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Title: The Periodic Autonomous Zone Author: Hakim Bey Language: en Topics: Peter Lamborn Wilson, TAZ Source: Retrieved on April 23rd, 2009 from http://www.hermetic.com/bey/periodic.html
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 first, 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 people’s economic life is virtually defined 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 Turgeniev’s Sketchbook. I find 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.
In effect 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
fireside (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
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 inefficient 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 1920’s — 1950’s 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 camp’s 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 afford camp — and then not even them.
One by one the camps began to close, a slow decline over the 70’s, 80’s,
and 90’s. 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.
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 Winter’s 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 flow 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 super-ego, an
air of Misrule, of Midsummer Night’s dreams, skinny-dipping, 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 difference, 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
camouflage. 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 fit yourselves into an
already-existing archetype? Provided you’re not running a kids’ camp, or
an openly-proclaimed Anarcho-Nudist retreat, you might be able to pass
yourselves off as just another bunch of harmless make-believe Indians
with a month’s 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, it’s affordable. I’m assuming that your group is not made up of
“nomads” or full-time freedom fighters, 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 off-the-books profit would
transform your group into true neo-transhumants, 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 affords 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 don’t frighten the horses or challenge
local interests, you’re 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 Club Med.: It’s saved from mere selfishness however by the
necessary fact of its self-organization. Your group must create the zone
— you can’t buy it pre-packaged from some tourist agency. The summer
camp can’t 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 neo-transhuman? What if the uprising doesn’t 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.