As easily noticed by comparing the project and the final essay, we restricted our final work to a few suggested investigations. Ideally one reviewed essay must incorporate the other suggested aspects, even because the interviews provided us with interesting material for that. However, for now we choose simplicity.
Bellow we have the plan of action which guided us to produce the article “SEARCHING FOR TAZs AMONG FACTORY WORKERS: LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM HOLES IN A ROUTINE BOUND WORLD”, also available here in the blog.
TEMPTATIVE ANALYSIS MODEL:
I suppose by now everybody may have read the suggested text.
In a very unclear language and through examples and illustrations which may be not fully familiar to most of us,
what Bey tries to show is that freedom can be achieved by ways which are not bonded to the traditional concepts of revolution. In fact, he points that traditional freedom struggle based on revolution are useless. He points that the main power struggle among sensitive beings (because it is not only restricted to the humans beings domination within theirselfs, but also envolves others species) didn’t lead the fighters to a world similar to their goals, but, instead, it just reshaped the reality of domination in other therms, eventually even worst.
He points that what bond us to this reality is basically the language, the methodology, action and perception patterns which conducts traditional movements against the system and, for this reason, drive one to a reality of continuously domination. For this he condemns the revolution concept. He also condemns revolution for its reticence, its millenary message which happens to drive individuals to a comfortable waiting behavior.
When pointing the failure of revolution in history he also points that attempts of invisibility and blossoming uprisings proved to be way more successful in the reality transformation. In a first moment it can be questioned by the simple fact that any uprising has existed continuously until now. However, Bey points that the merit of uprising and invisibility is exactly their non-dependence of perpetual structuralization of their bodies. More than this, their victorious role is to overcome language bonds and provide the sensitive actors a possibility of acting and experimenting linguistics, aesthetics and to freely express and experiment their flows and impetus.
According to Bey, the success of this tactics would lay in the fact that such achievements depend on buildings which took place in realities non-perceived by the domination world. For this, the society would be weakened by the loose of their dependent variable, the language actors and aesthetics performers. Complementary, this tactic would proof victorious because their ethos would work as an invisibility cloak which the modernity values would not be able to percept and, for consequence, would not be able to destroy.
Through his historic approach Bey sets the Pirates islands in the overseas world as a place of autonomous zones fostered in the scientific failures of the scientific society. Passing ahead time and evaluating the current situation, Bey points that nowadays there are no more virgin islands, that the science perception of world has no more unexplored caves to build secret freedom shelters. For this reason he points that the language shifting and the aesthetics and perceptions regarding basic institutions must be extremely critical and creative to foster observe and engage new meanings behind the traditional maping of what would be reality. According to him, this effort would highlight and give raise to what he calls Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).
We will, them, explain more properly the ontology and the characteristics of the TAZ using the factory reality as a case study. First of all, however, we must, clear that the non-continuity of these events are not a proof of failure. In fact, the mere shifting towards another perception of time, without beginning and end, is already a victorious step towards a world which is not in the scientific map and clock offered by the reality.
We must also say to the class that Bey didn’t mean to offer any theory, but, instead, an essay, attempt, suggestion, almost a poetic fancy, which is just fully comprehensible through action. For this, our presentation will also try to scape patterns and, as an attempt to settle a space of freedom we would invite all to sit somewhere outside the class in a circle while somebody would serve tea and biscuits. This because, according to Beys, freedom to be achieved… or better, freedom to be communicated, needs a previous experimentation of the issues to which it refers.
Still following Beys challenge to observe the world through non-strictly meditative lenses, we will present his theory altogether with the workers experiences which show the practical basis of his thesis. Putting together abstract ideas (and not theories) and practice we will expose a sum of glimpses of this aesthetical irruption of freedom which, according to him, is the only possibility in the modern reality. And also, is the necessary step to make one aware of the possibilities of freedom.
We also explain in anticipation that his text is full of illustrative examples which goes from shamanism, religion and theater to deep philosophy, which is a way of speaking about another reality without contaminating it by our reality linguistic shapes and structures.
