Viennese wish-fulllment, only kings & wild people populate my night. Monads & nomads. Pallid day (when nothing shines by its own light) slinks & insinuates & suggests that we compromise with a sad & lackluster reality. But 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. Like the dreamer, they must possess & do possess their own perceptions, & for this they must sacrice the merely social to a tyrannical Muse. Art dies when treated fairly. It must enjoy a cavemans wildness or else have its mouth lled with gold by some prince. Bureaucrats & sales personnel poison it, professors chew it up, & philosophers spit it out. Art is a kind of byzantine barbarity t only for nobles & heathens. If you had known the sweetness of life as a poet in the reign of some venal, corrupt, decadent, ineective & ridiculous Pasha or Emir, some Qajar shah, some King Farouk, some Queen of Persia, you would know that this is what every anarchist must want. How they loved poems & paintings, those dead luxurious fools, how they absorbed all roses & cool breezes, tulips & lutes! Hate their cruelty & caprice, yes but at least they were human. The bureaucrats, however, who smear the walls of the mind with odorless lth so kind, so gemutlich who pollute the inner air with numbness theyre not even worthy of hate. They scarcely exist outside the bloodless Ideas they serve. And besides: the dreamer, the artist, the anarchist do they not share some tinge of cruel caprice with the most outrageous of moghuls?

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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. In Russia the Narodnik-Anarchists would sometimes forge a ukase or manifesto in the name of the Czar; in it the Autocrat would complain that greedy lords & unfeeling ocials had sealed him in his palace & cut him o from his beloved people. He would proclaim the end of serfdom & call on peasants & workers to rise in His Name against the government. Several times this ploy actually succeeded in sparking revolts. Why? Because the single absolute ruler acts metaphorically as a mirror for the unique and utter absoluteness of the self. Each peasant looked into this glassy legend & beheld his or her own freedom an illusion, but one that borrowed its magic from the logic of the dream. A similar myth must have inspired the 17 th century Ranters & Antinomians & Fifth Monarchy Men who ocked to the Jacobite standard with its erudite cabals & bloodproud conspiracies. The radical mystics were betrayed rst by Cromwell & then by the Restoration why not, nally, join with ippant cavaliers & foppish counts, with Rosicrucians & Scottish Rite Masons, to place an occult messiah on Albions throne? 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 Prophets Household & metamorphosed it into the Imam-of-ones-own-being, the perfected self who is beyond all Law & rule, who is atoned with the One. And this doctrine led them into revolt against Islam, to terror & assassination in the name of pure esoteric self-liberation & total realization. Classical 19 th century anarchism dened itself in the struggle against crown & church, & therefore on the waking level it considered itself egalitarian & atheist. This rhetoric however obscures what really happens: the king becomes the anarchist, the priest a heretic. In this strange duet of mutability the politician, the democrat, the socialist, the rational ideologue can nd no place; they are deaf to the music & lack

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all sense of rhythm. Terrorist & monarch are archetypes; these others are mere functionaries. Once anarch & king clutched each others throats & waltzed a totentanz a splendid battle. Now, however, both are relegated to historys trashbin has-beens, curiosities of a leisurely & more cultivated past. They whirl around so fast that they seem to meld together . . . can they somehow have become one thing, a Siamese twin, a Janus, a freakish unity? The sleep of Reason . . . ah! most desirable & desirous monsters! Ontological Anarchy proclaims atly, bluntly, & almost brainlessly: yes, the two are now one. As a single entity the anarch/king now is reborn; each of us the ruler of our own esh, our own creations and as much of everything else as we can grab & hold. Our actions are justied by at & our relations are shaped by treaties with other autarchs. We make the law for our own domains & the chains of the law have been broken. At present perhaps we survive as mere Pretenders but even so we may seize a few instants, a few square feet of reality over which to impose our absolute will, our royaume. Letat, cest moi. 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. The words monarchism & mysticism are used here in part simply pour epater those egalito-atheist anarchists who react with pious horror to any mention of pomp or superstition-mongering. No champagne revolutions for them! Our brand of anti-authoritarianism, however, thrives on baroque paradox; it favors states of consciousness, emotion & aesthetics over all petried ideologies & dogma; it embraces multitudes & relishes contradictions. Ontological Anarchy is a hobgoblin for BIG minds. The translation of the title (& key term) of Max Stirners magnum opus as The Ego & Its Own has led to a subtle misinterpretation of individualism. The English-Latin word ego comes freighted & weighed with freudian & protestant baggage. A careful reading of Stirner suggests that The Unique & His Own-ness would better reect his intentions, given that he never denes the ego in opposition to libido or id, or in opposition to soul or

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spirit. The Unique (der Einzige) might best be construed simply as the individual self. Stirner commits no metaphysics, yet bestows on the Unique a certain absoluteness. In what way then does this Einzige dier from the Self of Advaita Vedanta? Tat tvam asi: Thou (individual Self) art That (absolute Self). Many believe that mysticism dissolves the ego. Rubbish. Only death does that (or such at least is our Sadducean assumption). 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 highest task of metaphysics (accomplished for example by Ibn Arabi, Boehme, Ramana Maharshi) is in a sense to self-destruct, to identify metaphysical & physical, transcendent & immanent, as ONE. Certain radical monists have pushed this doctrine far beyond mere pantheism or religious mysticism. An apprehension of the immanent oneness of being inspires certain antinomian heresies (the Ranters, the Assassins) whom we consider our ancestors. Stirner himself seems deaf to the possible spiritual resonances of Individualism & in this he belongs to the 19 th century: born long after the deliquescence of Christendom, but long before the discovery of the Orient & of the hidden illuminist tradition in Western alchemy, revolutionary heresy & occult activism. Stirner quite correctly despised what he knew as mysticism, a mere pietistic sentimentality based on self-abnegation & world hatred. Nietzsche nailed down the lid on God a few years later. Since then, who has dared to suggest that Individualism & mysticism might be reconciled & synthesized? The missing ingredient in Stirner (Nietzsche comes closer) is a working concept of nonordinary consciousness. The realization of the unique self (or ubermensch) must reverberate & expand like waves or spirals or music to embrace direct experience or intuitive perception of the uniqueness of reality itself. This realization engulfs & erases all duality, dichotomy, & dialectic. It carries with itself, like an electric charge, an intense & wordless sense of value: it divinizes the self.

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Being/consciousness/bliss (satchitananda) cannot be dismissed as merely another Stirnerian spook or wheel in the head. It invokes no exclusively transcendent principle for which the Einzige must sacrice his/her own-ness. It simply states that intense awareness of existence itself results in bliss or in less loaded language, valuative consciousness. The goal of the Unique after all is to possess everything; the radical monist attains this by identifying self with perception, like the Chinese inkbrush painter who becomes the bamboo, so that it paints itself. Despite mysterious hints Stirner drops about a union of Unique-ones & despite Nietzsches eternal Yea & exaltation of life, their Individualism seems somehow shaped by a certain coldness toward the other. In part they cultivated a bracing, cleansing chilliness against the warm suocation of 19 th century sentimentality & altruism; in part they simply despised what someone (Mencken?) called Homo Boobensis. And yet, reading behind & beneath the layer of ice, we uncover traces of a ery doctrine what Gaston Bachelard might have called a Poetics of the Other. The Einziges relation with the Other cannot be dened or limited by any institution or idea. And yet clearly, however paradoxically, the Unique depends for completeness on the Other, & cannot & will not be realized in any bitter isolation. The examples of wolf children or enfants sauvages suggest that a human infant deprived of human company for too long will never attain conscious humanity will never acquire language. The Wild Child perhaps provides a poetic metaphor for the Unique-one and yet simultaneously marks the precise point where Unique & Other must meet, coalesce, unify or else fail to attain & possess all of which they are capable. 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. When we speak of being & consciousness, we point to the Self; when we speak of bliss we implicate the Other. The acquisition of language falls under the sign of Eros all communication is essentially erotic, all relations are erotic. Avicenna & Dante claimed that love moves the very stars & planets in their courses the Rg Veda & Hesiods Theogony both proclaim Love the rst god born after Chaos. Aections, anities, aesthetic perceptions, beautiful creations,

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conviviality all the most precious possessions of the Unique-one arise from the conjunction of Self & Other in the constellation of Desire. Here again the project begun by Individualism can be evolved & revivied by a graft with mysticism specically with tantra. As an esoteric technique divorced from orthodox Hinduism, tantra provides a symbolic framework (Net of Jewels) for the identication of sexual pleasure & non-ordinary consciousness. All antinomian sects have contained some tantrik aspect, from the families of Love & Free Brethren & Adamites of Europe to the pederast sus of Persia to the Taoist alchemists of China. Even classical anarchism has enjoyed its tantrik moments: Fouriers Phalansteries; the Mystical Anarchism of G. Ivanov & other n-de-sicle Russian symbolists; the incestuous erotism of Arzibashaevs Sanine; the weird combination of Nihilism & Kali-worship which inspired the Bengali Terrorist Party (to which my tantrik guru Sri Kamanaransan Biswas had the honor of belonging) . . . We, however, propose a much deeper syncretism of anarchy & tantra than any of these. In fact, we simply suggest that Individual Anarchism & Radical Monism are to be considered henceforth one and the same movement. This hybrid has been called spiritual materialism, a term which burns up all metaphysics in the re of oneness of spirit & matter. We also like Ontological Anarchy because it suggests that being itself remains in a state of divine Chaos, of all-potentiality, of continual creation. In this ux only the jiva mukti, or liberated individual, is self-realized, and thus monarch or owner of his perceptions and relations. In this ceaseless ow only desire oers any principle of order, and thus the only possible society (as Fourier understood) is that of lovers. Anarchism is dead, long live anarchy! We no longer need the baggage of revolutionary masochism or idealist self-sacrice or the frigidity of Individualism with its disdain for conviviality, of living together or the vulgar superstitions of 19 th century atheism, scientism, and progressism. All that dead weight! Frowsy proletarian suitcases, heavy bourgeois steamer-trunks, boring philosophical portmanteaux over the side with them! We want from these systems only their vitality, their life-forces, daring, intransigence, anger, heedlessness their power, their shakti. Before

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we jettison the rubbish and the carpetbags, well rie the luggage for billfolds, revolvers, jewels, drugs and other useful items keep what we like and trash the rest. Why not? Are we priests of a cult, to croon over relics and mumble our martyrologies? Monarchism too has something we want a grace, an ease, a pride, a superabundance. Well take these, and dump the woes of authority & torture in historys 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. As the Ranters used to say when greeting any fellow creature from king to cut-purse Rejoice! All is ours!

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Instructions for the Kali Yuga

The Kali Yuga Still has 200,000 or so years to play good news for advocates & avatars of CHAOS, bad news for Brahmins, Yahwists, bureaucrat-gods & their runningdogs. I knew Darjeeling hid something for me soon as I heard the name dorje ling Thunderbolt City. In 1969 I arrived just before the monsoons. Old British hill station, summer hdqrs for Govt. of Bengal streets in the form of winding wood staircases, the Mall with a View of Sikkim & Mt Katchenhunga Tibetan temples & refugees beautiful yellowporcelain people called Lepchas (the real abos) Hindus, Moslems, Nepalese & Bhutanese Buddhists, & decaying Brits who lost their way home in 47, still running musty banks & tea-shoppes. Met Ganesh Baba, fat white-bearded saddhu with overly-impeccable Oxford accent never saw anyone smoke so much ganja, chillam after chillam full, then wed wander the streets while he played ball with shrieking kids or picked ghts in the bazaar, chasing after terried clerks with his umbrella, then roaring with laughter. He introduced me to Sri Kamanaransan Biswas, a tiny wispy middleage Bengali government clerk in a shabby suit, who oered to teach me Tantra. Mr Biswas lived in a tiny bungalow perched on a steep pinetree misty hillside, where I visited him daily with pints of cheap brandy for puja & tippling he encouraged me to smoke while we talked, since ganja too is sacred to Kali. Mr Biswas in his wild youth was a member of the Bengali Terrorist Party, which included both Kali worshippers & heretic Moslem mystics as well as anarchists & extreme leftists. Ganesh Baba seemed to approve of this secret past, as if it were a sign of Mr Biswass hidden tantrika strength, despite his outward seedy mild appearance. We discussed my readings in Sir John Woodrue (Arthur Avalon) each afternoon, I walked there thru cold summer fogs, Tibetan spirittraps apping in the soaked breeze loomed out of the mist & cedars. We practiced the Tara-mantra and Tara-mudra (or Yoni-mudra), and studied the Tara-yantra diagram for magical purposes. Once we visited a temple

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to the Hindu Mars (like ours, both planet & war-god) where he bought a nger-ring made from an iron horseshoe nail & gave it to me. More brandy & ganja. Tara: one of the forms of Kali, very similar in attributes: dwarsh, naked, four-armed with weapons, dancing on dead Shiva, necklace of skulls or severed heads, tongue dripping blood, skin a deep blue-grey the precise color of monsoon clouds. Every day more rain mud-slides blocking roads. My Border Area Permit expires. Mr Biswas & I descend the slick wet Himalayas by jeep & train down to his ancestral city, Siliguri in the at Bengali plains where the Ganges ngers into a sodden viridescent delta. We visit his wife in the hospital. Last year a ood drowned Siliguri killing tens of thousands. Cholera broke out, the citys a wreck, algaestained & ruined, the hospitals halls still caked with slime, blood, vomit, the liquids of death. She sits silent on her bed glaring unblinking at hideous fates. Dark side of the goddess. He gives me a colored lithograph of Tara which miraculously oated above the water & was saved. That night we attend some ceremony at the local Kali-temple, a modest half-ruined little roadside shrine torchlight the only illumination chanting & drums with strange, almost African syncopation, totally unclassical, primordial & yet insanely complex. We drink, we smoke. Alone in the cemetery, next to a half-burnt corpse, Im initiated into Tara Tantra. Next day, feverish & spaced-out, I say farewell & set out for Assam, to the great temple of Shaktis yoni in Gauhati, just in time for the annual festival. Assam is forbidden territory & I have no permit. Midnight in Gauhati I sneak o the train, back down the tracks thru rain & mud up to my knees & total darkness, blunder at last into the city & nd a bug-ridden hotel. Sick as a dog by this time. No sleep. In the morning, bus up to the temple on a nearby mountain. Huge towers, pullulating deities, courtyards, outbuildings hundreds of thousands of pilgrims weird saddhus down from their ice-caves squatting on tiger skins & chanting. Sheep & doves are being slaughtered by the thousands, a real hecatomb (not another white sahib in sight) gutters running inch-deep in blood curve-bladed Kali-swords chop chop chop, dead heads plocking onto the slippery cobblestones.

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When Shiva chopped Shakti into 53 pieces & scattered them over the whole Ganges basin, her cunt fell here. Some friendly priests speak English & help me nd the cave where Yonis on display. By this time I know Im seriously sick, but determined to nish the ritual. A herd of pilgrims (all at least one head shorter than me) literally engulfs me like an undertow-wave at the beach, & hurls me suspended down suocating winding troglodyte stairs into claustrophobic womb-cave where I swirl nauseated & hallucinating toward a shapeless cone meteorite smeared in centuries of ghee & ochre. The herd parts for me, allows me to throw a garland of jasmine over the yoni. A week later in Kathmandu I enter the German Missionary Hospital (for a month) with hepatitis. A small price to pay for all that knowledge the liver of some retired colonel from a Kipling story! but I know her, I know Kali. Yes absolutely the archetype of all that horror, yet for those who know, she becomes the generous mother. Later in a cave in the jungle above Rishikish I meditated on Tara for several days (with mantra, yantra, mudra, incense, & owers) & returned to the serenity of Darjeeling, its benecent visions. Her age must contain horrors, for most of us cannot understand her or reach beyond the necklace of skulls to the garland of jasmine, knowing in what sense they are the same. To go thru CHAOS, to ride it like a tiger, to embrace it (even sexually) & absorb some of its shakti, its life-juice this is the Path of Kali Yuga. Creative nihilism. For those who follow it she promises enlightenment & even wealth, a share of her temporal power. The sexuality & violence serve as metaphors in a poem which acts directly on consciousness through the Image-ination or else in the correct circumstances they can be openly deployed & enjoyed, embued with a sense of the holiness of every thing from ecstasy & wine to garbage & corpses. Those who ignore her or see her outside themselves risk destruction. Those who worship her as ishta-devata, or divine self, taste her Age of Iron as if it were gold, knowing the alchemy of her presence.

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Against the Reproduction of Death

One of the signs of that End Time so many seem to anticipate would consist of a fascination with all the most negative & hateful detritus of that Time, a fascination felt by the very class of thinkers who consider themselves most perspicacious about the so-called apocalypse they warn us to beware. Im speaking of people I know very well those of the spiritual right (such as the neo-Guenonians with their obsession for signs of decadence) & those of the post-philosophical left, the detached essayists of death, connoisseurs of the arts of mutilation. For both these sets, all possible action in the world is smeared out onto one level plain all become equally meaningless. For the Traditionalist, nothing matters but to prepare the soul for death (not only its own but the whole worlds as well). For the cultural critic nothing matters but the game of identifying yet one more reason for despair, analyzing it, adding it to the catalogue. Now the End of the World is an abstraction because it has never happened. It has no existence in the real world. It will cease to be an abstraction only when it happens if it happens. (I do not claim to know Gods mind on the subject nor to possess any scientic knowledge about a still non-existent future). I see only a mental image & its emotional ramications; as such I identify it as a kind of ghostly virus, a spook-sickness in myself which ought to be expunged rather than hypochondriacally coddled & indulged. I have come to despise the End of the World as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, & cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing. I understand why the religious & political powers would want to keep me quaking in my shoes. Since only they oer even a chance of evading ragnarok (thru prayer, thru democracy, thru communism, etc.), I will sheepishly follow their dictates & dare nothing on my own. The case of the enlightened intellectuals, however, seems more puzzling at rst. What power do they derive from this telling-the-beads of fear & gloom, sadism & hatred? Essentially they gain smartness. Any attack on them must appear stupid, since they alone are clear-eyed enough to recognize the truth, 86

they alone daring enough to show it forth in deance of rude shit-kicking censors & liberal wimps. If I attack them as part of the very problem they claim to be discussing objectively, I will be seen as a bumpkin, a prude, a pollyanna. If I admit my hatred for the artifacts of their perception (books, artworks, performances) then I may be dismissed as merely squeamish (& so of course psychologically repressed), or else at the very least lacking in seriousness. Many people assume that because I sometimes express myself as an anarchist boy-lover, I must also be interested in other ultra-postmodern ideas like serial child-murder, fascist ideology, or the photographs of Joel P. Witkin. They assume only two sides to any issue the hip side & the unhip side. A marxist who objected to all this death-cultishness as antiprogressive would be thought as foolish as a Xtian fundamentalist who believed it immoral. I maintain that (as usual) many sides exist to this issue rather than only two. Two-sided issues (creationism vs darwinism, choice vs prolife, etc.) are all without exception delusions, spectacular lies. My position is this: I am all too well aware of the intelligence which prevents action. I myself possess it in abundance. Every once in a while however I have managed to behave as if I were stupid enough to try to change my life. Sometimes Ive used dangerous stupiants like religion, marijuana, chaos, the love of boys. On a few occasions I have attained some degree of success & I say this not to boast but rather to bear witness. By overthrowing the inner icons of the End of the World & the Futility of all mundane endeavor, I have (rarely) broken through into a state which (by comparison with all Id known) appeared to be one of health. The images of death & mutilation which fascinate our artists & intellectuals appear to me in the remembered light of these experiences tragically inappropriate to the real potential of existence & of discourse about existence. Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning. I do not read this as a pessimistic statement. If it be true, then I can see in it nothing else but a declaration of autonomy for my imagination & will & for the most beautiful act they can conceive with which to bestow meaning upon existence.

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Why should I emblemize this freedom with an act such as murder (as did the existentialists) or with any of the ghoulish tastes of the eighties? Death can only kill me once till then I am free to express & experience (as much as I can) a life & an art of life based on self-valuating peak experiences, as well as conviviality (which also possesses its own reward). The obsessive replication of Death-imagery (& its reproduction or even commodication) gets in the way of this project just as obstructively as censorship or media-brainwashing. It sets up negative feedback loops it is bad juju. It helps no one conquer fear of death, but merely inculcates a morbid fear in place of the healthy fear all sentient creatures feel at the smell of their own mortality. This is not to absolve the world of its ugliness, or to deny that truly fearful things exist in it. But some of these things can be overcome on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear. I recently attended a gay dance/poetry performance of uncompromising hipness: the one black dancer in the troupe had to pretend to fuck a dead sheep. Part of my self-induced stupidity, I confess, is to believe (& even feel) that art can change me, & change others. Thats why I write pornography & propaganda to cause change. Art can never mean as much as a love aair, perhaps, or an insurrection. But . . . to a certain extent . . . it works. Even if Id given up all hope in art, however, all expectation of exaltation, I would still refuse to put up with art that merely exacerbates my misery, or indulges in schadenfreude, delight in the misery of others. I turn away from certain art as a dog would turn away howling from the corpse of its companion. Id like to renounce the sophistication which would permit me to sni it with detached curiosity as yet another example of post-industrial decomposition. Only the dead are truly smart, truly cool. Nothing touches them. While I live, however, I side with bumbling suering crooked life, with anger rather than boredom, with sweet lust, hunger & carelessness . . . against the icy avant-guard & its fashionable premonitions of the sepulcher.

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Ringing Denunciation of Surrealism

(For Harry Smith) At the surrealist lm show, someone asked Stan Brakhage about the medias use of surrealism (MTV, etc.); he answered that it was a damn shame. Well, maybe it is & maybe it isnt (does popular kultur ipso facto lack all inspiration?) but granting that on some level the medias appropriation of surrealism is a damn shame, are we to believe that there was nothing in surrealism that allowed this theft to occur? The return of the repressed means the return of the paleolithic not a return to the Old Stone Age, but a spiralling around on a new level of the gyre. (After all, 99.9999% of human experience is of hunting/gathering, with agriculture & industry a mere oil slick on the deep well of nonhistory.) Paleolithic equals pre-Work (original leisure society). PostWork (Zerowork) equals Psychic Paleolithism. All projects for the liberation of desire (Surrealism) which remain enmeshed in the matrix of Work can only lead to the commodication of desire. The Neolithic begins with desire for commodities (agricultural surplus), moves on to the production of desire (industry), & ends with the implosion of desire (advertising). The Surrealist liberation of desire, for all its aesthetic accomplishments, remains no more than a subset of production hence the wholesaling of Surrealism to the Communist Party & its Work-ist ideology (not to mention attendant misogyny & homophobia). Modern leisure, in turn, is simply a subset of Work (hence its commodication) so it is no accident that when Surrealism closed up shop, the only customers at the garage sale were ad execs. Advertising, using Surrealisms colonization of the unconscious to create desire, leads to the nal implosion of Surrealism. Its not just a damn shame & a disgrace, not a simple appropriation. Surrealism was made for advertising, for commodication. Surrealism is in fact a betrayal of desire. And yet, out of this abyss of meaning, desire still rises, innocent as a new-hatched phoenix. Early Berlin dada (which rejected the return of the art-object) for all its faults provides a better model for dealing

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with the implosion of the social than Surrealism could ever do an anarchist model, or perhaps (in anthro-jargon) a non-authoritarian model, a destruction of all ideology, of all chains of law. As the structure of Work/Leisure crumbles into emptiness, as all forms of control vanish in the dissolution of meaning, the Neolithic seems bound to vanish as well, with all its temples & granaries & police, to be replaced by some return of hunting/gathering on the psychic level a re-nomadization. Everythings imploding & disappearing the oedipal family, education, even the unconscious itself (as Andr Codrescu says). Lets not mistake this for Armageddon (lets resist the seduction of apocalypse, the eschatological con) its not the world coming to an end only the empty husks of the social, catching re & disappearing. Surrealism must be junked along with all the other beautiful bric-a-brac of agricultural priestcraft & vapid control-systems. No one knows whats coming, what misery, what spirit of wildness, what joy but the last thing we need on our voyage is another set of commissars popes of our dreams daddies. Down with Surrealism . . . Naropa, July 9, 1988

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For a Congress of Weird Religions

Weve learned to distrust the verb to be, the word is lets say rather: note the striking resemblance between the concept SATORI & the concept REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE in both cases: a perception of the ordinary with extraordinary consequences for consciousness & action. We cant use the phrase is like because both concepts (like all concepts, all words for that matter) come crusted with accretions each burdened with all its psycho-cultural baggage, like guests who arrive suspiciously overly well-supplied for the weekend. So allow me the old-fashioned Beat-Zennish use of satori, while simultaneously emphasizing in the case of the Situationist slogan that one of the roots of its dialectic can be traced to dada & Surrealisms notion of the marvelous erupting from (or into) a life which only seems suocated by the banal, by the miseries of abstraction & alienation. I dene my terms by making them more vague, precisely in order to avoid the orthodoxies of both Buddhism & Situationism, to evade their ideologicosemantic traps those broken-down language machines! Rather, I propose we ravage them for parts, an act of cultural bricolage. Revolution means just another turn of the crank while religious orthodoxy of any sort leads logically to a veritable government of cranks. Lets not idolize satori by imagining it the monopoly of mystic monks, or as contingent on any moral code; & rather than fetishize the Leftism of 68 we prefer Stirners term insurrection or uprising, which escapes the built-in implications of a mere change of authority. This constellation of concepts involves breaking rules of ordered perception to arrive at direct experiencing, somewhat analogous to the process whereby chaos spontaneously resolves into fractal nonlinear orders, or the way in which wild creative energy resolves as play & poesis. Spontaneous order out of chaos in turn evokes the anarchist Taoism of the Chuang Tzu. Zen may be accused of lacking awareness of the revolutionary implications of satori, while the Situationists can be criticized for ignoring a certain spirituality inherent in the selfrealization & conviviality their cause demands. By identifying satori

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with the r. of e.d.l. were performing a bit of a shotgun marriage fully as remarkable as the Surrealists famous mating of an umbrella & sewing machine or whatever it was. Miscegenation. The race-mixing advocated by Nietzsche, who was attracted, no doubt, by the sexiness of the halfcaste. Im tempted to try to describe the way satori is like the r. of e.d.l. but I cant. Or to put it another way: nearly all I write revolves around this theme; I would have to repeat nearly everything in order to elucidate this single point. Instead, as an appendix, I oer one more curious coincidence or interpenetration of 2 terms, one from Situationism again & the other this time from susm. The drive or drift was conceived as an exercise in deliberate revolutionizing of everyday life a sort of aimless wandering thru city streets, a visionary urban nomadism involving an openness to culture as nature (if I grasp the idea correctly) which by its sheer duration would inculcate in the drifters a propensity to experience the marvelous; not always in its benecent form perhaps, but hopefully always productive of insight whether thru architecture, the erotic, adventure, drink & drugs, danger, inspiration, whatever into the intensity of unmediated perception & experience. The parallel term in susm would be journeying to the far horizons or simply journeying, a spiritual exercise which combines the urban & nomadic energies of Islam into a single trajectory, sometimes called the Caravan of Summer. The dervish vows to travel at a certain velocity, perhaps spending no more than 7 nights or 40 nights in one city, accepting whatever comes, moving wherever signs & coincidences or simply whims may lead, heading from power-spot to power-spot, conscious of sacred geography, of itinerary as meaning, of topology as symbology. Heres another constellation: Ibn Khaldun, On the Road (both Jack Kerouacs & Jack Londons), the form of the picaresque novel in general, Baron Munchausen, wanderjahr, Marco Polo, boys in a suburban summer forest, Arthurian knights out questing for trouble, queers out cruising for boys, pub-crawling with Melville, Poe, Baudelaire or canoeing with Thoreau in Maine . . . travel as the antithesis of tourism, space rather than time. Art project: the construction of a map bearing a 1:1 ratio to the territory explored. Political project: the construction of shifting autonomous zones within an invisible nomadic network (like the Rainbow

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Gatherings). Spiritual project: the creation or discovery of pilgrimages in which the concept shrine has been replaced (or esotericized) by the concept peak experience. What Im trying to do here (as usual) is to provide a sound irrational basis, a strange philosophy if you like, for what I call the Free Religions, including the Psychedelic & Discordian currents, non-hierarchical neo-paganism, antinomian heresies, chaos & Kaos Magik, revolutionary HooDoo, unchurched & anarchist Christians, Magical Judaism, the Moorish Orthodox Church, Church of the SubGenius, the Faeries, radical Taoists, beer mystics, people of the Herb, etc., etc. Contrary to the expectations of 19 th century radicals, religion has not gone away perhaps wed be better o if it had but has instead increased in power, seemingly in proportion to the global increase in the realm of technology & rational control. Both fundamentalism & the New Age derive some force from deep & widespread dissatisfaction with the System that works against all perception of the marvelousness of everyday life call it Babylon or the Spectacle, Capital or Empire, Society of Simulation or of soulless mechanism what you wish. But these two religious forces divert the very desire for the authentic toward overpowering & oppressive new abstractions (morality in the case of fundamentalism, commodication in the case of the New Age), & for this reason can quite properly be called reactionary. Just as cultural radicals will seek to inltrate & subvert the popular media, & just as political radicals will perform similar functions in the spheres of Work, Family, & other social organizations, so there exists a need for radicals to penetrate the institution of religion itself rather than merely continue to mouth 19 th century platitudes about atheistic materialism. Its going to happen anyway better to approach it with consciousness, with grace & style. Having once lived near the Hdqrs of the World Council of Churches, I like the possibility of a Free Churches parody version parody being one of our chief strategies (or call it detournement or deconstruction or creative destruction) a sort of loose network (I dislike that word; lets call it a webwork instead) of weird cults & individuals providing conversation & services for each other, out of which might begin to emerge a trend or tendency or current (in magical terms) strong enough

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to wreak some psychic havoc on the Fundies & New Agers, even the ayatollahs & the Papacy, convivial enough for us to disagree with each other & yet still give great parties or conclaves, or ecumenical councils, or World Congresses which we anticipate with glee. The Free Religions may oer some of the only possible spiritual alternatives to televangelist stormtroopers & pinhead crystal-channelers (not to mention the established religions), & will thus become more & more important, more & more vital in a future where the demand for the eruption of the marvelous into the ordinary will become the most ringing, poignant & tumultuous of all political demands a future which will begin (wait a minute, lemme check my clock) . . . 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 . . . NOW.

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Hollow Earth
Subterranean regions of the continent excavated in cyclopaean caverns, cathedralspace fractal networks, labyrinthine gargantuan tunnels, slow black underground rivers, unmoving stygian lakes, pure & slightly luminiferous, slim waterfalls plunging down watersmooth rock, cataracting round petried forests of stalactites & stalagmites in spelunker-bewildering blind-sh complexity & unfathomable vastness . . . Who dug this hollow earth beneath the ice foreseen by Poe, by certain paranoid German occultists, Shaverian UFO freaks? Was Earth once colonized in the time of Gondwana or MU by some Elder Race? their reptilian skeletons still mouldering in the farthest secret mazes of the cavern system? Sluggish backwaters, dead-end canals, stagnant pools far from the centers of civilization like Little America, Transport City, or Nan Chi Han, down in the dark recesses and boondocks of the Antarctic caves, fungus & albino fern. We suspect them of mutations, amphibian webbed ngers and toes, degenerate habits Kallikaks of the Hollow Earth, Lovecraftian renegades, hermits, skulking incestuous smugglers, runaway criminals, anarchists forced into hiding after the Entropy Wars, fugitives from Genetic Puritanism, dissident Chinese Tongs & Yellow Turban fanatics, lascar cave-pirates, pale shiftless whitetrash from the prolewarrens of the industrial domes along Thwaits Tongue & the Walgreen Coast & Edsel-Ford-Land the Trogs have kept alive for over 200 years the folkmemory of the Autonomous Zone, the myth that someday it will appear again . . . Taoism, libertine philosophy, Indonesian sorcery, cult of the Cave Mother (or Mothers), identied by some scholars with the Javanese sea/moon goddess Loro Kidul, by others with a minor deity of the South Pole Star Sect, the Jade Goddess . . . manuscripts (written in Bahasa Ingliss the pidgin dialect of the deep caves) contain mangled quotations from Nietzsche & Chuang Tzu . . . Trade consists of occasional precious gems and cultivation of white poppy, fungus, over a dozen dierent species of magic mushrooms . . . Shallow Lake Erebus, 5 miles across, dotted with stalagmitic islets choked with fern & kudzu & black dwarf pine, held in a cave so vast it sometimes creates its own weather . . . The

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town belongs ocially to Little America but most of the inhabitants are Trogs living o the Shiftless Dole & the deep-cave tribal country lies just across the Lake. Rira, artists, drug addicts, sorcerers, smugglers, remittance-men & perverts live in crumbling basalt-&-synthplast hotels half-encrusted with pale green vines, along the lakefront, an avenue of squalid cafes, gem emporia guarded by armed ninjas, chinese krill-noodle shops, the crystal-tinselled hall for slow fusion-gamelan dancers, boys practicing their mudras on sleepy electronic dark blue afternoons to the rippling of synthgongs and metallophones . . . & below the pier perhaps a few desultory bathers along the black beach, genuine low-budget tourists gawking at the shrine behind the bazaar where pallid old Trog pamongs tranced out on fungus drool & roll up their eyes, breathe in the fumes of heavy incense, everything seems suddenly menacingly bright, ickering with signicance . . . a few cases of webbed ngers but the rumors of ritual promiscuity are true enough. I was living in a Trog shing village across the lake from Erebus in a rented room above the baitshop . . . rural sloth & degenerate superstitious rites of sensual abandon, the larval & unhealthy mysteries of the chthonic mutant downtrodden Trogs, lazy shiftless no-count hicks . . . Little America, so christian & free of mutation, eugenic & orderly, where ev-eryone lives jacked into the eshless realm of ancient software & holography, so euclidean, newtonian, clean & patriotic L.A. will never understand this innocent lth-sorcery, this spiritual materialism, this slavery to the volcanic desires of secret caveboy gangs like laughing owers jetting with dynamo erections pulsing up pure life curved taut as bows, & the smell of water, pond-scum, nightblooming white owers, jasmine & datura, urine, childrens wet hair, sperm & mud . . . possessed by cave-spirits, perhaps ghosts of ancient aliens now wandering as demons seeking to renew long-lost pleasures of esh & substance. Or else the Zone has already been reborn, already a nexus of autonomy, a spreading virus of chaos in its most exuberant clandestine form, white toadstools springing up on the spots where Trog boys have masturbated alone in the dark . . .

