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Title: Hakim Bey
Author: Andy Robinson
Date: October 28, 2017 - November 13, 2019
Language: en
Topics: Hakim Bey, occult, TAZ, chaos, alienation, the State, strategy, resistance, autonomy
Source: Retrieved on October 28, 2020 from https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/author/andrew-robinson/

Andy Robinson

Hakim Bey

An Introduction

Hakim Bey is a quasi-fictional anarchist theorist best know for his

concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). He has also formulated a

type of post-left anarchist theory known as immediatism. Bey is widely

regarded as a pseudonym for the writer and comparative religion

specialist Peter Lamborn Wilson. The works of Bey and Wilson can be

found and read for free at a number of websites. Stemming from

anarchism, New Age spirituality and the 60s counterculture, Bey’s work

provides one of the most astute recent theories of alienation and

capitalism to be found anywhere today. However his work is also

extremely controversial, for reasons that will be discussed in detail in

the last parts of the series.

Who is Hakim Bey?

On one level, the relationship between Bey and Wilson is clear: they are

the same person. But on another level, it is unclear. Bey may simply be

a pseudonym, or an alter ego. For example, Simon Sellars argues that

Hakim Bey is not just a pseudonym, but a fictional character. He cites

as evidence the fictionalised biography of Bey provided in TAZ.

Similarly, Greer suggests that Bey was originally a deliberate fiction.

The identity of Wilson, Bey, and the Association for Ontological Anarchy

was a closely guarded secret. When Bey appeared in a video about TAZ, he

is presented in a blurred form, using psychedelic colours and patterns.

In this series, I shall assume for sake of simplicity that Bey and

Wilson are the same person, although there are noticeable differences in

style.

The invented name ‘Hakim Bey’ has two probable sources. Hakim was a

Fatimid caliph admired by Wilson for his heterodoxy. Bey is a common

title given in the Moorish Science movement to which Wilson is loosely

affiliated. Given Wilson’s hostility to the Internet, connotations of

‘hacking’ are probably unintentional. Bey’s work is described by Simon

Sellars as ‘a potent brew of mysticism, historical narratives,

autonomous Marxist politics and French critical theory’. He explicitly

sees himself as continuing the struggle waged by Situationism and

Italian autonomia. However, he rejects the class-struggle orientation

central to these traditions. Instead, he theorises revolution in terms

of the achievement of altered states of consciousness, in struggle

against the dominant ‘Spectacular’, ‘consensus’ or ‘media trance’

worldview.

In Knight’s biography, Wilson is portrayed as a former hippy and

drug-user who converted to Sufi Islam during a period of exile in Iran.

He started out as a so-called ‘white Negro’ jazz fan and marijuana

smoker. He was later involved with the Moorish Orthodox Church, a

mainly-white splinter from the black-led Moorish Science Temple. He was

also involved with the LSD-fuelled religous activities of Timothy Leary.

When Leary’s activities were criminalised, and with a climate of

repression and the Vietnam draft hanging over his head, Wilson fled the

country. He claims that he intended permanent exile. He journeyed in

Bengal, Assam, Balochistan, northwest Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He

eventually settled in Iran, referred to the Iranian Sufis by an Indian

Sufi master. After studying with a number of masters, he became

affiliated with the Maryamiyya. This was a Sufi order founded by western

scholars connected to the Iranian monarchy. Wilson was editor of the

sect’s journal Sophia Perennis during the 1970s. The price for this

affiliation was turning a blind eye to the abuses of the last years of

the Shah’s rule. (Bey later associated himself with Ali Shariati, a

rebel against the Shah). At this time, Wilson also saw Islam as

providing a penetrating critique of modernity. Knight suggests that

photos from this period show a ‘happy’ Wilson, contrasting with the

‘tired’ man of today. Bey himself tells us that he converted to orthodox

Sufism in 1971. This cost him ‘seven lean years’, but also taught him a

lot. He is no longer a practising Muslim, but admires Sufism for its

emphasis on immediacy.

In 1979, he was forced to flee Iran due to the rise of Khomeini, and

ended up back in America. Most of his better-known writings appeared

after this date. The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism, appeared in

various zines and as decorated fliers on coloured paper in the 1980s.

(Zines are homemade, anarchic counterculture magazines). These were

written by Bey/Wilson, but attributed to the possibly fictitious

Association for Ontological Anarchy. They were compiled, with other

pieces, into the book TAZ in 1991. Bey/Wilson has written around a dozen

other books and a greater number of short pieces which have developed

and modified his theory. None of these works are as well-known as TAZ,

but many offer important contributions to understanding alienation,

liberation, capitalism and autonomy.

The Imaginal World

The central innovation of Bey/Wilson’s approach to anarchism and

transformative politics is his focus on the domain of images and

spirituality. Bey/Wilson suggests that a Mundus Imaginalis (world or

images or imagination) exists. In this world, there are ‘imaginal

personae‘ or archetypes. This idea of an imaginal world comes from the

work of comparative religion scholar Henry Corbin. ‘Imaginal’ means that

something exists in the world of images and archetypes – it does not

mean ‘imaginary’. For Bey (and Corbin), we can have relations with this

realm. In his discussion of archetypes, he suggests there are three

realms – the level of oneness of being, the imaginal level, and the

material level. Myths are not authored, but fished from the imaginal

realm. As in Jungian theory, Bey maintains that archetypes express

structural universals of the human condition. For this reason, ‘lost’

religious and indigenous traditions can often be reconstructed by

interpreting them through archetypes. Such texts are not fictional, so

much as polemics for imaginal initiation, which manifest a process of

such initiation. Imaginal links are actual – both material and spiritual

– and not simply symbols or metaphors. Bey’s own writing (and the Bey

persona) are in this style, a type of mythopoesis or deliberate

invention of a mythical system, which channels imaginative energies

through images. In one piece, Bey/Wilson advances the slogan ‘all power

to the imagination‘, which he argues it still emerging as a paradigm

despite setbacks since the 1960s.

Stylistically, Bey’s writings tend to be poetic and elusive, though

easily comprehensible to someone who has experienced the kind of intense

altered consciousness they summon. Even his longer works are composed of

fragments. They are suggestive and inspirational, but not particularly

difficult to read. This style is based on an ontological orientation to

the imaginal realm. Discussing mystical poetry in Scandal, Bey/Wilson

argues that insight starts with a moment of pure intuition of the unity

of being. This happens at the level of the heart or spirit. It quickly

begins to form into archetypal images, which the poet then arranges into

organised form. This process both crystallises and memorises the

intuition, integrating it into the self, and transmits it to others. The

poet seeks to draw the listener towards the altered state of

consciousness the poet wishes to invoke. He admits seeking to be

entertaining as well as instructive. He also writes that he has little

interest in dialogue, and none in disciples – seeking instead

‘co-conspirators‘. His style is as important as his content in conveying

his ideas. He offers readers a playful, poetic style of politics in

which nothing is fixed in place and everything is open to re-use.

Indeed, he seems to offer his work to readers in this way – as a

collection of items from which readers can borrow or steal at will. His

writing style sometimes imitates William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique.

Hence, something goes missing when I summarise his ideas in prosaic form

– unlike some theorists, there is no substitute for reading the

original.

As readers will have noticed, my own preferred writing style is direct

and literal. I sometimes criticise academic writers for unnecessarily

complex, poetic presentation which interferes with communication. In

Bey’s case, however, his style complements the substance of his work. In

Scandal, writing as Wilson, he suggests that representational language

is too easy, and says too little of importance. It activates one area of

consciousness to the exclusion of others – intellect rather than

intuition. Only poetry and story can speak to consciousness as a whole.

Art is the language of rebirth or transformation. It is associated with

open-mindedness. On the other hand, prose writing is associated with

closed systems of thought. Once an idea or image acquires

representational or prose forms, it tends to fixate on categories. It

creates polemics, dualisms and definitions. It stops expanding

percpetions. Dogmatic systems are composed of ideas, not images. If

Bey/Wilson is right, then the difficulty with some poststructuralists is

not their use of poetic style as such. It’s the fact that the style is

image-light, and seeks to frustrate readers rather than open their

minds.

Despite his preference for a poetic style, Bey/Wilson has also written a

number of more empirical works in a more direct style, usually under the

name Wilson. These are usually histories of particular past examples of

autonomous zones. These works are closer to academic style than most of

Bey’s works, but still rely heavily on imaginative reconstruction. They

often deal with areas of history where evidence is limited. Bey’s work

deviates from usual norms of historical scholarship by using imagination

and interpretation to fill in the gaps. Bey’s renderings of past

autonomous zones are perhaps best read as affective interpretations.

They attempt to reconstruct the zone’s lifeworld from similar autonomous

affects today. Similarly, his translations of historical texts are often

approximate, and include anachronistic contemporary elements.

Bey’s analysis of the social world follows from his emphasis on the

imaginal realm. Each group or individual lives under certain signs by

which they are known, which connect the Imaginary and Real realms. Bey

sees modern power as rooted in ancient forms of magic and spirituality.

Money, television, writing and so on are forms of magic because they

involve action at a distance. The Spectacle, or the capitalist system,

is a kind of trance-state produced by forms of mediatised magic or

representation. Bey often explores the ancient or esoteric meanings

underpinning current institutions. For instance, in his book

Abecedarium, Bey explains the symbolism behind each letter of the

alphabet. He also provides explorations around these imputed meanings.

On a similar note, Bey does not wish to dispense with origins. He views

origins as mythological or imaginal, rather than real. He encourages his

readers to stack up or combine different origins or conceptual elements

from different sources.

Bey’s strategic focus on struggle on the imaginal level has led to

accusations of ‘lifestyle anarchism‘. Usually, such accusations are

anathemas thrown by opponents. However, there are exceptions. For

instance, Leonard Williams sees Bey’s work as exemplary of a shift in

anarchism from a focus on the state to a political culture of

alternative living and aesthetic practice. This practice claims to be a

triumph of life over dogma. He suggests that Bey’s theory avoids

political and educational purpose. Instead it draws on artistic

expressivism, emphasising themes of art, imagination, immediacy and

experience. Bey’s approach to all belief-systems, including anarchism,

is to seek to channel their vital energy – their ‘life-forces, daring,

intransigence, anger, heedlessness‘ – while discarding their spooks, or

fixed categories. This leads to an approach in which he loots or

appropriates from different theories and traditions, without endorsing

their foundational assumptions. Bey terms this ‘cultural bricolage‘, or

as ‘thieving‘, or ‘hunting and gathering’, in an informational world. He

takes, for instance, passion from revolutionary socialism, grace and

ease from monarchism, self-overcoming or higher awareness from

mysticism.

A non-standard type of self or subject is at the heart of this process.

In order to perform acts of bricolage, there must be some kind of

selecting self. But this is not necessarily an ego associated with a

spook. The self is the Stirnerian Unique One, irreducible to categories.

In Bey’s work, the Unique One is associated with the higher Self of

mystical and spiritual traditions. Yet Bey also suggests that the Unique

One paradoxically requires the Other, as a witness or key to holism. In

his approach, the ideal is that the process of bricolage is driven by

desire. Bey’s work is deliberately inspirational. He seeks to cause

hearers or readers to reach for happiness, to purge barriers to freedom,

and to open themselves to difference.

Bey and Postanarchism

There are some who treat Bey as the first postanarchist. This is largely

due to his article ‘Post-Anarchism Anarchy’, which arguably pioneered

the term. (The title is probably a play on ‘post-left anarchy’, and

suggests the rejection of anarchism as an ideology – although Bey

elsewhere identifies with the term ‘ontological anarchism’). Bey shares

with postanarchism a simultaneous valuing of and distance from

historical and leftist forms of anarchism. He also shares with the

tradition an interest in poststructuralism (he clearly uses ideas drawn

from Deleuze and Baudrillard).

This said, I would suggest there are important differences between a

post-left anarchist position such as Bey’s and the forms of

postanarchism developed by academics. Postanarchists such as Saul Newman

and Simon Critchley generally maintain that there is no overarching

social system. They embrace a strong constructivist ontology in which

there is ‘no outside’ of dominant categories. As a result, they orient

politically to a practice of small transgressions rather than systemic

ruptures. They are influenced by Laclau, Foucault and Derrida, and see

power as partial and diffuse. They value reformist, non-separatist

strategies. These strategies operate on the inside of a system

considered to have no outside. Revolution and exodus are dismissed with

a hundred labels (moralist, purist, abstract, dualistic, irrelevant to

the people…) The point of post-anarchist practice is not to overthrow

the system, but to subvert the self, or the authority of the text. There

is thus a negative, fatalistic quality to the poetics of post-anarchism.

Bey’s work, in contrast, is unapologetically opposed to a dominant

system conceived largely as an external force which an actor can seek to

resist or escape. Its orientation is insurrectional even when its

tactics are not. A perspectival or everyday ‘outside’ is always

available in the form of altered consciousness. Derridean and

postcolonial approaches also arguably value a kind of shamanic altered

consciousness. They arguably seek to attain it through the failure and

dismantling of the self. They seek awareness of interdependence and

holism, the self/ego as a mere appearance, and the ethical call of the

whole of existence. Both Bey’s and the Derridean approach are broadly

pantheist, but with different affective and political consequences. Bey,

like Stirner, Deleuze and Nietzsche, derives a politics of affirmation,

desire, power, creativity, and ecstasy. The continuity of true Self and

divinity leads to antinomianism and affirmation of life whatever form it

takes. This leads to affects of euphoria, intensity and rebellion. On

the other hand, Derrida and postanarchism tend to produce affects of

humility and lack. They situate divinity mainly in the Other rather than

the Self.

Bey’s work influenced autonomous social movements, particularly in

Europe and America, in the 1990s. The idea of TAZ has inspired groups

such as ravers, computer hackers, squatters and countercultural

activists. Events like Reclaim the Streets and Carnivals against

Capital, as well as the rise of social centres and small-scale, informal

political groups, are partly inspired by the idea of the TAZ. According

to Bey/Wilson’s unofficial biographer, Michael Muhammad Knight, TAZ

inspired the early ‘Trips to the Zone‘ which evolved into the Burning

Man festival. There is reportedly at least one intentional community

based on Bey’s theories. There is also an event video based on the TAZ

idea. The video, like Bey’s work, uses humour, image manipulation and

appeals to altered consciousness. It seeks to ‘deconstruct, synthesise

and reconstruct’.

Note to readers:

Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson is a controversial figure due to his

apparent support for child sexual abuse. While there is some

disagreement over what exactly he believes, it is clear that at the very

least, he has provided apologia for child sexual abuse. I believe he

takes this position seriously, and is not just engaged in playful

provocation as some supporters claim. In my view, his position is

inconsistent with his wider positions on sexual consent and abuse, and

on children’s liberation. I believe Wilson/Bey is wrong on this

question. However, most of the theorists covered in this column take at

least one position which is oppressive or problematic (Aristotle

supported slavery, Bakunin was anti-Semitic, Aquinas was homophobic,

Althusser killed his wife…). If I required purity on all issues of

oppression from all the theorists I write on, and effectively

‘no-platformed’ any theorist who might be complicit in one or more

oppressions, I would have to exclude the overwhelming majority of

historical thinkers. I have therefore generally refrained from omitting

thinkers from the series based on single oppressive position, if I feel

their theory is otherwise useful. I also believe that the inner

structure of a theorist’s thought – the “problematic” or “theoretical

machine” which drives the generation of ideas – is separable from the

historical personage who formulates the thought. I believe the rest of

Bey’s theory can be used, without entailing endorsement of sexual abuse.

Bey’s position, and the problems with it, will be examined in detail in

part 15, where I also explain in more detail my disagreements with some

of Bey’s critics and defenders, and my rejection of a ‘no-platform’

position towards his work.

“Chaos never died”: Hakim Bey’s Ontology

“Chaos never died”. This is one of the best-known slogans from Hakim

Bey’s seminal work, TAZ. In the second of a sixteen-part series, Andrew

Robinson reconstructs the ontology of Bey’s “ontological anarchism”. He

examines what it means to take chaos as ontologically primary, and how a

sense of meaning or order can emerge from chaos.

Chaos Never Died

Bey’s ontology is based on the primacy of chaos. The concept of chaos

should not be seen as a synonym for disorder, or an attention-grabbing

rephrasing of anarchism. Chaos is not simply the absence of laws or the

state. It is an ontological condition characterised by constant flux and

flow, the absence of normative or other criteria of order, and a state

of being akin to intoxication. Chaos, Bey tells us, is ‘continuous

creation’. He also repeatedly states that ‘Chaos never died‘. Chaos has

survived the supposed foundation of order. It is a basic ontological

reality we should embrace and celebrate.

There are thus no essential or natural laws to provide us with meaning.

Nature, says Bey, has no laws, only habits. Meaning creation is, then, a

matter of personal construction based on desire. The only order possible

is the order one produces and imagines through ‘existential freedom‘.

All other orders are illusions. Life and the body are permeable, ad hoc,

impure, and full of holes. Yet nevertheless, existential autonomy and

self-actualisation must be accomplished in this field. In any case, Bey

prefers a world of ‘indeterminacy, of rich ambiguity, of complex

impurities’ to purist utopias. Chaos is therefore desirable as well as

ontologically basic, or necessary. Bey sometimes portrays his theory in

terms of a decision to say yes to life itself. In another work, Bey

describes himself as a ‘bad prophet‘ who bets on unlikely anomalies and

chaos.

Chaos is something prior to thought and social construction. Bey

conceives Chaos as a creative potential underlying all reality. It means

that living things can generate their own spontaneous orders. It also

undercuts the legitimacy of all hegemonic and hierarchical systems. Bey

suggests that something comes into thought which consciousness attempts

to structure. The structure appears to be the foundational level, but it

isn’t. This analysis rules out representation, but not thought as such.

Indeed, thought and images are both important. Letters or hieroglyphs

are both thoughts and images. Bey celebrates a type of in-betweenness

which deals with both thought and images.

Chaos is primary over order. In fact, order is an illusion. We are

always in chaos, but sometimes we fall for the lie that order exists.

This lie leads to alienation. The world is real, but consciousness is

also real since it has real effects. In one passage, Bey suggests that

the self cannot produce things, nor be produced. Everything simply is

what it is, spontaneously. In ‘The Information War’, Bey argues that

information is chaos, knowledge is spontaneous ordering from chaos, and

freedom is surfing the wave of that spontaneity. He counterposes this

view to the gnostic dualism of those who use information (or spirit) to

deny the body. Instead he seeks a ‘great complex confusion’ of body and

spirit.

Access to chaos comes through altered consciousness, but chaos is also

always present in everyday life, beneath the surface. Chaos, or

imagination, is the basis of a field which is outside the ordinary.

However, it is also the field from which the ordinary is composed. It

can enter into ordinary life. Interpretation, for example, occurs in

this field. It is similar to the field of becoming in Deleuzian theory,

of time or the virtual for Deleuze and Bergson, and the unconscious in

Jung. The numinous is ‘banal‘; it can be found everywhere. Bey refers to

himself as a radical monist, in distinction from the gnostic or

Manichean dualisms of the right-wing. Although he does not say so

directly, he seems to treat oppressive systems as distorted forms of the

field of chaos, turned aside by ‘dark magic’ or negative forms of

trance. The zone of altered consciousness is also the zone of hybridity,

the zone where the boundaries provided by interpretive categories break

down.

Psychological liberation consists in actualising, or bringing into

being, spaces where freedom actually exists. This is not something

unimaginably other. Bey suggests that many of us have attended parties

which have become a brief ‘republic of gratified desires’. The

qualitative force of even such a brief moment is sometimes greater than

the power of the state. It provides meaning, and attracts desire and

intensity. Similar claims are made elsewhere in post-left anarchy. For

instance, Feral Faun suggests that we all knew this kind of intensity in

childhood.

Chaos as the Basis for Meaning and Order

In the field of chaos, things are held together by desire or attraction.

Action is possible at this underlying, chaotic or quantum level. Magic

is ‘action at a distance’. Chaos also produces a kind of order, through

Eros (love) or the self-ordering activity of a Stirnerian ego. Bey

adopts Fourier’s view, which he also attributes to Sufi poets, that love

or attraction is the driving force of the universe. The Big Bang is

‘beautiful and loves beauty‘, although dirt is also the mirror of

beauty. For instance, flowers grow from dirt.

The possibility of ‘action at a distance’ is the main belief of the

Hermetic approach with which Bey identifies. This approach was

supposedly banished from science in its mechanistic phase, but keeps

coming back – in gravity as ‘attraction’, in quantum physics, strange

attractors, the power of media, and so on (and rather differently, in

Fourier’s work).

Hermeticists believed that the ‘moral power‘ of an image could be

conveyed across distance, by some kind of energy beam, especially if

boosted by other sensory inputs. Bey believes that artists continue to

do this, even when they deny it. Advertising, for example, conveys a

particular affective or ‘moral’ frame. Hermeticism thus has a dual

aspect. In its positive form, it is liberatory and politically radical.

However, it also provides the basis for advertising, PR and so on.

The only viable government is that of attraction or love among chaotic

forces. Only desire creates values. Values arise from the turbulent,

chaotic process of forming relations. Such values are based on

abundance, not scarcity, and are the opposite of the dominant morality.

Bey describes ‘peak experiences‘ as value-formative on an individual

level. They transform everyday life and allow values to be changed or

‘revalued’. Creative powers arise from desire and imagination, and allow

people to create values. Catastrophe has negative connotations today,

but it originally meant a sudden change, and such a change is sometimes

desirable.

Bey talks a lot about magic, spirituality, Hermeticism, esotericism, and

so on. This is not ‘mystification’ in the usual sense, nor a literal

belief in the kinds of magic seen in fiction. Rather, it involves

reflections on the symbolic and imaginary nature of many

taken-for-granted practices and objects. Something is ‘magical’ or

‘spiritual’ in a positive sense if it leads to an altered state of

consciousness.

Things can also be ‘magical’ or ‘spiritual’ in enacting invisible forms

of long-range communication or control. ‘Magic’ or ‘spirit’ in this

sense is something immanent, something most of us have experienced

already – as an intense emotional experience, romantic or sexual

attraction, a psychedelic trip, a meditative state, a powerful dream, an

empowering protest or direct action, a random moment where everything

feels right. It does not involve reference to a transcendent field

outside experience, although it is certainly taken to be outside

ordinary, ‘consensus’ experience.

Bey writes as if the entities experienced in altered consciousness, or

the archetypes found in dreams and stories, are real. But this is part

of the process of mythically initiating the reader. The ultimate

ontological status of these entities (whether they are merely imagined,

or have some real existence) is not particularly important. (In a sense,

if everything is chaos, oneness, or becoming, then nothing of a

categorisable type is real in any case). What matters is the role of

these figures, and belief in them, in producing altered consciousness

and intensity.

Chaos, Religion, and Science

Bey’s idea of chaos has a number of resonances. It is similar to the

idea of chaos in chaos theory, but qualitative, rather than

mathematical. It has similarities with a particular style of reading

quantum-level realities. It is also similar to Deleuze’s claim that

becoming or difference-production is ontologically basic, and Spinoza’s

univocity of being.

Bey periodically refers to Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism, Kabbalah, quantum

physics, and other bodies of thought as similar to his own, although his

relationship to them is often syncretic. To the extent that one

understands the Tao as an undifferentiated force of becoming, it is

similar to Bey’s chaos. To the extent that one understands God as

immanently coextensive with being, then God is another name for chaos.

In ‘Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory‘, Bey argues that scientific

worldviews both influence and are influenced by wider social discourses.

Ptolemaic theory echoed monarchy and religion, Newtonian/Cartesian

theories echoed capitalism and nationalism. Quantum theory and

relativity similarly co-constitute a current social reality. However,

theory continues to lag behind quantum mechanics, as scientists struggle

to explain phenomena which clearly “work” scientifically. Quantum theory

seems to validate Eastern and New Age worldviews, which might provide an

organising myth or poetics for quantum science.

Bey summarises a series of different possible readings, some of which

recover some form of realism, others of which do not. He insists that

the universe must be a single reality, and suggests that the underlying

chaotic nature of reality produces effects such as quantum uncertainty.

This possibility could shatter ‘consensus reality’ and its claims to

truth.

This could have various social effects. For example, an economy

mirroring quantum theory would have to abolish work, because work is

similar to classical physics in structure. The result might either be a

Zerowork utopia, or a form of enslavement worse than work (probably

cybernetic, and following Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of machinic

enslavement).

Taoism and Buddhism are recurring points of reference. According to

Wilson/Bey in Escape from the Nineteenth Century, Taoism is a Clastrian

machine for warding off hierarchy, which offers direct experience in a

manner similar to shamanism. Historically, it undermined Chinese

Imperial mediation. In another piece, Bey calls for a ‘new theory of

Taoist dialectics‘. In Taoism, Wilson argues in Shower of Stars, chaos

is not a figure of evil, but full of potential. It is the source of

creation. The only difference between ontological anarchism and Taoism

is on the question of action versus quietism.

Bey also embraces the Zen Buddhist idea of Beginner’s Mind. In another

piece, Bey compares the Buddhist concept of satori with the Situationist

Revolution of Everyday Life, and the Surrealist and Dadaist concept of

the eruption of the marvellous. All involve perceiving the ordinary in

extraordinary ways. While Situationism neglects the spiritual aspect,

Buddhism neglects the political.

Bey also likens his position to Sufism. In the Sufi tradition, a ‘single

vision’ of holistic divine reality is contrasted with the ‘double

vision’ of alienated consciousness. Wilson relates this to the one-eyed

monsters associated with the Soma-function and with magic mushrooms,

taking it to be a form of altered consciousness.

Bey’s readings are sometimes rather selective. Many of the traditions he

discusses counterpose spiritual awakening to bodily pleasure. They also

emphasise the channelling, constraint, or balancing of desire, not

simply its release. However, Bey nonetheless traces interesting

parallels among traditions of disalienation.

The idea of chaos is also similar to the primordial force which is slain

by the founder of civilisation in a number of statist epics (such as the

Epic of Gilgamesh). Bey further likens his view of chaos to

hunter-gatherer worldviews, arguing that we need to recover shamanism

against priesthood, bards against lords and so on. His approach is

modelled on a language which does not yet distinguish ritual from art,

religion from harmonious social life, work from play, art-objects from

useful objects, and so on. In one passage, Bey depicts a war between two

sets of forces. Chaos, Mother Gaia and the Titans are on the side of

aimless wandering, hunter-gatherers and freedom. Zeus and the Olympians

are on the side of order.

If humans are different from animals, it is because of consciousness or

self-consciousness, not awareness. Animals are also aware, in a

spiritual sense. However, only humans have technology – which can either

be a means or can dominate us. Symbolic systems are related to

consciousness. Humans are thus split between an ‘animal’ level of

intimacy and unified consciousness, and a distinctly human level of

alienated consciousness.

Religion stems from this tragic separation of mind and body. This, in

turn, leads to a huge range of practices of ‘knowing’, ranging from

psychedelic drugs to computers. But since early civilisations, religion

has sought to escape the body, becoming increasingly gnostic and

body-hating. Bey seeks to re-valorise the ‘animal’ level of immediate

awareness.

Bey’s position on altered consciousness puts him in disagreement with

many anarchists. He rejects the ‘two-dimensional scientism’ of classical

anarchism. The idea of being, consciousness, or bliss contained in

mystical conceptions is not for Bey a Stirnerian spook – an abstract

figure to which people subordinate themselves. It is a term for a type

of intense awareness or ‘valuative consciousness’ resulting from

immanence, which is to say, the rejection of spooks. Techniques for

higher consciousness can be appropriated by anarchists.

Bey sees science as a ‘way of thinking‘ without special ontological

status. He therefore opposes the common assumption that only one type of

consciousness, the scientific, has validity. One kind of consciousness –

universalising, Enlightenment, linear, rational, mechanical – has

dominated for too long. For Bey, experiences in altered states of

consciousness have as much reality as any other kind of experience.

Also, if something has effects, then it might as well be real.

Bey describes his approach as a ‘rationalism of the marvellous‘ –

neither science nor religion. This rationalism accepts that some things

cannot be explained. However, in Scandal, he also suggests that there is

‘something mad’ about any metaphysical experience of the oneness of

being, which is chaotic and primordial. Altered consciousness is both

rational (as something there are good reasons to believe in) and

extra-rational (as an experience). In Sacred Drift, Bey argues that

spiritual realisation is ‘good for quite a lot’, worth tasting and

striving for. But it is not the end point of human development. Rather,

it is a means to something deeper.

Joseph Christian Greer has explored the origins of Bey’s thought in the

zine movement, and the new religious movements of Chaos Magick and

Discordianism. He argues that Bey’s ontology is largely derived from

these movements. He also contends that Bey’s thought is formed in debate

with alternative (especially nihilistic) positions in particular zines.

TAZ, he notes, is a compilation of already-published articles, which had

appeared in zines such as Kaos and Mondo 2000.

The zine scene of the 1980s was rhizomatic and transgressive, often

covering taboo topics. Chaos Magick and other esoteric zines overlapped

constantly with those focusing on punk music, alternative sexuality,

cyberculture, and radical politics. Many of Bey’s pieces appeared in the

Chaos Magick zine Kaos, which operated a policy of printing everything

submitted to it.

Chaos Magick is a playful religious tradition which nevertheless focuses

on a central belief: that magical forces can be used to manipulate

reality. It maintains, like Bey, that one can achieve ‘gnosis’ through

ritual and psychedelic practices. Gnosis gives access to the forces

structuring reality. Such access is normally blocked by the mass media,

or other ‘psychic propaganda’.

The controversies between Bey and other contributors were focused on

Bey’s insistence that the death-drive, or ‘thanatos‘, belongs

exclusively to the Spectacle. Bey reads chaos as a creative force, and

the role of the Chaos magician as encompassing others’ desires. This

brought him into conflict with nihilistic and individualistic

contributors.

In ‘The Ontological Status of Conspiracy Theory‘, Bey argues that

conspiracy theory is right-wing only because it emphasises individual

rather than group action as the source of social problems. Similarly,

vanguardists believe the state is a conspiracy, and conspire to seize

it. Alternatively, one can maintain that elites are ‘simply carried by

the flow of history’. The state does not have power, so much as it

usurps individuals’ power.

However, social forces do not simply determine individuals. Rather,

there is also a feedback mechanism in which people modify the forces

which produce them. He calls for an existentialist valuing of acting as

if actions can be effective, to avoid a poverty of becoming. We have to

act as if we act freely, whether we really do or not. Bey also suggests

that history is chaotic, and abrupt denials of all conspiracy theories

reveal an irrational faith in the superficial social world.

Chaos and Technology

For Bey, techniques and technologies are associated with ‘action at a

distance’. Technology is a kind of magic. This position renders Bey both

sceptical of modern technology, and hostile to the wide-ranging

anti-technology positions of some eco-anarchists. For Wilson, writing in

Ec(o)logues, only a type of technology which ‘enhances freedom and

pleasure for all humans more-or-less equally’ can provide a basis for

the flourishing of creativity and individuality.

Neolithic technology fits this definition. However, some modern

technologies – such as bicycles and balloons – are basically of the

Neolithic type, even though they were invented much later. Similarly,

renewable energy, handlooms and the like are the right kinds of

technology.

In a piece titled ‘Domestication‘, Wilson argues for Fourier’s idea of

‘horticulture’ as a system which combines aspects of agriculture and

gathering. A transition to horticulture seems more viable than the

anarcho-primitivist idea of a transition to hunting and gathering.

Furthermore, Bey suggests that domestication was initially not control,

but an effect of love (caring for a young animal). However, in another

paper, Bey argues that agriculture is the only truly new technology, and

amounts to ‘cutting the earth’. It instantly seems a bad deal to

non-agricultural peoples, and leads to authoritarianism.

In ‘Back to 1911‘, Bey suggests that refusing technologies past a

certain point can allow the recovery of imagination and ‘human life’.

For example, amateur communal music is preferable to recorded music, and

letters to telephones. Like many of Bey’s experimental proposals, this

is a way of creating altered everyday experiences.

Bey has an ambiguous relationship to eco-anarchism. He opposes the

rejection of technology of authors such as Zerzan. But he also calls for

a psychological return of ‘paleolithic‘ or ‘primitive’ techniques such

as shamanism. He frames this as a return in a psychoanalytic sense – a

return of the repressed. The paleolithic continues to exist at an

unconscious level. Bey also supports Luddite tactics against

technologies used for oppression today, whatever their future potential.

But chaos implies a right to appropriate the high-tech as well as the

paleolithic. Bey does not seek to reduce the level of technology, but

instead to recover lost psychological or spiritual techniques. He also

suggests there is a kind of future which is at once paleolithic and

sci-fi, and also immediately present to those who can feel it. This

future involves new technologies of the Imagination, and a new science

beyond quantum science and chaos theory.

In ‘Primitives and Extropians‘, Bey responds to the appeal of his theory

both to deep ecological and anarcho-primitivist approaches, and to

Internet-focused and science-fiction movements, which have radically

different attitudes to technology. He accuses anarcho-primitivists of a

puritan impulse which uses the ‘primitive’ as a metaphysical principle

(an essence, trunk, or spook).

On the other side, pro-technology ‘Extropians’ lack a critique of modern

technology. They are also too purist, whereas the field of desire is

‘messy’. Zerzan criticised Bey on the back of this article for failing

to understand the oppressive effects of technology. In Seduction of the

Cyber Zombies, Bey suggests that there is some point at which technology

flips from serving to dominating humans, and we need to keep it serving

humans.

Bey calls on people to think about technology and society without

absolute categories. Instead, a ‘bricolage’ or ad-hoc approach should be

used. ‘Appropriate’ technology should be selected based on maximum

pleasure and low cost. Bey suggests that the basic principle after the

system is destroyed would be freedom from coercion of individuals or

groups by others. The ‘revolutionary desire‘ of freely acting people

would then arrive at the appropriate level of technology.

In terms of levels of technology, Bey suggests that it ultimately comes

down to desire. Do people who want computers or spaceships really want

them enough to make the components themselves? If so, they will happen,

if not, they are impossible, since people will reject alienated work.

While primitivists are sure that such a situation would preclude all

technology, Bey is less certain. Both sides will be reconciled to it

because it is based on pleasure and surplus, not scarcity, and the

process of creation and conviviality would be more immediate and

human-scale.

In TAZ, Bey opposes the idea of a return to the Paleolithic or any other

period. Instead, he writes of a return of the Paleolithic through

shamanic practices and zero-work, a return analogous to the Freudian

return of the repressed. This position is implicitly directed against

anarcho-primitivism. Similarly, he rejects the primitivist position of

trying to reverse the rise of agriculture.

Later, however, in Riverpeople, Bey/Wilson has come round to the view

that people were ‘meant to live’ like indigenous hunter-gatherers or

gardeners. This is the high stage of human development – not today’s

‘Civilisation’. Hunter-gatherers may know hunger, but not scarcity. He

calls for a return to gathering, hunting, or swidden (slash-and-burn)

cultivation, and the renunciation of literacy.

In Shower of Stars, Bey argues that hunter-gatherers have a way of

thought based on the generosity of the material bodily principle,

similar to peasant carnivals. He also argues that wilderness can be

recovered. Even if it has disappeared today, it can be restored or

summoned back. We need to forget (but not forgive) the system, and

become radically other to it, remembering our ‘prophetic selves’ and

bodies.

In Ec(o)logues, Wilson includes a ‘Neo-Pastoralist Manifesto’ which

suggests inculcating superstitious fear of nature as a way to ensure it

wins the ‘war on nature’ against humans. It is important that any return

to nature take the form of ‘coherent actions for re-enchantment’, not

passive tourism.

Hakim Bey: Chaos, altered consciousness, and peak experiences

Ontological anarchist Hakim Bey argues that chaos is ontologically

primary. Meaning can only be produced subjectively, through

self-valorisation. In this third essay of the series, I explore the role

of peak experience and altered consciousness in ontological anarchism. I

examines how immediacy can provide a basis for resistance to alienation,

explore Bey’s ethical theories, and look at whether social life is still

possible if outer order is rejected.

The orientation to chaos leads to a political theory of altered

consciousness. In order to be felt as really meaningful and existing,

something needs to interact with the body and with imagination. It needs

to exist in the ‘imaginal’ realm – the realm of images, unconscious

archetypes, and imagination. Bey seeks an intensification of everyday

life – a situation in which marvellous, ecstatic, intense, passionate

forces enter into life. The passions are not pale shadows of higher

realities, as in Platonism, but are themselves supernatural realities.

Everyday life can be raised or sublimated to ‘a degree of intensity

approaching full presence, full embodiment – and yet still indistinct…

an erotic dream of a utopian landscape’. A TAZ is a case of life

‘spending itself in living‘, rather than simply surviving. It can entail

risking the abyss. This position involves a particular kind of affective

politics. Bey clearly sees boredom or lack of meaning as the major

problem in contemporary life.

Bey also proposes a particular path to creating meaning. Chaos means

that anything ones does must be ‘founded on nothing‘. No solid

groundings are possible. Yet still, we need projects, because we are not

ourselves ‘nothing’. The project which remains is an uprising against

everything that posits an essential nature of things. Anarchism is faced

with a philosophical problem deriving from the contradiction between

meaninglessness and ethics. It seeks a ‘right way to live‘ in an ‘absurd

universe’. In ‘The Palimpsest‘, Bey distinguishes between theory – which

drifts nomadically – and ideology, which is rigid, and creates cities

and moral laws.

Ideology re-orders the world from outside, whereas theory refuses to let

go of desire and thus creates organic movements. Theory is like a

palimpsest, in which different texts are written over one another. The

idea of theory as a palimpsest comes from Derrida. However, Bey is

looking for ‘bursts of light’, moments of intensity, rather than

Derridean ironies. He is seeking values, or the creative capacity to

create values out of desires. Bey’s style of theory aims to be a ludic

(play-based) approach. It is not moral relativism in the usual sense. A

viewpoint is given value by a kind of subjective teleology – the

individual’s search for purposes, goals, and objects of desire. The

epistemology (way of learning and knowing) associated with this theory

will involve juxtaposing distinct elements, rather than developing them

consistently.

Awareness of chaos is intensified by altered states of consciousness and

intense experiences, including those arising from psychedelic drugs,

shamanism, meditation, and aestheticised living. Such practices are ways

of sucking everything present into the Other World, the spiritual or

chaotic world. They are attempts to reconnect with ‘original intimacy‘,

prior to cognition. Without such ‘higher states of consciousness‘,

anarchism dries up in resentment and misery. Hence the need for an

anarchism both mystical and practical. Bey lists a wide range of

possible sources of such intense, unmediated perception, including

inspiration, danger, architecture, drink and sexuality. One passage

refers to Iranian poetry set to music and chanted or sung, producing an

affect known as hal – somewhere between hyperawareness and an aesthetic

mood. Another passage refers to the techniques of heretics and mystics,

seeking inner liberation. Some such techniques get trapped in religion,

whereas others become revolutionary. Bey uses the term ‘magic’ or

‘sorcery‘ for practices which cultivate altered awareness and disrupt

the false selves that result from ordinary perception. A sorcerer

recognises the reality of consciousness. This leads to a state of

intoxication. Sorcery is a set of means to sustain this state of being,

and expand it to other people.