NOTE OF ORIENTATION TO THE GROUP:
The brief above brings ideas to be explained and, at the same time, contrasted, or compared, with the reality observed among the workers. Whenever it looks to be interesting, I added some question which I expect to raise answers which will be linked to the point being explained.
I expect and encourage any other questions to be added. As well as any other suggestion of interpretation of Bay’s ideas.
Also, it would be interesting if any colleague could link Beys theory with other authors. It was mentioned that feminist and local Indians ideas would be interesting. I totally agree, and wait for those suggestions. While suggesting such other contributions, please, also suggest possible questions which could drive to answers somehow related to the issue.
BRIEF OF THE TEXT: “THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE”, BY HAKIM BEY.
· The text takes piracy experiences in the overseas world to show that spaces of freedom and different patterns of civilization can occur by other means than the idea of revolution itself.
· He contextualizes the idea piracy to the reality where Cyberpunks praise the possibility of building freedom shelters through the tech development by marginal meanings and purposes.
o The decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living.
· Besides taking in account some Cyberpunk propositions, Bey believes that modern technology makes this kind of autonomy a romantic dream.
o Instead of Piracy Zones we should look for real possibilities of Autonomous Zones.
§ Modernity imposes a pattern of reality established according to generalizing patterns – everything must be structural and universal – rather than individual possibilities of reality experiences, of illegal freedom.
QUESTION: ASK ABOUT HOW THEY FEEL THEY ARE TREATED BY THEIR BOSSES. HOW THEY PERCEPT THEIR BOSSES DIFFERENTIATE THEM FROM THE OTHERS, IF THERE IS SUCH DIFFERENTIATION. ALSO ASK HOW THEY PERCEPT THEIRSELVES. THE AIM HERE IS TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR INDISTINCTION PERCEPTION.
§ So, to contest reality as it is we must shift the speech to a non-structural speech in which even the transition path is not defined on modernity patterns.
· 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?
QUESTION: TRY TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR EXPECTATIONS IN THIS ISSUE
o ANSWER: Logic and emotion unite to condemn such a position. 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.
§ Here he is basically saying that we must experience freedom to fight for it, to build a structural general reality we must first know it in a individual level.
§ Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it.
· In the line of some pedagogical thoughts like Paulo Freire’s one.
QUESTION: TO ILUSTRATE THIS, WE COULD ASK THEM ABOUT WHAT THEY CONSIDER TO BE GOOD QUALITY OF LIFE. I’M EXPECTING THEM TO SAY IT AS SOME GENERALIZATION OF PUNCTUAL EXPERIENCES THEY HAVE HAD WITH GOOD FOOD, HOUSING, ETC… WHAT PROOFS THAT ONE JUST CAN REALIZE A DREM WHICH S/HE HAS ALREADY DREAMED WITH.
§ The realization of the TAZ begins with the simple act of realization.
· To say that “I will not be free till all human (or all sentiment creatures) are free” is simply to abdicate our humanity.
QUESTION: POSE THIS QUESTION TO THEM
· The TAZ is not more than an essay (“attempt”), a suggestion, almost a poetic fantasy… understood in action.
QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY NOW ANY EXAMPLE OF THINGS WHICH ARE LIKE THIS, JUST UNDERSTANDABLE BY THE ENGAGEMENT… AS A WAY TO HIGHLIGHT SOME CONCIOUS ABOUT THIS KNOLEDGE BIGGER THAN TRADITIONAL SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
· Instead of the generalized and strict ruled revolution concept he suggest that shifts toward freedom come from UPRISINGS;
o 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 proof 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 vicius circle.
QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY REMEMBER ANY CASE OF PROTEST WHICH FAILED, HOWEVER, LEFT A GOOD MEMORY ON THEM. GOOD TIMES WHICH HAPPENED DUE TO ANY KIND OF UPRISING THEY TOOK PART. TRY TO HIGHLIGHT THE FESTIVE FEATURE OF SUCH CASES.
“The slogan ‘Revolutionn’ 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.
