Tag Archives for Hakim Bey

Peter Lamborn Wilson on secessionism (Arthur, 2005)

first published in Arthur No. 16 (May 2005)

Freedom Now Maybe: The New Secessionism
By Peter Lamborn Wilson

Last November, right after the Election, I attended an odd event in Middlebury, Vermont—a two-day conference devoted to the question of whether Vermont should consider seceding from the USA and declaring itself the “Second Vermont Republic.”

The first Vermont Republic lasted from 1777 to 1791, during which time it recognized neither Britain nor the USA as sovereign. Thanks to Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Rangers the state has an old and still-lively sense of itself as unique and independent-minded, if not downright cranky.

The keynote speeches delivered at Middlebury by SVR founder Prof. Thomas Naylor and activist/historian Kirkpatrick Sale made it clear that any Vermont independence movement would be radical, Green, Populist non-violent and typically “Vermont-socialist.” (The Bread & Puppet Theater is already interested.) SVR’s underlying philosophy is derived from the “Small Is Beautiful” school of Leopold Kohr (his The Breakdown of Nations is the bible), “Buddhist economist” E.F. Schumacher, the UK-based Fourth World Movement, and ultimately from the minarchism of Thoreau and the American tradition of “unterrified Jeffersonians,” extreme democrats and even anarchists.

All this may be considered odd enough. But what really struck me as strange was the mood of the conference. Everyone there was cheerful, optimistic and pugnacious. Everywhere else in America that weekend leftists, liberals and libertarians were plunged in gloom. But in Middlebury the triumph of Bushite Pre-Millenialist idiocy was taken as a sign that the US Empire is about to disintegrate.

The conference voted unanimously to support the aims of the Second Vermont Republic. Delegates stomped and cheered. One woman, whose son was in Iraq with the National Guard, proclaimed herself ready to die for this new cause if necessary. Suddenly it felt kind of like 1968 again. Were all these people crazy?

Four More Years.

You know what I’m talking about already but let me spell it out. Imagine: Four more years of Neo-Con Jihadist slope-browed pseudo-Zionist McImperialism; four more years of stomping on Iraq and Afghanistan and possibly Iran, Syria and North Korea; of deficit spending and debt both national and individual; of ludicrous Red/Blue culture war; of inflation and unemployment; erosion of civil liberties; no tree left behind; more tax breaks for the rich and the corporations; blah blah blah; and to top it off, “JEB IN ’08!”—and another Four More Years.

Some of my friends are moving to Canada where they can join grayhaired draft-dodgers of the Vietnam era and suffer the bitterness of exile along with the compensations of socialized health care and quasi-legal pot. No one dares to dream of staying on and overthrowing the Empire. Not even us grayhaired really believe in The Revolution anymore. But the piffle of tepid reformism (the “left wing” of Skull’n’Bones, so to speak) makes many of us reel with nausea and depression, or anyway terminal boredom. What’s to be done?

Continue reading →

"We had a war in 1968 and we lost but apparently we haven’t realized it, so instead of retreating we do this ritual of repeating the prayers of the 1960s."

bey_small.jpg

This is a Spring 2005 conversation between Hakim Bey (pseudonym for scholar/poet Peter Lamborn Wilson) and Sasha Miltsov posted online…

======

Hakim Bey:…automobiles used to look quite beautiful, some of them. Now, even the cars of the very rich – you can hardly tell them from the cars of the bourgeoisie. They’re all the same boring, puffy-looking cars: No flare, no aerodynamics, no daring art deco. What is a modern “Bugatti”? It’s nothing. Even the Arab sheiks don’t dare to have beautiful cars like before. Why? Nobody knows how to make them? What’s the big deal?

Of course, it’s all just cars. It’s all just disgusting shit, but within that bad technology, which started so nice…

Alexandre Miltsov:It’s just getting worse and worse.

HB:Yeah.

AM:Nowadays, they do “retromobiles”. They take a “Chrysler” like it used to be 50-60 years ago and rebuild it with all the modern gadgets. It looks even more repulsive.

HB:It’s just post-modernism. It’s not good or new design.

AM:What still amazes me in America, even though I’ve lived in Canada for five years, is this tremendous amount of cars everywhere. Public transportation is basically dead. And, as we know, it has been maliciously removed.