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Nietzsche & the Dervishes

Rendan, The Clever Ones. The sus use a technical term rend (adj. rendi, pl. rendan) to designate one clever enough to drink wine in secret without getting caught: the dervish version of Permissible Dissimulation (taqiyya, whereby Shiites are permitted to lie about their true aliation to avoid persecution as well as advance the purpose of their propaganda). On the plane of the Path, the rend conceals his spiritual state (hal) in order to contain it, work on it alchemically, enhance it. This cleverness explains much of the secrecy of the Orders, altho it remains true that many dervishes do literally break the rules of Islam (shariah), oend tradition (sunnah), and out the customs of their society all of which gives them reason for real secrecy. Ignoring the case of the criminal who uses susm as a mask or rather not susm per se but dervish-ism, almost a synonym in Persia for laid-back manners & by extension a social laxness, a style of genial and poor but elegant amorality the above denition can still be considered in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. That is: some sus do break the Law while still allowing that the Law exists & will continue to exist; & they do so from spiritual motives, as an exercise of will (himmah). Nietzsche says somewhere that the free spirit will not agitate for the rules to be dropped or even reformed, since it is only by breaking the rules that he realizes his will to power. One must prove (to oneself if no one else) an ability to overcome the rules of the herd, to make ones own law & yet not fall prey to the rancor & resentment of inferior souls which dene law & custom in ANY society. One needs, in eect, an individual equivalent of war in order to achieve the becoming of the free spirit one needs an inert stupidity against which to measure ones own movement & intelligence. Anarchists sometimes posit an ideal society without law. The few anarchist experiments which succeeded briey (the Makhnovists, Catalan) failed to survive the conditions of war which permitted their existence

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in the rst place so we have no way of knowing empirically if such an experiment could outlive the onset of peace. Some anarchists, however, like our late friend the Italian Stirnerite Brand, took part in all sorts of uprisings and revolutions, even communist and socialist ones, because they found in the moment of insurrection itself the kind of freedom they sought. Thus while utopianism has so far always failed, the individualist or existentialist anarchists have succeeded inasmuch as they have attained (however briey) the realization of their will to power in war. Nietzsches animadversions against anarchists are always aimed at the egalitarian-communist narodnik martyr types, whose idealism he saw as yet one more survival of post-Xtian moralism altho he sometimes praises them for at least having the courage to revolt against majoritarian authority. He never mentions Stirner, but I believe he would have classied the Individualist rebel with the higher types of criminals, who represented for him (as for Dostoyevsky) humans far superior to the herd, even if tragically awed by their obsessiveness and perhaps hidden motivations of revenge. The Nietzschean overman, if he existed, would have to share to some degree in this criminality even if he had overcome all obsessions and compulsions, if only because his law could never agree with the law of the masses, of state & society. His need for war (whether literal or metaphorical) might even persuade him to take part in revolt, whether it assumed the form of insurrection or only of a proud bohemianism. For him a society without law might have value only so long as it could measure its own freedom against the subjection of others, against their jealousy & hatred. The lawless & short-lived pirate utopias of Madagascar & the Caribbean, DAnnunzios Republic of Fiume, the Ukraine or Barcelona these would attract him because they promised the turmoil of becoming & even failure rather than the bucolic somnolence of a perfected (& hence dead) anarchist society. In the absence of such opportunities, this free spirit would disdain wasting time on agitation for reform, on protest, on visionary dreaming, on all kinds of revolutionary martyrdom in short, on most contemporary anarchist activity. To be rendi, to drink wine in secret & not get caught, to accept the rules in order to break them & thus attain the

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spiritual lift or energy-rush of danger & adventure, the private epiphany of overcoming all interior police while tricking all outward authority this might be a goal worthy of such a spirit, & this might be his denition of crime. (Incidentally, I think this reading helps explain Ns insistence on the MASK, on the secretive nature of the proto-overman, which disturbs even intelligent but somewhat liberal commentators like Kaufman. Artists, for all that N loves them, are criticized for telling secrets. Perhaps he failed to consider that paraphrasing A. Ginsberg this is our way of becoming great; and also that paraphrasing Yeats even the truest secret becomes yet another mask.) As for the anarchist movement today: would we like just once to stand on ground where laws are abolished & the last priest is strung up with the guts of the last bureaucrat? Yeah sure. But were not holding our breath. There are certain causes (to quote the Neech again) that one fails to quite abandon, if only because of the sheer insipidity of all their enemies. Oscar Wilde might have said that one cannot be a gentleman without being something of an anarchist a necessary paradox, like Ns radical aristocratism. This is not just a matter of spiritual dandyism, but also of existential commitment to an underlying spontaneity, to a philosophical tao. For all its waste of energy, in its very formlessness, anarchism alone of all the ISMs approaches that one type of form which alone can interest us today, that strange attractor, the shape of chaos which (one last quote) one must have within oneself, if one is to give birth to a dancing star. Spring Equinox, 1989

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Resolution for the 1990s: Boycott Cop Culture!

If one ctional gure can be said to have dominated the popcult of the eighties, it was the Cop. Fuckin police everywhere you turned, worse than real life. What an incredible bore. Powerful Cops protecting the meek and humble at the expense of a half-dozen or so articles of the Bill of Rights Dirty Harry. Nice human cops, coping with human perversity, coming out sweet n sour, you know, gru & knowing but still soft inside Hill Street Blues most evil TV show ever. Wiseass black cops scoring witty racist remarks against hick white cops, who nevertheless come to love each other Eddie Murphy, Class Traitor. For that masochist thrill we got wicked bent cops who threaten to topple our Kozy Konsensus Reality from within like Giger-designed tapeworms, but naturally get blown away just in the nick of time by the Last Honest Cop, Robocop, ideal amalgam of prosthesis and sentimentality. Weve been obsessed with cops since the beginning but the rozzers of yore played bumbling fools, Keystone Kops, Car 54 Where Are You, booby-bobbies set up for Fatty Arbuckle or Buster Keaton to squash & deate. But in the ideal drama of the eighties, the little man who once scattered bluebottles by the hundred with that anarchists bomb, innocently used to light a cigarette 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. But 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, weve been marginalized & replaced by the Other, the Cop. Thus the Cop Show has only three characters victim, criminal, and policeperson but the rst two fail to be fully human only the pig is real. Oddly enough, human society in the eighties (as seen in the other media) sometimes appeared to consist of the same three cliche/ 100

archetypes. First the victims, the whining minorities bitching about rights and who pray tell did not belong to a minority in the eighties? Shit, even cops complained about their rights being abused. Then the criminals: largely non-white (despite the obligatory & hallucinatory integration of the media), largely poor (or else obscenely rich, hence even more alien), largely perverse (i.e. the forbidden mirrors of our desires). Ive heard that one out of four households in America is robbed every year, & that every year nearly half a million of us are arrested just for smoking pot. In the face of such statistics (even assuming theyre damned lies) one wonders who is NOT either victim or criminal in our police-state-of-consciousness. The fuzz must mediate for all of us, however fuzzy the interface theyre only warrior-priests, however profane. Americas Most Wanted the most successful TV game show of the eighties opened up for all of us the role of Amateur Cop, hitherto merely a media fantasy of middleclass resentment & revenge. Naturally the truelife Cop hates no one so much as the vigilante look what happens to poor &/or non-white neighborhood self-protection groups like the Muslims who tried to eliminate crack dealing in Brooklyn: the cops busted the Muslims, the pushers went free. Real vigilantes threaten the monopoly of enforcement, lse majest vigilantes function perfectly within the CopState; in fact, it would be more accurate to think of them as unpaid (not even a set of matched luggage!) informers: telemetric snitches, electro-stoolies, ratnks-for-a-day. What is it that America most wants? Does this phrase refer to criminals or to crimes, to objects of desire in their real presence, unrepresented, unmediated, literally stolen & appropriated? America most wants . . . to fuck o work, ditch the spouse, do drugs (because only drugs make you feel as good as the people in TV ads appear to be), have sex with nubile jailbait, sodomy, burglary, hell yes. What unmediated pleasures are NOT illegal? Even outdoor barbecues violate smoke ordinances nowadays. The simplest enjoyments turn us against some law; nally pleasure becomes too stress-inducing, and only TV remains and the pleasure of revenge, vicarious betrayal, the sick thrill of the tattletale. America cant have what it most wants, so it has Americas Most Wanted instead. A nation of schoolyard toadies sucking up to an elite of schoolyard bullies.

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Of course the program still suers from a few strange reality-glitches: for example, the dramatized segments are enacted cinema verit style by actors; some viewers are so stupid they believe theyre seeing actual footage of real crimes. Hence the actors are being continually harassed & even arrested, along with (or instead of) the real criminals whose mugshots are ashed after each little documentoid. How quaint, eh? No one really experiences anything everyone reduced to the status of ghosts media-images break o & oat away from any contact with actual everyday life PhoneSex CyberSex. Final transcendence of the body: cybergnosis. The media cops, like televangelical forerunners, prepare us for the advent, nal coming or Rapture of the police state: the Wars on sex and drugs: total control totally leached of all content; a map with no coordinates in any known space; far beyond mere Spectacle; sheer ecstasy (standing-outside-the-body); obscene simulacrum; meaningless violent spasms elevated to the last principle of governance. Image of a country consumed by images of self-hatred, war between the schizoid halves of a split personality, Super-Ego vs the Id Kid, for the heavyweight championship of an abandoned landscape, burnt, polluted, empty, desolate, unreal. Just as the murder-mystery is always an exercise in sadism, so the cop-ction always involves the contemplation of control. The image of the inspector or detective measures the image of our lack of autonomous substance, our transparency before the gaze of authority. Our perversity, our helplessness. Whether we imagine them as good or evil, our obsessive invocation of the eidolons of the Cops reveals the extent to which we have accepted the manichaean worldview they symbolize. Millions of tiny cops swarm everywhere, like the qlippoth, larval hungry ghosts they ll the screen, as in Keatons famous tworeeler, overwhelming the foreground, an Antarctic where nothing moves but hordes of sinister blue penguins. We propose an esoteric hermeneutical exegesis of the Surrealist slogan Mort aux vaches! We take it to refer not to the deaths of individual cops (cows in the argot of the period) mere leftist revenge fantasy petty reverse sadism but rather to the death of the image of the ic, the inner Control & its myriad reections in the NoPlace Place of the media the gray room as Burroughs calls it. Self-censorship, fear of

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ones own desires, conscience as the interiorized voice of consensusauthority. To assassinate these security forces would indeed release oods of libidinal energy, but not the violent running-amok predicted by the theory of Law n Order. Nietzschean self-overcoming provides the principle of organization for the free spirit (as also for anarchist society, at least in theory). In the police-state personality, libidinal energy is dammed & diverted toward self-repression; any threat to Control results in spasms of violence. In the free-spirit personality, energy ows unimpeded & therefore turbulently but gently its chaos nds its strange attractor, allowing new spontaneous orders to emerge. In this sense, then, we call for a boycott of the image of the Cop, & a moratorium on its production in art. In this sense . . . MORT AUX VACHES!

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The Temporary Autonomous Zone

 . . . this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the world into a holiday . . . Not that I have much time . . . Nietzsche (from his last insane letter to Cosima Wagner)

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Pirate Utopias
The sea-rovers and corsairs of the 18 th century created an information network that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported intentional communities, whole minisocieties living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life. Some years ago I looked through a lot of secondary material on piracy hoping to nd a study of these enclaves but it appeared as if no historian has yet found them worthy of analysis. (William Burroughs has mentioned the subject, as did the late British anarchist Larry Law but no systematic research has been carried out.) I retreated to primary sources and constructed my own theory, some aspects of which will be discussed in this essay. I called the settlements Pirate Utopias. Recently Bruce Sterling, one of the leading exponents of Cyberpunk science ction, published a near-future romance based on the assumption that the decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living: giant worker-owned corporations, independent enclaves devoted to data piracy, Green-Social-Democrat enclaves, Zerowork enclaves, anarchist liberated zones, etc. The information economy which supports this diversity is called the Net; the enclaves (and the books title) are Islands in the Net. The medieval Assassins founded a State which consisted of a network of remote mountain valleys and castles, separated by thousands of miles, strategically invulnerable to invasion, connected by the information ow of secret agents, at war with all governments, and devoted only to knowledge. Modern technology, culminating in the spy satellite, makes this kind of autonomy a romantic dream. 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 ction pure speculation.

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Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices on our generation alone of humankind. To say that I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to dene ourselves as losers. I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about islands in the net we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of free enclave is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my own thinking, however, I dont intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay (attempt), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political dogma. In fact I have deliberately refrained from dening the TAZ I circle around the subject, ring o exploratory beams. In the end the TAZ is almost self-explanatory. If the phrase became current it would be understood without diculty . . . understood in action.

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Waiting for the Revolution

How is it that the world turned upside-down always manages to Right itself? Why does reaction always follow revolution, like seasons in Hell? Uprising, or the Latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and even more oppressive State the turning of the wheel, the return of history again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever. By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian spiral of that progress which is secretly nothing more than a vicious circle. Surgo rise up, surge. Insurgo rise up, raise oneself up. A bootstrap operation. A goodbye to that wretched parody of the karmic round, historical revolutionary futility. The slogan Revolution! has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that evil Aeon, that incubus the State, one State after another, every heaven ruled by yet one more evil angel. 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 shamans 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 cant stay up on the roof forever but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred a dierence is made.

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You will argue that this is a counsel of despair. What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuit? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world. I accept this as a fair criticism. Id make two rejoinders nevertheless; rst, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream. 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. I have not given up hope or even expectation of change but I distrust the word Revolution. Second, even if we replace the revolutionary approach with a concept of insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture, our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such a vast undertaking. 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. Its guns are all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry nds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark in an ectoplasm of information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and the absorbant eye of the TV screen. In short, were not touting the TAZ as an exclusive end in itself, replacing all other forms of organization, tactics, and goals. We recommend it because it can provide the quality of enhancement associated with the uprising without necessarily leading to violence and martyrdom. The 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. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can occupy these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves because they never intersected with the Spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation.

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Babylon takes its abstractions for realities; precisely within this margin of error the TAZ can come into existence. 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 denition of it. As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undenable 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. And because the TAZ is a microcosm of that anarchist dream of a free culture, I can think of no better tactic by which to work toward that goal while at the same time experiencing some of its benets here and now. In sum, realism demands not only that we give up waiting for the Revolution but also that we give up wanting it. Uprising, yes as often as possible and even at the risk of violence. The spasming of the Simulated State will be spectacular, but 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 TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if its only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the strike and the defense should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. 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. The nomadic war machine conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. Its a bootstrap operation. The rst step is somewhat akin to satori the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization. (Note: See Appendix C, quote by Renzo Novatore)

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The Psychotopology of Everyday Life

The concept of the TAZ arises rst out of a critique of Revolution, and an appreciation of the Insurrection. The former labels the latter a failure; but for us uprising represents a far more interesting possibility, from the standard of a psychology of liberation, than all the successful revolutions of bourgeoisie, communists, fascists, etc. The second generating force behind the TAZ springs from the historical development I call the closure of the map. The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the rst century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance not one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis of territorial gangsterism. Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced or untaxed . . . in theory. The map is a political abstract grid, a gigantic con enforced by the carrot/stick conditioning of the Expert State, until for most of us the map becomes the territory no longer Turtle Island, but the USA. And yet because the map is an abstraction it cannot cover Earth with 1:1 accuracy. Within the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map is not accurate; the map cannot be accurate. So Revolution is closed, but insurgency is open. For the time being we concentrate our force on temporary power surges, avoiding all entanglements with permanent solutions. And the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control. And here we should introduce the concept of psychotopology (and -topography) as an alternative science to that of the States surveying and mapmaking and psychic imperialism. Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sucient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot control its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features.

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We are looking for spaces (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to ower 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. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs. The closures of Revolution and of the map, however, are only the negative sources of the TAZ; much remains to be said of its positive inspirations. Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to manifest a TAZ. An uprising must be for something as well. 1. First, we can speak of a natural anthropology of the TAZ. The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. (Families! how I hate them! the misers of love! Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant oedipal miseries, 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 typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fullled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, childrens republics, and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the males possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open not to everyone, of course, but to the anity 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 anities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.) In our own post-Spectacular Society of Simulation many forces are working largely invisibly to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered stability of the unit-home and unit-family. Ones band nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at dierent jobs and pow-wows, anity groups, special interest networks, mail

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networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band. 2. The TAZ as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once oered, as an image of anarchist society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration (see Appendix C). Here we might also invoke Fourier and his concept of the senses as the basis of social becoming touch-rut and gastrosophy, and his paean to the neglected implications of smell and taste. The ancient concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lie outside the scope of profane time, the measuring-rod of the State and of History. These holidays literally occupied gaps in the calendar intercalary intervals. By the Middle Ages, nearly a third of the year was given over to holidays. Perhaps the riots against calendar reform had less to do with the eleven lost days than with a sense that imperial science was conspiring to close up these gaps in the calendar where the peoples freedoms had accumulated a coup detat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival. Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in the midst of armed struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia which has slipped loose (or been forced to vanish) from its intercalary interval and is now at liberty to pop up anywhere or when. Freed of time and place, it nevertheless possesses a nose for the ripeness of events, and an anity for the genius loci; the science of psychotopology indicates ows of forces and spots of power (to borrow occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ spatio-temporally, or at least help to dene its relation to moment and locale. The media invite us to come celebrate the moments of your life with the spurious unication of commodity and spectacle, the famous nonevent of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.) and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers

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of our leisure. Fight for the right to party is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which oers TVs and telephones as ways to reach out and touch other human beings, ways to Be There! Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style tribal gathering, the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles . . . Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, oldtime libertarian picnics we should realize that all these are already liberated zones of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always open because it is not ordered; it may be planned, but unless it happens its a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial. The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their eorts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss in short, a union of egoists (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form or else, in Kropotkins terms, a basic biological drive to mutual aid. (Here we should also mention Batailles economy of excess and his theory of potlatch culture.) 3. Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, rootless cosmopolitanism). Aspects of this phenomenon have been discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and by various authors in the Oasis issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term psychic nomadism here rather than urban nomadism, nomadology, driftwork, etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming-into-being of the TAZ. 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 rst time through eyes like some golden insects, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

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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. This paradox creates gypsies, psychic travellers driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow loyalties (in fact disloyal to the European Project which has lost all its charm and vitality), not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and adventure . . . This description covers not only the X-class artists and intellectuals but also migrant laborers, refugees, the homeless, tourists, the RV and mobile-home culture also people who travel via the Net, but may never leave their own rooms (or those like Thoreau who have travelled much in Concord); and nally it includes everybody, all of us, living through our automobiles, our vacations, our TVs, books, movies, telephones, changing jobs, changing lifestyles, religions, diets, etc., etc. Psychic nomadism as a tactic, what Deleuze & Guattari metaphorically call the war machine, shifts the paradox from a passive to an active and perhaps even violent mode. Gods last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time in the form of Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism, for example that theres still a lot of creative destruction to be carried out by post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally enemies) of the old Consensus. These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortied oases along secret caravan routes, liberated bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars. 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-ow and logistics and nally, 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.

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The Net and the Web

The next factor contributing to the TAZ is so vast and ambiguous that it needs a section unto itself. Weve spoken of the Net, which can be dened as the totality of all information and communication transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are open to all so the Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well. Military and Intelligence data are restricted, as are banking and currency information and the like. But for the most part the telephone, the postal system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a shing-net and the Web were spider-webs woven through the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally well use the term Web to refer to 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 o the Net itself. Net, Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-complex they blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to dene areas but to suggest tendencies. (Digression: Before you condemn the Web or counter-Net for its parasitism, which can never be a truly revolutionary force, ask yourself what production consists of in the Age of Simulation. What is the productive class? Perhaps youll be forced to admit that these terms seem to have lost their meaning. In any case the answers to such questions are so complex that the TAZ tends to ignore them altogether and simply picks up what it can use. Culture is our Nature and we are the thieving magpies, or the hunter/gatherers of the world of CommTech.) The present forms of the unocial Web are, one must suppose, still rather primitive: the marginal zine network, the BBS networks, pirated software, hacking, phone-phreaking, some inuence in print and radio, almost none in the other big media no TV stations, no satellites, no

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ber-optics, no cable, etc., etc. However the Net itself presents a pattern of changing/evolving relations between subjects (users) and objects (data). The nature of these relations has been exhaustively explored, from McLuhan to Virilio. It would take pages and pages to prove what by now everyone knows. Rather than rehash it all, I am interested in asking how these evolving relations suggest modes of implementation for the TAZ. The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but actual location in space. But clearly it must also have location in the Web, and this location is of a dierent sort, not actual but virtual, not immediate but instantaneous. The Web not only provides logistical support for the TAZ, it also helps to bring it into being; crudely speaking one might say that the TAZ exists in information-space as well as in the real world. The Web can compact a great deal of time, as data, into an innitesimal space. We have noted that the TAZ, because it is temporary, must necessarily lack some of the advantages of a freedom which experiences duration and a more-or-less xed locale. But the Web can provide a kind of substitute for some of this duration and locale it can inform the TAZ, from its inception, with vast amounts of compacted time and space which have been subtilized as data. At this moment in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands for the face-to-face and the sensual, 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. But more than that: 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 owlines 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 suce to construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the structure. Nevertheless, the whole concept of the Net implies the use of computers. In the SciFi imagination the Net is

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headed for the condition of Cyberspace (as in Tron or Neuromancer) and the pseudo-telepathy of virtual reality. As a Cyberpunk fan I cant help but envision reality hacking playing a major role in the creation of TAZs. Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the ocial Net will never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net that datapiracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free ow of information can never be frozen. (In fact, as I understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.) However, leaving aside all mere speculation about the future, we must face a very serious question about the Web and the tech it involves. The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the aair is breast-to-breast as the sus say, or face-to-face. But, BUT: the very essence of the Web is mediation. Machines here are our ambassadors the esh is irrelevant except as a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term. The TAZ may perhaps best nd its own space by wrapping its head around two seemingly contradictory attitudes toward Hi-Tech and its apotheosis the Net: (1) what we might call the Fifth Estate/Neo-Paleolithic Post-Situ Ultra-Green position, which construes itself as a luddite argument against mediation and against the Net; and (2) the Cyberpunk utopianists, futuro-libertarians, Reality Hackers and their allies who see the Net as a step forward in evolution, and who assume that any possible ill eects of mediation can be overcome at least, once weve liberated the means of production. 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. But it 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 TAZ tends to view the Tech/anti-Tech dichotomy as misleading, like most dichotomies, in which apparent opposites turn out to be falsications or even hallucinations caused by semantics. This is a way of saying that the TAZ wants to live in this world, not in the idea of another world, some visionary world born of false unication (all green OR all metal) which can only be more pie in the sky by-&-by (or as Alice put it, Jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, but never jam today).

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The TAZ is utopian in the sense that it envisions an intensication of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have said, lifes penetration by the Marvelous. But it cannot be utopian in the actual meaning of the word, nowhere, or NoPlace Place. 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, ows of air, water, animals. But now the lines are not all etched in time and space. Some of them exist only within the Web, even though they also intersect with real times and places. Perhaps some of the lines are non-ordinary in the sense that no convention for quantifying them exists. These lines might better be studied in the light of chaos science than of sociology, statistics, economics, etc. 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. The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself it will come to life whether in a cave or an L-5 Space City but above all it will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology. 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). Because the TAZ is an intensication, a surplus, an excess, a potlatch, life spending itself in living rather than merely surviving (that snivelling shibboleth of the eighties), it cannot be dened either by Tech or anti-Tech. It contradicts itself like a true despiser of hobgoblins, because it wills itself to be, at any cost in damage to perfection, to the immobility of the nal. In the Mandelbrot Set and its computer-graphic realization we watch in a fractal universe maps which are embedded and in fact hidden within maps within maps etc. to the limits of computational power. 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?

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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. Each of these areas of chaos could be represented by topographs similar to the Mandelbrot Set, such that the peninsulas are embedded or hidden within the map such that they seem to disappear. This writing parts of which vanish, parts of which eace themselves represents the very process by which the Net is already compromised, incomplete to its own view, ultimately un-Controllable. In other words, the M Set, or something like it, might prove to be useful in plotting (in all senses of the word) the emergence of the counterNet as a chaotic process, a creative evolution in Prigogines term. If nothing else the M Set serves as a metaphor for a mapping of the TAZs interface with the Net as a disappearance of information. Every catastrophe in the Net is a node of power for the Web, the counter-Net. The Net will be damaged by chaos, while the Web may thrive on it. 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 nd ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns in the Net (ways to make information out of entropy). As a bricoleur, a scavenger of information shards, smuggler, blackmailer, perhaps even cyberterrorist, the TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections. These connections, and the dierent information that ows among and between them, will form power outlets for the coming-into-being of the TAZ itself as if one were to steal electricity from the energy-monopoly to light an abandoned house for squatters. Thus the Web, in order to produce situations conducive to the TAZ, will parasitize the Net but we can also conceive of this strategy as an attempt to build toward the construction of an alternative and autonomous Net, free and no longer parasitic, which will serve as the basis for a new society emerging from the shell of the old. The counter-

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Net and the TAZ can be considered, practically speaking, as ends in themselves but theoretically they can also be viewed as forms of struggle toward a dierent reality. Having said this we must still admit to some qualms about computers, some still unanswered questions, especially about the Personal Computer. The story of computer networks, BBSs and various other experiments in electro-democracy has so far been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and libertarians have deep faith in the PC as a weapon of liberation and self-liberation but no real gains to show, no palpable liberty. I have little interest in some hypothetical emergent entrepreneurial class of self-employed data/word processors who will soon be able to carry on a vast cottage industry or piecemeal shitwork for various corporations and bureaucracies. Moreover it takes no ESP to foresee that this class will develop its underclass a sort of lumpen yuppetariat: housewives, for example, who will provide their families with second incomes by turning their own homes into electro-sweatshops, little Worktyrannies where the boss is a computer network. Also I am not impressed by the sort of information and services proered by contemporary radical networks. Somewhere one is told there exists an information economy. Maybe so; but the info being traded over the alternative BBSs seems to consist entirely of chitchat and techie-talk. Is this an economy? or merely a pastime for enthusiasts? OK, PCs have created yet another print revolution OK, marginal webworks are evolving OK, I can now carry on six phone conversations at once. But what dierence has this made in my ordinary life? Frankly, I already had plenty of data to enrich my perceptions, what with books, movies, TV, theater, telephones, the U.S. Postal Service, altered states of consciousness, and so on. Do I really need a PC in order to obtain yet more such data? You oer me secret information? Well . . . perhaps Im tempted but still I demand marvelous secrets, not just unlisted telephone numbers or the trivia of cops and politicians. Most of all I want computers to provide me with information linked to real goods the good things in life, as the IWW Preamble puts it. And

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here, since Im accusing the hackers and BBSers of irritating intellectual vagueness, I must myself descend from the baroque clouds of Theory & Critique and explain what I mean by real goods. Lets say that for both political and personal reasons I desire good food, better than I can obtain from Capitalism unpolluted food still blessed with strong and natural avors. To complicate the game imagine that the food I crave is illegal raw milk perhaps, or the exquisite Cuban fruit mamey, which cannot be imported fresh into the U.S. because its seed is hallucinogenic (or so Im told). I am not a farmer. Lets pretend Im an importer of rare perfumes and aphrodisiacs, and sharpen the play by assuming most of my stock is also illegal. Or maybe I only want to trade word processing services for organic turnips, but refuse to report the transaction to the IRS (as required by law, believe it or not). Or maybe I want to meet other humans for consensual but illegal acts of mutual pleasure (this has actually been tried, but all the hard-sex BBSs have been busted and what use is an underground with lousy security?). In short, assume that Im fed up with mere information, the ghost in the machine. According to you, computers should already be quite capable of facilitating my desires for food, drugs, sex, tax evasion. So whats the matter? Why isnt it happening? The TAZ has occurred, is occurring, and will occur with or without the computer. But for the TAZ to reach its full potential it must become less a matter of spontaneous combustion and more a matter of islands in the Net. The Net, or rather the counter-Net, assumes the promise of an integral aspect of the TAZ, an addition that will multiply its potential, a quantum jump (odd how this expression has come to mean a big leap) in complexity and signicance. The TAZ must now exist within a world of pure space, the world of the senses. Liminal, even evanescent, the TAZ must combine information and desire in order to fulll its adventure (its happening), in order to ll itself to the borders of its destiny, to saturate itself with its own becoming. Perhaps the Neo-Paleolithic School are correct when they assert that all forms of alienation and mediation must be destroyed or abandoned before our goals can be realized or perhaps true anarchy will be realized only in Outer Space, as some futuro-libertarians assert. But the TAZ does not concern itself very much with was or will be. The TAZ is

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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. Ive based the theory of the TAZ in large part on this intuition. Of course the Web also involves non-computerized networks of exchange such as samizdat, the black market, etc. but the full potential of non-hierarchic information networking logically leads to the computer as the tool par excellence. Now Im waiting for the hackers to prove Im right, that my intuition is valid. Where are my turnips?

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Gone to Croatan
We have no desire to dene the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas about how it must be created. Our contention is rather that it has been created, will be created, and is being created. Therefore it would prove more valuable and interesting to look at some TAZs past and present, and to speculate about future manifestations; by evoking a few prototypes we may be able to gauge the potential scope of the complex, and perhaps even get a glimpse of an archetype. Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism well adopt a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrarily with the 16 th-17 th centuries and the settlement of the New World. The opening of the new world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented the concept of magical imperialism and infected an entire generation with it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections with the School of Night a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and adepts to further the causes of exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was its rst showcase experiment. The alchemical view of the New World associated it with materia prima or hyle, the state of Nature, innocence and all-possibility (Virgin-ia), a chaos or inchoateness which the adept would transmute into gold, that is, into spiritual perfection as well as material abundance. But this alchemical vision is also informed in part by an actual fascination with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy for it, 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. Caliban, the Wild Man, is lodged like a virus in the very machine of Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans are invested from the very start with the magic power of the marginal, despised and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban is ugly, and Nature a howling wilderness on the other, Caliban is noble and unchained, and Nature an Eden. This split in European

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consciousness predates the Romantic/Classical dichotomy; its rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The discovery of America (Eldorado, the Fountain of Youth) crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual schemes for colonization. We were taught in elementary school that the rst settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message Gone To Croatan. Later reports of grey-eyed Indians were dismissed as legend. What really happened, the textbook implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless settlers. However, Croatan was not some Eldorado; it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians. Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real theyre still there, and they still call themselves Croatans. So the very rst 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 serng 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. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was betrayed, rst by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant radicals ed or were transported to the New World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace it. Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known (i.e. the most upper-class) of the Antinomians having had the bad luck to be caught up in Bay Colony politics but a much more radical wing of the movement clearly existed. The incidents Hawthorne relates in The Maypole of Merry Mount are thoroughly historical; apparently the

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extremists had decided to renounce Christianity altogether and revert to paganism. If they had succeeded in uniting with their Indian allies the result might have been an Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin syncretic religion, a sort of 17 th century North American Santeria. Sectarians were able to thrive better under the looser and more corrupt administrations in the Caribbean, where rival European interests had left many islands deserted or even unclaimed. Barbados and Jamaica in particular must have been settled by many extremists, and I believe that Levellerish and Ranterish inuences contributed to the Buccaneer utopia on Tortuga. Here for the rst time, thanks to Esquemelin, we can study a successful New World proto-TAZ in some depth. Fleeing from hideous benets of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment and the living death of the plantations, the 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. Having declared themselves at war with all the world, they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called Articles which were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the Captain usually only 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello. It is simply wrong to brand the pirates as mere sea-going highwaymen or even proto-capitalists, as some historians have done. In a sense 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. After the fall of Tortuga, the Buccaneer ideal remained alive all through the Golden Age of Piracy (ca. 16601720), and resulted in landsettlements in Belize, for example, which was founded by Buccaneers. Then, as the scene shifted to Madagascar an island still unclaimed by any imperial power and ruled only by a patchwork of native kings (chiefs) eager for pirate allies the Pirate Utopia reached its highest form. Defoes account of Captain Mission and the founding of Libertatia may be, as some historians claim, a literary hoax meant to propagandize for radical Whig theory but it was embedded in The General History of

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the Pyrates (172428), most of which is still accepted as true and accurate. Moreover the story of Capt. Mission was not criticized when the book appeared and many old Madagascar hands still survived. They seem to have believed it, no doubt because they had experienced pirate enclaves very much like Libertatia. Once again, rescued slaves, natives, and even traditional enemies such as the Portuguese were all invited to join as equals. (Liberating slave ships was a major preoccupation.) Land was held in common, representatives elected for short terms, booty shared; doctrines of liberty were preached far more radical than even those of Common Sense. Libertatia hoped to endure, and Mission died in its defense. But most of the pirate utopias were meant to be temporary; in fact the corsairs true republics were their ships, which sailed under Articles. The shore enclaves usually had no law at all. The last classic example, Nassau in the Bahamas, a beachfront resort of shacks and tents devoted to wine, women (and probably boys too, to judge by Birges Sodomy and Piracy), song (the pirates were inordinately fond of music and used to hire on bands for entire cruises), and wretched excess, vanished overnight when the British eet appeared in the Bay. Blackbeard and Calico Jack Rackham and his crew of pirate women moved on to wilder shores and nastier fates, while others meekly accepted the Pardon and reformed. But the Buccaneer tradition lasted, both in Madagascar where the mixed-blood children of the pirates began to carve out kingdoms of their own, and in the Caribbean, where escaped slaves as well as mixed black/white/red groups were able to thrive in the mountains and backlands as Maroons. The Maroon community in Jamaica still retained a degree of autonomy and many of the old folkways when Zora Neale Hurston visited there in the 1920s (see Tell My Horse). The Maroons of Suriname still practice African paganism. Throughout the 18 th century, North America also produced a number of drop-out tri-racial isolate communities. (This clinical-sounding term was invented by the Eugenics Movement, which produced the rst scientic studies of these communities. Unfortunately the science merely served as an excuse for hatred of racial mongrels and the poor, and the solution to the problem was usually forced sterilization.) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway slaves and serfs, criminals (i.e. the very

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poor), prostitutes (i.e. white women who married non-whites), and members of various native tribes. In some cases, such as the Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal structure absorbed the newcomers; in other cases, new tribes were formed. Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through the 18 th and 19 th 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 religion was HooDoo, a mixture of African, native, and Christian elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey the elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal Maroons were known as the Seven Finger High Glister. The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as the Jackson Whites) present another romantic and archetypal genealogy: 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 Smiths. An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups, such as the Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio in the mid-18 th 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. Their annual migration triangulated on frontier towns with names like Mecca and Medina. In the 19 th century some of them espoused anarchist ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a particularly vicious pogrom of salvation-by-extermination. Some of the earliest Eugenics laws were passed in their honor. As a tribe they disappeared in the 1920s, but probably swelled the ranks of early Black Islamic sects such as the Moorish Science Temple. I myself grew up on legends of the Kallikaks of the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens (and of course on Lovecraft, a rabid racist who was fascinated by the isolate communities). The legends turned out to be folk-memories of the slanders of the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters were in Vineland, NJ, and who undertook the usual reforms against miscegenation and feeblemindedness in the Barrens (including the publication of

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photographs of the Kallikaks, crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like monsters of misbreeding). The isolate communities at least, those which have retained their identity into the 20 th century consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the black subculture into which modern sociologists prefer to categorize them. In the 1970s, 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 ocial status. If theyd 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. Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the diachronic or historical explanation of their origins in favor of a synchronic selfidentity based on a myth of Indian adoption. Or to put it another way, they named themselves Indians. 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. That old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of our forests (which, by the way, have greatly increased in the Northeast since the 1819 th century as vast tracts of farmland return to scrub. Thoreau on his deathbed dreamed of the return of . . . Indians . . . forests . . . : the return of the repressed). The Moors and Ramapaughs of course have good materialist reasons to think of themselves as Indians after all, they have Indian ancestors but if we view their self-naming in mythic as well as historical terms well learn more of relevance to our quest for the TAZ. Within tribal societies there exist what some anthropologists call mannenbunden: totemic societies devoted to an identity with Nature in the act of shapeshifting, of becoming the totem-animal (werewolves, jaguar shamans, leopard men, cat-witches, etc.). In the context of an entire colonial society (as Taussig points out in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man) the shapeshifting power is seen as inhering in the native culture as a whole thus the most repressed sector of the society acquires a paradoxical

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power through the myth of its occult knowledge, which is feared and desired by the colonist. Of course the natives really do have certain occult knowledge; but in response to Imperial perception of native culture as a kind of spiritual wild(er)ness, the natives come to see themselves more and more consciously in that role. Even as they are marginalized, 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. The Massachusetts radical democrats (spiritual descendents of the radical Protestants) who organized the Tea Party, and who literally believed that governments could be abolished (the whole Berkshire region declared itself in a state of Nature!), disguised themselves as Mohawks. Thus the colonists, who suddenly saw themselves marginalized vis--vis the motherland, adopted the role of the marginalized natives, thereby (in a sense) seeking to participate in their occult power, their mythic radiance. From the Mountain Men to the Boy Scouts, the dream of becoming an Indian ows beneath myriad strands of American history, culture and consciousness. The sexual imagery connected to tri-racial groups also bears out this hypothesis. Natives of course are always immoral, but racial renegades and drop-outs must be downright polymorphous-perverse. The Buccaneers were buggers, the Maroons and Mountain Men were miscegenists, the Jukes and Kallikaks indulged in fornication and incest (leading to mutations such as polydactyly), the children ran around naked and masturbated openly, etc., etc. 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. And since many people in repressed moralistic racist societies secretly desire exactly these licentious acts, they project them outwards onto the marginalized, and thereby convince themselves that they themselves remain civilized and pure. And in fact some marginalized communities do really reject consensus morality the pirates certainly did! and no doubt actually act out some of civilizations repressed desires. (Wouldnt you?) Becoming wild is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness.

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Before leaving the subject of the tri-racial isolates, Id like to recall Nietzsches enthusiasm for race mixing. Impressed by the vigor and beauty of hybrid cultures, he oered miscegenation not only as a solution to the problem of race but also as the principle for a new humanity freed of ethnic and national chauvinism a precursor to the psychic nomad, perhaps. Nietzsches dream still seems as remote now as it did to him. Chauvinism still rules OK. Mixed cultures remain submerged. But the autonomous zones of the Buccaneers and Maroons, Ishmaels and Moors, Ramapaughs and Kallikaks remain, or their stories remain, as indications of what Nietzsche might have called the Will to Power as Disappearance. We must return to this theme.