Such practices produce a particular relationship to the universe. True

mysticism creates what Bey calls a ‘self at peace‘, a ‘self with power’.

Awareness of the ‘immanent oneness of being’ is at the root of various

anarchistic heresies such as the Ranters and Assassins. Another passage

(from the Black Fez Manifesto) refers to the ‘potential of an idleness

money can’t buy, the thrill of zilch, the zen of ZeroWork’. This

idleness, ‘natural to childhood, must be strenuously defended’. Bey

effectively calls for us to avoid being broken-in by capitalism, to

remain in or return to a childhood orientation to play and immediacy. A

shaman of bard uses a combination of words, music and archetypes to

create altered consciousness. Everyone is an artist, but not necessarily

all of the same type. Some might specialise in the ‘grand integrative

powers of creativity‘ or telling the ‘central stories’ of the group.

Such integration by bards is posited as an alternative to integration by

laws.

Many fields of life are already inflected with altered consciousness.

Hermetic powers have been appropriated by dominant institutions. The

means to prevent such capture is to insist that each adept control the

powers, rather than be manipulated through them. Bey periodically refers

to Bakhtin’s ‘material bodily principle‘, or the valuing of the body in

carnival, as typical of intensity. He counterposes the celebration of

the body to gnostic body-hatred, which he believes is prevalent in the

Spectacle. In a poem, Wilson suggests that animals already practice

zerowork economics.

Bey suggests that language does not have to be representational. The

structure of language may turn out to be chaotic, or complex and

dynamic. Grammar might be a strange attractor, rather than a structuring

law. Language is a bridge (of translation or metaphor) and not a

structure of resemblance. Language should be ‘angelic‘ – similar to the

figure of the angel as messenger or intermediary. It should carry magic

between self and other. Instead it is infected with a virus of sameness

and alienation. This virus is the source of the master-signifier in

language.

In many ways, Bey’s work can be understood as a theory of alienation.

Alienation (whether social, psychological or ecological) separates us

from awareness of, and life in, ontological chaos. For instance, belief

in order leads to normativities of good and evil, body-shame, and so on.

The family is criticised for encouraging miserliness with love.

Christianity, even in its liberationist variants, is condemned. The

point is to seize back presence from the absence created by abstraction.

Life belongs neither to past nor future, but to the present. Idealised

pasts and futures are rejected as barriers to presence. Time can become

authentic and chaotic by being released from planned grids.

Bey criticises negative ontology, in which he apparently includes much

of poststructuralism, for flattening reality onto a single, level plain.

This process makes altered consciousness and escape from capitalism

difficult. Everything becomes equally meaningless. Negative

consciousness is a predictable effect of the present system. But for Bey

it is a kind of ‘spook-sickness’ caused by alienation. It serves the

status quo, because it keeps people afraid, and reliant on leaders for

salvation. This makes attacks on leaders seem stupid. It creates a

binary between pointless action and sensible passivity. This argument is

similar to my own work on theories of constitutive lack.

Chaos is misappropriated when used as a scientific basis for death, as

nihilism, or for scams. Chaos is everywhere, and so is unsaleable. At

one point, Bey argues that both New Age spirituality and religious

fundamentalisms derive their power from the spiritual emptiness of

modern life. However, they divert the rejection of emptiness into new

abstractions – commodification in the New Age, morality in

fundamentalism. Escaping spiritual emptiness instead requires escaping

abstractions.

Bey specifically rejects the view of chaos as lack, entropy, or

nihilism. Instead, he argues that chaos is Tao, or continual creation.

It is a field of potential energy rather than exhaustion, of everything

rather than nothing. Bey speaks of moments when he’s overcome the

feeling of powerlessness and futility. He writes that these are the only

times he breaks through into a state of consciousness which feels like

health. In other words, action is necessary to disalienate, even if it

has no outer effect. Existence is a meaningless abyss. Yet this is not

cause for pessimism. Rather, it leads to an open world in which we can

create or bestow meaning through action, play, and will.

Bey seeks to make an offer of disalienation, which, once felt, breaks

the functioning of capitalism. Even a few moments of joy may be worth

considerable sacrifice. Awareness of the holism of being, or ‘metanoia‘,

can go beyond categorised thinking into smooth, nomadic, or chaotic

thinking and perception. Bey denies that he is pointing to a secret

which he is refusing to share. Rather, the material bodily principle is

secret because it is forgotten. The body is degraded both by the world

of images and by bodily narcissism.

Immediacy, or presence, is a central concept for Bey. Immediacy is

valued as a counterpoint to representation and simulation – which are

definitive of the dominant system. Immediacy can also be expressed in or

through representation, by means of chaotic processes which disrupt

order. The spirituality of pleasure, as Bey terms it, exists only in a

presence which disappears if it is represented. In Bey’s reading of

religious imperatives, such imperatives are not outer impositions but a

kind of inner choice – to live fully, or to risk dying without having

lived. The point seems to be to experience chaos as play, rather than

trauma. ‘The universe’, Bey states at one point, ‘wants to play‘. One

loses one’s humanity or divinity if one refuses to play. People

sometimes refuse to play due to alienated motives ranging from dull

anguish to greed to contemplation. The ‘magic’ practices of Bey’s

politics are ways of experiencing chaos in a suitably joyful way. In

Scandal, Wilson argues that one can handle pain, suffering and negative

emotions by ritualising them, turning them into reversible symbols.

Cultures also symbolise and channel the potentially destructive power of

Eros. Bey insists that this approach does not deny that there are ugly,

frightening things in the world. However, many of these can be overcome.

They can only be overcome if people build an aesthetic from overcoming

rather than fear. If one reads history through ‘both hemispheres‘ –

meaning both affectively and logically – then one realises the world

constantly undergoes death and rebirth.

If life is chaos, then Bey’s response is what he sometimes terms

‘aimless wandering‘ or nomadism, and compares to the Situationist drive

and Sufi ‘journeying’. Nomadism, along with the Uprising, provides a

model for everyday life. In Sacred Drift, Wilson invokes the figure of

the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, a Stalinist slander against Jews, as a

general modern strategy. People wander or drift today because nothing

fixes them in place or commands fixed loyalties. This process of

movement is also a kind of psychological nomadism which moves among

different bodies of theory. There is an ambiguity in that, since being

is oneness, journeys start and end in the same place.

For Bey, life is to be lived through peak experiences, and conviviality.

The peak experience becomes the goal of aimless wandering, much like a

shrine is the goal of a pilgrimage. Bey’s concept of peak experience is

modified from Maslow’s. Against the false unity of a flattened,

commodified world, Bey argues for disloyalty to the dominant culture and

nomadic movement among different alternatives.

In a poem in the Black Fez Manifesto, Bey cites Ibn Khaldun’s view that

nomads who awake at night to see the stars are like animals reassured

the universe is still there. But he adds that city-dwellers who awake

similarly while on a trip are sucked into ‘panic’ and ‘freefall’. The

point here seems to be that the experience of chaos is negative only

because of the habits and alienation of modern subjects. Embracing chaos

is not a loss in itself, but seems as such from a certain point of view,

because of a lack of familiarity with chaos. Modernity or the

Enlightenment tries to blot out the stars with light pollution, to

destroy the vitality of night. Night here symbolises a type of energy

associated with smooth space and altered consciousness. In a related

piece, Bey calls for a ‘Bureau of Endarkenment’ to encourage

superstitions about technologies such as cars and electricity.

Ethics and society

Like other post-left and politics-of-desire writers, Bey rejects

normativity and top-down morality. Instead, he argues for a type of

immanent ethics based on one’s own desire and ethos. In a fragment on

crime, Bey defines justice as action in line with spontaneous nature. He

argues that it cannot be obtained by any law or dogma. The moment

someone discovers and acts in line with a mode of being different from

alienated reality, the state or ‘law’ tries to crush it. This means that

we are all criminals. Instead of claiming martyrdom as victims of

persecution, we should admit that our very nature is criminal.

Ontological freedom stems from ontological chaos. We are already

sovereigns in our own skins, by virtue of the absence of order. Freedom

is not, therefore, something we have to achieve through revolution or

struggle. Freedom is realised in the experience of intensity, or emotion

experienced to the point of being overwhelmed. Bey supports Fourier’s

idea that unrepressed passions provide the only basis for social

harmony. However, people also seek other sovereigns (i.e. other

autonomous subjects) for relations. Reciprocity, or pleasure with

others, is the non-predatory expansion of intensity. It is a kind of

eros of the social. In one passage, Bey argues that ‘each of us owns

half the map‘, so finding intensity is often a cooperative activity. He

suggests that the self/other or individual/group contradictions are

false dichotomies created by the Spectacle. Self and other are

complementary. The Ego and Society are absolutes which do not exist.

Rather, people are drawn into complex relations in a field of chaos. Bey

refers to Stirner’s union of self-owning ones, Nietzsche’s circle of

free spirits, and Fourier’s passional series as inspirations for such

relations. They involve processes of redoubling oneself as others also

do so. The ‘gratuitous creativity’ of such a group would replace the

specialised field of art.

In a sense, Bey is constructing a virtue ethics very different from the

usual type, in which virtuous life consists in the pursuit of peak

experiences and a type of living compatible with ontological chaos. Some

readers see Bey’s politics as emphasising sincerity as a virtue. In such

a worldview, enjoyment is almost a moral imperative. One has an

obligation to experience joy, and not postpone it to the future or

afterlife, so as to do justice to oneself. In Sacred Drift, Wilson

argues that this is a prerequisite for doing justice to others. By

combining various Sufi theories of disalienation, Bey suggests that we

arrive at a position which valorises all kinds of sexualities, both as

permitted bodily enjoyment and spiritual practice.

Bey, following Bob Black, favours the abolition of work. The subset of

work-like tasks which remain necessary are to become a kind of play for

those attracted to them. Bey thinks that relations among autonomous

beings might find ways of working themselves out. He sometimes suggests

that we are all ‘monarchs’ or ‘sovereigns’. Today we survive as

pretenders, but we can still seize a little reality for ourselves.

Monarchy is closer to anarchy than other forms of government, because it

recognises individual sovereignty. Bey here plays on the Situationist

idea of ‘masters without servants’, which is an egalitarian attempt to

address hierarchical aspects of Nietzsche.

However, this does not mean that people should optimise their own

enjoyment in predatory ways. The point is to realise intensity in

altered consciousness, not to appropriate alienated experiences in a

maximising way. In ‘The Anti-Caliph‘, Wilson distances his position from

‘libertinism’, in the sense of doing what one likes regardless of

others’ values or lives. The difference between an antinomian

(Wilson/Bey’s position) and a libertine is that the former acts from a

personal ethic. This ethic is considered higher than outer laws and

social norms, and thus provides a basis for defying them. Such an ethic

is more demanding than normativity or law, since it involves the

expansion of the self to include others, rather than self- or

other-denial.

‘A freedom or pleasure that rests on someone else’s slavery or misery

cannot finally satisfy the self because it is a limitation or narrowing

of the self, an admission of impotence, an offence against generosity

and justice’.

Bey does not want to realise desires at the expense of others’ misery –

not for moral reasons, but because it is self-defeating. Misery breeds

misery, and desires to cause misery stem from psychological

impoverishment. He is sympathetic to Fourier’s argument that desire is

impossible unless all desires are possible. Everyone aspires to certain

‘good things‘ which are available only among free spirits. This is

particularly true in cases of love. The spiritual meaning of sexuality,

for instance, precludes uncaring, violent and dominating types of sex.

Bey thus advocates the destruction of all social relations which treat

some as subordinate to or owned by others – including marriage and the

family. One’s sexual code should be ‘both highly ethical and highly

humane’, valuing both pleasure and conviviality. It should include a

spiritual dimension, and not succumb to ‘joyless commodification’ or

‘vulgar materialism’. Such an ethic is distinct from normativity, and

continuous with shamanism. For instance, Bey remarks that paganism

invents virtues, but not laws.

‘Wrong’ in Bey’s code of ethics means counterproductive and

self-immiserating. Causing misery to others is wrong because it is

self-defeating (misery breeds misery). Those who immiserate others are

in Bey’s experience psychologically poor, and themselves miserable. Bey

associates de Sade with fascism – the satisfaction of desires of an

elite through the creation of enemies and victims. Against these

positions, Bey turns to Fourier’s view that desire is impossible unless

all desires are possible. This seems to be partly a response to

Bookchin’s critique. It is a similar critique of simple egoism to that

found, for instance, in Ancient Greek thought, which similarly argued

for ethical positions without assuming a standpoint higher than the

self.

Other passages also emphasise the relational aspect of chaos and

becoming. For instance, Bey argues that speech is dialogical or ‘diadic’

in structure. It relies on a pairing of speaker and hearer, and this

pairing can be reversed. In Sacred Drift, Wilson argues for reciprocity,

sharing, mutual benefit, and harmony, instead of either quarrelling or

submitting. In ‘Utopian Blues‘, he claims that utopia is a unity, not a

uniformity. It is based on something like Fourier’s idea of

harmonisation – a combination of widely different people and desires,

through each pursuing their own attractions. Utopian desire ‘never comes

to an end, even – or especially – in utopia’.

The primary conflict of the current world is the conflict between the

authority of the tyrant and the authority of the realised self. In

Ec(o)logues, Wilson claims that social life is to be based on

conviviality and creativity, rather than mediation. A key step towards a

different way of being is to summon the will to experience other living

beings as relatives or relations. The valuation of a different kind of

world is crucial here. Many people are forced to live by means of

conviviality or social networks due to poverty (for instance, collective

squatting). They don’t necessarily value such practices. However,

ontological anarchy values such a way of life as preferable to mass

consumerism.

At times, the imperative to support chaos and promote freedom lead to

ambivalent positions. For instance, Bey is ambivalent about abortion,

supporting women’s freedom but desiring that the entropic force of

family planning be negated by chaos. This position does not imply

optimism about human nature. Bey opposes the view that humans are

‘basically good’. Instead, he argues against others holding power

‘precisely because we don’t trust the bastards’. In another passage in

Sacred Drift, he argues that brilliance is not itself desirable. He

observes that people can be brilliant for good things like love or

humanity, but also for bad things like hatred and self-aggrandisement.

In the latter case, there is a need for self-defence against brilliance.

The best of human potentiality seems to come out in altered

consciousness, whereas capitalism stimulates the worst.

Hakim Bey: Alienation and The State

Hakim Bey’s TAZ is a well-known manifesto of anti-capitalism, providing

a model for alternative living. Yet Bey’s work has been criticised for

neglecting the critique of capitalism. In the fourth and fifth parts of

the series, I aim to show that Bey has an astute, unusual analysis of

the structure of the dominant system. This fourth part explores the view

of the dominant system as a ‘Spectacle’, the theory of alienation, and

the history and contemporary forms of the state.

Bey’s work is thoroughly anti-capitalist. Critics sometimes miss this

fact because of Bey’s unusual terminology. He rarely talks about

‘capitalism’. Nevertheless, his theory is clearly directed at a

more-or-less unitary adversary, identifiable as capitalism or modern

society. Bey seeks to challenge the whole system, rather than be

distracted by any particular issue. He does not see power as localised,

diffuse, or irrelevant. In this column and elsewhere, I’ve generally

paraphrased Bey using the words ‘system’ and ‘Spectacle’. In fact, Bey

tends not to talk about the system in such general terms. He assumes it

in the background of his theory. When he names it at all, he uses terms

like ‘consensus reality’, ‘scarcity’, and ‘images’. Sometimes, Bey uses

the Hegelian term ‘Totality‘ to refer to what he considers the false

consensus expressed on behalf of society. He also sometimes uses the

term Spectacle, derived from Situationism. Other times, Bey refers to

the Planetary Work Machine (from P.M.’s Bolo’Bolo), or to Empire (from

Hardt and Negri. While these terms don’t necessarily connote a dominant

system for some readers, they are used in a way which clearly refers to

a systemic structure. In a related discussion, Sellars suggests that

Bey’s view of the system is basically Debord’s.

Bey’s theory of capitalism draws heavily on the Situationist idea of the

Spectacle. This approach sees capitalism as a type of life mediated by

images. Bey similarly sees the system as a regime in which images

dominate life. If someone is within ‘consensus thought’, they accept the

dominant beliefs of the current system. For example, they only recognise

the existence of things that are represented, not those that are

present. Representing something (within the Spectacle) makes it

‘semiotically richer but existentially impoverished’. This process gives

something a more symbolic meaning, but a less emotional or lived

meaning. A represented thing becomes a potential commodity. This, in

turn, destroys the existential meaning of objects, especially those

which produce altered consciousness. Take an example such as dance

music. As part of a rave, it is hard to represent. At the same time, it

generates intense energy, such as ecstatic experiences and collective

bonding. Now suppose the same music is recorded, sold, and classified.

It gains symbolic meaning. It becomes easier to name, categorise and

compare with other things. But it loses some of its emotional meaning.

It is no longer part of the context of intense practice.

The Spectacle is also a system of scarcity. Like many eco-anarchists,

Bey contrasts the system of scarcity with an ethos of abundance in

indigenous societies. Modern cultures, and agricultural indigenous

cultures, often symbolise scarcity as a loss or fall. A familiar example

is the story of the fall from Eden. For Wilson (in Ploughing the

Clouds), this type of story symbolises the loss of original anarchy and

autonomy. In the passage to modern life, intimacy with nature is

replaced by separation from it. Abundance is replaced by scarcity. Gift

economies are replaced by commodity economies. ‘Polymorphous

co-sensuality’ in sexual relations is lost to kinship and marriage

structures.

If something went wrong in modern history – and Wilson/Bey is sure it

did – then it must have happened in the imaginal realm. He thinks that

humanity’s main historical mistake was to lose the experience of the

imaginal realm. Modern humans have lost the experience of intimacy with

the cosmos. Most of us can no longer attain altered consciousness. In

Shower of Stars, he adds that every society produces an excess, which it

needs to squander. There are different ways to do this. Wealth can be

squandered in rituals of consumption, such as potlatch. It can be

consumed by a large ‘idle’ population, such as monks. It can be consumed

in carnivals. Or it can be managed through the artificial production of

scarcity. Capitalism opts for the last of these options. This is not a

good way to deal with excess. Seen from an altered state of

consciousness, he adds in Riverpeople, authoritarianism and conventional

morality come to seem like a disease.

Bey also endorses most of the standard objections to capitalism. The

system is objectionable for a whole range of familiar reasons. Wealth is

too concentrated. Financial capitalism separates money from production.

The media enclose meaning in a limited sphere. Capitalism leads to

securitisation, repression, and ecological destruction. The benefits of

civilisation are only ever available to an elite of about 10%. The

system, or Empire, brings with it murder, famine, war and greed, all of

which are effects of the triumph of death over life.

Bey claims to be ‘personally at war‘ with each of these facts because

‘they violate my desires and deny me my pleasures’. In other words, Bey

is an anti-capitalist, but his grounds for anti-capitalism are largely

Stirnerian. He objects to capitalism because it blocks

self-actualisation and the personal production of meaning. He embraces

the Marxist critique of alienation, but not Marxist collectivism.

Capitalism is emptiness – what Bey in a poem terms a ‘lukewarm

necromantic vacuum of dephlogisticated corpse breath’. It is figured

archetypally as death, rather than life or joy. For instance, the dead

were the first to get privatised space and to invest in futures.

Alienation

Much of Bey’s theory focused on the question of alienation – though he

prefers the less ‘lofty’ term ‘loneliness’ – and he theorises the system

in such terms. Capitalism involves both sameness and separation. In

Riverpeople, he portrays capitalism as a form of monoculture. Property

is a type of ‘spectral alienation’, as opposed to the ‘mutualism of

usufruct’ (a Proudhonian term for temporary ownership based on use). The

problem with modern society is ‘civilisation‘, not culture or

technology. In other words, Bey identifies the main social problem as a

certain kind of social system, based on alienation. Civilisation

reproduces itself through alienation, negation, and unfulfilment. It

offers the appearance of fulfilment from which one always awakes

unhappy. The Totality renders people isolated and powerless. It offers

only illusory forms of self-expression. Alienation is a ‘demonic

democracy‘, everything equal but valueless. It is a ‘bad mood in which

every day is the same’. In his ‘Esoteric Interpretation of the IWW

Preamble‘, Bey argues that alienation is psychological as well as

economic. He argues for a political orientation to all of those affected

by alienation, not only industrial workers.

Alienation functions partly through the disruption of horizontal social

relations. In the essay ‘Immediatism versus Capitalism‘, Bey argues that

capitalism only supports or enables, or even allows, particular kinds of

groups. It promotes groups based on production (such as work

colleagues), consumption (such as self-help groups) or reproduction

(such as nuclear families). Capitalism is organised to prevent

conviviality in Bey’s sense – or coming together for purposes of play,

life, or mutual enhancement. Bey argues that pressures on people’s time

and energy from work, consumption and reproduction are today a bigger

force in oppressing people than things like police repression and unjust

laws. The structure of social life, which really makes everyone

miserable, goes unnoticed.

Conviviality is possible within small affinity-groups – in Bey’s terms,

bees or tongs. However, capitalism subtly disrupts such groups.

Affinity-groups come up against barriers such as the ‘busy‘ lives of

members, the need to earn money, or difficulties which seem like bad

luck. Today capitalism has fragmented people to an extraordinary degree.

Most people are caught in ‘involution‘ (shrinkage, or production through

their own inverse) with the media. Small groups are also isolated from

each other. Neoliberal capitalism is based on isolating people to an

increasing extent. Forms of ‘combination’, or life in common, have been

destroyed or turned into simulations. Poverty, terror, mediation and

alienation all contribute to this process of isolation. Hence, while Bey

rejects collectivism, he also opposes standard types of individualism.

The ego, as much as the group, can be a Stirnerian ‘spook’, or false

essence. People can be subordinated and captured through their own

appearance – for example, through self-branding.

Recuperation through representation is identified by Bey as the main

problem facing dissent. The system captures and redirects everything

simply by representing it, and changing its context. It can even

pre-empt opposition through simulation. In earlier works such as TAZ,

Bey argues that opposition is open to recuperation, as it gets converted

into post-revolutionary normality. Each generation’s dream becomes the

next generation’s parlour decor. People construct artificial outer

images of themselves, known as personae. They succumb to a kind of

generalised common sense or ‘consensus-perception‘ which filters out

much of what exists. The global crisis does not in fact result from

scarcity, but from the ideology of scarcity. The world doesn’t run out

of resources. Rather, it runs out of imagination, or creative energy.

Today there is too little, too thinly spread.

Bey sometimes goes as far as to see power as mainly an image. In ‘The

Information War’, he argues that the state is now a ‘disembodied

patterning of information’ rather than a force in its own right. There

is no ‘power’ today, but instead a complete and false totality which

contains all discourse through commodification and mediation.

Individuals always remain outside of this, but as something pathetic and

meaningless. One cannot appear in the media with one’s true

subjectivity, but only disappear in representation. The system’s power

does not stem from a solid structure – a possibility precluded by Bey’s

insistence on the primacy of chaos. In Immedistism, Bey repeats his view

that any order, except that arising from existential freedom, is

illusory. However, illusions can kill. Only desire creates values.

Civilisation is based on the denial of desire. In other words, it is a

kind of upside-down value which values its own denial. Knowledge has

also been alienated today. It is replaced by a simulation – the same

‘data’, but in a dead form. It is alienating because it fails to

interact with the body, or with imagination. The illusions created by

finance capital have become consensus reality, but remain illusions. Bey

seeks to recover the call of a submerged reality accessible only rarely

– the reality of intensity.

The persistence of this system offers a kind of de-intensified,

meaningless experience. We’re at the end of history, götterdämmerung,

and yet it’s also ‘goddam dull’. In one poem in Black Fez Manifesto, he

suggests that we hide in ‘squatted character armor’ which is not our

own, like hermit crabs. In another poem (this time in Ec(o)logues),

Wilson discusses his native New Jersey. Modern agriculture is associated

with death. It is opposed by ‘secret ludic economies’ connected with

meadows, woods and wild spaces. Today, the system tries to force people

into mediation. Today, unmediated pleasures are nearly always illegal.

Even simple enjoyments like outdoor barbecues often violate bylaws.

Pleasure becomes too stressful and people retreat into the world of

television.

The media play a central role in Bey’s theory of capitalist power. In

‘Media Creed for the Fin de Siécle‘, Wilson argues that the term ‘media’

should refer mainly to those media which claim objectivity. Subjective

media tend to resist mediation. Books, for instance, have become an

intimate or subjective medium because anyone can write one. The mass

media constructs an image of false subjectivity by blurring the boundary

between objective and subjective. It sells an illusion that each of us

has expressed her/himself by buying a lifestyle or appearing within

representation. The system still had ‘glitches’ in the 1960s because the

media failed to convince. War appeared as Hell, not glorious; the

counterculture appeared exciting, not evil. This led to cognitive

dissonance, or a gap between experience and representation. When the

system is able to produce experiences in line with its discourses, it

eliminates virtually all cognitive dissonance. The 1960s movement saw

and exploited the glitch, but fell into the trap of seeking to seize the

media, and thus becoming images and commodities themselves. In any case,

these tactics are no longer viable. However, in ‘Utopian Blues‘, Bey

argues that the ‘con’ of alienated civilisation is wearing thin to the

point of transparency. Capitalism is threatened by a ‘mass arousal from

the media-trance of inattention’.

The State and the Rise of Alienation

Bey discusses the state as a central aspect of alienation. In Bey’s

historical theory, the rise of the dominant system is an effect of

increasing alienation and mediation. In other words, lived, immediate,

intense symbolism and imagery are gradually replaced by increasingly

abstract, emotionally empty symbols. These symbols are in turn captured

and monopolised by dominant institutions, which are effectively

accumulations of such symbols. Law, writing, money, and computer coding

are all examples of extremely abstract symbolism with only an attenuated

relation to their original, imaginary basis. This contrasts with

indigenous symbolism such as shamanism, origin narratives (‘myths’),

symbolic exchange, and wampum. These all involve a close connection

between imagery, social use, and emotional or existential significance.

Bey seeks alternatives to capitalism, of a certain type. He seeks to

recover more intense, less mediated types of imagery and symbolism.

Bey rejects the view that either capital or the state is a determinant,

final instance of alienation. Oppressive, alienating institutions are

not reducible to a single matrix. There are a number of different

sources of alienation. Money (or Capital) and the State are distinct

institutions, although they are sometimes allied. Authoritarian religion

is a third, distinct force. The emergence of the state seems to have

been a revolution when seen from the longue durée of historical time.

But it is more gradual in human terms. The rise of the state is the rise

of separation and hierarchy. The early State had to coexist with social

forms – such as rights and customs – which resisted it. An absolute

State or ‘free’ market was inconceivable, as it violated reciprocity.

Only in modern times are there absolutist States or ‘free’ money.

Although distinct from capital, the state always remains mired in

production. In contrast, money can escape production as pure

symbolisation.

The emergence of the state requires the emergence of statist images. The

state has to ‘invent’ surplus and scarcity to disrupt indigenous bands,

which are based on abundance. The rise of the state must have been a

result of human actions (not for instance population growth or climate

change), since the state is a social relation. Bey suggests the rise of

the state must have involved a revolt by one or another group

differentiated by role. Maybe chiefs, shamans, or warriors revolted, or

of men revolted against women. The resultant structure is still with us.

In some ways, we are still within the Roman Empire. The Roman form of

the state, law, and property are still fundamental to modern power.

As we shall see later, Bey sees indigenous social forms as a type of

social ‘machine’ which includes a gift economy, shamanism, and diffuse

power as theorised by Clastres. The state had to defeat this social

machine to take power. Why was it defeated? What ‘went wrong’? Wilson

suggests in E(c)logues that excess production may have given the temple

political power, and metal-smithing may have strengthened warriors. A

new ideology of human sacrifice was created to replace the old

religions. The state was based on an elite, which captured the social

surplus. This elite then focused on war instead of food production. War

already existed as an aspect of indigenous diffuse power. However, it

changed with the rise of the state. The new, ‘classical‘ (rather than

indigenous) form of war was a means to capture wealth and slaves.

Corresponding to this process, land was privatised. Originally, myths

and institutions existed which warded off the state – for instance,

shamanism. Something went wrong somewhere, and the founding myths are

now those of alienation. The State is founded on symbolisation as

mediation and alienation. It thus has a magical basis, in writing as

‘action at a distance’. It also rests on the monopolisation of violence.

Violence originally belonged to everyone. It was monopolised by the

state. The state might even have started off as a scapegoat, carrying

off blood-guilt.

The state is also based on homogenisation. Planned statist cities are

designed as gridworks, whereas grottos associated with mysticism are

shapeless and meandering. Medieval cities are similar to grottos. In

statist systems, a single worldview and value-system is locked in place.

This is true of Christianity, and also of capitalism since the collapse

of Stalinism. This single worldview reshapes language. Linguistic

categories are a secondary structure used to interpret incoming chaotic

flows. Modernity is unusual in insisting on only a single structure. Bey

suggests that any map (or language) will fit any territory (or

experience), given enough violence. Capitalism seeks to fit the whole

world into a single conceptual language. This contrasts with the

hermeticist and indigenous views of multiplicity, in which many

worldviews contain part of the truth of a world based on difference. The

hegemony of a single image of the world obstructs the circulation of

images and undermines the expression of difference. Instead, the same

discourse is endlessly recycled or reproduced.

However, the state has also changed in the neoliberal period. With the

rise of the Spectacle, the function of law has changed. In Nietzsche’s

day, law still appeared as the oppressor’s arsenal of tools, which is

useful in providing something to struggle against. Today it is less an

edged weapon than a ‘viral ooze’, operating through the Spectacle and

‘cop culture’ which become indistinguishable from real power. The law

should still be used as ‘an edge to sharpen our lives‘. However, law has

mutated from a tool of oppressors to the self-image of the spectacle.

Law simulates power, while offering and denying the utopia of justice.

Anything which provides unmediated experience is a threat to the

Spectacle and at risk of being banned.

In some pieces, Bey argues that the law is a useful stimulus for the

subversive effects of dissent. Paradoxically, a liberal regime can

disempower dissent by making it safe. In ‘Against Legalisation‘, Bey

argues that dissident media is impossible without censorship.

American-style free speech absorbs or co-opts dissent as images, thus

rendering it ineffectual. Today, reform is impossible, because partial

victories are always absorbed as commodity relations. For example, Bey

suggests that legalisation would absorb drugs as a ‘new means of

control’. It could be used, for instance, to control drug research more

effectively, as the underground would disappear. The 10% of the world

economy which is ‘grey’ or quasi-criminal is a new frontier for capital

to recuperate. This article shows clearly Bey’s emphasis on recuperation

as a greater danger than repression.

The Contemporary State

Today, the state is undergoing a process of decline marked by its

current death-spasms of apocalyptic violence. Hence there are periodic

‘spasms of control-by-terror’ directed at perceived enemies, such as

hackers. ‘Robocop‘, or the automation of war, is the last interface

between power and its others. Bey portrays the state as simultaneously

liquefying and petrifying – its outer rigidity marking its emptiness.

Bey likens these spasms of repression to medieval public executions,

intended to terrorise and paralyse rebels. This is simulated justice, or

terror, as opposed to systematic repression. This pattern of repression

makes publicity a bad tactic and clandestinity a good one.

Another aspect of the contemporary state is its use of ‘depletion‘ as

social control. The old liberal approach sought to assimilate marginal

groups. Today’s approach instead relies on repression and isolation in

zones of depletion. In this context, immigration is really a problem for

global capitalism. Undergoing decay, capitalism practices social triage.

It lets go of areas (and classes, races, etc) which fall below a certain

level of participation in the Spectacle. This leads to no-go-zones where

control is mostly simulated. Officially these zones remain

state-controlled. They are not allowed political autonomy, and spasms of

spectacular terror are sometimes unleashed against them. The Spectacle

still tries to destroy any threat to its monopoly on spectacular

authority. In theory, everyone is represented. In practice, however,

most people are sacrificed. They cannot enter the deathly world of

virtual reality or Cyber-Gnosis. There is thus a process of polarisation

between included and excluded. Bey thinks this process will speed up,

and even parts of America will be affected. Triage will occur even

within the zones assigned to supposedly ‘safe’ subjects with rights.

However, this creates possibilities through the occupation of zones of

depletion, or NoGoZones.

Corresponding to its creation of zones of depletion, capital actually

retreats on a spatial level. A philosophy of risk-management and

protection is accompanied by a process of withdrawal into fortress-like

spaces such as gated communities and malls. This corresponds to the

disappearance of certain zones into virtual reality, and the consignment

of others as zones of depletion. Most people are left behind in the

resultant ‘social triage’, even if they remain media-entranced. There is

also a clever control strategy in which the system threatens something

very extreme, and when it falls short, people are relieved and find it

tolerable. The surveillance state creates a danger of ‘information

totality’ in which the map finally covers the whole territory. Such a

regime would amount to unchallenged terror and the triumph of order and

death. Our hopes in such a system are computer glitches and venal human

controllers.

In an earlier paper, Bey argued that the right-wing need an enemy. In

the absence of communism, they worry about the UN, or Arabs, or drugs.

This is partly because they cannot theorise the current regime of rule

by virtual capital. Elsewhere, he argues that both right and left are

caught up in identifying symptoms and enemies. These enemies actually

stem from the political subconscious, which is affected by neoliberalism

and the resulting dissatisfaction. Some symptoms are noticed from the

right, others from the left, but both are searching for a scapegoat for

the general malaise. This leads to a society which is waging war on

itself. In Sacred Drift, Wilson notes that the west has rediscovered

‘its ancient Other’. He cites Marx’s dictum that history repeats first

as tragedy, then as farce. Today’s Islamophobia is a farcical

re-enactment of medieval conflicts.

One of the more unusual aspects of Bey’s theory of the state is his

relative preference for monarchical and single-leader states over mass

culture and modern regimes. The only regimes which exist at an

archetypal level – in dreams, for example – are anarchy and monarchy.

Both are rooted in sovereignty and will. Monarchy is objectionable for

cruelty and capriciousness. But it is closer to anarchy than modern

regime-types. Monarchs at least are human in their flaws. Today’s rulers

barely even exist aside from the Ideas, or spooks, they serve. Such

people are functionaries, not archetypes. Bey suggests that anarchism is

actually a mutation of monarchy, in which each person becomes sovereign

in a creative sphere.

Hakim Bey: Capitalism, the State, and the Spectacle

In the previous essay, I examined Hakim Bey’s theories of alienation and

the state. Completing the examination of Bey’s analysis of the dominant

system, this fifth of sixteen columns examines Bey’s theory of

capitalism. It shows how Bey situates capitalism as a trance-like

manipulation of desire, and as a process of alienation from the body

culminating in a flight to the ether. It also examines Bey’s critique of

‘cop culture’ and his comments on American global hegemony, and provides

an analysis of Bey’s view of the dominant system.

Capital and Capitalism

Bey also analyses capital as a machine for the production of scarcity

and the destruction of intensity. Capitalism seeks, not to satisfy

desire, but to exacerbate longing through utopian traces. This idea –

which Bey attributes to Benjamin – plays on the idea that commodities

are advertised in terms of future promises. The commodity will provide

enjoyment or validity or reality, or validate one’s experiences. Capital

needs the promise of such future benefits to sell products. Yet it also

needs to avoid actually delivering on these promises. If it delivered,

then there would be no need to buy further products.

Hence, capitalism constantly reproduces scarcity to stimulate demand.

This renders art threatening to capitalism. Art, or creativity, is based

on the gesture of reciprocity, or presence. Everyone is an artist, in

the sense of co-creation through lived experience, play, and meaning.

But capitalism intervenes to mediate between people. It interrupts

reciprocity and introduces scarcity and separation. Capitalism is

vampiric. It relies on consuming others’ creativity. It liberates itself

by enslaving desire. Much of what the system offers has no real use – it

is ‘snake oil‘ – but it works because it has a placebo effect.

Capitalism stems from the invention of scarcity as an existential

condition. It is driven by a totalitarian logic of eternal growth. It

claims eternity, and therefore ahistoricity. Capitalism cannot “really”

escape production. But the ideology of globalised capitalism creates the

appearance of escaping production. It appears to be pure, disembodied

and ecstatic. The triumph of capital is connected to the triumph of the

screen. The system represents itself as a state of oneness, and as

invulnerable. But its weakness is shown in the feeling that it is ‘not

reflected in lived experience‘ – in experiences of alienation, emptiness

and boredom.

Contemporary capitalism takes this process to new extremes. Today, the

system is evolving towards rule by technocrats over a mass of

homogenised but atomised consumers, linked only by ‘CommTech’ and mutual

surveillance. The current situation is like the story, The Sorcerer’s

Apprentice – in which a junior wizard uses magic in which he is

untrained, causing disaster. Today this is happening with technology.

The current phase of capitalism involves a kind of historical blockage.

The world has basically remained in – or looped back to – the nineteenth

century. Authors as early as Fourier, in 1799, were already discussing

today’s problems. However, the system conceals such history. Capitalism

is building an ‘8-lane bypass over the Past’. Like the state, it

operates at the level of images.

The current situation is not so much postmodernist as anti-modernist.

Modern insights have been denied and jettisoned. For example, the

Freudian discovery of the unconscious has been rejected. It is denied

and spread-out across various forms of downmarket media. One might add

that Marxian insights are similarly rejected in neo-classical economics,

and that sociological knowledge has been displaced by policy discourse

and individualised explanations. The dominant system is today defined by

its denial or warding-off of certain directions of development of

knowledge, leaving knowledge as a kind of Lysenkoite shell.

Money may have originally appeared as a type of religious, symbolic

power. Coins might have been temple souvenirs deemed to have mana or

numinous value, which could be exchanged for real wealth. Alternatively,

it might have first appeared as debt. Either way, Bey suggests that its

basic gesture is to separate wealth from its symbol and recombine them

later, making the symbol tradeable. The rise of money is also part of

the rise of cumulative mediation. Whereas commodity currencies (such as

cattle or barley) still had personal uses, money is entirely impersonal

– a floating signifier.