HB: It is true. It’sabsolutely true. I don’t own a car – it’s not because I am so virtuous but rather because of circumstances. But I’m glad I don’t own a car – many times when I think about that – it’s horrible. At least I’m not adding to that particular misery. But if I didn’t go into other people’s cars – I would never get anywhere, except on a few rare bus stops.

AM:Since we’re talking about cars, what do you think about the projected “World Oil Peak”? It’s not a big secret that there is no real substitute for oil to run the existing gigantic world-industry. There’s a countless list of things running on and demanding oil; cars, of course, are on the top. So what do you think about oil depletion and all that?

HB:What a lot of people would say, primarily the “techno-optimists”, is that when the oil runs out – the other technologies will become economically feasible. So, they will have to run all the cars on hydrogen, or salad oil, or sunshine. But we will still have cars. It’s a horrible thought but they may be right. They may solve the problem. 

AM: But most probably it’s not going to happen that way. There are no real alternatives. There’s not enough sunshine to power all these cars,there’s not enough salad oil – I mean you need to grow crops to get it – a lot of it! And almost all the good land is already in use. It has been paved over by these gigantic roads – you have Eisenhower Interstate Highway system here. And  the so-called “hydrogen economy” is a myth, of course.

HB: That’s right. I’m just saying that we ought to think about all this from the “techno-fix” point of view. So far, they’ve always come up with something. History leads us to believe that they’ll figure something out. At least, we have to take it into consideration. After all, they have all the money in the world to spend on the most brilliant scientists and technologists.

But it seems that they’re not preparing. And that’s the interesting part. They’re acting as if there’s no tomorrow: they don’t think like American Indians or the Chinese for seven generations – they think for seven minutes. If you’re lucky – 15 minutes! That makes you think that there won’t be any smooth transition, brokered by the usual technological and capitalistic bla-bla. And maybe some crisis will occur, some fracture in this happy story. Should we hope for that or should we be incredibly afraid because of that? It’s hard to say. Anything short of the complete breakdown of civilization – nothing is working anymore – it’s going to be war, plague, horrible. Or can you still believe in a situation where the proponents of “the alternatives” have seized power in time to prevent it from happening? Can we really talk about “seizing power” in a context like that?

AM: Well, yes and no. “Power” is so obscure these days. I mean, “seizing” what? A TV or a radio-station?

HB: Yes, and you can have 2 billion dollars and think that you can change the world, and there’s nothing, no effect at all. Nothing seems to work.

AM: There is a popular and rather naïve belief that when the whole system, the Spectacle, will start to run out of energy – oil, gas and other resources – it will gradually loosen its grip on people’s minds and throats. The Media may still be there, the Capital will be there but they will be weak and disintegrated, and so society will inevitably break down into small autonomous collectives, not controlledby the outside world.

HB: Well, the attitudes are changing but the problem is – and now I can speak about the situation here locally – since I have been living here for 6-7 years, I have some insights – and that is that these attitudes are informed by reformism. They are not informed by a critique of capitalism or even of technology. The Green Party is a good example; basically, it’s a hobby group for losers. Here, by strange circumstances, we have a Green Party village government. I am still glad for that, I guess, but so far they haven’t accomplished anything here, except for some symbolic stuff. And the reason for this, I think, is that people of this reformist tendency are not really interested in building real alternative institutions.

For example, this movement is not taking place through labor unions, or food-cooperatives, or producers-cooperatives; it’s not taking place through free schools or alternative schools. It’s not taking place through autonomous action!

Look at the organic food situation: the big companies have already discovered that the organic food is a market and they’re in it, they’re marketing it. And for most of the consumers of organic food this is not a political issue. It’s a health issue. So they don’t care; if Monsanto is going to sell them health food – they’ll buy it from Monsanto. In other words, these nice impulses, these changing attitudes – some of which are forced on people by economic difficulties, as you pointed out, and some of which are voluntary, assumed out of a lifestyle or even out of consumerist attitude towards the “authentic” and the “organic” and the “alternative”, which after all is a market – it all runs into the sand, all the energy runs into the sand.

