B.2 Hakim Bey and The TAZ
The TAZ should be understood in the light of Bey's inspirations, position on 'the Media' and shift in strategy.
i. The Liberation of Desire.
A 'rootless cosmopolitan' and comparative religionist abnegating fixed positions and hierarchical structures, Bey articulates his project via a chaotic compendium of spiritual and cultural insights ransacked from numerous sources. In Bey's theory of liberation, Blake, Nietzsche and the psychological existentialism of Stirner are inspirational. Further, he champions the 'radical subjectivity' of Charles Fourier (founder of the communal 'phalansteries' where passion is the founding principle of association), and Steven Pearl Andrews (who built a grand utopian scheme he called the 'Universal Pantarchy' and was instrumental in founding several intentional communities including the infamous 'Modern Times' on Long Island) (The Lemonade Ocean 1991b). With Bakunin, Bey acknowledges the critique of the early Marx, yet reveals he is more sympathetic towards the erotic liberatory and mystical tendencies in the likes of Fourier and Pearl Andrews than to the 'cold atheism' or 'fundamental materialism' of Marx. The postmodernism of Deleuze and Guattari is rather implicit, as are pm's 'bolo-bolo' (a permanent urban utopian commune), the writings of Ivan Illich, William Burroughs, and the Situationist art movement (especially Debord). Finally, he draws on the heritage of the Ranters and Antinomians, and incorporates a cocktail of 'radical forms' of Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism and shamanism.
Bey is a proponent of a sophisticated 'individualist anarchism'. While stating that 'psychology precedes economics in [his] theory of liberation' (1991b), he denies subscribing to rigid ideological or psychological forms of individualism or egoism. He claims preference for a 'type-3 anarchism' (a term coined by Bob Black) - 'a radically non-ideological form of anarchism' which is neither individualist nor collectivist, but both (ibid). Advocating what he calls 'convivial individuality', Bey claims it is not merely 'Individual Sovereignty' that he propagates, but 'the free association of individuals' - that is associations that 'depend neither on Capital nor any other form of representation' (ibid).
Arguing that present autonomy can only exist on condition that 'we already know ourselves as free beings' (1991a:133), Bey is a champion of 'psychic liberation'. He inquires:
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. (ibid:98)
For Bey, overcoming 'not individuality per se, but rather the addiction to bitter loneliness which characterizes consciousness in the 20th century' (1994a:14), is paramount. This amounts to an assault on the regulation of desire. Like Blake and Fourier, he seeks the 'total liberation' of desire (Utopian Blues [BL]).
ii. The Enemy - The Media
'The Media' has triumphed and presides over loneliness and alienation. Two general points are made. The first concerns disembodiment and the illusory promise of self-fulfilment. In the battle for the control over the circulation of images - with promises of liberation or self-fulfilment - 'the Media's' gain is the Church's loss. Accordingly, 'when it comes to real power, the churches feel quite empty. The god has abandoned them. The god has his own talk-show now, his own corporate sponsors, his own network'. Moreover, since 'the Media' 'denies meaning to corporeality, to everyday life, just as the Church once defined the body as evil and everyday life as sin', it now becomes the target of our contempt. 'If insurrection once spoke to the Church as heresy, so it must speak now to the Media' (MH).
Second, 'the Media' expresses a 'false consensus' or 'objectivity' (what he calls 'the Totality'). 'The Media' imposes an 'authoritative world-view, far greater than any mere subject - inevitable, inescapable, a veritable force of Nature' (MC). People have become engaged in 'a relation of involution' with 'the Media'. Our relation with it 'is essentially empty & illusory, so that even when we seem to reach out & perceive reality in Media, we are in fact merely driven back in upon ourselves, alienated, isolated, & impotent' (1994a:29). Via simulation, recuperation and commodification, 'the Totality' is successful at subsuming and absorbing the subject or re-directing dissidence - which reinforces its own 'false objectivity'. 'The Media' 'actively recuperates the subject and reproduces it as an element within the great object ... [manufacturing] the perfect commodity: oneself' (MC). Although assaults on its power have been mounted (e.g. during the sixties), the Media resisted 'by opening all image-doors and ingesting its enemies. For, ultimately, one could only appear in the Media as an image, and once one had reduced oneself to this status, one simply joined the shadow-play of commodities, the world of images, the spectacle' (ibid).
iii. Shift: Disappearance to Revolution
In Bey's writing, the chronological shift from disappearance to revolution is clear. The 'insurrection' is associated with withdrawal - 'the will to power as disappearance' (1991a:128). Bey's early advocacy of 'the third force' was premised upon the view that revolutions fail as their trajectory is 'revolution, reaction, betrayal' and the founding of another State (ibid:99). He thought liberation would be realised in insurrection and not derive from reactionary political doctrines. 'Absolutely nothing', he wrote,
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 meagre weaponry finds 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 absorbent eye of the TV screen. (MH)
However, Bey claims history has forced him to reconsider his attitude towards revolution. In Millennium (1996) a revolutionary/oppositional tactic appears - 'the necessary revolution' of the jihad (1996:30). 'Whether we know it or like it or not [he writes] we are the opposition' (ibid:18). Once distrustful of the leftist dogma of revolution, Bey now considers himself as revolutionary and his theory as revolutionary theory (ibid). Following the 1989-91 collapse of Soviet Bloc communism (the second world), and the triumph of the 'mono-culture' of Capital wherein 'money decrees itself the law of Nature, and demands absolute liberty', we enter 'the millennium' (post 1989-91). A federation of autonomous, self-determined and non-communist enclaves, or 'lesser jihad', now become the 'second force', replacing communism in dialectical opposition to capitalism. Here 'presence' and 'difference' - specifically, a 'Proudhonian federalism based on non-hegemonic particularities in a "nomadological" or rhizomatic mutuality of synergistic solidarities' - is the 'revolutionary structure' and cause (ibid:43). The 'lesser jihad' - exemplified by the Zapatistas - seem to correspond to 'permanent autonomous zones' of resistance. And many such zones or groups may coalesce to form the 'millennium' or 'the greater jihad' (ibid:40).