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The Temporary Autonomous Zone
by Hakim Bey
The Temporary Autonomous Zone
Autonomedia Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. May be freely pirated & quoted
"...this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the
world into a holiday...Not that I have much time..."
--Nietzsche (from his last "insane" letter to Cosima Wagner)
THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century created an "information
network" that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim
business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout
the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned,
booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported
"intentional communities," whole mini-societies living consciously outside
the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry
life.
Some years ago I looked through a lot of secondary material on piracy hoping
to find a study of these enclaves--but it appeared as if no historian has
yet found them worthy of analysis. (William Burroughs has mentioned the
subject, as did the late British anarchist Larry Law--but no systematic
research has been carried out.) I retreated to primary sources and constructed
my own theory, some aspects of which will be discussed in this essay. I
called the settlements "Pirate Utopias."
Recently Bruce Sterling, one of the leading exponents of Cyberpunk science
fiction, published a near-future romance based on the assumption that the
decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of
experiments in living: giant worker-owned corporations, independent enclaves
devoted to "data piracy," Green-Social-Democrat enclaves, Zerowork enclaves,
anarchist liberated zones, etc. The information economy which supports this
diversity is called the Net; the enclaves (and the book's title) are Islands in the Net.
The medieval Assassins founded a "State" which consisted of a network of
remote mountain valleys and castles, separated by thousands of miles, strategically
invulnerable to invasion, connected by the information flow of secret agents,
at war with all governments, and devoted only to knowledge. Modern technology,
culminating in the spy satellite, makes this kind of autonomy a romantic dream. No more pirate islands! In the future the same technology--
freed from all political control--could make possible an entire world of autonomous zones. But for now the concept remains precisely science fiction--pure speculation.
Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never
to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom? Are we reduced
either to nostalgia for the past or nostalgia for the future? Must we wait
until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of
us can claim to know freedom? Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a
supposition. Reason demands that one cannot struggle for what one does not
know; and the heart revolts at a universe so cruel as to visit such injustices
on our generation alone of humankind.
To say that "I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures)
are free" is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate
our humanity, to define ourselves as losers.
I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands
in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free
enclave" is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research
and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS
ZONE (hereafter abbreviated TAZ). Despite its synthesizing force for my
own thinking, however, I don't intend the TAZ to be taken as more than an essay ("attempt"), a suggestion, almost a poetic fancy. Despite the occasional
Ranterish enthusiasm of my language I am not trying to construct political
dogma. In fact I have deliberately refrained from defining the TAZ--I circle
around the subject, firing off exploratory beams. In the end the TAZ is
almost self-explanatory. If the phrase became current it would be understood
without difficulty...understood in action.
HOW IS IT THAT "the world turned upside-down" always manages to Right itself? Why does reaction always follow revolution, like seasons in Hell?
Uprising, or the Latin form insurrection, are words used by historians to label failed revolutions--movements which do not match the expected curve, the consensus-approved
trajectory: revolution, reaction, betrayal, the founding of a stronger and
even more oppressive State--the turning of the wheel, the return of history
again and again to its highest form: jackboot on the face of humanity forever.
By failing to follow this curve, the up-rising suggests the possibility of a movement outside and beyond the Hegelian
spiral of that "progress" which is secretly nothing more than a vicious
circle. Surgo--rise up, surge. Insurgo--rise up, raise oneself up. A bootstrap operation. A goodbye to that wretched
parody of the karmic round, historical revolutionary futility. The slogan
"Revolution!" has mutated from tocsin to toxin, a malign pseudo-Gnostic
fate-trap, a nightmare where no matter how we struggle we never escape that
evil Aeon, that incubus the State, one State after another, every "heaven"
ruled by yet one more evil angel.
If History IS "Time," as it claims to be, then the uprising is a moment
that springs up and out of Time, violates the "law" of History. If the State
IS History, as it claims to be, then the insurrection is the forbidden moment,
an unforgivable denial of the dialectic--shimmying up the pole and out of
the smokehole, a shaman's maneuver carried out at an "impossible angle"
to the universe. History says the Revolution attains "permanence," or at
least duration, while the uprising is "temporary." In this sense an uprising
is like a "peak experience" as opposed to the standard of "ordinary" consciousness
and experience. Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day--otherwise
they would not be "nonordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape
and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns--you can't stay
up on the roof forever-- but things have changed, shifts and integrations
have occurred--a difference is made.
You will argue that this is a counsel of despair. What of the anarchist
dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuit? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world.
I accept this as a fair criticism. I'd make two rejoinders nevertheless;
first, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream. The vision comes to life
in the moment of uprising--but as soon as "the Revolution" triumphs and
the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed. I have not given up hope or even expectation of change--but I
distrust the word Revolution. Second, even if we replace the revolutionary approach with a concept of insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture, our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such a vast
undertaking. Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result
now from a head- on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate
information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are
all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry finds nothing to aim at but
a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark
in an ectoplasm of information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image
of the Cop and the absorbant eye of the TV screen.
In short, we're not touting the TAZ as an exclusive end in itself, replacing
all other forms of organization, tactics, and goals. We recommend it because
it can provide the quality of enhancement associated with the uprising without
necessarily leading to violence and martyrdom. The TAZ is like an uprising
which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which
liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves
itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation
rather than substance, the TAZ can "occupy" these areas clandestinely and
carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps
certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed,
like hillbilly enclaves--because they never intersected with the Spectacle,
never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of
Simulation.
Babylon takes its abstractions for realities; precisely within this margin of error the TAZ can come into existence. Getting the TAZ started
may involve tactics of violence and defense, but its greatest strength lies
in its invisibility--the State cannot recognize it because History has no
definition of it. As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it
must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere
else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle.
The TAZ is thus a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent
and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.
And because the TAZ is a microcosm of that "anarchist dream" of a free culture,
I can think of no better tactic by which to work toward that goal while
at the same time experiencing some of its benefits here and now.
In sum, realism demands not only that we give up waiting for "the Revolution" but also that we give up wanting it. "Uprising," yes--as often as possible and even at the risk of violence.
The spasming of the Simulated State will be "spectacular," but in most cases the best
and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence,
to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear.
The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep
moving the entire tribe, even if it's only data in the Web. The TAZ must
be capable of defense; but both the "strike" and the "defense" should, if
possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas;
the defense is "invisibility," a martial art, and "invulnerability"--an "occult" art within the martial arts. The "nomadic
war machine" conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map
can be adjusted. As to the future--Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It's a bootstrap operation. The first
step is somewhat akin to satori--the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization.
(Note: See Appendix C, quote by Renzo Novatore)
THE CONCEPT OF THE TAZ arises first out of a critique of Revolution, and
an appreciation of the Insurrection. The former labels the latter a failure;
but for us uprising represents a far more interesting possibility, from the standard of a psychology
of liberation, than all the "successful" revolutions of bourgeoisie, communists,
fascists, etc.
The second generating force behind the TAZ springs from the historical development
I call "the closure of the map." The last bit of Earth unclaimed by any
nation-state was eaten up in 1899. Ours is the first century without terra incognita, without a frontier. Nationality is the highest principle of world governance--not
one speck of rock in the South Seas can be left open, not one remote valley, not even the Moon and planets. This is the apotheosis
of "territorial gangsterism." Not one square inch of Earth goes unpoliced
or untaxed...in theory.
The "map" is a political abstract grid, a gigantic con enforced by the carrot/stick conditioning of the "Expert" State, until
for most of us the map becomes the territory- -no longer "Turtle Island," but "the USA." And yet because
the map is an abstraction it cannot cover Earth with 1:1 accuracy. Within
the fractal complexities of actual geography the map can see only dimensional
grids. Hidden enfolded immensities escape the measuring rod. The map is
not accurate; the map cannot be accurate.
So--Revolution is closed, but insurgency is open. For the time being we
concentrate our force on temporary "power surges," avoiding all entanglements
with "permanent solutions."
And--the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically
it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of
Control. And here we should introduce the concept of psychotopology (and
-topography) as an alternative "science" to that of the State's surveying
and mapmaking and "psychic imperialism." Only psychotopography can draw
1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity
to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot "control" its territory because
it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features. We are looking for "spaces" (geographic, social, cultural,
imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones--and we are looking
for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect
on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by
the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.