QUESTION: ASK THEM TO TELL A HISTORIC PERIOD, OF THE COUNTRY, OF THEIR FAMILIES, ANY KINF OF HISTORICAL SPEECH. AFTER THIS WE ASK ABOUT THINGS THEY ‘FORGOT MENTIONING’. WHATEVER THEY REMEMBER THEM MUST BE USED TO PUZZLE THEM WITH THE FACT THAT HISTORY IS A PATTERN TO CALCULATE TIME AND SO, IF THERE’S ‘LOST’ HISTORY, THAN THERE’S LOST TIME. MUST BE DONNE IN A VERY COMPREHENSIBLE LANGUAGE.
· If the State IS History, as it claims to be, than the insurrection is the forbidden moment, an untorgivable denial of the dialetic – 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’… the shaman returns, but hings have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred – a difference is made.
QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF REALITY OTHER THAN THE STATES. AFTER THIS, ASK THEM TO DEFINE ANY STATE, INDIA OR WHATEVER. AFTER THEY DO SO, TELL THEM THAT, AS WELL AS IN THEIR PERSONAL HISTORY WHICH NEGLECTED SOME FACTS, THE HISTORY OF THE STATE IS ALSO MISSING SOMETHINGS… AND DROP THE QUESTION: IS THIS MISSING HISTORY SOMETHING OTHER THAN STATES?
· Are we to abandon the hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuity?
o The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world.
1. Revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream
QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEY CAN QUOTE ANY REVOLUTION QHICH ACHIEVED THE OBJECTIVES
2. 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 vast undertaking.
a. The scientific era has developed powerful weapons against freedom fighters performing their acts in the modernist stage.
i. The field of positive knowledge is too sureveilled and known by the modernity civilization.
ii. The traditional geography and resources are favorable to the system permanence.
· Suggests that we should try shifting reality through uprisings, and says that fostering uprisings through questioning basically assumptions of modern language is the best option.
o For this he says that we should point in the direction of what he calls TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones).
§ The TAZ denies even the time perception imposed by modernity
QUESTION: DRIVE THEM TO SPEAK ABOUT THEIR WORKING ROUTINE AND ABOUT SOME SPECIAL DAY IN THEIR LIFES, OR ABOUT WEEKENDS BROADLY, IN A WAY TO HIGHLIGHT THAT TIME SOMETIMES SEEMS NOT TO PASS AT ALL, AND OTHER TIMES JUST PASSES VERY QUICKLY.
· 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. 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 relatively peace.
QUESTION: QUERY ABOUT POSSIBLE PATTERNS OF NON-ROUTINE CELEBRATIONS WICH TAKE PART IN THEIR LIFES AND HIGHLIGHT IT OCCURRENCE IN DIFFERENT PLACES AND LOCALS.
o Says that the mere fact of struggling against the state creates a space for State performance. By so, he suggests that we must abandon the state rather than directly struggling against it.
o Contextualizing to our work, we can say that Bey buys the idea of Society of Spetacle, created by Guy Debord, according to which the modernity is ephemerus and consists only of domination through aesthetical performances not linked to content or efforts to give raise to eventual contents believed to exist.
QUESTION: COLECT IMPRESSIONS ABOUT LIFE SHOWING THAT THEY FEEL LIKE JUST STAYING IN THE SURFACE, AS IF THEY FEEL THEY COULD GO DEEPER IN, E.G., RELATIONSHIPS, JOY, ETC… (WE COULD ASK ABOUT THE NON MONETARY REWARDING THEY RECEIVE FOR THEIR WORKING, THE FRIENDSHIP AMONG MOST WORKERS, THE PLEASURE THEY ARE ABOUT TO HAVE ON WEEKENDS, ETC…)
§ This way, we could argue that the intense experimentations of TAZ is a way to abandon the stage and sink in the realities neglected by modern language.
QUESTION: TRY TO HIGHLIGHT HOW THE FRIENDSHIP SEEMS TO BE BIGGER IN TAZ MOMENTS. HAVING IDENTIFIED SOME TAZ IN THEIR LIFES, INQUIRE THEM ABOUT FEELINGS OF TRUSTNESS AND FRIENDSHIP, ASKING WETHER THEY INCREASE IN MOMENTS OF TAZ OR IN THE TRADITIONAL ROUTINE MEETINGS.
· What we want to highlight in the factory workers is that: “Perhaps certain small TAZ have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves – because they never intersect with the spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation”.
