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Title: Interview with Hakim Bey
Author: Hakim Bey
Date: 1996
Language: en
Topics: TAZ, immediatism, spirituality
Source: https://hermetic.com/bey/millennium/sermonettes-interview

Hakim Bey

Interview with Hakim Bey

10 July 1996,

New York – Vienna

(by phone)

Q: [The first questions concern the book Immediatism (a.k.a. Radio

Sermonettes) and readers' response to it]:

A: Of course it's meant as a discussion of what people do rather than

what people should do. I'm not interested in preaching, and I don't

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 don't 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 define a space which I feel exists (anyway), that's

a private, even secret space, if you like… clandestine… in which the

whole problem of commodification, 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 reaffirmation 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: You're absolutely right, but it has not really worked that way. It's

true that TAZ [“The Temporary Autonomous Zone”] was part of a book which

caused a little bit of a stir in underground circles or whatever, there

was some publicity involved in this, but in the first place I don't seek

publicity for myself – I'm 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 it's commodification. This is all the media is interested

in, something which can sell products. And there's no product to be sold

here other than a small cheap book or two. In Europe things are slightly

different, there is perhaps one may say a remnant of a public

intelligentsia – which we don't 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 I'm 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 different in Europe perhaps

for these reasons, but in America there's been very little crossover

between my world and the world of media – and when I say that I don't

even mean magazines and newspapers. I'm not even talking about

television and advertising that are really mass media. I'm talking just

about local newspapers. They're just not interested. There's 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, I'm really not trying to be so mysterious or to imply that

there's a secret art which I know and which I'm not sharing. Why I

called it a secret martial art is that it's simply secret because it's

ignored or forgotten. What I mean to say is that living in the body,

being aware 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

don't know exactly, I think it would be different for each person maybe,

and certainly involve a kind of physical creativity that I discuss in

the essays. Unfortunately, I haven't got it down to a science yet that

could be taught in dojos and you get a black belt in it. It hasn't

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 identifies with your stuff? Can

you give examples?

A: I'll 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

won't give his address, though.

Q: There's a lot of frank non-pessimism in what you write, and there's

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, there's an existential choice involved here. I've

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 doesn't seem to me to be any point in giving

more misery or exacerbating unhappiness through some kind of

hyper-intellectual, pyrotechnical writing about unhappiness and the shit

that we all find ourselves in. That's been done plenty. I think first of

all that it doesn't need to be done any more and second of all there's 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 anti-pessimism – I won't say optimism

because that sounds so fatuous, futile; but anti-pessimism is a nice

phrase. And there's a deliberate attempt at that in the writing. Then

again it's 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

don't see any way in which you could say that laughter itself is

counter-revolutionary. This doesn't 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 you're going to accept culture on some

level you're certainly going to have to accept humor. And as long as

you're going to have to accept humor you might as well see humor as

potentially revolutionary. […]

I'm actually not out to raise a lot of laughs. Humor can indeed become

counter-revolutionary if it's simply exalted out of all proportion and

made into the purpose or center of one's art. Well, this could perhaps

be considered frivolity. Again, I would say that it's part of that

natural martial art of the ordinary mind and body, it's 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 don't 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

scientific 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

don't realize it. 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 don't 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 there's that, but then on the other hand

there's spontaneity, there's improvisation, there's the outflow 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 don't think the results

were always very positive. When you improvise in a performance situation

and you're not on, you're not brilliant, the results are totally

disastrous, whereas at least if you had a plan, if you had some kind of

structure that you're 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 it's connected to really exalted consciousness in some department

or another. Perhaps personally I tend more towards the palimpsest than

to improvisation. I wouldn't necessarily want to separate them as a

body-mind 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): I'm glad you asked. It's been over ten years since TAZ was

written and about five years since I worked on those essays on

immediatism and I think quite a lot has changed. I'm just now working on

an essay “Millenium” to try to update some of my thinking. Basically,

I've 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 artificial divisions in history, but it still makes

a kind of convenient way of thinking of it. And it's really taken me

five years personally to figure out the implications of that for my own

thinking. And the way 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. It's a neither/nor position. It's 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 that's the world of global

capital. The world order, the world market, too-late capitalism,

whatever you wanna call it, is now alone and triumphant. It's

determinedly triumphant. It knows it's the winner although really it's

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 we're looking at is one single world. Obviously this one single

world is not going to go without its revolution, it's not going to go

without its opposition, And in fact it's 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 can't talk about the Third World any more

for the one reason that there's no second world. So even this third

world as it used to be is now simply just the slums of the one world.