However, writing and money are not enough to explain the rise of

alienation. Money existed for 4000 years before the state emerged. The

material world tends to restore equality. It resists accumulation. In

any case, the State provides ‘protection’, which is not a material

resource. Bey believes that symbolic power is central here. The State

can only gain an advantage over diffuse social institutions when it can

present its power in symbolic terms.

Capital operates at the level of magic, or interpretation, the same

level where Bey locates resistance. The capitalist type of imagination

is negative, reducing everything to debt and sucking it into a black

hole. Debt mutates into peonage (slavery) as jubilee (debt write-off)

never comes. Abstractions are handed down from one generation to the

next. Nothing is experienced directly; everything is mediated by money.

Capital seeks a monopoly on interpretation. It constructs a space of

supposed dialogue which in fact precludes any response, resonance or

resistance.

This is similar to the idea of forced communication within dominant

terms. Whereas in totalitarian systems, the regime censors by fiat, in

capitalist systems the market censors through market failure. Today,

capital seeks to detach images from experienced life entirely. In

tourism, even the real world is experienced as an image. Tourists are

seduced by the utopian trace of difference, but bear the virus of

sameness into living spaces. Bey likens this process to the indigenous

idea of soul loss.

Capital Today

In Millennium, Bey suggests that, in the recent past – up to the 1990s –

it was still possible to see the Spectacle or the Planetary Work Machine

as the enemy. It was then possible to resist through exodus. This was

the analysis underpinning TAZ – creating nuclei of alternative forces

and using resistance to defend them. Today, in contrast, capitalism does

not need to concede space to such ‘third forces’. It has shed its

ideological armouring and initiated a full onslaught. It now treats all

opponents directly as enemies. This means we are left with a global

neoliberalism and a superpower which doesn’t even obey its own rules.

Bey opposes the postmodern position that all binaries and categories

have now dissolved. He argues that one category – the system – survives.

Survival in this context depends on persistence – on determination to

remain in history after its declared end. Bey suggests that capitalism

is triumphalist because of the end of the Cold War. But he argues that

it is only the winner by default – because viable alternatives have

collapsed first. Today, money is turning into a phantom-like, imaginary

entity outside the world. The energy of life remains outside the system.

In Escape from the Nineteenth Century, Bey/Wilson argues that the

increasing abstraction of capital renders it increasingly unreal and

ineffective. Over 90% of money has escaped into a kind of ‘CyberGnostic

heaven or numisphere’. This sphere has no relationship to production or

government. Bey is here alluding to the expansion of finance capital,

which has grown out of proportion to productive capital. This is similar

to the Marxist idea of fictitious capital.

However, Bey/Wilson believes it also has existential or spiritual

significance. Cyber-gnosis realises the Enlightenment dream of a unified

rational world-consciousness. It has expanded into a fragile membrane

around the earth, a bubble filled with hot gases. It has become

self-enclosed and self-referential. In another paper, Bey argues that

money referring only to more money in an endless chain is the most

abstract idea humanity has ever had.

In the poem Creepy Sensation, Bey speculates that we are being watched

by future people who might redeem our lost sensations, envying our

sensations which they lack, and our closeness to species extinct in the

future. Similarly, in ‘Islam and the Internet‘, Bey argues that the

spirit/body split and the hierarchical organisation of religion reaches

a culmination in cyberspace – the principle of mind separated from body.

The Internet was designed to resist physical destruction, such as

nuclear war, by rapidly transcendentalising matter, transferring it

between sites. It does not offer immanence, but a false transcendence

based on the gnostic mind-body split. It is a kind of heaven. The

conflict over the future of the Internet thus seems to be a ‘war in

heaven’. (In Riverpeople, Wilson reverses this and suggests that money

has virtualised itself into Hell). There is barely even a ruling-class,

firstly because CEOs are replaceable functionaries, and secondly because

only a few hundred people ‘control’ half the money. Actually, Bey

believes that nobody is in control any more. The ruling class has lost

control of virtual capital.

Capitalism today pretends to be the only possible world. For Bey, this

entails a kind of closure of reality. This closure has created a sense

of numbness and powerlessness. It also leads to ennui and anomie, as

ways of covering-up an anger with no clear target. It is impossibly

pessimistic to actually feel what is happening today, a ‘tragedy without

catharsis’. The current world is marked by a new kind of psychological

malaise.

Bey suggests that this malaise stems from a ‘cognitive collapse’. This

collapse is focused on the single world of capitalist monoculture. It is

the effect of a deep psychological capitulation to this world as the

only alternative available. Echoing Baudrillard, Bey argues that the

relationship of alienation, the ‘mirror of production’, has been

replaced by a ‘vertigo of terror‘.

This new phenomenon realises tendencies inherent in capitalism. Indeed,

money has always been nothing but absence or debt. Most people are now

in debt to de-realised finance capital, and excluded from the heaven

reserved for the very few. Capital takes off into a timeless future,

leaving the rest of us stuck, reliving the past. The stock market soars,

but leaves zones of depletion everywhere. Such zones of depletion are

both regions and groups of people. Such zones of depletion are not

rescued by the system but punished.

Bey sees money as a religious phenomenon, striving to remove itself from

the world of bodies to the world of spirit. Coins were initially seen as

‘liminal’ objects, existing at the intersection of the material and

spiritual worlds. Whereas nomads move between spaces, money moves from

time to time, obliterating space. It is based on what Bey calls the

‘sexuality of the dead’ – a type of inorganic reproduction through

constant splitting.

It thus captures chaos of sorts, but a type of chaos stripped of life.

It cannot deal with true complexity, reducing it to sameness. Today, the

attempt to posit capitalism as the only existing world turns money into

the one God. Capital increasingly needs no authority except money. It

has placed itself beyond the human – beyond conservatism as much as

beyond leftism.

Today (or at least in the 1990s), capital has gained primacy over the

state. All states, even the US, are simply turned into mercenaries of

capital. One might expect a showdown between capitalism and the State

for absolute power. However, the State seems to have realised it was

beaten. With money breaking free of the state, the state loses its power

to claim to be providing ‘something for nothing’ – protection.

The post-Fordist state provides ‘nothing for nothing’ and its power is

shattered. It has given up its protective role in every sphere from

human rights to economics. It seems to believe it can give up its powers

and functions and yet still survive as an ‘elected occupying army’. What

remains are empty ceremony and the exercise of terror against the poor

and different – for instance, the ‘war on crime’. However, Bey

speculates that the state could be used as a kind of social ‘custom and

right’ against capital.

Bey’s reaction to 9/11 in ‘Crisis of Meaning‘ is based on the idea that

meaning is already in crisis. This is not changed by ‘5000 murders’. Yet

others thought something had changed. For instance, articles after 9/11

were arguing that advertising now seemed shameful. Wasn’t it already

shameful, since death and tragedy happen every day?

Bey argues against the view that any trauma or tragedy is so great that

art or poetry are no longer possible. They have already survived the

Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the Gulag, in spite of predictions to the

contrary. Bey predicts – probably rightly – that 9/11 would quickly be

sublimated into the collective unconscious, after an orgy of fear, hate,

and destruction of freedoms.

In a later interview, Bey suggests that globalism has emerged stronger

than ever, because it now has the enemy it had been looking for since

the Soviet collapse. America is able to sustain globalism and hegemony

together. People were hypnotised by the media for two or three weeks

after 9/11. This produced a ‘neurotic, obsessive, trance-like

consciousness’. I would suggest that this kind of hypnosis is commonly

repeated when tragedies or atrocities occur. It has become an important

mechanism of stabilisation.

Spectacle as Trance

Bey sees economic systems as producing, or being co-produced with,

corresponding worldviews. Indigenous and agricultural systems have an

organic consciousness. Civilisation emerges from ideologies, which

rigidly order the world as if from outside. It makes abstract ideas

concrete, rather than emerging naturally or organically.

As technology expands in modernity, a corresponding machinic

consciousness emerges. The rigid psychological repression of the

unconscious in Victorian thought is based on a mind-machine model which

reflects the production line. It leads to puritanism and imperialism. We

are now undergoing a further paradigm shift focused on cybernetics,

quantum physics, and dematerialisation. Today, the law seeks to suppress

this shift (for instance, through the ‘War on Drugs’).

However, the system is also using the newly-recovered esoteric powers

unleashed by this shift. For Bey, civilisation is a ‘trance-like state‘

which produces a ‘bad consciousness’, somewhat like a bad drug trip.

Hermetic powers have also been appropriated by science, the State,

capitalism, and the media. For example, adverts use erotically charged

symbolic imagery, intelligence services use cryptography, and money has

a spiritual origin.

The power of such institutions can only be understood in terms of their

recuperation or turning-aside of hermetic processes originally designed

for liberation or immediacy. Such recuperation occurs by using the

powers to control users, thus leaving them alienated rather than

enchanted. Bey considers many forms of transformation to be alchemical.

The system uses a lot of ‘evil alchemy’, a category which includes

nuclear weapons, commodification, and acts such as 9/11. Both drug

addiction and the war on drugs are ‘shamanism gone bad’.

Bey theorises capitalist ideology as a variety of the gnostic ideology

of disembodiment. Information theory is now producing fantasies of

disembodiment worthy of Puritans or gnostics. The ‘information economy’

is a new mask for body-hatred. It involves revulsion against the

heaviness of material production, and the ongoing replacement of organic

space with machinic space to organise consciousness.

Computers are a kind of prosthesis of consciousness. They make the

religious mind-body split even more acute, by reifying consciousness in

technology. Virtual life encourages a false transcendence, in which

people believe consciousness will become immortal as pure information.

This ideology forgets that we can’t eat information. Capital seeks to

transcend the body into pure spirit or information. In fact, the gnostic

capital which escapes embodiment also relies on a huge exploited

periphery of old-fashioned industry and agriculture, mostly in the

global South. This process shows the falsity of commodities. The idea

that images are wealth is a delusion caused by the Spectacle and

believed by its supporters.

Bey argues that the ‘gnostic dualists are wrong’ – body and spirit

cannot exist without each other. The rule of spirit has alienated us

from the language of the body, which we scarcely even speak today.

Modernity believes in rationality, unified consciousness, teleological

history and so on. Public discourse pretends to be secular, and separate

from religion. But in fact, religious phenomena keep resurfacing, for

example in moral panics, conspiracy theories and so on. Such social

phenomena channel similar energies to religion. Bey views the current

system as in fact deeply religious, based on a gnostic separation of

mind and body, and a particular answer to the religious problem of

intensity.

Bey argues that the media’s extension across the social field also

creates problems for power. The media has paradoxically approached a

limit of ‘image-enclosure’ (by analogy with the Enclosures of land).

This leads to a ‘crisis of the stasis of the image, and of the complete

disappearance of communicativeness’.

In other words, because all images are captured by the media, images

lose the ability to communicate. Everything the media says refers to

itself, and lacks an external connection to an outside. This idea is

derived from Baudrillard, and points to transformative strategies

focused on horizontal communication and intimate media. Soviet communism

failed because it failed to embrace the Spectacle. Capital adapted, and

so will disintegrate instead of imploding.

In one essay, Bey suggests that the Evil Eye exists, in the sense of

having apparent effects. It’s a complex way in which humans affect each

other. Westerners are especially vulnerable to the Eye, because the

western social ethic is rooted in envy, and because defences are not

used. Capitalism and Russian-style communism are both rooted in envy,

and require it as a survival trait.

The gaze thus becomes a gaze of hate, rather than love. It is expressed

around us as the panopticon (surveillance, performance management and so

on). It manifests as an experience of deprivation and misery, often

focused on lack of some commodity. This experience is fuelled by the

ways we are represented, as lacking commodities or rights. Against envy,

Bey proposes not morality (‘another abstraction’) but over-abundant

power.

As in his other occult pieces, the claim that the Evil Eye ‘exists’ is

not so much an ontological claim as a metaphor for a particular affect

or social force – in this case, envy and lack. This in turn is a variant

of the recurring theme of alienation, which is counterposed to

life-force.

Critique of Representation

Bey theorises representation as a hardened form of imagery. Capitalism,

or the ‘cruel instrumentality of Reason‘, has a flattening effect. It

reduces consciousness to a 2-dimensional map. This map is viewed

mechanically. Meaning is excluded, as it would disrupt mechanical order.

This leads to a contemporary ‘plague of meaninglessness’ and a collapse

of ethics. Marxism is similarly limited because it reproduces

meaninglessness. The theory of meaning implied here is expressive or

affective. Instrumental rationality destroys meaning because it is

difficult to invest emotionally in it.

The type of image used in modern society reflects this tendency towards

meaninglessness. Writing and computer coding are based on images.

However, they are reified, solidified forms of images. Computer coding

is based on a very simple, binary image-system. It never escapes images,

but they are buried more deeply. In Abecedarium, Wilson argues that

writing is a form of alienation, which brings with it the state. It

enables communication and therefore action at a distance. This tends to

destroy earlier, direct forms of community.

However, various so-called ‘pre-writing’ systems, such as wampum, manage

to avoid alienation. They should be renamed (and not called writing or

pre-writing) to avoid implications of evolution-as-progress. Such

systems belong to complex, wealthy societies which refuse the emergence

of capitalism and the state.

Symbolism through images arises in non-state societies. However, writing

based on abstract letters is inherently statist. States seem to require

writing, along with irrigation and metallurgy, to exist. Writing is a

kind of magic, or ‘action-at-a-distance’, which entraps people for the

state. Wilson argues that Native American wampum is neither money nor

writing. Instead, it operates to ward off these technologies. Colonisers

turned it into money by mass-producing and counterfeiting it, cornering

the market.

In Abecedarium, Wilson recounts the evolution of the letters of the

English alphabet from hieroglyphs with pictorial resemblance to the

things they represent. He portrays this process as a kind of entrapment

and alienation of imaginal meaning. Letters capture the spirit of the

image so it can be manipulated or worshipped. Words maintain a magical

(imaginal) connection to things, but this is hidden by letters.

Nevertheless, the power of images persists beneath letters. Most images

are turned back-to-front or upside-down, to conceal their image-power.

A, for example, is a bull or ox – but the image of its head is turned

upside-down. Originally a proud bull, it is now domesticated. The

underlying pictoral meaning of letters is taken to rebut the

structuralist idea that writing is arbitrary.

“Cop Culture”

The police-state logics of the contemporary state also have an imaginal

element. In a 1980s piece, Bey calls for a boycott of ‘cop culture‘. He

argues that police TV shows encourage identification with power – which

he terms a ‘police-state-of-consciousness’. Viewers are encouraged to

identify as powerless victims. This victim identity plays into the

grievances of identity groups. It encourages us to see the police as the

mediator between criminal and victim, and between each other. This stops

us identifying as chaotic heroes. The power of the police is built on

the viewer’s helplessness and lack of autonomous substance.

In police dramas, if we aren’t powerless victims, we are criminals.

These shows also encourage people to act as amateur cops and ‘help’ the

police. While real vigilantes are threatening to the police-state, media

vigilantes support it. People are turned into extensions of the state’s

surveillance machinery through shows like Crimewatch. This process turns

people into a nation of toadies sucking up to an elite of bullies. It

prepares us for a messianic moment of police-state control which is at

once total control and leeched of content – ‘meaningless violent spasms’

as the ‘last principle of governance’.

The signifiers involved in this phenomenon are contradictory. People

ambiguously identify as victims or amateur cops, but also identify as

criminals and want ‘crime’. The signifier of ‘crime’ has come to stand

for unmediated desire. Hence, police shows enact a kind of inner

conflict between superego and id, across an abandoned landscape of

alienation.

The success of police shows is a result of popular acceptance of the

Manichean worldview of the police. It plays to an inner personality in

which passion is dammed and diverted against itself. Bey seeks the

destruction of the archetypal image of the cop or the cop-in-the-head

(not necessarily of individual cops). Destroying this inner repressive

force releases tides of passionate energy – not the negative disorder

feared by authoritarians.

American Global Hegemony

Bey also occasionally discusses global geopolitics. In ‘The Information

War‘, Bey distinguishes three kinds of conflict. Indigenous war is a

‘ritual brawl’, voluntary and non-hierarchical. Statist or classical war

is compulsory and hierarchical. Hyperreal or ‘pure’ war – the kind

discussed by Baudrillard – is based on images and psychological effects.

Wilson portrays the founding of America as a successful conspiracy by a

white male elite against Church and King.

The elite’s power is founded on enterprise, including slavery and

swindling, and a political system designed to perpetuate their rule. The

US has defined itself as the hegemon over an illusory ‘free market’,

acting as both CEO and ‘security cop’ at a global level. Overt

discrimination has largely been replaced by psychological racism, or

hostility to other cultures. Imaginative participation in other cultures

is a way to resist psychological racism.

America has tried to avoid the problem of diversity through its

melting-pot approach. But in practice, American consensus culture was

English colonial culture with amnesia and frontier bluster.

Multiculturalism emerged as a response to the failure of assimilation.

It is designed to save the American system of social control, by

allowing a small degree of cultural self-identity and tokenistic

inclusion.

Minority cultures are still valued only in relation to a ‘universal’

culture of the dominant group. They are also ‘appropriated’ in the sense

of being commodified, and reduced to images or ‘Spectacle’. Liberal

integration posits a false separation of cultures, which in fact are

only tolerated or encouraged if they tacitly recognise the centrality of

the consensus. Particularities and cultures are spokes in a wheel around

a central hub, the dominant system. Genuine cultural autonomy and

horizontal connections across cultures are forbidden.

The consensus thus sucks in energy in a death-like process. Since

particularism is a source of resistance, the system offers a false form

of it, devoid of insurrectionary desire. At the same time, it encourages

hatred and conflict among groups, and responds to social problems with

securitisation. The system provides false, packaged particularities

articulated by the commodity system, whereas Bey proposes autonomous

groups articulated through reciprocity and a gift economy.

Instead of multiculturalism, Bey calls for ‘radical tolerance’. This is

a situation of creative chaos and multiple relations among relatively

equal powers, without a centre. The system’s pluralism focuses on the

specific object of desire – such as a particular food or dance – whereas

the real issue is ‘to be yourself‘ or to ‘be free’. The possibility of

autonomous desire is more important than the object of desire. The

system can offer the object (conditional on conformity), but not

autonomy – and this renders partial victories and reforms problematic.

Today’s ‘pan-capitalism’ in theory permits any image, but in practice

proves unable to generate anything but sameness. Images of relations

other than exchange are implicitly prohibited. For example, a

documentary about an indigenous group cannot convey the meaning of gift

economy, although it might create ‘cognitive dissonances’ through things

which remain unseen.

Discussion

Bey’s analysis of capitalism, the state, and the Spectacle is

thought-provoking and insightful. It is written with an eye to strategic

responses to particular configurations of power. Counter to certain

critics, I wouldn’t interpret Bey as reducing the system to an imaginary

construct, or a ‘discourse’ in a narrow sense. Rather, he is suggesting

that the imaginal underpinning of the system provides the matrix for its

real functioning.

The imaginal aspect of the system disrupts responses on a purely

material level. It is necessary to fight at the imaginal as well as the

material level to be effective. This is similar to Gramsci’s view that

civil society insulates the state and capital from revolution. It by no

means implies that the system’s violence, or its human consequences,

aren’t ‘real’, or that the system will disappear simply from not

believing in it.

However, I feel Bey often places too great an emphasis on recuperation

relative to repression, as a threat to social movements. He seems,

therefore, to overemphasise imaginal strategies over material control of

spaces, resources and so on. Especially in the post-9/11 era, repression

is a very real threat. It responds in a targeted way to the danger posed

to it by autonomous zones.

The idea that the state can function as an ‘adversary’ against which to

sharpen one’s claws seems naive in a control society, in which

state-produced fear and anxiety have such a debilitating effect on

dissent. In addition to its imaginal operation, capital and the state

also rely on spatial dominance. It seems impossible to prevent this

dominance without some kind of counter-power. I would analyse

legalisation, and other border-conflicts with the state, as more than

just recuperation – they are also means to push back the state, to

create space for autonomy.

Hakim Bey: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

Counterculture guru Hakim Bey is best-known for his concept of TAZ – the

Temporary Autonomous Zone. Previous columns have reconstructed Bey’s

immanent ontology and his critiques of capitalism and the state. In this

sixth of sixteen parts, Bey’s seminal idea – the TAZ – is finally

examined. I also explore other types of autonomous zones found in Bey’s

work, and his later theories of small-scale group formation.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone

Bey’s best-known concept is the Temporary Autonomous Zone, usually

abbreviated TAZ. This concept originates in his works of the 1980s, and

especially the 1991 compilation of the same name. When the pieces

appearing in the book were first written, the figure of Bey was not yet

associated with Wilson. Many pieces appeared as typewritten,

sigil-covered leaflets on coloured paper, before being reprinted in a

bewildering array of zines. Many were first collated as a book in 1985,

and posted on the Internet – a process Bey claims he had ‘nothing to do

with‘.

Bey deliberately avoids defining the concept of TAZ, which he sees as

self-explanatory when experienced in action. However, it is not a

meaningless concept, but one with imaginal resonances. If someone has

experienced a TAZ, they will be able to tell a TAZ from a non-TAZ. Once

the phrase is lodged in someone’s mind, Bey predicts they will begin to

see TAZs everywhere. Roughly speaking, a TAZ is a deliberately

short-lived (or else precarious) spatial zone in which peak experiences

and altered consciousness are realised, in a context of ‘autonomy’ or

the absence of hierarchy. A TAZ is necessarily immediate and present,

rather than an ideal which fuels sacrifice for the future.

The idea of TAZ is an attempt to exploit cracks in the power of the

Spectacle. It is based on the limits of broad-brush representational

practices. The possibility of TAZ is grounded in the gap between the map

and the territory. A map, or other representation, is never a perfect

representation of the territory. It always simplifies and leaves things

out. This means that there are spaces where chaos can re-emerge. People

can practice autonomy, without being represented.

Bey draws on the cyberpunk idea of ‘islands in the net’. He suggests

that a collapse of centralised control will lead to a proliferation of

experimental communities and zones. The map is closed, but the TAZ is

open, expanding along molecular lines invisible on the map. A TAZ is

open because it is not ‘ordered’. Even if it is planned, it is the

spontaneous ‘happening’ which defines it. TAZ is festive, and fighting

‘for the right to party’ is not a parody when enjoyment is usually

mediated. It is a kind of endlessly replicating, temporary revolution.

One finds spaces where TAZ’s can be formed by looking for spaces and

times neglected or unnoticed by the state. Bey portrays TAZs as

occupying gaps in time as well as space, like medieval festivals. The

conditions for TAZs are like ‘strange attractors’ in chaos theory,

arising outside observable causality and seeming almost arbitrary. A TAZ

is a place where revolution has actually happened, even if only for a

short time, for a few people.

The experience of a TAZ is similar to a potlatch or a festival. It

involves an experience of excess, intensity and abundance. A TAZ is a

zone of peak experience and sensory intensity. Bey, following

Baudrillard, argues that the system values simulation, not substance.

This means that TAZs can invisibly occupy the zones of substance

neglected by the system. The TAZ is thus a ‘tactic of disappearance’. It

is thus rather different from the confrontation typical of revolutionary

politics. However, disappearance cannot simply entail ‘never coming

back’. It must be possible to conceive of everyday life in a liberated

zone. A TAZ provides the peak experience of insurrection without the

risk of martyrdom.

There is not a specific way to create a TAZ. Rather, TAZs have been and

are being created in different ways. From a strategic standpoint, Bey is

not expecting an imminent explosion of anarchist culture. However, he

sees TAZs as a step in this direction, prefiguring an anarchist culture

in microcosm. The world might change because of a TAZ, or it might not.

The focus should not be on such effects. Rather, Bey suggests that we

should ‘keep on the move, and live intensely‘. TAZs are connected by

open information networks. They are based on indiscriminate syncretism,

not exclusion.

Some TAZs are persistent, interconnected, underground nodes. A

well-formed TAZ is clandestine, invisible, not represented in the media

or the Spectacle, and undefinable in the system’s terms. It is therefore

able to avoid being recuperated or repressed by a system which cannot

see it. However, Bey does not wish for TAZs to be temporary moments of

excess which quickly burn-out. Rather, they are most effective as

islands in the net.

We don’t know where the process of intensity will lead – for instance,

whether it will be high-tech or anarcho-primitivist. However, we can

trace the direction to move in – ‘successful raids on consensus

reality’, increases in abundance and intensity. Bey argues that a TAZ is

more than simply a bolt-hole within the system, sustained by parasitism

on it. If TAZs expand past a certain point, they become an entire

alternative world, similar to that portrayed in the anachist utopia

bolo’bolo. TAZ is also a learning process, a growth from tameness to

ferality or wildness.

Aesthetics is important in realising an effective TAZ. Economically, a

TAZ might be based on what Bey calls the ‘surplus of social

overproduction’ or ‘pirate economics‘. This involves extracting part of

the surplus left over from consumerism and capitalism. Bey suggests that

the question of land is a recurring problem for anarchy. The central

question is how to separate space from control, so as to create

liberated spaces.

The TAZ as a strategy is prefigured in Bey/Wilson’s historical examples.

These were more-or-less permanent communities of resistance established

in remote or secluded geographical regions. Historical examples of TAZs

include most of the cases discussed by Bey – Maroon and ‘tri-racial

isolate’ communities, revolutionary moments like the 1919 Munich Soviet

and the 1871 Paris Commune, short-lived occupations like D’Annunzio’s

Fiume, pirate utopias, Fourierist experiments, the Assassins of Alamut

and so on.

However, modern technology makes such autonomous zones unlikely. We are

now, for the first time, in a world without unmapped zones. Bey posits

the TAZ as an alternative which already exists. It provides a

possibility for action even when it seems hopeless. At least, one should

seek to cultivate insight, love, freedom and justice within oneself and

one’s few close friends, to the greatest degree possible in one’s

context.

TAZ twelve years on

In a 2003 introduction to the book TAZ (which is a collection of several

80s pieces), Bey looks back on TAZ with nostalgia, describing it as a

very ’80s’ book, from a more erotic and romantic time. However, he also

suggests that the TAZ seems the ‘last and only means of creating an

Outside‘ or space of resistance to the system. He denies that he

invented the TAZ. Instead, he insists he merely gave a name to ways of

maximising some conception of freedom that come naturally to those who

resist.

In another later piece, Bey disavows the claim that TAZ abandons past

and future to an eternal present, or replaces concrete politics. Rather,

it is a way to maximise autonomy and pleasure for as many people as

possible, as soon as possible. TAZs have existed, and will exist in the

future. Furthermore, TAZ is not the end of the line, but simply the only

manifestation of radical conviviality visible today.

Bey looks back on the book as surprisingly anti-pessimistic. He suggests

that the ‘hippy/punk anarchism’ underpinning TAZ is one of an array of

third alternatives (to capitalism and communism) which seem to have

failed or disappeared after 1989. However, he argues that TAZ as peak

experience or existential condition remains important to revitalise the

social. He now sees the TAZ as the last way of creating an outside, at

least in the core countries.

Bey particularly criticises the Internet, and his earlier writings on

this, suggesting that it has now become a commercial/surveillance

network, and emphasising the need to resist mediation. He also suggests

that TAZs can be periodic (e.g. camps and holidays) or permanent (e.g.

communes and enclaves). There are even ‘degrees’ of TAZness in phenomena

such as hobby groups. At this point, he predicts a new movement against

capitalism and the simulated or spurious world of spectacle. This

movement will be spontaneous and experiential, Green, possibly

technophobe, spiritual or shamanistic, ‘social’, and probably based in

the Fourth World. It will vary between places, and will use guerilla

tactics to liberate space and time, avoiding big confrontations.

TAZ and the Internet

The association of TAZ with the Internet and cyberculture has been one

of the major lines of promotion of Bey’s work. For example, André Lemos

termed Minitel, the French proto-Internet system, a TAZ because it is

self-organising and rhizomatic. However, Bey was always hesitant about

virtual applications of the TAZ idea. He argued that the counter-net, or

network of dissident information, needs to be expanded. The zines and

BBS’s of the 1990s are said to insufficiently provide goods and services

for everyday life. In a new preface from 2003, Bey argues that the

discussion of the Internet is the least contemporarily relevant part of

TAZ. He criticises a counterculture which now mistakes ‘a few thousand

“hits”‘ for political action, and which neglects physical presence.

In ‘Islam and the Internet‘, Bey argues that the major limit of virtual

politics is that the Internet can be controlled from outside. It is

diffuse in its internal power-structure, but this is undermined by its

connections with the wider context. Therefore, resistance also has to

happen outside the Internet. An entirely virtual resistance is only a

spectacle of resistance. The body must also be present in effective

resistance.

However, communications technologies can organise revolutions. Bey uses

the example of the 1979 Iranian revolution, which relied heavily on

cassette tapes. He nevertheless argues that technology cannot overcome

the cultural or religious forces of power. We need to stop reifying

technology, and realise that only imagination creates values.

There is an ambiguity in the Internet, because it is designed in a

structure similar to indigenous warfare (i.e. diffuse power) to avoid

destruction. It is ‘designed to be out of control‘. However, this does

not render it safe or free. Those who control the means of communication

have power over those who communicate. The Internet is not really in

heaven, because it can be controlled from outside. As a result, it is a

false transcendence of the culture-nature dichotomy.

Since the Internet can be controlled from outside, resistance also has

to occur outside. Also, the controllers of the Internet will be

reluctant to allow it to spread to the global majority, because of the

fear of terrorism. Technology is in many ways a religious problem. The

binary of good and evil prevents a technology like the Internet from

bringing salvation. Indeed, communication technologies tend to become

forms of mediation and separation.

In a later work, ‘Seduction of the Cyber Zombies’, Bey argues that

‘other nets’ need to be set up alongside ‘the’ Net, otherwise it will

simply become another alienating medium. These ‘other nets’ would

include other patterns of communicativeness and conviviality. Indeed,

the Internet today is so alienated as to be interesting mainly as a

‘romantic ruin’ – a site where old sites, coding languages and webpages

are available to bricoleurs.

In ‘Media-Space! – Opening Speech‘, Bey argues that the Internet raised

social hopes because it was out of control. It is still technically out

of control, but now socially under control. This is because the tiny

free spaces are now dwarfed by massive multinationals. The struggle

today over Internet censorship is largely between capital and the state.

The Internet suits capital because it is similarly chaotic and

decentred. Technologies mirror the society and economy that generate

them. The Internet should be used as a tool, not imagined to be a

magical answer to political problems. The Internet is molecular, but

molecularity can be used against us.

In ‘A Network of Castles‘, Bey compares the Internet to Alamut. He

suggests that the network aspect of horizontal politics is now easier.

But the problem is in creating castles from which to network. It is no

longer possible to create defensible positions, given modern military

and surveillance technology. Instead, Bey suggests that unused sites may

be occupied in periods of confusion and collapse, and will then be

unassimilable but also irrelevant. There will be little reason for

capital or the state to waste effort destroying them. (In other pieces,

Bey speculates about survivalist hide-outs, underwater or underground

facilities, or outer space, though he concludes that none of them seem

feasible).

In an interview, Bey argues that the military made a mistake in

inventing the Internet. The Internet is a machine of indigenous war (in

Clastres’ sense of diffusion of power), not classical war. The Internet

is decentralised, and therefore reproduces the structure of indigenous

war. However, the military and corporations are seeking to control the

Internet. The Internet can reproduce mind-body separation. If people

don’t think about the body, desire, and pleasure, they are stuck in a

mental game without real resistance to oppression. Real resistance is

embodied resistance.

Bey predicts the fusion of television and the Internet into a single,

final medium which encloses and censors/moderates all discourse. More

recently, Bey is reported to want to smash the Internet with a hammer.

According to Knight, Wilson can’t use a computer, and doesn’t understand

that the Bey identity is no longer a secret. However, in his more

pro-Internet period, Bey/Wilson was reportedly involved in the Ong’s Hat

hoax.

Temporary, Permanent, and Periodic Autonomous Zones

Initially, TAZ is temporary for a particular strategic reason. In the

book TAZ, temporariness is connected to the need for struggle against an

adversary to produce intensity. ‘Successful’ revolutions risk collapsing

into habit and boredom. The temporariness of TAZ is thus a way to

prevent its encrustation into institutionalised socialism. Even then,

Bey recognised that certain causes remain semi-permanent, if only

because their adversaries are so awful.

This strategic perspective declines after the collapse of the Soviet

Union, with neoliberalism claiming to be the only possible world. As a

result, recurring and permanent TAZs become conceivable. In ‘Periodic

Autonomous Zone‘, Bey discusses festivals and carnival as varieties of

recurring TAZ. They create a liminal (inbetween) zone between culture

and nature. This sometimes reflects ecological and economic cycles. For

instance, summertime gathering seems like play compared to spring/autumn

farming. In this piece, Bey also argues for the re-emergence of camps,

as sites for autonomous zones. Such ‘neo-camps’ will need to be

disguised from the state, and provide a month or two of temporary

freedom. This is better than no autonomous zones at all, giving a taste

of autonomy.

In the paradoxically titled ‘Permanent TAZs‘, Bey responds to the

expansion of TAZs at the time of writing. People are dropping out,

disappearing, or at least creating their own networks in urban

folk-culture. For instance, much passion and creativity goes into hobby

networks. Furthermore, swathes of the world are now empty of substantive

power, besides media and a few police. In this context, some TAZs are no

longer temporary.

Autonomous groups still terrify the state – as in cases such as MOVE and

Waco. Groups which can stay invisible are able to survive and avoid

persecution. At this stage, Bey maintains that the system might already

be dead, and spasming violently. It becomes possible to wait out the

storm in autonomous zones – perhaps ‘a nice anarchist monastery

somewhere’.

One variant on the TAZ is the Pastoral Autonomous Zone discussed in

E(c)logues, an anti-tech type of TAZ set up for ‘ecstatic communion with

Nature’. Wilson suggests that, by experiencing this state before it’s

too late, we can contribute to bringing immanence into the world.

Pastoralism does not necessarily imply peace. Indeed,pastoral cultures

sometimes practice indigenous warfare.

In extreme cases, people end up living in stone towers and guarding

their flocks with weapons. Remote mountainous regions also have their

own cultures, which often involve special forms of intensity. Sometimes,

everyone is considered noble. Urban pastoralism is also possible in some

cities, such as Benares (Varanasi). In a poem, Wilson suggests that

‘Scythians without horses’ are like centaurs cut in half, ‘half human

half nothing’, wasting 12,000 years of co-evolution.

In ‘Back to 1911: Temporal Autonomous Zones‘, Wilson argues for the

reconstruction of alternative experiences based on past historical

periods. This is achieved through restricting oneself to technology that

existed or was possible in the period. The period he proposes is

1900-1914, the era of the ‘dawn of modernism’ which never came. The

experience of this period can be reconstructed by using technologies and

techniques of the period, such as letter-writing, and avoiding other

technologies, such as television.

Tongs, Bees, and Other Groups

In works written after TAZ, Bey has increasingly focused on small-scale,

immediate, often clandestine groups, with the terms ‘tong’ and ‘bee’

often recurring. In ‘The Criminal Bee‘, Bey argues that TAZ and related

structures rely on illegality, even when they break no laws. They break

the framework of consensus reality. He advocates ‘bees’, or small-scale,

task-focused groups, as the ‘only viable immediate means of realizing

passional series in real-time, everyday life’. They are based on evasion

and nomadism, rather than confrontation and seizing power.

However, Bey argues strongly against the reading of TAZ as an evasion,

postponement or substitute for revolution. Instead, he argues that

uprising, on a model similar to that of Sorel, emerges from the TAZ,

which is a ‘matrix’ for it, and a prefiguration, a ‘pre-echo’. In Sorel,

revolution is theorised as ‘general strike’, which is at once a future

event and an organising ‘myth’. Particular uprisings and strikes serve

as instances of the same energy, or as prefigurations, of the general

strike. An effective TAZ in this sense should be both enjoyable and

political. Bey argues that most groups are one or the other – either

joyless politics or apolitical lifestyle events.

The tong, or secret society (a term for a certain type of revolutionary

or criminal group in pre-revolutionary China), is a similar type of

group. In ‘Black Thorn Manifesto‘, Bey celebrates ‘certain

anarcho-Taoist Chinese tongs’ and expresses a wish to reproduce their

‘mutual aid webworks’. In ‘Tong Aesthetics‘, Bey suggests that the City

of Willows was an imaginal space of the Chinese tong.

Bey argues that aesthetics, or style, is also important in the emergence

of tongs today. A tong requires a cause and a legend. The legend is

similar to a Sorelian myth – something one wishes to manifest in the

world. The cause might be the Insurrection, which is prefigured in the

TAZ. The legend is a passionate reading or psychological structure of

the cause. For instance, it might revive radical millenarian beliefs.

In Immediatism, Bey claims to refocus from disappearance to

reappearance, and, hence, organisation. Capitalism now recuperates

artistic intensity almost instantly. The tong is again proposed as an

organisational form. Bey defines a tong as a secret mutual benefit group

for marginal or illegal purposes. Today’s tongs may be virtually secret

simply by means of avoiding mass-media attention. Avoiding the media is

crucial for maintaining the power of an activity. A tong may also be

selective in whom it admits, and in how much information it shares. Bey

denies that this is elitist, because the group does not restrict itself

so as to coalesce power.

Overcoming isolation is itself a central goal of a modern tong. Such

groups also operate to mutually enhance members’ lives. They would

evolve into nuclei of ‘self-chosen allies’ seeking to seize back more

and more space and time for play, eventually expanding into a network

and a movement, and finally a new society. However, its networking needs

to be slow and corporeal.

Bey later tries to systematise the different groups he discusses. They

are different levels of expression of his project of ‘immediatism’. In

‘The Occult Assault on Institutions‘, he lists a series of increasingly

broad groups which he portrays as levels of immediatist organisation:

• The gathering – any spontaneous action, such as a revolt, party, rave,

or Be-in;

• The potlatch, or exchange party;

• The Bee, such as quilting bees – a group of friends meeting to work

together on a project, or united by a common passion;

• The Tong or secret society, or its above-ground equivalent, the club;

• The TAZ, which can arise from any or all of the previous levels. A TAZ

lasts between one night and a couple of years, but while it lasts, it

fills the horizon of attention of its participants, becoming a whole

society;

• The uprising or insurrection, in which the TAZ seeks to become the

whole world.

Of these, the Tong is the highest that can be predetermined. The others

cannot be ‘organised’ – at most one can maximise conditions for them to

happen. In another passage, Bey argues that the social model implied by

ontological anarchism is the band or gang. Whereas families result from

scarcity, bands express abundance. This echoes anthropological studies

of bands.

All of the group-types listed above have a similar purpose and function.

In ‘Seduction of the Cyber Zombies‘, Bey argues for a principle of

group-formation similar to Fourier’s. The purpose of the group is to

maximise pleasure or ‘luxury’ for its members. The cohesion of the group

stems from passion, which for Bey is the only viable integrative force.