QUESTION: BE AWARE TO NOTICE IF OCASIONALY ANY TAZ EXPERIENCE FITS IN THIS MODEL.
· TAZ is not to play the Spetacle Society theater.
· Getting 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.
QUESTION: HIGHLIGHT THOSE ASPECTS IN THEIR NARRATIVE OF OCCURRED TAZs.
· TAZ is a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.
· 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.
o Also needed in order to abandon state. State is the weapons one uses to fight.
· REASONS FOR TAZ RATHER THAN REVOLUTION
o NEGATIVE ONES:
1. Uprising represents a far more interesting possibility, from the standard of psychology of liberation, than all the ‘successful’ revolutions of burgoisie, communists, fascists, etc
a. 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.
QUESTION: TRY TO HIGHLIGHT HOW THEY FEEL IN TAZ MOMENTS, AS TO SHOW THE FREEDOM SELF-PERCEPTIO.
2. The Closure of Map: There is no more freedom resorts within the modern language itself (traditional geography, politics, etc…)
QUESTION: TRY TO SHOW THAT THE LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTIONS BY WHICH THEY REACHED THEIRE TAZ WAS NOT THE TRADITIONAL ONE. HIGHLIGHT AVERY KIND OF ART AND UNCONVENCIONAL SPEECH PRESENT IN THE MOMENT OF THEIR TAZ (ANY FEELING THAT DROVE THEM, MUSIC THAT MARKED THE MOMENT, A BEAUTIFUL IMAGE THEY HAVE OF THEIRSELFS, DESIRES WHICH MOTIVATED THEM, ETC…).
· Revolution is closed, but insurgency is open
· PSYCHOTOPOLOGY(-TOPOGRAPHY) is the art of downsizing for potential arts
o Process of exploring different psychological perception revealing unexplored possible realities, as a way to map the non-scientific shelter of the world which could host ‘invisible’ freedom experiences.
o TAZ unfolds within the fractal dimension invisible to the cartography of Control
§ We can quote the Zapatistas Uprising in Mexico, where their ideas are expressed through folklore and child stories of invented new geographies, color and other ‘basic’ stand points or the modern building.
QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT POSSIBLE CONDITION TO THE IRUPTIONS OF FESTIVE UNEXPECTED ROUTINE-BRACKER MOMENTS – TAZ. THE EFFORT IS TO SHOW THAT THEY ALSO HAVE THIS ALTERNATIVE MAP, THAT THEY ALSO SEE PLACES, SPACES AND TIMES WITH A DIFFERENT PERCEPTION OF IT, WHAT DRIVE THEM TO LOCALIZE THOSE REGIONS AS POSSIBLE TAZ AREAS.
o POSITIVE ONES:
1. Natural anthropology of the TAZ: Paleolitic ‘Band Model’ (based on abundance and natural affinity group) VS Neolitical nuclear Family Invention (based on scarcity and hierarchical imposition, settled by genetics)
a. Quotes the “more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band”.
QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT THE GROUPS GENERALY PRESENT IN THEIR TAZ, MAINLY IN THOSE LINKED TO THEIR WORK. TRYING TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR BAND BEHAVIOUR, THEIR AFFINITY FREE APROXIMATION AND THE IDEA OF ABUNDANCE WHICH GENERALY TAKES PART IN TAZ MOMENTS. WE CAN ARGUE THAT, BESIDES THE BROADLY AND GENERAL POOVERTY AMONG THEM, THERE IS ALSO MOMENTS WHERE THEY BEHAVE AS IF THEY WERE IN ABUNDANCE, BEING NOT-SELFISH, OFFERING AND SHARING WITH PLEASURE. JUST LIKE IN PARTIES WHERE WE OFFER AVERITHING AND ‘WASTE’ IN PROPORTIONS WHICH WE NORMALLY COULDN’T.
2. The TAZ as a festival: The ancient concepts of jubilee and saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lay outside the scope of ‘profane time’.
a. By the middle ages, nearly a third of the year was given over the 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’ètat, a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a clockwork universe. The death of the festival.
b. The media invites 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.