The closures of Revolution and of the map, however, are only the negative
sources of the TAZ; much remains to be said of its positive inspirations.
Reaction alone cannot provide the energy needed to "manifest" a TAZ. An
uprising must be for something as well.
1. First, we can speak of a natural anthropology of the TAZ. The nuclear
family is the base unit of consensus society, but not of the TAZ. ("Families!--how
I hate them! the misers of love!"--Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant
"oedipal miseries," appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response
to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed
hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical:
the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi- nomadic band consists of
about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled
by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret
societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics,"
and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in
miserliness), the band is produced by abundance--and results in prodigality.
The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial
society. The band is open--not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn
to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather
part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance,
spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian society preserves certain aspects
of this structure even now.)
In our own post-Spectacular Society of Simulation many forces are working--largely
invisibly--to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns
in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home
and unit-family. One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and
lovers, people met at different jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special
interest networks, mail networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and
more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms--and the
obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious
rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility
of the band.
2. The TAZ as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of anarchist society,
the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and celebration
(see Appendix C). Here we might also invoke Fourier and his concept of the
senses as the basis of social becoming--"touch-rut" and "gastrosophy," and
his paean to the neglected implications of smell and taste. The ancient
concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain
events lie outside the scope of "profane time," the measuring-rod of the
State and of History. These holidays literally occupied gaps in the calendar--intercalary intervals. By the Middle Ages, nearly a third of the year was given over to holidays.
Perhaps the riots against calendar reform had less to do with the "eleven
lost days" than with a sense that imperial science was conspiring to close
up these gaps in the calendar where the people's freedoms had accumulated--a
coup d'etat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the
organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival.
Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in
the midst of armed struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia
which has slipped loose (or been forced to vanish) from its intercalary
interval and is now at liberty to pop up anywhere or when. Freed of time
and place, it nevertheless possesses a nose for the ripeness of events,
and an affinity for the genius loci; the science of psychotopology indicates "flows of forces" and "spots of
power" (to borrow occultist metaphors) which localize the TAZ spatio-temporally,
or at least help to define its relation to moment and locale.
The media invite us to "come celebrate the moments of your life" with the
spurious unification of commodity and spectacle, the famous non-event of pure representation. In response to this obscenity we have, on the one
hand, the spectrum of refusal (chronicled by the Situationists, John Zerzan, Bob Black et al.)--and on the other hand, the emergence of a festal culture removed and even hidden from the would-be managers of our leisure. "Fight
for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle
but a new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and
telephones as ways to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to
"Be There!"
Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new
society taking shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style
"tribal gathering," the forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane
of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent
parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics--we
should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" of a sort, or
at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner
party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always
"open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of spontaneity is crucial.
The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their
efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance,
conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to
create a communal artwork, or to attain the very transport of bliss-- in
short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form--or
else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here
we should also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of
potlatch culture.)
3. Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, "rootless cosmopolitanism"). Aspects of this
phenomenon have been discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and by various authors in the "Oasis" issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term "psychic nomadism" here rather than "urban nomadism,"
"nomadology," "driftwork," etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts
into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming- into-being
of the TAZ. "The death of God," in some ways a de-centering of the entire
"European" project, opened a multi-perspectived post- ideological worldview
able to move "rootlessly" from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science
to Taoism-- able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden
insect's, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.
But this vision was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where
speed and "commodity fetishism" have created a tyrannical false unity which
tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality, so that "one place
is as good as another." This paradox creates "gypsies," psychic travellers
driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow loyalties (in fact
disloyal to the "European Project" which has lost all its charm and vitality),
not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and
adventure...This description covers not only the X-class artists and intellectuals
but also migrant laborers, refugees, the "homeless," tourists, the RV and
mobile-home culture--also people who "travel" via the Net, but may never
leave their own rooms (or those like Thoreau who "have travelled much--in
Concord"); and finally it includes "everybody," all of us, living through
our automobiles, our vacations, our TVs, books, movies, telephones, changing
jobs, changing "lifestyles," religions, diets, etc., etc.
Psychic nomadism as a tactic, what Deleuze & Guattari metaphorically call "the war machine," shifts
the paradox from a passive to an active and perhaps even "violent" mode.
"God"'s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long
time--in the form of Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism, for example--that
there's still a lot of "creative destruction" to be carried out by post-Bakuninist
post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally "enemies") of the old Consensus. These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for
TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified
oases along secret caravan routes, "liberated" bits of jungle and bad-land,
no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.
These nomads chart their courses by strange stars, which might be luminous
clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map
of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map
of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine
information-flow and logistics--and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the
creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life,
animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light,
secret tunnels, surprises.
THE NEXT FACTOR CONTRIBUTING to the TAZ is so vast and ambiguous that it
needs a section unto itself.
We've spoken of the Net, which can be defined as the totality of all information and communication
transfer. Some of these transfers are privileged and limited to various
elites, which gives the Net a hierarchic aspect. Other transactions are
open to all--so the Net has a horizontal or non-hierarchic aspect as well.
Military and Intelligence data are restricted, as are banking and currency
information and the like. But for the most part the telephone, the postal
system, public data banks, etc. are accessible to everyone and anyone. Thus within the Net there has begun to emerge a shadowy sort of counter-Net, which we will call the Web (as if the Net were a fishing-net and the Web were spider-webs woven through
the interstices and broken sections of the Net). Generally we'll use the
term Web to refer to the alternate horizontal open structure of info- exchange,
the non-hierarchic network, and reserve the term counter-Net to indicate clandestine illegal and rebellious use of the Web, including
actual data-piracy and other forms of leeching off the Net itself. Net,
Web, and counter-Net are all parts of the same whole pattern-complex--they
blur into each other at innumerable points. The terms are not meant to define
areas but to suggest tendencies.
(Digression: Before you condemn the Web or counter-Net for its "parasitism,"
which can never be a truly revolutionary force, ask yourself what "production"
consists of in the Age of Simulation. What is the "productive class"? Perhaps
you'll be forced to admit that these terms seem to have lost their meaning.
In any case the answers to such questions are so complex that the TAZ tends
to ignore them altogether and simply picks up what it can use. "Culture is our Nature"-- and we are the thieving magpies, or the hunter/gatherers
of the world of CommTech.)
The present forms of the unofficial Web are, one must suppose, still rather
primitive: the marginal zine network, the BBS networks, pirated software,
hacking, phone- phreaking, some influence in print and radio, almost none
in the other big media--no TV stations, no satellites, no fiber- optics,
no cable, etc., etc. However the Net itself presents a pattern of changing/evolving
relations between subjects ("users") and objects ("data"). The nature of
these relations has been exhaustively explored, from McLuhan to Virilio.
It would take pages and pages to "prove" what by now "everyone knows." Rather
than rehash it all, I am interested in asking how these evolving relations
suggest modes of implementation for the TAZ.
The TAZ has a temporary but actual location in time and a temporary but
actual location in space. But clearly it must also have "location" in the Web, and this location is of a different sort, not actual but virtual, not
immediate but instantaneous. The Web not only provides logistical support
for the TAZ, it also helps to bring it into being; crudely speaking one
might say that the TAZ "exists" in information- space as well as in the
"real world." The Web can compact a great deal of time, as data, into an
infinitesimal "space." We have noted that the TAZ, because it is temporary,
must necessarily lack some of the advantages of a freedom which experiences duration and a more-or-less fixed locale. But the Web can provide a kind of substitute for some of this duration
and locale--it can inform the TAZ, from its inception, with vast amounts of compacted time and space
which have been "subtilized" as data.
At this moment in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands
for the "face-to-face" and the sensual, we must consider the Web primarily
as a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another,
of defending the TAZ, rendering it "invisible" or giving it teeth, as the
situation might demand. But more than that: If the TAZ is a nomad camp,
then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of
the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which
make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will
experience as signs and portents.
The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth,
mail, the marginal zine network, "phone trees," and the like already suffice
to construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of
tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the structure. Nevertheless,
the whole concept of the Net implies the use of computers. In the SciFi imagination the Net is headed for the
condition of Cyberspace (as in Tron or Neuromancer) and the pseudo-telepathy of "virtual reality." As a Cyberpunk fan I can't
help but envision "reality hacking" playing a major role in the creation
of TAZs. Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the official Net will
never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net--that data-piracy,
unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be
frozen. (In fact, as I understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible.)