Immediatist groups are not based on ‘group-think’ or a common moral

code. They are not meant to counter individuality. Instead, they are

meant to enhance individuals by providing a ‘matrix of friendship‘, and

combating loneliness and alienation. This type of group is both the most

natural possible for humans, and the worst abomination for capital.

An immediatist group has rules of play (as a game), but not laws. It

seeks to resist capture, which follows from representation. Immediatist

organisations have the goals of conviviality (coming together and

enhancing each other’s pleasures), creation of beauty outside structures

of mediation, destruction of the ‘ugliness’ of capitalism, and the

construction of values through peak experiences.

Forming such groups is itself an act of resistance. Capitalism only

allows a limited range of groups, based on production, reproduction or

consumption. Simply coming together outside of these categories is

already a victory – indeed, it has ‘achieved virtually everything

Immediatism yearns for’. This defiance of alienation and boredom will

generate play and art almost automatically.

Forming such a group is a struggle, because time and work pressures

militate against it. One must overcome the feeling of being ‘too busy’

for Immediatist projects – this is the whole point, to defeat the

structure of capitalism which prevents conviviality. Another problem Bey

identifies is the temptation to sell the art created through such

projects. The temptation is strong, because it allows one to avoid work.

However, it risks mediation, and hence being seen, and hence repression

of the secret group.

Hakim Bey: The Pessimism of Autonomy

Hakim Bey’s theoretical creativity did not end with the publication of

TAZ, and he has continued to produce new contributions for those seeking

autonomy in a changing strategic field. In this essay, the seventh in a

series of sixteen columns on Bey’s work, I examine his contributions

from the 1996 book Millennium onwards.

Millennium: a changed strategic field

The strategic concerns underpinning TAZ recede in Bey’s more recent

work. In Millennium, written in 1996, Bey reverses his earlier critique

of revolutionary politics. With communism no longer an issue, he refers

to a need for ‘revolutionary presence’, pitted against the alienation

and separation of capitalism. However, he insists that this presence

should also value difference. For instance, he celebrates the Zapatistas

for wishing to remain Mayans without making everyone Mayans. They assert

the right to be different. They also act to expel power, rather than

seize it, knowing the state could not destroy their zone, which was

already depleted.

During the Cold War, anarchism took a position as a third alternative to

capitalism and Stalinism. Today, there is no such possibility, as the

second position has collapsed. This changed context thrusts anarchists

into the position of being the opposition, the second pole. It forces

Bey to rethink his previous criticisms of revolutionary politics. Bey

argues that difference is the organic revolutionary response to

capitalist sameness, or monoculture. Bey sees ‘tribal’ or communal

differences becoming increasingly precious as sites of difference from

capitalism. Often, such differences are recuperated as spectacle,

customs, consumption options and so on. However, ‘organic integral

difference’ becomes revolutionary today. There is thus a choice between

a hegemonic particularity – integrated into neoliberalism – and an

anti-hegmonic particularity.

Bey now calls for an alliance of particularities. Today, any

unassimilable difference is potentially revolutionary. Some remain

reactionary, as ‘hegemonic particularities’ seeking control, whereas

others become truly revolutionary ‘non-hegemonic particularities’. Both

right and left rebel against the system’s total control, and they are

now hard to tell apart. While encouraging non-hegemonic particularities,

Bey also argues for the development of conviviality which communicates

across ‘false boundaries’. The uniting factor among such particularities

is ‘presence’, or overcoming alienation through intensity.

Bey proposes a federalism similar to Proudhon’s, between various

particularities. In such a model, autonomy and federation are

complementary rather than contradictory. The key principle of such a

federation would be to recognise freedom at every level of organisation,

even the smallest. This should not, however, be a federation of

orthodoxies. Islam, for instance, includes a range of different views of

the sacred, irreducible to orthodoxy or fundamentalism. It is the

unorthodox and heretical variants which Bey seeks to bring together in a

global networked struggle with other particularities. Indeed, Bey

suggests that Islam is indispensable to a global anti-capitalist

coalition.

For Bey, anarchism is anti-ideological. One shouldn’t care if someone

else wishes to be a Mayan, Muslim, or rationalist, as long as one can

secede and individual autonomy is safe. This creates a possibility for

broad coalitions of groups excluded by capital, on the basis of mutual

tolerance. Autonomous enclaves of different groups are to be linked

through anarcho-federalism (Islam and Eugenics). Anarchism is the only

movement capable of being taken seriously, in a post-ideological age. In

Millennium, Bey also argues for the creation of spaces for artists

outside the commodified world of art. These spaces would reaffirm

creativity in everyday life.

In the current period, contestation is intensified. Each zone either

belongs to capital, or ends up in opposition. Whatever the system tries

to destroy takes on an aura of life. Sometimes it differs from

capitalism only by a hair’s breadth, but still this is enough to make it

completely revolutionary, defying the rule of the one system. Bey likens

this to the small distance in satori. Religion is faced with a choice of

capitulation or revolt. Art, too, can survive only in opposition

Nationalism is on a collision course with capitalism because capitalism

has reduced nations to ‘zones of depletion’, and because capital is

interested in nations only for instrumental reasons. This issue could go

either right or left, depending on whether the nation as particularity

is defined as hegemonic. Capital also begins to clash with remnants of

social ideology in liberalism, conservatism, the UN, the EU and so on.

Politics is reduced to ‘cognitive dissonance‘, as no ideology is really

compatible with total capitalist rule.

Hence, the ground for TAZ’s has disappeared. Third positions have been

eliminated. Everything is now either capitulating, or opposing

capitalism. Capital can now turn its attention to what it formerly had

to ignore due to the bipolar conflict. It also no longer needs former

allies, such as Christianity, or to make deals with social sectors. It

formerly needed allies in its fight against socialism or the Soviet

bloc. Today, it reverses the deals it made with Northern labour

movements and other allies. Everything becomes disposable. Regions of

the North can be turned into regions of the South through capital

flight. Any particular region, class, profession, sexuality, or attitude

might be the next to be disposed of. For privileged people, however, the

choice is between capitulation on comfortable terms and reinventing

opposition. TAZs retain a strategic role, but the goal is now to extend

them into permanent autonomous zones, which coalesce into the

‘millennium’ or new world.

Autonomy as such is now criminalised. Bey discusses the cases of MOVE

and the Waco siege, and argues that both groups were attacked by the

state because they wanted to be autonomous. The fact that people just

want to ‘be weird – by themselves‘, or be a group on their own terms,

outrages consensus reality. Sociologically, millions of people from many

backgrounds are dissatisfied. But they tend to be invisible, because

they don’t vote or work in the formal sector. The middle-class is

shrinking, which creates dangers of fascism and populism.

Neoliberalism claims there is only one world. Money is free within this

one world. However, in practice, it divides the world into included and

excluded zones, zones of security and zones of depletion, in which it

sucks away all life-energy. Instead of clashing ideologies, there is now

capital, on one side, and what it excludes, on the other. By declaring

itself the one world – the only alternative – capital has called into

being its nemesis. This nemesis is the last-ditch defence of everything

that cannot become part of global capitalism. Bey suggests that the

opposition that emerges in such a context will be profoundly influenced

by the ‘Clastrian machine‘, particularly shamanism. This machine will

attack exchange itself, and promote reciprocity and generosity. He also

suggests that power vaccuums will appear in zones depleted and evacuated

by capital, providing radical possibilities. This analysis also implies

that transgression and the critique of binaries are no longer effective

approaches to resistance. Without bipolar categories – with the system

operating as oneness instead of binary – there is nothing to transgress.

There is only capitulation or opposition.

In ‘Islam and the Internet‘, Bey argues that there is a need for

embodied resistance. We need something like an ideology, and we need to

clarify (but not purify) language. Communication needs to be

reconstructed as ‘communicativeness’. By this, Bey means that

communication should be festive, dialogical, pleasurable, warm, and

linked to desire – rather than being abstract and mediated. Bey also

calls for a spirituality of and for the body, and a re-enchantment of

the world.

Certain types of movements are partially resistant, but also

problematic. Fundamentalism spearheads resistance to capitalist

capitulation. But by closing the doors of interpretation, it represses

the desire for difference and prevents the emergence of a fully-fledged

critique of capitalism. Mafias are a kind of shadow government which

emerges from the degeneration of the Pastoral Code (Clastres’s view of

indigenous warfare) in struggle against the state.

In ‘The Obelisk‘, Bey argues that resistance movements since the rise of

centralised power are based on the gift economy, which preceded this

rise. This is less clear today than in the past. But Bey suggests that

today’s movements still seek ’empirical freedoms’ defined by the economy

of the gift – freedoms such as the absence of oppression, conviviality,

bodily or spiritual pleasure, peace, plenty, equality, and so on. These

same values appear in immemorial ‘rights and customs’, in the politics

of desire, and in movements such as tactical media.

Green Hermeticism and the Last Possible Outside

From 2004 onwards, Bey has been increasingly interested in ecology as

the site of altered consciousness. He has developed the idea of ‘Green

Hermeticism’ as a potential philosophical matrix for ecology. He has

also written a series of ecologically inflected works, such as

Riverpeople and Ec(o)logues. Such works combine intense appreciation for

local ecological sites with Bey’s older themes of mysticism, autonomy,

disalienation, altered consciousness, and alternative history.

Other recent works have a more pessimistic tone. In Escape from the

Nineteenth Century, Bey suggests that the present feels as if history

has stopped, and we are trapped in the ruins of time. In ‘Seduction of

the Cyber Zombies‘, Bey suggests that a desperate global war is coming,

between global capital and a worldfull of individuals and groups. The

best we can hope is that it be a peaceful war, like Sorel’s General

Strike. But we should prepare for the worst. In another piece, Bey

predicts that the situation will become very ugly when capital is

finally opposed.

If one finds oneself in a zone of depletion, or No Go Zone, one’s

prospects for autonomy increase with the withdrawal of power into the

virtual. Such zones are unlikely to be able to assert political

autonomy. However, there are possibilities for freedom in everyday life.

Today, such zones are already vacuums of control, but mostly suffer

‘negative chaos’. To become emancipatory sites, they need to be filled

with ‘positive chaos’. Such possibilities depend on an appropriate model

of the economy and the social. Bey suggests this might operate as a kind

of borderless bricolage, a ‘melange of whatever works’. Technology is

likely to be low-tech and ad-hoc, but ‘more human than green’. It should

be constructed to resist hierarchy through each person’s will to power.

Failure may be the last refuge from the ‘Capitalist heaven‘ of

simulation. One can at least be a beautiful spirit doomed to fail,

rather than an ugly one.

In periods of defeat, the most pressing issue is survival as a trace or

remnant, to be recovered later. Following the Anabaptists after their

defeat, Wilson argues that, if the world cannot be saved (through

revolution), at least a ‘saving remnant‘ can withdraw into intentional

communities based on pleasure. In a poem, ‘Failure as the Last Possible

Outside’, Bey writes of a future in which entire nations are enclosed as

‘literal garbage dumps’, but are secretly inhabited by outcasts and

bricoleurs. Even in the darkest dystopia, Bey creates hope of an

outside, an autonomous zone.

Whatever slips past panoptical surveillance, perhaps because it seems

futile, becomes the basis for this zone. In this poem, Bey appeals to

the ‘paradoxical productivity of all that refuses to be computed, that

which “doesn’t count”‘. Rebels disguise themselves as outcasts to slip

through the cracks in the Empire. In another poem, ‘Herm’, he incites us

to live like ‘Them’, the tri-racial isolates, as ‘rebels against

progress’, as if with ‘bad genes’.

In one poem, he suggests that, if our pagan deities have gone silent, we

should do the same, and withdraw to a monastic or druidic site. He also

refers in this era to ‘endarkenment’, or reversal of Enlightenment. This

is another term for altered consciousness, this time associated with

low-technology, low-mediation forms of life – such as, in one poem,

‘flyfishing while under the Influence’. We cannot become ‘innocent’ or

‘primitive’, but we can still ‘fall in love with the beauty of the Earth

as a sign of divinity’. Recognising the archetype of ‘Perfect Nature’ in

actual nature might be an illusion. But it is a necessary, creative

error. It creates possibilities for altered consciousness.

Discussion of TAZ

In some ways, it is unsurprising that Bey is more pessimistic today than

previously. The idea of TAZ seems to stem from a particular conjuncture.

Bey’s theory stems from the fraying of the world-system in the 1980s and

1990s. As capital withdrew from vast zones and the Fordist

control-mechanisms broke down, areas fell out of systemic control. The

state collapsed in Somalia and Afghanistan, gangs took control of

shanty-towns, secessionist movements seized control of regions. Only a

few of these (such as Chiapas) became autonomous zones with emancipatory

projects. Nevertheless, the fraying of the system provided hope for

autonomists and anarchists worldwide.

Things have changed somewhat in the 2000s. The system continues to fray

around the edges, with ‘black holes‘ emerging in its power-structure.

But increasingly these emergent autonomous zones are shut down,

pre-empted, or militarised. Intensified control is eliminating or

shrinking the spaces the system cannot see, at least within countries

like the UK. With GIS, Google Maps, GPS systems, personalised laws and

data mining, the gap between map and territory is growing ever narrower.

What is more, the system is remodelling the territory to fit the map

ever more closely. I would speculate that the state has found ways of

seeing TAZs, firstly by defining anything it cannot predict as a threat,

and secondly by focusing its gaze more closely on each micro-element of

space and life.

Another possible issue with TAZ is the apparent necessity of an

adversary, so as to keep it temporary. In early pieces (like TAZ and

‘The Criminal Bee’), Bey tends towards the position that laws and

oppression are necessary, to provide a target for rebellion. He seems to

abandon this position in his more recent work. Is a permanent TAZ even

thinkable? I think it would be possible to have a kind of society in

which peak experience is the ultimate value, without requiring a

repressive regime as a challenge to overcome. But it couldn’t be based

on conflictual action-spaces of the kind seen in activism. The closest

analogue are certain indigenous groups in which intergroup conflict and

intense ritual experiences are common. The utopian work Bolo’Bolo

provides an image of something akin to a society of permanent TAZs.

The idea of failure as the last possible outside sounds pessimistic

compared to Bey’s earlier work. However, the emphasis on disappearance

is continuous. If capitalism claims to be a unitary world, yet excludes

zones which cannot be commodified, then failure and autonomy go

together. Knight suggests that Bey speaks as if his generation were the

last one with a chance at revolution, as well as at overseas adventures.

The TAZ concept is often used to interpret aspects of 1990s

counterculture, particularly raves. In a video, Bey lists as examples of

TAZ-like phenomena such events as neo-pagan festivals, rainbow camps,

‘open conspiracies’ such as Queer Nation, raves, collaborative art

events, anarchist collectives, intentional communities, secret

societies, and even drug dealing. These gatherings attempt to realise

enjoyment, or ‘passional series’, in everyday life. Many groups fail to

realise the depth of their threat to the spectacle, use the media, and

end up recuperated. Political groups have mainly failed to master

pleasure, and lifestyle groups to grasp politics.

Benjamin Noys lists TAZ as one of a number of recent approaches

emphasising the role of space in liberation. Simon Sellars refers to

‘Reclaim the Streets’ occupations, raves, and occasions where protesters

overrun police, as instances of TAZ. He also surveys a list of academic

pieces which refer to TAZ in relation to themes such as popular culture,

Critical Mass, areas of Deaf culture defined by sign language,

Stonehenge, camping, hip-hop, and various Black, women’s, and gay/queer

spaces. Williams uses a similar example of the Fare Dodgers’ Liberation

Front, who held parties on London Underground stations to protest and

subvert fare rises. Jeff Shantz sees Bey’s work as an inspiration for

the formation of anarchist social centres in 1990s America. Sellars

suggests that the idea of TAZ became widespread, but without a definite

meaning. It had general connotations of anarchy and freedom, but was not

always understood in Bey’s sense. This led to criticisms, such as

Zerzan’s depiction of the term as ‘hip posturing’. Similarly, Geert

Lovink has observed that TAZ is taken out of its political and cultural

context in recuperated forms of cyberculture.

Williams suggests that TAZ, and some of Bey’s other concepts, tend to be

‘empty signifiers‘: They have so many meanings and uses that they lack a

definite meaning. He also draws the conclusion from Bey that fulfilment

never comes, that a little enlightenment is better than none. He argues

that Bey ultimately arrives at the conclusion that anarchism is

unattainable. Instead, he seeks to make the current world a bit more

anarchist. However, I’d suggest that there’s a core qualitative

reference to intensity and disalienation which provides a core of

meaning to such concepts.

It is true that Bey is sometimes strategically pessimistic. He is not

confident that we can reach emancipation from the strategic options

available today. However, he has a clear transformative perspective in

which the ultimate goal is a society integrated by passion, operating as

something like a permanent TAZ. Enlightenment is not an absent goal

which never comes. Enlightenment means altered consciousness, which is a

lived alternative.

Bey does not simply try to make the world a bit better. He has an

antagonistic orientation to a dominant system, conceived as a ‘totality’

or Spectacle. Far from becoming more pessimistic with time, Bey becomes

more revolutionary after the collapse of ‘communism’. He feels a need

for uncompromising opposition to a system which accepts only full

capitulation. On this question, I believe Bey is right, and Williams is

wrong. The Gramscian strategy of fighting in the ‘trenches and

fieldworks‘ of a complex society is increasingly ineffective in a

‘joined-up‘, high-speed, low-tolerance form of capitalism. The system’s

demand for total capitulation makes it impossible to make the world a

bit better – especially from a standpoint inside it. Today, even the

most reformist demands seem to require a near-revolution to succeed.

Those who give up on revolution, and use their included position to seek

small reforms, will have to settle for less and less.

Despite all the changes since 1991, TAZs still exist. The ZAD in France

is an archetypal TAZ. There are also shades of the TAZ in Tahrir Square,

Gezi Park and Occupy, though they are oriented to visibility rather than

invisibility. Social movement-controlled spaces in autonomous

communities in Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, South Africa and so on are

arguably a variety of TAZ. Authors such as Graeber argue that autonomous

zones continue to exist invisibly in areas such as rural Madagascar. The

most effective TAZ’s, almost by definition, will be invisible to us,

too. Yet the regulation of everyday life, and the extension of

surveillance and repression to post-TAZ spaces, are rendering it harder

to alternate TAZ with ordinary life. This, in turn, creates a need for

something more permanent. Arguably, the possibility of TAZ relies on the

semi-permanence of everyday practices of resistance, such as squatting,

countercultural events, festival circuits and so on. If the everyday is

too regulated, it becomes harder to carve a TAZ from the everyday.

There are strange echoes between Bey’s Millennium – the system versus

anything that cannot be englobed – and the liberal idea of ‘Jihad vs

McWorld‘ (except in the latter case, the dominant system is valued). The

main difference is that Bey conceives opposition mainly in terms of

autonomous movements expressing powerful affirmative passions. In ‘Jihad

Revisited‘, Bey rejects the idea of any similarity between his dream of

a neo-Sufi Islamic Zapatismo and the rise of ‘Islamism’. Bey has little

sympathy for the anti-fun, anti-Sufi orthodoxy of groups like the

Taliban and al-Qaeda. He sees it as a ‘simulation’, a false conflict

between the Spectacle and a self-defined energy which is not really

anti-systemic. This leads to a fake conflict between ‘democracy’,

meaning coca-colonisation, and ‘Islam’, taken to mean ’emotional plague’

(Reich’s term for psychological repression). ‘Islamism’ cannot negate

Empire because it is itself based on negation and resentment. In a later

interview, Bey suggests their limit is shown by their lack of a critique

of capital, and an economic model he considers fascistic. Such groups

are only able to gain popular support in countries like Afghanistan –

with a rich tradition of everyday enjoyment – as a lesser evil in a

context of absolute destruction.

Bey here attempts to grapple with what I elsewhere discuss as ‘reactive

networks’. Reactive networks lead to a certain ambiguity, because they

clearly create autonomous zones (relative to capital), but these zones

do not incarnate the affects Bey seeks. Indeed, the proliferating

revolutionary oppositions of anything that cannot be incorporated are

expressed just as much in reactive movements (e.g. ISIS, Boko Haram,

Mungiki, gangs of various kinds) as in autonomous movements. This

complicates the picture of ‘system vs autonomous particularities’

considerably. Anarchism and other radical positions (Marxism, pacifism,

feminism, etc) seem to be back in the position of a ‘third’, but in a

context where the system still defines itself as the one world and

treats difference as enmity.

Another possible difficulty with TAZ is that it identifies excess with

abundance. This is a strategic response to scarcity-based dynamics, but

creates difficulties in the current context. Is it possible to be

paralysed by excess, as well as by lack? Berardi claims so, and suggests

that contemporary capitalism has recuperated 1960s-wave revolt in this

way. People are now exposed to attentive stress due to an excess of

information and stimulation. Native American therapist Lewis

Mehl-Madrona makes similar claims. He suggests that, without forms of

meaning to provide purpose, chaos is paralysing and anxiety-inducing.

However, such critiques do not seriously problematise Bey’s argument.

Bey is not saying that we should do without existential attachments or

meanings. He is saying that meanings are rooted in desire, which is

accentuated in altered states of consciousness. The tenuous construction

of personal meanings may be the last structuring force possible in a

world of information overload. In any case, intensity can be experienced

as euphoric rather than overwhelming, given certain conditions. Much of

Bey’s theory seems designed to produce these conditions. Bey also

observes that information excess can lead to darkness rather than

enlightenment – a ‘lite age‘ in Bey’s terms. The problem is that the

excess is itself mediated and de-intensified.

Hakim Bey: Strategies of Resistance

Hakim Bey’s general strategic perspectives, such as the TAZ, are

complemented by a range of tactical proposals for political action. In

this essay, I will explore the strategic underpinnings for Bey’s

political proposals, and will examine his focus on resisting

recuperation, his emphasis on “empirical freedoms” as means to

liberation, and his theory of immediatism.

Bey’s strategic approach

There is a transformative strategy at work in Bey’s theories, which

stems logically from his ontology and his view of the dominant system.

He favours a range of tactics which produce altered consciousness and

peak experiences. In his theory, peak experiences provide a means to

transform values. They are also a challenge to the Spectacle, which is

unable to provide them.

This strategy is based on Bey’s ontology of chaos. His approach is

driven by the ‘desire for desire, for Eros son of Chaos‘. No ideology or

normativity is adequate today. An adequate ethics must be situational.

Peak experience is part of this. However, peak experience is not a goal

in itself. TAZ is not purely hedonistic, but insurrectionary in intent –

seeking to infect or become the ‘social‘. Experiences such as those of a

TAZ can serve as the matrix for a Sorelian myth of uprising. (In Sorel,

a myth is a mobilising idea which inspires action, regardless of its

truth). The point is to provide the hope, the morale, necessary for

transformative struggle and personal enjoyment. ‘Whether or not you

believe you’re going to save the world, you have to act like you believe

it or your life will be crap’.

Chaos is ontologically primary. Therefore, every social order is

ultimately illusory. It is made real only by coercion. Even so, fighting

the system’s agents is less important than breaking down the

self-alienation which underpins it. There is a danger that fighting the

state helps sustain it as an effective illusion.

This leads some of Bey’s critics and supporters to interpret him as

opposing social struggle. Despite these concerns, there is a recurring

orientation to insurrection, or the ‘Uprising’, in his work. The

‘Uprising’ is a moment, like Sorel’s General Strike, when the TAZ comes

to encompass all of social life, and becomes permanent.

Bey insists on altered consciousness against consensus reality. But it

is not necessarily a rare occurrence. Esoteric, mystical and magical

forces are found in unusual, everyday places. Ice-cream, for instance,

is a mystical mixture of ice, fire, ocean and space, holding natural

appeal for children. It has its origins in Persian hermeticism and the

discovery of rock-salt.

Resisting Recuperation – Exodus not Revolution

Resisting recuperation is a central aspect of Bey’s strategy. The

Spectacle is a trap for revolt, because rebellion can also be turned

into an image or a product. People are failing to create an outside

because they are too glued to, or hypnotised by, televisions and

computers. Visible militancy can become an image of itself and be

recuperated by the media.

If mediation is the main enemy, the system’s main means of control, then

effective resistance takes the form of disappearance, disengagement,

immediacy (instead of mediation) and presence (instead of

representation). Refusal to be mediated, or to engage with the

Spectacle, creates spaces which are outside the system. While Bey also

argues periodically for sabotage, reappropriation, and tactical use of

the media, refusal seems to be the privileged tactic. His tactics are

similar to the tactics of détournement used by Situationists. In an

interview, Bey suggests that a strategy irrecuperable by the system has

to involve altered consciousness. Altered consciousness or peak

experience is irrecuperable because it cannot be represented, or reduced

to mediated forms.

Strategically, Bey opposes a head-on collision with the state for two

reasons. Firstly, he thinks it is futile. Secondly, he thinks the state

is ‘terminal‘, or dying of its own accord. The system is violently

spasming in its death throes. In this context, there is no point

confronting a power-system which has lost all meaning and is just a

simulation. The best tactic is to avoid this spectacular violence which

cannot reach the substance of social life, instead disappearing.

Insurrection and armed action are tragically counterproductive, because

they are recuperated by the Spectacle. Also, radical action or

organising should not be a sacrifice, but self-liberation with immediate

psychological reward. Struggles against the system risk recuperation. As

an alternative, Bey proposes personal and cultural actions. His

alternative is to live as if the struggle were already won, to realise

alternatives immediately, in the present. He discourages purely

destructive acts (without a constructive element), and direct attacks on

people. Instead, he defines the task of radicals as finding cracks in

the system’s power and images, chipping away at the Spectacle and its

influence. With enough success, such tactics might cause the system to

lose its coherence and assurance, and thus also its power.

Armed attacks are ‘tragically counterproductive’. What counts today is

personal/cultural action and ‘bearing witness‘. Attacks like 9/11 are

‘automatically recuperable‘ and always produce the opposite of their

intended effect, because they are incorporated in the system’s internal

image of the enemy. On another occasion, Bey reportedly expressed

disapproval of the mass murders, but called 9/11 a ‘brilliant piece of

artwork’ falling into the broad category of ‘bad shamanism’ which

underpins reactionary movements.

Bey feels there is an obligation to feel joy, and not postpone it until

the future or the afterlife. Feeling joy is necessary both to do justice

to oneself, and to deal fairly/beautifully with others. Bey seeks to tap

the energy of insurrection, without risking martyrdom or capture by the

image. Insurrection must relate to the media today as it used to relate

(in Bey’s historical examples) to religion as heresy. It is effectively

a heresy against the Spectacle.

Resistance to the Spectacle occurs mainly through images and

imaginaries. Simply being conscious of the Spectacle, sameness, and

alienation cannot overcome them. Rather, opposition needs

‘counter-imagery‘ and a kind of spirituality or marvel. In Millennium,

Bey suggests that there is a lack of an inspiring ‘myth’ or ‘metanoia‘,

a focal point for dissident energies, both in above-ground radical

movements and in countercultures and underground groups. The present

task as he sees it is to build an anti-capitalist resistance movement

out of the remaining fragments of radical movements.

In line with this perspective, Bey proposes a range of different

tactics, the goal of which is to free desire from a state of capture or

bondage to the system. Everyday life is the main field for

insurrectionary self-empowerment against the system. Bey suggests that

everyone knows what is going on and what to do, provided s/he can break

free of ‘false consciousness‘, the Spectacle, interpretation, or

scarcity. Bey calls for a type of resistance which melts into the wider

resistance of the excluded. It avoids confrontation on unequal terms,

but breaks down the system’s monopoly on violence. It occupies cracks in

the system of control and reproduces techniques of indigenous warfare.

Viewed as a general strategy, this is not a strategy of resistance at

the level of theory or art alone. Rather, it seeks dis-alienation

through the strategic use of images, culminating in an alternative

consciousness geared towards the Uprising. However, some of the tactics

do focus on theory or art. Before the world can be changed, we need to

destroy the dominant archetypes, the ‘cops in the head’. This is the

only practical insurrection possible today.

Bey suggests that it may also change the landscape around us. An

insurrection against false consciousness will sweep away the power, the

technology, of oppression. Attacking power is no longer possible because

it is no longer ‘there’ – is is pure spectacle. The state, as an outer

institution, is increasingly irrelevant as a focus, because of the

spread of virtual capital. Yet spaces cannot be neutral. Either a zone

is part of capital, or it is in opposition.

Bey’s position leads to certain general propositions. In ‘Post-Anarchism

Anarchy‘, he provides a nine-point manifesto which includes ‘Zerowork’

or anti-work, opposing the education system and the ‘serfdom of

children’, promotion of sexuality, and addressing the issue of land in

the context of de-spatialisation of capitalism. However, Bey also

critiques single-issue politics as playing into the commodification of

opinions. Specific oppressions cannot be separated out from the general

problem of the system.

Strategies and Contexts

In some ways, this is a consciously anti-strategic strategy.

Politically, Bey criticises the idea of revolution as a goal, instead

valuing insurgence, uprising, or insurrection as an inner process of

rejecting power. There is no overarching programme for revolution.

Worthwhile struggles are always for ‘empirical freedoms‘, rather than

ideology. ‘Strategic autonomy is made up of tactical incremental

empirical freedoms not ideology’. He theorises uprisings as an

equivalent at the social movement scale of peak experiences at the

individual level. The aim is to get outside mediation by creating

different ways of being.

In this context, the TAZ is not only a tactic, it is also a

‘psychospiritual state’ or ‘existential condition’. The physical TAZ is

a way to sample this state of being. It is a way to create a

psychological and political ‘outside‘ – from which resistance can

happen. Sometimes the insurrection itself is a zone of freedom,

regardless of whether it is successful. Its temporary nature can be a

virtue. The process of revolt is arguably preferable to the sleepiness

of a realised social form.

In a sense, even dropping or reforming repressive rules is unnecessary,

since rules and the morality of the herd are there to be overcome. They

are something to prove and measure oneself against. Bey’s main point

here is that one should break the rules, instead of trying to reform

them. The imperative to resist does not disappear even in miserable

conditions. If rebellion is not possible, then Bey advises what he calls

a ‘clandestine spiritual jihad‘, or struggle to disalienate life and

culture.

Bey’s strategies vary greatly with context. Each situation has a

particular strategic structure and needs to be approached situationally

to find sources of power. ‘Situation’ here seems to mean something like

a social structure or opportunity structure in relation to which

strategies and tactics are formulated to create autonomy or conditions

for its emergence. In his early work, Bey cocneived of TAZ in Deleuzian

molecular terms, as a tactic used as part of a worldview distrustful of

strategy. In his later work, faced with the totalising effects of the

post-Cold War ‘end of history’, he suggests that he’s now forced into

trying to formulate a strategic position, without the authoritarian

implications of strategy (Interview, Sakhra).

At various points, Bey also calls for creating alternative economic

institutions, and for anarchist involvement in wider social movements.

For example, the strategic position of TAZ changes a lot through Bey���s

writings. In the book TAZ, Bey wishes for the ‘eruption of the

marvellous into the ordinary‘. This means spiritualising everyday life.

For Bey at this time, spiritualisation is the most tumultuous and urgent

political demand. In Immediatism, Bey claims that he staked and

ultimately lost on this position. He now seeks to find hidden treasure

instead. This later position suggests that the marvellous is contained

mainly in secretive small groups. In ‘The Occult Assault on

Institutions‘, he argues for a strategy to optimise conditions for TAZ’s

to emerge.

There are thus major differences in Bey’s strategic perspective over

time. Overall, however, his varying strategies and tactics pursue a

consistent goal of immediacy, intensity, and altered consciousness. In

Escape from the Nineteenth Century, he argues that capital is based on

sameness and separation. The antidotes are therefore difference and

presence. In an interview, he counterposes ‘real immanence’ to the

‘false transcendence’ offered by the Spectacle.

In ‘Post-Anarchism Anarchy‘, Bey argues that anarchism is caught between

a tragic Past and a utopian Future, but it needs to find a present in

‘true desires’ and things we can do ‘before it’s too late’. It starts

from the question, ‘What is your True Desire?’ A first step in ‘utopia’

is always to look in the mirror and demand to know one’s true desire.

This requires at least temporarily overcoming anxiety, or fear of one’s

shadow.

In some works, Bey redefines the Islamic concept of jihad in terms of

the struggle against alienation. The greater jihad is the struggle

against the separated self and the suffocation of the true self. The

lesser jihad is the struggle against the Spectacle. In ‘Jihad

Revisited‘, Bey suggests that he was hoping for a kind of ‘Islamic

Zapatismo’ when he wrote Millennium, possibly derived from neo-Sufism.

This jihad he imagined has not come to pass and it is ‘probably too

late’.

Immediatism: Tactical Resistance to Mediation

Bey sees mediation as a central aspect or cause of alienation. All

experience is mediated, but mediation differs in degree. Embodied

experiences are the least mediated. Certain sensory experiences – such

as taste, touch, and sexual pleasure – are less mediated than others.

Live or performance arts are less mediated than recorded arts. Even

among recorded arts, there are degrees of mediation depending on how

much imaginative participation each work demands. When hearers or

readers play an active role in imagination or dreaming, there is less

mediation.

Books draw on the reader’s imagination, but involve a hierarchical

relationship between producer and consumer. Spirit-possession is less

mediated than theatre, which is less mediated than film, and television

is especially mediated and in need of overcoming. However, the point is

not to do away with any means of artistic production. The more

imagination is freed or shared, the more useful the medium. In other

words, mediation is a continuum, ranging from the barely-mediated to the

extremely mediated, with many shades in between.

The idea of mediation is central to Bey’s analysis of art. Capitalism

propels art towards increasing mediation, and recuperates art

increasingly rapidly today. Authentic art is play. Play is one of the

least mediated experiences. Bey seems to connect artistic creativity

with peak experience. Immediatism is a means of creative, liberatory and

playful energy-production, without alienation or mediation. Today’s art

and advertising promote endless images of death and mutilation.

On the other hand, images of life are sometimes punished. Bey argues

that art cannot exist for itself. Art functions as political power, a

way of expressing or changing the world. Even if there is such a thing

as art without political content, it would still be political in its

means of production and consumption. Immediatist art expresses its

radicalism in its means of production and consumption. It is kept within

a small group of friends and ideally leaves no trace at all, except

self-transformation.

In the 1990s, Bey theorised disappearance as desirable, to avoid

recuperation. Disappearance is a way to save something from dying of

mediation. Capitalism has created a kind of closure in which a single

image of the world dominates. Other images cannot emerge because of the

hegemony of this image. This leads to a dead process of endless

reproduction of sameness. Any image which ruptures this hegemony would

have to come from outside. And it would have to be asserted as a kind of

‘Image War‘.

The ‘outside’ here is presence, or the gift economy, as something which

cannot be represented. In Riverpeople, Wilson claims that publication

sometimes ‘profanes’ (dirties or despiritualises) secret knowledge which

is better transmitted in less-mediated forms, such as manuscript or

word-of-mouth. These less-mediated forms retain a small chance of

enchantment, of becoming ‘Poetic Facts’ with truth in the archetypal

world as well as the real world. In contrast, mass-published facts

become mere data or information. They lose any relationship to the

imaginal world. Bey also claims that ‘secrets still exist’. Secrets are

powerful, against the system’s claims to see and represent everything.

Secrecy is central to the tong, immediatism, and Bey’s conception of

‘tact’.

In ‘Media Creed for the Fin de Siécle‘, Wilson argues that the mass

media alienates whatever it captures. One cannot express one’s true

subjectivity in the media. Instead, what is expressed is rendered

meaningless. Therefore, he calls for a refusal to let the media possess

one’s image and extract ‘vampiric power’ from it. Instead, one should

invest energies in intimate or subjective media, and either evade or

destroy mass media.

Virtual reality failed because human reaction times are faster than

vision. VR caused sickness and illnesses by separating embodied and

visual experiences. In ‘The Obelisk‘, Bey argues that voluntary

self-restraint in relation to the world of representation and images can

lead to flows of power to the autonomous imagination. The point is to

imagine ourselves, rather than to allow ourselves to be imagined through

words or images. Things which are unrepresented and unseen –

deliberately or fortuitously – tend to maintain their lived meaning.

This in turn creates optimal conditions for the emergence of the

‘marvelous’ in lived experiences (or of altered consciousness).

In Immediatism, Bey proposes to practice art in secret, so as to avoid

‘contamination’ by mediation. All spectators should also be performers.

Artistic products should be shared with participants only, and never

sold. Techniques involving physical presence are preferred. This

practice is framed as a response to alienation and to the ‘death of art’

due to mediation.

Art should be created from inspiration, as a free gift, which may or may

not be reciprocated. Today, instead, it is produced for money. Art is

meant to provide a kind of ‘healing laugh‘, which is serious, but not

sober. It is to be a boast, not an excuse. Bey suggests that art which

is not produced through alienation is today classified in terms such as

‘insane’ and ‘neo-primitive’. It appeals because of its imaginal

presence.

As an example of an immediatist project, Bey proposes a variety of the

potlatch, or ritual feast. It should be made without ready-made

ingredients. The main point is to give and receive gifts. Another piece,

‘A Lunar Garden of Legal Phantastica‘, suggests modern items for

creating a Greek pantheon. Priapus could be a garden gnome with a

painted-on penis; Mercury a hood ornament from a car, or the Western

Union logo.

Similarly, in ‘The Occult Assault on Institutions‘, Bey argues that

actions to promote TAZ should avoid mediation, directly realising their

goal. They should also add up to more than the sum of their parts. Such

actions should both ‘damage or destroy some real and/or imaginal

time/space of “the enemy”‘, and create a strong chance of a peak

experience. In terms of enemies, abstractions like ‘the state’ are of

little use. Resistance must target specific functionaries. The aim is to

provide a particular ‘occult effect’, projecting power back at the

media.

One way to avoid recuperation by the Spectacle is to ensure that

symbolism has depth or ‘fractal dimensions’ which cannot be reduced to

the flat imagery of the Spectacle. In such cases, even when others try

to recuperate an image, it will continue to carry an uncertain,

anti-systemic subtext. Sabotage, for instance, is too easily recuperated

by being classified as crime. It might avoid this if combined with

information, beauty, or adventure, provided one does not get caught.

For instance, media employees might be sent powerful imagery or magic

art-objects which are said to carry a curse. The curse is that it will

cause them to realise their true desires. The aim of such a tactic is to

infiltrate the images into their dreams and desires, to make their jobs

seem boring and destructive.