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Music as an Organizational Principle

Meanwhile, however, we turn to the history of classical anarchism in the light of the TAZ concept. Before the closure of the map, a good deal of anti-authoritarian energy went into escapist communes such as Modern Times, the various Phalansteries, and so on. Interestingly, some of them were not intended to last forever, but only as long as the project proved fullling. By Socialist/Utopian standards these experiments were failures, and therefore we know little about them. When escape beyond the frontier proved impossible, the era of revolutionary urban Communes began in Europe. The Communes of Paris, Lyons and Marseilles did not survive long enough to take on any characteristics of permanence, and one wonders if they were meant to. From our point of view the chief matter of fascination is the spirit of the Communes. 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. In fact, certain anarchists of the Stirnerite/ Nietzschean strain came to look on this activity as an end in itself, a way of always occupying an autonomous zone, the interzone which opens up in the midst or wake of war and revolution (cf. Pynchons zone in Gravitys Rainbow). They declared that if any socialist revolution succeeded, theyd be the rst to turn against it. Short of universal anarchy they had no intention of ever stopping. In Russia in 1917 they greeted the free Soviets with joy: this was their goal. But as soon as the Bolsheviks betrayed the Revolution, the individualist anarchists were the rst to go back on the warpath. After Kronstadt, of course, all anarchists condemned the Soviet Union (a contradiction in terms) and moved on in search of new insurrections. Makhnos 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. Therefore,

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from among the experiments of the inter-War period Ill concentrate instead on the madcap Republic of Fiume, which is much less well known, and was not meant to endure. Gabriele DAnnunzio, Decadent poet, artist, musician, aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautist, black magician, genius and cad, 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. After a necromantic ceremony with his mistress in a cemetery in Venice he set out to conquer Fiume, and succeeded without any trouble to speak of. But Italy turned down his generous oer; the Prime Minister called him a fool. In a hu, DAnnunzio 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. The Navy (made up of deserters and Milanese anarchist maritime unionists) named themselves the Uscochi, after the long-vanished pirates who once lived on local oshore islands and preyed on Venetian and Ottoman shipping. The modern Uscochi succeeded in some wild coups: several rich Italian merchant vessels suddenly gave the Republic a future: money in the coers! Artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists (DAnnunzio corresponded with Malatesta), fugitives and Stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies (the uniform was black with pirate skull-&-crossbones later stolen by the SS), and crank reformers of every stripe (including Buddhists, Theosophists and Vedantists) began to show up at Fiume in droves. The party never stopped. Every morning DAnnunzio read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then reworks. This made up the entire activity of the government. Eighteen months later, when the wine and money had run out and the Italian eet nally showed up and lobbed a few shells at the Municipal Palace, no one had the energy to resist. DAnnunzio, like many Italian anarchists, later veered toward fascism in fact, Mussolini (the ex-Syndicalist) himself seduced the poet along that route. By the time DAnnunzio realized his error it was too late: he was too old and sick. But Il Duce had him killed anyway pushed o a balcony and turned him into a martyr. As for Fiume, though it lacked the seriousness of the free Ukraine or Barcelona, it can probably

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teach us more about certain aspects of our quest. It was in some ways the last of the pirate utopias (or the only modern example) in other ways, perhaps, it was very nearly the rst modern TAZ. I believe that if we compare Fiume with the Paris uprising of 1968 (also the Italian urban insurrections of the early seventies), as well as with the American countercultural communes and their anarcho-New Left inuences, we should notice certain similarities, such as: the importance of aesthetic theory (cf. the Situationists) also, what might be called pirate economics, living high o the surplus of social overproduction even the popularity of colorful military uniforms and the concept of music as revolutionary social change and nally 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 wouldnt. Meanwhile keep on the move and live intensely. The Munich Soviet (or Council Republic) of 1919 exhibited certain features of the TAZ, even though like most revolutions its stated goals were not exactly temporary. Gustav Landauers participation as Minister of Culture along with Silvio Gesell as Minister of Economics and other anti-authoritarian and extreme libertarian socialists such as the poet/playwrights Erich Mhsam and Ernst Toller, and Ret Marut (the novelist B. Traven), gave the Soviet a distinct anarchist avor. Landauer, who had spent years of isolation working on his grand synthesis of Nietzsche, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner, Meister Eckhardt, the radical mystics, and the Romantic volk-philosophers, knew from the start that the Soviet was doomed; he hoped only that it would last long enough to be understood. Kurt Eisner, the martyred founder of the Soviet, believed quite literally that poets and poetry should form the basis of the revolution. Plans were launched to devote a large piece of Bavaria to an experiment in anarcho-socialist economy and community. Landauer drew up proposals for a Free School system and a Peoples Theater. Support for the Soviet was more or less conned to the poorest working-class and bohemian neighborhoods of Munich, and to groups like the Wandervogel (the neo-

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Romantic youth movement), Jewish radicals (like Buber), the Expressionists, and other marginals. Thus historians dismiss it as the Coeehouse Republic and belittle its signicance in comparison with Marxist and Spartacist participation in Germanys post-War revolution(s). Outmaneuvered by the Communists and eventually murdered by soldiers under the inuence of the occult/fascist Thule Society, Landauer deserves to be remembered as a saint. Yet even anarchists nowadays tend to misunderstand and condemn him for selling out to a socialist government. If the Soviet had lasted even a year, we would weep at the mention of its beauty but before even the rst owers of that Spring had wilted, the geist and the spirit of poetry were crushed, and we have forgotten. Imagine what it must have been to breathe the air of a city in which the Minister of Culture has just predicted that schoolchildren will soon be memorizing the works of Walt Whitman. Ah for a time machine . . .

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The Will to Power as Disappearance

Foucault, Baudrillard, et al. have discussed various modes of disappearance at great length. Here I wish to suggest that the TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. When the Theorists speak of the disappearance of the Social they mean in part the impossibility of the Social Revolution, and in part the impossibility of the State the abyss of power, the end of the discourse of power. The anarchist question in this case should then be: 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 whove inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons. (Perhaps this is a crude american misunderstanding of sublime and subtle Franco-Germanic Theory. If so, ne; whoever said understanding was needed to make use of an idea?) As I read it, disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for our time, not at all a disaster or death for the radical project. Unlike the morbid deathfreak nihilistic interpretation of Theory, mine intends to mine it for useful 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, for the Marvelous. And as Nietzsche said, if the world could come to an end, logically it would have done so; it has not, so it does not. And so, as one of the sus said, no matter how many draughts of forbidden wine we drink, we will carry this raging thirst into eternity. Zerzan and Black have independently noted certain elements of Refusal (Zerzans term) which perhaps can be seen as somehow symptomatic of a radical culture of disappearance, partly unconscious but partly conscious, which inuences far more people than any leftist or anarchist idea. These gestures are made against institutions, and in that sense are negative but each negative gesture also suggests a positive tactic to replace rather than merely refuse the despised institution.

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For example, the negative gesture against schooling is voluntary illiteracy. Since I do not share the liberal worship of literacy for the sake of social ameliorization, I cannot quite share the gasps of dismay heard everywhere at this phenomenon: I sympathize with children who refuse books along with the garbage in the books. There are however positive alternatives which make use of the same energy of disappearance. Homeschooling 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. Apathy (i.e. a healthy boredom with the weary Spectacle) keeps over half the nation from the polls; anarchism never accomplished as much! (Nor did anarchism have anything to do with the failure of the recent Census.) 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. (ACT UP and Earth First! are two examples. Alcoholics Anonymous, oddly enough, is another.) 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. Refusal of the Church? Well, the negative gesture here probably consists of . . . watching television. But the positive alternatives include all sorts of 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 inuenced 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. It might also be said that the chief refusal of orthodoxy consists of the construction of private moralities in the Nietzschean sense: the spirituality of free spirits.

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The negative refusal of Home is homelessness, which most consider a form of victimization, not wishing to be forced into nomadology. But 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. The negative refusal of the Family is clearly divorce, or some other symptom of breakdown. The positive alternative springs from the realization that life can be happier without the nuclear family, whereupon a hundred owers bloom from single parentage to group marriage to erotic anity group. The European Project ghts a major rearguard action in defense of Family oedipal misery lies at the heart of Control. Alternatives exist but they must remain in hiding, especially since the War against Sex of the 1980s and 1990s. What is the refusal of Art? The negative gesture is not to be found in the silly nihilism of an Art Strike or the defacing of some famous painting it is to be seen in the almost universal glassy-eyed boredom that creeps over most people at the very mention of the word. But what would the positive gesture consist of? Is it possible to imagine an aesthetics that does not engage, that removes itself from History and even from the Market? or at least tends to do so? which wants to replace representation with presence? How does presence make itself felt even in (or through) representation? Chaos Linguistics traces a presence which is continually disappearing from all orderings of language and meaning-systems; an elusive presence, evanescent, latif (subtle, a term in su alchemy) 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. (Note: for an explanation of Chaos Linguistics see Appendix A, then please read this paragraph again.) The disappearance of the artist IS the suppression and realization of art, in Situationist terms. But from where do we vanish? And are we ever seen or heard of again? We go to Croatan whats our fate? All our art consists of a goodbye note to history Gone To Croatan but where is it, and what will we do there?

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First: Were not talking here about literally vanishing from the world and its future: no escape backward in time to paleolithic original leisure society no forever utopia, no backmountain hideaway, no island; also, no post-Revolutionary utopia most likely no Revolution at all! also, no VONU, no anarchist Space Stations nor do we accept a Baudrillardian disappearance into the silence of an ironic hyperconformity. I have no quarrel with any Rimbauds who escape Art for whatever Abyssinia they can nd. But we cant build an aesthetics, even an aesthetics of disappearance, on the simple act of never coming back. By saying were not an avant-garde and that there is no avant-garde, weve written our Gone To Croatan the question then becomes, 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? Where and when is the world of unmediated creativity? If it can exist, it does exist but perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far have not learned to perceive. Where would we look for the seeds the weeds cracking through our sidewalks from this other world into our world? the clues, the right directions for searching? a nger pointing at the moon? I believe, or would at least like to propose, that the only solution to the suppression and realization of Art lies in the emergence of the TAZ. I would strongly reject the criticism that the TAZ itself is nothing but a work of art, although it may have some of the trappings. I do suggest that the TAZ is the only possible time and place for art to happen for the sheer pleasure of creative play, and as an actual contribution to the forces which allow the TAZ to cohere and manifest. Art in the World of Art has become a commodity; but deeper than that lies the problem of re-presentation itself, and the refusal of all mediation. In the TAZ art as a commodity will simply become impossible; it will instead be a condition of life. Mediation is harder to overcome, but the removal of all barriers between artists and users of art will tend toward a condition in which (as A.K. Coomaraswamy described it) the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist. In sum: disappearance is not necessarily a catastrophe except in the mathematical sense of a sudden topological change. All the

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positive gestures sketched here seem to involve various degrees of invisibility rather than traditional revolutionary confrontation. The New Left never really believed in its own existence till it saw itself on the Evening News. The New Autonomy, by contrast, will either inltrate the media and subvert it from within or else never be seen at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond denition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the States ability to see.

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Ratholes in the Babylon of Information

The TAZ as a conscious radical tactic will emerge under certain conditions: 1. Psychological liberation. That is, we must 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. WORK, for example, is a far more actual source of misery for most of us than legislative politics. Alienation is far more dangerous for us than toothless outdated dying ideologies. Mental addiction to ideals which in fact turn out to be mere projections of our resentment and sensations of victimization will never further our project. The TAZ is not a harbinger of some pie-in-the-sky Social Utopia to which we must sacrice our lives that our childrens children may breathe a bit of free air. 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. 2. The counter-Net must expand. At present it reects more abstraction than actuality. Zines and BBSs exchange information, which is part of the necessary groundwork of the TAZ, but very little of this information relates to concrete goods and services necessary for the autonomous life. We do not live in CyberSpace; to dream that we do is to fall into CyberGnosis, the false transcendence of the body. 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 others must not be subtracted from it, as in some horrible parody of the mystic trance. Without the Web, the full realization of the TAZ-complex would be impossible. But the Web is not the end in itself. Its a weapon. 3. The apparatus of Control the State must (or so we must assume) continue to deliquesce and petrify simultaneously, must progress on 141

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. Weve already dealt with the question of whether the TAZ can be viewed merely as a work of art. But you will also demand to know whether it is more than a poor rat-hole in the Babylon of Information, or rather a maze of tunnels, more and more connected, but devoted only to the economic dead-end of piratical parasitism? Ill answer that Id rather be a rat in the wall than a rat in the cage but Ill also insist that the TAZ transcends these categories. A world in which the TAZ succeeded in putting down roots might resemble the world envisioned by P.M. in his fantasy novel bolobolo. Perhaps the TAZ is a proto-bolo. But inasmuch as the TAZ exists now, it stands for much more than the mundanity of negativity or countercultural drop-out-ism. Weve mentioned the festal aspect of the moment which is unControlled, and which adheres in spontaneous self-ordering, however brief. It is epiphanic a peak experience on the social as well as individual scale. Liberation is realized struggle this is the essence of Nietzsches selfovercoming. The present thesis might also take for a sign Nietzsches wandering. It is the precursor of the drift, in the Situ sense of the derive and Lyotards denition of driftwork. We can foresee a whole new geography, a kind of pilgrimage-map in which holy sites are replaced by peak experiences and TAZs: a real science of psychotopography, perhaps to be called geo-autonomy or anarchomancy. The TAZ involves a kind of ferality, a growth from tameness to wild(er)ness, a return which is also a step forward. It also demands a yoga of chaos, a project of higher orderings (of consciousness or simply of life) which are approached by surng the wave-front of chaos, of complex dynamism. 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. Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratied desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of,

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say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the parties weve mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth ghting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism and who knows what we might attain? Spring Equinox, 1990

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Appendix

Appendix A: Chaos Linguistics

Not yet a science but a proposition: That certain problems in linguistics might be solved by viewing language as a complex dynamical system or Chaos eld. Of all the responses to Saussures linguistics, two have special interest here: the rst, antilinguistics, can be traced in the modern period from Rimbauds departure for Abyssinia; to Nietzsches I fear that while we still have grammar we have not yet killed God; to dada; to Korzybskis the Map is not the Territory; to Burroughs cut-ups and breakthrough in the Gray Room; to Zerzans attack on language itself as representation and mediation. The second, Chomskyan Linguistics, with its belief in universal grammar and its tree diagrams, represents (I believe) an attempt to save language by discovering hidden invariables, much in the same way certain scientists are trying to save physics from the irrationality of quantum mechanics. Although as an anarchist Chomsky might have been expected to side with the nihilists, in fact his beautiful theory has more in common with platonism or susm than with anarchism. Traditional metaphysics describes language as pure light shining through the colored glass of the archetypes; Chomsky speaks of innate grammars. Words are leaves, branches are sentences, mother tongues are limbs, language families are trunks, and the roots are in heaven . . . or the DNA. I call this hermetalinguistics hermetic and metaphysical. Nihilism (or HeavyMetalinguistics in honor of Burroughs) seems to me to have brought language to a dead end and threatened to render it impossible (a great feat, but a depressing one) while Chomsky holds out the promise and hope of a last-minute revelation, which I nd equally dicult to accept. I too would like to save language, but without recourse to any Spooks, or supposed rules about God, dice, and the Universe. Returning to Saussure, and his posthumously published notes on anagrams in Latin poetry, we nd certain hints of a process which somehow escapes the sign/signier dynamic. Saussure was confronted with

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the suggestion of some sort of meta-linguistics which happens within language rather than being imposed as a categorical imperative from outside. As soon as language begins to play, as in the acrostic poems he examined, it seems to resonate with self-amplifying complexity. Saussure tried to quantify the anagrams but his gures kept running away from him (as if perhaps nonlinear equations were involved). Also, he began to nd the anagrams everywhere, even in Latin prose. He began to wonder if he were hallucinating or if anagrams were a natural unconscious process of parole. He abandoned the project. I wonder: if enough of this sort of data were crunched through a computer, would we begin to be able to model language in terms of complex dynamical systems? Grammars then would not be innate, but would emerge from chaos as spontaneously evolving higher orders, in Prigogines sense of creative evolution. Grammars could be thought of as Strange Attractors, like the hidden pattern which caused the anagrams patterns which are real but have existence only in terms of the sub-patterns they manifest. If meaning is elusive, perhaps it is because consciousness itself, and therefore language, is fractal. I nd this theory more satisfyingly anarchistic than either anti-linguistics or Chomskyanism. It suggests that language can overcome representation and mediation, not because it is innate, but because it is chaos. It would suggest that all dadaistic experimentation (Feyerabend described his school of scientic epistemology as anarchist dada) in sound poetry, gesture, cut-up, beast languages, etc. all this was aimed neither at discovering nor destroying meaning, but at creating it. Nihilism points out gloomily that language arbitrarily creates meaning. Chaos Linguistics happily agrees, but adds that language can overcome language, that language can create freedom out of semantic tyrannys confusion and decay.

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Appendix B: Applied Hedonics

The Bonnot Gang were vegetarians and drank only water. They came to a bad (tho picturesque) end. Vegetables and water, in themselves excellent things pure zen really shouldnt be consumed as martyrdom but as an epiphany. Self-denial as radical praxis, the Leveller impulse, tastes of millenarian gloom and this current on the Left shares an historical wellspring with the neo-puritan fundamentalism and moralic reaction of our decade. The New Ascesis, whether practiced by anorexic health-cranks, thin-lipped police sociologists, downtown straight-edge nihilists, cornpone fascist baptists, socialist torpedoes, drug-free Republicans . . . in every case the motive force is the same: resentment. In the face of contemporary pecksnian anaesthesia well erect a whole gallery of forebears, heros who carried on the struggle against bad consciousness but still knew how to party, a genial gene pool, a rare and dicult category to dene, great minds not just for Truth but for the truth of pleasure, serious but not sober, whose sunny disposition makes them not sluggish but sharp, brilliant but not tormented. Imagine a Nietzsche with good digestion. Not the tepid Epicureans nor the bloated Sybarites. Sort of a spiritual hedonism, an actual Path of Pleasure, vision of a good life which is both noble and possible, rooted in a sense of the magnicent over-abundance of reality. Shaykh Abu Said of Khorassan Charles Fourier Brillat-Savarin Rabelais Abu Nuwas Aga Khan III R. Vaneigem Oscar Wilde Omar Khayyam Sir Richard Burton Emma Goldman add your own favorites 147

Appendix C: Extra Quotes

As for us, He has appointed the job of permanent unemployment. If he wanted us to work, after all, He would not have created this wine. wine With a skinfull of this, Sir, this would you rush out to commit economics? Jalaloddin Rumi, Diwan-e Shams Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A ask of Wine, A Book of Verse and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness And Wilderness is Paradise enow. Ah, my Beloved, ll the cup that clears To-day of past Regrets and future Fears Tomorrow? Why, Tomorrow I may be Myself with Yesterdays Sevn Thousand Years. Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits and then Re-mould it nearer to the Hearts Desire! Omar FitzGerald History, materialism, monism, positivism, and all the isms of this world are old and rusty tools which I dont need or mind anymore. My principle is life, my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely for to embrace my life tragically.

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You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you will be ready (God, what an endless wait!) I wont mind going along with you for awhile. But when youll stop, I shall continue on my insane and triumphal way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing! Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild & virgin thoughts they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion! I shall be among them! And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows: So turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to light; show yourselves! Because every person; who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was mysteriously hidden therein; is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which can exist under the sun! All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of the tramps, the inaccessibles, the uniques, the rulers over the ideal, and the conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances. So, come on iconoclasts, forward! Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent! Renzo Novatore Arcola, January, 1920

Pirate Rant
Captain Bellamy Daniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote what became the rst standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringles Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most eective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported

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criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates. I am sorry they wont let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this dierence, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment? When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued: You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the eld; and this my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.

The Dinner Party

The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found in the parlor. In the elegant and rened reunions of the aristocratic classes there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The Individuality of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are formed according to attraction. They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through the operation of the same subtile and all-pervading inuence. Mutual deference pervades all classes, and the most perfect 150

harmony, ever yet attained, in complex human relations, prevails under precisely those circumstances which Legislators and Statesmen dread as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion. If there are laws of etiquette at all, they are mere suggestions of principles admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, by each individual mind. Is it conceivable that in all the future progress of humanity, with all the innumerable elements of development which the present age is unfolding, society generally, and in all its relations, will not attain as high a grade of perfection as certain portions of society, in certain special relations, have already attained? Suppose the intercourse of the parlor to be regulated by specic legislation. Let the time which each gentleman shall be allowed to speak to each lady be xed by law; the position in which they should sit or stand be precisely regulated; the subjects which they shall be allowed to speak of, and the tone of voice and accompanying gestures with which each may be treated, carefully dened, all under pretext of preventing disorder and encroachment upon each others privileges and rights, then can any thing be conceived better calculated or more certain to convert social intercourse into intolerable slavery and hopeless confusion? S. Pearl Andrews The Science of Society

Retrieved on April 16 th, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

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Hakim Bey

Post-Anarchism Anarchy

1987

The Association for Ontological Anarchy gathers in conclave, black turbans & shimmering robes, sprawled on shirazi carpets sipping bitter coee, smoking long chibouk & sibsi. Question: Whats our position on all these recent defections & desertions from anarchism (esp. in California-Land): condemn or condone? Purge them or hail them as advance-guard? Gnostic elite . . . or traitors? Actually, we have a lot of sympathy for the deserters & their various critiques of anarchism. Like Sinbad & the Horrible Old Man, anarchism staggers around with the corpse of a Martyr magically stuck to its shoulders haunted by the legacy of failure & revolutionary masochism stagnant backwater of lost history. Between tragic Past & impossible Future, anarchism seems to lack a Present as if afraid to ask itself, here & now, what are my true desires? & what can I do before its too late ? . . . Yes, imagine yourself confronted by a sorcerer who stares you down balefully & demands, What is your True Desire? Do you hem & haw, stammer, take refuge in ideological platitudes? Do you possess both Imagination & Will, can you both dream & dare or are you the dupe of an impotent fantasy? Look in the mirror & try it . . . (for one of your masks is the face of a sorcerer) . . . 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 oers no concrete program whereby the truly deprived might fulll (or at least struggle realistically to fulll) real needs & desires? If so, then this failure would explain not only anarchisms lack of appeal to the poor & marginal, but also the disaection & desertions from within its own ranks. Demos, picket-lines & reprints of 19 th century classics dont add up to a vital, daring conspiracy of self-liberation. If the movement is to grow rather than shrink, a lot of deadwood will have to be jettisoned & some risky ideas embraced. The potential exists. Any day now, vast numbers of americans are going to realize theyre being force-fed a load of reactionary boring hysterical articially-avored crap. Vast chorus of groans, puking & retching . . . angry mobs roam the malls, smashing & looting . . . etc., etc.

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The Black Banner could provide a focus for the outrage & channel it into an insurrection of the Imagination. We could pick up the struggle where it was dropped by Situationism in 68 & Autonomia in the seventies, & carry it to the next stage. We could have revolt in our times & in the process, we could realize many of our True Desires, even if only for a season, a brief Pirate Utopia, a warped free-zone in the old Space/Time continuum. If the A.O.A. retains its aliation with the movement, we do so not merely out of a romantic predilection for lost causes or not entirely. Of all political systems, anarchism (despite its aws, & precisely because it is neither political nor a system) comes closest to our understanding of reality, ontology, the nature of being. As for the deserters . . . we agree with their critiques, but note that they seem to oer no new powerful alternatives. So for the time being we prefer to concentrate on changing anarchism from within. Heres our program, comrades: 1. Work on the realization that psychic racism has replaced overt discrimination as one of the most disgusting aspects of our society. Imaginative participation in other cultures, esp. those we live with. 2. Abandon all ideological purity. Embrace Type-3 anarchism (to use Bob Blacks pro-tem slogan): neither collectivist nor individualist. Cleanse the temple of vain idols, get rid of the Horrible Old Men, the relics & martyrologies. 3. Anti-work or Zerowork movement extremely important, including a radical & perhaps violent attack on Education & the serfdom of children. 4. Develop american samizdat network, replace outdated publishing/ propaganda tactics. Pornography & popular entertainment as vehicles for radical re-education. 5. In music the hegemony of the 2/4 & 4/4 beat must be overthrown. We need a new music, totally insane but life-arming, rhythmically subtle yet powerful, & we need it now. 154

6. Anarchism must wean itself away from evangelical materialism & banal 2-dimensional 19 th century scientism. Higher states of consciousness are not mere spooks invented by evil priests. The orient, the occult, the tribal cultures possess techniques which can be appropriated in true anarchist fashion. 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 & anticlerical; avid for all new technologies of consciousness & metanoia a democratization of shamanism, intoxicated & serene. 7. Sexuality is under assault, obviously from the Right, more subtly from the avant-pseud post-sexuality movement, & even more subtly by Spectacular Recuperation in media & advertising. Time for a major step forward in SexPol awareness, an explosive rearmation of the polymorphic eros (even & especially in the face of plague & gloom) a literal glorication of the senses, a doctrine of delight. Abandon all world-hatred & shame. 8. Experiment with new tactics to replace the outdated baggage of Leftism. Emphasize practical, material & personal benets of radical networking. The times do not appear propitious for violence or militancy, but surely a bit of sabotage & imaginative disruption is never out of place. Plot & conspire, dont bitch & moan. The Art World in particular deserves a dose of Poetic Terrorism. 9. The despatialization of post-Industrial society provides some benets (e.g. computer networking) but can also manifest as a form of oppression (homelessness, gentrication, architectural depersonalization, the erasure of Nature, etc.) The communes of the sixties tried to circumvent these forces but failed. 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?

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Anarchism ultimately implies anarchy & anarchy is chaos. Chaos is the principle of continual creation . . . & Chaos never died. A.O.A. Plenary Session March 87, NYC

Retrieved on 23 November 2010 from http://www.tsuibhne.net/mt/archives/cat_articles_hakim_bey.html

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Hakim Bey

An esoteric interpretation of the I.W.W. preamble

1991

Hakim Bey, the Association for Ontological Anarchy People who think that they know our politics, who know that we are individualists (or even worse, neo-individualists), will no doubt be shocked to discover us taking an interest in the IWW. Theyll be even more abbergasted to hear that Mark Sullivan & I joined the NY Artists & Writers Job Branch of the IWW this January at the urging of Mel Most (who subsequently went & died on us!). Actually, were a bit shocked ourselves. Never complain, never explain . . . ..; but perhaps this time well relax the rule a bit hence the apologia. The Mackay Society, of which Mark & I are active members, is devoted to the anarchism of Max Stirner, Benj. Tucker & John Henry Mackay. Moreover, Ive associated myself with various currents of post-situationism, zero work, neo-dada, autonomia & type 3 anarchy, all of which are supposed to be anathema to the IWW & syndicalism in general. Other members of the NY Artists Branch are also individualists or pacist-anarchists (in the Julian Beck line of transmission); some unease has already been expressed during meetings about the Preamble & other IWW texts . . . .; so, aside from making a sentimental gesture in honor of Mels memory . . . . why are we collaborating with the IWW? First: whats wrong with a little sentiment? When I rst discovered anarchism at about 12 or 13 I wanted to be a hobo (more practical ambition than piracy, I gured), & the Wobbly organizers appeared to me as authentic American heros. I still think so. Second: we type-3s like to show our contempt for ideology even our own brand of anti-ideology. Class-warfare may not suce for us as an explanation of all reality, but obviously it is real we know where our sympathies lie. We oppose the idea of the social construct Work but we are far from opposing the workers. The alienation of labor, we feel, cannot be explained entirely by wage-system economics; it also has a psychological origin. This double critique throws the very concept & deep structure of industrial work into the crucible of radical deconstruction. Meanwhile however industrial work is real, & workers control must be considered a fully valid tactic toward realizing both the economic & the psychological aspects of any hypothetical new society within the shell of the old.

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A individualists moreover we have good reason to appreciate the IWW concept of the union. Stirner contrary to the belief of those who have not actually read his book spoke approvingly of a Union of Unique Ones (we prefer this translation to Union of Egoists), in which all members would reach for individual goals through common interests. He suggested that the workers had the most to gain by embracing this notion, & that if the productive class were to organize on such a basis it would prove irresistible. (The prejudice against Stirner, by the way, can be traced to Marx & Engels, who considered him potentially even more dangerous than Bakunin, & wrote their biggest book to destroy his inuence.) The Mackay Society, incidentally, represents a little-known current of individualist thought which never cut its ties with revolutionary labor. Dyer Lum, Ezra & Angela Haywood represent this school of thought; Jo Labadie, who wrote for Tuckers Liberty, made himself a link between the american plumb-line anarchists, the philosophical individualists, & the syndicalist or communist branch of the movement; his inuence reached the Mackay Society through his son, Laurance. Like the Italian Stirnerites (who inuenced us through our late friend E. Arrigoni) we support all anti-authoritarian currents, despite their apparent contradictions. Why? Because we feel that some realization of personal liberty is possible even in the very act of struggling for it. From our point of view, radical organizing (up to the point of insurrection) is not a sacrice one makes to the future; it is rather a mode of self-liberation with its own immediate reward even if that reward consists only of fragments & moments of realization. Wobblies, with their contempt for pie in the sky someday (or as Lewis Carroll put it, Jam tomorrow or jam yesterday, but never jam today), must feel the same distrust of any leftist utopianism which demands our martyrdom on behalf of a materialist someday which we ourselves will not live to see. In a recent issue of Factsheet Five, M. Gunderloy (another notorious neo-individualist) salutes the winds of change . . . . blowing through the One Big Union as exemplied by an intriguing article on The Greening of the IWW in The Industrial Worker. If the IWW is compatible with Earth First!, it must surely be able to accept pacists & individualists. In the Jan. issue of the IW a San Francisco delegate describes the 1989

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Without Borders Conference as a festival of anti-work counterculturalism but admits that the local Branch beneted greatly from the gathering. The SF delegate would perhaps be surprised to hear that we neo-individualists also felt underrepresented at the conference. The point is that the anarchist movement is growing & that all varieties & currents of anarchism will thrive, cross-pollinate, & bloom. No antiauthoritarian tendency should be excluded or exclude itself from this ferment. Ideology is dying Communism today, maybe Capitalism tomorrow & anarchism is the only modern political movement left with any chance of being taken seriously. We challenge the IWW to broaden its horizons beyond class consciousness, just as we challenge the punks (or the environmentalists) to become more aware of class, of labor, & of anarchist history. Were all in this together, & its time to start treating one another in a comradely fashion. The IWW Preamble is almost a sort of sacred text a Scripture. No believer likes to meddle with scripture & were just superstitious enough not to want to disturb the ghosts of those old hobos we venerate. But times change, & Scriptures need to be re-interpreted. Thus, with a smile, this suggestion for an esoteric reading of the text. From the viewpoint of the alert exegetist, there are some wonderfully vague & elastic key-terms to be found in the Preamble. The denition of working class could be extended to include all those who suer from the alienation of labor, both economic & psychological. The employing class would then consist of all forces opposing both economic & psychological freedom. The good things of life are clearly not to be understood only as material goods, but also as the arts of life, actions, creations, inspirations, modes of freedom, ways of living. An injury to one is an injury to all not because we are parts of some mystical body or church under some categorical imperative or moral code or Holy Spook, but because each of us aspires to good things which circulate freely only among free spirits, individuals acting in union for certain values values which begin to emerge in the very act of declaring them, & declaring ones willingness to struggle with them. Why after all are we against hunger & want? Because were bleedingheart pious do-gooders? Or because hunger & want (both economic & psychological) prevent the full realization of a society in which good

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things circulate freely, & therefore diminish the power of each individual to obtain those things? As artists & writers we appreciate the image of the banner inscribed with the revolutionary watchword our own work is precisely the creation of such banners, such symbols. We do not create icons to be worshipped or slogans to be carved in eternal stone no, we make tools for realization. Our Job Branch produces the potential for free consciousness by working toward the abolition of consensus perception, both self-repression & the oppression of authority. The wages of alienation is the death of the human spirit; the revolutionary watchword is possession of the earth which includes possession of the self, of the imagination, the body, the creative power all these, too, are the machinery of production.

***
Notes: Mel Most was an IWW organizer who died last year. Mark Sullivan is the founder of a branch of the John Henry MacKay Society. Type 3 anarchy is a term coined by Bob Black to mean an amalgamation of individualist and communist anarchy. Autonomia is an antiauthoritarian movement which began in Italy and Germany in the 1970s. Julian Beck founded, with Judith Malina, the Living Theatre. ( Eds.)

from The International Review, 1991 (published the 15 th day of Operation Desert Storm), pp 2 3. This unnumbered Boulder, Colorado publication was edited by Paul Sager and Louis A. Villaire. Retrieved on August 20, 2011 from http://radicalarchives.org/2010/05/02/hakim-bey-joins-iww/

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Hakim Bey

The Lemonade Ocean & Modern Times

1991

1. One More River to Cross

In our experience (that is, not merely in intellectual speculation but in everyday-life) we have found that the Ego can be as much of a spook as the Group or indeed, spooky as any abstraction which is allowed to control behavior, emotion, thought, or fate. Deeply as weve been inuenced by Stirner / Nietzsche Tucker/ Mackay, we have never held to any rigid ideological or psychological form of Individualism / Egoism. Individualist anarchism is lovely dynamite, but not the only ingredient in our cocktail. Our position, put quite simply (in the form of a truism): The autonomy of the individual appears to be complemented & enhanced by the movement of the group; while the eectiveness of the group seems to depend on the freedom of the individual. In the 1980s thru poverty, terror, mediation, & alienation the individual was more & more isolated, while all forms of combination (communes, co-ops, etc.) were eliminated or else reduced to pure simulation. The pleasures of the isolated ego have begun to pull as the self is gradually reduced to a comm-terminal or funnel for commodity-fetishes. In the 90s we will demand eective means of association which depend neither on Capital nor any other form of representation. We reject the false trance of the Spectacular group but we also reject the lonely ineectiveness of the embittered hermit. Always one more illusion to overcome!

2. Maximizing Marx
Type-3 anarchism (a term coined by Bob Black) designates a radically non-ideological form of anarchism neither Individualist nor Collectivist but in a sense both at once. This current within anti-authoritarianism is not a new invention, however (nor has it been given any nal form). One can nd versions of it in such works as bolobolo, or in the writings of the Situationists. One Situ group (For Ourselves) went so far as to suggest a synthesis of Max Stirner & Karl Marx, who in real life were bitter enemies. They pointed out that Stirners psychological existentialism does 163

not necessarily conict with Marxs economics. Bakunin criticized not Marxs original critique but rather the solution he proposed, dictatorship. As for us, Stirner outweighs Marx because psychology precedes economics in our theory of liberation but we read Stirner in the light of Bakunin & the early Marx the light of the 1 st International & the Commune of 1870 the light of Proudhon. In order to clarify this position, well introduce two more names from our family tree, Steven Pearl Andrews (18121886) & Charles Fourier (17721837). In a sense we nd them a more congenial pair than Max und Marx, because they both made signicant donations to the cause of erotic liberation (a central concern of the Mackay Society), unlike say the virginal Bakunin, or Marx or Proudhon both prudes or for that matter Stirner, Nietzsche, or Tucker, who all more or less avoided the subject. Serious historians of the Social often ignore Andrews & Fourier because they were cranks utopianists, marginals, Blake-like visionaries. One needs to be something of a surrealist to appreciate them. But our appreciation is more than erotic, aesthetic, or spiritual. We also draw from them a precise picture of our own position in the type-3 current of contemporary libertarianism.

3. Lemonade Ocean
Fourier was amazing. He lived at the same time as De Sade & Blake, & deserves to be remembered as their equal or even superior. Those other two apostles of freedom & desire had no political disciples, but in the middle of the 19 th century literally hundreds of communes (phalansteries) were founded on fourierist principles in France, N. America, Mexico, S. America, Algeria, Yugoslavia, etc. Proudhon, Engels, & Kropotkin all read him with fascination, as did Andre Breton & Roland Barthes. But today in America he is forgotten not one complete work by Fourier is in print here a few anthologies came out in the 70s but have vanished & only one work about him (a ne biography by Jonathan Beecher, which may serve to stir some enthusiasm). Fouriers own disciples suppressed some of his most important texts (on sexuality), which did not appear in print till 1967. Its about time he was re-discovered again. 164

To quote Fourier out of context is to betray him. To say for example that he believed the ocean would turn to lemonade in the future, when humanity comes to live in Harmonial Association, is to make him a gure of fun (as Hawthorne did in The Blythedale Romance). To understand the beauty of the idea it must be seen in the context of Fouriers grand & brilliant cosmological speculations, rivals in complexity of Blakes prophecies. For Fourier the universe is composed of living beings, planets, & stars, who feel passion & who carry out sexual intercourse, so that creation itself is continual. The miseries of Civilization have deected Earth & humanity from their proper destiny in a literal cosmic sense. Passion, which we have been taught to regard as evil, is in fact virtually the divine principle. Human beings are microscopic stars, & all passions & desires (including fetishes & perversions) are by nature not only good but necessary for the realization of human destiny. In Fouriers system of Harmony all creative activity including industry, craft, agriculture, etc. will arise from liberated passion this is the famous theory of attractive labor. Fourier sexualizes work itself the life of the Phalanstery is a continual orgy of intense feeling, intellection, & activity, a society of lovers & wild enthusiasts. When the social life of Earth is harmonized, our planet will re-join the universe of Passion & undergo vast transformations, aecting human form, weather, animals, & plants, even the oceans. Passion draws humanity into association just as gravity draws celestial bodies into orbital systems. The phalanstery is a little solar system revolving around the central re of the passions. Thus, altho Fourier always defends the individual against the tyranny of the Civilized groups (what weve called Spectacular groups, in the modern context), nevertheless for him the group in its ideal form takes on a quality of absoluteness. Its been jokingly said of him that the only sin in his system is eating lunch alone. But association cannot be considered a form of collectivism or communism it is not strictly egalitarian, nor does it eliminate personal property or even inheritance. Moreover, all the elaborate titles & ranks Fourier delighted to invent for his Harmonians were voluntary & purely ceremonial. The Harmonian does not live with some 1600 people under one roof because of compulsion or altruism, but because of the

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sheer pleasure of all the social, sexual, economic, gastrosophic, cultural, & creative relations this association allows & encourages.