However, leaving aside all mere speculation about the future, we must face
a very serious question about the Web and the tech it involves. The TAZ
desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the affair is "breast-to-breast" as the sufis say,
or face-to-face. But, BUT: the very essence of the Web is mediation. Machines
here are our ambassadors--the flesh is irrelevant except as a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.
The TAZ may perhaps best find its own space by wrapping its head around
two seemingly contradictory attitudes toward Hi- Tech and its apotheosis
the Net: (1) what we might call the Fifth Estate/Neo-Paleolithic Post-Situ Ultra-Green position, which construes itself
as a luddite argument against mediation and against the Net; and (2) the
Cyberpunk utopianists, futuro-libertarians, Reality Hackers and their allies
who see the Net as a step forward in evolution, and who assume that any
possible ill effects of mediation can be overcome--at least, once we've
liberated the means of production.
The TAZ agrees with the hackers because it wants to come into being--in
part--through the Net, even through the mediation of the Net. But it also
agrees with the greens because it retains intense awareness of itself as body and feels only revulsion for CyberGnosis, the attempt to transcend the body through instantaneity and simulation.
The TAZ tends to view the Tech/anti-Tech dichotomy as misleading, like most
dichotomies, in which apparent opposites turn out to be falsifications or
even hallucinations caused by semantics. This is a way of saying that the
TAZ wants to live in this world, not in the idea of another world, some visionary world born of false
unification (all green OR all metal) which can only be more pie in the sky by-&-by (or as Alice put it, "Jam yesterday or jam tomorrow, but never jam today").
The TAZ is "utopian" in the sense that it envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have said, life's penetration
by the Marvelous. But it cannot be utopian in the actual meaning of the
word, nowhere, or NoPlace Place. The TAZ is somewhere. It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power- spot
at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly
unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. But
now the lines are not all etched in time and space. Some of them exist only
"within" the Web, even though they also intersect with real times and places.
Perhaps some of the lines are "non-ordinary" in the sense that no convention
for quantifying them exists. These lines might better be studied in the
light of chaos science than of sociology, statistics, economics, etc. The
patterns of force which bring the TAZ into being have something in common
with those chaotic "Strange Attractors" which exist, so to speak, between the dimensions.
The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself--it
will come to life whether in a cave or an L-5 Space City--but above all
it will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle
a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti- ideology.
It will use the computer because the computer exists, but it will also use
powers which are so completely unrelated to alienation or simulation that
they guarantee a certain psychic paleolithism to the TAZ, a primordial-shamanic spirit which will "infect" even the Net
itself (the true meaning of Cyberpunk as I read it). Because the TAZ is
an intensification, a surplus, an excess, a potlatch, life spending itself
in living rather than merely surviving (that snivelling shibboleth of the eighties), it cannot be defined either
by Tech or anti-Tech. It contradicts itself like a true despiser of hobgoblins,
because it wills itself to be, at any cost in damage to "perfection," to
the immobility of the final.
In the Mandelbrot Set and its computer-graphic realization we watch--in
a fractal universe--maps which are embedded and in fact hidden within maps
within maps etc. to the limits of computational power. What is it for, this map which in a sense bears a 1:1 relation with a fractal dimension?
What can one do with it, other than admire its psychedelic elegance?
If we were to imagine an information map--a cartographic projection of the Net in its entirety--we would have to
include in it the features of chaos, which have already begun to appear,
for example, in the operations of complex parallel processing, telecommunications,
transfers of electronic "money," viruses, guerilla hacking and so on.
Each of these "areas" of chaos could be represented by topographs similar
to the Mandelbrot Set, such that the "peninsulas" are embedded or hidden
within the map--such that they seem to "disappear." This "writing"--parts
of which vanish, parts of which efface themselves--represents the very process
by which the Net is already compromised, incomplete to its own view, ultimately
un-Controllable. In other words, the M Set, or something like it, might
prove to be useful in "plotting" (in all senses of the word) the emergence
of the counterNet as a chaotic process, a "creative evolution" in Prigogine's
term. If nothing else the M Set serves as a metaphor for a "mapping" of the TAZ's interface with the Net as a disappearance of information. Every "catastrophe" in the Net is a node of power for the Web, the counter-Net.
The Net will be damaged by chaos, while the Web may thrive on it.
Whether through simple data-piracy, or else by a more complex development
of actual rapport with chaos, the Web- hacker, the cybernetician of the
TAZ, will find ways to take advantage of perturbations, crashes, and breakdowns
in the Net (ways to make information out of "entropy"). As a bricoleur,
a scavenger of information shards, smuggler, blackmailer, perhaps even cyberterrorist,
the TAZ-hacker will work for the evolution of clandestine fractal connections.
These connections, and the different information that flows among and between them, will form "power outlets"
for the coming-into-being of the TAZ itself- -as if one were to steal electricity
from the energy- monopoly to light an abandoned house for squatters.
Thus the Web, in order to produce situations conducive to the TAZ, will
parasitize the Net--but we can also conceive of this strategy as an attempt
to build toward the construction of an alternative and autonomous Net, "free"
and no longer parasitic, which will serve as the basis for a "new society
emerging from the shell of the old." The counter-Net and the TAZ can be
considered, practically speaking, as ends in themselves--but theoretically
they can also be viewed as forms of struggle toward a different reality.
Having said this we must still admit to some qualms about computers, some
still unanswered questions, especially about the Personal Computer.
The story of computer networks, BBSs and various other experiments in electro-democracy
has so far been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and libertarians have deep faith in
the PC as a weapon of liberation and self-liberation--but no real gains
to show, no palpable liberty.
I have little interest in some hypothetical emergent entrepreneurial class
of self-employed data/word processors who will soon be able to carry on
a vast cottage industry or piecemeal shitwork for various corporations and
bureaucracies. Moreover it takes no ESP to foresee that this "class" will
develop its underclass--a sort of lumpen yuppetariat: housewives, for example, who will provide
their families with "second incomes" by turning their own homes into electro-sweatshops,
little Work-tyrannies where the "boss" is a computer network.
Also I am not impressed by the sort of information and services proffered
by contemporary "radical" networks. Somewhere--one is told--there exists
an "information economy." Maybe so; but the info being traded over the "alternative"
BBSs seems to consist entirely of chitchat and techie-talk. Is this an economy?
or merely a pastime for enthusiasts? OK, PCs have created yet another "print
revolution"--OK, marginal webworks are evolving--OK, I can now carry on
six phone conversations at once. But what difference has this made in my
ordinary life?
Frankly, I already had plenty of data to enrich my perceptions, what with
books, movies, TV, theater, telephones, the U.S. Postal Service, altered
states of consciousness, and so on. Do I really need a PC in order to obtain
yet more such data? You offer me secret information? Well...perhaps I'm tempted--but still I demand marvelous secrets, not just unlisted telephone numbers or the trivia of cops and
politicians. Most of all I want computers to provide me with information
linked to real goods--"the good things in life," as the IWW Preamble puts it. And here, since
I'm accusing the hackers and BBSers of irritating intellectual vagueness,
I must myself descend from the baroque clouds of Theory & Critique and explain
what I mean by "real goods."
Let's say that for both political and personal reasons I desire good food,
better than I can obtain from Capitalism-- unpolluted food still blessed
with strong and natural flavors. To complicate the game imagine that the
food I crave is illegal--raw milk perhaps, or the exquisite Cuban fruit mamey, which cannot be imported fresh into the U.S. because its seed is hallucinogenic
(or so I'm told). I am not a farmer. Let's pretend I'm an importer of rare
perfumes and aphrodisiacs, and sharpen the play by assuming most of my stock
is also illegal. Or maybe I only want to trade word processing services
for organic turnips, but refuse to report the transaction to the IRS (as
required by law, believe it or not). Or maybe I want to meet other humans
for consensual but illegal acts of mutual pleasure (this has actually been
tried, but all the hard-sex BBSs have been busted--and what use is an underground
with lousy security?). In short, assume that I'm fed up with mere information, the ghost in
the machine. According to you, computers should already be quite capable
of facilitating my desires for food, drugs, sex, tax evasion. So what's
the matter? Why isn't it happening?