People with wonderful attitudes and desires that are good desires; but since there is no comprehensive movement, there’s nothing other than these “positive attitudes” and there’s no way to focus them.

I went to a Peace March yesterday – it was the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. I swear it was like being back in the 60s again: same clothes, same slogans:

“- What do we want?
– Peace!
– When do we want it?
– Now!”

We’ve been saying this for 40 years and we still haven’t realized that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action!

And this is even better: there was a counter-demonstration, and the anti-demonstrators were yelling at us that we were communists! This is like a civil war reenactment; it’s like people in medieval costumes pretending to be knights and ladies. Totally bizarre. I haven’t been going to demonstrations lately, so I thought maybe a few things have changed. But no! It’s just “a blast from the past” – for everybody, including the fascists who thought that they were still living in 1979. Very strange.

And this is it! You go, you have a march, you say: “Not in my name!” And then you go home and watch TV. You don’t then go out and start an alternative institution: a church, a farm, a commune…

AM: A pleasure club.

HB: Or even a pleasure club! Instead, they just go home and watch TV.

AM: And then they go to work and get their salaries from the same people who are waging the war. And the taxes go to war, of course.

HB: Exactly! And of course, you NEED your SUV; you NEED your cellular phone. These are real needs. So all these so-called “green people” around here are sucking up gasoline and cement… Just “not in my backyard” – that’s what they say. They are not going to swear off using cement. They will say: “Move the cement plant to Mexico”. I can’t participate in this pseudo-politics; there is no entry-point for me here.

AM: Back to the “Peace March”: the Iraq war looks like it is going to last long. We don’t really know what’s happening there; there are all sorts of media, mainstream and alternative, producing all sorts of  “news” and speculations. But who in his or her sane mind will trust them? They are the media after all. The notion I have is that it’s going to be a big, long and ugly war for the last remnants of oil and for the control of the Gulf region. What do you think?

HB: I think you’re right or you might as well be right. We might as well plan on what you’ve just said; because it would be foolish to think that they’re going to stop just because we don’t like it. They’ve already proved that it’s not going to happen.

Let me try to be an “anti-pessimist” here and point out that if you are right, and I think you are, this will also involve a continuation of this unbelievable deficit spending and going into debt that we are practicing here in the US, both on the personal and the national level. And it must eventually lead to an economic collapse, as far as I can see. For one thing, Europe is going to be driven a little bit further to the left by anti-Americanism, so you will get more things like the mayor of Paris or the Spanish government happening -kind of nostalgic social-democratic, but still no longer interested in playing the global game with America as the sole superpower.

In fact, the whole ten years of globalism and neo-liberalism are already over. We are at a new stage now. That is why the anti-globalist movement suddenly seems so dead and irrelevant.

Going further with the scenario: A couple of other major things can happen, like China shifting its economic activities from the dollar to the euro and OPEC is, of course, practically out, and so forth.

So America is isolated economically: we don’t produce anything here anymore – we can’t be self-sufficient in terms of industry. We don’t make shoes here; we don’t make umbrellas, pencils. We make entertainment and information. We don’t even make the fucking computers! We produce the ideas that occupy the computers. That’s why artists are so important right now – it’s one of the few things that we actually produce. So the arts are hot, some artists are successful – this whole area around here is full of artists, and they drove the real estate prices up. So, now you can’t move into this county for less then 250,000 dollars. Thanks to the artists! You wonder why people get angry at artists – it’s not our fault – we’re just looking for low rent but the real-estate developers are following us, sniffing our butts wherever we go to find out where the next beautiful cheap real-estate is going to be…

So on with the scenario: in 1984 if somebody had asked “would the Soviet Union break up”, everybody would go “ha-ha-ha” – nonsense; it will never happen! In 1984, if people asked whether the United Kingdom would break up, if Scotland would be independent again – “Oho-ho-ho! – This would be a joke!” Just 20 years ago, it would be a total joke. Well, it happened  – and to Yugoslavia too. So, it could happen here. Things move so quickly. It’s possible that with the neo-liberal period already over, we’re now into something new –
the American Empire, and maybe that will only last for 8 years -10 years.