4. The Convivial Individualist

One of Fouriers favorite illustrations of how harmony works even in Civilization was the dinner party, where wine, wit, & good food are enjoyed according to a spontaneous order, not subject to any law or morality. Social Harmony would be like a never-ending party: Fourier envisioned people leaping out of bed at 3 a.m. to pick cherries as if they were rushing o to a grand ball. Steven Pearl Andrews (who also used the dinner-party metaphor) was not a fourierist, but he lived through the brief craze for phalansteries in America & adopted a lot of fourierist principles & practices. His chief mentor was Josiah Warren, rst exponent of Individualist anarchism (or Individual Sovereignty) in America altho Warren in turn inherited much from certain strains of radical democracy & Protestant spritual anarchy which can be traced to the earliest Colonial period. Andrew was a system-builder, a logothete like Fourier & Blake, a maker of worlds out of words. He syncretized Abolitionism, Free Love, spiritual universalism, Warren, & Fourier into a grand utopian scheme he called the Universal Pantarchy. He was instrumental in founding several intentional communities, including the Brownstone Utopia on 14 th St. in New York, & Modern Times in Brentwood, Long Island. The latter became as famous as the best-known fourierist communes (Brook Farm in Massachusetts & the North American Phalanx in New Jersey) in fact, Modern Times became downright notorious (for Free Love) & nally foundered under a wave of scandalous publicity. Andrews (& Victoria Woodhull) were members of the infamous Section 12 of the 1 st International, expelled by Marx for its anarchist, feminist, & spiritualist tendencies. Like Fourier, Andrews created a religion to replace all the corrupt authoritarian cults of Civilization. We admit that this mystical tendency in both thinkers interests us a great deal, & again rouses our sympathies more than the cold atheism (or fundamental materialism) of a Stirner 166

of Marx. Type-3 anarchism includes for us the heritage of the Ranters, Antinomians, & Family of Love, as well as radical forms of buddhism, taoism, & susm. Like Blake, Fourier & Pearl Andrews built systems of their own so as not to be slaves to someone elses & these grand structures included psychological, sexual, & spritual dimensions missing from mere ideological or philosophical systems. The structural details of Harmony & Pantarchy are fascinating & inspiring, but for us their deepest value lies in the daring of their total radical subjectivity. Fourier & Pearl Andrews created poetics of life, not merely politics or economics, & it is this aspect of their work we most admire & wish to emulate.

5. Universal Pantarchy & North American Phalanx

In a more immediate sense, however, we nd that Fourier & Pearl Andrews oer useful arguments & practical hints for the establishment of a kind of association which seems even more desirable now than before the age of Late Capitalism, Dead Communism, pure Spectacle, & the eerie alienation of credit cards & answering machines, polls & surveys, computer viruses, & immune-system breakdowns. In the 1980s even the anti-authoritarian Margin fell into a spooky state of communication via the mail, BBSs, xerography, & tape. Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by conviviality, by living together in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered & Controlled. True desires erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual are best attained in a context of freedom of self & other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation. The entire revolt against Civilization can be seen (at least from one point of view) as an attempt to recreate the autonomous intimacy of the band, the free association of individuals. Morbid loneliness is no better than the engineered consensus of the New World Order in fact the two are but opposite sides of the coin, like

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homelessness & rent: false individualism vs. false collectivism. In the face of this illusory dichotomy we will continue to propagate Individual Sovereignty but at the same time proclaim that our rst & most urgent research of the decade must concern the nature of association. Thus we announce our intention to revive & amalgamate both the Universal Pantarchy & the North American Phalanx, the local (NY area) manifestations of Andrews & Fouriers systems. The new Universal Pantarchy & North American Phalanx (UP/NAP) will be rst a society of appreciation & research (more musty-dusty 19 th century obscure crackpots to venerate & imitate!) but also & perhaps more importantly it may become a nucleus of association. We plan to make eld trips to the original sites of Modern Times & the Phalanx; we intend to revive the fourierist tradition of banquets; we plan to construct a shrine to Fourier & the Pantarch; we may even go so far as to produce another newsletter! And perhaps our research will actually lead to further experiments in the creation of temporary autonomous zones, free times & spaces excavated in the walls of Babylon creative autonomy & comradeship in the no-go areas where power has disappeared & who knows? even in our lifetimes, the mutation . . . A crank? Yes, Im a crank: a little device that causes revolutions! (E.F. Schumacher). Long live Individual Sovereignty! Long live the Pantarchy! Long live Harmony! April 7 (Fouriers birthday) 1991 NYC

Retrieved on April 15 th, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/lemonade.html

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Hakim Bey

Permanent TAZs

1993

TAZ-theory tries to concern itself with existing or emerging situations rather than with pure utopianism. All over the world people are leaving or disappearing themselves from the Grid of Alienation and seeking ways to restore human contact. An interesting example of this on the level of urban folk culture can be found in the proliferation of hobby networks and conferences. Recently I discovered the zines of two such groups, Crown Jewels of the Hlgh Wire (devoted to the collection of glass electrical insulators) and a journal on cucurbitology (The Gourd). A vast amount of creativity goes into these obsessions. The various periodic gatherings of fellow-maniacs amount to genuine face-to-face (unmediated) festivals of eccentricity. Its not just the counter-culture which seeks its TAZs, its nomad encampments and nights of liberation from the Consensus. Self-organized and autonomous groups are springing up amongst every class and sub-culture. Vast tracts of the Babylonian Empire are now virtually empty, populated only by the spooks of MassMedia, and a few psychotic policemen. TAZ-theory realizes that THIS IS HAPPENING were not talking about should or will be were talking about an already existing movement. Our use of various thought experiments, utopian poetics, paranoia criticism, etc., aims at helping to clarify this complex and still largely undocumented movement, to give it some theoretical focus and self-awareness, and to suggest tactics based on coherent integral strategies to act the midwife or the panegyrist, not the vanguard! And so weve had to consider the fact that not all existing autonomous zones are temporary. Some are (at least by intention) more-or-less permanent. Certain cracks in the Babylonian Monolith appear so vacant that whole groups can move into them and settle down. Certain theories, such as Permaculture, have been developed to deal with this situation and make the most of it. Villages, communes, communities, even arcologies and biospheres (or other utopian-city forms) are being experimented with and implemented. Even here however TAZ-theory may oer some useful thought-tools and clarications. What about a poetique (a way of making) and a politique (a way of living-together) for the permanent TAZ (or PAZ)? What about the actual relation between temporariness and permanence? And how can

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the PAZ renew and refresh itself periodically with the festival aspect of the TAZ?

THE QUESTION OF PUBLICITY

Recent events in the US and Europe have shown that self-organized/ autonomous groups strike fear into the heart of the State. MOVE in Philadelphia, the Koreshites of Waco, Deadheads, Rainbow Tribes, computer-hackers, squatters, etc., have been targeted for varying intensitylevels of extermination. And yet other autonomous groups go unnoticed, or at least unpersecuted. What makes the dierence? One factor may be the malign eect of publicity or mediation. The Media experience a vampiric thirst for the shadow-Passion play of Terrorism, Babylons public ritual of expiation, scapegoating, and blood-sacrice. Once any autonomous group allows this particular gaze to fall upon it, the shit hits the fan: the Media will try to arrange a mini-armageddon to satisfy its junk-sickness for spectacle and death. Now, the PAZ makes a ne sitting target for such a Media smartbomb. Beseiged inside its con-pound, the self-organized group can only succumb to some sort of cheap pre-determined martyrdom. Presumably this role appeals only to neurotic masochists? In any case, most groups will want to live out their natural span or trajectory in peace and quiet. A good tactic here might be to avoid publicity from the Mass Media as if it were the plague. A bit of natural paranoia comes in handy, so long as it doesnt become an end in itself. One must be cunning in order to get away with being bold. A touch of camoage, a air for invisibility, a sense of tact as a tactic . . . might be as useful to a PAZ as a TAZ. Humble suggestions: Use only intimate media (zines, phonetrees, BBSs, free radio and mini-FM, public-access cable, etc.) avoid blustering-machoconfrontationist attitude you dont need ve seconds on the Evening News (Police Raid Cultists) to validate your existence. Our slogan might be: Get a life, not a life-style.

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ACCESS
People probably ought to choose the people they live with. Openmembership communes invariably end up swamped with freeloaders and sex-starved pathetic creeps. PAZs must choose their own membership mutually this has nothing to do with elitism. The PAZ may exercize a temporarily open function such as hosting festivals or giving away free food, etc. but it need not be permanently open to any self-proclaimed sympathizer who wanders by.

THE EMERGENCE OF A GENUINELY ALTERNATIVE ECONOMY

Once again, this is already happening but it still needs a huge amount of work before it comes into focus. The sub-economies of lavoro nero, untaxed transactions, barter, etc., tend to be severely limited and localized. BBSs and other networking systems could be used to link up these regional/marginal aeconomies (household managements) into a viable alternative economy of some magnitude. P.M. has already outlined something like this in bolobolo in fact a number of possible systems already exist, in theory anyway. The problem is: how to construct a true alternative economy, i.e. a complete economy, without attracting the IRS and other capitalist runningdogs? How can I exchange my skills as, say, a plumber or moonshiner, for the food, books, shelter, and psychoactive plants I want without paying taxes, or even without using ally State-forged money? How can I live a comfortable (even luxurious) life free of all interactions and transactions with CommodityWorld? If we took all the energy the Leftists put into demos, and all the energy the Libertarians put into playing futile little 3 rd-party games, and if we redirected all that power into the construction of a real underground economy, we would already have accomplished the Revolution long ago.

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THE WORLD CAME TO AN END IN 1972

The hollowed-out egy of the Absolute State nally toppled in 1989. The last ideology, Capitalism, is no more than a skin-disease of the Very Late Neolithic. Its a desiring-machine running on empty. Im hoping to see it deliquesce in my lifetime, like one of Dalis mindscapes. And I want to have somewhere to go when the shit comes down. Of course the death of Capitalism neednt entail the Godzilla-like destruction of all human culture; this scenario is merely a terror-image propagated by Capitalism itself. Nevertheless it stands to reason that the dreaming corpse will spasm violently before rigor mortis sets in and New York or LA may not be the smartest places to wait out the storm. (And the storm may already have begun.) [On the other hand NYC and LA might not be the worst places to create the New World; one can imagine whole squatted neighborhoods, gangs transformed into Peoples Militias, etc.] Now, the gypsy-RV way of life may be one way to deal with the on-going melt-down of Too-Late Capitalism but as for me, Id prefer a nice anarchist monastery somewhere a typical place for scholars to sit out the Dark Ages. The more we organize this NOW the less hassle well have to face later. Im not talking about survival Im not interested in mere survival. I want to thrive. BACK TO UTOPIA.

FESTIVALS
The PAZ serves a vital function as a node in the TAZ-web, a meetingplace for a wide circle of friends and allies who may not actually live fulltime on the farm or in the village. Ancient villages held fairs which brought wealth to the community, provided markets for travelers, and created festal time/space for all participants. Nowadays the festival is emerging as one of the most important forms for the TAZ itself, but can also provide renewal and fresh energy for the PAZ. I remember reading somewhere that in the Middle Ages there were one hundred and eleven holidays a year; we should take this as our utopian minimum and strive to do even better. [Note: the utopian minima proposed by C. Fourier consisted of more food and sex than the average 18 th century 173

French aristocrat enjoyed; B. Fuller proposed the term bare minimum for a similar concept]

THE LIVING EARTH

I believe that there exist plenty of good selsh reasons for desiring the organic (its sexier), the natural (it tastes better), the green (its more beautiful), the Wild(er)ness (its more exciting). Communitas (as P. Goodman called it) and conviviality (as I. Illich called it) are more pleasurable than their opposites. The living earth need not exclude the organic city the small but intense conglomeration of humanity devoted to the arts and slightly decadent joys of a civilization purged of all its gigantism and enforced loneliness but even those of us who enjoy cities can see immediate and hedonic motives for ghting for the environment. We are militant biophiles. Deep ecology, social ecology, permaculture, appropriate tech..were not too picky about ideologies. Let 1000 owers bloom.

PAZ TYPOLOGY
A weird religion or a rebel art movement can become a kind of nonlocal PAZ, like a more intense and all-consuming hobby network. The Secret Society (like the Chinese Tong) also provides a model for a PAZ without geographic limits. But the perfect case scenario involves a free space that extends into free time. The essence of the PAZ must be the long-drawn-out intensication of the joys and risks of the TAZ. And the intensication of the PAZ will be . . . Utopia Now. Hakim Bey D R E A M T I M E, A U G U ST 1 9 93 CONTACT: DREAMTIME VILLAGE * ROUTE 2 BOX 242W VIOLA WI 54664 $4 FOR NEWSLETTER 174

Retrieved on April 23 rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/paz.html

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Hakim Bey

Millennium

1996

Part 1

Interview with Hakim Bey

[A longer version appears as a preface to the German translation of Immediatism] 10 July 1996, New York Vienna (by phone) Q: [The rst questions concern the book Immediatism (a.k.a. Radio Sermonettes) and readers response to it]: A: Of course its meant as a discussion of what people do rather than what people should do. Im not interested in preaching, and I dont think myself a guru in any sense. More than that, in this particular book I really meant to describe what I considered to be the revolutionary potential of everyday life, to put it in Situationist terms. The response has been pretty good I mean I dont get hundreds of letters or anything, but I do get lots of letters, and I do get lots of response and it seems to strike a chord especially with people in the arts, which is who it was meant for really. I mean, when I say people in the arts that could be anybody, not just professional artists; it could be anyone who feels a necessity for creative action in their life. My idea was to dene a space which I feel exists (anyway), thats a private, even secret space, if you like . . . clandestine . . . in which the whole problem of commodication, the buying and selling of art, the turning of art into a commodity and the use of art to sell commodities, which is sort of a curse to the modern artist, is avoided, just plain avoided; just a withdrawal from that world and a rearmation of a creative power in everyday life, outside the life of commodity, the life of the market. After all, this is why all artists are artists, this is why one becomes an artist not to sell your soul to the company store but to create. Q: Is there a lot of media interest in what you do? because somehow the Disappearing One could attract lots of attention, and the one who places a critique could become himself very interesting for the media. How would that circle work for you? A: Youre absolutely right, but it has not really worked that way. Its true that TAZ [The Temporary Autonomous Zone] was part of a book

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which caused a little bit of a stir in underground circles or whatever, there was some publicity involved in this, but in the rst place I dont seek publicity for myself Im not interested in establishing some sort of personality cult. I really would like to be invisible. Actually, it was probably a mistake to use an exotic name to write this material. It does actually draw curiosity and attention instead of just being accepted as a pseudonym. So there was a little bit of media attention but not very much, and one reason for that is that in America nothing reaches the media unless its commodication. This is all the media is interested in, something which can sell products. And theres no product to be sold here other than a small cheap book or two. In Europe things are slightly dierent, there is perhaps one may say a remnant of a public intelligentsia which we dont have here. We really do not have that here. We have some famous writers, who get published in all the journals, and then we have masses of people who are probably far more intelligent, far more creative, but who are not seen in the media and therefore are not seen to exist sometimes even in their own eyes, and this is why Im writing a book like Immediatism: to emphasize to the artist and the creative people that they do exist, they should exist in their own eyes, so what they do is important, even politically important; even though it happens outside the mass media in a sense is a blessing, not a curse. Things are slightly dierent in Europe perhaps for these reasons, but in America theres been very little crossover between my world and the world of media and when I say that I dont even mean magazines and newspapers. Im not even talking about television and advertising that are really mass media. Im talking just about local newspapers. Theyre just not interested. Theres no interest in political radicalism in intellectual circles in America, and I think it would be fair to say that no interest whatsoever. Q: In your text, you mentioned a certain psychic martial art and the return of the Paleolithic in the sense of a psychic technology which we forgot. Can you explain that? A: Well, Im really not trying to be so mysterious or to imply that theres a secret art which I know and which Im not sharing. Why I called it a secret martial art is that its simply secret because its ignored or forgotten. What I mean to say is that living in the body, being aware

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of the positivity of the material bodily principle (to quote Bakhtin) is in fact a form of resistance, a martial art, if you will. In a world where the body is so degraded, so de-emphasized on the one hand by the empire of the image and on the other hand where the body is degraded by a kind of obsessive narcissism, athletics, fashion, and health, that somewhere in between these extremes to me is the ordinary body which, as the Zen masters would say, is the Zen body, to rephrase the saying that the ordinary mind is the Zen mind. To be conscious and aware of this is already to take a stance of resistance against the obliteration of the body in media or the pseudo-apotheosis of the body in modern sports, or fast food or all this kind of degradation of the body which occurs along with its erasure. So what would that art be I dont know exactly, I think it would be dierent for each person maybe, and certainly involve a kind of physical creativity that I discuss in the essays. Unfortunately, I havent got it down to a science yet that could be taught in dojos and you get a black belt in it. It hasnt occurred yet, although perhaps some genius will come along and invent it. Q: Do you get many invitations to parties that are strange for you or really come as a surprise because of who identies with your stu? Can you give examples? A: Ill just give you one example. I was invited by a ceremonial magician who lives in a medieval castle in the south of France to come and see his museum of occult art. And this was simply as a result of reading my work and corresponding with me for a while. It was great. I wont give his address, though. Q: Theres a lot of frank non-pessimism in what you write, and theres one chapter in your book about laughter as either a weapon or medicine. I was wondering who the people who would communicate this sort of healing laughter might be? A: First of all, theres an existential choice involved here. Ive always thought that literature should be entertaining as well as instructive a very old-fashioned idea but one that I adhere to. When I set out to write in this way particularly in this way, a political way, if you want to call it that I intend to make a donation, to try to give something. There doesnt seem to me to be any point in giving more misery or exacerbating unhappiness through some kind of hyper-intellectual, pyrotechnical

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writing about unhappiness and the shit that we all nd ourselves in. Thats been done plenty. I think rst of all that it doesnt need to be done any more and second of all theres a kind of reactionary aspect to it which is that the emphasizing of misery without any anti-pessimism, as you put it, would be simply seduction into inactivity and political despair. In other words, to do politics at all on any level, especially on a revolutionary or on an insurrectionary level, there has to be some antipessimism I wont say optimism because that sounds so fatuous, futile; but anti-pessimism is a nice phrase. And theres a deliberate attempt at that in the writing. Then again its a matter of my personality, I guess, inclined towards the notion of the healing laugh to some extent. We have an anarchist thinker in America, John Zerzan, who wrote an essay against humor which maybe is one of the things I was reacting against. Even if irony is counter-revolutionary which I think it might be to a certain extent I dont see any way in which you could say that laughter itself is counter-revolutionary. This doesnt make any sense to me unless you mean to get rid of language and thought altogether, which is just another form of nihilism. So as long as youre going to accept culture on some level youre certainly going to have to accept humor. And as long as youre going to have to accept humor you might as well see humor as potentially revolutionary. [ . . . ] Im actually not out to raise a lot of laughs. Humor can indeed become counter-revolutionary if its simply exalted out of all proportion and made into the purpose or center of ones art. Well, this could perhaps be considered frivolity. Again, I would say that its part of that natural martial art of the ordinary mind and body, its just something that is, and therefore should be celebrated as part of existence. Q: Palimpsest. A: The whole idea behind palimpsest was to get over the fetish of the single original philosophy, the origin of single philosophies or the philosophy of single origins. I dont think that we should throw the idea of origins out the window, as for example is done in certain post-structuralist thinkers, or indeed really across the board in modern scientic discourse. In other words, origins are mythological, and comparative mythology still has a great deal to teach us, obviously. We still live in a world which generates mythology, even though people dont realize it.

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So origins are important, whether for positive or negative reasons, and my idea of the palimpsest was that it inscribes origins upon origins, and every origin that is potentially interesting should be added to the text, and although I dont literally write on top of writing although it might be an interesting experiment I do sort of encourage the readers to try to stack these origins or conceptual elements up in their minds as they read, and try to entertain them simultaneously. As the Red Queen told Alice in Wonderland, you have to entertain six impossible ideas before breakfast. This seem to me to be the best way to read. So theres that, but then on the other hand theres spontaneity, theres improvisation, theres the outow of the moment, and so on, all of which are very important. But you know, I grew up in an era when improvisation really took over avantgarde art, especially theater and music and so forth, and I dont think the results were always very positive. When you improvise in a performance situation and youre not on, youre not brilliant, the results are totally disastrous, whereas at least if you had a plan, if you had some kind of structure that youre working with to begin with, you could at least turn it into a decent performance that would decently entertain everybody. So I tend to steer clear of improvisation as a principle, unless its connected to really exalted consciousness in some department or another. Perhaps personally I tend more towards the palimpsest than to improvisation. I wouldnt necessarily want to separate them as a bodymind split. Noise might even be a better concept than improvisation. (C. Loidl): Since I had the good fortune to meet you every now and then, I wonder what your mind is right now dwelling on. You always seem to be quite a bit ahead of your publications. (H. Bey): Im glad you asked. Its been over ten years since TAZ was written and about ve years since I worked on those essays on immediatism and I think quite a lot has changed. Im just now working on an essay Millenium to try to update some of my thinking. Basically, Ive recently come to feel that the collapse of the Communist world between 1989 and 1991 really marks the end of the century, so to speak. Of course, these are articial divisions in history, but it still makes a kind of convenient way of thinking of it. And its really taken me ve years personally to gure out the implications of that for my own thinking. And the way

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I would express it now is that in TAZ and the Radio Sermonettes I was really proposing a third position, a position that was neither Capitalism nor Communism. This is basically, you could say, something that all Anarchist philosophy does. In this period I was telling it in my own way. Its a neither/nor position. Its a third position. Now, however, when you come to think about it, there are not two worlds any more or two possibilities or two contending opposing forces. There is in fact only one world, and thats the world of global capital. The world order, the world market, too-late capitalism, whatever you wanna call it, is now alone and triumphant. Its determinedly triumphant. It knows its the winner although really its only the winner by default, I think. And it tends to transform the world in its image. And that image, of course, is a monoculture based on Hollywood, on Disney, on commodities, on the destruction of the environment in every sense, from trees to imaginations, and the turning of all that into commodity, the turning of all that into money and the turning of money itself into a gnostic phantom-like experience which exists outside the world somewhere in a mysterious sphere of its own where money circulates, never descends, never reaches you and me. So what were looking at is one single world. Obviously this one single world is not going to go without its revolution, its not going to go without its opposition, And in fact its around the word revolution that my thoughts are circulating now, because it seems to me that anarchists and anti-authoritarians in general can no longer occupy this third position; because how can you occupy a third position when there is no longer a second position? We cant talk about the Third World any more for the one reason that theres no second world. So even this third world as it used to be is now simply just the slums of the one world. Its just the no-go zone of that one single unied world of Capital. Obviously the communists are not going to step back into the position of opposition. Political Communism has completely shot its load, its made itself look bad, taste bad in the mouth of history. No-one is calling on authoritarian Marxism to step back into this position of opposition. So where is this opposition supposed to come from? In my mind, rst of all, this implies that if were no longer trying to occupy a third position outside of this dichotomy, then WE are the opposition. Whether we know it or like it or not, we are the opposition. Now, who is we? For me the important

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thing is the realization that I have a new relation to the word revolution, whereas before I was inclined to look on it as a historical phantom, as in fact the lie told by Communism as opposed to the lie told by Capitalism. And whereas before I was extremely distrustful of the leftist dogma of revolution as opposed to the uprising or the insurrection, I would now say that history forces me once again to have to consider the idea of revolution and of myself as revolutionary and of my theory as revolutionary theory, because the opposition to the one world is already quite real. There is no way in which this triumph of capital can really & truly be a monolithic triumph excluding all dierence from the world in the name of its sameness. And it looks to me like the revolutionary force in the single world of sameness has to be dierence: revolutionary dierence. And at the same time since the single world is involved, since the one world of capital is the world of separation, of alienation, that along with revolutionary dierence it also has to be revolutionary presence (used to be called solidarity, although this is a word that presents some diculties; Id prefer simply the word presence as opposed to separation or absence.) So, I would say that the revolution of the present is a revolution for dierence and for presence. Its opposed to sameness and separation. And as I look around the world to see where there might be arising a natural militant organisational form that speaks to this condition, the one shining example that I might be able to come up with would be the Zapatistas in Mexico, defending their right to be dierent, essentially. They want to be left alone in peace to be Mayan Indians, but theyre not forcing anybody else to become Mayan Indians. Theyre not even suggesting it. They are dierent, but theyre in solidarity with all those people around the world who have come to support them, because their message is very new, its very fresh and it attracts a lot of people: the idea that one can be dierent and revolutionary, that one can ght for social justice without the shadow of Moscow continually poisoning every action, etc. This is something new in the world. The New York Times called it the rst postmodern revolution, which was simply their sneering ironical way of trying to dismiss it, but in fact when you think about it, it is the rst revolution of the 21 st century in the terms that I began with, saying that were already at the beginning of a new century, were already if you like at the beginning of a millennium. And

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I expect to see many many more phenomena such as the Zapatistas. I would say that Bosnia potentially could have been such a phenomenon, not in the sense of an ethnic particularity like the Mayans, but in the sense of a pluralistic particularity: a small society where people were dierent but wanted to live together in peace. And this was seen to be perhaps even more dangerous than the Zapatista model, which is why in my view it was destroyed. Its possible that Bosnia may never be able to recreate itself again in the utopian way that it dreamed of in 1991. But that moment was there, and I think it has great signicance for us. So, this to me is the line of the future. I think we have to reconsider all our priorities, we have to realize that militancy is once again a very important concept. This is not to say that I have any plan of march. I dont know what armies to join and am always suspicious of joining any army. But things have denitely changed. Im embarrassed that it took me so long to gure it out. I dont think many people have really caught on to this yet. In fact, the fact that we still use words like Third World means that the popular language has not realized what happened in 19891991. So, the rst goal is simply to try to raise consciousness about this and thats what I hope to do in the near future. (D. Ender): Do you see any tangible eects of this lack of opposition in the USA? (H. Bey): Oh yes, absolutely. The most tangible thing, and I think really the thing which gave me the clue to think about this, is precisely a psychic condition. One could point to lots of economic or social factors, but above all I feel a psychic malaise that is something quite new, and, well, a few years ago I began noticing in public speaking that there was a great deal less response on the part of audiences. You would get audiences that would sit there quite passively looking at you as if you were on television. And if questions came, they were very likely to be questions such as Tell us what to do. You know when people ask you this sort of question they have no intention of actually taking your advice. What theyre doing to trying to ll up some hole in themselves. So I thought, rst of all its just the inuence of TV thats been around since 1947 or whatever, but then I realized that thats not a sucient explanation for this kind of strange passivity. And I began hearing about it from other people who are involved in public speaking and

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then nally I read a whole section about it in Noam Chomskys latest book. He has exactly the same experience of audiences, and all of these experiences begin around 1989, 1991. What I think has happened to us is not just TV. TV is just a symptom. So, whats happening is a kind of cognitive collapse around this single world. When people no longer feel a possibility in the world, a possibility of another position, then they become consciously opposed to the one. And conscious opposition is extremely dicult in an atmosphere thats completely poisoned by media such that no oppositional voice is ever really heard. Unless you yourself make the eort to get down to the alternative media, where that voice is still feebly speaking, then youre left simply in this one world of sameness and separation. Sameness everything is the same; separation every individual is separated from every other individual; complete alienation, complete unity. And I think that on the unconscious level, on the level of images, on the mythological level, on the religious level if you wanna put if that way, this is whats happening, especially in America. I cant really speak of other places to the same degree. Ive traveled in other countries, but one never has the sense of other countries the way one has the sense of ones own country. But I would imagine that its a world-wide phenomenon this kind of capitulation to the mono-culture on the deepest psychic level. So, yeah, it was in fact this sign which began to bother me to the point where I had to think my way through this problem of the one world, the two worlds, the three worlds and the revolutionary world. By no means have I nished thinking about it, but I recently had this to me this breakthrough about the word revolution. So I see that as the only way to break through this particular wall of glass, this screen, yeah, to break through the screen. C.L.: Sounds like a conclusion almost. H.B.: Well, if you wish. C.L.: No, not that I wish . . . When you talk about one or two or three or opposition and so on, I get totally contrary images to that in my head, because Europe right now and the further you go East in the Old World Europe, you see how it all has collapsed into little, almost tribal, very chauvinistic entities of people trying frantically to survive the maa is the very model from that point of view and also from your talking about Too-Late Capitalism, Id like to have an image of yours for how

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Europe as the EC or EU, which were sitting right inside of right now, presents itself from over there. H.B.: Well, obviously, especially from the breakdown of Communism youre going to get this smashing up into many little pieces. But its more than that. We have to realize that dierence is the organic revolutionary response to sameness and all of these splinter societies that you speak of consciously or unconsciously are revolutionary. Now, in the case of the Zapatistas or the Bosnians, lets say, this is a positive kind of revolution that we could support perhaps. In the case of the Serbians, its something else. Its a conservative revolution, perhaps even a fascistic revolution. Its not really nationalism, its a form of ethnic imperialism. The point is that people are going to be emphasizing dierence. Look at it this way: If you have your own culture, lets say it would be Bosnian Muslim or Finnish or Celtic or Ashanti or some tribal culture this is going to become more and more precious to you as a source and a site of dierence. This is where the dierence is for you. Its in language, its in cuisine, its in art, its in all of these things. The dierence is that dierence does not have to be hegemonistic or fascistic. And this is going to be extremely dicult for the old leftists to realize, because the old left itself had an ideal of a single world culture secular, rationalistic, you know, totally illumined, no shadows, industry, proletariat, forward into the future, basically extremely hegemonistic towards dierences. Yes, they had their little Uzbeki folk-dancers, but this is simply a spectacle of dierence, its not true dierence. And we have the same thing: we have 600 channels choose one! Theres a channel for everybody. Is this dierence? No. This is not really dierence. This is just sameness disguised as dierence. But true organic integral dierence is revolutionary, now. It has to be, because its opposed to the single world, the mono-world, the monoculture of capital. So, we have to choose and we have to inuence other peoples choices to go for an anti-hegemonistic particularity rather than a hegemonistic particularity. In other words, take the Zapatistas again as a model here. As I said, they are not asking other people to become Mayan Indians. They are simply saying, This is our dierence. This is revolutionary for us. We are defending it. So it seems to me that whats happening in Europe on the one hand is this shattering into all of these fragments, which is a situation where political consciousness

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becomes extremely dicult. On the other hand, you have things like the EEU, which is simply, in my mind, symptomatic of capitalist monoculture. So I guess that would mean, although I would have to think about this very carefully, I would say that a revolutionary stance in Europe would be anti-EEU. I think it would have to be, because the thing that we have to preserve is an ecology, you know. An ecology of mind and body implies dierence. It implies dierence in a state of balance balance which can even include conict. If you look at tribal societies, they are not necessarily peaceful societies. But the idea of war to the extinction of all individual desire this is the monopoly of triumphant capital. And I think that it behooves us we have to rethink our position if we consider ourselves as leftists of some sort or part of the leftist tradition in some way. We have to really seriously re-think our view of what revolutionary dierence is, what it really could be. So, this to me is all inevitable. Whats going on in Eastern Europe is inevitable and is potentially revolutionary. If it gets bogged down into conservative revolution and neo-fascism, this would be the great tragedy of the 21 st century, but I dont think its strictly speaking necessary. There is such a thing as revolutionary particularity. And as far as Eastern Europe goes, I would mention not only Bosnia as a failure, but maybe some other small enclaves as possible successes, you know. The anarchists in Ljubljana, they seem to be doing quite interesting things. Its a small enough country where they could have some real inuence. So, interesting times ahead, not doubt about it. C.L.: Yeah. I wish I could share your outlook on that. H.B.: Go ahead and argue with me, because C.L.: No, no. What I saw much more was the latter part of what you said the conservative capitalist revival in all those countries like Lithuania and Romania and so on. There was sort of a resistance spirit there, while there were those authoritarian governments. And now that those collapsed, its like the Dollar is the main authority for everyone and its everyone against everyone, and its very hard to see anything revolutionary in that. Except that it looks like something very selfdefeating.

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H.B.: I agree with you, but Eastern Europe is the ideological battleground where capital wants to parade its triumph, where capital is determined to convert everybody. And of course, theres no doubt about it that sixty years of Communism made everybody extremely exhausted. C.L.: And left them backwards also mentally. People have just been deprived of all sorts of information. H.B.: I know exhaustion, but at the same time when I meet bright people from Eastern Europe, young intellectuals, punks, anarchists and so forth, I get the feeling of a kind of freshness of approach thats lacking in Western Europeans and Americans; because they were out of the loop for so long, because there is a certain perhaps even naivete based on (laughter) ignorance. This can be turned into a kind of strength, too, in a paradoxical way. I mean, at conferences that I went to last year in Europe which mostly concerned the Internet and communication theory, always without exception the most interesting people were from Eastern Europe. They had the most to say, they had the most energy, the most creative ideas etc. etc. etc. So I dont think its a totally grim and hopeless situation. I think that the power of international capital is very much focussed on that part of the world right now. So, resistance is extremely important. I think that its a top priority for Americans and Western Europeans to show every kind of support for resistance in Eastern Europe. Whether its going to work or not, who knows, you know. But what else have we got to do? David Ender Jack Hauser Christian Loidl

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Part 2

Millennium

1. JIHAD
When two set out to dine or duel together a third appears tertium qiud, parasite, witness, prophet, escapee. [see M.Serres, Hermes.] Five years ago it still remained possible to occupy a third position in the world, a neither/nor of refusal or slyness, a realm outside the dialectic even a space of withdrawal; disappearance as will to power. But now there is only one world triumphant end of History, end of the unbearable pain of imagination actually an apotheosis of cybernetic Social Darwinism. Money decrees itself a law of Nature, and demands absolute liberty. Completely spiritualized, freed from its outworn body (mere production), circulating toward innity & instantaneity in a gnostic numisphere far above Earth, money alone will dene conciousness. The 20 th century ended ve years ago; this is the millenium. Where there is no second, no opposition, there can be no third, no neither/nor. So the choice remains: either we accept ourselves as the last humans, or else we accept ourselves as the opposition. (Either automonotony or autonomy.) All positions of withdrawal must be re-considered from a point of view based on new strategic demands. In a sense, were cornered. As the oldtime ideologues would have said, our situation is objectively pre-revolutionary again. Beyond the temporary autonomous zone, beyond the insurrection, there is the necessary revolution the jihad.

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2. SAMENESS
21 st century money is a chaos while 20 th century ideology was merely an entropy. Both bourgeois & anti-bourgeois thought proposed a single world unied in conciousness by science but money alone will actually achieve that world. Money is not migratory, for the nomad moves from place to place while money moves from time to time, obliterating space. Money is not a rhizome but a chaos, an interdimensionality, inorganic but reproductive [innite regressive bifurcation] the sexuality of the dead. Capital, then, must be considered a strange attractor. Perhaps the very mathematics of this money (out of control) could already be traced in such esoteric webs as SWIFT, the private internet for banks and arbitrage houses, where a trillion dollars a day disports itself in cyberspace (and less than 5% of it refers even obliquely to actual production). The one world can deal with chaos, but it reduces all true complexity to sameness & separation. Conciousness itself enters into representation; lived experience which demands presence must be denied lest it threaten to constitute another world beyond enclosure. In a heaven of imagery there persists only the afterlife of the screen, the gnostic stargate, the glass of disembodiment. Innitely the same within an innity of enclosures; innitely connected yet innitely alone. Immeasurable identity of desire, immeasurable distance of realization.