Using Images and Media

When he engages in media and art politics, Bey seeks to

liberate imagination

from the regime of the image, or the Spectacle. Sight and sound are

today hegemonic. We need to valorise smell, touch, taste and the 'third

eye' (or spiritual seeing). Bey also calls for the use of silence,

secrecy, and veiling of images to combat the Spectacle. He suggests that

capitalism is a 'blind panopticon' which is especially vulnerable in the

field of 'magic', or the manipulation of images to produce events.

Secrecy and invisibility are useful for this purpose. The art of the

unseen, or clandestinity, can be used to

avoid absorption

in the Spectacle. Art is play. It requires

secrecy and silence

, and uneven rather than smooth time. Things which are

real but unseen

have imaginative, erotic, or spiritual power. The very existence of

unseen things challenges the regime of images, the Spectacle. By

becoming invisible, we can become re-enchanted, and avoid being visible

to the system. In a panoptical world, we must seek to explore the

last tiny corner of the room

which the eye cannot see. Geographically, this seemingly tiny corner

might comprise large regions – such as Chiapas. In such zones, the right

to be different is posited increasingly forcefully.

Wilson also proposes that, to break the hypnotic trance exercised by

media, especially on the unconscious, one sometimes needs to '

just stop

'. By taking a pause from media and reassessing it, one can limit the

effects of the trance, as when Wilson himself avoided media after 9/11

to resist this effect. He likens this practice to Sufi 'halting', which

is a meditative practice used to distance from and reassess fixed

assumptions and habits.

Bey also suggests that tactical or 'guerrilla' media can be used to

subvert dominant images and create glimmers of the unseen.

Intimate media

(such as zines) can also remain outside the totality of representation.

Tactical media is messy or organic, as opposed to the

sterility of strategic media

. The tactical problem is to avoid, or stay ahead, of representation and

capture. Wilson aims for 'relative invulnerability' to representation

through mobility and invisibility. The problem here is that most

tactical media continues to represent. The appropriate response is to

make uncertainty or messiness a 'principle', to refuse to be 'cleaned

up'. Ad hoc tactics tend to coalesce into a strategy of spontaneous

ordering. New technologies have a magical aura. For instance, the

Internet raised almost messianic expectations. It was a factor for

liberation because it was

out of control

.

Powerful art is art which produces intense emotional reactions – good or

bad. Bey wishes to

reconnect poetry and art to the body

, recreating its ability to produce affects (emotions). Bey suggests

that freedom of publication in the arts is a sign that the system has

destroyed the ability of art to subvert the dominant reality. At least

when poets are jailed, this shows they are taken seriously. Porn is

still restricted, says Bey, because it has a definite affective effect,

uncovering desires. However, today's porn is mostly based on

body-hatred. Bey calls for alternative erotic art which is a 'better

vehicle for enhancement of being/consciousness/bliss'.

Poetic Terrorism and Art Sabotage

In his book TAZ, Bey advances the idea of 'poetic terrorism'. This is

not terrorism in the sense of armed opposition. Bey uses the term as a

provocation. Rather, poetic terrorism consists of playful actions

designed to shock people into awareness of ontological chaos or to

provoke intensity. Such actions seek an audience reaction of aesthetic

shock, at least as strong as terror – for example, intuitive

breakthrough, awe, arousal, or disgust. Poetic terrorism possesses some

of the affect or 'resonance' of terrorism or cruelty, but directed at

abstractions or images

, rather than people, and carried out for pleasure rather than power or

profit. In other words, poetic terrorism does to a myth or symbol what

literal terrorism does to people or spaces.

Bey conceives this as a new, nonviolent way of fighting by bringing

life. Artists conspire to spread generosity, life, and

disappearance

from the alienated world. Such approaches, which target ideas and

institutions, are tactically advised, instead of actions against

individuals. However, they are

expected

also to lead to other forms of insurrection. In a later work, Bey/Wilson

suggests that the use of poetic terrorism or '

Image Magic

' to attack the totality of the Image (i.e. the Spectacle) is necessary,

not to destroy the Spectacle but to define a possible outside.

Examples

include breaking into houses to leave gifts, instead of stealing, or

staging all-night dances in bank lobbies. Pyrotechnics or fireworks have

a special place, as an ancient weapon invented to shock rather than

kill.

There are similarities between what Bey proposes and

carnivalesque

protest

tactics

. There are also similarities to

trolling

(in the humorous sense), as well as to the art practices of Dadaism and

Situationism.

Williams

sees these tactics as a kind of con trick, designed to alter

consiousness rather than accumulate money. Many such actions are

designed to

shock

but also to point towards altered consciousness – such as Bey's

proposals for self-flagellating anarchists in black robes, or curses

mailed to malign institutions. In

Sacred Drift

, Wilson promotes the Trickster archetype, and suggests that the Green

Man and the Hidden Prophet are varieties of it. This archetype heals and

inspires through laughter and clowning. Its actions provoke shock –

either laughter or outrage. The trickster intervenes to take someone to

the borderland where the marvelous (or imaginal) enters everyday life.

The darker side of these practices is termed '

art sabotage

', and consists of seeking to create intensity through destruction and

disruption of the culture industry, such as disrupting TV transmissions.

This type of sabotage aspires to be a Luddite response to the dominant

system. Art sabotage does not seek power. It seeks to release power

which is trapped in existing structures. It is a kind of

imaginative disruption

.

Sexuality and Sexual Repression

Sexuality can also be a path to altered consciousness. Bey promotes a

view of sexuality as intense experience and polymorphous perversity

deployed to create intensity. Such sexuality would promote

pleasure

rather than self-denial. It is based on an explosive reaffirmation of

Eros, the life-force, as

polymorphic and powerful

. Obscenity counters the cold life-destruction of the

Evil Eye

, which in Bey's work reflects not only envy and hatred but also

instrumentalism and control.

Romantic love, based on unsatisfied desire, is an effect of ideals of

chastity. It glorifies hopeless longing. In capitalism, the beloved

becomes a '

perfect commodity

' – desired and paid for, but not enjoyed. Romantic love is tainted with

ownership and alienation. Bey counterposes both the Surrealist idea of

transgressive excess of obsessive desire, and John Henry Mackay's idea

of erotic friendship based on generosity. Bey concludes that both

obsessive longing and happiness can create mystical states of

consciousness (Obsessive Love).

The view that the repression of sexuality – in the broad sense of

'Eros', life-force or passion, as well as in specific sexual forms – is

at the root of alienation can be traced back to

Freud

and

Reich

. Its specific manifestations are weaker today – for example, sexual

activity and imagery are less restricted than in the 1950s. But the

general pattern of excluding intensity from life is arguably stronger

today. The regime

Baudrillard

terms simulation requires the de-intensification of those aspects of

life which are permitted, to an unprecedented degree. Think of the

regulation of

football

, of

music

festivals

, of

nightclubs

and

music

, of

pubs

, of

fireworks

, and of

drugs

as a few examples.

We can here cross-read Bey with

Norbert Elias

and the cumulative exclusion of the body and its flows from public life.

Elias traces how, from early modernity onwards, things like nudity, sex,

pissing and shitting, disease, old age, human death, animal slaughter,

and punishment were hidden or excluded from public spaces. This process

goes hand-in-hand with the rise of the modern ego or cogito – the idea

that the self is simply a brain, and the body an instrumental means. It

is also tied-up with the rise of the bourgeoisie, in opposition to

'vulgar' warlords and feudalists. This process is still very much with

us, in the

criminalisation of nudity

for example. Another author who takes up these themes is

Bakhtin

. who argues that the interpenetrating aspects of bodily flows are ways

of summoning an image of a continuous, abundant universe.

Drugs and Entheogenesis

Another path to intensity is drug use. Bey terms psychedelic drugs '

entheogenic

', meaning that they stimulate the 'divine within'. He argues that such

plants were worshipped once agriculture was adopted, because they

provide a route back to the lost immediacy of a psychoactive world.

Previously, the entire world was psychoactive. All cultures had such a

cult, until the rise of Christianity – after which, psychoactive

knowledge was maintained underground, by country doctors and wise-women.

Bey suggests that psychoactive drugs were revived after 1945 because the

world became more dematerialised. Nuclear war and

computers

were both aspects of dematerialisation. At the same time, people began

to recognise archaeological cave art as art. This process reflects a

paradigm-shift out of modernity. The law seeks to suppress this shift,

because the law is machinic or 'clockwork', not fluid and organic. It

attempts to re-impose machine consciousness on the re-emerging organic

or quantum consciousness.

Drugs are a threat to capitalism because they provide the enjoyment

capitalism only pretends to provide. They are the '

perfect commodity

' in that they provide what adverts only claim that products provide,

and thus undermine alienation and mediation. This is why they are

criminalised, because they destroy the lack which otherwise sustains

consumption. In '

Ayahuasca Reading

', Wilson observes how people taking this plant-based drug often

encounter plant-beings in their visions, including some which point to

cures or other information, or provide what are taken as prophecies. The

experience creates a sense that humans, plants and animals are one, or

forever woven together.

The fact that the system

continues to wage war on drugs

, rather than recuperating them, suggests that some kind of authentic

power is at stake in this struggle. Drugs are criminalised because of

their 'neo-shamanic' potential in altering consciousness. Bey

suggests

that the war on drugs is a war between organic and machinic worldviews.

The war cannot be won, because the organic realm is more fluid and

responsive.

Bey seems to see psychedelic consciousness as more realistic, or in tune

with the nature of the world, than mundane, media-inflected

consciousness. He recognises that drug use can be dangerous. But he

argues that 'life is a risky business'. People should not seek safety at

all costs. Safety ultimately ends up as sterility, 'a vegetable plugged

into a computer'. The use of drugs to produce altered consciousness,

spiritual experiences, and a broader, more holistic view of the world is

distinct from, but continuous with, their 'recreational' use for simple

pleasure. It is more drastically distinct from the use of drugs to numb

pain or to self-medicate for psychological suffering – the

usual context of use

in modern societies. This is one of the forms of dark magic which

sustain the system.

Other Forms of Disalienation

In general, Bey's approach is framed in terms of anarchist theory. He

claims that anarchism has been successful for 99% of human history, in

hunter-gatherer and early farming societies, and also in

inspiring resistance

throughout the period of capitalism. There is a kind of revolutionary

spirit in stateless societies which overturns authority before it can

appear. Autonomy and authority seem easily distinguished, but they can

become confused either via theoretical absraction, or on an emotional

level. The desire for freedom can be projected onto 'society' or various

groups, and then becomes authoritarian.

Society can be constructed without the state. Indeed, it has been for

most of human existence. Such a process of construction relies on the

creation of myths, customs and institutions that suppress the state –

for example,

shamanism

. However, Bey differentiates his approach from anarchist theory more

broadly. Existing anarchism is criticised for failing to follow through

on its critique of the myths and '

spooks

' of the dominant society. He argues that it becomes a

new church

by incorporating elements of Cartesian subjectivity and ethical

humanism.

In addition to specific liberation struggles, it is necessary to seek a

certain transgressive power which undermines recuperation. In

Riverpeople

, Wilson argues that 'queers' have lost their transgressive magic from

recuperation, along with the liberationist rhetoric. They need more

Debord or Breton to free them from 'bourgeois deviation, betrayal of

Dionysian principles'. Wilson here suggests that normalisation as a

variant on heteronormative life – legal relationships, gay marriage,

gays in the army – has corroded the transgressive force which gay

sexuality once had.

Bey rejects politics based on lack or scarcity, including the

restoration of a lost past or progress towards a future revolution. He

calls for an art of

abundance and excess

, rather than mutilation and death. He associates scarcity and lack with

sexual repression, and the rejection of intensity. Nihilistic action and

art are fine, as long as they are means to liberation through intensity.

Images

may be dark

, so long as they are simply masks behind which is light and pleasure.

Resistance to work is also central to social transformation. Zerowork is

realised through seizing back time. The more of one's time one can wrest

back from systems of production and reproduction – 'Work/Consume/Die' –

the better. Time which is restored to immediate, everyday groups (even

something as simple as a quilting bee) is time which increases the

chance of pleasure. Withdrawing time from capitalism is risky. But the

risk is also

part of the pleasure

. Time seized back from capitalism and mediation can become

time for play

.

In '

The Jubilee Saints Project

', Bey celebrates the ancient practice of Jubilee. Once every fifty

years, all debts were cancelled, slaves freed and fields left fallow.

Workers observed feast days and festivals. Jubilees have not existed for

500 years, but would effectively combat today's

permanent

indebtedness

. This position also leads to scepticism about workerist positions. In a

critique of Surrealism

, Bey argues that the liberation of desire turns into the

commodification of desire, unless it escapes the matrix of the

work-system.

As we have seen, Bey sees alienation partly in terms of the destruction

of horizontal connections. Restoration of such connections is thus a

powerful form of resistance. In

Immediatism

, Bey argues that

conviviality

– coming together face-to-face for reasons other than work, consumption

or reproduction – is itself a victory against alienation. Isolation and

absorption in media are among the major forces which oppress people

today. Conviviality is thus a major purpose of the groups Bey proposes,

perhaps even the main goal. The system forces us to keep 'making a

living', but the real point is to

make a life

.

In architecture, Bey recognises a nostalgia and desire for cities which

have

designed themselves

on the basis of conviviality, with narrow alleys, covered ways and so

on. The arhcitecture of a convivial world would likely be

grotesque

, in the sense of being cave-like, akin to mystical grottos. Ritualised

language can also challenge alienation. Language is a

mask

– a way of giving something a ritual or symbolic meaning. Such

ritualisation is a way of destroying the suffocating paralysis of the

alienated system.

Childhood has a special place as a site of resistance to alienation. In

the piece

Wild Children

, Bey calls for a type of intensity which involves thinking in images,

polymorphous sexuality, and 'delirious and obsessive play'. In

another piece

, Bey describes childhood as a site of permanent insurrection, suggested

by messiness, collections, intense enjoyment, band/gang formations, and

running away. After the collapse of civilisation, it is children who

restore awareness of the cosmic. Anti-work or

Zerowork

actions, including attacks on education and the 'serfdom of children',

are also very important. Forms of resistance to schooling might include

'

voluntary illiteracy

', home-schooling and craft-apprenticeship. Presumably, this image of

childhood is partially archetypal. Real childhoods may be traumatic, but

this can be ascribed to the aforementioned 'serfdom'.

Bey also calls for, and exemplifies, '

Rootless Cosmopolitanism

'. This is an outlook which searches the ruins and remains of different

cultures for viable fragments, and helps itself to whichever fragments

are needed. This may be criticised by others, either as cultural

appropriation, or as indulging religious and anti-modern worldviews. Bey

justifies it on the basis that Chaos cannot be restricted to categories.

In fact, Bey argues that

psychological racism

– hostility to other cultures – has largely replaced overt

discrimination. Participation in other cultures helps combat

psychological racism. The same applies to historical phases. We seem to

be

stuck in the past,

forced to re-live it as capital escapes into the ether. In this context,

we can at least ransack the past for useful tools. But we may also be

able to re-visit and correct decisive moments.

Rootless cosmopolitanism can express itself in the use of travel as a

means to altered consciousness. In '

The Caravan of Summer

', Wilson criticises tourism and argues for an alternative mode of

travel based on Sufism. Sites of pilgrimage primarily provide 'baraka'

or 'mana' (spiritual power, charisma). Pilgrimage is reciprocal rather

than alienating. In contrast, tourists seek and consume difference, and

use it up. Wandering dervishes gave baraka in return for hospitality,

whereas tourists tend to break reciprocity and hospitality. In addition

to Sufi 'aimless wandering', Wilson gives the example of the Trobriand

Islanders, who travelled to give useless but aesthetically powerful

gifts among the islands. Dervish wandering may be ineffective or

impossible today, but its 'conceptual matrix' is still possible.

Technological reversals can also alter perceptions. In a piece

provocatively titled '

Take Back the Night: Ban Electricity

', Wilson argues that electricity was known in the ancient world, and

transmitted to the present through the hermetic tradition. It is a kind

of magic which has escaped from its bottle. We need at least moments

without electricity so as to revive mystery and meaning. Similarly,

recorded music both realises a dream of pure music, and realises the

death of music. Music ceases to be performed, and becomes 'background',

for example in stores. Amateur communal music disappears.

A range of other practices also lead to altered consciousness. For

instance, Tantric Hinduism restores the lost '

Soma-function

' (roughly, altered consciousness) through transcendence of caste, use

of banned substances such as wine, kundalini yoga, hemp, and

extra-marital sex. Quilts can be psychedelic. They are connected to

potlatch

and gift economy. Cyberspace is

almost psychedelic

, producing a visionary inner space.

Trepanning

may produce permanent altered consciousness. Many things can be

alchemical – for instance,

cooking

.

Food

can also offer intensities, if treated as nourishment rather than

consumption. People are encouraged to develop a

personal mythscape

as a way of summoning vivid, intense images. A full sense of tactical

options would also consider the various religious practices Wilson

discusses in his historical works, as well as his lists of sources of

altered consciousness – which range from chanted Iranian poetry to

drink, danger, inspiration and architecture.

Tactics and strategies: discussion

Bey is sometimes accused of failing to address race, class and gender in

his work, but this is not entirely true. Bey sometimes talks about

issues of racism and sexism. For instance, he

dismisses de Sade

for wanting freedom only for adult men to eviscerate women and children.

In another passage, Bey criticises anarchism on the basis that

oppressed racial groups are absent

, suggesting that it lacks means to fufil real needs and desires. In

another passage, he argues that mystical symbols are not gendered, but

instead stand for energies of

life and death

.

He also recognises the importance of hybrid groups such as 'tri-racial

isolates', and discusses Black and Muslim resistance to colonialism in

his historical works. However, he also criticises the tendency of

radical groups to denounce and exclude each other as '

crypto-authoritarian

', distancing himself from many identity-oriented groups. Instead, he

calls on people to 'ride the wave of liberation no matter what outward

form it might happen to take'. Bey's tactical flexibility suggests that,

while it is always important to resist or at least to disalienate,

modifications are possible based on people's different situations.

People might not all be able to escape or to seize back their time to

the same degree, but it is important to try to do so, to the greatest

extent possible.

On a different matter, Bey takes the view that insurrectionary tactics

are futile, because they are recuperable (in the image of the enemy),

attack at the wrong place (because the enemy is mostly an image), and

risk martyrdom, which entails the wrong affects. He instead gambles on

invisibility and mobility as forms of protection. His argument follows

consistently from his view of the nature of the system and the basis and

goal of resistance. If the point is to maximise altered consciousness,

pleasure, and an 'outside', then it makes sense to avoid

representational entanglements and reduce the danger of repression as

far as possible. Bey sometimes seems to underestimate the determination

of contemporary capitalism to crush every remaining 'outside', however

inoffensive or hidden. Today, the very fact of being a '

black hole

' is taken as threatening by the system, almost as much as being in open

rebellion. It is possible that invisible and mobile 'outsides' survive

better than those which attract the system's attention. It is also

possible that 'outsides' which defend themselves are more resilient. The

invisibility of the former renders both claims hard to test.

The growing repression of marginal zones is reflected in a certain

contradiction or shift in his more recent work, in which opposition

comes to be increasingly central, but many of the older tactical

orientations remain intact. Tactics similar to Bey's, such as raves,

squatting, protest camps and even convergence spaces, have taken heavy

blows from the increase in repression. In contemporary activist

movements, there is arguably a shift towards creating and militantly

defending permanent or semi-permanent autonomous zones (such as the ZAD,

or autonomous communities in southern Mexico, or cities such as El

Alto), and away from temporary gatherings which are repressed with

increasing frequency. This reflects the changed context Bey recognises,

but also highlights a possible tactical error in fearing visibility and

demonisation more than outright repression. It is possible that the most

effective movements today are not so much those which avoid

confrontation as those which are too costly to repress, which are able

to carve out and then defend autonomous zones.

This said, zones created in periods of confusion, when the state is

focused on a greater danger, often show considerable resilience. Kurdish

autonomy is a possible example. So Bey's position of avoiding

confrontation and looking for cracks may still be viable, although the

general trend is towards a combination of spatial autonomy with

insurrectionary tactics. This said, there is also a tendency for today's

drop-out communities (squatters, ravers, etc) to eschew visibility and

to seek to remain below the radar of the media and police. In a

different context,

Lisa McKenzie

suggests that working-class men in St Ann's often stay off the grid and

keep a low profile (whereas women strategically engage with services).

Many have no official address, no registration with the benefit or

medical systems, and hence are largely invisible outside local networks

unless they are arrested.

David Graeber

makes similar claims about the largely stateless people he studied in

Madagascar – they simply minimise contact with the state. He suggests

that, the more successful such 'anarchic' spaces are, 'the less likely

we are to hear about them'. This suggests that something similar to

Bey's idea of invisibility might be a common strategy among marginalised

groups.

Indigenous anti-hierarchical mechanisms: gift economy, Clastrean

struggle, and shamanism

In various works, including

Escape from the Nineteenth Century

, Bey attempts to look back to when non-authoritarian social bands were

first shattered by the state, i.e. separation and hierarchy. He suggests

that alienation would only emerge when separation reaches a

'catastrophic' tipping point. The indigenous band is/was structured to

maximise autonomy and pleasure for all, as is shown by

Sahlins' claim

that it rests on abundance. Following

Clastres

, Bey argues that indigenous bands had already imagined the possibility

of separation and worked to ward it off. They understand centralised

power very well, and actively reject it. Pursuing a goal of preserving

autonomy and pleasure, they use 'rights and customs' to ward off

concentrated power. In some contexts, they also operate as sites of

oppositional power.

The hunter-gatherer world is the closest humans have come to social

harmony – not because people are/were naturally good, but because

mechanisms exist to successfully ward off hierarchy. Farming societies,

such as those of the Neolithic, also involve complex, intense (even

'erotic') relations with nature – not conquest, but intimacy. Such

societies still have egalitarian technologies and are far preferable to

states, even if they are not 'proper anarchism'. Such societies have

survived until recently, even in the North. For instance, Wilson

suggests that Ireland was organised this way until 1848.

In

another piece

, Wilson suggests that he was earlier influenced by early critiques

which saw farming as a 'fall from grace' in relation to

hunter-gathering. However, he has reconsidered this view on the basis of

botanical history. He now suspects that farming began with seeds growing

spontaneously at human campsites. People started to cultivate certain

favourite plants – mainly luxuries, not necessities. The earliest were

barley (for beer), grapes (for wine) and marijuana. Without the creation

of the state, people could have transitioned straight from horticulture

to utopia.

Indigenous groups are based on a particular kind of small-group

universe. A tribe or village is sometimes a self-contained cosmos. It is

not true that this structure prevents individuality. Rather, there can

be space for every kind of marginal person within such a

complete universe

. The exclusionary dynamics of villages and particularisms stem from

constant attack or vampirism by the centre, in a situation where the

village is not a cosmos. For instance, capital cities often suck money,

energy, and creative people from villages.

There is thus a specific aim to ward off concentrated power in

indigenous social groups. The

three mechanisms

operating for this purpose are indigenous warfare, the gift economy (or

society), and shamanism. Following Clastres, Bey argues that indigenous

warfare is centripetal (it prevents centralised power). It is driven by

honour rather than acquisition, and any booty must be shared with the

group. This structure prevents warriors from taking power and inventing

'classical' warfare, in which warriors become a powerful class through

looting. 'Classical' warfare refers to the kind of warfare found in

Ancient Greece and Rome, and in authors such as Sun Tzu and Clausewitz.

This is the type of war waged by states.

When states don't exist, there is usually a kind of '

tribal anarchy

' where the possibility of diffuse violence has an effect of dispersing

power. In tribal anarchy, nobody accumulates power, and everyone is

considered noble. Each self has 'honour', which signifies an autonomous

self whose freedom is the object of the entire system. (Bey's account,

like Clastres', ignores the question of gender). Inter-clan raiding can

also be a means of redistributing any surplus. In

another piece

, Bey argues that classical war is a betrayal of indigenous war, and the

violence built into the religious or sacred project.

A second mechanism is the

gift economy

. Following

Mauss

, Bey argues that the gift is a balancing structure. It atones for the

violence of the hunt and creates symbolic unity and renewal within the

social group. It differs from modern exchange in focusing on

reciprocity, instead of accumulation or the profit motive.

The third mechanism, shamanism, will be discussed in more detail below.

Here, the importance of the relationship between shamanism and altered

consciousness should be emphasised. While shamanism as an immanent

spiritual practice is eliminated after the rise of the state, it leaves

a 'shamanic trace'. Aesthetics tends to reduce and mediate, but not to

eliminate, the shamanic trace. The trace easily revives or re-appears at

times of crisis in the dominant system. The crisis of the state is a

time of opportunity for the Clastrean machine. The carnivalesque, in the

Bakhtinian

sense, is shamanic in that it entails altered consciousness.

Wilderness and wildness

often symbolise the shamanic space in the worldviews of farming and

settled peoples. The Robin Hood myth is an example. European nobles also

preserved aspects of nomadic shamanism, such as hunting and heraldry.

Shamanism in a broad sense is a non-specialised practice of immanent

religion. It does not represent spirits, but makes them present, through

means such as psychedelic drug use and spirit possession. Sometimes it

is practiced by the whole group. Bey associates shamanism with direct

experience of altered consciousness, or of a second, spiritual or

timeless world.

Bey suggests that elements of the three indigenous mechanisms persist in

popular culture in medieval and modern societies. The myths and customs

of indigenous groups resist the re-emergence of hierarchy and bullying.

The pursuit of intensity and conviviality are part of this structure.

Such myths and customs provide a '

million year triumph of human spirit

' over fear, force, separation and hierarchy. Bey suggests that we don't

lose the 'rights and customs' of indigenous bands. Remnants of these

practices preserve remnants of autonomy and pleasure. These fragments

are not lost, but severely

reduced in scope

, and relegated to hidden corners. For instance, gift economy persists

in the loose structures of shadow and informal economies.

Resisting capitalism today requires us to recover a relation with such

rights and customs, so as to restore pleasure and autonomy against

separation and hierarchy. Bey analogises the situation to a house in

ruins – the underlying pillars (indigenous war, gift economy, shamanism)

can still be discerned. He believes that shamanism has particular

importance in fighting capitalism. Shamanism often manifests itself as a

hidden power beneath the power of the oppressed, even when it is

extremely muted. It appears as a rising-up of direct experience and

immediacy.

Religion and Shamanism

One of Bey's most unusual contributions is his theory of the origins of

religion. According to him, spirituality and religion are different. Bey

defines spirituality as the '

imaginal creative esprit

of the social', the force of social creativity and imagination. Religion

is its spectral or shadow form. In other words, spirituality and

religion are forms of the shamanic trace. They differ in their degree of

alienation.

Bey sees religion as a certain

subset of zones

in the field of human becoming. These zones are associated with holism

and altered consciousness. Revolutionaries have been too quick to throw

out altered consciousness with their rejection of puritanism and

religious repression. Every religion calls forth its antithesis

repeatedly, generating forms which conflict with power or theorise

resistance. Shamanism lies at the root of religion, and all religion

contains its trace. Shamanic religion uses spirituality against the

emergence of alienation and hierarchy. For instance, Bey defines

messianism in terms similar to Benjamin. The messiah is not an

individual but a historical collective. It is the same as '

the difference and presence of revolution

' – a synonym for immediacy. Religion is also a strong

force for social cohesion

, for instance in intentional communities.

The roots of religion lie in abstract thought. Humans have a type of

consciousness which allows separation and categorisation (symbolic

systems, technology, etc). This leads to a split between a separating,

alienating approach and a desire to recover intimacy and

participatory/unified consciousness. Religion arises from the

latter desire

. At root, religion is 're-linking' of consciousness. This process is

often violent. A further split within shamanic consciousness later

emerges around the idea that sacrifice will restore unified

consciousness. This gives us three types of spiritual force: shamanic

altered consciousness, the sacrificial shadow version of this

consciousness, and the force of alienation.

There is something existentially primordial in the spiritual drive.

Religion comes from a desire for accommodation with

mysterious forces

, including ancestors. This issue arises in all cultures. The binary of

nature and culture exists even for indigenous people and shamanic

religions. Religion works in the marginal zone between nature and

culture. However, the split between nature and culture has become

increasingly severe over time. It has also shifted into a vertical

rather than horizontal relation. Most religions transmute consciousness

of death into a

separation

of the immortal soul from the body, and thus into body-hatred, and a

series of other exclusions – of nature, of indigenous peoples, of women,

and so on. The marginal zone is occupied exclusively by priests.

Religion was initially a means to access altered consciousness and

chaos. It was later monopolised by rulers. Shamanism is a type of

religion which avoids alienation because creative acts are carried out

by everyone, for everyone. The exchange of units or quanta of

imagination is

roughly equal

. For instance, in voudoun and Santeria, people claim to be possessed by

spirits. They do not represent, but simply present or express the

spirit. This is very different from the passive relationship found in

theatre

between playwright, actor, and audience. Bey cites Ibn Arabi's claim

that there are

strands between heaven and earth

along which meanings descend like angels. This image reflects Bey's own

view that magical power can be channelled from the field of chaos or

imagination.

Bey suggests that there is an underground,

hermetic tradition

which preserves the old values in the forms of heresies. Movements such

as the Free Spirit movement recover the trace of shamanism. Bey claims

that shamanism has subverted colonial power – first turning hostility

into romanticism, and then generating dependence on 'native' power. The

field of the

carnivalesque

carries this trace. The permeable body of carnivalesque is both the

fully realised self and the the desired body. Festival is the inner

structure of autonomy. Bey

refers

to Clastres' discussion of shamanic movements seeking an earthly utopia

by downing tools and adopting nomadism. He suggests that many indigenous

groups are not archaic remnants, but deliberate drop-outs from statist

history. While this is usually read as evidence against the likes of

Clastres and Sahlins, Bey suggests it actually shows that people can

succeed in overthrowing the supposedly 'higher' social forms of

hierarchy and separation. Bey celebrates free religions – 'half-serious,

half-fun cults' like his own Moorish Orthodox Church. He opposes

authoritarian religions with normative moralities.

Discussing the Mound-Builders of North America, Bey suggests that the

mounds are not at all mysterious. Their purpose is to enchant the

landscape. They show the viewer something about the art of harmony and

guardianship of nature. The shamanic trace is also clear in the

Zapatista revolt. Bey suggests that shamanism reappears in religions

which reject it. For example, in Islam, it appears in forms such as

sufism, the Shi'ite hidden Imam or Mahdi, and the eschatological Shi'ite

socialism of Ali Shariati. Popular religions – European witchcraft,

Iranian traditions linked to Zoroastrianism – often preserve the

shamanic trace. Some come to see themselves as

devil-worshippers

, as their enemies portray them. If all things are one, and are

manifestations of God, then even the devil must be an aspect of God. The

devil is necessary because light cannot exist without darkness. Whereas

he appears to the alienated as an evil force destroying joy, to the

esoteric he appears as a bearer of light and truth, as the multiplicity

which is key to oneness.

The shamanic trace is carried in Europe by the '

hermetic left

'. In contrast with the right's moral dualisms, the hermetic left

celebrates the 'ancient rights and customs' of freedom, justice,

equality, and bodily pleasure. Wilson/Bey reportedly sees his own

Moorish Orthodox Church as the latest phase in a centuries-old

psychological and spiritual war. This war pits Native Americans,

African-Americans, poor whites, and drop-outs against Anglican, Puritan

and

imperialist hierarchies

. Other new religions such as Discordianism and Chaos might also figure

on the progressive side of this conflict, although co-opted varieties of

the New Age and cyber-gnosticism do not. Wilson/Bey's side has much

existential appeal – for instance, Puritans kidnapped by Native

Americans sometimes refused to be 'rescued'. However, the repressive

side has largely won out.

Organised religion is formed through the hierarchical degeneration of

mystical traditions. This requires misreading the founding, mystical

texts and experiences. Initial psychological doctrines such as the

rebirth of the self (as disalienated) are given literal meanings, or

freedom is reserved for those who are fully realised. For Wilson,

transformation occurs as an '

immediate psychological reality

', not in the afterlife or the far future. In mystical terms, 'death'

stands for dissolution of the alienated ego, and 'paradise' refers to

metaphysical realisation. 'Hell' stands for present alienation and

misery, not a future punishment. All religions seek salvation, which is

basically disalienation. They differ on the way to achieve it. However,

organised religions deal in abstractions instead of actual

disalienation. Those who have tasted disalienation have little time for

abstract religious disputes.

The basis of alienated religion is the claim of authorities to a

monopoly on initiation. Without authority, there is taken to be no

opening to the spiritual. In

Shower of Stars

, Wilson suggests that dreams and books can also serve as initiators.

This allows people to evade divine and human authority, creating a

non-hierarchical process of initiation. He discusses a case from Buryat

shamanism, in which the shamanic book is lost but the shaman can still

get spirit into their words, as evidence for this claim. In

another passage

, he suggests 'urban shamanism' as a way to democratise religion.

Orthodox religion has to play down the

playfulness

of spiritual becoming, which is a variety of serious play or serious

joke. Orthodoxy creates an

ontological hierarchy

between One and Many, transcendence and immanence, and privileges

transcendence. This contrasts both with gnostic dualism and with radical

monism, which favours the Many. People are left waiting for

signs

of a coming messiah, rather than looking for the divine spark within

themselves. Orthodoxy always insisted that law remain the dominant

frame. Mystical experience was meant to remain within the law. For this

reason, mystics tread a

thin line

between accepted heterodoxy and heresy. Organised religion prioritises

'God the creator' over 'God the inner reality', or the mystical

experience. This experience in turn breaks down organised religion.

Since one can see God in everything, the idea of Divine Law (which

creates a split between sacred and profane, permitted and prohibited)

breaks down.

Rather than rejecting the drive behind religion, Bey argues for religion

to be democratised. The religious experience (ecstasy, transcendence,

altered consciousness) should be available in an

egalitarian fashion

, without specialists, priests or gurus. Bey takes his stand where

'religion becomes

aesthetic, festal, ludic, and creative

– a source of power and freedom'. The mystical experience not only

breaks religious and secular law, but also the '

law of the ordinary

', the order of things. Transformations require trickery, norm-breaking

and symbolic reversals. Mysticism maintains that 'belief' is a delusion.

It seeks

experience

, rather than faith. Mysticism is a process of initiation into

disalienated being, with a goal of a '

state of bliss

', or realisation. The recognition that one is already part of the

unitary spiritual substance does not leave everything unchanged. Rather,

it leads to an

unlearning or loss of fear

, so that one can be led by one's natural senses, like a child. This

leads to disalienation. Although mysticism has radical effects,

some mystics

, such as Augustinians, remain within law through hierarchical dualisms

and strict regulation of interpersonal relations.

The implication is sometimes present in Bey's work that anarchist and

radical traditions are continuations of a hermetic, esoteric, shamanic

underground tradition which has repeatedly revived and is rarely fully

exterminated. Survivors of persecution often wander afield and spread

aspects of forbidden doctrines in invisible ways, so the doctrines

continue and reappear down the years. Bey seeks to uncover the roots of

religion in shamanism, and he is probably right that organised religion

is an alienated form of this indigenous practice. However, Bey tends to

read spiritual traditions (the Andean '

condor

') as bodily traditions (the Andean 'snake'). This arguably limits his

ability to engage with the indigenous traditions on which he draws.

Art and shamanism

The shamanic trace can also be found in art. Bey sometimes identifies as

an artist in his work, and reflects on the nature of art, artists and

audiences. He theorises art as a residue of an original practice of

personal or group ecstasy, which has been damaged by the artist-audience

separation. The original, disalienated form of art is the tribe or

band's '

creation of itself in the aesthetic imagination

', without any separation between performers and audience. The artist's

calling is to restore the original space of ecstasy or to create altered

consciousness – not to 'entertain' in a narrow sense, or to accumulate

status as an authorial authority. Transformative art ultimately destroys

art-as-spectacle and the boundary between artist and audience.

In '

The Utopian Blues

', Bey argues that musicians hover in an in-between space of shamanic

intoxication. Music probably emerged as a symbol of separation from

nature. However, it also preserves symbols of the lost unity of an

earlier time. Music often expresses the 'festal' or carnival spirit,

which is associated with utopian energy. When music emerges as a

distinct category of art, it becomes alienated and specialised. The

bohemian artist is simply a modern, commodity-society version of the

'low-down spirituality' of musicians and artisans through history, both

tabooed and possessed of a shamanic trace.

Artistic revolutions have been attempted (Romanticism, Wagner, Fourier).

They have failed because art remains commodified. Even revolutionary and

non-western music is appropriated and reduced to a simulation or

counterfeit. However, art retains a utopian trace. Music in particular

is utopian because it addresses emotions, without mediation by images or

words. Music connects to emotion and desire, and therefore the 'utopian

imagination'. It is bodiless, yet speaks to and from the body. Claiming

music as 'ours' – as something which belongs, performatively, to the

audience or to diffuse artists – is a disalienating gesture. The

musician should disappear as a 'specialist', and reappear as a 'shamanic

function'.

Bey embraces the Situationist idea of the '

suppression and realization of Art

' – its suppression as a separate sphere, and realisation in everyday

life. Artists yearn to recover the bardic function of telling the

group's stories. Unable to do so, they spiral into ever greater

alienation. The role of art today is split between the recovery of the

bardic function and the pursuit of the suppression and realisation of

art.

Art needs to be removed from the commodity economy and placed in a gift

economy. In a gift economy, festival is a focal point of social life, a

kind of government (or a replacement for the master-signifier). Today,

events such as raves, Be-Ins and gatherings recover an aspect of

gift-economy. Hence, they are seen as dangerous sites of disorder from a

commodified perspective. Bey proposes that each artwork should be a

'seduction machine' designed to awaken 'true desires', anger at

repression, or a belief that realisation is possible. Such artworks

would have to convey an '

insane generosity

' or abundance, an almost

painful excess

of emotional or lived meaning.

Bey argues that artists do not choose alienation. They seek to add to

the 'image-hoard' of their tribe or band. They are forced into

alienation because modern society separates work and play. The

shamanic trace

is more easily visible in non-western societies – for example, in

Balinese and Javanese art, dance and theatre. In the west it is buried

beneath the apparatuses of organised religion, machines, and Empire.

However, it reappears in the west as 'modern' art which is directed

against modernity. In Riverpeople, Wilson expresses a similar sentiment

poetically:

'you risk insanity in order to bring back

healing word from the Ninth Sky

nobody wants them because they're not for sale'

The Spectacle has largely

contained and recuperated art

. Artists have been reduced to providers of images or bytes, such as

advertisements. Even images of utopia and transformation fall into this

trap. The system can use all artforms to deepen simulation and control.

Artists have been trapped in enclaves, akin to Native American

reservations. We shouldn't give up the enclaves, because they're the

last vestiges of autonomy. Providing entertainment is not evil, but it's

not Bey's calling. rather, art should transform everyday life. The

work-consume dichotomy is being undermined and sabotaged in everyday

life – not in the media or theory. We may just need to 'exorcise the

spooks' and give up the artist-audience relation. Play makes the

audience impossible.