The TAZ has occurred, is occurring, and will occur with or without the computer.
But for the TAZ to reach its full potential it must become less a matter
of spontaneous combustion and more a matter of "islands in the Net." The
Net, or rather the counter-Net, assumes the promise of an integral aspect
of the TAZ, an addition that will multiply its potential, a "quantum jump"
(odd how this expression has come to mean a big leap) in complexity and significance. The TAZ must now exist within a world
of pure space, the world of the senses. Liminal, even evanescent, the TAZ
must combine information and desire in order to fulfill its adventure (its
"happening"), in order to fill itself to the borders of its destiny, to
saturate itself with its own becoming.
Perhaps the Neo-Paleolithic School are correct when they assert that all
forms of alienation and mediation must be destroyed or abandoned before
our goals can be realized--or perhaps true anarchy will be realized only
in Outer Space, as some futuro-libertarians assert. But the TAZ does not
concern itself very much with "was" or "will be." The TAZ is interested
in results, successful raids on consensus reality, breakthroughs into more
intense and more abundant life. If the computer cannot be used in this project,
then the computer will have to be overcome. My intuition however suggests
that the counter-Net is already coming into being, perhaps already exists--but
I cannot prove it. I've based the theory of the TAZ in large part on this
intuition. Of course the Web also involves non-computerized networks of
exchange such as samizdat, the black market, etc.--but the full potential
of non-hierarchic information networking logically leads to the computer
as the tool par excellence. Now I'm waiting for the hackers to prove I'm
right, that my intuition is valid. Where are my turnips?
WE HAVE NO DESIRE to define the TAZ or to elaborate dogmas about how it must be created. Our contention is rather that it has been created, will be
created, and is being created. Therefore it would prove more valuable and
interesting to look at some TAZs past and present, and to speculate about
future manifestations; by evoking a few prototypes we may be able to gauge
the potential scope of the complex, and perhaps even get a glimpse of an
"archetype." Rather than attempt any sort of encyclopaedism we'll adopt
a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrarily
with the 16th-17th centuries and the settlement of the New World.
The opening of the "new" world was conceived from the start as an occultist operation. The magus John Dee, spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I, seems to have invented
the concept of "magical imperialism" and infected an entire generation with
it. Halkyut and Raleigh fell under his spell, and Raleigh used his connections
with the "School of Night"--a cabal of advanced thinkers, aristocrats, and
adepts--to further the causes of exploration, colonization and mapmaking. The Tempest was a propaganda-piece for the new ideology, and the Roanoke Colony was
its first showcase experiment.
The alchemical view of the New World associated it with materia prima or hyle, the "state of Nature," innocence and all-possibility ("Virgin-ia"), a
chaos or inchoateness which the adept would transmute into "gold," that
is, into spiritual perfection as well as material abundance. But this alchemical vision is also informed in part
by an actual fascination with the inchoate, a sneaking sympathy for it,
a feeling of yearning for its formless form which took the symbol of the
"Indian" for its focus: "Man" in the state of nature, uncorrupted by "government." Caliban, the Wild Man,
is lodged like a virus in the very machine of Occult Imperialism; the forest/animal/humans
are invested from the very start with the magic power of the marginal, despised
and outcaste. On the one hand Caliban is ugly, and Nature a "howling wilderness"--on
the other, Caliban is noble and unchained, and Nature an Eden. This split
in European consciousness predates the Romantic/Classical dichotomy; it's
rooted in Renaissance High Magic. The discovery of America (Eldorado, the
Fountain of Youth) crystallized it; and it precipitated in actual schemes
for colonization.
We were taught in elementary school that the first settlements in Roanoke
failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic
message "Gone To Croatan." Later reports of "grey-eyed Indians" were dismissed
as legend. What really happened, the textbook implied, was that the Indians
massacred the defenseless settlers. However, "Croatan" was not some Eldorado;
it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians. Apparently the
settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp
and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real--they're still there, and they still call themselves Croatans.
So--the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract
with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban.
They dropped out. They became "Indians," "went native," opted for chaos
over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals
of London.
As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan
remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the
state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness
of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to
give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes-- all the burdens of civilization--and
"go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England
was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant
radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now become
a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters
were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace
it.
Anne Hutchinson and her friends were only the best known (i.e. the most
upper-class) of the Antinomians--having had the bad luck to be caught up
in Bay Colony politics--but a much more radical wing of the movement clearly
existed. The incidents Hawthorne relates in "The Maypole of Merry Mount"
are thoroughly historical; apparently the extremists had decided to renounce
Christianity altogether and revert to paganism. If they had succeeded in
uniting with their Indian allies the result might have been an Antinomian/Celtic/Algonquin
syncretic religion, a sort of 17th century North American Santeria.
Sectarians were able to thrive better under the looser and more corrupt
administrations in the Caribbean, where rival European interests had left
many islands deserted or even unclaimed. Barbados and Jamaica in particular
must have been settled by many extremists, and I believe that Levellerish
and Ranterish influences contributed to the Buccaneer "utopia" on Tortuga.
Here for the first time, thanks to Esquemelin, we can study a successful
New World proto-TAZ in some depth. Fleeing from hideous "benefits" of Imperialism
such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance, from the tortures of impressment
and the living death of the plantations, the Buccaneers adopted Indian ways,
intermarried with Caribs, accepted blacks and Spaniards as equals, rejected
all nationality, elected their captains democratically, and reverted to
the "state of Nature." Having declared themselves "at war with all the world,"
they sailed forth to plunder under mutual contracts called "Articles" which
were so egalitarian that every member received a full share and the Captain
usually only 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 shares. Flogging and punishments were forbidden--
quarrels were settled by vote or by the code duello.
It is simply wrong to brand the pirates as mere sea-going highwaymen or
even proto-capitalists, as some historians have done. In a sense they were
"social bandits," although their base communities were not traditional peasant
societies but "utopias" created almost ex nihilo in terra incognita, enclaves
of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map. After the fall of Tortuga,
the Buccaneer ideal remained alive all through the "Golden Age" of Piracy
(ca. 1660-1720), and resulted in land-settlements in Belize, for example,
which was founded by Buccaneers. Then, as the scene shifted to Madagascar--an
island still unclaimed by any imperial power and ruled only by a patchwork
of native kings (chiefs) eager for pirate allies--the Pirate Utopia reached
its highest form.
Defoe's account of Captain Mission and the founding of Libertatia may be,
as some historians claim, a literary hoax meant to propagandize for radical
Whig theory--but it was embedded in The General History of the Pyrates (1724-28), most of which is still accepted as true and accurate. Moreover
the story of Capt. Mission was not criticized when the book appeared and
many old Madagascar hands still survived. They seem to have believed it, no doubt because they had experienced pirate
enclaves very much like Libertatia. Once again, rescued slaves, natives,
and even traditional enemies such as the Portuguese were all invited to
join as equals. (Liberating slave ships was a major preoccupation.) Land
was held in common, representatives elected for short terms, booty shared;
doctrines of liberty were preached far more radical than even those of Common Sense.
Libertatia hoped to endure, and Mission died in its defense. But most of
the pirate utopias were meant to be temporary; in fact the corsairs' true
"republics" were their ships, which sailed under Articles. The shore enclaves
usually had no law at all. The last classic example, Nassau in the Bahamas,
a beachfront resort of shacks and tents devoted to wine, women (and probably
boys too, to judge by Birge's Sodomy and Piracy), song (the pirates were inordinately fond of music and used to hire on
bands for entire cruises), and wretched excess, vanished overnight when
the British fleet appeared in the Bay. Blackbeard and "Calico Jack" Rackham
and his crew of pirate women moved on to wilder shores and nastier fates,
while others meekly accepted the Pardon and reformed. But the Buccaneer
tradition lasted, both in Madagascar where the mixed-blood children of the
pirates began to carve out kingdoms of their own, and in the Caribbean,
where escaped slaves as well as mixed black/white/red groups were able to
thrive in the mountains and backlands as "Maroons." The Maroon community
in Jamaica still retained a degree of autonomy and many of the old folkways
when Zora Neale Hurston visited there in the 1920's (see Tell My Horse). The Maroons of Suriname still practice African "paganism."