It's just the no-go zone of that one single unified world of Capital.

Obviously the communists are not going to step back into the position of

opposition. Political Communism has completely shot its load, it's 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, first of

all, this implies that if we're 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 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 difference 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 difference: revolutionary difference. 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

difference it also has to be revolutionary presence (used to be called

solidarity, although this is a word that presents some difficulties; I'd

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

difference and for presence. It's 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 different,

essentially. They want to be left alone in peace to be Mayan Indians,

but they're not forcing anybody else to become Mayan Indians. They're

not even suggesting it. They are different, but they're in solidarity

with all those people around the world who have come to support them,

because their message is very new, it's very fresh and it attracts a lot

of people: the idea that one can be different and revolutionary, that

one can fight 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 first 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 first revolution of the

21st century in the terms that I began with, saying that we're already

at the beginning of a new century, we're already if you like at the

beginning of a millennium. And 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 different 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. It's 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 significance 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 don't know what armies to

join and am always suspicious of joining any army. But things have

definitely changed. I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to figure it

out. I don't 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 1989-1991. So, the

first goal is simply to try to raise consciousness about this and that's

what I hope to do in the near future.

(D. Ender): Do you see any tangible effects 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 they're doing to trying to fill up

some hole in themselves. So I thought, first of all it's just the

influence of TV that's been around since 1947 or whatever, but then I

realized that that's not a sufficient explanation for this kind of

strange passivity. And I began hearing about it from other people who

are involved in public speaking and then finally I read a whole section

about it in Noam Chomsky's 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, what's 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 difficult in

an atmosphere that's completely poisoned by media such that no

oppositional voice is ever really heard. Unless you yourself make the

effort to get down to the alternative media, where that voice is still

feebly speaking, then you're 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 what's happening, especially

in America. I can't really speak of other places to the same degree.

I've traveled in other countries, but one never has the sense of other

countries the way one has the sense of one's own country. But I would

imagine that it's 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 finished 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

mafia is the very model – from that point of view and also from your

talking about Too-Late Capitalism, I'd like to have an image of yours

for how Europe as the EC or EU, which we're sitting right inside of

right now, presents itself from over there.

H.B.: Well, obviously, especially from the breakdown of Communism you're

going to get this smashing up into many little pieces. But it's more

than that. We have to realize that difference 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, let's say, this is a

positive kind of revolution that we could support perhaps. In the case

of the Serbians, it's something else. It's a conservative revolution,

perhaps even a fascistic revolution. It's not really “nationalism”, it's

a form of ethnic imperialism. The point is that people are going to be

emphasizing difference. Look at it this way: If you have your own

culture, let's 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 difference. This is where the

difference is for you. It's in language, it's in cuisine, it's in art,

it's in all of these things. The difference is that difference does not

have to be hegemonistic or fascistic. And this is going to be extremely

difficult 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 differences. Yes,

they had their little Uzbeki folk-dancers, but this is simply a

spectacle of difference, it's not true difference. And we have the same

thing: we have 600 channels – choose one! There's a channel for

everybody. Is this difference? No. This is not really difference. This

is just sameness disguised as difference. But true organic integral

difference is revolutionary, now. It has to be, because it's opposed to

the single world, the mono-world, the mono-culture of capital. So, we

have to choose and we have to influence other people's 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 difference. This is

revolutionary for us. We are defending it.” So it seems to me that

what's happening in Europe on the one hand is this shattering into all

of these fragments, which is a situation where political consciousness

becomes extremely difficult. On the other hand, you have things like the

EEU, which is simply, in my mind, symptomatic of capitalist

mono-culture. 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 difference. It implies difference in a state of balance –

balance which can even include conflict. 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 difference is, what it really

could be. So, this to me is all inevitable. What's 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 21st century, but I don't think it's 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. It's a small enough country where

they could have some real influence. 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, it's like the Dollar is the main authority for everyone

and it's everyone against everyone, and it's very hard to see anything

revolutionary in that. Except that it looks like something very

self-defeating.

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, there's 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 that's

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 don't think it's 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 it's a top priority for

Americans and Western Europeans to show every kind of support for

resistance in Eastern Europe. Whether it's going to work or not, who

knows, you know. But what else have we got to do?

David Ender

Jack Hauser

Christian Loidl