In the past, there was a time-lag between the emergence of artistic

movements and their recuperation by the Spectacle. Today, this lag

barely exists. Most art, including avant-garde and popular art, is

instantly commodified. In this context, art which avoids mediation has a

function of '

insurrectionist propaganda

'. Bey is not calling for Realist or crudely political art. Rather, art

propagandises by acting as an invitation to altered consciousness.

Artists should encourage readers to perceive an 'outside' to capitalism,

and to pursue peak experiences. They should promote a 'desire to

desire', and an aesthetic 'taste' and way of life contrary to

commodification.

Wilson endorses Shelley's idea of the artist/poet as unacknowledged

legislator, or provider of an

ethic of living

. Propagandistic art should produce powerful emotions which rip aside

the veils of everyday life, such as inattention, boredom and

self-betraying egotism. In

Millennium

, however, Bey differentiates the US and European situation. In Europe,

there are still remnants of the public intellectual, whereas in the US,

masses of creative people are invisible. The TAZ plays a special role in

affirming for creative people that they exist.

Hakim Bey's Histories

Bey/Wilson's histories are nearly always discussions of historical TAZ's

or social movements which create periods of autonomy and intensity. His

histories focus on the esoteric, in the sense of non-ordinary or

spiritual states of consciousness. In

Pirate Utopias

,

Bey suggests that existing histories – such as those of Corbin and

Eliade – are useful in categorising religions, but neglect the role of

insurrectionary desire. He admits to using imagination more than an

academic historian would. He defends this, as a type of alternative

history. Imagination is powerful, as for instance in Noble Drew Ali's

version of Islam (which involves not only a reconstruction of religious

doctrine, but also an origin narrative). Imagination allows reference to

the imaginal (or archetypal, or virtual) realm. Place-names like

Tibet and Egypt

, used apocryphally, can unlock altered consciousness in dreams, books

or visions. These names function as metaphors for the spiritual realm or

paradise, for the realm of shamanic or ecstatic experience.

Bey/Wilson's histories are nearly always histories of small-scale or

short-lived non-state (or quasi-state) communities neglected by

mainstream history. Examples include '

tri-racial isolate

' communities in America, radical strands within Sufism,

pirate communities

in North Africa, the African-American

Moorish Science Temple

, d'Annunzio's short-lived Republic of Fiume, the

Grange

(an American rural organisation), and

Chinese

Tongs

or secret societies, to mention just a few examples.

Defending the transformative importance of such cases, Wilson suggests

that people pay too much attention to supposedly successful revolutions,

like Russia, instead of

supposedly failed ones

. He attributes this bias to an identification with aggregate collective

responses to capitalism. The Social as an idea opposed to Capital was a

strong opposing idea for some time. Yet it is not Bey's preferred

alternative. Instead, Bey is interested in what

Sellars

terms 'mini-societies', set up beyond the reach of law and the state.

However, Bey argues regarding Marxism that it was sincerely

emancipatory.

Stalin

largely stamped that out. But at the same time, Stalinism was implicit

in earlier authoritarian aspects of Marxism.

Historical Method

As a historian, Bey/Wilson writes in an unfashionably general way,

somewhere between classical universalism and a particularism focused on

syncretic uses. In

Ploughing the Clouds

, Wilson admits that his comparative approach is similar to

nineteenth-century generalism. He portrays such generalism as necessary

to escape the boundaries of academic disciplines and to 'analyze the

ineffable' so as to recover what is forgotten.

Wilson suggests that myth and folklore deal with origins, but social

science and anthropology refuse them. For him, the resultant academic

refusal to interpret facts means that facts cannot become knowledge or

meaning, and are rendered useless. He argues, however, that origin is

not an 'exclusive category'. Instead, it is a kind of narrative element

used in interpretation, and multiple incommensurable origins are

possible. He thus recovers the kind of comparative, general history

which is precluded by the poststructuralist rejection of metanarratives,

and by the policing of identity-boundaries.

However, he is not seeking to recover a universalist approach. His

history, like poststructuralism, encourages multiple narratives. He

argues that fairy tales are the only universal world literature, and

their spread is unrelated to authors, literacy, or 'high' traditions.

The existence of multiple narratives means that one should recognise and

use many different traditions. Even science has a place, provided it can

renounce its claim to exclusive truth and seriousness. Mythology is

'fractal', and there are always multiple meanings overlaid in each

story.

As a result of this pluralistic position, Wilson suggests that

traditions of interpretation such as Marxism and feminism are too

reductive. They miss the imaginal realm, because they over-use dualisms.

The imaginal realm is a space where dualisms break down, a third point.

Bey works on the margins between empirical history and what

Ptolemy Tompkins

calls speculative history – the spiritualised reconstruction of the past

as part of general narratives constructed from contemporary viewpoints.

The

Ancient Aliens

series is a good example of the speculative approach at its purest.

Academic historians such as the

British Marxist Historians

and the

Subaltern Studies Group

are good examples of the more sober historical approach, although most

of its adherents are more on the conservative side. Writers like

Wilson/Bey, Tompkins, R. Gordon Wasson and Timothy Leary tread a fine

line between the two approaches, giving free reign to imaginative

reconstruction while also focusing on empirical evidence.

Wilson/Bey often lacks adequate evidence to decisively demonstrate his

claims, but at the same time, they rarely violate the historical record

or require supernatural explanations. They don't deploy

Occam's Razor

and they assume that historical societies are interested in certain

existential questions important to the author. This can be seen as abuse

of the historical material. However, I would argue that it is better

seen as a different type of knowledge, derived from a different

regime of truth

connected to a different subjectivity from the scholarly gaze of

conventional history. This is history written from the standpoint of

schizorevolutionary desire

.

In

Scandal

, Wilson treats different facts, stories, rumours, historical sources,

and pieces of scholarship as 'like little bits of a crystal prism',

which might be arranged together to reveal light. For instance,

discussing the use of marijuana and other drugs in South Asian Islamic

mysticism, Bey/Wilson attempts to avoid a sociological and psychological

treatment, and instead to adopt the viewpoint of a heterodox mystic.

This is an imaginative activity which 'cannot claim authenticity'. In

Shower of Stars

, he suggests that comparing different approaches – for instance, Sufi

practices, Taoist spirit-writing, African-American mediums, and

Christian angels – provides a set of 'anthropological coordinates' for a

wider project. In a

poem

, Bey raises the intriguing figure of a 'prophet of a future that should

have been but won't', in many ways an analogy to past TAZ's themselves.

Bey/Wilson denies that the past is necessarily worse than the present.

Modernist Europe considers the past

cruel

, but only because it conceals its own cruelty technologically. Bey

argues

against

determinism because it labels creativity and revolution as futile. In a

way, not much has changed since the 1600s. History is written from the

state's point of view. Revolutionary and religious motivations are

viewed as dangerous and fanatical. We rarely see history told from the

point of view of the

rebel

. Bey/Wilson has variously claimed that we're still in the Roman Empire

(since the state-form has barely changed), and that we're in the

nineteenth century (since capitalism has attempted to reverse

theoretical advances since this point). However, he is also acutely

alert to the different conditions for autonomy in different eras – such

as the technological barriers to Alamut-style castle utopias today. His

relationship to the past is non-linear, imaginative, and focused on

extracting possibilities for autonomy.

The approach taken in Wilson's historical works is not standard

historiography. His historical method provides interesting alternative

histories which make for compelling reading. They are always

historically possible. They don't, for instance, rely on miracles or on

the falsity of "proven" conclusions. They simply build up new

constellations from the available "evidence". Yet Wilson often

speculates on, or even claims to have received by revelation, various

conclusions which the available sources do not suggest directly. There

is a danger that Wilson projects his own desires, fantasies, or

preferences onto his source-material. There is also a danger of

overinterpreting symbols based on presumed equivalences, in such a way

that just about anything can come to 'prove' what Wilson is looking for.

An example of the former is the speculated relationship between Oscar

Wilde and George Wharton Pepper, discussed in Riverpeople. An example of

the latter is the treatment of mythology in Ploughing the Clouds, in

which common mythological figures such as gold, snakes, cows, dragons,

berries, chalices, and water are taken as signifying psychedelic 'soma'.

In neither case is the posited history impossible, and the purpose of

presenting it may be to inspire the imagination as to what might have

been, as much as to suggest what actually was.

In many other cases, the image of what 'might have been' is both more

likely and more inspiring. Images of pirate utopias, networks of

autonomous castles, libertarian religious heresies, travelling on

pilgrimages in pursuit peak experience, and psychedelic traditions

stretching back into antiquity are inspiring images at the level of

imagination. They are images Wilson inspires the reader to want to be

true, and provides just about enough evidence that they might have been

to stimulate a feeling that other worlds are possible. They are also

images of the utopian impulse towards altered consciousness and

autonomy, actualised in different conditions, providing a kind of

imaginary genealogy for present struggles.

Imaginative Participation and Appropriation

Bey/Wilson's tendency to appropriate from a range of cultures leads to

an eclectic approach which takes on and claims labels and practices from

outside his own context. He also writes about regions through his own

experiences, and he writes about historical topics through contemporary

analogies. His creative process is similar to Romanticism, which seeks

emotional intensity rather than literal truth, and to Burroughs'

cut-up method

. This is arguably a cost of working at the level of archetypes, seeking

spiritual meanings and connections rather than empirical, spatial

accounts.

Bey has been criticised for this position. For instance,

Joseph Christian Greer

accuses Bey, and Chaos Magick more broadly, of

appropriating

and decontextualising Taoism by identifying it with chaos. The main

issue seems to be the position that classical Taoists never directly

claimed that Taoist ontology precludes law or government. Similarly,

Knight

questions Wilson's reconstruction of Moorish Science for a mainly-white

group of followers unconnected to the original Temple. He claims that

Bey/Wilson has cherry-picked the parts of Islam which best fit with his

'American-ness' – particularly the American-ness of the Beat generation.

With its embrace of idols and anything-goes spirituality, Bey's Islam is

more neo-pagan than Islamic, though also rooted in pantheist forms of

Sufism. In addition, both Knight and

Helms

accuse Bey of unacknowledged privilege.

However, this line of critique rests on the assumption that cultures

should be enclosed, separate entities. Or at least, 'privileged' people

shouldn't mix them. In which case, 'privileged' people are either

supposed to retreat into dominant ideology because they can't escape it,

or else somehow do without a culture (presumably the better to act as

subordinate actors to underprivileged power-brokers). If one

rejects

both of these options, then one cannot reasonably object to cultural

bricolage.

Bey's philosophy encourages hybridity, syncretism, bricolage and

nomadism, because Bey sees these tactics as ways of resisting the power

of the Spectacle. For example, the types of religion he promotes are

deliberately semi-humorous and heretical, and subversive of established

religious orders and divisions. This raises problems for those

interested in purity, and Bey can easily be accused of appropriation, of

misusing Islam or other religions, or of making something light-hearted

out of serious identities and attachments. Against such criticisms, one

must consider firstly, Bey's ontology (in which chaos is primary), and

secondly his identification of altered consciousness as the primary

means to resist the Spectacle. Further, he is 'appropriating' (if this

is the right word) for a global counterculture against capitalism, not

for the American mainstream or the world of commodification. Knight is

wrong to see Bey's selection as particularly 'American'. Rather, it is

countercultural. Bey selects the parts of traditions which are

compatible with a broadly anti-systemic, politics-of-desire orientation.

This is part and parcel of his method of 'psychic nomadism', syncretism,

or bricolage.

Whether cultural bricolage is disrespectful or harmful is a matter of

debate. In Bey's view,

participating

in other cultures is a counterbalance against the prevalent form of

racism, which is mainly psychological. I would emphasise that Bey is

using such accounts of difference to rupture dominant categories, to

open up zones of intensity, and not at all to trap 'others' in their

otherness or posit western superiority. Quite the opposite, in fact – he

posits intensities in other traditions as preferable to the emptiness of

alienation. His ontology owes more to Sufism and Taoism than to modern

epistemology. Of course, he is selective. He takeswhat he values in

other traditions, discarding the aspects he considers oppressive, and

de-emphasising (though hardly denying) the suffering which is associated

with the imposition of modernity on such traditions. But this is how

difference enters the world. Something of the sort is clearly needed if

Eurocentric modernity is ever to be overcome. Over-sensitivity about

partial appropriations and hybridity is a barrier to this process.

Bey's reliance on archetypes is also open to the criticism that it

reproduces

Barthesian myths

or essentialist categories. For instance, gendered archetypes often

reproduce gender roles. In Bey's case, the biggest potential problem is

the treatment of non-western cultures, which sometimes verges on

Orientalism

. Bey presents personal experiences of place through fragmentary

presentation of details which are often sensory or quasi-spiritual in

nature, usually in a beat-poetic style. The

Khyber Pass

– 'actually controlled by uncontrollable Pathan tribes who allowed the

border to function in exchange for tribute' – is characterised by

'hashish, fake Lugers, Japanese radios, opium, flintlock rifles, Chinese

tea kettles, daggers, binoculars', 'bowls of cardamom-scented syrupy

green tea' and so on. Such passages give an impression of an exotic

otherness, in which intensity is constantly possible, and is part of

everyday life.

When reading these passages, it is important to remember that the

discussion is focused on the imaginal construction of altered

consciousness, rather than the empirical description of the outer world.

Bey's method of sympathetic reconstruction refuses the distance and

humility of poststructuralist anthropology, but arguably gets closer to

a real transformation of western perceptions, a process of

becoming-other. This does not entail reducing the other to a western

gaze, but rather, transforming and 'othering' this gaze through altered

consciousness. In contrast to usual western reductions, Bey does not

take outer aspects of cultures while ignoring their social significance.

He uses the experience of cultural difference to disrupt dominant

categories.

Similarly, Bey may be accused of 'romanticising' indigenous people. His

work is

romantic

in the sense of being emotionally expressive, favouring the emotional

impact of an experience over its outer empirical aspects. But the idea

that altered consciousness, relationality, and disalienation are central

to explaining how indigenous cosmology differs from western thought is

common

in

indigenous

scholarship

, as well as in

contemporary

anthropology

. Similarly, Bey's remarks on the Islamic world stem from a long spell

of living in Iran/Persia and studying comparative religion.

There are many for whom 'romanticising' is automatically a bad thing.

This is either for scientific reasons (it is factually incorrect) or

identity-political reasons (it stereotypes others). However, Bey makes a

powerful case for 'romanticising' places and social phenomena. By

romanticising something, one connects it to the imaginal realm. It

potentially becomes a site at which altered consciousness is possible.

If the resultant image is untrue as a representation (as arguably are

all representations), it is nevertheless true at a different level, as

an imaginal construct. Bey uses archetypes, and connects them to zones

of experience. But it is arguably not the use of archetypes which is the

problem. Rather, the confusion of archetypal figures, in the imaginal

realm, with real people or spaces creates dangers of stereotyping. In

general, Bey does not stereotype, but indicates possibilities.

In

Sacred Drift

,

Wilson engages directly with the problem of 'Orientalism'. The kind of

history of religion on which Wilson draws stands within the tradition of

Oriental studies. This tradition has been exposed, from Edward Saïd

onwards, as translation for imperial appropriation. However, Bey argues

that translation can also occur through a 'heretical' model of

translation. Such translation connects forms of resistance, rather than

forms of power.

Bey exhorts readers not to throw out the 'Oriental baby' with the '

Orientalist bathwater

'. Translations from outside a culture are often inaccurate, but

inaccurate translations are sometimes productive and useful. Romantic

perceptions distort reality. But they distort it so as to free

perception from 'consensus reality', or ideology. The 'exotic' may not

be the '

true

', but it is still a relief from simulation and banality. Romantics do

not 'prettify' or 'sentimentalise' the environment. They

poeticise and spiritualise

it. Factories are not excluded as un-picturesque, but as sacriligeous.

This is a type of gaze which does not dominate. Instead, it performs a

sublimation or transformation.

In the case of Native American revivalism, Bey

praises

the revival of indigenous traditions. He recognises that some ceremonies

'belong' to particular families and has no wish to 'appropriate' them.

(Secrecy is also part of his own model of resistance). But he refuses to

pretend not to be enthusiastic for 'traditions that once shaped the very

landscape I now inhabit'. By destroying the Esopus 'Indians', settlers

also suffered a loss of the near presence of non-authoritarian,

non-capitalist culture. This absence lies at the heart of the

disenchantment of the area.

Bey also endorses 'anti-translation', in which 'don't tread on me'

becomes 'don't translate me'. Translation as representation should be

avoided. Instead, one should seek a 'direct making-present'. Such a

process requires abandoning one's 'self' or ego so as to go inside the

other culture to the maximum extent possible. Avoiding appropriation

requires tact and sometimes silence. But it does not require a refusal

to communicate.

Wilson does not claim to have produced an adequate anti-translation,

though he has practiced Islam in various forms. Instead, he seeks to

revalorise the 'romantic' image of Islam. He claims that this image

survives the problem of translation because it already exists in both

Islamic and western culture. I would add that the problem of translation

tends to disappear when the original text already points towards the

untranslatable or unknowable.

Hence, Wilson's approach is not Orientalist in Said's sense; it does not

reduce the 'Orient' or 'Islam' to fixed categories. In particular, it

does not reproduce the tropes identified by Said, such as irrationalism,

despotism, timelessness and incomprehensibility. Wilson does not promote

'one-dimensional' portrayals of cultures. He seeks to appreciate

complexity, mutability and difference within a culture. In his view,

heretical translation can still be used to appropriate, but it is better

seen as a cooperative venture among heretics, artists, rebels and

visionaries of all cultures.

Bey openly

calls

for appropriation of techniques to reach altered consciousness, whether

from indigenous cultures, the East, or the occult tradition. However, in

other places, he differentiates his own style of

hybridity

from appropriation, which he associates with commodification and

dilution of shamanic or utopian energies. Cultural diversity should be

preserved, not because any culture is good in itself, but because of the

powerful

syncretisms

and ways out of consensus reality they provide. The 'rootless

cosmopolitan culture' of the future will create bricolage, or 'mosaics

and mandalas', out of elements of all cultures. Non-appropriated

cultures can be shared through gift economy. This is an alternative to

appropriation through commodification.

Bey thus argues for sharing or potlatch as the answer to

commodification. For instance, people should be welcomed into tribes on

a non-commodified basis. It is appropriation, for instance, if people

commodify or use cultural practices while

rejecting underlying cosmologies

, but not if they adopt both. The result would be a 'non-hierarchic,

de-centered web of cultures', each unique but not alienated from the

others. Exchange is based on reciprocity, and boundaries are fluid. He

argues

that heresy is an important means of cultural transfer. Religions

usually cross cultural boundaries only through syncreism.

Some identity theorists would doubtless still see this as appropriation,

because they wish to maintain rigid boundaries between cultures.

However, I would argue that Bey's conversion of aspects of cultures into

parts of a decentred network is fundamentally different from the

conversion of aspects of other cultures into commodities or statist

categories. In effect, Bey fights appropriation by replacing a trunk

with a rhizome. Standard appropriation uses commodification or the

market as a trunk. Multiculturalism similarly maintains capitalism (or

liberal integration) as a trunk. But anti-appropriation approaches often

turn their own cultures into trunks ('hegemonic particularities' in

Bey's terminology) – with or without attaching them to capitalism. Bey

follows Day's proposal to replace the hegemony of hegemony with an

affinity for affinity

. By adopting a general horizontal structure as the form of contact

among cultures, Bey provides a way of avoiding both 'hegemonic

particularities' and commodified appropriation. Identity politics treats

power differentials as so absolute and structural as to preclude

horizontal exchanges in everyday life. In reality, however, everyday

sites have considerable autonomy, and TAZ's even more so. Replacing

trunks with rhizomes – not with new trunks – is the best way to fight

domination.

Ploughing the Clouds: Psychedelic experiences in classic literature

In

Ploughing the Clouds

, Wilson uses a comparative approach to cross-read the Indian story of

soma, Irish Celtic stories, and psychedelic experiences. In Indian

accounts, soma is a specially prepared drink or potion which gives its

user visionary or propetic powers, poetic frenzy, and divine status or

attributes. Someone in such an altered state of consciousness sees the

universe as light or consciousness. Wilson tries to make a case that the

Indian idea of soma reached Ireland (and all of Europe).

Soma first appeared in the Ŗg veda or Rigveda, a Hindu scripture which

is arguably the oldest written text in existence today. While the word

may originally have referred to a particular substance, it also refers

to what Wilson calls the 'soma-function'. This function is simply the

broad idea of an ecstatic transformation of consciousness by a

psychotropic substance (possibly fly agaric or psilocybin mushrooms) – a

variant on the recurring theme of altered consciousness. Soma has both

licit and illicit dimensions. Both are paths to enlightenment, but the

illicit path is higher. The illicit path leads to divine status and a

right to pleasure and perversion.

The idea that soma was a psychedelic plant is not original to Wilson,

having appeared for instance in the work of Robert Gordon Wasson. Wilson

is unusual, however, in suggesting that soma as an idea or function

spread throughout the Indo-European world. As a 'function', soma is

associated with a complex of spiritual egalitarianism, entheogenesis and

poetic inspiration. Although there may well have been an original Soma,

the function is more important for Wilson. Specific plants may perform

the role of Soma or 'Soma-substitutes' (with or without psychedelic

properties) in different contexts.

According to Wilson, knowledge of 'entheogens' – plants which could

induce spiritual experiences – was widespread in medieval Europe. This

knowledge has been lost today, due to 'induced amnesia' from sometime in

early modernity. Indeed, in the shamanic tradition, such plants are said

to disappear in times when they are not respected.

The soma-function was repressed because it had to be repressed to

sustain a system based on scarcity and repression. Modern capitalism

seeks to cover up alienation. It seeks to deny the loss of gift

economies, ecstasy, abundance and so on. It also needs to restrict

access to the spiritual realm to specialist clerics. However, the

soma-function is never completely lost, and keeps reappearing. It

reappeared, for instance, in the 1960s psychedelic movement. Outwardly,

this movement lost – but it continues to resist its own recuperation.

The recurrence of the soma-function is a variant of the shamanic trace

found throughout Bey/Wilson's work.

Soma is a special case of a wider phenomenon of entheogenic/psychedelic

plant use. Such plants are also widely used by indigenous peoples.

Wilson suggests that, whereas hunter-gatherers tend to use them to

create individual relations with spirits, farming societies tend to

ritualise and socialise them. He claims that such plants were among the

first cultivated plants. They are tied-up with narratives about the rise

of agriculture and the loss of an ecstatic original intimacy. The plant

symbolised or recreated the supposedly lost intimacy with the wild or

the wilderness, a process of yoga, relinkage or disalienation.

Modern societies see this disalienated state as a feature of other

societies. Indeed, European colonisation seemed to acquire or 'conquer'

more and more intoxicants (chocolate, coffee, tobacco, opium, and so

on), as if constantly seeking soma However, the theme of the receipt of

soma from the Other is not simply an effect of colonialism. It is

structurally necessary, because of soma's radical otherness. On an

imaginal level, soma is both 'wild' – symbolising wilderness, nature,

and disorder – and yet also the origin of speech and consciousness.

Wilson also suggests that autonomous groups were often absorbed into

invading societies in a subordinate status – for instance, as

untouchables. This function was often ambiguously tied-up with their

perceived access to entheogens, wilderness, and lost traditions. This is

partly because of the absorbed people's local knowledge of the land and

its plants, partly because of their reputation as uncanny and close to

nature. In Ireland, this place is sometimes taken by the Fomorians, who

are portrayed as one-eyed giants but who Wilson suggests may have been

African, and in other works by the fairy-like Tuatha Dé Danaan. In this

context, knowledge of soma is associated in mythology with pre-Celtic

peoples

Following Wasson, Eric Ruck and others, Wilson argues that language

about magic mushrooms and other entheogens is often disguised and

euphemised. However, it can be recovered because it uses standard

symbols. Of course, this requires a style of reading which explicitly

looks for concealed meanings which are not directly present in the text.

For example, one-eyed, one-legged beings, like the Irish Fomorians, are

often mushrooms.

Much of Ploughing the Clouds consists of a lengthy exploration of

possible symbols of soma, the soma-function or entheogens in Irish

mythology and folklore. For example, the Pooka, an Irish spirit-being,

is etymologically related to mushrooms. Dragon-slaying repeats the

slaying of Vŗtra in the Soma narrative, and symbolises the destruction

of restrictions on consciousness. Snakes – common in Irish mythology,

although never found in Ireland – are symbols of soma. The imaginal

realm is signified variously as fairyland, Tír na nóg, the Land of

Promise and so on. The hypothesis of symbolic themes performing a

masking function for Soma leads to a huge list of common symbols – gold,

dragons, cups, serpents, lightning, beheadings, cows and milk, and so on

– which Wilson interprets as soma stand-ins or indicators. Such a

reading is viable, but ignores the wide range of other possible

symbolisms involved. Furthermore, the list of symbols is so long, and

the symbols are so common, that it's possible to read just about

anything as a soma story in this sense.

However, Wilson himself suggests that interpretation is never reductive,

since the 'map is not the territory'. Hence, he is not claiming that

these stories are only about soma – only that the soma-story is an

element (possibly latent) within them. In some cases, furthermore,

Wilson is not pointing out single symbols, but entire lists of

similarities. The 'soma-function' becomes a historical name for

something akin to the idea of peak experience or altered consciousness

which inspires Bey's ontology and politics. Peak experience is present

as a disguised element in mythology, with or without psychedelic

overtones.

Pirate Utopias

Wilson's

Pirate Utopias

focuses on pirates operating out of North Africa, particularly Salé and

Rabat (in modern Morocco), from the late 1500s to the 1700s. Many of

these pirates were European 'Renegadoes': white Christians who rejected

European power-structures, converted to Islam, and fled to pirate

enclave-states along what was then called the Barbary coast. Seen as

blessed in the Muslim world, such converts were killed on sight in

Europe, where rampant prejudice against Islam was already prevalent.

Others were Muslims driven out of Spain after the reconquista. These

so-called Moriscos sought revenge against Spain. There were also Jews,

whom Wilson claims had a reputation for magic. Still others were slaves

captured by pirates. Wilson expresses discomfort with the fact the basis

for pirates' liberty involved enslaving others, though he provides

evidence that slaves were well-treated by the pirates and were able to

become citizens. He also suggests, following B.R. Burg, that pirate

enclaves devoid of European laws and morals were attractive refuges for

gay men.

Some pirates were Muslim converts, and the attraction of the Islamic

world for European dissidents is significant. Wilson suggests that Islam

might have had a 'positive shadow', or pull, for dissident Europeans.

This might have stemmed from esoteric or mystical ideas, or European

speculation that such ideas existed. It might also have stemmed from the

European stereotype associating Islam with sensuality, a stereotype

which reflects Islam's comparatively sex-positive doctrines. Or it might

reflect the fact that Islam, as a newer religion, contained a

revolutionary critique of Christianity.

European hermetic reformers, such as Rosicrucians and Freemasons (and

later Nietzsche and the Enlightenment), were allegedly influenced by

Islamophile European intellectuals attracted to the absence of an

authoritative priesthood of the European type, or to Islam as the

geopolitical antithesis of Christianity. They probably misread Islam,

and yet the misreading was

productive

as a means of cultural transfer. Barbary pirates were also influenced by

European free-spirit heresies such as Ranterism. They were seen in North

Africa as waging a just war against countries such as Spain.

Like many scholars, Wilson interprets piracy as social resistance,

particularly in relation to the inegalitarian structures of commercial

and state navies. The 'Moorish' pirates raided European coastal

villages, but more often, targeted Spanish and Portuguese ships

returning from plundering America. They persisted for centuries, but

states gradually increased their control over uncontrolled regions, and

pirate republics gradually disappeared. Wilson does not discuss it (the

work is too old), but piracy has

re-emerged

as a form of autonomy today.

The

political forms

of the pirate republics are particularly interesting, in a period where

Europe was ruled by absolutist monarchs. For several decades, Salé was

ruled by a council of pirate chiefs. It operated with a two-chamber

parliament similar to those established centuries later in France and

America. In other words, European democracy might actually be an

imitation of pirate politics. In Algiers, the ruling council was decided

by strict seniority. Any pirate who survived long enough would be

promoted until they reached it. However, its power was so limited in

practice that it struggled to attract recruits. Wilson suggests that

such structures reflect a desire to prevent strong political power from

emerging. The pirates also evolved a language of their own, known as

Franco. It was a lingua franca, but for Wilson suggests the pirates had

become a 'people' in their own right, with their own culture. We don't

know if such a culture really existed, but it could have existed, since

all the conditions were present.

Pirates weren't usually

social bandits

in the Marxist sense, because they had no peasant 'social base'. (There

are exceptions in unmapped zones with base communities). However, they

weren't capitalists engaged in primitive accumulation. At least amongst

themselves, they practiced economic

near-equality

and social and personal freedom. Social nequality was limited. Captains

only took one-and-a-half to two times the share of a regular pirate,

compared to forty-to-one among state privateers. Local rulers were

elected, and could be removed. Bey concludes that the Salé pirates were

less egalitarian and libertarian than those of

Libertatia

, but more so than Europe of the time. Wilson sees pirates as creating

rather than expressing a community of resistance (whereas social bandits

express an existing community). Their rebellion is a kind of

self-expression, otherwise similar to the mass expression of peasant

movements.

Methodologically, it is difficult to establish many of Wilson's claims.

The source-base on 'Moorish' pirates is somewhat limited, and Wilson

restricts it further. He discounts much European history-writing as an

attempt to preserve a myth of barbarism to justify a civilising mission.

However, Defoe's fictionalised General History of the Pyrates is used

alongside several biographies as a basis for guessing what pirate

ideology would have been. Bey takes such sources as Defoe's, and Gosse's

History of the Pirates, to be plausible because they were believable in

their day. He also suggests that such sources carry the 'aura of

seduction' of the 'positive shadow' discussed above. In other words,

even if they were untrue, they convey the appeal of piracy – why it had

(and has) an imaginal attraction.

Wilson suggests that pirates were anti-establishment, influenced by

liberal and republican ideas, and determined to steal from the rich.

They had a 'Zerowork' ethos, financing months of leisure with a few

summer expeditions. They also preferred trickery and camouflage to

battle. He also speculates that they may have practiced Sufism, maybe a

then-current variant involving drugs or spirit possession. The erotic

nature of pirate culture is suggested by certain folktales, and for Bey,

is connected to their spiritual and geographical nomadism.

Pirates are said to have functioned as a globe-spanning information

network, held together by islands in the net, some of which were

intentional communities. They were often multiracial. Some adopted

indigenous cultures from the Caribbean. Some declared themselves to be

'at war with the world' or in a 'state of nature'. They forbade

punishments, and resolved disputes by voting or duels.

Daniel Defoe's

account of

Libertatia

(or Libertalia) provides the clearest picture of a progressive pirate

utopia. It is

debated

whether it is factual or fictional. Libertatia reputedly recognised a

right to necessities of life, primordial freedom, anti-racism, and a

socialist economy with common ownership. Other pirate utopias emerged in

the Caribbean and on Madagascar. Caribbean enclaves such as Hispaniola

drew a mixture of drop-outs and escaped slaves. Wilson emphasises the

democratic structure of pirate ships and their lack of command

hierarchies; disputes were resolved by voting or duelling. On shore,

radical democracy seemed to give way to anarchy.

Alamut and the Qiyamat

Unsurprisingly given his background in comparative religion in Iran,

many of Wilson's references are to Islamic social movements. One

recurring location is Alamut. This '

tiny but intense civilization'

was founded by Hasan-i Sabbah, a Persian Ismaili convert who lost a

power-struggle in Cairo. The Assassin 'state' was a

network

of remote castles and valleys connected by information flows. Its Imams,

or rulers, lived in '

concealment

' in Alamut, an impregnable mountain fortress in modern-day northwestern

Iran. It was a refuge for philosophers and scientists attracted to

meditation and pleasure, and for 'extreme' mystics and revolutionaries

in the Shi'ite world. Initially a kingdom, Wilson sees Alamut as

reaching an intense level of autonomy at a later stage. According to

him, Hassan II of Alamut proclaimed the end of profane time and the

beginning of angelic time, or the time of the Holy Spirit. This meant

that the

religious law was abrogated

, since its esoteric meaning was now directly revealed. There are no

full prophets after Mohammed, but there is a new cycle of

esoteric interpreters

who play a similar role. In effect, Wilson claims that Alamut realised a

millennium which restored the immediacy of spiritual experience.

This process was based on a religious doctrine similar to

Wilson's/Bey's. The Ismailis of Alamut gave a

radical meaning

to the concept of ta'wil. They saw the relationship between law and

spirit as like that between a shell and a reality underneath. Law

(shari'ah) was seen as a shell which had to be broken or reinterpreted

to reach the underlying Spiritual Path (tariqah), behind which is God or

absolute Being. This reflects broader interpretive traditions of the

time. Human thought is structured through forms, which both reveal and

conceal the reality beneath. These forms had to be interpreted to reach

the ineffable. Usually, such interpretation is carried out in a way

which preserves the necessity of law, at least for the majority of

followers (clerics and rulers may be excepted). However, Wilson suggests

that it took a more radical term in Alamut. In Hassan II's doctrine, the

meaning of the Path is found in the reality of the Imam (spiritual

ruler), which ultimately devolves into the Imam-of-one's-own-being, the

inner soul or perfected human. This is a position Bey paradoxically

terms 'anarcho-monarchism': each person is her or his own ruler.

In this view, the law is not a necessary shell, but something which will

fall aside

like a used husk once the essence is revealed. Once the Imam (higher

self) is realised, the Law and Path

fall away

. Those who have reached the kernel can discard the shell. They still

consider themselves Muslims, but discard religious law. Once someone has

reached inner perfection, everything they do is permitted. There is no

path and no goal, only reality or truth (Haqq). However, Wilson suggests

that this does not mean that any and all ways of life qualify as divine.

The Ismaili is meant to be constantly intoxicated with intensity.

In Alamut, the Qiyamat, or day of judgement, was believed to have

already come. Alamut claimed to be a 'hidden garden' freed of state,

religious power, law, and so on. What this means for Bey is that time

has become completely immanent. We are no longer waiting for revolution.

We are

already in angelic time

, but do not realise it. The Millennium, or the moment of radical

transformation, is always now, the present, the awakening of each soul

to its own divinity.

This argument repeats Bey's general ontology in religious language.

People are alienated through the

loss of immediacy

, and achieve transformation through its reclamation and expansion. The

idea of the Imam-of-one's-own-being leads to freedom. This is different

from mysticism as quietism or asceticism. People realise their divine

nature by following their true nature or becoming, conceived as a

'subjective arc of spiritual progress'.

The radical Ismaili approach was extremely controversial in its day.

While many Sufis used variants of the shell/being metaphor, the open

abrogation of religious law was considered outright heretical.

Furthermore, the Qiyamat story was feared by the elite, who were

concerned that eliminating initiation and duty would eliminate their

assassins and workers. After the murder of Hassan II, they managed to

restrict the libertarian doctrine to the elite. Orthodoxy maintains that

unenlightened selves need the religious law. Wilson responds that we are

already free, whether we recognise it or not. Realisation is not a

'becoming', a process of becoming something else, but a 'being',

something we already have.

Wilson also sees the social system of Alamut as an inspiration. For most

of its existence, Alamut had a hierarchy – albeit one defined by

spiritual attainment. However, it had a more

libertarian social system

than other kingdoms of its period, and encouraged science and learning.

The networked nature of the society, and its economic 'communism', are

reminiscent of syndicalism

and council communism. It was primarily oriented to 'gnosis' or

spiritual knowledge, but it also used militancy and stealth. Alamut

defended itself from larger neighbouring kingdoms, which considered it

heretical, by means of the order of assassins. The risk of assassination

created a

fearful reputation

which deterred action against Alamut for centuries (S 37). Its castles

were

impregnable even to siege

, since they had their own gardens in their mountain valleys. They were

able to communicate and trade because of porous borders. This situation

lasted for centuries, until the Mongol invasions.

Knight

suggests that this reading is 'problematic'. Ismaili doctrine is

generally taken to reserve knowledge of the inner meaning to the Imam or

the chosen few. Esoteric readings are sometimes treated as privileged

readings which empower particular interpreters. Modern Nizari Ismailis

operate with a hierarchical structure based on purported descent from

the Shi'ite ruler Ali. The declaration of the Qiyamat or qiama (usually

translated as resurrection) is shrouded in mystery, partly because

Hassan II

destroyed historical accounts

. It is usually interpreted as an attempt by the ruler to

set himself up as caliph

, although it did entail the abrogation of shariah law.

Although Alamut was destroyed by the Mongols, and cannot be reproduced

in today's conditions, Wilson suggests that Alamut's Qiyamat

remains alive

as a state of consciousness in which we are already in paradise. Even if

the hidden garden cannot be accessed in the outer world, the

interiorisation of the Qiyamat story offers an inner sense of personal

freedom that the state cannot touch. It provides a kind of 'moment'

outside history which can be accessed existentially. Following Corbin,

he suggests that the Qiyamat (or moment of disalienation) is

always alive

in the imaginal plane, and each of us can participate in it there. This

moment of unveiling is sometimes expressed in terms of visits from

guardian angels and messianic figures.

Sufi Journeying

The history of Alamut is one of a number of occasions where Bey/Wilson

discusses Islamic history. He argues that medieval Islam was often

tolerant. Islam sometimes imagined itself as a

whole world

, with great latitude – a vision expressed in social tolerance

(Caravan). This vision is undermined today, because the Islamic world

feels like a partial world, surrounded by hostile forces. The context of

conflict causes reactive forces and scarcity. This, for Wilson, is why

dervishes and Sufis are persecuted today. The ideological and social

closure of Islam is a response to the colonial condition.

Sufi journeying – as a means to altered consciousness – was a particular

effect of the earlier, enlightened condition. In

Sacred Drift

, Wilson argues that western mapmaking seeks to fill in unknown spaces.

In contrast, Sufi journeying seeks something always 'unknown', no matter

how often it has been discovered. Particular geographical points, or

even the entire landscape, is invested with imaginal meaning. The

journey is carried out in a state of altered consciousness. The

traveller is encouraged to maintain psychological openness to adventure,

and a type of 'power-without-self-will' or will without distracting

thoughts. Travellers are to avoid 'disequilibrium', such as ill-health,

because it disrupts the experience of the marvellous. The journey

requires hardships, toil and danger. Its goal is entry into the imaginal

world. Sufi travel writings often refer as much to poetic significance

as real places. The 'tale' is stripped of meaningless or gratuitous

elements, and written as a meaningful process. Such stories 'rise

above', rather than falling short of, the truth.