Throughout the 18th century, North America also produced a number of drop-out
"tri-racial isolate communities." (This clinical-sounding term was invented
by the Eugenics Movement, which produced the first scientific studies of
these communities. Unfortunately the "science" merely served as an excuse
for hatred of racial "mongrels" and the poor, and the "solution to the problem"
was usually forced sterilization.) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway
slaves and serfs, "criminals" (i.e. the very poor), "prostitutes" (i.e.
white women who married non-whites), and members of various native tribes.
In some cases, such as the Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal
structure absorbed the newcomers; in other cases, new tribes were formed.
Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through
the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting runaway slaves, functioning as a way
station on the Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and ideological
center for slave rebellions. The religion was HooDoo, a mixture of African,
native, and Christian elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey
the elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal Maroons were
known as "the Seven Finger High Glister."
The Ramapaughs of northern New Jersey (incorrectly known as the "Jackson
Whites") present another romantic and archetypal genealogy: freed slaves
of the Dutch poltroons, various Delaware and Algonquin clans, the usual
"prostitutes," the "Hessians" (a catch-phrase for lost British mercenaries,
drop-out Loyalists, etc.), and local bands of social bandits such as Claudius
Smith's.
An African-Islamic origin is claimed by some of the groups, such as the
Moors of Delaware and the Ben Ishmaels, who migrated from Kentucky to Ohio
in the mid-18th century. The Ishmaels practiced polygamy, never drank alcohol,
made their living as minstrels, intermarried with Indians and adopted their
customs, and were so devoted to nomadism that they built their houses on
wheels. Their annual migration triangulated on frontier towns with names
like Mecca and Medina. In the 19th century some of them espoused anarchist
ideals, and they were targeted by the Eugenicists for a particularly vicious
pogrom of salvation-by-extermination. Some of the earliest Eugenics laws
were passed in their honor. As a tribe they "disappeared" in the 1920's,
but probably swelled the ranks of early "Black Islamic" sects such as the
Moorish Science Temple. I myself grew up on legends of the "Kallikaks" of
the nearby New Jersey Pine Barrens (and of course on Lovecraft, a rabid
racist who was fascinated by the isolate communities). The legends turned
out to be folk-memories of the slanders of the Eugenicists, whose U.S. headquarters
were in Vineland, NJ, and who undertook the usual "reforms" against "miscegenation"
and "feeblemindedness" in the Barrens (including the publication of photographs
of the Kallikaks, crudely and obviously retouched to make them look like
monsters of misbreeding).
The "isolate communities"--at least, those which have retained their identity
into the 20th century--consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream
culture or the black "subculture" into which modern sociologists prefer
to categorize them. In the 1970's, inspired by the Native American renaissance,
a number of groups--including the Moors and the Ramapaughs--applied to the
B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official
status. If they'd won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent
for drop-outs of all sorts, from "white Peyotists" and hippies to black
nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians-- a "reservation" for
anyone and everyone! The "European Project" cannot recognize the existence
of the Wild Man-- green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial
dream of order.
Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the "diachronic" or historical
explanation of their origins in favor of a "synchronic" self-identity based
on a "myth" of Indian adoption. Or to put it another way, they named themselves "Indians." If everyone who wished "to be an Indian" could accomplish this by an act
of self- naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take place. That
old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of our forests (which, by the
way, have greatly increased in the Northeast since the 18-19th century as
vast tracts of farmland return to scrub. Thoreau on his deathbed dreamed
of the return of "...Indians...forests...": the return of the repressed).
The Moors and Ramapaughs of course have good materialist reasons to think
of themselves as Indians--after all, they have Indian ancestors--but if
we view their self-naming in "mythic" as well as historical terms we'll
learn more of relevance to our quest for the TAZ. Within tribal societies
there exist what some anthropologists call mannenbunden: totemic societies devoted to an identity with "Nature" in the act of shapeshifting,
of becoming the totem-animal (werewolves, jaguar shamans, leopard men, cat-witches,
etc.). In the context of an entire colonial society (as Taussig points out
in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man) the shapeshifting power is seen as inhering in the native culture as a
whole-- thus the most repressed sector of the society acquires a paradoxical
power through the myth of its occult knowledge, which is feared and desired
by the colonist. Of course the natives really do have certain occult knowledge;
but in response to Imperial perception of native culture as a kind of "spiritual
wild(er)ness," the natives come to see themselves more and more consciously
in that role. Even as they are marginalized, the Margin takes on an aura of magic. Before the whiteman, they were simply tribes
of people--now, they are "guardians of Nature," inhabitants of the "state
of Nature." Finally the colonist himself is seduced by this "myth." Whenever
an American wants to drop out or back into Nature, invariably he "becomes
an Indian." The Massachusetts radical democrats (spiritual descendents of
the radical Protestants) who organized the Tea Party, and who literally
believed that governments could be abolished (the whole Berkshire region
declared itself in a "state of Nature"!), disguised themselves as "Mohawks."
Thus the colonists, who suddenly saw themselves marginalized vis-·- vis
the motherland, adopted the role of the marginalized natives, thereby (in
a sense) seeking to participate in their occult power, their mythic radiance.
From the Mountain Men to the Boy Scouts, the dream of "becoming an Indian"
flows beneath myriad strands of American history, culture and consciousness.
The sexual imagery connected to "tri-racial" groups also bears out this
hypothesis. "Natives" of course are always immoral, but racial renegades
and drop-outs must be downright polymorphous-perverse. The Buccaneers were
buggers, the Maroons and Mountain Men were miscegenists, the "Jukes and
Kallikaks" indulged in fornication and incest (leading to mutations such
as polydactyly), the children ran around naked and masturbated openly, etc.,
etc. Reverting to a "state of Nature" paradoxically seems to allow for the
practice of every "unnatural" act; or so it would appear if we believe the Puritans and Eugenicists.
And since many people in repressed moralistic racist societies secretly
desire exactly these licentious acts, they project them outwards onto the
marginalized, and thereby convince themselves that they themselves remain
civilized and pure. And in fact some marginalized communities do really
reject consensus morality--the pirates certainly did!--and no doubt actually
act out some of civilization's repressed desires. (Wouldn't you?) Becoming "wild" is always an erotic act, an act of nakedness.
Before leaving the subject of the "tri-racial isolates," I'd like to recall
Nietzsche's enthusiasm for "race mixing." Impressed by the vigor and beauty
of hybrid cultures, he offered miscegenation not only as a solution to the
problem of race but also as the principle for a new humanity freed of ethnic
and national chauvinism--a precursor to the "psychic nomad," perhaps. Nietzsche's
dream still seems as remote now as it did to him. Chauvinism still rules
OK. Mixed cultures remain submerged. But the autonomous zones of the Buccaneers
and Maroons, Ishmaels and Moors, Ramapaughs and "Kallikaks" remain, or their
stories remain, as indications of what Nietzsche might have called "the
Will to Power as Disappearance." We must return to this theme.
MEANWHILE, HOWEVER, WE TURN to the history of classical anarchism in the
light of the TAZ concept.
Before the "closure of the map," a good deal of anti- authoritarian energy
went into "escapist" communes such as Modern Times, the various Phalansteries,
and so on. Interestingly, some of them were not intended to last "forever,"
but only as long as the project proved fulfilling. By Socialist/Utopian
standards these experiments were "failures," and therefore we know little
about them.
When escape beyond the frontier proved impossible, the era of revolutionary
urban Communes began in Europe. The Communes of Paris, Lyons and Marseilles
did not survive long enough to take on any characteristics of permanence,
and one wonders if they were meant to. From our point of view the chief
matter of fascination is the spirit of the Communes. During and after these years anarchists took up the practice
of revolutionary nomadism, drifting from uprising to uprising, looking to
keep alive in themselves the intensity of spirit they experienced in the
moment of insurrection. In fact, certain anarchists of the Stirnerite/Nietzschean
strain came to look on this activity as an end in itself, a way of always occupying an autonomous zone, the interzone which opens up in the midst or wake of war and revolution
(cf. Pynchon's "zone" in Gravity's Rainbow). They declared that if any socialist revolution succeeded, they'd be the first to turn against it. Short of universal anarchy they
had no intention of ever stopping. In Russia in 1917 they greeted the free
Soviets with joy: this was their goal. But as soon as the Bolsheviks betrayed the Revolution,
the individualist anarchists were the first to go back on the warpath. After
Kronstadt, of course, all anarchists condemned the "Soviet Union" (a contradiction in terms) and
moved on in search of new insurrections.