That’s why recently I have taken an interest in the idea of separatism and secession. Because, I think that the only optimistic or anti-pessimistic way of reading the American future is to see the breakup of the American Empire, meaning a political breakup, just like in the USSR. And, as you know very well, this is a mixed blessing – to put it mildly. But there is one advantage to it, and that is that you get a small social unit that you can deal with – maybe, if you’re lucky.

It can very well happen in America, and people have already started to talk about it. I’m writing articles trying to push that idea. If I’m wrong – I’ll be wrong. To me it’s just a tactic, because from an anarchist point of view, secession is good because you get a smaller unit to deal with and eventually – this is straight Proudhon – you will break it down into autonomous regions, and then you confederate them in an anarcho-federalist union, completely voluntarily and based on popular democracy with revocable delegates. And as he put, it is necessary to organize for production and if necessary defense. This is an anarchist ideal, and secession could be a step towards it. As we know, it can also end up in a fascist nightmare. This is a dangerous idea, I admit, but I don’t see any other interesting political possibility for America.

Continue reading →

Green Hermeticism

Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology


Peter Lamborn Wilson, Christopher Bamford, Kevin Townley
Introduction by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan
ISBN: 9781584200499
Book (Paperback)
Lindisfarne Books
$25.00
6 x 9 inches
224 pages
September 2007

“In Alchemy, there is an injunction to quicken, or revive, the dead, which is illustrated by a dead tree growing verdant again. That is exactly what this wonderful and rare work does in awakening human consciousness to its Divine potential and Ultimate Destiny. Art thus helps Nature to achieve its ideal Perfection. The authors must be congratulated for their insightful words. I wholeheartedly recommend reading it again and again, and again.” —Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, author Alchemy: The Secret Art and The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century

“Environmental solutions today are largely technical, but the planetary crisis is also a crisis of soul—or better yet, of the Imagination. Too tricky for religion, too poetic for reductionist science, Green Hermeticism reheats a prophetic imagination still in love with the material world—a new alchemy of ancient nature.” —Erik Davis, author, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape

“Just when you felt numb and disenfranchised, thinking the world had become bleak and dead, along comes this rare, much needed book to remind us that there is still some sanity, depth, and creative energy percolating up from the heart of Reality. Thank God (and the Goddess Nature) for this smart and inspiring breath of fresh air! Green Hermeticism is where the wasteland ends—and where the world becomes re-enchanted with genuine living thought that goes beyond superficialities. It’s a rare pleasure to be in the presence of living minds who actually know something wonderful and have not been deadened by the opiates of capital or the tenure track. Very highly recommended.” —David Fideler,publisher (Phanes Press) editor (Alexandria), author of Jesus Christ, Sun of God and translator of Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition (with Sabrineh Fideler)

“The publication of Green Hermeticism has the sense we so rarely get, of a genuine moment in cultural history. It is not just the eloquence of its authors’ knowledge and arguments or that they are showing us, once again, the depth and range and beauty of alchemy, and the Hermetic tradition, and what Peter Lamborn Wilson calls Romantic Science. Nor is it even the links they establish between the Hermetic tradition and ecology, and the value of a science that perceives the world as alive rather than a machine. What makes this work significant is the sense that it shows us how we can use these ideas and knowledge to create a genuine counter to destruction and despair, an alchemy of our politics as well as of our spirit.” —Rachel Pollack, author of 78 Degrees of Wisdom: A Book of Tarot

“Green Hermeticism reminds us that the art of the Great Work is to enter more deeply into the dynamic and practical wisdom of the universe, which is our laboratory, where work and prayer combine. When we engage with the All, we know ourselves to be one kindred with all in the viriditas—God’s greening power—where body, soul, and spirit honor each other.” —Caitlín & John Matthews, authors of Walkers Between the Worlds: The Western Mysteries from Shaman to Magus

Hermeticism, or alchemy, is the ancient, primordial mystery science of nature through which people in all times and places have, for the sake of world evolution, sought to unite Heaven and Earth—divinity, cosmos, earth, and humanity, as a single whole. Selfless, intimate, dedicated to healing and harmony, Hermeticism has accompanied and sustained every religious epoch and revelation. It may be found in all historical cultures, from the traditions of India and China in the East to the Judeo-Christian West. It could even be said that Hermeticism is the primal cosmological revelation and the common ground of all spiritual traditions.