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3. MANAGEMENT OF DESIRES
The one world cannot package pleasure itself but only its image; malign hermeticism, a kind of baraka in reverse, the event horizon or terminal of desire. The spirituality of pleasure lies precisely in a presence that cannot be represented without disappearing; inexpressible, unimpeachable, possible only in that economy of the gift that always exists (or is always re-invented) beneath the orthodoxy and paralysis of exchange. Desire is dened here as movement along such a trajectory not as the itch that money can scratch. Radical theory has recently developed a problematic of desire based on the perception that Capital is concerned with desire and able to satisfy it. Desire therefore is selsh and reactionary. But Benjamin has already shown that Capitals concern is precisely not to satisfy desire (i.e. to provide pleasure) but to exacerbate longing through the device of the utopian trace (the metaphysical shenanigans of the commodity, to paraphrase Marx). To say that capital liberates desire is a semantic absurdity based on a mistranslation: Capital liberates itself by enslaving desire. Fourier claimed that the twelve Passions unrepressed constitute the only possible basis for social Harmony. We may not follow his numerology, but we catch his drift. Against the negative hermetism of the one world and its sham carnality, opposition proposes a gnosis of its own, a dialogics of presence, the pleasure of overcoming the representation of pleasure a kind of touchstone. Not censorship, not management of the image, but the reverse the liberation of the imagination from the empire of the image, from its overbearing omnipresence and singularity. The image alone is tasteless, like a bioindustrial tomato or pear odorless as civilization itself, our society of safety, our culture of mere survival. Ours is partly a struggle against colonial hearing & imperial gaze, and for smell, touch, taste and for the third eye. If desire has disappeared into its representations then it must be rescued. Silence & secrecy are demanded, even a veiling of the image ultimately a reenchantment of the forbidden. Only an eros that moves

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toward escape from enclosure within the banality of the image (and here, conciousness scarcely matters) can harmonize with the aesthetic of the jihad; whether it be expressed in conventional or unconventional roles or acts seems almost irrelevant. Sexuality itself can be considered entheogenic like the sacred plants, it can provide not only cognitive structure but also imaginal content. The festal for us is at least a serious joke [an old denition of alchemy] if not a ritual necessity. Enlightenment is also a material bodily principle and our secret is that our project need not be built exclusively on Nietzsches nothing.

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4. GREEN SHADE
Wild(er)ness stands for this very irreducibility of desire. The elimination of the non-human invokes the elimination of the human; culture can only be dened in relation to what it is not. Herein lies the profundity of paganism; in Islam, green is a heraldic color because water, greenery & a beautiful face (as the Prophet said) are ontologically privileged in experience and are in fact the basis of the esoteric rejection of sameness & separation the divine as dierence, immanent & immediate not only in Nature but even in the garden or city as spontaneous organic crystallization of lifes desire for itself. Perhaps all real wilderness has been disappeared into a cartomantic management of desires after all, the one world knows no other but if so, then its spectre haunts that world. It can be called back; it can be restored. If Nature is de-natured in mediations murderous museological gaze and if everything is mediated (even direct sensory perception), then how can we speak of restoration or of immediacy? First, because (in another manner of speaking) not everything has entered into representation. The claim of the one world to its oneness is of course spurious there persists by denition an outside to every enclosure in representation; not to mention a liminality around every border, an area of ambiguity. Oneness represents itself as invulnerable but its weakness is revealed precisely in the moment of our perception that it is not reected in lived experience; it shows itself in dislocation, hollowness, boredom, immiseration this moment might constitute the rending of the veil that would allow a glimpse of the future, or at least of our desire for the future. Second: we can speak here of restoration because not even every representation subsumed or produced within the enclosure of oneness can be considered eective in the service of repression. Language itself is haunted by the (sometimes unintentional) poetics of its own self-overcoming, by the subversive, the erruption of the marvellous. Life seems to conspire with this outsideness, such that even representation nally escapes representation.

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5. CASH
Green is made to symbolize the damned fertility of money, its contranatural fecundity the alchemy of expropriation, the innite weight of the privileged & Masonic gaze. In transcending its own textuality it becomes pure representation; from the very beginning however, from the rst clay tokens or coins of electrum, money was already nothing but debt, nothing but absence. Money itself retains a certain innocence as a simple medium of exchange poor money, so to speak, stripped of interest in sheer circulation. At this level money might play its role even in the temporary autonomous zone; in relation to the jihad however money remains and must be considered under the sign of Capital as the measure of expropriation and the basic mytheme of separation. And as money transcends its textuality in virtuality, interest can be extracted from each transaction, each disturbance of the aether; poor money gives way to pure money. Who benets? The global machinery will never fall ripely into the hands of the insurgent masses, nor will its single Eye pass to the people (as if to one of three blind Fates); there will be no transition, smooth or bumpy, between Capitalism & some economic utopia, some miraculous salvation for the unied conciousness of post Enlightenment rationalism & universal culture (with cozy corners for eccentric survivals & touristic bliss) no Social Democracy taking over the controls in the name of the people. The money-power (as the old agrarians called it) is not in the power of an elite (wether conspiratorial or sociological) rather the elite is in the power of money, like the hired human lackeys of some sci- AI entity in cyberspace. Money-power is the global machinery it can only be dismantled, not inherited. Will some sort of theoretical limit appear in the numisphere, so that the bubble bursts on its own as it were? Is Capitalism headed for the last round-up & nal crisis to end all crises, or will it nd a way to deal with & even prot by any limits to growth or chaotic perturbations within its closed atmosphere of suocation? [Stay Tuned.] In any case (to evoke Gustav Landauer) there is no historical

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inevitabitlity about a revolution reborn in the very moment of Capitals triumphant closure of the dialectic. [In one sense Capitalism seems to become inevitable in the invention of scarcity the rst moment of expropriation. But where precisely is this moment to be located? Agriculture is a great long-drawn-out crisis but many horticultural-tribal societies remain as staunchly nonauthoritarian & gift-oriented as the purest hunter/gatherers. Ancient hierarchic states (Sumer, Egypt, Shang China, etc.) and even feudalism still retain economies of reciprocity & redistribution; the Market, as predicted by Classical Economics, simply fails to appear (see Karl Polyani). Moreover, every threat of its emergence is met with prescient resistance (as Clastres might have predicted): separation & expropriation never go uncontested, and thus never appear in their absolute form. There exits in fact no natural law of circulation & exchange, no historical fatality, no destined atomicity of the social, and no unied world of representation. Capitalism exists but not alone; revolution is its other. And vice versa.] There is never a correct moment for declaring oneself in a state of rebellion. Perennial heretics, we have already made our choices as if in some previous incarnation, or in some mythic time out of time, as if everything rethinks itself in us or without us, and refusal were a kind of tepid pre-death, a resignation in morbidity. There is for us no return to innocence in the ecstasy of 600 channels, some dating back to the so-called Fall of the Roman Empire or even the early Neolithic. The very rst emergences of separation in the earliest forms of money & the State crested for us a tradition now some 10,000 years old ultimately it doesnt matter whether this is the crisis or not. We would still choose.

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6. ASSAULT ON THE SCREEN

The media of sameness & separation represent the one world in its most religious form the structuring of the social in images. Mere consciousness of this process cannot overcome it opposition must also take a religious form in a reenchantment of counter-imagery; here one might speak of a rationalism of the marvellous. The only way to evade mere reaction (and thus subsumption into the image) would seem to lie in sacralizing our struggle against sameness & separation; but only failure could induce us to accept the term Romanticism as critique (or praise) of our proposal. Five years ago the media of sameness & separation attained much the same freedom & autonomy as the medium of money itself. Thus they shifted their emphasis from mere surpression to realization and to the interdisciplinary boundary-breaking amalgamation of all modes of representation (from education to advertizing) into a single polysemic catastrophe of form: the body slumped before the screen, all corporeality reduced to a darkness given shape only by light from the gnostic pleroma, that realm of transcendence from which bodies are exiled: the heaven of glass. The old Dualism has imploded into a totalized topology dened by the gnoseographic geosophy of money and its less-than-one dimensionality. The mirror of production has been superceded by a complete transparancy, the vertigo of terror. Land, labor, nature, self itself, life itself, and even death can be re-invented as the basis of all exchange everything is money. [Note: Needless to say, these generalizations do not concern the reality, but rather the ideology of global Capital (the ideology of the postideological con) the intoxicated pronouncements of an information economy the charade of deregulation (how can one speak of revolution when Capital has already broken all the rules?) Of course Capital has not really transcended production, but merely resituated it somewhere near the realm of cemetery management or waste disposal. Capital wants ecstasy, not Taylorism; it longs for purity, for disembodiment.]

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Ecstatic mediation nally blocks expression at the root, as for example in the biotechnological prosthesis or indierentiation of body & screen. Mock nuptials of Eros & Thanatos: terminal enclosure. The greater jihad of course is directed against the separated self against suocation of the true self that must express its lord, its deepest meaning. But the lesser jihad is no less vital or imbued with baraka: the assault on the screen.

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7. THE MORALITY OF VIOLENCE

Any paradoxical reappearance of morality here will naturally begin on the ruins of orthodoxy and pitch nothing more permanent there than the black tents of Ibn Khalduns bedouin. And yet sooner or later jihad (struggle) leads back (via tawil or hermeneutic exegesis) to shariah or law. But shariah also means path, or way it is already the open road of the aimless wanderer. Values arise from imagination, i.e. from motion. Where the gods have stopped this is the real. But the gods move on; they move, like light on water in Pindars Odes. The attentat is not immoral but simply impossible. The message of terrorism is that theres no there there; only the cybergnostic historydump of sheer emptiness and anguish limited liability as a cosmic principle. One might consider a morality (perhaps even an imaginal morality) of violence against ideas & institutions but the language lacks terms for such a form and thus dooms militancy to an indistinction of focus, even a decit of attention. In any case its not merely a question of ones spiritual state but of an actual auto-restructuring of cognition not a state but a station in Su terms. To borrow a phrase from Ismailism, this is our version of the Dawa al Qadimi or the Ancient Propaganda old because it is never quite fully born.

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8. FIN DE SIECLE
Theres nothing of futurity left to the concept of utopia. Hope against hope; no real choice is involved. Presence remains impure only absence assumes the crystalline skeletal form of perfect eternity. A moral judgement if you like: intolerance for what opposes the jihad but no more dandyism, no more brittle & elaborate constructions of the self. Dierence as identity constitutes a mode of expression as well as a mode of volition; there exists a tao of this process, a spontaneous ordering rather than an imperialist Cartesian gaze. This mode of expression as it pertains to culture (the self-made aspect of the social) either sets up an amplicatory resonance with Nature and is thus capable of changing the world-as-concensus or else it is mere criminal stupidity. Here again mere conciousness scarcely matters; hence there emerges for us an emphasis on non-ordinary states that overcome the dichotomy of self-reective auto-intellection in concentrated attentiveness and in skill. The self-closure of aesthetic or mental isolation denies the fact that every pleasure is an expansion, that reciprocity is non-predatory expansiveness. If revolt as expression responds to sameness & separation simultaneously, it constitutes by denition a movement toward dierence & presence and as the old phrenologists said, toward communicativeness. That is neither mere communication subject to the drag of mediation & discorporealization nor ecstatic communion ( a term which smacks of the exacerbated authoritarianism of an enforced presence) but rather a convivial connectivity an eros of the social.

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9. THE REVOLT OF ISLAM

Proudhonian federalism based on non-hegemonic particularities in a nomadological or rhizomatic mutuality of synergistic solidarities this is our revolutionary structure. (The very dryness of the terms itself suggests the need for an infusion of life into the theoryscape!) PostEnlightenment ideology will experience queasiness at the notion of the revolutionary implications of a religion or way of life always already opposed to the monoculture of sameness & separation. Contemporary reaction will blanch at the idea of interpermeability, the porosity of solidarity, conviviality & presence as the complementarity & harmonious resonance of revolutionary dierence. To take Islam as an example the hyperorthodox & the ulemocracy cannot so easily reduce it to a hegemonistic/universalistic ideology as to rule out divergent forms of sacred politics informed by Susm [e.g. the Naqsbandis], radical Shiism [e.g. Ali Shariati], Ismailism, Islamic Humanism, the Green Path of Col. Qada (part neo-Susm, part anarcho-syndicalism), or even the cosmopolitan Islam of Bosnia. [Note: we mention these elements not to condone them necessarily, but to indicate that Islam is not a monolith of fundamentalsm.] Traditions of tolerance, voluntaryism, egalitarianism, concern for social justice, critique of usury, mystical utopianism etc. can form the constellations of a new propaganda within Islam, unshakably opposed to the cognitive colonialism of the numisphere, oriented to empirical freedoms rather than ideology, critical of repression within Islam, but committed to its creativity, reticence, interiority, militance, & style. Islams concern with pollution of the imagination, which manifests in a literal veiling of the image, constitutes a powerful strategic realization for the jihad; that which is veiled is not absent or invisible, since the veil is a sign of its presence, its imaginal reality, its power. That which is veiled is unseen.

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10. VOLKWAYS
Tribal societies, left to their own devices, wage war in a manner not so much hegemonistic as adventuristic and as P.Clastres pointed out, such horizontal warfare (like other primitive customs) actually militates against the emergence of the State and its verticality: violence as a form of resistance against separation, which is always felt by the tribe as a dangerous or evil possibility violence as a form of the perennial ssipation or break up & redistribution of power. The jihad is not meant to be a return of this form of violence but a dialectical realization of its repressed content. This principle allows for a coalescence of variegated dierences not just as a utopian construct but as a strategic bundling as a war machine. Gustav Landauer makes clear that such groupings can themselves be considered both horizontally (or federally) and vertically not as categorical entications, that is, but as volk, peoples, nations in the Native-american sense of the term. This concept was looted by base reaction and distorted into hegemonism of the worst sort, but it too can be rescued (an adventure in itself). [We need to re-read Proudon, Marx, Nietzsche, Landauer, Fourier, Benjamin, Bakhtin, the IWW, etc. the way the EZLN re-reads Zapata!] Landauer also pointed out that the State is in part an inner relation, and not an absolute. Inasmuch as power shifts from the national map to pure Capital, the outer State becomes increasingly irrelevant as a focus of opposition. Neutrality is not an option: either a zone is part of the one world, or it enters opposition. If the opposition zone coincides with certain political entities, then the revolution may have to consider political alliances. The greater jihad against the inner relation of power remains always the same; but the lesser jihad, against the outer relation, constantly changes shape. [Note: Everything hinges on the perception that two forces autonomy & federation are not opposed but complementary or even complicit; if this is paradox, then it is paradox that must be lived. Ethnic cleansing & violent chauvinism are to be opposed from the point of

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view of federalism & solidarity because the hegemonism of such reaction simply reproduces the hegemonism (the cruelty) of the one world & even augments it. And authentic (non-hegemonic) dierence must be defended because (or inasmuch as) it cannot or should not be obliterated by the Moloch of capitalist conciousness. Autonomy without federalism is at best implausible, at worst reactionary but federalism without autonomy simply threatens the one value that unites the jihad selfdetermination or empirical freedom.] For the strategic coalescence, complexity is not just an aesthetic but a necessity, a cognitive maquis or zone of resistance, a realm of ambiguity where the uprising must nd its economy, its heartlands. Every nation whether self-formed or traditional, and every group which moves horizontally within or across this milieu councils, committees, unions, festivals indeed, every sovereign individual may consider federation on the basis of an ad-hoc anti-hegemonic front against the selfproclaimed totality of sameness & separation, and for a world of dierence and presence. From a certain viewpoint the force of presence or solidarity arises from the reality of class although if we adopt that term we must consider the vast realignments and kaleidoscopic shifts of meaning that have unpacked & assembled it anew, stripped it of its 19 th century accoutrements, its one-world telos & monocultural aeshetic its scientism, its disenchantments, & its fatality. Its not just a question of the proletarianization of the zones, but of the seamless and natural suppression of autonomous conciousness (and here, conciousness does matter).

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11. REVOLUTIONARY SOTERIOLOGY

Thus the world to be saved by the jihad consists not only of that Nature which cannot suer nal enclosure without the fatal estrangement of conciousness itself from all original intimacy, but also the space of culture, of authentic becoming: Tierra y Libertad. Agriculture may be considered as a tragic Fall from natural human economy (gathering, hunting, reciprocity) and even as a catastrophic shift in cognition itself. But to entertain the notion of its abolition involves a crypto-malthusian or even biophobic nihilism suspiciously akin to Gnostic suicide. The morality of substruction is already a morality of rescue (and vice-versa); the kernel of the new society is always already forming within the shell of the old. Whatever the one world seeks to destroy or denigrate takes on for us the unmistakeable aura of organic life; this applies to the whole panoply of our present late stone age, even its Fourierist renements, even its surrealist urbanism (even Civilization might be considered a good idea if it could be released from its own predatory determinism), this denes our conservatism. Thus despite everything, despite the titanic depredations of Capitals articial intelligence, the world to be saved sometimes seems to dier from this world only by a hairsbreadth of satori. But it is entirely from this crack that our radical opposition emerges. The millennium is always the opening of a present moment but it is also always the ending of a world.

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12. THE HIDDEN IMAM

The jist of the jihad: when oppression takes the simultaneous & even paradoxical form of sameness & separation, then resistance or opposition logically proposes dierence & presence a revolutionary paradox. The rhizomatic segmentary society of identity that precipitates from this super-saturated logic of resistance can be contemplated from any angle, vertical or horizontal, diachronic or synchronic, ethnic or aesthetic within the one necessary revolutionary anti-hegemonic principle of presence. Our present state of attened and irritable inattentiveness can only be compared to some esoteric medieval sin like spiritual sloth or existential forgetfulness; our rst pleasure will be to imagine for ourselves a propaganda potent as the gnostic Call, an aesthetic of repentance-&-conversion or self-overcoming, a Sorelian mythos a Millennium. The blind panopticon of Capital remains, after all, most vulnerable in the realm of magic the manipulation of images to control events, hermetic action at a distance. If the tong provides a possible form for the new propaganda of the deed, then it must be confessed that mere aesthetic withdrawal (disappearance as will to power) cannot provide sucient heat to hatch the egg of its secrecy. All that was once tertium quid is now (or soon will be) engaged either in capitulation or in opposition, as conagration, as uprising against the management of desire & imagination within the englobed enclosure of the one world. But in a pre-revolutionary situation the tactical advantage of clandestinity, of the unseen (the language of the heart), already restores to aesthetics its revolutionary centrality. The art of the unseen escapes absorption into the image-based discourse of the totality and thus, alone of all possible forms, still holds out the millennial promise of art, the changing of the world. [Note: the term art is being used here in two dierent senses: the rst sense is perhaps Romantic in that it adresses the dilemma of the artist per se & the problem of the avant garde. But the second sense aims to dissolve the whole question of arts seperateness in a practicum

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that is normal & that intersects (indeed almost coincides) with the realm of lived experience. The ordinary & the extraordinary are no longer opposed here, & are perhaps even in collusion, or in a dance of fused delineations. A crude truism: the moment of the well-made is the very fabric of life itself, of lifes saturation with itself; it is in the sense that traditional cultures could see no distinction between life & art. If we were to speak of political art, it could only be in the sense of an investigation of the fact that for us Capital denes itself in the context of a split between these things that cannot be separated. But this is a problem for every worker, & not just for the cultural worker & so in this sense, art begins to approach an area of identity with revolutionary action.]

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13. CALL & RESPONSE

Less than a decade ago it was still possible to think of the enemy as the Planetary Work Machine, or the Spectacle & therefore to think of resistance under the rubric of withdrawal or even escape. No great mysterious veil separated us from our will to imagine other forms of production, ludic & autonomous, or other form of representation, authentic & pleasurable. The obvious goal was to form (or sustain) alternative nuclei based on the implementation of such forms, deploying resistance as a tactic in defence of these zones (whether temporary or permanent). In aikido theres no such thing as oense one simply removes oneself from the force of an attack, whereupon the attackers force turns against itself & defeats itself. Capitalism actually lost some ground to these tactics, in part because it was susceptible to third force strategies, and in part because as an ideology it remained unable to deal with its own inner contradictions (democracy for example). Now the situation has changed. Capitalism is freed of its own ideological armoring & need no longer concede space to any third force. Although the founder of aikido could dodge bullets, no one can stand aside from the onslaught of a power that occupies the whole extent of tactical space. Escapism is possible for the third guest, the parasite, but not for the sole opponent. Capitalism is now at liberty to declare war & deal directly as enemies with all former alternatives (including democracy). In this sense we have not chosen ourselves as opposition we have been chosen. In kendo it is said that there is no such thing as a defensive move, or rather that the only defense is a good oense. The attacker however has the disadvantage (imbalance) as in aikido: so what to do? A paradox: when attacked, strike rst. Clearly our alternatives are no longer merely interesting options, but life-or-death strategic positions. However, revolution is not a kendo match nor a morality play. It would seem that our tactics will be dened not so much by history as by our determination to remain within history not by survival but by persistence.

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The What Is To Be Done? question must now be begged for two reasons: rst, there already exists thousands of organisations working above-ground for de facto revolutionary goals (or at least for good causes) but no organizing myth, no propaganda, no transformative revolutionary conciousness capable of transcending separation as reformist institutionalization & ideological sclerosis [franchising the issues]. Second, most illegalism is frustratingly doomed to counterproductivity & recuperation for precisely the same reason no conciousness, or rather, no metanoia, no unfragmented conciousness. In such a situation no coalescence seems feasible, and the jihad is faced rst & foremost by the brutally theoretical need to comprehend & articulate its own historicity. To speak now of a pre-revolutionary situation smacks of the irony that such terms must inevitably invoke (history as nightmare) What signs have arisen, & on what horizon? Here it should be recalled that propaganda of the deed was originally intended to include good works as well as violent ones; the temporary autonomous zone thus retains its value not only for its own sake but as a historicization of lived experience, perhaps even a mode of propaganda-in-action. The uprising could then be seen as the proposal of a permanent autonomous zone; and the coalescence of many such groups would make up the form of the millennium. Here even withdrawal could have value as a tactic provided it were coordinated & practised militantly on a mass scale revolutionary peace. The very expression of such a scheme reveals at once how distant we remain from any realization. While we would like to indulge a crude exitentialist penchant for action, or at least for some sort of anti-pessimism, any discussion of real tactics at this point might well prove fatally (or ludicrously) premature. Besides, What should I do? is perhaps the most mediated of questions, the one guaranteed to make any answer impossible.

***
Such is our density that its taken ve years to gure this out. Everything that was once a third path must be re-thought in the light of one fact: one world faces us, not two. If resistance has collapsed into bickering nostalgism (1968 has become as tragic for us as every 209

other failure) if leftist bitchiness & fascist particularism hold such an allure for exhausted radicals etc. then it is because we have failed to articulate this one fact even to ourselves: that by proclaiming itself absolute and by constructing a world on that proclamation, Capital has called back into being its old nemesis (so disgraced by the 20 th century, so dead, so dull) called it back into a whole new incarnation as the last ditch defense of all that cannot be englobed called back the revolution, the jihad. New York/Dublin Sept 1, 1996 [Note: This version, not necessarily nal, was arrived at with criticism & help from several groups: The Libertarian Book Club of New York, The Autonomedia editorial collective of Brooklyn, and the Garden of Delight in Dublin; the opinions however are my own, not theirs.]

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Part 3

For and Against Interpretation

Angels are knocking at the tavern door Hafez of Shiraz . . . [to] the Lunaticks of Ireland . . . Dean Swifts Last Will & Testament (formerly inscribed on the 10 note) Kildare is at so no matter where you go you can see the electric lines parading across the landscape like Hollywood Martians. Patrick is staying at Bishops Court which despite the name turns out to be a dank, three-room cottage and an old cowshed littered with artworks by Hilarius and others including several pieces made out of rusty farm implements and slabs of peat cut from local bog. After tea in the windswept muddy farmyard, we set out to nd St. Patricks Church and Well, not far away in another farmyard next to a metal barn and surrounded by cows and cowshit thirteenth century or earlier, Romanesque with a touch of Gothic (or Egyptian?) in the pointed arch of the windows restored in the 1950s but forgotten and overgrown with ivy and cobwebs the architecture enforces humility since one must stoop to enter as in Zen tea-houses. Our friends James and Sean have decided to spruce it up, construct an altar and hang a brass bell in the belfry, then see how long it takes for anyone to notice. We walk along the road occasionally cringing into the wildowers, to dodge the fast cars of big farmers, then duck into the hedge of blackberry vines full of late owers and early fruit. The Well doesnt appear to be listed in any national Register perhaps no one visits it anymore. Like other springs Ive seen in Ireland, it feels like a sapphire set in an emerald set in jade, set in a druids hand we circle it thrice sunwise then drink cars are whizzing by not twenty paces away Sean recently saw a spirit here and left a portrait of it like a lifemask in plaster next to the Well on a slab of stone. According to the 13 th century Andalusian Su Ibn Arabi there exist delicate tenuities that stretch between heaven and earth like Jacobsladders and the meanings which descend along these tenuities are like angels. I believe he actually saw the tenuities as nearly-transparent ribbands of light, strands of aurora borealis pulsing with luminous nodes

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like stars falling through gauze curtains. Theres no need to limit this perception either by theological or psychological explanations for the nave realist any experience has as much a prior claim to ontological authenticity as any other experience a spirit is seen or a meaning descends in the same manner that a soft rain is seen and descends. But how nave can we be? Never mind the most advanced science or abstruse theology leads us in bewilderment back to the same crude existentialist proposal: since it appears, it might as well be real. So if the meaning that appears in the tenuity is real, it can be traced back to its source which is real or real enough for our present purposes and this tracing-back is called (by the Ismaili gnostics) tawil, or Interpretation. The psychologist would say the knowledge that arises in this operation comes from inside the theologian would say it comes from outside but for us both explanations have lost power to beguile. As an alchemical process, interpretation transpires in a space both inside/outside and neither simultaneously; as hermeneutic exegesis (in Henry Corbins phrase) it belongs to an in-between or isthmus called Mundus Imaginalis, where images appear as autonomous, or where dreams foretell the truth. In one sense neither real nor unreal, in another sense, perfectly capable of appearing to us as spirit, the world of imagination acts as if it were the source of signicances, location of personae, breath of the world. Science and religion might unite to call this delusion but for us it is rather a matter of sheer desperation. The two-dimensionality of duelling epistemologies, dichotomies, semantic traps, bad faiths fuck science and religion we should demand a rationalism of the marvellous an end to the violence of the explanation. In this context, individuals and groups bear the responsibility of making contact with their own angels even the mystic gurus has misled us here, since they stand between us and our own awareness and pretend to an authority that reduces us to subjects or rather to objects objects of someone elses interpretation. It seems we cannot escape the imputation of an old heresy here based on the presumption that everyone at every moment knows precisely whats going on and what to do if only they can break free of need, oppression, and the suocation of false consciousness and escape the scarcity by which authority

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measures its wealth and its power against us. Above all the scarcity of interpretation. The most pernicious power of interpretation belongs now to Capital itself, which claims to be free of all dualities, all otherness in a terminal obscene ecstasy of united and attened consciousness a universalization of money in conceptual space, far removed and transcended above all mere lthy production, a kind of numisphere or heavenly weather of pure money and in global debt, everythings debt to nothing, like a black hole on the event horizon, sucking up every last particle of light in an emptiness beyond history. According to the natural law of this total liberation of money, nothing not even air, water, or dirt is to be experienced directly by the autonomous self or group; everything must be mediated by money itself, which intends to stand between consciousness and production as an absolute lter, sifting out every last trace of authenticity and charging for it taxing reality itself as an ultimate power beyond even authority or law. Above all, Capital intends to acquire a monopoly on interpretation. Walter Benjamin has elucidated the process whereby the commodity is imbued with a utopian trace that is, by the image of a promise: that this object-for-sale contains a kind of futurity or no-place-place where your consciousness will once more be valid, your experience real. If the product were not so advertized, you would not buy it but if the product delivered its promise, you would stop buying other products why go on spending money once realization is attained? and thus cause the collapse of Capitalism. Money can only circulate freely in a realm of continual disappointment the reproduction of scarcity is the production of wealth. I am only rich if others are poor but money itself has no other end or goal than the total poverty of everything that is not the Market. Having long ago capitalized all material being, the power of scarcity has had no choice but to commodify the image (and the imagination) as well on the presumption that this is an ever-expanding market. Awareness must be privatized thought must be appropriated, adulterated, alienated, packaged, labelled, advertized and sold back to consciousness. All creativity must be priced, and even the very process of resistance against this expropriation must be turned to prot (Be a rebel buy a Toyota! or Image is nothing, taste is everything

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as a slogan for some crappy softdrink). All informational media from education to advertizing are dedicated to detaching the image from any mooring in experienced life, oating it free, and rematerializing it in commodication. Work, consume, die. Tourism is perfect Capitalism: the consumption of the image of the world as it really is the chief goods on sale include geography (the inscription of signicance in the landscape) and historiography (the inscription of meaning in the culturescape). But the ultimate image is that of the blessing or baraka inherent in the object of the tourists gaze. The possible moment of realization is packaged, pre-interpreted by ocial experts, transformed into a series of views, distanced from the direct senses (touch, taste, smell); space is overwhelmed by time, stratied, separated, parcelled on a grid of permissible expectation; becoming is rendered into the rigid digitalizations of recording devices, banished from memory, and embalmed into a counterfeit of pure being. So-called primitives would say that soul is being stolen here, that meaning itself has entered a eld of decay, a sort of beam emanating from an evil eye or withered self eaten by envy of all signicance. The problem lies not in the content of the tourists experience one can imagine tours based on ideas we might consider quite correct or even beautiful the problem is inherent in the container, in the very fact of interpretation, in the structure of a dialogue that excludes all response, resonance, or resistance. Certain kinds of travel nomadism, pilgrimage return meaning to the landscape. Other kinds war, tourism can only take it away. Reciprocity reaches a vanishing point in such patterns of depredation. Even the most subtle propaganda of the State never approached this ultimate edge after all, it always evoked its own opposition while tourism represents the end of all dialectic since the only negative gesture it evokes is terrorism, which is its own suppressed content, its evil twin. The tourist, seduced by the utopian trace in its most poignant aspect the image of dierence becomes a molecule of pollution, bears the virus of sameness, and the burden of disappointment, into a world that once lived for itself. The role of the artist in Capitalism can be compared with that of the tour-guide: interpreter of experience for consumption on the most elite level, agent of recuperation for societys most exquisite longing or

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deepest resentments; and even a tour-guide may be sincere. But the comparison might prove invidious inasmuch as the artists intention is to add meaning to the sum total of experience, not to subtract or abstract it. The gesture art makes presupposes the gesture of reciprocity, of presence. This movement is interrupted by the essentially non-human intervention of Capital, the exacerbated mediation of a power that can only grow by creating scarcity and separation. What if all the artists, poets, scholars and musicians of Ireland were invited to transform the countrys new Interpretive Centres in their own image? Who cares what exalted aesthetic lays claim to the triumph of interpretation so long as the result is always the suppression of our own creativity? In Java, I heard that Everyone must be an artist and indeed everyone already is an artist to the extent that all lived experience is a co-creation of self and other: production that is also play and above all, the production of meaning. We do not need the artist to live for us, but simply to be our facilitator, our companion, part of our circle of reciprocity and as for art, if there exists any way for it to avoid being englobed, we can see it only as a form of opposition to the One Big World of unied representation. Such art refuses to become part of the Grand Unied Theory of the end of physics or history or the minimum wage or anything else. Theres nothing virtual about it and its not headed for a condition of disappearance, which would simply amount to defeat. I believe modern art as resistance is headed for the condition of the Unseen. That which is real but not seen has the power of the occult, of the imagination, of the erotic like Seans spirit-mask at Patricks Well, it gives back meaning to the landscape it abides unnoticed until someone perhaps takes it as a free gift by its very existence it challenges the world of the commodied image and changes (however slightly) the shape of consensus reality. Even at its most hidden and secret, it exercises a magnetic eect, brings about subtle shifts and re-alignments and at least in theory, it gives up merely talking about the world in order to change it. Is this perhaps however covertly an authoritarian act? No, not if it were a sharing of meaning, an opening into the eld of delicate tenuities. What if it were rendered completely invisible? Then perhaps we might speak of the presence of spirits, of a necessary re-enchantment too tenuous for the imperial heaviness of the eye and

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of a necessary clandestinity. And what if it were to re-appear sometime as sheer opposition to the unbreathing virtuality of a world which is always deferred, always someplace else, always fatal? That evening we drive back to Dublin in the long summer light past megalithic mounds, travellers encampments, and the crumbling 18 th century follies and ziggurats of mad Ascendency lords past St. Patricks Hospital, which Dean Swift left in his will to the lunaticks of Ireland sites that have perhaps not yet been absorbed into the new world of Euro-money, golf, and the National Heritage. Just before nightfall, were in Dun Laoghaire near the Martello tower, looking out at a heavy and nostalgic view of the ocean under gray clouds. The front gardens of the seedy Victorian seaside villas are adorned with one of my favorite Irish plants, mysterious and rather shabby palmtrees that evoke for me a secret Moorish past, a memory of Barbary corsairs, or of monks from Egypt and Spain. A Celtic cross was once discovered in Ireland engraved with the Arabic phrase Bismillah, the opening of the Koran. These palmtrees were probably introduced by some turn-of-the-century horticulturalist with a taste for the exotic, but for me they stand for Irelands hidden African soul. A soft dark rain begins to fall. Or that at least is my interpretation. Dublin, Aug. 23, 1996

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Part 4

Religion and Revolution

Real money & hierarchic religion appear to have arisen in the same mysterious moment sometime between the early Neolithic and the third millennium BC in Sumer or Egypt; which came rst, the chicken or the egg? Was one a response to the other or is one an aspect of the other? No doubt that money possesses a deeply religious implication since from the very moment of its appearance it begins to strive for the condition of the spirit to remove itself from the world of bodies, to transcend materiality, to become the one true ecacious symbol. With the invention of writing around 3100 BC money as we know it emerges from a complicated system of clay tokens or counters representing material goods & takes the form of written bills of credit impressed on clay tablets; almost without exception these cheques seem to concern debts owed to the State Temple, & in theory could have been used in an extended system of exchange as credit-notes minted by the theocracy. Coins did not appear until around 700 BC in Greek Asia Minor; they were made of electrum (gold and silver) not because these metals had commodity value but because they were sacred Sun & Moon; the ratio of value between them has always hovered around 14:1 not because the earth contains 14 times as much silver as gold but because the Moon takes 14 suns to grow from dark to full. Coins may have originated as temple tokens symbolizing a worshippers due share of the sacrice holy souvenirs, which could later be traded for goods because they had mana, not usevalue. (This function may have originated in the Stone Age trade in ceremonial stone axe-heads used in potlach-like distribution rites.) Unlike Mesopotamian credit-notes, coins were inscribed with sacred images & were seen as liminal objects, nodal points between quotidian reality & the world of the spirits (this accounts for the custom of bending coins to spiritualize them and throwing them into wells, which are the eyes of the otherworld.) Debt itself the true content of all money is a highly spiritual concept. As tribute (primitive debt) it exemplies capitulation to a legitimate power of expropriation masked in religious ideology but as real debt it attains the uniquely spiritual ability to reproduce itself as if it were an organic being. Even now it remains the only dead substance in all the world to possess this power money begets money. At this point money begins to take on a parodic aspect vis--vis religion it seems that money wants to rival god, to become immanent spirit in

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the form of pure metaphysicality which nevertheless rules the world. Religion must take note of this blasphemous nature in money and condemn it as contra naturam. Money & religion enter opposition one cannot serve God & Mammon simultaneously. But so long as religion continues to perform as the ideology of separation (the hierarchic State, expropriation, etc.) it can never really come to grips with the moneyproblem. Over & over again reformers arise within religion to chase the moneylenders from the temple, & always they return in fact often enough the moneylenders become the Temple. (Its certainly no accident that banks for along time aped the forms of religious architecture.) According to Weber it was Calvin who nally resolved the issue with his theological justication for usury but this scarcely does credit to the real Protestants, like the Ranters & Diggers, who proposed that religion should once & for all enter into total opposition to money thereby launching the Millennium. It seems more likely that the Enlightenment should take credit for resolving the problem by jettisoning religion as the ideology of the ruling class & replacing it with rationalism (& Classical Economics). This formula however would fail to do justice to those real illuminati who proposed the dismantling of all ideologies of power & authority nor would it help to explain why ocial religion failed to realize its potential as opposition at this point, & instead went on providing moral support for both State & Capital. Under the inuence of Romanticism however there arose both inside & outside of ocial religion a growing sense of spirituality as an alternative to the oppressive aspects of Liberalism & its intellectual/artistic allies. On the one hand this sense led to a conservative-revolutionary form of romantic reaction (e.g. Novalis) but on the other hand it also fed into the old heretical tradition (which also began with the rise of Civilization as a movement of resistance to the theocracy of expropriation) and found itself in a strange new alliance with rationalist radicalism (the nascent left); William Blake, for example, or the Blaspheming Chapels of Spence & his followers, represent this trend. The meeting of spirituality & resistance is not some surrealist event or anomaly to be smoothed out or rationalized by History it occupies a position at the very root of radicalism; and despite the militant atheism of Marx or Bakunin (itself a kind of mutated mysticism or heresy), the spiritual