Makhno's Ukraine and anarchist Spain were meant to have duration, and despite the exigencies of continual war both succeeded to a certain
extent: not that they lasted a "long time," but they were successfully organized
and could have persisted if not for outside aggression. Therefore, from
among the experiments of the inter-War period I'll concentrate instead on
the madcap Republic of Fiume, which is much less well known, and was not meant to endure. Gabriele D'Annunzio, Decadent poet, artist, musician,
aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautist, black magician, genius
and cad, emerged from World War I as a hero with a small army at his beck
and command: the "Arditi." At a loss for adventure, he decided to capture
the city of Fiume from Yugoslavia and give it to Italy. After a necromantic ceremony with his mistress in a cemetery
in Venice he set out to conquer Fiume, and succeeded without any trouble
to speak of. But Italy turned down his generous offer; the Prime Minister
called him a fool.
In a huff, D'Annunzio decided to declare independence and see how long he
could get away with it. He and one of his anarchist friends wrote the Constitution,
which declared music to be the central principle of the State. The Navy (made up of deserters and Milanese anarchist maritime unionists)
named themselves the Uscochi, after the long- vanished pirates who once lived on local offshore islands
and preyed on Venetian and Ottoman shipping. The modern Uscochi succeeded
in some wild coups: several rich Italian merchant vessels suddenly gave
the Republic a future: money in the coffers! Artists, bohemians, adventurers,
anarchists (D'Annunzio corresponded with Malatesta), fugitives and Stateless
refugees, homosexuals, military dandies (the uniform was black with pirate
skull-&-crossbones--later stolen by the SS), and crank reformers of every
stripe (including Buddhists, Theosophists and Vedantists) began to show
up at Fiume in droves. The party never stopped. Every morning D'Annunzio
read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then
fireworks. This made up the entire activity of the government. Eighteen
months later, when the wine and money had run out and the Italian fleet finally showed up and lobbed a few shells at the Municipal Palace, no one had the
energy to resist.
D'Annunzio, like many Italian anarchists, later veered toward fascism--in
fact, Mussolini (the ex-Syndicalist) himself seduced the poet along that
route. By the time D'Annunzio realized his error it was too late: he was
too old and sick. But Il Duce had him killed anyway--pushed off a balcony--and
turned him into a "martyr." As for Fiume, though it lacked the seriousness of the free Ukraine or Barcelona, it can probably teach us more about certain
aspects of our quest. It was in some ways the last of the pirate utopias
(or the only modern example)--in other ways, perhaps, it was very nearly
the first modern TAZ.
I believe that if we compare Fiume with the Paris uprising of 1968 (also
the Italian urban insurrections of the early seventies), as well as with
the American countercultural communes and their anarcho-New Left influences,
we should notice certain similarities, such as:--the importance of aesthetic
theory (cf. the Situationists)--also, what might be called "pirate economics,"
living high off the surplus of social overproduction--even the popularity
of colorful military uniforms--and the concept of music as revolutionary social change--and finally their shared air of impermanence,
of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re- locate to other universities,
mountaintops, ghettos, factories, safe houses, abandoned farms--or even
other planes of reality. No one was trying to impose yet another Revolutionary
Dictatorship, either at Fiume, Paris, or Millbrook. Either the world would
change, or it wouldn't. Meanwhile keep on the move and live intensely.
The Munich Soviet (or "Council Republic") of 1919 exhibited certain features
of the TAZ, even though--like most revolutions--its stated goals were not
exactly "temporary." Gustav Landauer's participation as Minister of Culture
along with Silvio Gesell as Minister of Economics and other anti- authoritarian
and extreme libertarian socialists such as the poet/playwrights Erich Mªhsam
and Ernst Toller, and Ret Marut (the novelist B. Traven), gave the Soviet
a distinct anarchist flavor. Landauer, who had spent years of isolation
working on his grand synthesis of Nietzsche, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Stirner,
Meister Eckhardt, the radical mystics, and the Romantic volk-philosophers, knew from the start that the Soviet was doomed; he hoped
only that it would last long enough to be understood. Kurt Eisner, the martyred founder of the Soviet, believed quite literally
that poets and poetry should form the basis of the revolution. Plans were
launched to devote a large piece of Bavaria to an experiment in anarcho-socialist
economy and community. Landauer drew up proposals for a Free School system
and a People's Theater. Support for the Soviet was more or less confined
to the poorest working-class and bohemian neighborhoods of Munich, and to
groups like the Wandervogel (the neo-Romantic youth movement), Jewish radicals
(like Buber), the Expressionists, and other marginals. Thus historians dismiss
it as the "Coffeehouse Republic" and belittle its significance in comparison
with Marxist and Spartacist participation in Germany's post-War revolution(s).
Outmaneuvered by the Communists and eventually murdered by soldiers under
the influence of the occult/fascist Thule Society, Landauer deserves to
be remembered as a saint. Yet even anarchists nowadays tend to misunderstand
and condemn him for "selling out" to a "socialist government." If the Soviet
had lasted even a year, we would weep at the mention of its beauty--but
before even the first flowers of that Spring had wilted, the geist and the spirit of poetry were crushed, and we have forgotten. Imagine what
it must have been to breathe the air of a city in which the Minister of
Culture has just predicted that schoolchildren will soon be memorizing the
works of Walt Whitman. Ah for a time machine...
FOUCAULT, BAUDRILLARD, ET AL. have discussed various modes of "disappearance" at great length. Here
I wish to suggest that the TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. When the Theorists speak of the disappearance of the Social they mean
in part the impossibility of the "Social Revolution," and in part the impossibility
of "the State"-- the abyss of power, the end of the discourse of power.
The anarchist question in this case should then be: Why bother to confront a "power" which has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation?
Such confrontations will only result in dangerous and ugly spasms of violence
by the emptyheaded shit-for-brains who've inherited the keys to all the
armories and prisons. (Perhaps this is a crude american misunderstanding
of sublime and subtle Franco-Germanic Theory. If so, fine; whoever said understanding was needed to make use of an idea?)
As I read it, disappearance seems to be a very logical radical option for
our time, not at all a disaster or death for the radical project. Unlike
the morbid deathfreak nihilistic interpretation of Theory, mine intends
to mine it for useful strategies in the always-ongoing "revolution of everyday
life": the struggle that cannot cease even with the last failure of political
or social revolution because nothing except the end of the world can bring
an end to everyday life, nor to our aspirations for the good things, for the Marvelous. And as Nietzsche said, if the world could come to an end, logically it would have done so; it has not, so it does not. And so, as one of the sufis said, no matter how many draughts of forbidden
wine we drink, we will carry this raging thirst into eternity.
Zerzan and Black have independently noted certain "elements of Refusal"
(Zerzan's term) which perhaps can be seen as somehow symptomatic of a radical
culture of disappearance, partly unconscious but partly conscious, which
influences far more people than any leftist or anarchist idea. These gestures are made against institutions, and in that sense are "negative"--but each negative gesture
also suggests a "positive" tactic to replace rather than merely refuse the
despised institution.
For example, the negative gesture against schooling is "voluntary illiteracy." Since I do not share the liberal worship of
literacy for the sake of social ameliorization, I cannot quite share the
gasps of dismay heard everywhere at this phenomenon: I sympathize with children
who refuse books along with the garbage in the books. There are however
positive alternatives which make use of the same energy of disappearance.
Home-schooling and craft-apprenticeship, like truancy, result in an absence
from the prison of school. Hacking is another form of "education" with certain
features of "invisibility."
A mass-scale negative gesture against politics consists simply of not voting.
"Apathy" (i.e. a healthy boredom with the weary Spectacle) keeps over half
the nation from the polls; anarchism never accomplished as much! (Nor did
anarchism have anything to do with the failure of the recent Census.) Again,
there are positive parallels: "networking" as an alternative to politics
is practiced at many levels of society, and non-hierarchic organization
has attained popularity even outside the anarchist movement, simply because
it works. (ACT UP and Earth First! are two examples. Alcoholics Anonymous, oddly
enough, is another.)