Nevertheless, in the great revival of mystical, esoteric traditions and practices during the last century, Hermetic tradition—in fact, Nature herself—has been largely ignored. Today, when the Earth seems most under attack, Green Hermeticism is especially appropriate. The book explores not only the ancient Masters’ inner science, but also their science of Nature.

During spring and summer 2006, Pir Zia Khan convened a series of gatherings to begin to unfold the contemporary meaning of ancient, sacred science for our time. Green Hermeticism is a partial record of that meeting. Peter Lamborn Wilson, explores the many ramifications of the alternative worldview offered by Hermeticism; Christopher Bamford provides a broad historical overview of the tradition from the Ancient Mysteries to contemporary manifestations of the alchemical tradition; while Kevin Townley brings a practical dimension to the gathering teaching the preparation of herbal elixirs and demonstrating that cosmology and philosophy can become a truly healing path for the Earth.

Green Hermeticism is necessary reading for anyone seeking a spiritual and cultural path for the healing of the current ecological and cultural crisis.

Peter Lamborn Wilson (b.1945) is a scholar of Sufism and Western Hermeticism and (under the pseudonym “Hakim Bey”) a well-known radical-anarchist social thinker. His books include Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam (City Lights, 1993) and Escape from the Nineteenth Century and Other Essays (Autonomedia, 1998).

Christopher Bamford is the editor in chief of SteinerBooks and its imprints. A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he has lectured, taught, and written widely on Western spiritual and esoteric traditions and is the author of The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity and An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. He has also translated and edited numerous books, including Celtic Christianity, Homage to Pythagoras, and The Noble Traveller (all published by Lindisfarne Books). HarperSanFrancisco included an essay by Mr. Bamford in its anthology Best Spiritual Writing 2000.

Kevin Townley has been a lifelong student of Western Hermeticism. Early on in his studies, he was drawn to the writings of Dr. Paul Foster Case and has been a member of the Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.) for eleven years. Kevin is currently the Vice President of LPN- USA, an esoteric organization dedicated to the study and practice of Qabalah and Laboratory Alchemy. His studies have led him around the world seeking original Rosicrucian and alchemical texts, as well as individuals who practice this royal art. He is the author of The Cube of Space: Container of Creation (Archive Press, 1993) and Meditations on the Cube of Space (Archer Books, 2002).

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is the spiritual leader of the Sufi Order International (established by Hazrat Inayat Khan in London, 1917) and founding director of the Suluk Academy, an esoteric school in upstate New York. His initiatory heritage integrates the sacred transmissions of the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri, and Naqshbandi lineages within a post-denominational, inter-spiritual goal. Pir Zia holds a master’s degree in religion from Duke University.

The Luddite critique.

From the Brooklyn Rail

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley
in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Jennifer Bleyer
July 2004

It’s been nearly ten years since Peter Lamborn Wilson–nee Hakim Bey–looked at the pitiably state-bound, rule-bound world around him and asked: “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?” In a slim, rattling volume called Temporary Autonomous Zone, Wilson intoned that, in fact, freedom is already here. Autonomy exists in time, he said, rather than space. It’s in times of wildness, revelry, abandon and revolution that for even just one brief jail-breaking moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is freed of all political and social control.

Wilson rightly became celebrated as a kind of urban prophet. It was an identity to add the others he bears seamlessly and without contradiction: anarchist, poet, public intellectual, psychedelic explorer, artist, social critic, Sufi mystic. Six years ago he moved upstate from the East Village to New Paltz, New York. The setting is different, but the ideas have only deepened–notably his critique of global capital and “technological determination.” In his green wood-frame house, trees rustling overhead and birds chirping outside, we drank tea and talked.

Jennifer Bleyer: You left New York City six years ago and moved upstate to New Paltz. There’s a lot of art happening here and in the Hudson Valley in general, which seems pretty cool.