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still remains inextricably involved with the Good Old Cause it helped create. Some years ago Regis Debray wrote an article pointing out that despite the condant predictions of 19 th century materialism, religion had still perversely failed to go away and that perhaps it was time for the Revolution to come to terms with this mysterious persistence. Coming from a Catholic culture Debray was interested in Liberation Theology, itself a projection of the old quasi-heresy of the Poor Franciscans & the recurrent rediscovery of Bible communism. Had he considered Protestant culture he might have remembered the 17 th century, & looked for its true inheritance; if Moslem he could have evoked the radicalism of the Shiites or Ismailis, or the anti-colonialism of the 19 th century neoSus. Every religion has called forth its own inner antithesis over & over again; every religion has considered the implications of moral opposition to power; every tradition contains a vocabulary of resistance as well as capitulation to oppression. Speaking broadly one might say that up until now this counter-tradition which is both inside & outside religion has comprised a suppressed content. Debrays question concerned its potential for realization. Liberation Theology lost most of its support within the church when it could no longer serve its function as rival (or accomplice) of Soviet Communism; & it could no longer serve this function because Communism collapsed. But some Liberation theologians proved to be sincere and still they persist (as in Mexico); moreover, an entire submerged & related tendency within Catholicism, exemplied in the almost Scholastic anarchism of an Ivan Illich, lingers in the background. Similar tendencies could be identied within Orthodoxy (e.g. Bakunin), Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, and (in a somewhat dierent sense) Buddhism; moreover, most surviving indigenous forms of spirituality (e.g. Shamanism) or the Afro-american syncretisms can nd common cause with various radical trends in the major religions on such issues as the environment, & the morality of anti-Capitalism. Despite elements of romantic reaction, various New Age & post-NewAge movements can also be associated with this rough category. In a previous essay we have outlined reasons for believing that the collapse of Communism implies the triumph of its single opponent, Capitalism; that according to neo-liberal global propaganda only one world now

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exists; & that this political situation has grave implications for a theory of money as the virtual deity (autonomous, spiritualized, & all-powerful) of the single universe of meaning. Under these conditions everything that was once a third possibility (neutrality, withdrawal, counter-culture, the Third World, etc.) now must nd itself in a new situation. There is no longer any second how can there be a third? The alternatives have narrowed catastrophically. The One World is now in a position to crush everything which once escaped its ecstatic embrace thanks to the unfortunate distraction of waging an essentially economic war against the Evil Empire. There is no more third way, no more neither/ nor. Everything that is dierent will now be subsumed into the sameness of the One World or else will discover itself in opposition to that world. Taking this thesis as given, we must now ask where religion will locate itself on this new map of zones of capitulation & resistance. If revolution has been freed of the incubus of Soviet oppression and is now once again a valid concept, are we nally in a position to oer a tentative answer to Debrays question? Taking religion as a whole, including even those forms such as shamanism that belong to Society rather than the State (in terms of Clastress anthropology); including polytheisms, monotheisms, & nontheisms; including mysticisms & heresies as well as orthodoxies, reformed churches, & new religions obviously the subject under consideration lacks denition, borders, coherence; & it cannot be questioned because it would only generate a babel of responses rather than an answer. But religion does refer to something call it a certain range of colors in the spectrum of human becoming & as such it might be considered (at least pro tem) as a valid dialogic entity & as a theorizable subject. In the triumphant movement of Capital in its processual moment so to speak all religion can only be viewed as nullity, i.e. as a commodity to be packaged & sold, an asset to be stripped, or an opposition to be eliminated. Any idea (or ideology) that cannot be subsumed into capitals End of History must be doomed. This includes both reaction & resistance & it most certainly includes the non-separative re-linking (religio) of consciousness with spirit as unmediated imaginal self-determination & value-creation the original goal of all ritual & worship. Religion in other words has lost all connection with

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worldly power because that power has migrated o-world it has abandoned even the State & achieved the purity of apotheosis, like the God that abandoned Anthony in Cavafys poem. The few States (mostly Islamic) wherein religion holds power are located precisely within the ever-shrinking region of national opposition to Capital (thus providing them with such potential strange bedfellows as Cuba!). Like all other third possibilities religion is faced with a new dichotomy: total capitulation, or else revolt. Thus the revolutionary potential of religion clearly appears although it remains unclear whether resistance might take the form of reaction or radicalism or indeed whether religion is not already defeated whether its refusal to go away is that of an enemy, or a ghost. In Russia & Serbia the Orthodox Church appears to have thrown in its lot with reaction against the New World Order & thus found new fellowship with its old Bolshevik oppressors, In Chechnya the Naqshbandi Su Order continues its centuries-old struggle against Russian imperialism. In Chiapas theres a strange alliance of Mayan pagans & radical Catholics. Certain factions of American Protestantism have been driven to the point of paranoia & armed resistance (but even paranoids have some real enemies); while Native-american spirituality undergoes a small but miraculous revival not a Ghost Shirt uprising this time, but a reasoned & profound stand against the hegemony of Capitals monoculture. The Dalai Lama sometimes appears as the one world leader capable of speaking truth both to the remnants of the Communist oppression & the forces of Capitalist inhumanity; a Free Tibet might provide some kind of focus for an interfaith bloc of small nations & religious groups allied against the transcendental social darwinism of the consensus. Arctic shamanism may re-emerge as an ideology for the self-determination of certain new Siberian republics and some New Religions (such as Western neo-paganism or the psychedelic cults) also belong by denition or default to the pole of opposition. Islam has seen itself as the enemy of imperial Christianity & European imperialism almost from the moment of its inception. During the 20 th century it functioned as a third way against both Communism & Capitalism, & in the context of the new One World it now constitutes by denition one of the very few existing mass movements which cannot

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be englobed into the unity of any would-be Consensus. Unfortunately the spearhead of resistance fundamentalism tends to reduce the complexity of Islam into an articially coherent ideology Islamism which clearly fails to speak to the normal human desire for dierence & complexity. Fundamentalism has already failed to concern itself with empirical freedoms which must constitute the minimal demands of the new resistance; for example, its critique of usury is obviously an inadequate response to the machinations of the IMF & World Bank. The gates of Interpretation of the Shariah must be re-opened not slammed shut forever and a fully-realized alternative to Capitalism must emerge from within the tradition. Whatever one may think of the Libyan Revolution of 1969 it has at least the virtue of an attempt to fuse the anarcho-syndicalism of 68 with the neo-Su egalitarianism of the North African Orders, & to create a revolutionary Islam something similar could be said of Ali Shariatis Shiite socialism in Iran, which was crushed by the ulemocracy before it could crystallize into a coherent movement. The point is that Islam cannot be dismissed as the puritan monolith portrayed in the Capitalist media. If a genuine anti-Capitalist coalition is to appear in the world it cannot happen without Islam. The goal of all theory capable of any sympathy with Islam, I believe, is now to encourage its radical & egalitarian traditions & to substruct its reactionary & authoritarian modes of discourse. Within Islam there persist such mythic gures as the Green Prophet and hidden guide of the mystics, al-Khezr, who could easily become a kind of patron saint of Islamic environmentalism; while history oers such models as the great Algerian Su freedom-ghter Emir Abdul Qadir, whose last act (in exile in Damascus) was to protect Syrian Christians against the bigotry of the ulema. From outside Islam there exists the potential for interfaith movements concerned with ideals of peace, toleration, & resistance to the violence of post-secular post-rationalist neo-liberalism & its allies. In eect, then, the revolutionary potential of Islam is not yet realized but it is real. Since Christianity is the religion that gave birth (in Weberian terms) to Capitalism, its position in relation to the present apotheosis of Capitalism is necessarily more problematic than Islams. For centuries Christianity has been drawing in on itself & constructing a kind of make-

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believe world of its own, wherein some semblance of the social might persist (if only on Sundays) even while it maintained the cozy illusion of some relation to power. As an ally of Capital (with its seeming benign indierence to the hypothesis of faith) against Godless Communism, Christianity could preserve the illusion of power at least until ve years ago. Now Capitalism no longer needs Christianity & the social support it enjoyed will soon evaporate. Already the Queen of England has had to consider stepping down as the head of the Anglican Church & she is unlikely to be replaced by the CEO of some vast international zaibatsu! Money is god God is really dead at last; Capitalism has realized a hideous parody of the Enlightenment ideal. But Jesus is a dying-&-resurrecting god one might say hes been through all this before. Even Nietzsche signed his last insane letter as Dionysus & the Crucied One; in the end it is perhaps only religion that can overcome religion. Within Christianity a myriad tendencies appear (or have persisted since the 17 th century, like the Quakers) seeking to revive that radical messiah who cleansed the Temple & promised the Kingdom to the poor. In America for instance it would seem impossible to imagine a really successful mass movement against Capitalism (some form of progressive populism) without the participation of the churches. Again the theoretical task begins to clarify itself; one need not propose some vulgar kind of entryism into organized Christianity to radicalize it by conspiracy from within. Rather the goal would be to encourage the sincere & widespread potential for Christian radicalism either from within as an honest believer (however existentialist the faith!) or as an honest sympathizer from the outside. To test this theorizing take an example say Ireland (where I happen to be writing this). Given that Irelands Problems arise largely from sectarianism, clearly one must take an anti-clerical stance; in fact atheism would be at least emotionally appropriate. But the inherent ambiguity of religion in Irish history should be remembered: there were moments when Catholic priests & laity supported resistance or revolution, & there were moments when Protestant ministers & laity supported resistance or revolution. The hierarchies of the churches have generally proven themselves reactionary but hierarchy is not the same thing as religion. On the Protestant side we have Wolfe Tone & the United Irishmen a

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revolutionary interfaith movement. Even today in Northern Ireland such possibilities are not dead; anti-sectarianism is not just a socialist ideal but also a Christian ideal. On the Catholic side . . . a few years ago I met a radical priest at a pagan festival in the Aran Islands, a friend of Ivan Illich. When I asked him, What exactly is your relation to Rome? he answered, Rome? Rome is the enemy. Rome has lost its stranglehold on Ireland in the last few years, brought down by anti-puritan revolt & internal scandal. It would be incorrect to say that the Churchs power has shifted to the State, unless we also add that the governments power has shifted to Europe, & Europes power has shifted to international capital. The meaning of Catholicism in Ireland is up for grabs. Over the next few years we might expect to see both inside & outside the Church a kind of revival of Celtic Christianity devoted to resistance against pollution of the environment both physical & imaginal, & therefore committed to anti-Capitalist struggle. Whether this trend would lead to an open break with Rome and the formation of an independent church who knows? Certainly the trend will include or at least inuence Protestantism as well. Such a broad-based movement might easily nd its natural political expression in socialism or even in anarcho-socialism, & would serve a particularly useful function as a force against sectarianism & the rule of the clerisy. Thus even in Ireland it would seem that religion may have a revolutionary future. I expect these ideas will meet with very little acceptance within traditionally atheist anarchism or the remnants of dialectical materialism. Enlightenment radicalism has long refused to recognize any but remote historical roots within religious radicalism. As a result, the Revolution threw out the baby (non-ordinary consciousness) along with the bathwater of the Inquisition or of puritan repression. Despite Sorels insistence that the Revolution needed a myth, it preferred to bank everything on pure reason instead. But spiritual anarchism & communism (like religion itself) have failed to go away. Indeed, by becoming an anti-Religion, radicalism had recourse to a kind of mysticism of its own, complete with ritual, symbolism, & morality. Bakunins remark about God that if he existed we would have to kill him would after all pass for the purest orthodoxy within Zen Buddhism! The psychedelic movement, which oered a kind of scientic (or at least experiential )

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verication of non-ordinary consciousness, led to a degree of rapprochement between spirituality & radical politics & the trajectory of this movement may have only begun. If religion has always acted to enslave the mind or to reproduce the ideology of the ruling class, it has also always involved some form of entheogenesis (birth of the god within) or liberation of consciousness; some form of utopian proposal or promise of heaven on earth; and some form of militant & positive action for social justice as Gods plan for the creation. Shamanism is a form of religion that (as Clastres showed) actually institutionalizes spirituality against the emergence of hierarchy & separation & all religions possess at least a shamanic trace. Every religion can point to a radical tradition of some sort. Taoism once produced the Yellow Turbans or for that matter the Tongs that collaborated with anarchism in the 1911 revolution. Judaism produced the anarcho-zionism of Martin Buber & Gersholm Scholem (deeply inuenced by Gustav Landauer & other anarchists of 1919), which found its most eloquent & paradoxical voice in Walter Benjamin. Hinduism gave birth to the ultra-radical Bengali Terrorist Party & also to M. Gandhi, the modern worlds only successful theorist of non-violent revolution. Obviously anarchism & communism will never come to terms with religion on questions of authority & property; & perhaps one might say that after the Revolution such questions will remain to be resolved. But it seems clear that without religion there will be no radical revolution; the Old Left & the (old) New Left can scarcely ght it alone. The alternative to an alliance now is to watch while Reaction co-opts the force of religion & launches a revolution without us. Like it or not, some sort of pre-emptive strategy is required. Resistance demands a vocabulary in which our common cause can be discussed; hence these sketchy proposals. Even assuming we could classify all the above under the rubric of admirable sentiments, we would still nd ourselves far from any obvious program of action. Religion is not going to save us in this sense (perhaps the reverse is true!) in any case religion is faced with the same perplexity as any other former third position, including all forms of radical non-authoritarianism & anti-Capitalism. The new totality & its media appear so pervasive as to fore-doom all programs of revolutionary

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content, since every message is equally subject to subsumption in the medium that is Capital itself. Of course the situation is hopeless but only stupidity would take this as reason for despair, or for the terminal boredom of defeat. Hope against hope Blochs revolutionary hope belongs to a utopia that is never wholly absent even when it is least present; & it belongs as well to a religious sphere in which hopelessness is the nal sin against the holy spirit: the betrayal of the divine within the failure to become human. Karmic duty in the sense of the Bhagavad Gita or in the sense of revolutionary duty is not something imposed by Nature, like gravity, or death. It is a free gift of the spirit one can accept or refuse it & both positions are perilous. To refuse is to run the risk of dying without having lived. To accept is an even more dangerous but far more interesting possibility. A version of Pascals Wager not on the immortality of the soul this time, but simply on its sheer existence. To use religious metaphor (which weve tried so far to avoid) the millennium began ve years before the end of the century, when One World came into being & banished all duality. From the Judao-ChristianoIslamic perspective however this is the false millennium of the AntiChrist; which turns out not to be a person (except in the world of Archetypes perhaps) but an impersonal entity, a force contra naturam entropy disguised as life. In this view the reign of iniquity must & will be challenged in the true millennium, the advent of the messiah. But the messiah is also not a single person in the world rather, it is a collectivity in which each individuality is realized & thus (again metaphorically or imaginally) immortalized. The people-as-messiah do not enter into the homogenous sameness nor the infernal separation of entropic Capitalism, but into the dierence & presence of revolution the struggle, the holy war. On this basis alone can we begin to work on a theory of reconciliation between the positive forces of religion & the cause of resistance. What we are oered here is simply the beginning of the beginning. Dublin, Sept. 1, 1996

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Part 5

Note on Nationalism

Viewed as the quintessentialization of hierarchy & separation, the State can replicate itself on any level of experience from the individual psyche to the laws of nations. And yet society can exist in theory without the State & did so in fact for nearly a million years, 99% of the time span of the human species, thanks to the persistence of customs & institutions and mythemes that appear to have been designed for just this purpose, i.e. the suppression of the State & realization of the Social. War itself can be one of these institutions of Society against the State, since (in its primitive form) it acts to disperse power & wealth rather than concentrate it. On another level we might say that shamanism also tends toward centrifugality of power in its emphasis on direct experience rather than mere symbolization (i.e. the shaman must really heal the patient, the medium must really be possessed, otherwise their prestige evaporates: in some tribes shamanic failure was punishable by exile or death). The proto-State then must emerge in the moment of breakdown of centrifugal force in war & religion. Changes in economic structure appear to follow upon this breakdown rather than cause it. [Note: The breakdown itself may have had economic causes but we cannot perceive them certainly overpopulation and climatic change are inadequate explanations!] For instance, the replacement of hunting/gathering by agriculture failed to produce the proto-State. We cannot even blame the State on specialization of labor, since we are perfectly capable of imagining (with Fourier) a State-less Society based on fairly complex economics. The State seems almost sui generis its birth is shrouded in a certain mystery. Something went wrong somewhere the old myths (based on reciprocity & redistribution) collapsed before the power of a new story based on separation & accumulation. The precise instant is lost, although the true State lurches into archaeological view sometime around the 4 th to 3 rd millennium in Sumer & Egypt. In both cases the realms of war & religion seem to have coalesced to produce gurative & literal pyramid-structures impossible to conceive without tribute & slavery. The centrifugality of the social is gradually supplanted by the centripetality of power & wealth till a crisis point is reached in the catastrophic emergence of a priest-king & a nascent bureaucracy the infallible signs of the true State.

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The essence of the State is found in symbolization as mediation, & in mediation as alienation. These abstractions denote a brutal reality: The appearance of Historys Bootheel. Separation & expropriation must be accomplished simultaneously on both the symbolic & actual plane. Symbols must be made to do the work of accumulation the State cannot expend its energy in re-creating itself in every moment. Writing for instance technologizes symbolization to the point where power can act at a distance hence the magic of writing, its Hermetic origin but writing itself may have been invented in order to implement an even more basic form of symbolization i.e. money. Lets examine the hypothesis that the State is impossible without money as symbolic exchange. Even the most primitive king (as opposed to elder or chieftain) can only be dened by the creation of scarcity & the accumulation of wealth & this double process can only be reproduced in symbolization. Generally this means that the king is somehow sacred & thus in himself (or herself) symbolizes the very motion of energy in or between surplus & scarcity. But this motion must be impeded if the energy-transfer can only take crude material form (actual cows or jars of wheat etc.). The essential exchange of protection-for-wealth that denes the true State must be symbolized in order to transcend what might be called the inherent egalitarianism of the material, its recalcitrance, its natural resistance to accumulation. Protection moreover has no overt material base, whereas wealth does hence the State will be at a disadvantage in the exchange unless it can present its power in symbolic (non-material) form as nothing for something. If however the State remains impossible without money (even in its most unexpected or exotic or primitive form), money seems to be quite possible without the State. Our best evidence for this comes not only from the Past but also so to speak from the Future. In the past we can discern money in the symbolic exchange & social construction of the sacrice. When the tribe grows beyond the point where it can re-create itself in the sharing of a sacricial animal, for instance, we might surmise that ones due share could be symbolized by some token. Once the spiritual content of these tokens is transferred to an economic sphere outside the sacrice (as for example in the Lydian temple-coins of the 7 th century BC) the existence of the tokens would

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then facilitate the creation of scarcity by symbolizing the accumulation of wealth. Thus money would precede the State. If we wish to push the origin of money even farther back into the past, we could examine the mysterious clay tokens that appeared in the Neolithic Near East around the 7 th millennium BC, apparently as counters for commodities. Real goods that are present only in symbolic form already express the possibility of scarcity & in fact these clay counters almost certainly stand for debt. When the symbolic counters themselves are then symbolized by writing a concept that appears at a very precise moment datable to about 3100 BC in the city of Uruk we can speak not only of money but of banking: the centralization of debt at the religio-political focus of power, the Temple. Thus, to put it crudely, money exists for 4000 years before it mutates into a form that makes possible the emergence of the true State. If we look to the future i.e. to the logic of the present we can see even more clearly that money exists beyond the State. In a situation where money is free to move across borders in deance of all political economy, as in neo-liberal free-market internationalism, the State can nd itself abandoned by money, & re-dened as a zone of scarcity rather than wealth. The State remains by denition mired in production, while money attains the transcendence of pure symbolization. In the last ve years money has achieved almost absolute lift-o, since more than 90% of all money now refers to nothing in the sphere of production, not even to the dirty outmoded symbolic tokens called cash although the entire productive world remains utterly in the power of money, such that scarcely a tomato can be grown & eaten without the mediation of symbolic exchange. Paracelsus once told a petty German king, Your Majesty is the true alchemist, not me (a mere puer)! Your Majesty has only to empower a bank with a monopoly to coin money, and then borrow it. Thus you will create something out of nothing, a far more puissant act than making lead into gold! The joke here is that the king was not the real alchemist. The locus of the magical act lay in the bank not the court. When all thrones in the world were hopelessly in debt to their own self-created central banks, the focus of power shifted. When governments resign their ancient role of protection, money breaks free at last governments can

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now provide only nothing for nothing their power is shattered. Their power has migrated into the alchemical sphere of pure symbolization. Thus money & the State have never at any point been exactly identical, or even necessarily in alliance. Like the paradoxical relation of money & religion, money & the State are sometimes in conspiracy, sometimes in competition, occasionally even at war. God & Moloch, Mammon & Moloch the intricacies of their cosmic dance might be revealed in the legend of the Templars or the IMF! Money & the State (& religion) do not possess the simple paradoxicality of the ancient riddle about chicken & egg, but a far more complex relation; the question about cause & eect is the wrong question. Money, the State, & religion: all are powers of oppression, but not the same power of oppression. In fact, when deployed against each other, they can act as powers of liberation. Money buys freedom for example; the populist State can suppress the banks, thus freeing its citizens from money-power; and religion has been known to deploy its higher morality against both economic & political injustice. Moreover, the State does not appear all at once in its absolute form. If primitive societies possess institutions which successfully prevent the emergence of the State, nevertheless the emergence of the State cannot erase these institutions all at once. The early State must still co-exist with customs & rights that enable Society to resist its power. In ancient Ireland for example the kingship had to depend on (and often contend with) semi-independent warrior bands, the anna, whose lives were devoted to sources of power (raiding) and wealth (hunting) that remained essentially outside the control of the State. The anthropology of Society against the State can be extended to a sociology of historical State systems *such as feudalism) where some potent institutions & mythemes work against the total accumulation of power usually at the cost of violence. Moreover, as Karl Polyani noted, money is also held in check in pre-modern cultures, not just in primitive societies (where money simply fails to appear), but also in quite complex State systems. Classical civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Greece, Mesoamerica, Egypt & even Rome retained structures of redistribution of wealth to some extent if only as panem et circenses; no one could have conceived of a free market in such circumstance, since its obvious inhumanity would

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have violated every surviving principle of reciprocity not to mention religious law. It was left to our glorious modern era to conceive of the State as absolute power, & money as free of all social restraint. The result might be called the Capital State: the power of money wedded to the power of war. Ultimately, once the struggle against Communism was won, it would be logical to expect a last & nal struggle between Capital & the State for power pure & supreme. Instead the Molochian State appears to know that it was already secretly beaten long ago (all thrones hopelessly in debt . . . ) & has capitulated without a whimper to the triumph of Mammon. With a few exceptions the nations are now falling all over themselves in their eagerness to privatize everything from health to prisons to air & water to consciousness itself. Protection the only real excuse for the States existence evaporates in every sphere of governments inuence, from taris to human rights. The State seems somehow to believe it can renounce not only its vestigial power over money but even its basic functions, & yet survive as an elected occupying army! Even the US, which boasts of itself as the last & nal superpower, found itself in the very moment of its apocalyptic victory reduced to a mercenary force at the bidding of international Capital blustering bush-league bully boasting of its crusade to overthrow a Hitler of the Middle East, but capable only of serving the interests of oil cartels & banks. National borders must survive so that political hirelings can divert taxes to corporate welfare; & so that huge prots can be made on arbitrage & currency exchange; & so that labor can be disciplined by migratory capital. Otherwise the State retains no real function everything else is empty ceremony, & the sheer terrorism of the war on crime (i.e. the States post-Spectacular war on its own poor and dierent). Thatcher & Reagan foretold with true prescience what government should & would do once it had fullled its last historical goal the overthrow of the Evil Empire. Government would voluntarily dismantle itself (at the peoples bidding of course) & gracefully submit to the real Hegelian absolute: money. Of course to speak of the end of History when there has been no ending (for example) of writing nor for that matter of material production is merely a form of insanity perhaps even a terminal form! Like religion, the State has simply failed to go away in fact, in a

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bizarre extension of the thesis of Society against the State, we can even re-imagine the State as in institutional type of custom & right which Society can wield (paradoxically) against an even more nal shape of power that of pure Capitalism. This is an uncomfortable thought for a good anarchist; weve always tended to view the State as the enemy, & capitalism as one of its aspects or accidents. The ideal opposite of the anarch is the monarch. [In fact there were some amusing & futile attempts in n-de-sicle France to forge links between anarchism & monarchism against the common enemy, the fading illusion of democracy & the emerging reality of Capitalism.] In this sense we may have been out-thought by syndicalism & by council-communism, which at least developed more mature economic critiques of power. Like the left in general however anarchism collapsed in 1989 (a growing North-american movement for example suddenly imploded) in all likelihood because at that moment our enemy the State also secretly collapsed. In order to move into the gap left by the defeat of Communism we needed a critique of Capitalism as the single power in a unied world. Our careful & sophisticated critique of a world divided into two forms of State/economic power was rendered suddenly irrelevant. In an attempt to rectify this lack, I believe we need a new theory of nationalism as well as a new theory of Capitalism (and indeed a new theory of religion as well). So far the only interesting model for this is the EZLN in Mexico (its gratifying to see Zapatista slogans scrawled all over Dublin!) & it would be worth analyzing their theory-&-praxis for inspiration. The EZLN is the rst revolutionary force to dene itself in opposition to global neo-liberalism; it has done so without aid or inuence from the Internationale because it appeared in the very same moment that Moscow disappeared. It has received the support of the remnants of Liberation Theology as well as the secret councils of Mayan shamans & traditional elders. In the Native-american sense of the word it is a nationalist movement, & yet it derives its political inspiration from Zapata, Villa, & Flores Magon (i.e., two agrarian anarcho-syndicalists & one anarcho-communist). It is concerned with empirical freedoms rather than purist ideology. [As Qadda says, In need, freedom remains latent.] No wonder the NYTimes called Chiapas the rst post-modern revolution; in fact, it is the rst revolution of the 21 st century.

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James Connolly, one of the founders of the IWW, developed in Ireland a theory that socialism & nationalism were parts of one & the same cause & for this theory he suered martyrdom in 1916. From one point of view Connollys theory might lead toward National Socialism on the Right but from another point of view it leads to third wold nationalism on the Left. Now that both these movements are dead it is possible to see more clearly how Connollys theory also ts with anarchist & syndicalist ideas of his own period, such as the left volkism of Gustav Landauer or the General Strike of Sorel. These ideas in turn can be traced back to Proudhons writings on mutualism & anarchofederalism. [The quarrel between Marx & Proudhon was for more unfortunate for history than Marxs much noisier & more famous quarrel with Bakunin.] Inasmuch as we might propose a neo-proudhonian interpretation of the Zapatista uprising, therefore, Connollys ideas may take on a new relevance for us [and thus perhaps its not surprising if the EZLN sparks a response from the Irish left!]. Nationalism today is headed for a collision with Capitalism, for the simple reason that the nation per se has been redened by Capital as a zone of depletion. In other words, the nation can either capitulate to Capitalism or else resist it no third way, no neutrality remains possible. The question facing the nation as zone of resistance is whether to launch its revolt from the Right (as hegemonic particularity) or from the left (as non-hegemonic particularity). Not all nations are zones of resistance, & not all zones of resistance are nations. But wherever the two coincide to some extent the choice becomes not only an ethical but also a political process. During the American Civil War the anarchist Lysander Spooner refused to support either side the South because it was guilty of chattelslavery, the North because it was guilty of wage-slavery & moreover because it denied the right to secede, and obvious sine qua non of any genuinely free federation. In this sense of the term, nationalism must always be opposed because it is hegemonic & secession must always be supported inasmuch as it is anti-hegemonic. That is, it can only be supported to the extent that it does not seek power at the expense of others misery. No State can ever achieve this ideal but some national struggles can be considered objectively revolutionary provided they meet basic minimal requirements i.e. that they be both non-hegemonic

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& anti-Capitalist. In the New World such movements might perhaps include the Hawaiian secession movement, Puerto Rican independence, maximum autonomy for Native-american nations, the EZLN, & at least in theory the bioregionalist movement in the US and it would probably exclude (with some regrets) such movements as Quebec nationalism, & the militia movement in the US. In Eastern Europe we might see potential in such states as Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia, the Ukraine but not in Serbia nor in Russia. In the Mid-East one cannot help supporting Chechnya & the Kurds. In Western Europe the EU must be opposed, & the smaller nations most likely to be crushed by the weight of Eurotrash & Eurodollars should be encouraged to stay out of the Union or to oppose it from within. This includes the Atlantic littoral from Morocco (where Berber resistance & Saharan independence have our sympathy) to Ireland, Denmark, perhaps, Scandinavia, the Baltics, & Finland. Celtic secessionism should be encouraged in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, & Man; this would add a strong socialist & green tint to any possible coalition of small Atlantic States. In Northern Ireland the best possible solution to the Troubles might be an independent Ulster based on socialist antisectarian solidarity a dream perhaps but far more interesting than Peace at any price & a free revolutionary Ulster would no doubt release an unbelievable burst of energy into the anti-Capitalist movement despite its size Ulster would emerge as a leader of any such movement it would possess tremendous moral prestige. Since were indulging in dreams lets imagine that an anti-Communist/anti-Capitalist movement emerges in E. Europe, & allies itself with new movements within Islam, no longer fundamentalist & hegemonistic but denitely anti-Capitalist & opposed to One World culture. In turn an alliance is made with the anti-capitalist anti-Europe states of the Atlantic littoral & simultaneously within all these countries revolutionary forces are at work for social & economic justice, environmental activism, anti-hegemonic solidarity, & revolutionary dierence. NGOs & religious groups lend their logistical support to the struggle. Meanwhile we can imagine Capitalism in crisis for any of a myriad reasons, from bank-collapse to environmental catastrophe. Suddenly the radical populist critique of neo-liberalism begins to cohere for millions of

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workers, farmers, tribal peoples, x-class drop-outs & artists, heretics, & even petit-bourgeois shopkeepers & professionals . . . . . . After the Revolution of course all nationalist forms would have to be carefully reconsidered. The goal of neo-Proudhonian federalism would be the recognition of freedom at every point of organization in the rhizome, no matter how small even to a single individual, or any tiny group of secessionists. No doubt these freedoms would have to be ensured through constant struggle against the natural tendencies to greed & power-hunger inherent within every individual & every collectivity. But thats a matter for the future. In the present we are faced with the monumental task of constructing an anti-Capitalist resistance movement out of the shattered remnants of radicalism, some glue, some tissue paper, & some hot rhetoric. We can no longer aord the luxury of ignoring politics. This does not mean Im about to ruin a perfect anarchist record & vote for the rst time since in my country voting means nothing & gains one nothing, not even $5 or a free drink (as in the old days of Tammany Hall). I mean politics in the Clauswitzian sense. And war makes for strange bedfellows even for unexpected comrades & allies. Id like to believe that revolution could be a non-violent war for peace but like a good scout, one should be prepared. Dublin, Sept. 23, 1996

Retrieved on April 23 rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/millennium/index.html

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Hakim Bey

Crisis of Meaning

2001

A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article on the advertising industry and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird eect: suddenly it seems impossible to have advertising at all. It seems massively inappropriate to move product as per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience & peeping; with hate & envy masked as fashion, with greed thinly disguised as freedom of choice. Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasnt advertising ever seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media which cannot utter a sound without puking up a clich speaks now of the waking of a sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer terrorism etc.) but what was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame? Last week, it seems we were willing to admit that our highest social values could be expressed in price codes (the mark of the Beast as the cranks say, the prophets of doom). This week, we feel shame. In a Times interview a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any signicance and wondered if she could go with it. The fashion industry is also ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed; even the news media expressed some eeting longing for decorum & dignity & decency. Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our meanspiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry & information, our degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on? or should we defend all this as freedom and our way of life? Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign signicance to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will mediate for us with the forces of evil. But what exactly is this normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame? Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what it means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves; and their teachers evade the question, saying that we dont understand. And the ad execs, they dont understand either theyre bewildered.

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Awake but confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning? A hyper-fashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products. Photographs even huge billboards showing people dying of AIDS or waiting to be executed designed to sell woolly jumpers. In this life as normal? Should we return to it? For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass speakers rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no Madison Avenue Choirs hymning the celestial delites of commodities or vacations in the midst of other peoples misery. For a few hours or days there appeared no ocial spin on the event, no slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning. We watched the cloud drift around the city, rst to the East over Brooklyn then up the west side of Manhattan, nally over the east side as well. With the smell and the poisonous haze around the moon came a nightmare abut the occult signicance of the cloud: angry bewildered ghosts in a vast white cloud. And we breathed that cloud into us. Well never get it out of our lungs. What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a meaning. But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its a ndreds who died trying to save thenswer Attack On America, our freedom, our values, our way of life, carried out by cowards who were nevertheless not physical cowards (as some ocial explained in the Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He didn e our faculty and students of colot say. Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent answer. Do they hate us because we use of 75% of the worlds resources even though we only constitute 20% of its population? because we bomb Baghdad & Belgrade without risking even one American life? because we export a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world, video games about death, movies about death, TV shows about death, commodities that are dead, music that kills the spirit? because weve made advertising copy our highest artform? because we dene freedom as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money? The politicians have told that they envy us and our way of life and therefore wish to destroy it. Envy yes, why not? The whole system of

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global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire. No desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global capital, q.e.d. But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers & sports teams & entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame? And why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend, and waste? What does it mean? After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers said that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently. We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before. It may not mean anything. But we have it. And who could have dreamed at the gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have Nike ads or sitcoms about lawyers? Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning tragedy ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our leaders seek closure perhaps by killing many Afghan children perhaps by a new Crusade against the Saracens and of course by a return to normal. Well show them by refusing meaning. We will sleep because it is our right not to awake to confusion & shame. Our sleep will be troubled. Well have to sacrice a few freedoms to protect Freedom. Well have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or months we will have buried even the fear & hate, rather we will have transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the media, our externalized unconscious. Well have sitcoms again and gangster rap and arguments about our right to download it all for free into our home computers. Well get those airplanes ying, once again polluting our skies with noise & carcinogens. Well overcome our shame. And that will constitute our revenge. That will be our meaning. Our morality.