Refusal of Work can take the forms of absenteeism, on-job drunkenness, sabotage, and sheer
inattention--but it can also give rise to new modes of rebellion: more self-
employment, participation in the "black" economy and "lavoro nero," welfare scams and other criminal options, pot farming, etc.--all more
or less "invisible" activities compared to traditional leftist confrontational
tactics such as the general strike.
Refusal of the Church? Well, the "negative gesture" here probably consists of...watching television.
But the positive alternatives include all sorts of non-authoritarian forms
of spirituality, from "unchurched" Christianity to neo- paganism. The "Free
Religions" as I like to call them-- small, self-created, half-serious/half-fun
cults influenced by such currents as Discordianism and anarcho-Taoism--are
to be found all over marginal America, and provide a growing "fourth way"
outside the mainstream churches, the televangelical bigots, and New Age
vapidity and consumerism. It might also be said that the chief refusal of
orthodoxy consists of the construction of "private moralities" in the Nietzschean
sense: the spirituality of "free spirits."
The negative refusal of Home is "homelessness," which most consider a form of victimization, not wishing
to be forced into nomadology. But "homelessness" can in a sense be a virtue, an adventure--so
it appears, at least, to the huge international movement of the squatters,
our modern hobos.
The negative refusal of the Family is clearly divorce, or some other symptom of "breakdown." The positive
alternative springs from the realization that life can be happier without
the nuclear family, whereupon a hundred flowers bloom--from single parentage
to group marriage to erotic affinity group. The "European Project" fights
a major rearguard action in defense of "Family"--oedipal misery lies at
the heart of Control. Alternatives exist--but they must remain in hiding,
especially since the War against Sex of the 1980's and 1990's.
What is the refusal of Art? The "negative gesture" is not to be found in the silly nihilism of an
"Art Strike" or the defacing of some famous painting--it is to be seen in
the almost universal glassy-eyed boredom that creeps over most people at
the very mention of the word. But what would the "positive gesture" consist
of? Is it possible to imagine an aesthetics that does not engage, that removes itself from History and even from the Market? or at least tends to do so? which wants to replace representation with presence? How does presence make itself felt even in (or through) representation?
"Chaos Linguistics" traces a presence which is continually disappearing
from all orderings of language and meaning- systems; an elusive presence,
evanescent, latif ("subtle," a term in sufi alchemy)--the Strange Attractor around which
memes accrue, chaotically forming new and spontaneous orders. Here we have
an aesthetics of the borderland between chaos and order, the margin, the
area of "catastrophe" where the breakdown of the system can equal enlightenment.
(Note: for an explanation of "Chaos Linguistics" see Appendix A, then please
read this paragraph again.)
The disappearance of the artist IS "the suppression and realization of art,"
in Situationist terms. But from where do we vanish? And are we ever seen
or heard of again? We go to Croatan--what's our fate? All our art consists
of a goodbye note to history--"Gone To Croatan"--but where is it, and what
will we do there?
First: We're not talking here about literally vanishing from the world and
its future:--no escape backward in time to paleolithic "original leisure
society"--no forever utopia, no backmountain hideaway, no island; also,
no post- Revolutionary utopia--most likely no Revolution at all!-- also,
no VONU, no anarchist Space Stations--nor do we accept a "Baudrillardian
disappearance" into the silence of an ironic hyperconformity. I have no
quarrel with any Rimbauds who escape Art for whatever Abyssinia they can
find. But we can't build an aesthetics, even an aesthetics of disappearance,
on the simple act of never coming back. By saying we're not an avant-garde and that there is no avant- garde,
we've written our "Gone To Croatan"--the question then becomes, how to envision
"everyday life" in Croatan? particularly if we cannot say that Croatan exists
in Time (Stone Age or Post-Revolution) or Space, either as utopia or as
some forgotten midwestern town or as Abyssinia? Where and when is the world
of unmediated creativity? If it can exist, it does exist--but perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far
have not learned to perceive. Where would we look for the seeds--the weeds
cracking through our sidewalks--from this other world into our world? the
clues, the right directions for searching? a finger pointing at the moon?
I believe, or would at least like to propose, that the only solution to
the "suppression and realization" of Art lies in the emergence of the TAZ.
I would strongly reject the criticism that the TAZ itself is "nothing but"
a work of art, although it may have some of the trappings. I do suggest
that the TAZ is the only possible "time" and "place" for art to happen for
the sheer pleasure of creative play, and as an actual contribution to the
forces which allow the TAZ to cohere and manifest.
Art in the World of Art has become a commodity; but deeper than that lies
the problem of re-presentation itself, and the refusal of all mediation. In the TAZ art as a commodity will simply become impossible; it will instead
be a condition of life. Mediation is harder to overcome, but the removal
of all barriers between artists and "users" of art will tend toward a condition
in which (as A.K. Coomaraswamy described it) "the artist is not a special
sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist."
In sum: disappearance is not necessarily a "catastrophe"-- except in the
mathematical sense of "a sudden topological change." All the positive gestures sketched here seem to involve various degrees of invisibility rather than
traditional revolutionary confrontation. The "New Left" never really believed
in its own existence till it saw itself on the Evening News. The New Autonomy,
by contrast, will either infiltrate the media and subvert "it" from within--or
else never be "seen" at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but
also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond
the understanding of the State, beyond the State's ability to see.
THE TAZ AS A CONSCIOUS radical tactic will emerge under certain conditions:
- Psychological liberation. That is, we must realize (make real) the moments
and spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual. We must know in what ways we are genuinely oppressed, and also in what
ways we are self- repressed or ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us. WORK, for example, is a far more actual source of misery for
most of us than legislative politics. Alienation is far more dangerous for
us than toothless outdated dying ideologies. Mental addiction to "ideals"--which
in fact turn out to be mere projections of our resentment and sensations
of victimization--will never further our project. The TAZ is not a harbinger
of some pie-in-the-sky Social Utopia to which we must sacrifice our lives
that our children's children may breathe a bit of free air. The TAZ must
be the scene of our present autonomy, but it can only exist on the condition
that we already know ourselves as free beings.
- The counter-Net must expand. At present it reflects more abstraction than actuality. Zines
and BBSs exchange information, which is part of the necessary groundwork
of the TAZ, but very little of this information relates to concrete goods
and services necessary for the autonomous life. We do not live in CyberSpace;
to dream that we do is to fall into CyberGnosis, the false transcendence
of the body. The TAZ is a physical place and we are either in it or not.
All the senses must be involved. The Web is like a new sense in some ways,
but it must be added to the others-- the others must not be subtracted from it, as in some horrible
parody of the mystic trance. Without the Web, the full realization of the
TAZ-complex would be impossible. But the Web is not the end in itself. It's
a weapon.
- The apparatus of Control--the "State"--must (or so we must assume) continue
to deliquesce and petrify simultaneously, must progress on its present course
in which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss
of power. As power "disappears," our will to power must be disappearance.
We've already dealt with the question of whether the TAZ can be viewed "merely"
as a work of art. But you will also demand to know whether it is more than
a poor rat-hole in the Babylon of Information, or rather a maze of tunnels,
more and more connected, but devoted only to the economic dead-end of piratical
parasitism? I'll answer that I'd rather be a rat in the wall than a rat
in the cage--but I'll also insist that the TAZ transcends these categories.
A world in which the TAZ succeeded in putting down roots might resemble the world envisioned by "P.M." in his fantasy novel bolo'bolo. Perhaps the TAZ is a "proto-bolo." But inasmuch as the TAZ exists now, it stands for much more than the mundanity of negativity or countercultural
drop-out- ism. We've mentioned the festal aspect of the moment which is unControlled, and which adheres in spontaneous
self- ordering, however brief. It is "epiphanic"--a peak experience on the
social as well as individual scale.
Liberation is realized struggle--this is the essence of Nietzsche's "self-overcoming." The present
thesis might also take for a sign Nietzsche's wandering. It is the precursor of the drift, in the Situ sense of the derive and Lyotard's definition of driftwork. We can foresee a whole new geography, a kind of pilgrimage-map in which
holy sites are replaced by peak experiences and TAZs: a real science of psychotopography, perhaps to be called "geo-autonomy" or "anarchomancy."
