No.490720
>One of the most unsavory examples of lifestyle anarchism is Hakim Bey’s (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson’s) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone […] the call for autonomy is taken to lengths so absurd as to seemingly parody a self-absorbed and self-absorbing ideology.
>T.A.Z. presents itself as a state of mind, an ardently antirational and anticivilizational mood, in which disorganization is conceived as an art form and graffiti supplants programs. The Bey (his pseudonym is the Turkish word for ‘chief’ or ‘prince’) minces no words about his disdain for social revolution: ‘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’ (TAZ, p.128).
>‘The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla 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’ (TAZ, p.101). In a TAZ we can ‘realize many of our true Desires, even if only for a season, a brief Pirate Utopia, a warped free-zone in the old Space/Time continuum)’ (TAZ, p.62).
>So transient, so evanescent, so ineffable is a TAZ in contrast to the formidably stable State and bourgeoisie that ‘as soon as the TAZ is named … it must vanish, it will vanish … only to spring up again somewhere else’ (TAZ, p.101). A TAZ, in effect, is not a revolt but precisely a simulation, an insurrection as lived in the imagination of a juvenile brain, a safe retreat into unreality. Indeed, declaims the Bey: ‘We recommend [the TAZ] because it can provide the quality of enhancement without necessarily leading to violence & martyrdom’ (TAZ, p.101). More precisely, like an Andy Warhol ‘happening,’ a TAZ is a passing event, a momentary orgasm, a fleeting expression of the ‘will to power’ that is, in fact, conspicuously powerless in its capacity to leave any imprint on the individual’s personality, subjectivity, and even self-formation, still less on shaping events and reality.
>Perhaps no better description can be given of T.A.Z.’s message than the one that appeared in Whole Earth Review, whose reviewer emphasizes that the Bey’s pamphlet is ‘quickly becom[ing] the countercultural bible of the 1990s … While many of Bey’s concepts share an affinity with the doctrines of anarchism,’ the Review reassures its yuppie clientele that he pointedly departs from the usual rhetoric about overthrowing the government. Instead, he prefers the mercurial nature of ‘uprisings,’ which he believes provide ‘moments of intensity [that can] give shape and meaning to the entirety of life.’ These pockets of freedom, or temporary autonomous zones, enable the individual to elude the schematic grids of Big Government and to occasionally live within realms where he or she can briefly experience total freedom. (emphasis added)
>The bourgeoisie has nothing whatever to fear from such lifestyle declamations. With its aversion for institutions, mass-based organizations, its largely subcultural orientation, its moral decadence, its celebration of transience, and its rejection of programs, this kind of narcissistic anarchism is socially innocuous, often merely a safety valve for discontent toward the prevailing social order. With the Bey, lifestyle anarchism takes flight from all meaningful social activism and a steadfast commitment to lasting and creative projects by dissolving itself into kicks, postmodernist nihilism, and a dizzying Nietzschean sense of elitist superiority.
>The price that anarchism will pay if it permits this swill to displace the libertarian ideals of an earlier period could be enormous. The Bey’s egocentric anarchism, with its post-modernist withdrawal into individualistic ‘autonomy,’ Foucauldian ‘limit experiences,’ and neo-Situationist ‘ecstasy,’ threatens to render the very word anarchism politically and socially harmless — a mere fad for the titillation of the petty bourgeois of all ages.