According to Wilson, there is a call within Sufism to

flight

, journey, or migration which is also associated with the death of ego

and of an existing 'world'. Travelling dervishes are sometimes

full-time guests

, offering baraka in return for hospitality. Sufi wanderers seek to open

up an altered, spiritualised gaze on particular sites, travelling in the

material and imaginal worlds at the same time. There might be space

among such travellers for people who would be labelled as insane today,

who might be regarded and cared for as helpless saints.

Such journeying may provide an option for the modern world. The

spiritual pursuit of imaginal points is

always possible

. However, the related kind of physical journeying is difficult today.

The loss of wide and wild lands, of terra incognita (unknown lands not

on the maps), interferes with such travel. Wilson suggests that it can

be recovered in an experience of 'rootless cosmopolitanism'. Life can

never be accurately mapped because it is qualitative. As a result, one

can still vanish in fractal complexities missed by linear maps. This is

the modern equivalent to Sufi wandering: to disappear into hidden

dimensions the media and quantification cannot penetrate. The

Situationist dérive or drift is an example of this. Ultimately, this

might expand into a culture of 'urban nomads' and 'techno-gypsies' who

finally become modern Sufi wanderers and restore imaginal travel. (The

British

New Traveller movement

was largely contemporary with these writings).

Sufi journeying is distinguished from tourism. Whereas existentialist

travel pursues difference, tourism alienates it. The structure of

tourism mediates between visitor and place. The process becomes

vampiric

, consuming and destroying difference and contaminating the places it

affects. In another text, Wilson argues that travel '

faster than a camel

' destroys distance and is the same as not moving at all. Other kinds of

action at a distance, like writing, also tend to negate travel by taking

away the need for it.

Bey

refers

sympathetically to the

Qalandars

, a colourful religious mendicant order in South Asia. He sees them as a

surviving variant of the way of the wild dervish. A few are con-men, a

few are 'genuine mystics', but most are amiable wanderers of a spiritual

persuasion, similar to western drop-outs. Historically recognised, this

bohemian order provided an important pressure-valve in an otherwise

doctrinally rigid world. The Qalandars are historically one of the most

heterodox Sufi orders. They practice a kind of

dropping-out,

abandoning work and adopting a code of total spontaneity.

Many Sufis adopt views compatible with orthodox Islam. However, some

Sufis maintain some degree of immediatism alongside adherence to

orthodox doctrine.

Neo-Sufism

from the nineteenth century onwards is a response to colonialism, and

corresponding authoritarian social formations. Sufism views objectivity

and subjectivity as

complementary

. Also, Sufism is often quietistic, promoting 'becoming who you are'

over any outer cause. Many adopt the position of being '

in the world, but not of it

', carrying on with mainstream lives. However, Sufis have also launched

revolutions. In his historical work, Wilson selects those aspects of,

and trends in, Sufism which resonate with his own political orientation.

Cumantsa and Fiume

TAZ's can also take modernist forms. In the essay '

A Nietzschean Coup d'Etat'

, Bey writes sympathetically of a short-lived independent government in

Cumantsa, a region of Romania, after World War 1. The project was set up

by an eccentric minor aristocrat, Georghiu Mavrocordato, whom

one scholar

terms semi-fictitious. Bey suggests it is the only government experiment

openly based on Nietzschean theory. At this point in history, Nietzsche

was considered a radical rather than reactionary theorist. His thought

is based on process, rather than teleology, and inspired revolutionaries

such as Landauer.

As a Nietzchean, Mavrocordato condemned the First World War as a

conspiracy of moribund powers against life itself . After seizing power

from the remnants of an occupying German army, his group proposed

radical land redistribution, including Mavrocordato's own estate. This

led to massive peasant support. The new rulers declared their intent to

create a Nietzschean utopia. They were 'young romantics' who apparently

expected their idea to spread. The establishment of Cumantsa was a

Nietzschean expressive act, adopting the Dionysian pessimist position of

acting in spite of knowledge, out of sheer expression. According to

Wilson, the revolt was a kind of peak experience. It quickly drew

followers of Stirner, many of whom at the time celebrated any revolt as

a means to struggle against the non-self.

An attempt was made to imitate revolutionary councilism. In a city with

no factories, this was a councilism of different ethnic communities. No

community was to have mastery over the others. In practice, Cumantsa

pretty much ran itself. The system was popular, based on land

redistribution, a tax-free port, and giveaways from the treasury. Bey

sees it as akin to a TAZ, although it did have a militia and border

guards. It eventually collapsed ahead of a Romanian attack. The leaders

of the revolt escaped, and Mavrocordato may have gone into exile and

become a Sufi.

Another reputed autonomous zone, the Republic of Fiume, was set up by

the poet (and later fascist) Gabriele D'Annunzio, who sought to capture

Fiume from Yugoslavia for Italy, for nationalist reasons. Turned down by

Italy but unevicted by Yugoslavia, D'Annunzio declared independence.

This self-consciously

short-lived community

attracted artists, anarchists, pirates, bohemians, gay men, fugitives

and eccentrics of every stripe. Bey portrays the community operating as

a constant party or festival for the eighteen months of its existence.

This analysis has attracted controversy, as critics have drawn attention

to d'Annunzio's later fascist politics, the nationalistic reasons for

the occupation (which deprived the newly-formed Yugoslavia of its main

port), and the proto-fascist iconography of its aesthetic. However, Bey

takes the position that Italian aesthetic radicalism only later

degenerated into fascism. Applying such criteria to Fiume is

anachronistic.

Other Autonomous Zones

Many other movements feature marginally, but sometimes recurrently, in

Bey/Wilson's writings. In America, Bey also celebrates so-called

'tri-racial isolate' and Maroon communities formed by escaped slaves,

Native Americans, and downtrodden whites. Bey

celebrates

the fact that some of these groups sought 'Indian' status, and suggests

that they were denied it mainly to avoid setting a precedent of

recognising dropouts. Many of these groups were targeted by eugenicists

in the early twentieth century. Other

historical precursors

include American settlers who assimilated into Native American bands.

People abducted from puritan settler communities often actively resisted

being rescued, preferring Native American life. Ranter, Leveller, and

Digger revolts seem to have been experienced both as political

insurrections and mystical states. In Bengal, Bey claims to have met

allies Sufis and Kali-worshippers who introduced him to tantra, and

allegedly had their own political party.

Utopianism also has a place as a precursor of TAZ. Bey also writes

favourably of early intentional communities such as Fourier's

phalansteries

. When the map was 'closed' and intentional communities on the frontier

became impossible, they were largely replaced by urban communes like the

Paris Commune. Some revolutionaries adopted a kind of nomadism between

different zones of revolt.

Islamic 'Heresies'

The book

Scandal

is devoted to unorthodox traditions on the margins of Islam. Wilson sees

Islam as a continuum of shifting heterodoxies, with no fixed orthodoxy.

He is most interested in positions deemed heretical or heterodox, rather

than orthodoxies. He also rejects Wahhabism, Khomeinism and other

positions he deems hyper-orthodox. He argues that western perceptions of

Islam are generally too monolithic and shallow. In his reading of Islam,

the human calling is self-perfection. Christian-style martyrdom is rare.

Risking death can be used to enhance consciousness of the world, but

fighting and concealment are preferred to passive self-sacrifice. Sufism

adds other elements which render Islam more progressive, such as the

shell/kernel metaphor.

Wilson argues that heretical re-interpretations and popular syncretisms

are not unwanted innovations, but useful hybridities. Popular eruptions

of playfulness do not betray a religious tradition, but renew it.

Heresies speak the language of a culture or religion, but give certain

words a '

catastrophic

', radically transformative meaning. Mystics and poets seek '

poetic facts

', or bits of information which, 'at a certain density', can cause a

breakthrough or breakdown in the border between ordinary and

altered/imaginal consciousness. Heresy produces a certain kind of

scandal, in which a religious veil is removed.

Heresies are usually needed for cultural transfer. For instance, Persia

(Iran), Northern India and Indonesia became Islamic through

heterodox ideas

. Heresies are like lucky or deliberate mistranslations. Most Javanese

still practice an eclectic mixture of Islam, shamanism, Buddhism and

Hinduism. The Moorish Science Temple is another instance of heresy as

cultural transfer. I would add that heterodoxy and heresy may also be

needed in secular radicalisms. For instance, Marxism spread mainly in

heterodox forms.

Islam was able to spread so widely because of its democratic element, or

openness to interpretation by each believer, with the community as final

authority. Of course, this openness often operates only 'in theory',

like the Christian commitment to pacifism. However, it sometimes

operates in practice. For instance, Rumi accepted non-Muslim disciples,

and Islam recognises earlier, non-Muslim prophets.

Sufism is particularly interesting as a source of heresies. Some Sufis

played with deliberately 'shocking' themes to highlight the tension

between outer law and inner spirit. Mystics sought to shed received

opinion and habit, including law, to reach an altered state of

consciousness. The mystic 'dies before death' through dissolution of the

alienated ego, which is taken to be a programmed illusion. Material

arising from the unconscious is neither repressed nor succumbed to, but

spiritualised. On this reading, the real message of religion is

disalienation. The religious law is at best a means to this truth, a

veil over it. Once the truth is accessed directly, the intermediary of

law is unnecessary.

Wilson thus reads Sufi radicalism as similar to his own commitment to

unmediated intensity. An emphasis on individual realization removes the

mediating role of religious authorities and leads to the rejection of

hierarchy. Wilson sees mystical, ascetic and religious practices as a

'barrel of tricks' for tricking the mind out of its alienated, illusory

condition. The basic point is to find a gateway between ordinary and

non-ordinary consciousness so as to access the latter. This position

blurs the boundaries between religions.

Echoing

Bergson

, Bey suggests that the mystical position identifies 'God's point of

view' with a holistic world where everything is one. This is contrasted

with the hierarchical structure perceived by creatures. In this

hierarchical structure, some things are seen as more important, central

or powerful than others. For mystics, anything which can illuminate the

oneness of being is a 'grace of God'. Anything can be either a poison or

support, in relation to disalienated perception.

Wilson

discusses

aspects of the doctrines of a number of dissident Sufi and Ismaili

theorists, such as Mansur al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, and Hamid al-Din

al-Kermani. Many of these figures were persecuted by the orthodox

establishment. For example, Wilson

suggests

that the Establishment had Hallaj killed, although the story has been

rewritten as orthodox martyrdom. Similarly, dervishes were persecuted as

radicals. Historically, they wandered between places, owned nothing,

sometimes begged, played music and danced. They sought ecstasy through

rhythm and dancing. From the mid-nineteenth century, Sufis suffered

persecution. Many stopped wandering and adopted more conventional

religious positions. This process seems to stem from colonisation and

the reaction to it.

Some of the scholars Wilson discusses proposed otherwise prohibited

means to reach altered consciousness. The image of wine was sometimes

used to connote intensity, for instance in the poetry of Fakhroddin

Iraqi. Although prohibited by religious law, many people in Iran, India,

Pakistan and Afghanistan use marijuana for religious purposes. The basis

for this seems to be that people in 'ordinary' consciousness lack the

attentiveness and willpower to see the Real or truth.

Prayer and perfume

can also act as gateways. Wilson was

told

by a Sufi leader that Love is more important than specific doctrines. He

suggests that, for mystics, love is the binding power of being, or the

substance of which being is composed.

According to Wilson, some mystics accepted the idea of

romantic love

or physical attraction as a divine state, since the other is a part of

or stands for God. Hence, there is Sufi love poetry from authors such as

Ibn Arabi, comparing a woman, girl, or boy with God. Through total

concentration on the beauty of the beloved, the mystic escapes ego and

self, and remembers the beauty of her/his spiritual nature. Some, such

as Kermani, saw self-realisation occurring more perfectly in love than

in religious practices.

Wilson uses the term 'imaginal yoga' for the intense contemplation of an

object or form until it is transformed by the imagination into a

metaphysical focus. One example is the 'Witness Game', a practice in

which one contemplates an attractive person without acting on sexual

urges. The state of unrequited attraction provides a pathway to

spiritual experience. Bey sees this as a means of transmuting erotic,

bodily energy into spiritual consciousness. It is a special case of the

broader process by which Islam transmutes nature into spirit, rather

than destroying nature as modernity does. However, he is

also aware

that authors such as Ibn Arabi tend to be masculinist.

Poetry can also be a means to altered consciousness. Wilson

protests

at the relegation of mystical poetry to a lesser status than 'realistic'

tragedies and the like. He argues that mysticism is not substanceless,

but rather, points to an altered state of consciousness. It is a model

in which one relates not only to reality/truth (haqq), but also to

creativity. Creativity is a mirror of divine outpouring.

Mysticism can be expressed in different ways. Often, the oneness of

being experienced by mystics is expressed in terms which crystallise

back into literal systems of dogma. Some orders focus on each detail –

through precise rules and instructions – until each detail becomes

luminous. Others are more '

bohemian

', promoting drugs, parties and sex.

Another possible gateway is art. Austere official Islamic artwork can

seem devoid of the spirit of play. But popular and commercial artworks

are playful, creative and day-dreamy. For instance, Wilson describes

[The Black Div] as 'jagged, violent, hallucinatory' and 'brilliant'. The

figure of

Buraq

expresses a concealed feminine side to Islam. There is also popular

music with similar attributes.

Dreams and Writing in Sufism and Taoism

Another means to altered consciousness is dreaming. In '

The Anti-Caliph

', Wilson refers to hidden figures such as Khezr the Green Man, the

Hidden Imam, and the idea of prophetic visitations in dreams. In

Shower of Stars

, Wilson argues that initiation into non-ordinary (spiritual, esoteric)

consciousness can be performed by archetypal figures in dreams. He

argues that this process is recognised in both Sufism and Taoism. The

spiritual realm is something one can contemplate directly.

Sufism and Taoism have different ontologies. Chuang Tzu (

Zhuangzi

) is a linguistic relativist, though not a nihilist. Words 'say

something', but the map is not the territory. The nature of reality

cannot be conveyed in speech or silence. In contrast, Sufis tend to be

linguistic Platonists. Words have magical powers because of the

correspondence between signifier and signified. However, both approaches

allow access to knowledge through dreams. For example, Oveissi dervishes

are trained to induce 'veridical dreams' believed to give access to

initiatory figures, rather than being initiated by a master.

Dreams are a site of knowledge because they exist in the liminal

(in-between) zone. The dream is a 'privileged locus' of the identity of

everything, the oneness of being. Wilson suggests there are particular

ways to intentionally create the conditions for these kinds of dreams.

In the book

Shower of Stars

, Wilson argues that the unconscious tends to be sensitive to

suggestion. Hence, the practices of istikhara, used to call initiatic

dreams, are a kind of 'imaginal machine' for producing effects in the

unconscious. In dream initiation, the dreamer often visits heaven in the

present (not the afterlife), to be taught shamanic secrets.

Writing is derived from dreaming. It depends on the ability to detach

images from materiality, and hence on the imaginal level. Dream, angel,

star and book are interchangeable but autonomous images. In

Aimless Wandering

, Bey suggests that intermediaries such as muses and spirits are

invented because of the oversupply of meaning which occurs in chaotic

language.

Themes of dreaming might even manifest in orthodox religion. For

instance, Mohammed received the Qur'an in a '

shower of stars'

, over a long period, and Wilson suggests this must have been a mystical

experience. All three Abrahamic religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity)

are reticent about how Scripture was revealed, so as to maintain its

uniqueness. However, Wilson suggests it may have been a similar process

to that found in

Spirit Writing

or

Mao Shan Taoism

. In this tradition, a type of spiritual writing is deemed possible, in

a cosmology which sees everything as an emblem or sign of an underlying

cosmic order. Books are considered to represent or symbolise something

in this way, and to contain spirits.

According to Wilson, such writing was often conducted under the

influence of marijuana. It involved the use of a chanted, incantatory

language which ruptured discursive language and had very different

effects, infecting language with an excess of meaning with spiritual

effects. The book becomes a god in a polytheist world, moving both

towards its reader and towards heaven. In contrast to monotheist texts,

scripture in Mao Shan Taoism was part of a repeated or reiterated game.

This allows people to participate directly in the descent of revelation,

instead of relying on a pre-written, authoritative text. It reflects a

view that beings respond to each other through categories, or

archetypes.

Such writing is ludic, and related to 'aimless wandering'. It was

largely a male monopoly, although Wilson suggests this was challenged by

the

Tzu-Ku

cult. In Taoism the body is considered to be alchemically transformed by

being infused with starbeams. Initiation through altered consciousness

(dreaming, possession) also appears in religions such as Batuque and

Santeria.

Writing is often a means to transmit such visions. The words revealed in

dreams are important in allowing them to be revealed or shared socially,

and to benefit others. Books may contain keys pointing to particular

psychological states for sensitive readers. The text 'spills over' in an

excess of meaning, pointing to something beyond it. This excess is not

fixed, but is also not empty. Such words 'play', rather than segmenting

and categorising. Language comes to reflect or reproduce the abundance

of nature.

However, writing and even speaking carry a danger of alienating or

ossifying the 'living word' into something 'dead'. The way to resist

this is to keep the book an open process, constantly renewed or

reinterpreted into new existential contexts. Language can be a means of

control, but it can also be possessed by imaginal content. Wilson argues

that writing can be interpreted as symbolisation. The rise of writing

led to the interpretation of events as symbolising hidden meanings.

Hermetic doctrine identified letters or hieroglyphs with Platonic forms

or archetypes. Hence, writing is itself a magical practice. Letters are

'pictures' of supernatural realities, not abstract signs (as in

structuralism).

Angels

Wilson wrote the volume on

angels

for the Art and Imagination series. Here, he argues that angels, or

winged messengers of the spirit realm, appear in many different

traditions – shamanic, classical European, Christian, Zoroastrian,

Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist. They are beings which are believed

to move between earth and heaven, bridging the two worlds. Winged

creatures such as Buraq play a similar role. Angels and winged beings

are associated with the field of becoming. For instance, in some

traditions, the air from which God creates the universe is made up of

angels.

Angels are often messengers of some kind. Some bring spiritual

knowledge, appearing with (or as) a book or letter. For instance, each

letter of the alphabet might have an angel, or angels might be said to

have created human languages. Others provide the basis for journeys to

heaven or the spirit realm. Still others reveal an uncontrollable divine

fire which extinguishes reason and which humans cannot, or can barely,

perceive. In some shamanic traditions, the shaman 'marries' and sexually

cohabits with a guardian spirit, which is often terrifying in

appearance.

The role of angels in Christianity is ambiguous. Worship of angels stems

from the peasantry rather than the church hierarchy. They closely

resemble earlier 'pagan' beings. They are rooted in the popular and/or

mystical imagination, and are more common in art than theology. Their

role in Scripture is more about their function than their nature. Angels

are considered to be outside profane (or homogeneous empty) time; in

some traditions, they govern the realm of time, and profane time is an

illusion. Angelic time is eternal time, a single ray of light with

duration but not sequence. Angels can be tricksters and magicians, like

the Greek god Eros. Female angels are often modelled on Sophia, goddess

of wisdom.

This book, and a passage in Sacred Drift, also discusses the Devil as an

angel. The idea of the Devil is a metaphor for separation from God, and

hence for alienation. Wilson refers to mystical traditions in which the

Devil or Lucifer, the fallen angel, is akin to a Jungian shadow. He is

to be redeemed and saved along with humanity, and maybe stands for the

ego as something which alienates us from the spiritual realm. In

one reading

, Satan is a projection of humans' spiritual imperfection. According to

Wilson, in Judaism, there is no separate principle of Evil. Christianity

created such a principle as a side-effect of emphasising God's goodness.

Again, Wilson draws on Sufi radicals who effectively deconstruct

religious doctrine. Husayn al-Hallaj advocated a principle of

complementarity. Evil is a necessary companion of Good. Ayn al-Qozat

maintained that the story of the Devil is a story of true love of God,

proven by the separation necessary to test love. Aziz ad-Din Nasafi

argued that the story of Satan is a metaphor. All the powers submit to

spirit, except imagination, which refuses to submit. Such positions were

too outrageous even for medieval Islam, but they provide interesting

parallels to Wilson's views.

In Sacred Drift, Wilson also discusses the

Ahl-i-Haqq

and the

Yezidis

. He was unable to encounter the former, but managed to meet Yezidi

people in Kurdistan, and also draws on anthropological studies.

According to his account, they worship a figure known as the 'Peacock

Angel', broadly identical with Lucifer, but not alienated from God. This

figure is said to be unjustly demonised, and to free them from the Law.

He is a principle of energy, not evil. From these various accounts,

Wilson concludes that Satan is a gatekeeper at the doorway to the land

of imagination. In one poem,

Ghazal

, Bey parodies the idea of 'neighbours from Hell' by taking it

literally. Since everyone has a neighbour from Hell, one in four

Americans must be demonically possessed. Globally, America itself is the

neighbour from Hell, polluting and offending others.

There are

other places

where Wilson/Bey discusses archetypal imagery. Javanese shadow puppets,

for instance, shift perceptions to represent the spirit world. In a

traditional context, they are viewed at length, monotonously, in a

context where everyday action (eating, sleep, playing with babies) goes

on uninterrupted. The process relies on active imagination, to a much

greater extent that TV or cinema. For this very reason, shadow theatre

is losing its appeal. Wilson also shows a recurring interest in drawings

which combine Arabic text and realistic art, such as the [Green Man

figure] which appears on the cover of several of his books. Elsewhere,

Wilson suggests that love and death are often mystically connected.

Dragons and serpents stand for vital spirit. The myth of dragon-slaying

is actually about taming the spirit to use it for intellectual or

religious ends. However, it also accompanies the emergence of hierarchy

and oppression.

History of Ideas

Wilson reads the history of ideas in a similar way to social history.

The moment of desire underpins revolutions such as the

French Revolution

, an event which is still ongoing. In particular, the nineteenth-century

socialist Fourier is considered a forerunner of Wilson because of his

emphasis on pleasure. Fourier was opposed to marriage and other modern

customs. He celebrated lesbianism. He also had a theory of voluntary

erotic slavery. Fourier also perversely celebrated money, provided it

was purified of alienation. He is best known for his utopian intentional

communities, the Phalansteries, which attempted to realise his eccentric

theory of a balanced life. For Wilson, Fourier's system is not literally

true, but is useful as a focus for meditation. Fourier created and lived

in a world of words, but this world was also inflected by music.

In Fourier's model, the key organising principles are luxury and

harmony. Harmony in Fourier's sense entails finding ways for differences

to coexist. The desire to be 'carefree' is to be unfettered. The passion

inspired by Fourier's poetry is a pale foreshadowing of that promised in

his utopian world, in which passion is the driving force. Production

could only be liberated when people did the tasks they were attracted

to. Society would only reach its potential when all desires are free. In

effect, says Wilson, Fourier invests hope in the magic power of Eros.

Wilson views Fourier as ambiguously despising present bodies but

deifying the body in general. He suggests that reading Fourier is like

discovering a lost ancient cult.

Fourier saw erotic attraction as the basic force of existence. Gravity,

for instance, is a special kind of attraction. Everything is alive and

sexually active. This is the basis for Wilson/Bey's view of attraction

as the basis of order. Fourier believed that everything is related, in

terms of belonging to a category. Everything is attracted erotically to

other things in its category. The problems of modernity have arisen

because civilisation has knocked the Earth out of its place in the

system of categories and passions. Fourier's utopian politics is an

attempt to restore cosmic balance by arranging everything in line with

its passions.

For Wilson, Fourier is relevant today because we are still within his

context in some respects. He theorises that we are stuck in the

nineteenth century, as capital abandons humanity for the ether. He

proposes a thought-experiment to reconstruct past moments and rewrite

them as they should have been. (This thought-experiment is reminiscent

of visualisations used in trauma therapy). He proposes an imaginary

history in which Marx became an anarchist. He also proceeds to

cross-read Marx and Proudhon on property. What they saw as the hidden

essence of capital is now its real form.

Bey also suggests that we are back where Marx and Proudhon were at the

time of their disagreement. He suggests the disagreement was a mistake.

Existing Marxism is weakened by its history of excluding and slandering

perceived enemies, leading to purges. Against the idea that revolution

is impossible until capitalism is perfect (or 'fully developed'),

Proudhon and Landauer propose that revolution is always possible in

response to alienation and misery. The main disagreement between Marx

and Proudhon was on the question of authority, or the state. Proudhon

believed that contradiction or difference is eternal (not dialectical).

It should be harmonised and balanced, not reconciled and eliminated.

Wilson also speculates that hermeticism lies at the root of modern

radicalism. For instance, Marx may have been connected to the Polish

messianic leader Jakob Frank.

In

Aimless Wandering

, Bey analyses the Taoism of

Chuang Tzu

(

Zhuangzi

). He reads Zhuangzi as anti-metaphysical. Zhuangzi's major text does

not offer transcendental realisation, but a path to self-realisation.

Human misery stems from falling out of sync with the Tao. Zhuangzi's

response is to seek to reverse this separation and return to the flow,

to spontaneity. To achieve this, one must reject all deities and

metaphysics. This approach is opposed to the Confucian social structure,

and oriented to aimless wandering.

In linguistics, Bey writes of a 'hermetalinguistics' in which God

reveals language (as in Platonism and in a secular form Chomsky), and a

'nihilistic linguistics' in which words mean nothing essential (as in

poststructuralism). Bey seeks an alternative to both positions, and

finds it in Zhuangzi. The Taoist position both distrusts words and uses

them magically. Words which 'ward and sector' – which classify and

categorise – are not Taoist words, and reproduce separation. Both

positionality ('from a lodging place') and hierarchical language ('ahead

of others') are 'ward and sector' language.

Zhuangxi's third alternative is 'spillover saying'. Things are in flux,

unfixed, and become blurred. Spillover saying reproduces this structure

of reality. It leads to a kind of excessive, superabundant, generous

language which reflects a similarly abundant view of reality. It thus

defies the capitalist imposition of scarcity and restores a sense of

existential abundance and excess. Such words do not 'ward and sector'.

Instead, they play. Bey suggests that they operate like 'strange

attractors' in chaos theory, acting as determinants yet only existing

within the process itself. Grammar is a kind of strange attractor rather

than a genetic structure.

The Moorish Science Temple

Wilson has also written about the

Moorish Science Temple

, a black-led religious movement which peaked in the 1920s, from which

Wilson's Moorish Orthodox Church is descended. Wilson portrays the

Temple as a 'powerful means of

cultural transfer

', adapting Islam to American conditions. He claims that its leader,

Noble Drew Ali, was an 'American prophet'. Like other 'prophets', Drew

created his own set of founding myths. Moors (black people) originally

came from Asia. Their empire covered America, Ireland and Atlantis. They

were dispossessed by the American Founding Fathers, and their identity

forgotten, but now restored. The myth is fabulous, but effective as an

organising narrative. It may have had its roots in Muslim traditions

preserved among African slaves, which was combined with theosophy and

political radicalism.

There is an earlier episode recounted by Wilson in which runaway slaves

and poor whites formed a community led by Ben and Jennie Ishmael. This

group opposed land-ownership, believed property should be moveable, and

opposed the law, courts, rich, and police. They fled Indiana in response

to a draconian eugenics law, and eventually vanished.

The Moorish Science Temple claims its origins in Islam. However, Drew

Ali's Circle Seven Koran is allegedly derived from Christian New Thought

texts, and his movement was denounced by Islamic leaders in Cairo. The

Temple was founded by Drew Ali. Founders were given new surnames – Bey

or El (presumably the origin of Hakim Bey's surname). It practiced a

series of restrictions – no meat, alcohol, shaving, smoking, etc – and

used a quiet style of worship. The Temple had its own '

Koran

', with an emphasis on spiritual individuality and self-sufficiency, and

references to forerunners such as Marcus Garvey. Relying on others to

think or act for us is alienating, and creates 'Hell'.

Groups like the Nation of Islam appear to have been spin-offs, although

the Temple lacks later groups' anti-white sentiments. White people were

allowed into the Temple by being given passports as "Persians" or

"Irish" (identities Wilson has taken semi-seriously). Irish were

included on the basis of a story that the Moors had been expelled from

Ireland, and possibly because early Irish settlers were poor and

mistreated. This was an earlier period, when cooperation among

marginalised racial groups was common.

The history of the group is also recounted. In 1912, Noble Drew Ali

demanded recognition of former slaves as a separate nation at a rally in

Washington. The group moved to Chicago following persecution for defying

the draft in World War 1. It underwent a meteoric rise in its early

years, after its official founding in 1928. Wilson attributes the

group's downfall to its growing visibility. Some members began flashing

their membership cards and openly ranting about the overthrow of

European civilisation, against the orders of Drew Ali. In September

1929, two police and one Moor died in a shootout. Police turned Chicago

into an 'armed camp'. Drew Ali was arrested, and died while released on

bail – either from injuries caused by the police, or assassinated by a

rival. However, Bey suggests that the group slowly revived and grew by

the 1980s.

Wilson/Bey himself belongs to the

Moorish Orthodox Church of America

, a spinoff of the Moorish Science Temple formed by some of its white

members. It is a non-hierarchical organisation in which members choose

their own titles. He apparently has little direct connection to the

remaining members of the Temple, instead acting as the senior figure in

the spin-off Church.

Knight

describes this group as all-white, quasi-parodic, and with so few

members that Wilson is the last remaining elder.

Pastoralism and Green Hermeticism

Wilson also sometimes sees the pastoral tradition as a variety of

autonomy and intensity. In the essay

Grange Appeal

, Wilson argues that the Grange was once a progressive part of the

Populist movement, and a hotbed of rural radicalism. (It still exists,

as a series of social clubs, a co-op, and campaigning organisation for

rural interests). The Grange 'formula' had four elements: economic

cooperation, social militancy without electoral involvement, plenty of

outings and social activities, and an

Eleusinian

ritual. The organisation officially disavowed politics, but its ideology

had obvious political implications. It was initially anarchistic, in

avoiding organised politics and religion. It campaigned on issues of its

day which reappear today – for instance, against patent-holding

monopolies. Historians generally consider populism a right-wing

movement, but Wilson suggests its racist and authoritarian elements were

late additions rather than parts of the original movement. He argues

that one in three Americans belonged to a fraternal organisation in the

1840-1914 period. Later, these organisations were undermined by media.

But nineteenth century Americans still imagined they were creating a new

world. In relation to co-ops, Wilson suggests they succeed when given

the chance – but they are often ruined by corporations with more

capital.

In

Ec(o)logues

, Wilson argues that pastoralism had an original radical heritage. In

American history, Jefferson had an inconsistent attachment to

pastoralism. This was taken further by rebels, as in the Shays

Rebellion, the Green Mountain Boys, the Whiskey Rebels, the Anti-Rent

War and so on. Wilson interprets such rebellions as attempts to create a

free yeoman or pastoral republic similar to his own vision of

pastoralism as a Clastrean diffuse power-structure.

His recent, ecologically-inflected work draws on similar themes. In

Riverpeople

, Wilson presents a history and speculative mythology of the Esopus

River, near his home in New York. He claims he fell in 'green love' with

the river. Green love is his recent term for intense connections to

ecological sites which become the source of altered consciousness. The

area is today owned by the Rockefellers, but regularly attracts beatniks

and neo-survivalists engaged in rambling and camping. Wilson discusses

the area's indigenous population, the Esopus 'Indians', and their

dispossession and genocide by the Dutch. The damming of the river is

treated as a terrible violence in which villages become ghost towns and

the Water Supply Police act as an 'invading occupying force'.

Wilson's history includes discussions of Oscar Wilde's visit to the

area, and what Wilson suspects was a relationship with the young George

Wharton Pepper, later a local politician. By visiting the area, Wilde

becomes one of its saints and martyrs. Others in the list include the

folklore hero 'Big Indian', the local witch Becky de Milt, and her enemy

Dr. Brink, who performed charms against witchcraft. Wilson attempts a

ritual reconciliation and revival of the two magical figures. He

suggests that belief in witchcraft coincided geographically with the

areas where the 1845 Anti-Rent War happened – expressing a hidden

dissident tradition. At other points, Wilson describes rituals he has

performed in the area, and hidden wonders such as waterholes.

Wilson's recent theory of

Green Hermeticism

articulates similar themes. He argues that science can be reconnected

with Hermeticism or romanticism to re-enchant nature. Over the longue

durée, science serves capital and the state by making war and money.

Another science might have been, and might still be, possible or

conceivable. But it might have to rely on ideas which now seem falsified

or absurd. Famous scientists such as Newton, Franklin, and Bacon were

closet hermeticists. However, they seem to have succumbed to

conventional power and contributed to a process of dimming our awareness

of reality. Such a dimming is part of the 'dead-matter' worldview of

capitalism, the state and the Enlightenment. They gradually rejected

their own belief in an 'ensouled' or animist universe. Science is

similar to magic and occultism in that its ideas are also actions.

However, only a science freed from capitalism and the state can create

ideas which could save the world from alienation.

Wilson discusses Novalis's fragmentary novel/manifesto

The Disciples at Sa

ï

s

as an example of 'hermetic-Romantic science-theory'. Like all Romantics,

Novalis believed in a more natural, primordial human condition. He

argued that we have a direct relations to nature as something which

stirs our feelings. Disciples prefigures an eco-spirituality in its

critique, however nascent, of scientific spirituality. Wilson suggests

that this kind of theory is a necessary prerequisite for resisting

ecological destruction.

Hakim Bey, children, and sexuality

The biggest controversy around Bey's work is not his ontology or his

theory of autonomy, but his association with what he terms 'boy-love'.

In other words, he thinks it is possible and desirable for adults to

have 'consensual' sex with children. In defence of this view, Bey has

written a number of pieces for NAMBLA (a paedophile or 'boy-love'

advocate group) and the gay magazine Gayme which allegedly promote

sexual abuse of children. These pieces are not widely available, and

seem to mainly consist of poetry. According to

Knight

, one poem includes a rant against a mother who discouraged Bey's

interest in her son. Knight describes these works as 'a child molester's

liberation theology... for an audience of potential offenders'. There's

also an obscure novel, Crowstone, which includes fictional depictions of

a world where man-boy sex is normal. Then there's a piece on the

'Witness Game' in historical Sufism, and a (loose) translation of

related works by Abu Nuwas.

This issue appears only occasionally in Bey/Wilson's political work. One

of the communiques in TAZ calls for xeroxing pictures of a ten-year-old

boy masturbating, marked as '

the face of God

'. Bey portrays this as an image of life, which – unlike contemporary

artists' images of death – is banned and punished because it points to

intensity. On the surface, this gesture is both shocking and

disalienating. It associates enjoyment and divinity – a recurring aspect

of Bey's theory – and it is shocking because it is prohibited. It is

usually read as provocation, drawing attention to child sexuality.

However, according to Knight, a version of the communique published by

NAMBLA re-frames the image as an attempt to portray child-porn moral

panics as religious witch-hunts.

Learning of this position in support of 'boy-love' has shocked many of

Bey's readers, myself included. Indeed, some still seek to deny it. I've

come across a variety of readings from scholars and others interested in

Bey: he doesn't mean it literally, but as Sufi-style allegory; he's

doing it to provoke and shock; he's simply raising questions about child

sexuality; or he's mainly talking about sexually active youths. (The

fact that children and adolescents have a sexuality of sorts is now

widely recognised

, independently of issues around paedophilia). For instance,

Sellers

reads Bey's position as a Foucaldian attempt to stimulate discussion

about adolescent sexuality. He accuses critics of 'institutionalized

homophobia', and of taking Bey's playful writings too literally.

References in Bey/Wilson's works can often be read in this way. However,

I feel that Bey's poetry and literature, his NAMBLA affiliation, and his

exchanges with Knight defeat such readings.

Unsurprisingly, Bey/Wilson's position has produced strong negative

reactions. There are people who refuse to promote Bey's work or use his

concepts on the grounds that they consider him a 'paedophile' or an

'apologist for child abuse'. For example, his entry has been deleted on

ZineWiki for this reason. An opponent by the name of

Robert Helms

has written a

series of articles

condemning Bey/Wilson on these grounds. Helms goes so far as to portray

Bey's theory of autonomy as simply a way of creating lawless spaces in

which children will be vulnerable to abuse. Another critic, the

eco-authoritarian

Vinay Gupta

, uses the child-abuse issue as a hook to argue against autonomy in

general. He suggests that only people with nefarious desires want the

abolition of the state. In fact, Helms, Gupta, and Knight all read Bey's

position on abuse broadly in this way – as exposing the problems with

his opposition to moral order. This is roughly a re-hash of the

Hobbesian argument that abuse and 'crime' would flourish in an anarchist

society. I shall come to this broader issue later.

The issue of paedophilia as conventionally conceived is highly

emotionally loaded and lacking in important distinctions. It's the type

of issue where it's hard to have a reasoned or compassionate, rather

than a visceral, reaction to an opposing position. As a result, it's too

easy to ignore important distinctions. Attraction to children is not the

same as molestation or rape. Adults who are attracted to other adults

are usually capable of being attarcted to teenagers. Not all child

rapists or convicted abusers, even against young children, are

specifically attracted to children. Most people who rape or exploit

teenagers are attracted mainly to adults. (As feminists often point out,

rape and exploitative sex are more about power than sexual attraction).

The issue has unfortunately become the focus of

moral panics

which blur boundaries and create an unrealistic image in which child

abuse is perpetrated by a small, monstrous outgroup of predators. These

panics are often homophobic (portraying gay men predating on boys) or

racist (labelling Muslims as 'child groomers' or Aboriginal communities

as abusive), channelling broader fears of sexual difference, of sexual

predation by racial outgroups, of race-mixing, and of sexuality in

general.

Critics like Helms are clearly mobilising this moral-panic discourse to

demonise Bey and impugn both the man and the content of his theories –

deliberately blurring the question of exactly what he has said and done

(there is no evidence, for instance, that he has been accused of rape).

This treatment of Bey is an expression of a wider

trend

to

exclude

or '

no-platform

' theorists, politicians and activists who are deemed to be

oppressors

– sometimes based on a

single

remark

on a controversial topic. This type of move has sadly become

increasingly

common

in the current climate.

On the other hand, the fact that a position is subject to hysteria,

overreaction and emotive category-blurring does not mean that the

position is either right or harmless. For example, Wahhabi/salafi

varieties of Islam are deeply politically problematic, even though their

adherents are often also victims of Islamophobic police-state methods.

This makes things harder for opponents of repression. I don't believe in

jailing people for expressing the wrong opinion, but I also don't

believe in sexual enslavement or homophobic killings. One can oppose

both totalitarian Islamophobia and totalitarian readings of Islam,

support free speech for radical Muslims and Charlie Hebdo (without

supporting the views of either). Similarly, one can oppose both

Stalinism and American McCarthyism – and the human rights violations

against Russian dissidents and against American communists.