QUESTION: TRY TO COMPARE THE HAPPINESS AND FEELING OF FREEDOM IN TAZ SPONTANEOUSLY BORN AND ON SETTLED FESTIVE DAYS AND ORGANIZED PARTIES.
c. Peter Andrew said that “dinner parties are the seed of the new society taking shape within the shell of the old”.
i. In parties we recognize some kind of humanism as natural human identification and attraction which can be explained by most distinct modes, both them pointing to the blossoming of intense human feelings experiences.
1. Stirner ‘Union of Egoists’; Kropotkin ‘Mutual Aid’; and Bataille ‘Economy of Excess’.
3. Psychic Nomadism (Rootless Cosmopolitanism): “The Death of God”, in some ways a de-centering of the entire “European” project, opened a multi-perspective post-ideological worldview able to move ‘rootlesly’ 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.
a. 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’s place is as good as another”.
i. We kind of loose the capacity to evaluate how comfortable we could be in the other realities. We gain the ‘insect view’ but loose our judge capacity.
b. God’s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time – in the form of Capitalism, Fascism and Comunism, for exemple – that there’s still a lot of ‘creative destruction’ to be carried out of post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally ‘enemies’) of the old Consensus.
QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT OTHER WAYS OF LIFE FEASIBLE TO THEM, LIKE STREET BEGGERS, RURAL WORKERS, TRIBAL LIFE, ETC… AND TRY TO SHOW HOW THEY ARE RESILIENTLY ACOMODATED IN THEIR OWN WORLD, AS I EXPECT THEM TO ANSWER (IN CASE THEY DON’T KNOW ANY POSSIBILITY OF LIFE THEY COULD HAVE, TELL THEM ABOUT HIPPIE LIFE, ETC…).
c. 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 the NET, specially 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.
QUESTION: ASK THEM TO DESCRIBE THEIR FACTORY ACCORDING TO BRIEF STORIES WHICH RELATE THEM TO EVERY PART OF IT, AS TO SHOW THAT SOME AREAS ARE BIGGER OR SMALLER ACCORDING TO THE FEELINGS INVOLVING IT. WHAT WE ARE INTERESTED IN HERE ARE SIMPLE THINGS, LIKE, A STORY OCCURRED IN THE LAUNCHERY, IN THE BATHROOM, IN THE WORKING PLACE, IN THE WAY OUT, ETC…
4. The NET and the WEB: WEB, or Anti-NET, refers to the Marginal links struggling against the established wires – NET.
a. 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.
b. 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 No Place Place.
i. The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself - it will come to life whether in a cave or in 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 a 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 real meaning of Cyberpunk as I read it).
c. The TAZ hs 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 WEB is a quantum jump for the TAZ.
d. The full potential of non-hierarchic information networking logically leads to the computer as the tool par excellence.
QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT OCCASION EHRE THEY ‘MISUSED’ THINGS OF THEIR WORK OR OTHER TOOLS TO ACHIEVE MOMENTS OF ROUTINE-BREAK. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR HERE IS, FOR EXAMPLE, THE USE OF FACTORY SPACES FOR A SMALL PARTY OR CELEBRATION; THE USE OF A FACTORY TO COMMUNICATE A MESSAGE TO THE GROUP OF LABOR OR, IF IT HAPPENS TO BE, THE STEALING OF SOME THINGS FOR TAZ POURPOSES.
QUESTION: ASK ABOUT THEIR LINK WITH TECHNOLOGYM AMINLY COMPUTER, TO EVALUATE WHETHER THIS SPECIFIC TREND OF TAZ IS MISSING OR NOT IN THE FACTORY LABOURS EXPERIENCE.
· When tracking the ontology of the uprising movements which drove to the current TAZ shape, he denies any sort of encyclopaedism and, instead, adopted a scatter-shot technique, a mosaic of glimpses, beginning quite arbitrary with the 16th-17th centuries and the settlement of the New World.
o We will also use this interview technique with the workers.
o Proves, along the history of uprisings and marginal freedom building, that the aesthetics of the autonomy marginalization exerces a convincingly and attractive influence all over society.