Peter Lamborn Wilson: The fact of it happening anywhere makes it more interesting than a kick in the face. But the fact of the matter is that America doesn’t produce anything anymore. A couple of years ago, we passed the halfway mark from being a so-called productive economy to a services economy. What are services? You tell me. Whatever it means, we don’t make pencils. We don’t make cement. We don’t make ladies garments or roll cigars. We don’t even manufacture computers. In other words, we don’t make anything,, especially not around here. There are a few cement factories left up in Greene County, but basically, industry died here in the fifties. It was a long slow death, certainly over by the seventies. There was a depression, so artists, who are certainly blameless in this, discovered low real estate prices and low rents, and they started to move up here. And the gap between the artists and the real estate developers has gotten very small in our modern times, down to where it’s almost nothing.

So for a few years the artists and their friends came up here and got bargains and moved in, and now artists’ studios in Beacon sell for a quarter-million dollars. And we’re talking about a one-room building on a half-acre lot. You want a house? Half-a-million. Do you know any artists who can afford that? The point is that there’s a lot of boosterism for the arts in the Hudson Valley because there’s no other economy. It’s either that or “green tourism,” which in my mind is a disgusting term and something that I don’t want to see promoted in any way. It’s a commodification of nature, turning nature into a source of profit for the managerial caste in the Hudson Valley. That’s not the solution I’m interested in.

We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. “Sustainable development”–that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture. They talk about agriculture, they get all weepy about it, but they won’t do anything for the family farms because family farms use pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in the minds of these people. So they’re perfectly happy to see the old farms close down and build McMansions, as long as they’re green McMansions, of course, with maybe a little solar power so they can boast about how they are almost off the grid. This is just yuppie poseurism. It’s fashionable to be green, but it’s not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we’re serving in this economy, I’m afraid we would see that we’re basically shills for real estate developers.

Bleyer: Which is really the case in Beacon, I suppose.

Wilson: Oh, absolutely. Dead Hudson Valley industrial towns reinventing themselves as prole-free zones and calling it art. Now, everyone I know is involved in the arts, and I’m involved in the arts, so what I’m saying here is a bit of a mea culpa. I don’t think that we can consider ourselves guiltless and not implicated in all this because we’re creative and artsy and have leftist emotions. Where are our actual alternative institution-building energies? Where are our food co-ops? Where’s our support for the Mexican migrant agricultural workers? Most people here are not interested in that.

Bleyer: So where should people who consider themselves radical be directing their energies?

Wilson: I think that a radical life is not something that depends on Internet connections or websites or demos or even on politics, like having Green mayors. This may sound dull to people who think that having a really hot website is a revolutionary act. Or that getting a million people to come out and wave symbolic signs at a symbolic march is a political act. If it doesn’t involve alternative economic institution building, it’s not. As an anarchist, I’ve had this critique for years, and experience has only deepened it. Here, there are people who are very concerned with trying to preserve whatever natural beauty and farmland exists in this region, and my heart’s with them. But I think it’s done by and large without any consciousness that this is already a privileged enclave. We’re saying that this is our backyard and we don’t want any cement factories. However, we’re not saying that we volunteer to do without cement. What we’re saying is cement is fine, as long as the factories are in Mexico.

Bleyer: Or in Sullivan County.

Wilson: Or Sullivan County. Although Sullivan County is fast reinventing itself, too.

Bleyer: You mentioned hot websites. I’m curious about your thoughts on the web now, because ten years ago you seemed optimistic about its potential.

Wilson: Well, I wouldn’t say I was an optimist. I was curious and attempted an anti-pessimist view. I went to about 25 conferences in Europe in seven years, and in all that time, I never had a computer or was on the Internet myself. I never have been. So I went to these conferences as the voice of caution, the one guy who doesn’t own a computer. Little by little, my talks at these conferences would become more and more Luddite, sounding the knell of warning about mechanization of consciousness and alienation and separation. There was a time when everything was so confused and chaotic that it was easy to believe that this technology would be an exception to all the other technologies, and instead of enslaving us, it would liberate us. I never actually believed that, but I was willing to talk to people who did. Now I’m not willing to talk to them anymore. I have no interest in this dialogue. It’s finished. The Internet revealed itself as the perfect mirror image of global capital. It has no borders? Neither does global capital. Governments can’t control it? Neither can they control global capital. Nor do they want to. They’ve given up trying, and now they basically serve as the mercenary armed forces for the corporate interstate–the 200 or 300 megacorporations that actually run the world. Fine. But let’s not call this radical politics, and let’s not call this liberation, and let’s not talk about cyberfeminism or virtual community. Basically, I’m a Luddite. Certain technologies hurt the commonality, as they used to say in the early 19th century. Any machinery that was hurtful to the commonality, they took their sledgehammers out and tried to smash. Direct action. That’s the Luddite critique–you do it with a sledgehammer. What it means now to live as a Luddite seems to me to involve a strict attention to what technologies one allows into one’s life.