So how can one respond to Bey's position? Firstly, as will be apparent

from my writing this series, I don't feel it is appropriate to

'no-platform' Bey/Wilson because he takes one potentially oppressive

position. The field of political thought will become extremely small if

everyone who has made a racist, sexist, abusive, or problematic

statement is excluded. Labelling someone with a negative category and

then refusing to engage with their work is unhelpful in drawing

constructively on perspectives other than one's own.

Zizek

and

Plato

have been accused of condoning child abuse.

Freud

failed to expose child rape when he had the chance. Heidegger, de Man

and Jung had problematic relations to Nazism.

Derrida

might be no-platformed for defending de Man. Proudhon was sexist and

anti-Semitic; Marx was Eurocentric; Rousseau was ableist; Aquinas was

sexist and homophobic; Aristotle condoned slavery. Foucault wanted rape

treated as

simple assault

. I feel it is important to recognise the value in theories, even if one

rejects strongly a particular position within the theory. Often, the

oppressive view is on the margins of the theory, and does not affect its

main contributions.

In the case of Bey, it's quite possible to embrace his theory of

alienation, his theory of altered consciousness, his ontology of chaos,

or his model of TAZ without supporting child-abuse. In my view, Helms

and Gupta are massively exaggerating the importance of the issue in the

structure of Bey's work. There is little textual evidence for Helms's

claim that Bey's emancipatory theories are simply ways of creating

spaces where abuse can flourish. Sexuality is intertwined with Bey's

theory of disalienation, but only as one of several paths – drugs,

music, meditation, conviviality, art, travel, etc. Bey is no more

promoting autonomy 'in order to' molest boys than he is doing so 'in

order to' traffic drugs or promote a tourism business.

In my view, Bey's support for 'boy-love' is actually in contradiction

with his core theory. It does not rest on theoretical support for abuse,

but on an empirical confusion about the possibility of non-abusive

relationships. To clarify, among adults, sexual relations can be divided

into three types. There are outright relationships of domination, using

force, threat, blackmail and so on. These are opposed (in principle) by

just about everyone. Then there are relations which involve apparent

consent, but where one partner reluctantly or naively 'consents' in

return for bribery, attention, or because of a relation of structural

power. Feminists also

treat these

as rape or abuse, whereas mainstreamers tend to accept them as minimally

consenting. Finally, there are fully consenting relationships which are

both actively sought and enjoyed by both partners, in a relation of

equality.

Someone like Bey would also oppose the first two kinds of sexual

relations between adults and children, but support the third. But

opponents would maintain that the third type, between adults and

children, is in effect an empty set. Encounters of this kind cannot

happen, either because children can't consent in the appropriate sense,

because the power-relation is too unequal, because the encounter risks

harm to the child, or because it is impossible to eliminate subtle

manipulation or abuse of trust. Hence,

critics

argue that the third type of relationship is precluded by developmental

hierarchies and power differentials, which allow adults to manipulate

children, 'without regard for the welfare of the partner'.

It thus appears to critics that Bey believes that manipulative abuse is

unproblematic. But Bey has also explicitly written against abuse of

power differentials, and actions 'without regard for the welfare of the

partner'. In

Sacred Drift

, he writes: 'A freedom or pleasure that rests on someone else's slavery

or misery cannot finally satisfy the self because it is a limitation or

narrowing of the self, an admission of impotence, an offence against

generosity and justice'. However, a page later, he discusses the Witness

Game as an 'apologia' for what he terms 'boy-love'. He also writes

enthusiastically of the importance of consent. It is precisely because

of the importance of consent and conviviality that he opposes parental

power over children. His fantasy is a kind of initiation into pleasure

and spirituality, which occurs outside or against the grain of the

dominant system.

In other words, Bey does not disagree ethically with the mainstream

position, that children should not be coerced or exploited. He disagrees

empirically about the capabilities of children or the nature of

adult-child encounters. He disagrees about whether the third category of

relationship can exist between adults and children, except as a

rationalisation for the first and second categories.

Bey/Wilson has written a few pieces on sexual freedom which touch on the

controversy, mainly by denouncing moral panics as puritanical. In '

Boundary Violations

', Bey criticises the rejection of Freudianism and the idea of false

memories, as well as the Freudian view of childhood sexuality. He argues

that current views of abuse are based on a denial of childhood desire.

The idea of boundaries imitates nationalist discourse and the immune

system, with fear of contact or contamination. He suggests that this

carries the implication that pleasure is evil and non-contact is

desirable. Abusers are seen as aliens, and are the site of projected,

forbidden desires. Anxiety about border violation leads to a protection-

and safety-focused philosophy, which empowers the security state. In a

wider context of social triage and zones of depletion, we are likely to

find that the enemy is already ourselves. We have lost in advance by

defining ourselves relative to loss and borders, which can be

reclassified to make any of us the contaminant. Sexuality is displaced

into contactless forms, such as phone sex. The absence of direct contact

and conviviality in turn provide space for mediation.

Hence, Bey treats fusion instead of separation as desirable.

Multiculturalism similarly protects cultural boundaries, rather than

stimulating conviviality. In this article, Bey assumes that the origin

of trauma is the erection of borders to protect against chaos. Instead,

he promotes the Bakhtinian idea of 'permeable boundaries', in which

bodies are not self-enclosed.

Bey admits that such permeability leads to crossings which can be either

pleasurable or catastrophic. However, such a space is necessary to reach

intensity. In

Sacred Drift

, Wilson argues that we are not progressing towards liberated desire,

but regressing towards fear of sexuality 'in which all desire will

eventually be experienced as "abuse" or "sin"'. Against the association

of abuse with sexuality, Wilson suggests that it makes sense in terms of

abuse of authority (which undermines consent). In other words,

consensual sex is never abuse, but sex in an authoritarian context might

be. Bey/Wilson argues that sexuality should be based on conviviality,

mutual pleasure, and non-domination. He denounces 'libertine' positions

and calls for a spiritual aspect to sexuality.

While this tends to rebut the various theories positing a Sadean

rejection of ethics in Bey's work, it does not fee him from the

accusation that he's (unintentionally) encouraging abuse. Bey does not

support sadistic sex or sexual exploitation. However, most advocates of

paedophilia would also make such disclaimers, as part of a strategy of

neutralisation

. This position does not preclude abuse in practice. Sex offenders often

perceive

their actions as involving mutual attraction and consent, despite often

manipulating, socialising, and 'grooming' the children concerned. This

is presumably a variety of psychological projection.

In other words, abusers sometimes believe that the third category of

consensual relations exists because they rationalise and misrepresent

actions in the second category – those involving indirect coercion.

These beliefs are probably ways to avoid negative self-awareness.

Applying this analysis to Bey, it can be argued that his support for

'boy-love' actually promotes reactive desire – the subordination of

flows of becoming to the dominating narrative of an abuser – but

disguised as active desire, or consensual love. The problem underlying

this distortion is the propensity to rationalise as consensual a type of

action which actually objectifies the other – in effect, the disguising

of reactive desire as active desire. This position is thus contradictory

with his broader position of supporting active desire against reactive

desire. Or possibly, he imagines there is a non-abusive outlet for his

desire, which is not based on the 'misery of others' (in effect as well

as intent), when in fact there is not. He might not intend to abuse

anyone, but he desires things which require such abuse, or else are

unactualisable.

In practice, abuse is closely tied-up with objectification. Abuse

generally involves objectifying a child, using them to produce adult

pleasure, usually without concern for the effect on the child. Survivors

report feeling '

used or hurt

', feeling a violation of trust, and suffering loss of self-respect.

According to

Judith Herman

, sexual abuse usually happens in a wider context of control, or even

'pervasive terror, in which ordinary caretaking relationships have been

profoundly disrupted'. This usually occurs in a climate of totalitarian

control enforced by isolation from horizontal relationships, capricious

and violent enforcement of petty rules, and absence of trust. Social

isolation is enforced to preserve control and secrecy.

This has serious psychological effects. Herman argues that, unable to

protect themselves, children deploy an 'immature system of psychological

defences' which 'simultaneously conceal and reveal their origins'.

Survivors often blame their own 'innate badness' for the abuse. This

feeling of innate badness leads to the projection of an inauthentic

outer self. Many survivors feel an almost indescribable psychological

state known as dysphoria, which is a mixture of confusion, agitation,

emptiness and aloneness. Some discover that pursuing extreme arousal or

excitement can offset this, creating cycles of crisis and despondency.

What Herman discusses may well be the normal situation, but it isn't

what Bey advocates. The encounters he portrays are voluntary, mutually

pleasurable and harmless. But is Bey's image of adult-child

relationships anything more than a fantasy? Studies generally show that

child sexual abuse as conventionally defined

causes post-traumatic stress

and

other psychological harm

, although some survivors are surprisingly resilient. In addition, there

are approaches which suggest that repressed memories of sexual abuse are

at the root of

many psychological problems

. Variations in trauma have been taken to suggest that certain types of

abuse are

not psychologically harmful

(as Bey would probably argue). But these variations seem to reflect the

same sources of

resilience

which reduce the impact of any kind of trauma.

Most of those who discuss experiences of underage sex with adults report

feeling abused

at the time

or

in retrospect

, even when there was not outright coercion, because of a wider context

of vulnerability. However, a few report

complex, ambivalent experiences

in which repression and moral panics did more harm than the relationship

itself. There are

a few cases

where people retrospectively deny that any harm came from experiences

which would usually be called abusive. But the first group of

experiences seem much more common.

Bey would probably respond that bad experiences result from

authoritarianism he opposes, or from social responses such as shame,

guilt and sexual puritanism. Experiences might be quite different if

adult-child relations were not as power-laden as they are. Future

cross-cultural research might change current conclusions. But shame,

social responses, and the adult's social power do not seem to account

for all the negative accounts. In any case, shame is better explained on

a trauma model than a social model, because abuse survivors are not

socially classified as committing a shameful or deviant act. Given this

evidence, Wilson/Bey's rejection of dominating and non-consensual forms

of sex should logically cover those forms of child-abuse he supports.

The scenarios Bey fantasises about are probably impossible in practice.

Is Bey's position on child abuse an indictment of autonomy?

On a more general, theoretical level, Bey's problematic position on

'boy-love' is sometimes taken to discredit autonomy in general. Bey can

here be grouped with Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche, Reich, Stirner,

Situationism, post-left anarchy, and arguably anarchism more broadly, as

part of a politics of desire. This type of position is often dismissed

by opponents in a too-easy way which goes something like this: the

author rejects authority and morality, therefore everything is justified

and anything goes, therefore they must condone all kinds of abuse,

murder, rape, and so on. It is basically a re-hash of the Hobbesian

argument against anarchism, spontaneous order and autonomy, on the basis

that freedom leads to chaos and violence. According to this ideology,

people who follow their desires will harm each other. This claim leads

to ideologies of security, order and protection. And for someone trying

to make this argument, the fact that a famous anarchist advocates

child-abuse is useful confirmation! This kind of argument arises in all

the main critics who focus on Bey's ideas on child sexuality – Knight,

Helms and Gupta. It also appears, for example, in certain critiques of

Deleuze, such as

Eve Bischoff's

argument that the 'Hanover werewolf' is an instance of Deleuzian desire.

This overlaps with a second issue, of 'safeguarding' or 'safe spaces'.

Does the type of anarchy propounded by people like Bey – and to which

I'm also extremely sympathetic – entail a lack of protection for

vulnerable people? This is the usual argument against children's

liberation, and is also advanced by various identity-based critics of

post-left anarchy, including

some feminists

. TAZ and anarchy imply the removal of the formal protections which are

meant to prevent all kinds of violence and abuse. It is (or it creates)

an 'unsafe space' for people who need to avoid particular kinds of abuse

or harassment. This critique has in recent years fuelled a move in

radical politics away from autonomous organising and towards

quasi-bureaucratic models of organisation with formalised protection

procedures.

Both of these positions rest on a Hobbesian view of anarchy. The

misunderstanding underpinning this type of critique is the idea that

people either act in destructive and abusive ways or submit to outer

norms and morals. The politics-of-desire position, however, is that

people can follow their passions and pursue intensity, without becoming

predatory on one another. Accountability to outer norms, authorities and

moralities is rejected. However, there is a kind of immanent ethics

which emerges for each person from an experience of balance and

becoming. (This is similar in some ways to the treatment of "badness" as

imbalance in ancient and indigenous philosophies). As we have seen, Bey

does not believe in living without ethics. He believes in a type of

virtue ethics in which conviviality, mutual attraction, and intensity

are valued. He rejects what he terms 'libertine' positions such as those

of the Marquis de Sade.

Theorists of desire usually argues that truly living – intensely,

passionately, playfully, without limits – is more important than simple

survival. For this reason, they are not open to criticism based on risk

or harm. If people sometimes live shorter lives because they (or others)

pursue their pleasures intensely, this does not mean the situation is

worse than in an authoritarian society. However, there is little reason

to believe that an egalitarian, free, passion-driven social world would

be worse than today's dystopian nightmare. The restraint of passions

entails institutional systems which themselves cause immense harm, for

example war, police brutality and economic exploitation. There is an

inherent contradiction in the Hobbesian argument from harm, in that it

both posits the value of (bare) life and yet

denies it

, by rendering life subject to exterior standards. According to the

politics of desire, the disalienation of desire increases general

freedom and intensity. In Bey's theory, altered consciousness provides a

context in which competitive, scarcity-oriented social practices can be

overcome.

Bey's support for 'boy-love' is not based on a conscious endorsement of

harming others on the grounds of desire. (If he took such a position,

then he would also support overt rape, torture, and murder). It is based

on a denial that 'boy-love' entails harm. This is an empirical dispute,

and I believe Bey is wrong on this point, but it does not at all

undermine the politics of desire. In other words, if the view that

adult-child sex is oppressive/abusive to children is right, then such

acts are also inconsistent with Bey's wider theory.

In response to the question, 'is it wrong to act on one's desires when

it harms others?', the mainstream has a simplistic answer: it's always

wrong, because morality is abstract and is not connected to desire.

However, this answer is wrong, because morality can have no basis other

than desire, and because moral regimes have themselves produced much

sadism and suffering. The politics of desire answers that it is

sometimes right and sometimes wrong, but for different reasons. It is

wrong when it is based on reactive or negative desires, rather than the

free flow of becoming. The politics of desire implies that, if something

is really someone's desire at an existential level, then they have a

right to act on it. However, people are not only discrete entities, but

also part of the flow of becoming, and reactive actions, which block and

repress becoming in general, are alienated from the flow of becoming.

There may be rare cases where a desire with destructive effects is

really an effect of self-actualisation, and will thus have to be

accepted and embraced. (Predatory animals are a good example; the

'bandit-bolo' in Bolo'Bolo is also theorised this way). Usually,

however, destructive effects are signs that desire has been distorted

through alienation – much the same way as in neuroses, addictions, and

self-abnegations. Crucially, this is not a normative condemnation but an

awareness of the social deviant as the site of a blockage in the wider

flow of becoming.

Children's Liberation

Most post-left anarchists also support

children's liberation

, and hence oppose laws targeting children, and what Bey terms the

serfhood of children in contemporary society. One tenet of children's

liberation is opposition to age-discriminatory laws, such as compulsory

schooling, prohibitions on leaving one's parents, and bans on drinking

and smoking. Discrimination against children makes little sense from a

theoretical point of view favouring desire, intensity, pleasure, and

immanent becoming (rather than a framework favouring a Cartesian

rational subject).

Both paedophile advocates and opponents of children's liberation

frequently suggest that children's liberation implies support for

paedophilia. However, the two issues are clearly separate. Children's

liberation opposes adult exploitation of children for the adult's

purposes, whether these be sexual, economic, pedagogical or cultural.

The difficulty arises because paedophile advocates claim that children

enter consensually into relationships with paedophiles, whereas

opponents deny this.

Bey gives the impression of being strongly in favour of children's

liberation. For instance, he co-edited an anthology, Wild Children,

which promotes children's voices. It does not contain any paedophile

advocacy material, but rather, children's creative works, and critiques

of school. While Helms sees this as a matter of suspicion, to me it

suggests that Bey is committed to children's liberation, independently

of his views on sexuality. Children are portrayed in Bey's work as

beings of wildness, play, imagination, and pure delight. Indeed, Bey's

work frequently speaks to the archetype of childhood or the inner child.

However, he seems to mix up childhood and sexuality, which are both

sites of insurrection and intensity.

Hobbesian critics assume that outer accountability makes the world a

safer place. However, there is little evidence for this view. Both

states and stateless social groups can be peaceful or conflictual. But

modern states and capitalism are immensely destructive, in forms such as

industrialised warfare, genocide and ecocide. The illusion that "order"

provides safety and welfare is really an illusion of in-groups, who are

sometimes made safer and richer through the subordination or out-groups.

Bey's theory of social triage, and the risk that any of us could be

labelled a 'contaminant', is closer to the reality of securitised

neoliberalism than the Hobbesian illusion.

Authoritarians are also not on very solid ground believing they have a

better response to abuse. Law has been proven to be a clumsy,

ineffective response – as it is to most social problems. The protectors

are often the

abusers

. State institutions meant to protect children often

reproduce abuse

. Age-of-consent laws sometimes criminalise young people, ignore

differences in the consent capacity of people in an age-group, and fail

to protect anyone over the specified age. Stateless societies rarely use

laws for social control at all. Informal, diffuse normative systems

might be more sensitive than laws to the actual nature of a relationship

and its impact on a young person.

Capitalism does not oppose children's liberation to protect children

from abuse. It opposes children's liberation so as to continue to coerce

children into being indoctrinated as capitalist subjects through the

school system and authoritarian families. The idea of 'protection' is

grounded on a misperception of the biggest violent force in contemporary

society – the modern state – as a benign guardian to be trusted with the

interests of the vulnerable. Look at the miserable faces in any academy

playground, look at the use of

police in schools

, read how children's homes are becoming a

conveyor belt to jail

, how

play is criminalised

along with

other everyday acts

, family courts

forcing mothers

to turn children over to abusers, and repeated

accusations

of sexual abuse at children's homes, and the lie of the state as

protector from abuse becomes abundantly clear. Indeed, the state and

capitalism have an interest in working-class children being traumatised,

to prepare them for domination by bosses and to break their will to

resist. Indeed, the kinds of tyrannical adult relations which Herman

portrays as the usual context for child abuse are paradoxically

encouraged by the same authoritarians who oppose child abuse so

aggressively.

Trauma and Peak Experience

Bey, and politics of desire in general, seeks intensity, peak experience

and affirmation of being. The experience of trauma is a barrier to such

experiences. Trauma can cause 'anhedonia' or an inability to feel

pleasure; it can make the world feel empty and meaningless. If a free

world led to an epidemic of trauma, then the appeal of the politics of

desire would be undermined. However, there are

various

accounts

which

suggest

that

stateless

societies

lead to childhoods which are both freer and happier than in modern

societies. Far from these societies being hotbeds of abuse, it is

unknown in some societies for children even to be left crying.

Punishments are minimal or nonexistent. Comparing such accounts with

problems in postcolonial indigenous societies – such as

Eduardo Duran's

work with Native American communities – shows that physical and sexual

abuse are effects of colonisation. Groups who are colonised,

dispossessed and alienated suffer

big increases in violence

, including sexual abuse. Some still

remember

an experience familiar to readers of Bey, such as Haida Thowhegwelth:

'My principal cause is freedom. I'm old enough to remember what it was

like to be free. Free from harassment by police, free from harassment by

fisheries... People talk about this country being a free country. They

have no idea of freedom. If you ever had the taste of freedom that I

have known, you would never give it up, you'd fight for it like I do'.

There are various ways in which freedom reduces trauma. Firstly, it is

harder to establish coercive control (the usual root of abuse) in a

world without authoritarian institutions. Secondly, the type of

self-actualising, immanent selves encouraged by the politics of desire

are less likely than enclosed, modern subjects to abuse each other.

(However, there is a danger that people adopting fusion-based,

spontaneous positions similar to Bey's will be easy targets for

abusers). Thirdly, people who are less frustrated and angry, less

neurotic, and more fulfilled are less likely to be abusive.

The danger of trauma is downplayed in Bey's work. In practice, aimless

wandering usually entails risk-taking, and trauma can block the

possibility of having peak experiences. Activists who have suffered

trauma

suggest

that it makes these kinds of experiences impossible. Bey is right that a

certain kind of consciousness or relationship to chaos might help to

make trauma seem overcomable, but there is a problem of constructing

this orientation in embodied as well as intellectual ways. Indeed, Bey

writes of a '

healing laugh

' which arises from an intoxicated yet serious type of art or play. The

paradox is that, while peak experiences are arguably the answer to

trauma, the state of being traumatised tends to block people from

accessing peak experiences, or even feeling them to be possible. I

sometimes feel that Bey is naive in his treatment of trauma, ignoring

the difficulty of constructing experiences/relations of abundance and

contingency. But this might be because of a lack of sufficient peak

experiences, rather than because it's really naïve.

Structural oppression and autonomy

There is another residual problem. Autonomous zones negate formal

structural power, but what about informal power based on patterns of

dominant and subordinate identity? The gamble of theories like Bey's is

that people can be invited to leave their structural oppression and

'conditioning' at the door, and live by desire and self-determination

instead of existing categories. Bey considers dominant subjectivities to

be effects of a media trance. Break the trance, and people will

re-emerge as distinct, desiring subjects. Some theorists would be

pessimistic about this possibility, because they take structural

oppressions to be extremely deep-rooted or even inescapable. Although I

feel this critique is overplayed, there are also possibilities that

people will bring habits and patterns into autonomous zones. For

example, someone who is used to deferring to others might continue to do

so, even when there is no structural authority. People might continue to

prefer to do tasks they are competent at, when their competency is

affected by class or gender.

I don't feel this is a reason for rejecting autonomous spaces as

oppressive or informally hierarchical, and regressing to authoritarian

power-structures. In a horizontal space, it doesn't matter much if some

people are louder or more active than others, provided power-relations

remain fluid. The reduction of every disagreement or instance of

discomfort to macrosocial structures outside the autonomous context is a

barrier to effectively constructing horizontal relations. The political

style which condemns others for "taking up too much space" or deviating

from etiquette codes is an imposition of outer power onto autonomous

spaces. It fails to treat people as immanent singularities or as part of

the field of becoming. However, the issue of how to construct

autonomously-desiring subjects – and resist formations of alienation and

reactive desire – is a real issue for autonomous therapy and pedagogy.

The goal should not be to produce 'responsible',

cautious people

who identify with their positionalities and follow etiquette codes.

Instead, the goal should be the emergence of unique subjects who are not

reducible to their positionalities. Creating horizontalism and intensity

combats social exclusion. There is

evidence

that conditions of conflict and scarcity lead to closed, intolerant

communities, whereas conditions of abundance lead to open communities.

An approach like Bey's thus contributes to creating the conditions for

acceptance of difference more effectively than scarcity-reproducing

identity positions.

Bey's approach may not be perfect in preventing oppression, but it is

more likely to be successful in the medium term than the alternative,

austere approach. Emotions of joy and euphoria, a social connection

derived from experienced intensity rather than normativity, a culture

marked by hybridity and nomadism, and awareness of the interconnected

and holistic nature of being, all point towards the development of

authentically open relations to others. This transformation is one of

the most effective means of preventing oppression and abuse – far more

effective than bureaucratic 'safe spaces' policies or risk-management

approaches, which reproduce hierarchical power.

Overall, Bey's mistake in rationalising one form of abusive power does

not render his general theory any less useful in combatting abusive

power in general. Authoritarian power leads to abuse by those in power.

A TAZ is less oriented to the goal of protection than a modern state

with its rhetoric of risk-management. The idea of burning up life in the

process of living is counterposed to the idea of risk-minimisation. But

still, a TAZ may often be a safer place for difference than a

micro-managed institution. Micro-management generates its own forms of

danger by cutting off the life-force itself. The ethos Bey promotes in

his work – intensity, peak experiences, bricolage, altered

consciousness, living for enjoyment, conviviality, immanent ethics –

affirms the life-force and counteracts trauma with experiences of

intensity.

Leftist Critiques

Bey's work has also come in for sharp criticism from left-anarchist

writers, including

Murray Bookchin

,

John Armitage

,

Richard Barbrook

,

Sean Sheehan

and others. These critiques generally have the tone of hatchet-jobs or

dismissals, often hinging on marginal aspects of Bey's work (such as the

idea of anarcho-monarchism, or a single remark about abortion). Critics

argue that Bey is unconcerned about capitalism, despite his extensive

theory of alienation, which they generally ignore. They typically fail

to appreciate the type of experience to which Bey points, or its

subversive potential (which they reduce to hedonism). This is partly a

result of Bey's style, which is more suggestive than direct. Without an

intuitive connection to the ideas of TAZ and peak experience, Bey's work

seems nonsensical. Critics often fill in the resultant void with

tendentious interpretations of particular passages. These are condemned

as heretical relative to their own political ideology.

For example, Bookchin's 'social anarchism' (before he renounced

anarchism completely) included strong elements of social control,

structure, responsibility, and collectivism. He labels opponents like

Bey as denying the necessary preconditions for social life. He also

lumps them together in the rather meaningless category of 'lifestyle

anarchism'. This strange conceptual amalgam of deep ecology,

eco-anarchism, politics of desire, post-left anarchy, and

anarcho-capitalism is unified in its alleged 'individualism' and refusal

of socialist collectivism. Besides this purely negative unity it

otherwise consists of various distinct positions unified in a bogeyman

adversary.

As we have seen, Bey is not strictly individualist. He has a distinct

theory of conviviality, or social life based in passion, which is

compatible with his emphasis on intensity and personal becoming. He

would thus disagree with Bookchin that authoritarianism is 'necessary

for social life'. However, he opposes social integration through

self-denial and normativity. This is a real bone of contention with some

left-anarchists.

Bookchin believes that countercultural eruptions die down without social

effects. They provide 'kicks' rather than 'temporary commitment', and do

not even change those who take part, let alone the wider society. Yet

there are many cases of social transformation due to counterculture –

for example, the collapse of lifelong monogamy and the recognition of

'youth' as a social category. I know many people who have been changed

permanently by participation in drop-out movements. The very awareness

of a possible outside is one of the most lasting changes. As

Williams

puts it, a TAZ allows us to 'sample the autonomous life'. There are also

many cases of recruits to left-wing groups who do not become lifelong

revolutionaries, and of organised campaigns which are unsuccessful.

Sean Sheehan accuses Bey of a 'mere politics of style', without

political substance. In particular, he alleges that Bey lacks a class

perspective. To me, it's pretty clear from earlier discussions that

Bey's theory has plenty of substance. There are good strategic reasons

for the approaches he adopts, which follow logically from his analysis

of capitalism. He doesn't emphasise class exploitation because he sees

mediation, alienation and recuperation as the main problems. Another

critic,

Gavin Grindon

, argues that Bey succumbs to the Spectacle by imagining the world of

the autonomous image to be the real world. This misunderstands Bey's

point that the system functions mainly through the power of the image.

Benjamin Franks

advances elements of a similar critique. He argues that nomadic

strategies might only be available to economically independent,

privileged actors. He also argues that strategies of exodus lead to a

sense of being 'special' or even 'sanctified' relative to the masses.

This is combined with a concern that Bey proposes avoiding direct

confrontation with the state. I feel these concerns are misplaced for

several reasons. Firstly, 'dropping-out' is by no means limited to

privileged groups, but occurs worldwide, from shanty-town alternative

economies to the New Traveller movement (who were mostly working-class),

from American freight-train riders to indigenous movements like the

Zapatistas. Secondly, the sense of being 'special' is certainly

preferable to the sense of being submerged in a dominant, oppressive

culture. When leftists urge post-leftists to refrain from exodus so as

to avoid separating from the masses, they reveal the extent to which

they have internalised oppression as politically desirable. In any case,

any critic, however traditionally leftist, who wants to avoid accepting

reactionary 'common sense' will necessarily have to adopt a critical

distance from the majority's 'false consciousness', however they choose

to spin it.

In addition, I'd argue that Bey is right when he says that traditional

leftist demonstrations, pickets and publishing activities 'don't add up

to a vital, daring conspiracy of self-liberation' today. More is needed,

especially in everyday life. Bey is producing original theories of power

and resistance today, paying close attention to the current context and

the latest theories about it. This brings him closer to the strategic

issues of activism today than those groups which trust in historical

models. Many of today's cutting-edge movements, from Tahrir Square and

Occupy to the ZAD, the Greek revolt and Anonymous, look more like TAZ's

or tongs than they do like Marxist models of revolution.

Along similar lines,

John Armitage

and

Richard Barbrook

make a great deal of Bey's enthusiasm for TAZ's with reactionary

associations. Fiume is a particular point of disagreement. Armitage sees

the Fiume occupation as proto-fascist and politically reactionary.

Cross-reading this with a few of Bey's comments on anarcho-monarchism,

Armitage argues that Bey's theory is intellectually conservative. In

response,

Sellars

replies that Bey is aware that d'Annunzio later became fascist, but is

interested in the moment of suspension between the old world and the new

– and hence in Fiume before it was associated with fascism.

Armitage's critique is based on a reading of Bey as exaggerating the

impact of the Spectacle, and ignoring 'material' aspects of capitalism.

Bey emphasises images, such as 'cop culture', to the exclusion of social

forces. Armitage complains that Bey rarely discusses capitalism. He

suggests that Bey's theory is Situationism or autonomia, shorn of the

Marxist elements. Instead of class struggle, Bey talks about resistance

by individuals and marginalised groups. Armitage also criticises Bey for

his objection to social order, and calls him a 'liberal' because he

separates the state, society and desire. (This way of using the word

'liberal' has an Althusserian structuralist heritage. People who follow

this tradition believe that desire is simply an effect of social

structures).

This seems to entail a misunderstanding of Bey's position. Armitage

presumably believes that Bey does not refer to capitalism because Bey

rarely uses the word capitalism (or other Marxist-rooted terminology).

However, if we include references to the Spectacle, the totality,

mediation, civilisation, the planetary work-machine, and other such

system-concepts as instances of capitalism by other names, Armitage's

argument collapses. In fact, Bey has a strong analysis of contemporary

capitalism, focused on the power of the media, the virtualisation of

money, and the recuperation of alternatives. There is nothing inherently

liberal in separating the state, society and desire. In fact, a

separation of state and society seems as necessary to the Marxist idea

of dual power as to Bey's theory.

As for desire, Bey's (and Deleuze's, Nietzsche's, Debord's...) refusal

of the Althusserian structuralist view that desire is simply an effect

of subjectification by the existing system is not necessarily any less

revolutionary than the structuralist alternative. If desires are effects

of the existing system, then any possibility of revolution is

faint

. Why would people seek to overthrow a system which determines what they

seek? The answer typically hinges on internal contradictions, or the

subject as a 'void' in the structure – conceptions which are unhelpful

for formulating radical practices. In practice, such theories tend to

restore power to a revolutionary vanguard (which can identify the real

contradictions) or restrict people to reformist tactics on the 'margins'

of existing structures. In any case, the idea that desire is never

'outside' capitalism, but simply an effect of it, is false – and calling

it 'liberal' a million times will not make it true. I engage with this

issue more thoroughly – in relation to Spivak's critique of Deleuze –

elsewhere

.

The argument that Bey reduces capital and the state to images is a more

solid criticism. Bey emphasises tactics of invisibility, withdrawal and

media subversion. He tends to reject head-on conflict. This is due to a

view of the system as dangerous mainly in terms of recuperation through

images. However, there are also solid empirical reasons for Bey's belief

that capitalism now takes this form.

It is also true that Bey focuses on individual and small-group

resistance. But this makes complete sense in terms of avoiding

recuperation. Small-group resistance is not necessarily ineffective

relative to large-scale resistance, as is shown in

James Scott's example

of cumulative peasant resistances which defeated particular policies.

Similarly, leftist critics assume that class is the only politically

effective identification. This claim, at the very least, needs testing

empirically.

On a slightly different note,

Luther Blissett

, a pen-name for a post-Situationist culture-jamming collective

associated with Stewart Home, published a hoax volume of translated

'Hakim Bey' articles to expose the naivete of Bey's Italian readership.

The volume included everything from Zerzan's critique of Bey to

barely-altered Stalinist material. The hoax apparently worked. The

collective take this as evidence for the insubstantiality of Bey's

project, which they deem a mixture of 'Hippie bullshit', 'oriental

trinkets', poststructuralism and 'cybercrap'. Without the integrating

force of an intuitive grasp of the experience of altered consciousness,

this is doubtless how Bey's work appears. However, the success of the

hoax suggests that some of Bey's readers are similarly unaware of the

gist of his work.

Other Critiques

There has also been a dispute between Bey and the anarcho-primitivist

theorist

John Zerzan

. Zerzan's main criticism is that Bey is too technophile. Zerzan

believes that technology is at the root of alienation; Bey does not. In

his critique of Bey, Zerzan repeats many of the leftist criticisms that

Bey's work is insubstantial, fashionable, and 'postmodernist' (taken to

entail a refusal of decisive political positions, and a resultant

liberal politics). In addition, Bey and Zerzan have real disagreements

on the role of art. For Zerzan, art, and even shamanism, are forms of

alienation. For Bey, art engages with a primordial problem of the human

condition, and has a specific role in disalienated societies.

While there are real disagreements here, I believe Zerzan is wrong to

claim that Bey does not reject the contemporary system as a 'totality'.

Rather, the disagreements are at the level of which aspects of the world

are utterly implicated in the totality, and which can be reclaimed as

tools. Bey also

claims

that some Latin American critics are uneasy with the 'adventurousness'

of TAZ. The context of this criticism is unclear, but Bey's approach is

clearly more playful and joy-oriented than neo-Marxist tendencies common

in Latin American autonomous movements.

There is also a

psychological critique

of approaches such as Bey's which rests on the prevalence of feelings of

anxiety and powerlessness. Bey is typical of a generation of theorists

(from the 1960s to the 1990s) whose main adversary was the boredom,

emptiness and conformist habit of modern life. This was in turn an

effect of the fact that they were struggling against the Fordist,

Keynesian form of 'organised capitalism'. Today, it has been argued that

anxiety is a more pressing problem holding back transformative politics.

Anxiety, trauma and burnout seem to contribute to the ineffectiveness of

tactics inherited from the struggle against Fordism.

This makes it harder and harder to create TAZ's, in a society marked

both by the intensified 'management' of social life, the pre-emption of

possible spaces of autonomy, and the generalisation of anxiety. Bey's

strategies focus on providing excitement and peak experience, but people

are already overstimulated. The lack of a sense of safety, and the focus

on boredom rather than anxiety, limit the effectiveness of such

processes. However, it is also possible that altered consciousness

provides a standpoint from which anxiety and demoralisation are

undermined. It often feels like no change is possible. But this is an

effect of media trance-consciousness, of neoliberalism. Altered

consciousness might offset the feeling.

If, as Bey argues, the universe is chaos, founded on nothing solid or

representable, this can easily be experienced as terrifying or

anxiety-inducing, rather than exhilarating. Many of Lovecraft's

depictions of monstrous experiences sound similar to Bey's affirmative

proclamations. Take for instance the following passage from

The Call of Cthulhu

: “That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the

secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His

subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know,

for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild

and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men

shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones

would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy

themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy

and freedom”. This almost sounds like a passage from Bey – but for

Lovecraft it is portrayed with a sense of terror! Could this be an

effect of different ways of dealing with the flow of becoming?

In some respects, this difference between Bey and Lovecraft models the

difference between the revolutionary exodus of the 1960s-70s and the

neoliberal precarity which recuperated it. Undercut by capitalism, the

experience of flow and self-transformation became a source of anxiety

rather than euphoria. Many poststructuralist writers who once celebrated

post-Fordist contingency – such as Stuart Hall and Arjun Appadurai –

later came to recognise that it had generated anxiety, fundamentalisms

and insecurity, rather than the open-ended, self-defined identities they

sought. Bey differs from these scholars in refusing to identify

contingency with neoliberal capitalism or the 'postmodern condition',

but there is a similar issue with the effect of chaos. Another thing

that Bey does, that poststructuralists generally do not, is to suggest

concrete practices to overcome alienation.

Bey's work is similar to other traditions of re-enchantment and magic,

such as the Wiccan tradition, as exemplified by

Starhawk

. He shares with these authors an emphasis on desire and becoming, an

immanentist critique of dominant religions, openness to the 'imaginal

realm', and a personalised view of spiritual practices. While this

tradition is also useful for radical politics, I would argue that Bey's

approach is more uncompromisingly radical, shedding boundaries,

'ordinary' concerns (such as work), and fixed identities. In contrast,

authors like Starhawk are careful to tread a middle path between

ordinary and altered consciousness, carefully encouraging restraint and

protection from a complete loss of self. This is arguably the difference

between a revolutionary use of magic, which seeks to overturn the

ordinary, and a supplementary use, which seeks to survive within and

subtly alter the ordinary.

Often, self-transformation becomes a substitute for revolution, and a

pretext for capitulation. Bey does not replace outer revolution with

inner change, but connects the two. He is also unusual in theorising

capitalism, the state, and social hierarchy as forms of dark magic. This

makes it hard to combine his theory with conformist goals or practices,

and requires an anti-systemic position. As a result of this element, his

theory is very much oppositional to, rather than supplementary of, the

mainstream. Furthermore, he is inclined to embrace risky emotions (such

as anger) and practices (such as drug use), rather than maintaining a

zone of conformity compatible with social inclusion.

In conclusion, I find Bey's work to be a powerful critical approach in

engaging with issues of struggle against mediation and alienation. He

sees chaos as ontologically primary, social praxis as a kind of 'magic',

and capitalism and the state as effects of 'dark magic'. The dominant

system is mainly a matter of alienation, by means of mediation, and it

can be combated by immediacy, autonomy, intensity, and altered

consciousness. This transformed perspective can be achieved by a variety

of means, and extended outwards into zones of autonomy which might

ultimately cover the whole world. This is an inspiring and very

contemporary view of resistance which resonates well with emerging forms

of autonomous social movement. While the strategic conditions for

realising autonomy are constantly shifting, it is important to keep

pursuing a disalienated world, and the perspective of disalienation as

altered consciousness, peak experience, and immediacy is at least as

convincing as the more standard Marxian view.

---

Andy McLaverty-Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in

the UK. He is the co-author (with Athina Karatzogianni) of Power,

Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements,

Networks and Hierarchies (Routledge, 2009). He has recently published a

series of books on Homi Bhabha. His 'In Theory' column appears every

other Friday.