The author was in NYC from Sept. 9 th to Sept. 15 th and this piece was written in the week after the attack. Published as Peter Lamborn Wilson. Retrieved on April 23 rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/crisis-meaning.html

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Hakim Bey

Jihad Revisited

2004

In the mid-90s I was invited to a big philosophy conference in Libya. I wrote a little paper on the inuence of Neo-Susm on Col. Qadda and his Green Book. I wondered if the Libyans would even allow me to read it. After all, Q came to power in 1969 by overthrowing a king who was also a Su master. Perhaps he had repudiated the inuence of Susm on his own life and thought? Turned out the Libyans loved the paper and told me I was correct: in a sense the Libyan Revolution had been directed against corrupt Susm on behalf of reformed Susm. Unfortunately, Q himself never showed up at the conference to conrm or deny this, but Im sure they were right. Neo-Susm arose in the 19 th century in response to the corrupt authoritarian Susm of colonial times and partly in response to colonialism itself. Anti-French resistance in Algeria was spearheaded by the great Emir Abdel Kader, guerilla chief and brilliant Su shaykh in the school of Ibn Arabi. Neo-Sus broke with the medieval concept of the all-powerful master. Instead, they sought initiation in dreams and visions. In North Africa, the Sanussi Order and the Tijani Order, amongst others, were founded by seekers whod been empowered in dreams by the Prophet Mohammed himself. The Neo-Su orders were also conceived and shaped to some extent as reform movements within Islam, in competition with modernism & secularism on one hand and Salast/Wahhabi neo-puritan Islamism on the other. Education & health and economic alternatives to colonialism were stressed in the Sanussi Order in Libya. And when armed struggle against Italian rule erupted, Sanussi fuqara (dervishes) led the uprising. After independence, the head of the Order became King Idris I. Young Moammar Qadda, born in a Sanussi village to Sanussi parents, attended a Sanussi elementary school and high school. In England for military training in the 60s, the young ocer read Colin Wilsons The Outsider and absorbed some New Left ideas, including council communism and the notion of the Spectacle. (See The Green Book, esp. the section on sports.) Libyan Islam is not fundamentalist, as so many Americans seem to believe. In fact its anti-fundamentalist. The Islamists hate Q as a heretic, innovator & crypto-su. The Libyan ulema (religious authorities)

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declared the Ahadith (the Prophetic traditions) to be non-canonical, an extremely liberal position. There is still a Council of Su Orders in Libya, and the Sanussi Order still exists (Just not the royal branch of it, as a Libyan delegate told me). Elsewhere in the Islamic world, however, Neo-Susm largely failed to provide a paradigm for contemporary spirituality or politics. Westernization and its reactionary double Islamism have swept the eld. The old Su ideals of tolerance, dierence, cultural depth, the arts of peace as the Tunisian poet Abdelwahab Meddeb asserts in The Malady of Islam (Basic Books, 2003) are despised by both secular modernists and rabid neo-puritans. Mebbed also points out that the Islamists by no means adhere to antimaterialist values. They adore technology and Capital as fervently as Westerners provided its Islamic tech and Islamic money, of course. The synthesis of mysticism and socialism, envisioned by anti-Capitalist/anti-Soviet thinkers of the 60s and 70s like Ali Shariati of Iran, or Col. Q himself, appears to be a lost cause along with third world socialism in general, and third world neutralism as well. The very terms indicate their historical emptiness: how can there be a third world when the second world has imploded and vanished? The conference in Tripoli turned out to be a curious circus of lost causes, including two anarchists from New York (we were cheered as heroes for defying the travel ban), countless African liberation fronts, the interesting French New Right philospher Alain de Benoist and some Australian Red/Brown types, two charming Turkish Greens, a Slovenian anarchist, a clique of Parisian Maoists, etc., and a phalanx of hospitable Libyans, all fuelled by excessive coee intake. A German doctor gave a paper on depleted uranium in Iraq, the rst time most of us had heard of such a thing. A New Zealand delegate told horror stories about privatization of water; ditto. At one point I overheard one of the Parisian Maoists say that the real objectively-existsing enemy of humanity was not neo-liberal/Global Capital, but the USA. At the time I considered this view misguided, in part because of my enthusiasm for Zapatismo, in part because the Maoist line sounded so old-fashioned. At that time neo-liberalism was on the

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ascendent and a nuanced global response seemed more vital than any Vietnam-era anti-Americanism. In a collection of essays, Millennium (Autonomedia, 1996), I speculated on the need for new ways to express anti-Capitalist strategies in a postSpectacular situation. If Zapatismo could draw on Mayan spirituality as well as anarchist inuences, perhaps something similar could happen with Susm. Islam contains a potential for socialism in its strictures against usury and its communitarian idealism (according to Ali Shariati, for example). Lawless (bishahr) Susm and some types of Islamic heresy have anarchistic aspects. At the time, I thought Islamism was on the wane. Susm itself is sometimes dened as the greater jihad, while holy war is called the lesser jihad. The struggle to become who you are takes precedence over even the most righteous cause. But esotericism is not always quietistic in Islam. Sus have launched revolutions, including 19 th and early 20 th century anti-colonialist/imperialist struggles. Perhaps, I fantasized, its now time for a kind of Islamic Zapatismo to emerge. I actually proposed this in a preface for the recent Turkish translation of my now-quite-elderly book, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, 1985). Since 1996, two changes seem to have occured within the so-called End of History. First appeared neo-conservative neo-liberalism, a.k.a. the USA as sole superpower and hegemon of Global Capitals nal triumph a.k.a. the Empire. Second, it turned out that puritanical Islamism was given new life during the Soviet gotterdamerung in Afghanistan. American Intelligence discovered a magic lamp and rubbed it once, twice, thrice and then the genie escaped and became the Old Man of the Mountains. The US then invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and committed itself to the Israeli Right. Islamism somehow became the new Evil Empire of Pure Terror. It also became anti-Americanism. A few people have misguidedly complimented me on predicting this New Jihad. Anyone who ever wrote a word on Islamism before 9/11/01 is now burdened with this dreary mantle. In fact the jihad I predicted (or rather imagined) has not come to pass. By now its probably too late.

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From the US Empires p.o.v., Islamism makes the perfect enemy because its not really anti-Capitalist or anti-technocratic. It can be subsumed into the one great image of Capital as Law of Nature, and also simultaneously used as a bogeyman to discipline the masses at home with fear-of-terror, and to explain away the miseries of neo-liberal readjustment. In this sense Islamism is a false ideology or Simulation as Baudrillard put it. America makes a perfect enemy for the Islamists because Americanism isnt a real ideology either. Brute force, McDisney-kultur, an Orwellian Free Market and a frothy post-industrial economy based on out-sourcing the entire misery of production to the former third world all of this fails to achieve even the tarnished and untrustworthy status of ideology its all simulation. Money talks, as the popular wisdom has it. Money is the only master of speech here and money speaks only to itself. Democracy is now a codeword for coca-colonization by clusterbomb Islam for the emotional plague. Its the wrong jihad. At present (May 04), the Empire seems to be choking on an overdose of its own image addiction, stupid lies, suocating mass media, politics as snu porn. Staying in Iraq or pulling out of Iraq: both seem equally impossible to imagine the Vietnam Syndrome, complete with atrocity photos. If the current US regime is changed, presumably the best we can expect is a return to the neo-liberal Globalism of the 90s. But this may prove impossible and its not clear that the Democrats intend any such retreat. How do you step down gracefully from imperialism? That Parisian Maoist: was he correct after all? The USA seems to have positioned itself quite deliberately by alienating Europe and horrifying the Islamic world. It has rushed to embrace the role of enemy-of-humanity and thrown away the last of its diminished popularity as defender of freedom. But Islamism will never provide the dialectic negation of this Empire because Islamism itself is nothing but an empire of negation, of resentment and reaction. Islamism has nothing to oer the struggle against Globalism except dessicated theofascist spasms of violence. Americanism & Islamism: a plague on both their houses. As for true jihad, theres more going on in South America and Mexico now than

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anywhere else. Maybe while President Tweedledee and the Imam ibn Tweedledum bite each others throats out on CNN, something interesting might have a chance to emerge from the barrios of Argentina or Venezuela, or the jungles of Chiapas.

Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, June 5, 2004 Reprinting permissible with attribution Retrieved on December 21, 2009 from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=04/06/08/6775773

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Hakim Bey

Against Legalization

As a writer, I am distressed and depressed by the suspicion that dissident media has become a contradiction in terms an impossibility. Not because of any triumph of censorship however, but the reverse. There is no real censorship in our society, as Chomsky points out. Suppression of dissent is instead paradoxically achieved by allowing media to absorb (or co-opt) all dissent as image. Once processed as commodity, all rebellion is reduced to the image of rebellion, rst as spectacle, and last as simulation. (See Debord, Baudrillard, etc.) The more powerful the dissent as art (or discourse) the more powerless it becomes as commodity. In a world of Global Capital, where all media function collectively as the perfect mirror of Capital, we can recognize a global Image or universal imaginaire, universally mediated, lacking any outside or margin. All Image has undergone Enclosure, and as a result it seems that all art is rendered powerless in the sphere of the social. In fact, we can no longer even assume the existence of any sphere of the social. All human relations can be and are expressed as commodity relations. In this situation, it would seem reform has also become an impossibility, since all partial ameliorizations of society will be transformed (by the same paradox that determines the global Image) into means of sustaining and enhancing the power of the commodity. For example, reform and democracy have now become code-words for the forcible imposition of commodity relations on the former Second and Third Worlds. Freedom means freedom of corporations, not of human societies. From this point of view, I have grave reservations about the reform program of the anti-Drug-Warriors and legalizationists. I would even go so far as to say that I am against legalization. Needless to add that I consider the Drug War an abomination, and that I would demand immediate unconditional amnesty for all prisoners of consciousness assuming that I had any power to make demands! But in a world where all reform can be instantaneously turned into new means of control, according to the paradox sketched in the above paragraphs, it makes no sense to go on demanding legalization simply because it seems rational and humane. For example, consider what might result from the legalization of medical marijuana clearly the will of the people in at least six states. The

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herb would instantly fall under drastic new regulations from Above (the AMA, the courts, insurance companies, etc.). Monsanto would probably acquire the DNA patents and intellectual ownership of the plants genetic structure. Laws would probably be tightened against illegal marijuana for recreational uses. Smokers would be dened (by law) as sick. As a commodity, Cannabis would soon be denatured like other legal psychotropics such as coee, tobacco, or chocolate. Terence McKenna once pointed out that virtually all useful research on psychotropics is carried out illegally and is often largely funded from underground. Legalization would make possible a much tighter control from above over all drug research. The valuable contributions of the entheogenic underground would probably diminish or cease altogether. Terence suggested that we stop wasting time and energy petitioning the authorities for permission to do what were doing, and simply get on with it. Yes, the Drug War is evil and irrational. Let us not forget, however, that as an economic activity, the War makes quite good sense. Im not even going to mention the booming corrections industry, the bloated police and intelligence budgets, or the interests of the pharmaceutical cartels. Economists estimate that some ten percent of circulating capital in the world is gray money derived from illegal activity (largely drug and weapon sales). This gray area is actually a kind of free-oating frontier for Global Capital itself, a small wave that precedes the big wave and provides its sense of direction. (For example gray money or oshore capital is always the rst to migrate from depressed markets to thriving markets.) War is the health of the State as Randolph Bourne once said but war is no longer so protable as in the old days of booty, tribute and chattel slavery. Economic war increasingly takes its place, and the Drug War is an almost pure form of economic war. And since the Neoliberal State has given up so much power to corporations and markets since 1989, it might justly be said that the War on Drugs constitutes the health of Capital itself. From this perspective, reform and legalization would clearly be doomed to failure for deep infrastructural reasons, and therefore all

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agitation for reform would constitute wasted eort a tragedy of misdirected idealism. Global Capital cannot be reformed because all reformation is deformed when the form itself is distorted in its very essence. Agitation for reform is allowed so that an image of free speech and permitted dissidence can be maintained, but reform itself is never permitted. Anarchists and Marxists were right to maintain that the structure itself must be changed, not merely its secondary characteristics. Unfortunately the movement of the social itself seems to have failed, and even its deep underlying structures must now be re-invented almost from scratch. The War on Drugs is going to go on. Perhaps we should consider how to act as warriors rather than reformers. Nietzsche says somewhere that he has no interest in overthrowing the stupidity of the law, since such reform would leave nothing for the free spirit to accomplish nothing to overcome. I wouldnt go so far as to recommend such an immoral and starkly existentialist position. But I do think we could do with a dose of stoicism. Beyond (or aside from) economic considerations, the ban on (some) psychotropics can also be considered from a shamanic perspective. Global Capital and universal Image seem able to absorb almost any outside and transform it into an area of commodication and control. But somehow, for some strange reason, Capital appears unable or unwilling to absorb the entheogenic dimension. It persists in making war on mindaltering or transformative substance, rather than attempting to co-opt and hegemonize their power. In other words it would seem that some sort of authentic power is at stake here. Global Capital reacts to this power with the same basic strategy as the Inquisition by attempting to suppress it from the outside rather than control it from within. (Project MKULTRA was the governments secret attempt to penetrate the occult interior of psychotropism it appears to have failed miserably.) In a world that has abolished the Outside by the triumph of the Image, it seems that at least one outside nevertheless persists. Power can deal with this outside only as a form of the unconscious, i.e., by suppression rather than realization. But this leaves open the possibility that those who manage to attain direct awareness of this power might actually be able to wield it and implement it. If entheogenic neo-shamanism (or whatever you want to call it) cannot

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be betrayed and absorbed into the power-structure of the Image, then we may hypothesize that it represents a genuine Other, a viable alternative to the one world of triumphant Capital. It is (or could be) our source of power. The Magic of the State (as M. Taussig calls it), which is also the magic of Capital itself, consists of social control through the manipulation of symbols. This is attained through mediation, including the ultimate medium, money as hieroglyphic text, money as pure Imagination as social ction or mass hallucination. This real illusion has taken the place of both religion and ideology as delusionary sources of social power. This power therefore possesses (or is possessed by) a secret goal; that all human relations be dened according to this hieroglyphic mediation, this magic. But neo-shamanism proposes with all seriousness that another magic may exist, an eective mode of consciousness that cannot be hexed by the sign of the commodity. If this were so, it would help explain why the Image appears unable or unwilling to deal rationally with the issue of drugs. In fact, a magical analysis of power might emerge from the observed fact of this radical incompatibility of the Global Imaginaire and shamanic consciousness. In such a case, what could our power consist of in actual empirical terms? I am far from proposing that winning the War on Drugs would somehow constitute The Revolution or even that shamanic power could contest the magic of the State in any strategic manner. Clearly however the very existence of entheogenism as a true dierence in a world where true dierence is denied marks the historic validity of an Other, of an authentic Outside. In the (unlikely) event of legalization, this Outside would be breached, entered, colonized, betrayed, and turned into sheer simulation. A major source of initiation, still accessible in a world apparently devoid of mystery and of will, would be dissolved into empty representation, a pseudo-rite of passage into the timeless/ spaceless enclosure of the Image. In short, we would have sacriced our potential power to the ersatz reform of legalization, and we would win nothing thereby but the simulacrum of tolerance at the expense of the triumph of Control. Again: I have no idea what our strategy shall be. I believe however that the time has come to admit that a tactics of mere contingency can

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no longer sustain us. Permitted dissent has become an empty category, and reform merely a mask for recuperation. The more we struggle on their terms the more we lose. The drug legalization movement has never won a single battle. Not in America anyway and America is the sole superpower of Global Capital. We boast of our outlaw status as outsiders or marginals, as guerilla ontologists; why then, do we continually beg for authenticity and validation (either as reward or as punishment) from authority? What good would it do us if we were to be granted this status, this legality? The Reform movement has upheld true rationality and it has championed real human values. Honor where honor is due. Given the profound failure of the movement however, might it not be timely to say a few words for the irrational, for the irreducible wildness of shamanism, and even a single word for the values of the warrior? Not peace, but a sword.

No publication date found at source. Retrieved April 18 th, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/legalization.html

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NoGoZone

Is theory a crystal ball? Is there any magic in theory? (Originally, the word meant vision, which certainly suggests the mysterious.) Can Ontological/Anarchic Theory be used to predict the future like a Ouija board in some degree of that clarity with which it describes the present or predicts the past? Is specto-simulo-commodity-ism on its last legs, like Marxism in the 80s? What would cause it to collapse? What about resurgent Islam unifying ideology of the South, or cultural death rattle? Religion in general? Various sci- scenarios? The police as the nal simulacrum of power, nal organ of disappearance? Balkanization and ethnic cleansing? Is theory a zodiac we can skry? Can we make some New Year predictions, like the National Enquirer? I dont see Capitalism vanishing overnight like Communism its too organic, too closely linked up with whats really going on. Marxism fell because it had entered a state of abstraction and denial failed to embrace the Spectacle as the true site of power but Capital didnt make this mistake. Capital will disintegrate or deliquesce, rather than undergo sudden implosion. The signs of disintegration will become more and more obvious to experience and theory, but will not erase the simulacrum of the totality with any revolutionary collapse. The murky clouds in the crystal are starting to drift and clear. Suddenly, a concept: social triage. And immediately a corollary: the no-go zone. The state, as the last spectacular locus of the world of simulation, will be forced to practise social triage, letting go of real control over zones which fall beneath the level of adequate involvement in the empty discourse. Zones: classes, races, marginalized groups, and to some extent actual geographic areas. Triage: gradual and imperceptible letting-go of services, leading to the emergence of no-go zones where control is reduced to purely simulated means (e.g. TV as social glue). Zones which have been economically abandoned (the homeless, small farmers, migrant workers, welfare classes) will gradually be eliminated from all other networks controlled by the spectacle of the state, including the nal interface, the Police. Ocially of course this policy will not exist and the specto-state will continue to claim jurisdiction and proprietorship of these zones no political autonomy will be permitted, and occasional terror acts will be broadcast in the spectacle to provide a veneer of control-simulation. But in stark economic reality these zones will have

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been sacriced, like passengers thrown out of the troika of History to the wolves of Memory. Inasmuch as this process is already under weigh, the study of demographics provides a clue to the future: where are the classes leaving, where are they going? Mike Davis has analyzed this movement in the microcosm of Los Angeles, where a complex pattern of triage and terror has already emerged to prove him a prescient prophet, whose brand of geomancy reads the bones of buildings and entrails of urban space rather than natural features of animals or landscape. (Inasmuch as culture has an unconscious it disgorges magic signs and symbols not the smoke of burnt oerings but of burning cop cars.) I believe this process will speed up to the point where it will be quite obvious, in 5 to 10 years, that portions of America are no longer on the map. They will produce no growth, neither will they consume, and they will no longer be serviced by any of the spectacles vanishing bureaux IRS, Healthcare, military/police, social security, communication and education. These areas (economic/social/geographic) will cease to exist for all practical purposes of control. The consuming classes will leave these areas and move elsewhere, either socially or geographically or both simultaneously. Having been seduced by the commodity, we will be abandoned by it or rather, they will be abandoned, the alien others who were never really part of it in the rst place. Interestingly, however, this them will gradually come to include more and more individuals and groups who now think of themselves as us the heirs of that great Bourgeois Rational sun-lit world which the spectacle still simulates and preserves the ones with rights, the ones who are safe and destined to survive. Triage will be practised in these zones as well. The cracks in the monolith will widen, and a lot of us will miss that last helicopter out of town. I could move to Boulder or Portland now, hang on to my rentier status, survive as a licensed clown on the margin of the spectacle and believe me the temptation is real enough. Those no-go zones are not going to be very comfortable theyre not going to be utopias they might even end up nasty as the resurgent fascist statelets of E. Europe in the wake of 1989. Who would volunteer to live in Bosnia (or South L.A.) simply because disorder and violence can produce wild freedoms as well as

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sheer panic and genuine horror? As for specto-simulo-capital itself, its next (and perhaps nal?) stage will consist of the Empire of pure Speed the instantaneity of communications technology, elevated to the status of transcendent being (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence): a kind of TechGnosis in which the body (earth, production) will be transcended under the sign of pure spirit (information). This will unveil the terminal false transcendence or totality of the commodity: the nal disembodiment of desire, the absolute otation of the signier language as gnostic prison, and death the last bargain holiday special. The lines of this structure are already being laid, and a map of these lines transforms itself into a map of the future, or at least of future History. If we study this embryonic or ontogenic map we can see clearly that the South has already been cut out of the pattern, by an act of cartomantic imperialism that denies meaning to the same areas which have been denied access to the Commlinks. The South will not enter the paradise of information for information is glacial crystalline ice, while the South is the realm of re and noise. And indeed the South is (or will become) the body, the realm of everything which is not pure spirit and information, everything heavy and mortal the realm of agriculture and industry the dark last vestiges of the neolithic of production (that crude demiurgic barrier to the free mutagenesis of signicance and the free exchange of emblems and images of pure information). The South will supply us with microchips and soylent green, so we can all jack into virtual reality and download our consciousness (what a relief!) into the software. The information economy may have already begun to cut its ties with the material economy its not at all clear that certain kinds of money retain any link even a symbolic link with actual social wealth. This is virtual money. In the context of specto-simulo-capital this money is hyperreal, and thus seems more powerful than money which is merely real and still tied to the material bodily principle. In this scenario we can nally let our servants live for us (Maldoror) while we go on and rise up to something better. The machine is not our servant (as some old sci- authors believed) but rather our symbiont. Our servant is the South.

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So part of the North disappears into Cyberspace, leaving the other part deserted and bereft, no-go zones, cracks in the monolith. What could be more natural than this: that the South will interpenetrate the North like mycelia in a loaf of bread? The holes and cracks in the North will become more Southern, more African, more Latino, more Asiatic, more Islamic. (P.K. Dick, a true Gnostic visionary, seems particularly prophetic on this point.) Now the crucial question: is it possible to imagine the no-go-zone fullling a liberatory function? (in any way other than as a reversion to primitive warfare interesting perhaps to a few Neitzschean Vikings?) that is, do the NGZs play any necessary role in the emergence of the Temporary Autonomous Zone or even the Permanent Autonomous Zone? Does the NGZ represent in some weird paradoxical way the rebirth of the possibility of the social? Forget political autonomy no Republic of the South Bronx or Free State of Western Wisconsin no Libertarian enclaves or anarchist liberated zones, no Ecotopia, no New Afrika, etc., etc. The spectacle (even in its last gasp) will ruthlessly destroy anyone who threatens its monopoly of spectacular authority. The TAZ, the clandestine time/space society of the festival, provides a much more realistic model for the NGZs than the model of micronationalism. The important thing is not postage stamps or ags the image of freedom (freedom as commodity) but the reality of freedom on the level of everyday life. We can forego the emblematism of power for the possibility of power over our destinies (or at least of unmediated failure!). The sine qua non for the NGZ as a possible locus for liberation consists of the implementation of an economy adequate to this function; and the implementization of such an economy depends (at least in part) on an idea of the social. So far neither of theses stages has emerged in any but the crudest preliminary outline so here we shift the burden of this text from prediction to prescription. Well try to imagine what we could do right now to turn the NGZs into autonomous zones, and snatch our freedom even in hell even from the Lord of the Flies. Is it possible to picture an economy for the NGZs which would relate somehow (in countless and complex ways) with the economy of the South which is already beginning to appear in marginal areas of the

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North where control is shaky? Im not at all sure what this would mean, but I picture an advanced and borderless stage of bricolage, not just of things but of entire systems and fragments of systems. I envision an alternative communications system, self-organized and non-hierarchic what I call a web rather than a net which might make use of some cyberpunk ideas, but only the poor ones and the rough ones (and really, fuck cyberspace Id rather live in New Jersey!). I see not only black work (lavoro nero, a ne art in Italy) but also black service, black production, and black exchange used in alternative (but not purely PC) technology. I suspect well have a technology more human than green, more concerned with farming or permaculture and low-tech ad-hocism than with wilderness and deep ecology. The green aspect of our tech will arise not out of any sentimental predilections but from inescapable economic logic, the mad logic of briocolage and the poor logic of recycling. These ideas are not specically utopian in the maximal sense, but we can admit them as adequate to the concept of the utopian minimum (Fourier) and for this reason, these forms of technology will involve at least some satisfaction which is not at all the case with commodity economy (based as it is in the surplus of the image as mask for the scarcity of good). The economy I forsee will not adhere exclusively to any current model, neither the entrepreneurial humanism of the Libertarians nor the Associational schemes of Socialism, but will concoct a melange of whatever works within a very broad framework of organic non-authoritariansim. The NGZ must be self-organized in nonhierarchic form, or else fall prey to crimino-fascism or sheer entropy; no other possibility seems very probable, or at least very palatable! Were looking at vacua of control if we dont ll the NGZ with positive chaos, it will be lled with negative chaos. This line of thought predicts that the NGZ will develop at least one political form the Peoples Militia which can all too easily be mistaken for (or become) a vigilante committee. Only an economics which resists hierarchization, not out of ideological conviction but rather out of sheer will to power, can guarantee that the Peoples Militia will not become the posse of the secret elite. A vital task in the present: to imagine and to begin setting up the conditions for such an economy now, in the pre-NGZ areas where it can already serve a real function i.e., by providing good things

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(as the IWW Preamble calls them); and by preparing the kernel of the new social within the (rotting) shell of the old, to paraphrase the Wobbly manifesto. By the way, syndicalism has a future only in the NGZs, where production will actually be capitalized directly by labor and by simple accumulation, in part amidst the ruins of the early industrial era Bayonne, New Jersey, Detroit, Michigan, etc. where the NGZ will rst blossom in all its appalling ugliness. The same holds true for all forms of agrarian radicalism that is, no future except in the rural NGZs; all this, however, not as a Museum of the Social, but as a living mutating (drifting) situational praxis or nomadic bricolage of social models reallife experiments based on dire necessity and the obsessive passion for freedom. No one will willingly risk life in the NGZ for mere ideology but the ulility of certain utopian models can be tested. To speak of such models however brings up the question of the idea of the social, which is (according to a very loose categorization) either political or religious. Weve assumed that the NGZ has abandoned or been abandoned by the political. Can it be that the idea of the social appropriate to the NGZ is religious in nature? I mention this for two reasons: (1) religion has not gone away, as predicted by Rationalism, and (2) religion has proven to be a powerful source for social cohesion, for example, in the history of intentional communities more powerful than political ideology or utopian planning. I hypothesize the possibility and reality of non-authoritarian, autonomous, self-organized, non-hierarchic aspects of the huge complex subsumed in the word religion shamanism, for example, or the multivalent and innitely expandable pattern of paganism, in which no culture can gain a monopoly of interpretation, or even a hegemony. Im not saying the NGZ should be religious, Im saying it will be religious, and is religious and that if we believe in the desire for some liberatory potential in the NGZ, we should begin now to nd a religious language that will reect and help to shape and realize that potential or else we will face a religion of fascism (xtian right-wingers attempting to dominate the NGZs) or a spirituality of entropy. One good reason, for instance, to ransack the history of Protestantism for radical models (Ranters, Diggers, Antinomians, etc.) would be to resurrect them and not merely to serve as camouage.

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Earth and body forms of spirituality (shamanic, neo-pagan, Afro-American, etc) immanentist rather than transcendentalist emphasizing an existentialism of works not faith, hence ethicalism not moralism radical tolerance for all cults (on the pagan model) distrust of dualist models but also of totalitarian-monist models mystical but not ascetic festal but not sacricial. These would be some of the models proposed by our form of spirituality. None of the established means of propagating a religion would be appropriate here, however. Just as we need now to re-imagine the Economy of the Gift, so also we need to re-invent (or even to fabricate) a spirituality of freedom relevant to our future as inhabitants of the NGZs a spirituality of everyday life in the situ sense of the word. Im thinking of certain old European genre paintings which always fascinated me as a child, depicting peasants or gypsies living in the ruins of some vanished empire usually Roman. The images appealed to a Bachelardian sense of reverie and magic about certain kinds of home, certain kinds of space. I like the sense of abandonment implied in the paradox of abandoned ruins brought to life by abandoned bohemians, low-lifes, Breughelian ddlers and dancers the contrast of the heavy remains of vanished triumphalism with the lightness and brightness of nomads. I may very well be romanticizing the NGZ as a possible utopian topos or site but then again, I might be inclined to defend the occasional usefulness of romanticism: it beats despair. The NGZ is on the way, whether we dread it or romanticize it.

Retrieved on April 23 rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/nogozone.html

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The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory

(for Kevin Coogan) Is conspiracy theory a delusion of the Right which has infected the Left as well? Leftist Conspiracy Theorists sometimes make uncritical use of the texts of Rightest Conspiracy Theorists delving into the work of the Liberty Lobby for JFK Assassination tidbits, picking up Birchist notions about the CFR/Bilderberg/Rockefeller liberal internationalists, etc., etc. Since anti-semitism can be found on the Left as well as the Right, echoes of the Protocols may be heard from both directions. Even some anarchists are attracted to Historical Revisionism. Anticapitalism or economic populism on the Right has its counterpoint on the Left in Red Fascism, which broke the surface of History in the Hitler/Stalin Pact, and has come back to haunt us in the bizarre European Third Wave amalgamation of Right and Left extremism, a phenomenon which emerges in the USA in the libertine nihilism and satanism of anarchofascist groups like Amok Press and Radio Werewolf and conspiracy theory plays a big role in all these ideologies. If conspiracy theory is essentially right wing, it can only be so because it posits a view of History as the work of individuals rather than groups. According to this argument, a Mae Brussel-type theory (she believed that Nazis had penetrated American Intelligence and Government at policy level) may appear Leftist but in fact provides no sustenance for genuine dialectical analysis, since it ignores economics and class struggle as causal forces, and instead traces all events to the machinations of hidden individuals. Even the anti-authoritarian Left may sometimes adopt this low opinion of conspiracy theory, despite the fact that it is not bound by any dogmatic belief in economic determinism. Such anarchists would agree that to believe in conspiracy theory is to believe that elites can inuence History. Anarchism posits that elites are simply carried by the ow of History and that their belief in their own power or agency is pure illusion. If one were to believe otherwise, such anarchists argue, then Marx and Lenin would be correct, and conspiratorial vanguardism would be the best strategy for the movement of the social. (The existence of vanguardism proves that the Left or at least the authoritarian Left has not merely been tainted accidentally with conspiracy theory: vanguardism IS conspiracy!) The Leninists say the state is a conspiracy, either of Right or Left-take your choice. The anarchists argue that the

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state does not have power in any absolute or essential sense, but that it merely usurps the power which, in essence, belongs to each individual, or to society en masse. The states apparently conspiratorial aspect is therefore illusory mere ideological wanking on the part of politicians, spies, bankers and other scum, blindly serving the interests of their class. Conspiracy Theory is therefore of interest only as a kind of sociology of culture, a tracking of the delusory fantasies of certain in-groups and outgroups but conspiracy theory itself has no ontological status. This is an interesting theory with a great deal of merit, especially as a critical tool. However, as an ideology, it suers from the same aw as any other ideology. It constructs an absolute Idea, then explains reality in terms of absolutes. The authoritarian Right and Left share a view of the ontological status of elites or vanguards in History; the antiauthoritarian response is to shift the ontological-Historical weight to individuals or groups; but neither theory has bothered to question the ontological status of History, or for that matter of ontology itself. In order either to conrm or deny conspiracy theory categorically one must believe in the category of History. But since the 19 th century History has fragmented into dozens of conceptual shards ethnohistory, psycho-history, social history, history of things and ideas and mentalities, cliometrics, micro-history these are not competing ideologies of History, but simply a multiplicity of histories. The notion that History is made by great men, or that History is the outcome of blind struggle between economic interests, or that History is anything specic at all, cannot really survive this fragmentation into an innity of narratives. The productive approach to such a complex is not ontological but epistemological; i.e., we now ask not what History is, but rather what and how we can know of and from the many many stories, erasures, appearances and disappearances, palimpsests and fragments of the multiple discourses and multiple histories of the inextricably tangled complexities of human becoming. Thus we might posit (as an epistemological exercise if nothing else) the notion that although human beings are carried along or moved by class interests, economic forces, etc., we can also accept the possibility of a feedback mechanism, whereby the ideologies and actions of both individuals and groups can modify the very forces which produce them.

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In fact it seems to me that as anarchists of one sort or another we must adopt some such view of matters, or else accept that our agitation, education, propaganda, forms of organization, uprisings, etc., are essentially futile, and that only evolution can or will bring about any signicant change in the fabric of society and life. This may or may not be true of the long duree of human becoming, but it is manifestly not true on the level of individual experience of everyday life. Here a kind of rough existentialism prevails, such that we must act as if our actions could be eective, or else suer in ourselves a poverty of becoming. Without the will to self-expression in action, we are reduced to precisely nothing. This is unacceptable. Therefore, even if one could prove that all action is illusion (and I do not believe that any such proof is available), we would still face the problem of desire. Paradoxically we are forced (on pain of utter negation) to act as if we freely choose to act, and as if action can bring about change. On this basis it seems possible to construct a non-authoritarian theory of conspiracy theory which neither denies it altogether nor elevates it to the status of an ideology. In its literal sense of breathing together, conspiracy may even be thought of as a natural principle of anarchist organization. Face to face, unmediated by any control, together we construct our social reality for ourselves. If we must do so clandestinely, in order to avoid the mechanisms of mediation and control, then we have perpetrated a kind of conspiracy. But more: we can also see that other groups may organize clandestinely not to avoid control but to attempt to impose it. Its pointless to pretend that such attempts are always futile, because even if they fail to inuence History (whatever that is), they can certainly intersect with and impact upon our everyday lives. To take one example, anyone who denies the reality of conspiracy must face a dicult task indeed when attempting to explain away the activities of certain elements within Intelligence and the Republican Party in the USA over the last few decades. Never mind the Kennedy Assassination, that spectacular boondoggle; forget the remnants of the Gehlen Org who were lurking around Dallas; but how can one even begin to discuss Nixons plumbers, Iran/Contra, the S&L crisis, the show-wars against Libya, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq, without some recourse to the concept of conspiracy? And even if we believe that the conspirators were acting

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as agents of blind forces, etc., etc., can we deny that their actions have actually produced ramications on the level of our own everyday lives? The Republicans launched an open War on Drugs, for example, while secretly using cocaine money to nance right wing insurgency in Latin America. Did anyone you know die in Nicaragua? Did anyone you know get caught up in the hypocritical war on marijuana? Did anyone you know fall into the misery of crack addiction? (Lets not even mention the CIAs heroin dealing in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.) As Carl Oglesby points out, sophisticated conspiracy theory posits no single, all-powerful, over-riding cabal in charge of History. That would indeed be a form of stupid paranoia, whether of the Left or the Right. Conspiracies rise and fall, spring up and decay, migrate from one group to another, compete, collude, collide, implode, explode, fail, succeed, erase, forge, forget, vanish. Conspiracies are symptoms of the great blind forces (and hence useful as metaphors if nothing else), but they also feed back into those forces and sometimes even aect or eect or infect them. Conspiracies, in eect, are not the way history is made, but are rather parts of the vast complex of myriads of ways in which our multiple stories are constructed. Conspiracy Theory cannot explain everything but it can explain something. If it has no ontological status, nevertheless it does have its epistemological uses.

Heres a hypothesis:
History (small h) is a kind of chaos. Within history are embedded other chaoses, if one can use such a term. Late democratic Capitalism is one such chaos, in which power and control have become exceedingly subtle, almost alchemical, hard to locate, perhaps impossible to dene. The writings of Debord, Foucault, and Baudrillard, have broached the possibility that power itself is empty, disappeared, and been replaced by the mere violence of the spectacle. But if history is a chaos the spectacle can only be seen as a strange attractor rather than as some sort of causative force. The idea of force belongs to classical physics and has little role to play in chaos theory. And if capitalism is a chaos and the spectacle is a strange attractor, then the metaphor can be extended: 267

we can say that the Republican conspiracies are like the actual patterns generated by the strange attractor. The conspiracies are not causal but, then, nothing is really causal in the old classical sense of the term. One useful way in which we can, so to speak, see into the chaos that is history, is to look through the lens provided by the conspiracies. We may or may not believe that conspiracies are mere simulations of power, mere symptoms of the spectacle but we cannot dismiss them as empty of all signicance. Rather than speak of conspiracy theory we might instead try to construct a poetics of conspiracy. A conspiracy would be treated like an aesthetic construct, or a language-construct, and could be analyzed like a text. Robert Anton Wilson has done this with his vast and playful Illuminati fantasy. We can also use conspiracy theory as a weapon of agitprop. Conspiracies of power make use of sheer disinformation; the least we can do in retaliation is to trace it to its source. Indeed we should avoid the mystique of conspiracy theory, the fantasy that conspiracy is all-powerful. Conspiracies can be blown. They can even be defeated. But I fear they cannot simply be ignored. The refusal to admit any validity to conspiracy theory is itself a form of spectacular delusion-blind belief in the liberal, rational, daylight world in which we all have rights, in which the system works, in which democratic values will prevail in the long run because Nature has so decreed it. History is a big mess. Maybe conspiracies dont work. But we have to act as if they do work. In fact the non-authoritarian movement not only needs its own conspiracy theory, it needs its own conspiracies. Whether they work or not. Either we all breath together or we each suocate on our own. They are conspiring, never doubt it, those sinister clowns. Not only should we arm ourselves with conspiracy theory, we should have our own conspiracies our TAZs our ontological guerilla commando hit-squads our Poetic Terrorists our chaos cabals our secret societies. Proudhon said so. Bakunin said so. Malatesta said so. Its anarchist tradition.

Retrieved on 3 February 2011 from http://hermetic.com/bey/conspire.html

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The Periodic Autonomous Zone

I would guess that the old life way of transhumancy always proved both enjoyable and practical, at least in small scale economies. Twice a year you get up and move, travel, change your life and even your diet a taste of nomadic freedom. But always the same two places. One place is typically more heimlich than the other the village, the hearth; while the other place is typically wilder than the rst, and this one might be called the place of Desire, of Summer. In the tales of Finn Mac Cumal and his Fenian band we nearly always meet them at this wilder end of the spectrum, the greenwood, the landscape of the hunt which reaches back in time to a more golden pre-agricultural age, and also aslant in time to Tir nan Og, the Land of Summer, realm of the Tuatha de Danaan, who are both the Dead and the Fairies. We forget that the Fenians spent only half the year free in the forests. They were like transhumants they owed the other half of the year to work (military service) for the King. In this respect they resembled the Irish peasants, who until recently practiced pastoral transhumancy. Traces may survive even now. Irish folklore certainly preserves the image of this Summertime freedom; Nature always seems somehow interlaced and even confused with Culture in Irish tradition (as in the zoomorphic capitals of the Book of Kells), in ways which have often impressed the foreign observer as uniquely Irish. Elizabethan colonists compared native Irish with native American Indians: both were perceived as wild and both received the same treatment from the English. Transhumancy gives a people the chance to remain in touch with Nature in its merrie aspect (as Morton of Merrymount would have phrased it), even if that peoples economic life is virtually dened by agriculture, peonage, and drudgery. This explains the radical aspect of poaching, from Robin Hood to the Black Laws, and also the universal human romanticization of hunting. This romanticism begins already even in hunter/ gatherer societies, where the prestige (and fun) of the hunt provides far less food for the tribe than the (comparative) drudgery of gathering and the romanticism continues to this day. I think of my two late uncles, who cultivated the country romance of the hunt like characters out of Turgenievs Sketchbook. I nd it impossible to despise this romanticism, which appears to me so clearly as the last remnant of Paleolithic freedom in a world given over to the gridwork of the plow and the highway.