The TAZ involves a kind of ferality, a growth from tameness to wild(er)ness, a "return" which is also a step
forward. It also demands a "yoga" of chaos, a project of "higher" orderings
(of consciousness or simply of life) which are approached by "surfing the
wave-front of chaos," of complex dynamism. The TAZ is an art of life in
continual rising up, wild but gentle--a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler
rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.
Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic
of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics
of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the
entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" we've mentioned lasted for
two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility,
webworking, psychic nomadism--and who knows what we might attain?
--Spring Equinox, 1990
NOT YET A SCIENCE but a proposition: That certain problems in linguistics
might be solved by viewing language as a complex dynamical system or "Chaos
field."
Of all the responses to Saussure's linguistics, two have special interest
here: the first, "antilinguistics," can be traced--in the modern period--from
Rimbaud's departure for Abyssinia; to Nietzsche's "I fear that while we
still have grammar we have not yet killed God"; to dada; to Korzybski's
"the Map is not the Territory"; to Burroughs' cut-ups and "breakthrough
in the Gray Room"; to Zerzan's attack on language itself as representation
and mediation.
The second, Chomskyan Linguistics, with its belief in "universal grammar"
and its tree diagrams, represents (I believe) an attempt to "save" language
by discovering "hidden invariables," much in the same way certain scientists
are trying to "save" physics from the "irrationality" of quantum mechanics.
Although as an anarchist Chomsky might have been expected to side with the
nihilists, in fact his beautiful theory has more in common with platonism
or sufism than with anarchism. Traditional metaphysics describes language
as pure light shining through the colored glass of the archetypes; Chomsky
speaks of "innate" grammars. Words are leaves, branches are sentences, mother
tongues are limbs, language families are trunks, and the roots are in "heaven"...or
the DNA. I call this "hermetalinguistics"--hermetic and metaphysical. Nihilism
(or "HeavyMetalinguistics" in honor of Burroughs) seems to me to have brought
language to a dead end and threatened to render it "impossible" (a great
feat, but a depressing one)- -while Chomsky holds out the promise and hope
of a last- minute revelation, which I find equally difficult to accept.
I too would like to "save" language, but without recourse to any "Spooks,"
or supposed rules about God, dice, and the Universe.
Returning to Saussure, and his posthumously published notes on anagrams
in Latin poetry, we find certain hints of a process which somehow escapes
the sign/signifier dynamic. Saussure was confronted with the suggestion
of some sort of "meta"-linguistics which happens within language rather than being imposed as a categorical imperative from "outside."
As soon as language begins to play, as in the acrostic poems he examined,
it seems to resonate with self- amplifying complexity. Saussure tried to
quantify the anagrams but his figures kept running away from him (as if
perhaps nonlinear equations were involved). Also, he began to find the anagrams everywhere, even in Latin prose. He began to wonder if he were hallucinating--or if
anagrams were a natural unconscious process of parole. He abandoned the project.
I wonder: if enough of this sort of data were crunched through a computer,
would we begin to be able to model language in terms of complex dynamical
systems? Grammars then would not be "innate," but would emerge from chaos
as spontaneously evolving "higher orders," in Prigogine's sense of "creative
evolution." Grammars could be thought of as "Strange Attractors," like the
hidden pattern which "caused" the anagrams--patterns which are "real" but
have "existence" only in terms of the sub-patterns they manifest. If meaning is elusive, perhaps it is because consciousness itself, and therefore language,
is fractal.
I find this theory more satisfyingly anarchistic than either anti-linguistics
or Chomskyanism. It suggests that language can overcome representation and
mediation, not because it is innate, but because it is chaos. It would suggest that all dadaistic experimentation (Feyerabend described
his school of scientific epistemology as "anarchist dada") in sound poetry,
gesture, cut-up, beast languages, etc.--all this was aimed neither at discovering
nor destroying meaning, but at creating it. Nihilism points out gloomily that language "arbitrarily" creates meaning.
Chaos Linguistics happily agrees, but adds that language can overcome language,
that language can create freedom out of semantic tyranny's confusion and
decay.
THE BONNOT GANG WERE vegetarians and drank only water. They came to a bad
(tho' picturesque) end. Vegetables and water, in themselves excellent things--pure
zen really--shouldn't be consumed as martyrdom but as an epiphany. Self-denial
as radical praxis, the Leveller impulse, tastes of millenarian gloom--and
this current on the Left shares an historical wellspring with the neo-puritan
fundamentalism and moralic reaction of our decade. The New Ascesis, whether
practiced by anorexic health-cranks, thin-lipped police sociologists, downtown
straight-edge nihilists, cornpone fascist baptists, socialist torpedoes,
drug-free Republicans...in every case the motive force is the same: resentment.
In the face of contemporary pecksniffian anaesthesia we'll erect a whole
gallery of forebears, heros who carried on the struggle against bad consciousness
but still knew how to party, a genial gene pool, a rare and difficult category
to define, great minds not just for Truth but for the truth of pleasure, serious but not sober, whose sunny disposition makes them not sluggish
but sharp, brilliant but not tormented. Imagine a Nietzsche with good digestion.
Not the tepid Epicureans nor the bloated Sybarites. Sort of a spiritual
hedonism, an actual Path of Pleasure, vision of a good life which is both
noble and possible, rooted in a sense of the magnificent over-abundance of reality.
Shaykh Abu Sa'id of Khorassan
Charles Fourier
Brillat-Savarin
Rabelais
Abu Nuwas
Aga Khan III
R. Vaneigem
Oscar Wilde
Omar Khayyam
Sir Richard Burton
Emma Goldman
add your own favorites
As for us, He has appointed the job of permanent unemployment.
If he wanted us to work, after all,
He would not have created this wine.
With a skinfull of this, Sir,
would you rush out to commit economics?
--Jalaloddin Rumi, Diwan-e Shams
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A flask of Wine, A Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears
To-day of past Regrets and future Fears--
Tomorrow?--Why, Tomorrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.
Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits--and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
--Omar FitzGerald
History, materialism, monism, positivism, and all the "isms" of this world
are old and rusty tools which I don't need or mind anymore. My principle
is life, my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely for to embrace
my life tragically.
You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you
will be ready (God, what an endless wait!) I won't mind going along with
you for awhile. But when you'll stop, I shall continue on my insane and
triumphal way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing! Any
society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any
society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild & virgin
thoughts--they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts
of rebellion!
I shall be among them!
And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows:
"So turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what
hides in yourselves; bring it to light; show yourselves!"
Because every person; who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was
mysteriously hidden therein; is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which
can exist under the sun! All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy
of the tramps, the inaccessibles, the uniques, the rulers over the ideal,
and the conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances.
So, come on iconoclasts, forward!
"Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!"
--Renzo Novatore Arcola, January, 1920
PIRATE RANT
Captain Bellamy
Daniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote
what became the first standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most effective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen,
and transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling
of class inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy
made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize.
The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join
the pirates.
I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any
one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must
sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy,
and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men
have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage
otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn
them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel
of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there
is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth,
and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you
not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?
When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the
laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:
You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as
much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail
of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience
tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow
superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.
THE DINNER PARTY
The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found
in the parlor. In the elegant and refined reunions of the aristocratic classes
there is none of the impertinent interference of legislation. The Individuality
of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation
is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are formed according to attraction.
They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through the operation of
the same subtile and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference pervades
all classes, and the most perfect harmony, ever yet attained, in complex
human relations, prevails under precisely those circumstances which Legislators
and Statesmen dread as the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion.
If there are laws of etiquette at all, they are mere suggestions of principles
admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, by each individual mind.
Is it conceivable that in all the future progress of humanity, with all
the innumerable elements of development which the present age is unfolding,
society generally, and in all its relations, will not attain as high a grade
of perfection as certain portions of society, in certain special relations,
have already attained?
Suppose the intercourse of the parlor to be regulated by specific legislation.
Let the time which each gentleman shall be allowed to speak to each lady
be fixed by law; the position in which they should sit or stand be precisely
regulated; the subjects which they shall be allowed to speak of, and the
tone of voice and accompanying gestures with which each may be treated,
carefully defined, all under pretext of preventing disorder and encroachment
upon each other's privileges and rights, then can any thing be conceived
better calculated or more certain to convert social intercourse into intolerable
slavery and hopeless confusion?
--S. Pearl Andrews The Science of Society
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