QUESTION: ASK THEM IF THEI NPOTICED THEIR TAZ SEEMED ATRACTIVE TO OUTSIDERS.
QUESTION: IF SOME OF THEM EVER WERE LEFT BACK IN ANY TAZ ENJOYED BY THE OTHERS, TRY TO HIGHLIGHTS THE WILL THEY FELT TO TAKE PART.
QUESTION: QUOTE SOME TAZ EXAMPLES AND NOTICE IF THEY FEEL ATRACTED SOMEHOW.
o Quotes the autonomous zones of:
§ Buccaneers; Maroons; Ishmaels; Moors; Ramapaughs; Kalliaks
· Aims to prove the Nieztchean “Will to Power as Disappearance”.
o 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’.
o The end of the speech depends on the shutting up of the speaker.
§ Why bother to confront a ‘power’ wich has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation?
· I noted some similarity with the new-French School of IR.
o “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 deathfreack nihilistic interpretation of Theory, mine intends to mine it for useful strategies in the always-ongoing ‘revolution of everyday life’.
o Zerzan and Black have independently noted certain ‘elements of Refusal’ 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 institutions.
QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR EXPECTATION IN CASE THEY DISAPEAR. WHAT THEY EXPECT WOULD HAPPEN SO. WHAT THEY BELIEVE WOULD HAPPEN IN THE FACTORY THEY WORK FOR, IN THEIR FAMILY, IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD, IN THE SOCIETY AS A HOLE.
QUESTION: AFTER THE LAST QUESTIONS, ASK THEM WHAT THEY BELIEVE WOULD HELP IF MORE PEOPLE LIKE HIM STARTED DISAPEARING. HIGHLIGHT THE WAY S/HE REACTS TO THE PERCEPTION THAT INVISIBILITY CAN THREATEN THE STATE.
o E.G:
è THE QUESTIONS ABOVE WILL TRY TO SHOW WHETHER THIS VANISHMENT IS ALREADY OCCURING IN THEIR LIFES AS A NATURAL OUTCOME OF THE WORLDS POWER DOMINATION REALITY.
1. Voluntary Illiteracy: Home-schooling and craft-apprenticeship, like truancy, result in an absence.
QUESTION: OF COURSE THIS PEOPLE WON’T REALLY CHOOSE ILLITERACY IN A CLASSIC WAY… THEIR SOONS AND DAUGHTERS DON’T STUDY BECOUSE THEY DON’T HAVE MEANS. HOWEVER, WE SHOULD TALK ABOUT THE TRADITIONAL INSTITUTION OF EDUCATIONS AND THEIR PERSONAL BELIEFS OF WHAT IS ESSENTIAL TO THEIR SOONS DEVELOPMENT, HIGHLIGHTING THE SITUATIONS WHERE THEY VALORIZE THE POSSIBILITIES OF ‘TEACHING’ THEIRSELFS SO THEIR SPRINGS.
2. Not voting (‘Apathy’): Networking as an alternative to politics, on-hierarchic organization.
QUESTION: ASK ABOUT THEIR POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR, NOT PROPERLY THEIR POSITION IN THE LEFT-RIGHT AXIS, BUT ABOUT HOW HAPPY AND STIMULATED THEY FEEL TO GET INFORMATION ABOUT POLITICS, TO TRUST IN POLITICIANS AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND TO PROPERLY VOTE. HIGHLIGHT WHETHER THEIR POLITICAL ACTS ARE SOURCES OF FEAR AND IMPOSED TRADITION OR REALLY POLITICAL IMPETUS. THE IDEA IS TO TAKE OF THE MASK WHICH HIDDE AN EVENTUAL APATHY RELATED TO POLITICS.
3. Refusal to Work: Can take the forms of absenteeism, on job-drunkness, sabotage, and sheer inattention… or more creative alternatives, such as: self-employment, participation in the black economy and ‘lavoro nero’, welfare scams and other criminal options, pot farming, etc.