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In eect Romanticism itself can be said to revolve (if not resolve) around this tension in the Nature/Culture spectrum. The transhumant must be a sort of practical romantic, an ambulatory schizophrenic who functions as a personality, split between the magnetic poles, and ambulating back and forth according to the weather. Winter / Summer village / mountain or forest work / play agriculture / festival pastoralism/hunt reside (axes of bothy (the hut of greenery) narrative the year) adventure reverie / desire etc. When agriculture reproduces itself, through a process of further rationalization and abstraction, and creates industrial culture, then the split widens beyond breaching. The transhumants lose the basic structure of their economy through enclosure of village commons and loss of forest rights or traditional grazing lands. Pure nomads, who provide (as Ibn Khaldun recognized) a necessary dialectic tension in traditional (agricultural) societies, become redundant in the Industrial regime but they do not disappear. The Tinkers and Travelers still roam around Ireland as in the 18 th and 19 th centuries (and perhaps even in prehistory). But the transhumants are simply doomed. The liminal space they once occupied, in between settlement and nomadry, in between Culture and Nature, has simply been erased. The psychic space of transhumancy however cannot be so easily disappeared. No sooner does it vanish from the map but it re-appears in Romanticism in the new-found appreciation for landscape and even wilderness, in Nature worship and Naturphilosophie, in tours of the

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Alps, in the Parks movement, in picnics, in nudist camps, in the Summer cottage, even in the Summer vacation. Nowadays reformers want children to attend school year round, and they criticize the summer vacation of two or three months as an inecient remnant of an agricultural economy. But from the (romantic) viewpoint of children, summer is sacred to freedom a temporary (but periodic) autonomous zone. Children are diehard transhumants. To a certain extent and from a certain point of view we now inhabit a post-industrial world; and it has been noted that precisely to the extent that this is so, nomadism has reappeared. This has its good aspects (as in Deluze and Guattari) and its bad aspects as for instance in tourism. But what has become of transhumancy in this new context? What situations might we elucidate by seeking out its traces? A very clear trace or remnant of psychic transhumancy expressed itself in the 1920s 1950s in America as the summer camp movement. A great many of these camps were inspired by various progressive and radical tendencies naturism, communism and anarchism, Reicheanism and other psychological schools, oriental mysticism, spiritualism a plethora of marginal forces. The utopian rural commune like Brook Farm was diluted into a low-cost summer vacation for cranks. During the same period countless thousands of vacation communities were created, with cabins only a bit less primitive than those of the camps. My family owns one in a decaying lakeside resort-town in Upstate New York, where all the streets are named after Indians, forests, wild animals. These humble communities represent the individualist or entrepreneurial version of the summer camps communalism; but even now some vestiges of seasonal communitarian spirit survive in them. As for the camps, eventually the majority began to cater to children, those natural citizens of summer. As the price of sheer hedonistic idleness went up and up, soon only the children of the well-to-do could aord camp and then not even them. One by one the camps began to close, a slow decline over the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Desperate measures are still attempted (Marxist Computer Slim-down Camp; neo-pagan gatherings and holistic seminars, etc.) but by now the Summer Camp almost seems like an anachronism.

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Now the Summer Camp may be an extremely watered-down version of the utopia of transhumancy much less the utopia of utopia! but I would argue that it is worth defending, or rather, worth re-organizing. If the old economics failed to support it, perhaps a new economics can be envisioned and realized. In fact such a tendency has already appeared. As old Summer Camps go bankrupt and come on the market, a few are acquired by groups who try to preserve them as camps (with perhaps some year-round residents), either as private or semi-private summer communes. Some of these neo-camps will simply serve as vacation retreats for the groups who acquire them; but others will need extra funding, and will thus be drawn into experiments in subsistence gardening, craft work, conference-organizing, cultural events, or some other semi-public function. In this latter case we can speak of a neo-transhumancy, since the camp will serve not simply as a space of leisure but also as a space of work for the primary participants. Summer work appears to the transhumant as a kind of play by comparison with village labor. Pastoralism leaves time for some arcadian pleasures unknown to full-time agriculture or industry; and the hunt is pure sport. (Play is the point of the hunt; game is a bonus.) In somewhat the same way the neo-summer camp will have to work to get by, but its labor will be self-managed and self-owned to a greater extent than Winters wages, and it will be work of a festal nature recreation, hopefully in the original sense of the word or even creation. (Artists and craftsfolk make good citizens of Summer.) If the economy determined the downfall of the old summer camp movement, the state played a role as well: regulations, restrictions, precautions, insurance requirements, codes, etc., helped raise the real cost of running a camp above the level of feasibility. One might almost begin to suspect that the State somehow felt the camp movement as some vague sort of threat. For one thing, camps escape the daily gaze of control, and are removed from the ow of commodities and information. Then too, camps are suspiciously communal, focuses of possible resistance to the alienation and atomization of consumerism and modern democracy. Camps have an erotic subversiveness to them, as every ex-Summer-camper will testify, a wildness and laxness of superego, an air of Misrule, of Midsummer Nights dreams, skinny-dipping,

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the crush, the languor of July. The camp cannot be reconciled to the ideal of the industrial production of leisure (holiday package) and the reproduction and simulation of summer as a theme park, the vacation process, the systematic emptying-out of all dierence, all authentic desire. Inasmuch as the State distrusts the camp, the neo-camp will (to that extent) need to cultivate certain forms of invisibility or social camouage. One possible disguise for the neo-camp however would be to assume the precise guise of an old-fashioned half-bankrupt summer camp. After all, the Summer camp is not illegal, and if your group can meet the insurance requirements, why not t yourselves into an already-existing archetype? Provided youre not running a kids camp, or an openly-proclaimed Anarcho-Nudist retreat, you might be able to pass yourselves o as just another bunch of harmless make-believe Indians with a months vacation to waste. My defense of the summer (neo-)camp is based on two simple premises: one, a month or two of relative freedom is better than absolutely none; two, its aordable. Im assuming that your group is not made up of nomads or full-time freedom ghters, but of people who need to work for a living or are stuck in a city or burb most of the year potential transhumants. You want something more than a summer vacation you want a summer community. Splashing in a humble Adirondack lake is more pleasureable to you than Disney World provided you can do it with the people you like. Sharing the costs makes it possible, but also makes it an adventure in communicativeness and mutual enhancement. Making the place pay for itself or even turn a little o-the-books prot would transform your group into true neotranshumants, with two economic focuses in your lives. Even if you seek legal status (as a tax-exempt educational center religious retreat, or Summer camp) your proprietorship aords you a certain degree of privacy which if used discreetly can exceed all legal bounds in terms of sex, nudity, drugs, or pagan excess. As long as you dont frighten the horses or challenge local interests, youre simply another bunch of Summer people, and as such expected to be a bit weird. Of all the versions of the TAZ imagined so far, this periodic or seasonal zone is most open to criticism as a social palliative or an Anarchist

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Club Med.: Its saved from mere selshness however by the necessary fact of its self-organization. Your group must create the zone you cant buy it pre-packaged from some tourist agency. The summer camp cant be the social Revolution, true enough. I suppose it could be called a training-camp for the Uprising, but this sounds too earnest and pretentious. I would prefer simply to point to the desperation felt by many for just a taste of autonomy, in the context of a valid romanticism of Nature. Not everyone can be a neo-nomad but why not at least a neotranshuman? What if the uprising doesnt come? Are we never to regain the land of summer even for a month? Never vanish from the grid even for a moment? The summer camp is not the war, not even a strategy but it is a tactic. And unmediated pleasure, after all, is still its own excuse.

Retrieved on April 23 rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/periodic.html

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Primitives and Extropians

The anarcho-primitivists have backed themselves into a situation where they can never be satised without the total dissolution of the totality. Luddism as a tactic has much to recommend it: on the local level, machine-smashing can actually accomplish something. Even one or two nuclear reactors have been shut down by sabotage (legal, political, or actual) and one can always gain at least a moment of satisfaction with a wooden shoe or a monkey wrench. On a global level however the strategic level the totality of the neo-primitive critique of the totality itself begins to take on a disturbing air of totalitarianism. This can bee seen most clearly in certain strains of deep ecology and ecofascism, but it remains an inherent problem even in the most left-wing strains of primitivism. The puritan impulse purication, the realization of purity imparts a certain rigidity and aggression to all possible actions on behalf of such a total critique. This must seem especially the case when the critique extents beyond, say, urban civilization (or History) into the prehistoric realm of art, music, techn, language, and symbolic mediation itself. Short of some hypothetically natural evolution (or devolution) of the very species, how precisely is such purity to be attained? Primitivism in eect has proposed an absolute category the primitive itself which assumes the function of a metaphysical principle. Of course the primitive in its true essence remains beyond denition (beyond symbolic mediation), but until mediation itself is abolished, the primitive must assume (in relation to all other possible totalities) the philosophical trappings of an imperative, and even of doctrine. This brings us perilously close to the notorious violence of the sacred. The deepest of this violence is directed at the self, since the reication of the eschaton (either in the future or the past) precisely devalues the present, the place where we are actually living our everyday lives. But invariably the violence must be directed outwardly as well. Fine, you say: let the shit come down. Yet the successful resolution of the violence (i.e., the total abolition of symbolic mediation) can logically be dened only by a presumptive vanguard of the pure. The principle of hierarchy has thus reappeared but hierarchy contradicts the initial premises of primitivism. This, I believe, can be called a tragic contradiction. On the level of the individual and of everyday life such a contradiction can only manifest as ineectuality and bitterness.

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By contrast, the anarcho-Extropian or futurians are also forced to reify the eschaton since the present is obviously not the utopia of techn they envision by placing perfection in a future where symbolic mediation has abolished hierarchy, rather than in a past where such mediation has not yet appeared (the ideal Paleolithic of the primitivists). Obviously for the Extropians, mediation per se cannot be dened as impurity or as the invariable source of separation, alienation, and hierarchy. Nevertheless, it remains obvious that such separation does in fact occur, that it amounts to immiseration, that it is bound up in some way with techn and mediation, that not all technology is liberating according to any anarchist denition of the term, and that some of it is downright oppressive. The Extropian therefore lacks and needs a critique of technology, and of the incredibly complex relation between the social and the technical. No one with any intelligence can any longer accept the notion of technology as morally neutral, with control of the means of production the only criteria for valuation. The social and the technological are somehow bound in a complex relation of co-creation (or coevolution), such that techn shapes cognition even as cognition shapes techn. If the extropian vision of the future is viable it cannot depend on machine evolution alone to achieve realization. But unless anarchofuturism can develop a critique of technology, it is relegated precisely to this passive role. Invariably a dialectic of good machines and evil machines is developed, or rather of good and evil modes of social-technological relations. This rather manichaean world view however fails to eliminate or even plaster over the contradictions which arise from such premises, and which revolve around the bad-t between human values and machine logic, human autonomy and machine autonomy. As M. de Landa pints out, the autonomous machine derives from and denes the war machine (Taylor developed Taylorism while working in an arsenal). Extropianism has marked cyberspace as the area of struggle for good human/machine relations (e.g. the InterNet), and this struggle has taken on the aspect of a resistance against the militarization of cyberspace, its hierarchization as an Information Highway under centralized management. But what if cyberspace itself is by denition a mode of separation and a manifestation of machine logic? What if the disembodiment inherent in any appearance within cyberspace amounts

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to an alienation from precisely that sphere of everyday life which extropianism hopes to transform and purge of its miseries? If this were so, the results might very well resemble the dystopian situations envisioned by P. K. Dick and W. Gibson; turned inward, this violent sense of contradiction would evoke the kind of futility and melancholia these writers depict. Directed outward, the violence would conjure up other SciFi models such as those of R. Heinlein or F. Herbert, which equate freedom with the culture of a technological elite. Now, when I talk about the return of the Paleolithic I nd myself leaning toward the primitivist position and have consequently been criticized by extropians for luddoid reaction, nostalgism, and technophobia. However, when I talk about (say) the potential use of the InterNet in organizing a TAZ, I begin to tilt a little toward my old SciFi enthusiasms and sound a bit like an extropian and have consequently been criticized by primitivists for being soft on technology (like some sort of melting watch by Dali), seduced by techno-optimism, by the illusion that separation can overcome separation. Both these criticisms are correct to some degree, inasmuch as my inconsistency results from an attempt to think about techn and society without any recourse to an inviolate system of absolute categories. On the one hand, most of my thinking about technology was shaped by the radical ad-hoc-ism and briocolage theory of the 60s and 70s, the appropriate tech movement, which accepts the de facto link between techn and human society, but looks for appropriate ways to shape situations toward low-cost/maximal-pleasure tendencies. In ction a model is attempted by B. Sterling in his short-story Green Days in Brunei, a brilliant imagining of low-tech non-authoritarian solutions to 3 rd world over-population and poverty. In real life a smaller but most exquisite model is provided by the New Alchemy Institute, which turns polluted sinkholes into arcadian springs with low green technologies in cheap installations which are aesthetically beautiful. On the other hand, I prefer the burden of inconsistency (even foolish inconsistency) to the burden of the Absolute. Only an impure theory can do justice to the impunity of the present which, as everyone knows, is only a psychological impossibility caught between a lost past and a nonexistent future. Everyday life is not a category even the body is not a category. Life and the body

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are full of holes, permeable, grotesque ad hoc constructions already compromised with an impure empiricism, fated to drift, to relativism, and to the sheer messiness of the organic. And yet it is precisely here, in this imprecise area of contradiction and vulgar existentialism, that the creative act of autonomy and self-actualization must be accomplished. Critiques can be directed at the past or future, but praxis can only occur in the impure and ontologically unstable here-and-now. I dont want to abandon the critique of past-and-future in fact I need it, in the form of a utopian poetics, in order to situate praxis in the context of a tradition (of festivity and of resistance) and of an anti-tradition (of utopian hope). But I cannot allow this critique to harden into an eschatology. I ask of theory that it remain exible in regard to situations, and able to dene values in terms of the struggle for empirical freedoms (as one modernday Zapatista put it). Revolution no less than Religion has been guilty of promising pie in the sky (as Joe Hill put it) but the real problem of theory is (as Alice put it) jam today. The concept of the TAZ was never intended as an abandonment of past or future the TAZ existed, and will exist but rather as a means to maximize autonomy and pleasure for as many individuals and groups as possible as soon as possible even here and now. The TAZ exists the purpose of the theory has been simply to notice it, help it to dene itself, become politically conscious. The past and future help us to know our true (revolutionary) desires but only the present can realize them only the living body, for all its grotesque imperfection. Suppose we were to ask as anarchists what should be done about the problem of technology after the revolution. This exercise in utopian poetics may help us to clarify the question of desire, and of praxis in the present. The primitivist might argue that there can be no revolution without the abolition of symbolic mediation, or at least of the technological imperative; extropians might say that no revolution can occur without technological transcendence. But both parties must perforce admit a transitional stage, when de facto power has been seized by the Revolution, but the full unfolding of revolutionary society has yet to occur. Lets imagine that the one rough principle agreed upon by everyone is the freedom of the individual from coercion by the group, and the freedom of the (self-organized) group from coercion by all other groups.

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The only price of this freedom is that it damage no other free and autonomous interests. This would seem to be a minimalistic but adequate denition of basic anarchism. At this point the primitivist may hold that the dialectic of freedom moves irrevocably toward the re-appearance of the Paleolithic, albeit at a higher and more conscious level than the rst time around, since this re-appearance will have been announced by revolution, by consciousness. Similarly at this point the extropian may argue that the further unfolding of freedom can only be envisioned as self-directed evolution through the co-creation of humanity and its technology. Fine and dandy. But now what? Are these two anarchist tendencies going to become armies and ght it out to the last recalcitrant computer jock or neo-wild-man? Are they going to force their visions of the future on each other? Would such action be consistent with the basic anarchist premise of mutual non-coercion? Or would it reveal each of these tendencies to be awed by destructive and tragic contradictions? Ive said before that in such a situation, the problem of technology can be solved only by the principle of revolutionary desire. Since weve ruled out coercion of all those who accept the premise of mutual non-coercion, all competing models of utopia are submitted to the crucible of desire. How much do I want a computer? I cant force Taiwanese and Mexican women to make silicon chips for slave wages. I cant pollute other peoples air with some outrageous plastic factory to make consoles. Im free to have a computer, but I must meet the price of mutual non-coercion. Or how much do I want the wilderness? I cant force people to get out of my forest now because its also their forest. I can do what I want with my share of the forest, but only at the agreed-upon price. If my neighbors desire to plant wheat, or handcraft ne computers, so long as they respect my Nature I must respect their Culture. Of course we may wrangle about acceptable emission standards or forest preservation about the appropriateness of a given technological or non-technological solution in a given situation but we will accept the price of mutual non-coercion in the form of mess and compromise, impurity and imperfection because empirical freedoms are worth more to us than categorical imperatives. Of course, everyone if free to play this game of utopian poetics with dierent rules, and dierent results. After all, the future does not exist.

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However, I would like to push the implications of my thought-experiment a bit further. I suspect that this utopia would prove disappointing to both the primitives and the extropians. I suspect that a workable utopia would adhere more closely to the messy model than to either of the pure models of the pro-tech/anti-tech theorists. Like bolobolo, I imagine a complex multiplicity of social models co-existing under the voluntary aegis of the social price of mutual non-coercion. In eect the primitivists will get less wilderness than they demand, and the extropians will get less tech. Nevertheless, all but the most fanatical extremists on either side will be reconciled to the messy utopia of desire or so I predict because it will be organized around pleasure and surplus, rather than the denial and scarcity expressed by the totality. The desire for wilderness will be fratied at a level undreamed since the early Neolithic, and the desire for creativity and even co-creation will be gratied at a level undreamed by the wildest science ction. In both cases the means for this enjoyment can only be called appropriate techn green, low energy, high information. I dont believe in the abolition of symbolic mediation, and I dont believe that separation can overcome separation. But I do hypothesize the possibility of a much more immediate and satisfactory experience of creation and conviviality through the human (animal/ animate) scaling of economy and technology and this, however untidy, I would call utopia. If I have disagreed with both primitives and extropians here, it was not to reject them as allies. The only useful purpose served by our after the Revolution game is to shed light on our present situation, and our possible options for concrete action here and now (more or less). It seems to me that both the Ps and Es are quite capable of grasping the theory of messiness and the impure model of the TAZ. A night, a week, a month of relative autonomy, relative satisfaction, relative realization, would be worth far more to most anarchists than a whole lifetime of absolute bitterness, resentment, and nostalgia for the past or future. The most enthusiastic cyberpunk can still embrace the festal body, and the most savage primitives have been known to succumb to civilized impurities such as beer, or art. I fear that a few diehards in both camps will still sneer at our enjoyment of the impure TAZ or the impure uprising because it falls short of the perfect revolution. But realization

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arises only from direct experience, from participation. They themselves admit this. And yet action is always impure, always incomplete. Are they too fastidious? Will nothing suit them both the void wither of wilderness, or of cyberspace? Are they dandies of the Absolute? The TAZ project is one of indiscriminate syncretism, not of exclusion. By disagreeing with both parties we are attempting to reconcile them at least pro tem to a sort of united front or ad hoc tendency, determined to experiment now with various modes of contestation as well as enjoyment, of struggle as well as celebration. The palimpsest of all utopian theories and desires including all redundancies and repetitions forms the matrix of an anti-authoritarian movement capable of lumping together the mess of anarchist, libertarian, syndicalist, council communist, post-situationist, primitivist, extropian and other free tendencies. This union-without-uniformity will not be driven (or riven) by ideology, but by a kind of insurrectionary noise or chaos of TAZs, uprisings, refusals, and epiphanies. Into the nal totality of global capital it will release a hundred blooming owers, a thousand, a million memes of resistance, of dierence, of non-ordinary consciousness the will to power as strangeness. And as capital retreats deeper and deeper into cyberspace, or into disembodiment, leaving behind itself the empty shells of spectacular control, our complexity of anti-authoritarian and autonomist tendencies will begin to see the re-appearance of the Social. But at this present moment the TAZ (in its broadest possible sense) seems to be the only manifestation of the possibility of radical conviviality. Every non-authoritarian tendency should support the TAZ because only there (aside from the imagination) can an authentic taste of life without oppression be experienced. The vital question now concerns the technology of the TAZ, i.e., the means for potentiating and manifesting it most clearly and strongly. Compared to this question, the problems of technology (or of zero-technology) take on an air of theological debate a ghostly and querulous other-worldliness. My critics have a point but its aimed somewhere about 10,000 years in the past, or ve minutes into the future, and misses the mark. I must admit that my own taste inclines neither toward Wilderness World nor spaceship Earth as exclusive categories. I actually spend far more time defending wildness than civilization, because it is far more

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threatened. I yearn for the re-appearance of Nature out of Culture but not for the eradication of all symbolic mediation. The word choice has been so devalued lately. Lets say Id prefer a world of indeterminacy, of rich ambiguity, of complex impurities. My critics, apparently, do not. I nd much to admire and desire in both their models, but cant for even a moment believe in either of them as totalities. Their futurity or eschatology bores me, unless I can mix it into the stew of the TAZ or use it to magic the TAZ into active existence to tease the TAZ into action. The TAZ is broad-minded enough to entertain more than two, or even six, impossible ideas before breakfast. The TAZ is always bigger than the mere ideas which inspire it. Even at its smallest and most intimate the TAZ englobes all totalities, and packs them into the same kaleidoscope conceptual space, the imaginal world which is always so closely related to the TAZ, and which burns with the same re. My brain may not be able to reconcile the wilderness and cyberspace, but the TAZ can do so in fact, has already done so. And yet the TAZ is no totality, but merely a leaky sieve which, in the fairy tale, can carry milk or even become a boat. For the TAZ, technology is like that paper fan in the Zen story, which rst becomes a fan, then a device for scooping cake, and nally a silent breeze.

Retrieved on August 9, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/primitives.html

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Quantum Mechanics & Chaos Theory: Anarchist Meditations on N. Herberts Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics

1. Scientic worldviews or paradigms can inuence or be inuenced by social reality. Clearly the Ptolemaic universe mirrors theocentric & monarchic structures. The Newtonian/Cartesian/mechanical universe mirrors rationalistic social assumptions, which in turn underlie nationalism, capitalism, communism, etc. As for Relativity Theory, it has only recently begun to reect or be reected by certain social realities. But these relations are still obscure, embedded in multinational conspiracies, the metaphysics of modern banking, international terrorism, & various newly emergent telecommunications-based technologies. 2. Which comes rst, scientic paradigm or social structure? For our purpose it seems unnecessary to answer this question and in any case, perhaps impossible. The relation between them is real, but acts in a manner innitely more complex than mere cause-&-eect, or even warp-&-weft. 3. Quantum Mechanics (QM), considered as the source of such a paradigm, at rst seems to lack any social ramications or parallels, almost as if its very weirdness deprives it of all connnections with everyday life or social reality. However, a few authors (like F. Capra, or Science-Fictioneers like R. Rucker or R. Anton Wilson) have seen Quantum Theory both as a vindication of certain oriental philosophies & also as prophetic of certain social changes which might loosely & carelessly be lumped under the heading Aquarian. 4. The mystical systems evoked by our contemplation of Quantum facts tend to be non-dualist and non-theocentric, dynamic rather than static: Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Tantra (both Hindu & Buddhist), alchemy, etc. Einstein, who opposed Quantum theory, believed in a God who refused to play dice with the universe, a basically JudeoProtestant deity who sets up a cosmic speed limit for light. The Quantum enthusiasts, by contrast, prefer a dancing Shiva, a principle of cosmic play. 5. Perhaps oriental wisdom will provide a kind of focusing device, or set of metaphors, or myth, or poetics of QM, which will allow it to 286

realize itself fully as a paradigm & discover its reection on the level of society. But it does not follow that this paradigm will simply recapitulate the social complexes which gave rise to Taoism, Tantra or alchemy. There is no Eternal Return in the strict Nietzschean sense: each time the gyre comes round again it describes a new point in space/time. 6. Einstein accused Quantum Theory (QT) of restoring individual consciousness to the center of the universe, a position from which Man was toppled by Science 500 years ago. If QT can be accused of retrogression, however, it must be something like the anarchist P. Goodmans Stone Age Reaction a turning-back so extreme as to constitute a revolution. 7. Perhaps the development of QM and the rediscovery of oriental wisdom (with its occidental variations) stem from the same social causes, which have to do with information density, electronic technology, the ongoing collapse of Eurocentrism & its Classical philosophies, ideologies & physics. Perhaps the syncresis of QT & oriental wisdom will accelerate these changes, even help direct them. 8. Table of Paradigms With Their Spritual, Political & Economic Parallels I. Paleolithic shamanic non-authoritarian hunter/gatherer II. Neolithic polytheistic authoritarian agricultural III. Earth-centered Cosmos theistic monarchial/theocratic (hierarchical) urban IV. Sun-centered Cosmos monotheistic divine right of kings colonialism & imperialism V. Mechanistic universe deist or atheist democracy, capitalism, communism industrial/technological 287

VI. Relativistic universe Modernism cybernocacy post-industrial (electronic) VII.Quantum universe . . . 9. Just as Modernism here parallels Relativity Theory as a sort of spiritual concomitant, so oriental wisdom seems to attach itself to QT. But what political systems, what economics would derive from this amalgamation? 10. QT, which attempts an explanation of the reality behind Quantum facts, lags far behind QM itself. Unlike Relativity, QM oers no coherent ideas about reality, only a set of statistical possibilities, tools for prediction. QM works but Quantum facts remain unexplained. The excitement of the science for non-scientists lies in the way it seems to have revived speculative philosophy as an integral part of the scientic endeavor: at present, competing theories about Quantum reality rival any occultist or mystical excesses for sheer madness & breathtaking incredibility. In Quantum Reality, physicist Nick Herbert outlines eight philosophies or world views, Quantum Realities, all based on Quantum fact but all dierent. 11. Quantum Reality Number One (QRI) the Copenhagen interpretation. There is no deep reality. Objects, everyday real things, oat on a world that is not as real. (Bohr, Heisenberg.) Emphasis on Uncertainty, and thus comparable to Buddhist Anti-realism or even Berkelean Idealism. The Copenhagen orthodox ontology leads directly to QR2, which posits an observer-created reality in which the act of measurement gives rise to observed reality (The moon is demonstrably not there when no one looks N.D. Mermin). 12. QR3 Reality is an undivided wholeness. Developed by W. Heitler. In this interpretation, the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being. The separation of the world into an objective outside reality and us, the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object

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and subject have become inseparable from each other. According to Bohm, One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts . . . The inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fun damental reality. 13. Capras popularization of this stance in Tao of Physics explores possible leads in Far Eastern mysticism. But none of the orientalists have so far noted a much more relevant metaphysics in susm, especially Ibn Arabis doctrine of the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujud). My intuition says that Ibn Arabi might prove a goldmine to Quantum Theorists, but the mingling of two oceans conjured up by such an imagined confrontation would involve decades of hard labor to grasp & contain & so I leave it to someone else to follow up. 14. Bells Theorem, which proves or seems to prove that Quantum Reality is non-local, bolsters rather than deates what we might call the taoist theory of QM, or in Herberts phrase, QR3. Something in Bells Theorem seems to be violating Einsteins cosmic speed limit some superluminal aether or eld, or Faster-Than-Light particles or telepathic particles! So far this bizarrarie can be experimentally demonstrated only though negative inference; no laboratory hard evidence of such a eld (or whatever) has been uncovered. Randomicity Theory suggests that non-local phenomena will remain inaccessible that superiuminal signaling devices (ansibles in SciFi terminology) will prove impossible to decode, hence useless. However, this remains unproven. If telepathy exists, then human consciousness may already be making use of such codes. 15. QR4 The many worlds interpretation (H. Everett, 1957) suggests that the wave function never collapses that every possible event actually occurs, either in our world or in some instantaneously created alternative universe. The Copenhagenists deny reality altogether; Everett oers innite realities: an elegant solution, so far totally unveriable . . . but . . . SciFi Heaven! (I wish to expropriate

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one of Everetts notions, the non-collapse of the wave function, for my own fanciful synthesis [see below].) 16. QR5 Quantum Logic. What Einstein did to Euclidean geometry, some Quantum physicist/mathematicians hope to do to Boolean (Classical) Logic. Other than making it easier to think about, Im not sure how this new logic would relate to QR but it sounds like a good idea. 17. QR6 Neo-realism. Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger, Bohm & de Broglie have all looked for ways to save the phenomena, to discover & describe Quantum Reality per se, rather than take the disagreeable step of agreeing with Copenhagian anti-realisms (Atoms are not things Heisenberg. There is no quantum world Bohr.) Reconciling the neo-realist project with Quantum facts leads to some very peculiar positionssuch as maintaining that the world is real but non-local. 18. Could it be that the quarrel between anti-realists & neo-realists arises from a semantic problem about the denition of reality? It looks to me as if both sides are maintaining that reality means Classical reality. Thus the Copenhagenists are forced to deny that ordinary objects exist an absurdity while the neo-realists are reduced to looking for loopholes in QM, & seem so far to have been utterly frustrated. But if QR & ordinary reality are both real, modalities of the same one reality, then the dichotomy vanishes like a delusion caused by bad grammar. The only problem then remaining is that of Quantum measurement, which asks in eect how quantumstu becomes ordinary objects? 19. QR7 Consciousness creates reality. Von Neumann posits that only one kind of stu exists, quantumstu, & that ordinary objects are made of it. At some point the wave function, the all-possible nature of quantumstu, collapses into a single statistical probability, a quantum jump which somehow creates the world. Where does this occur? The only logical answer appears to implicate human

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consciousness as the setting of the wave function collapse. Ironic that Von Neumann, the wizard of cybernetics & strategic game theory, should have been forced to develop a math which suggests that human consciousness must be written into any complete explanation of QR. Von Neumanns interpretation is not the same as QR2, observer-created reality, in which the observer could as easily be a measuring device as a human being; QR2 tacitly accepts a basic dualism between a real Classical measuring device, and Quantum unreality itself. Nor does QR7 necessarily imply Buddhist-style antirealism or Idealism: reality exists, but only in conjunction or unity with consciousness. 20. On one hand this trend leads to a kind of neo-Aristotelian neo-Platonism such as QR8, Heisenbergs duplex world of potentials and actualities, in which real objects appear almost as manifestations or hypostases of a Quantum Reality which is both more abstract & yet more real than everyday things. 21. On the other hand however Von Ns all-quantum explanation of QR harks back to & strengthens the taoist arguments of QR3. Here, rather than a platonic modied non-dualism we get a strong & radical monism, in which matter & consciousness cannot be distinguished except as modalities of a single reality. 22. In eect, might one not say (as in QR4) that the wave function never collapses but that there still remains only one reality? That there has never been a fall from one into two? If QR is non-local, if phase interference & Bells proof mean that all Quantum-particles which connect hologrammatical instantaneous connections with each other if all matter was originally (before the Big Bang) one dimensionless macro-particle/wave then all particles are implicated in all waves, & vice versa. The universe is (as Capra says, quoting Hindu sources) a seamless net of jewels, every jewel reected in every other. The wave function collapse in this case would constitute a mathematical description of a mode of individual consciousness & its awareness of the world, its inherent implicatedness in the totality & oneness of

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that world in fact, its virtual identity with that world. The wave function collapse would then not actually describe a physical event at all; in eect, it would have never happened. The universe is now what it was & ever shall be: one reality. 23. As far as I know, this synthesis of QR3 and QR7 (lucky numbers!) violates current thinking in Quantum Theory & perhaps even the Quantum facts as well. Still . . . science marches on; things may change & become even weirder. I have a strong hunch that the ongoing study of randomicity (e.g. at thermonuclear temperatures) may shed light on QR philosophy in the near future. Another source for the next breakthrough in physics may well come from brain physiology provided it can tear itself away from rat-running & linguistic rat-holes & address itself to the problem of consciousness. New work on the morphogenetic eld in biology looks promising; personally, I feel less enthusiasm for cognitive philosophy & AI research. 24. My groping attempt at a synthesis is suggested by what I call Chaos Theory, which holds to the axiom that reality itself subsists in a state of ontological anarchy. The one gave birth to the two, the two to the 10,000 things but all this IS the tao & nothing but the tao. Yin & yang have no being in themselves, but act as interpenetrating modalities of the tao. The real/unreal dichotomy enslaves us in false consciousness. Looked at from one point of view, nothing is real; from another point of view, everything is real; from another, nothing is real except the Real; from yet another, I am the Real (anaI Haqq, a su koan). These semantricks create a set of paradoxes and the resolution will give us an essentially metalinguistic certainty of beings oneness. Such oneness cannot be structured or dened in any way. It has no ruler and no laws hence, ontological anarchy. 25. On a mathematical (or statistical) level, the chaotic nature of reality may manifest as randomicity; I suspect it manifests in the Uncertainty Principle as well. Whatever the truth of these speculations, I feel that Chaos Theory & Quantum Theory are moving closer & closer together. If this is so, then we may be able to predict some social

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implications of Quantum Theory as a paradigm and thus answer the questions posed in paragraph nine by looking at the social programme of Chaos Theory or ontological anarchy. 26. Chaos Theory, like any good theory, can be applied to anything, from physics to literary criticism just as it can absorb energy from any kind of source, from the heretical spiritual teachings of sus, Ismailis, Ranters, shamans or sorcerers to QM itself. Thus it may provide the link, yoke, nexus or connection between QM & oriental wisdom, & help dene the paradigm were looking for. 27. Chaos Theory predicts that Quantum Theory will fail to turn up any hidden laws, hidden variables that restore some privileged class of objects or perceptions to a status of objective reality at the expense of other objects & perceptions. The anti-realists who recognize only the measuring device as real, & the neo-realists who yearn for a Classical resolution of QMs paradoxes, are simply proposing dierent ways of saving the phenomena or metaphorically, of preserving reality as we know it. Consensus Reality. This project seems doomed from the start at least, to us chaotes. The new paradigm will shatter Consensus Reality, & with it all authoritative representatives of scientic truth. 28. This is not to claim that the solving of Quantum Theory will somehow result in an anarchist Utopia. The predictive power of Chaos Theory seems to falter here. After all, total destruction is as much a type of chaos as the most benign visions of Bakunin or Stirner. In eect the social & economic results of the new paradigm depend on forces other than those described or controlled by the paradigm, whatever its claims to absoluteness. For instance, an economy which mirrors this paradigm will almost certainly involve the abolition of work as we know it (a relic of Classical physics) but what replaces it may either enslave us more miserably than work could ever accomplish, or it may liberate us in harmony with the visions of zero-work radicals, neo-situationists & anarchists.

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29. Similarly Chaos Theory can make no predictions about the development of technologies which mirror the paradigm, such as telepathic signaling, FTL spaceships, ansibles, controlled ESP or other fancies indulged in by fantasists (including me). Social change resists all such sibylline seductions, since it involves the incalculability of consciousness itself, & of human history. I can foresee Quantum dystopias as easily as Utopias. 30. Given all these caveats however. Chaos Theory still envisions a Quantum-Social-Paradigm with distinctly anti-authoritarian implications in one sense a reprise of the Paleolithic/shamanic worldview, in another sense wildly post-postmodern. Such a movement or change would transcend all current denitions of Anarchism, whether communist, syndicalist, libertarian-capitalist or individualist. So far there is no name for what Im talking about. 31. Like Quantum Theory itself, this politique/poetique is still emergent. It can only be sensed as it emerges or begins to emerge from the facts of everyday life, just as Quantum Theory peeps out of the strangeness of Quantum facts. Somewhere in the welter of Quantum Theory & Chaos Theory the paradigm is already bom, & waits for us to assist at the mystery of its naming, of its transmutation from potentiality to actuality. In this action poets & physicists may play equal parts, for the glory of Quantum Theory is that by restoring consciousness to its theorems it has turned science once again into a type of Natural Philosophy or alchemy. 32. Fleshing out the vision of a world somehow based on the mindboggling perceptions of QM linked with the alien realizations of oriental wisdom a world which lives with ideas such as non-locality, particles which travel backwards in time, alternative universes, randomicity at the heart of creation, etc. etc . . . this is properly the work of Utopian Science Fiction at this point in history. Perhaps within a few years it will become the province of revolutionaries, artists, philosophers the unacknowledged legislators of a lawless future anarchs of the new paradigm.

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33. QM is said to be complete but then so are all scientic systems in their moment of power. QM should by no means be fetishized either by scientists or poets, since Quantum Theory itself may hold the seeds of a paradigm which overthrows even QM. The tao which can be spoken is not the tao; the moment Quantum Theory presents itself as complete, it must be at once attacked. Chaos theory seems to predict that Quantum Theory will ourish as long as it remains incomplete, not tied down on any Classical (or even non-Boolean) procrustrean beds-metalogical, metalinguistic, essentially unstructured free, like reality itself which is a state not of Anarchism but of anarchy, even to the very roots of being.

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