QUESTION: IN A VERY SENSITIVE WAY, ASK THEM ABOUT THEIR INVOLVEMENT EITH EVERY ONE OF THOSE KINDS OF ACTIVITIES. NOT PROPERLY BY POINTING THE NAMES, BUT, FOR EXAMPLE, ASKING IF THEY HAVE SOME COMPLEMENTARY SOURCE OF MONEY AND FITING IN THIS CASES. THE CASES OF SABOTAGE, DRUNKNESS AND SHEER INATENTION DEMANDS EVEN MORE CONFIDENCE AND SKILLS OF THE INTERVIEWER. ALSO KEEP SPACE FOR ANY OTHER KIND OF NON-TRADITIONAL EXPERIENCE RELATING TO THE WORK ROUTINE.
MOST IMPORTANTE QUESTIONS FOR OUR WORK BECOUSE IT IS DIRECTLY FOCUSED IN THE WORK FIELD.
ð Activities which are more or less ‘invisible’ compared tp traditional leftist confrontational tactics such as the general strike.
4. Refusal to Church: Non authoritarian forms of spirituality.
QUESTION: COMPARATIVELY ASK ABOUT THEIR INSTITUTIONALIZED FAITH ACTS AND THOSE THEY TOOKED BY THEIRSELFS OR AMONG FRINDS, WITHOUT THE INSTITUTIONAL INTERVENTION. TRY TO HIGHLIGHT IN WHICH CASE THEY FEEL MORE FREE AND ALSO TO MEASURE THE EXTEND OF WHICH ONE IN THEIR LIFES
5. Refusal to Home: Homelesness as an alternative or, instead, more creatively Hobos and similar trends.
QUESTION: SEE IF ONE OF THE WORKERS HAS A MIGRATION STORY AND, IF SO, TRY TO GO BEYOND THE STRICLTLY MATERIAL CAUSES OF THAT AND HIGHLIGHT THEIR SELF PERCEPTION OF HAPINESS AND FREEDOM DUE TO THIS, MEASURING THE INFLUENCE OF COGNITIVE ASPECTS IN THEIR DECISION OF MOOVING (THE MOOVE CAN BE FROM HOME, NEIBORHOOD, CITY OR COUNTRY). ALSO ASK THOSE WHO NEVER MOOVED ABOUT HIPOTHETICAL SITUATIONS OF MOVVING, AND EVEN OF MOOVING FOR PLACES WHICH ARE NOT REALLY BETTER, JUST TO MEASURE HOW THEY WELCOME THE IDEA OF CHANGING HOME.
6. Refusal of Family: Divorce situations are the most obvious when the reasons are self pleasure, however, the family identification with affinity groups is a parallel to family which, somehow, expresses the unsatisfaction with family.
QUESTION: OF COURSE THEY WON’T EXPRESS THEIR FAMILIES UNSATISFACTIONS IN A BRIEF INTERVIEW. WE CAN TRY, ASK ABOUT HOME AND TRY TO GET SOME INFORMATIONS ABOUT HOW CONFORTABLE THEY FEEL AT HOME. HOWEVER, WE MAY GET MORE POSITIVE ANSWER BY COMPARING THEIR EXITMENT WHILE TALKING ABOUT AFFINITY GROUPS AND AWHILE TALKING ABOUT FAMILY… THIS WAY WE CAN TRY TO MEASURE THE IMPORTANCE OF THOSE REALITIES IN THEIR LIFES.
7. Refusal of Arts: Theoretically it is an art which removes itself from History and even from Market. However, he asks whether it is possible.
QUESTION: ASK THEM ABOUT BEAUTIFUL AESTHETICS THEY MAY POINT IN THEIR TAZ HISTORIES, LIKE MUSICS SONG BY THEIRSELFS, LANDSCAPES WHICH MARKED THEIR STORYES, TASTES AND SMELLS THEY REMIND IN THE TAZ STORIES. THAN ASK ABOU TRADITIONAL MARKET-HISTORIC ART, QUOTE, FOR EXAMPLE, POPULAR SINGERS FROM THE RADIO, NOVELS, TV SHOWS AND OTHER COMERCIAL EXAMPLES, AND TRY TO GET THE INTENSITY THEY GET AFECTED BY THE A-HISTORIC ART AND BY THE TRADITIONAL ONE.
QUESTION: BEFORE GIVING ANY DEFINITION OF ART, TRY TO ASK THEM ABOUT THINGS WHICH MAKE THEY FEEL MORE CONFORTABLE OR DRIVE THEM TO DISTANT THOUGHTS. TRY TO MAKE THEM SPEACK ABOUT THE ART PRESENT IN THE TAZ THEY QUOTED BEFORE.
ð “I believe, or 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”.
ð In the TAZ, art as a commodity will simply become impossible; it will instead be a condition of life.
ð Mediation is hard to overcome but the suppression of barriers between artists and users of art will tend toward a condition in which ‘the artist is not a special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist’ (Coomaraswamy).
ð The disappearance of the artist IS the suppression and realization of art, in Situationist terms.
8. Chaos Linguistics: Language should be viewed as a complex dynamical system of “Chaos field”.
QUESTION: ALL OVER THE INTERVIEW NOTICE THE LANGUAGE PARTICULARITIES OF THEM, INQUIRING THAM ABOUT SOME SPECIFIC LANGUAGES THEY MAY USE, TECHNICAL WORDS USED IN THEIR ROUTINE AND THE MOS KEY WORDS USED TO DEFINE IMPORTANTE PATTERNS OF THEIR LIFES AND ALSO USED TO DESCRIBE THEIR FEELINGS DURING TAZs. AFTER THIS WE MAY ARRANGE THEIR PERCEPTION TRENDS IN THE TWO TRADITIONAL LINGUISTIC VIEWS AND, IF THERE IS STILL UNCOMPREHENSION, WE MAY USE BEYS LINGUISTIC CHAOS THEORY.
ð Two possible answers to Saussure’s linguistics of sign/signifier:
a) Antiliguistics: Rimbaud; Nieztche; Dadaism; Korzybski’s; Burroughs; Zerzan.
b) Chonskyan Linguistics: Belief in a universal grammar depending on hidden invariables (Bey considers to be mataphisical).
ð Bey points to a third answer which takes the believe that meaning is elusive and, therefore, language is fractal and, for that, linguistic is not established or created, but a Chaos in which creation and reality are not pure categories and exist or not according to the links one choose to establish among selected fractions.
ð This way, it is suggested that language can overcome representation and mediation, not because it is innate but because it is chaos.
ð This points that the Dadaist experience was not destroying or discovering language, but creating it.
ð The language perception behind the concept of TAZ points that if freedom can exist than it does exist – but perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which we so far have not learned to perceive.
· Sets music as the organization principle of TAZ.
o Quotes that, when escapade beyond the frontier proved impossible, the era of revolutionary urban Communes began in Europe.
o Quotes Fiume
o Quotes Munich Soviet (or Council Republic)/ also called critically by “Cofeehouse Republic” – 1919.
QUESTION: HIGHLIGHT ALL THE OCCASION IN WHICH THEY CAN’T EXPLAIN THE INTERNAL COHERENCE OF THEIR TAZs, BUT JUST JUSTIFY THE PLEASURE OF IT BY LOOKING THE BROAD PORTRAIT. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BEY MEANS BY MUSIC ORGANIZATION.
· Reserves a special role to be played by the perception of time.
QUESTION: ASK ABOUT THEIR PERCEPTION OF TIME DURING THEIR TAZs. IF IT PASSED THE SAME WAY AS WHEN THEY ARE WORKING, ETC…
· 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 traditional 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 ‘seem’ 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.
QUESTION: INQUIRE THAN RATHER STRONG FEELINGS IN WHICH THEY ARE VERY CONFIDENT DEPEND ON THE OTHER APROVAL. FOR EXAMPLE, IF LOVE, FRIENDSHIP AND FEAR NEEDS CONFIRMATION FROM OTHERS. THAN ASK THEM ABOUT WHETHER FREEDOM AS A FEELING ALSO NEED TO BE CONFIRMED BY OTHERS (I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT OF THIS ANSWER, BUT IT MAY BE INTERESTING).
· We’ve mentioned the festal aspect of the moment which is UnControled, and which adheres in spontaneous self-ordering, however brief. It is ‘epiphanic’ – a peak experience on the social as well as individual scale.
· 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 geoautonomy or anarchomancy.
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