Bleyer: And I guess the Internet has really come to be the pinnacle of this hurtful technology, in our age.

Wilson: Yes. You’re slumped in front of a screen, in the same physical situation as a TV watcher, you’ve just added a typewriter. And you’re “interactive.” What does that mean? It does not mean community. It’s catatonic schizophrenia. So blah blah blah, communicate communicate, data data data. It doesn’t mean anything more than catatonics babbling and drooling in a mental institution. Why can’t we stop? How is it that five years ago there were no cell phones, and now everyone needs a cell phone? You can pick up any book by any half-brained post-Marxist jerkoff and read about how capitalism creates false needs. Yet we allow it to go on.

Bleyer: But isn’t there something to be said for the subversive use of technologies?

Wilson: We believed that in the ’80s. The idea was that alternative media would allow us the space in which to organize other things. Even in the ’80s I said I’m waiting for my turkey and my turnips. I want some material benefits from the Internet. I want to see somebody set up a barter network where I could trade poetry for turnips. Or not even poetry–lawn cutting, whatever. I want to see the Internet used to spread the Ithaca dollar system around America so that every community could start using alternative labor dollars. It is not happening. And so I wonder, why isn’t it happening? And finally the Luddite philosophy becomes clear. We create the machines and therefore we think we control them, but then the machines create us, so we can create new machines, which then can create us. It’s a feedback situation between humanity and technology. There is some truth to the idea of technological determination, especially when you’re unconscious, drifting around like a sleepwalker. Especially when you’ve given up believing in anti-capitalism because they’ve convinced you that the free market is a natural law, and we just have to accept that and hope for a free market with a friendly smiling face. Smiley-faced fascism. I see so many people working for that as if it were a real cause. “If we have to have capitalism, let’s make it green capitalism.” There’s no such thing. It’s a hallucination of the worst sort, because it isn’t even a pleasurable one. It’s a nightmare.

Bleyer: I’m curious if you think we’re hallucinating more now than ever before–if the psychic energy for liberation is gone.

Wilson: The answer would have to be extremely complex, because I don’t have any snappy aphorisms to explain this. You might say that it wouldn’t matter if every government in the world was taken over by screaming green socialists tomorrow morning, they couldn’t reverse the damage. I don’t know. It seems clear that in human society, despite the best intentions, technology has alienated people to such an extent that they mistake technological and symbolic action for social/political action. This is the commodity stance. You buy a certain product, and you’ve made a political statement. You buy a car that runs on salad oil. It’s still a car! Or make a documentary. Where did we cross that line where we forgot that making a documentary about how everyone would like to have a food co-op is not the same as having a food co-op? I think some people have lost that distinction. Now, about art in the service of the revolution: There is no art in the service of the revolution, because if there’s no revolution, there’s no art in its service. So to say that you’re an artist but you’re progressive is a schizo position. We have only capital, so all art is either in its service or it fails. Those are the two alternatives. If it’s successful, it’s in the service of capital. I don’t care what the content is. The content could be Malcolm X crucified on a bed of lettuce. It doesn’t matter.

Bleyer: But what about the growing protest movement of the past five years, which really does seem significant?

Wilson: You mean people who are building puppets and going around the world being radical tourists?

Bleyer: The perhaps one million people coming to the streets of New York to protest the RNC in August, for example.

Wilson: Well, make it two million. It can be like the biggest anti-war marches ever held, they were forgotten five minutes later. All they’re doing is assuaging their conscience a little. At best, it’s symbolic discourse and it never goes beyond that. Especially in North America. It’s not going to save the world to dump Bush and these people are deluded.

Bleyer: What do you think about Burning Man and other events that are in essence Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) but don’t necessarily dismantle the power structures of global capital?

Wilson: I’ve never been to Burning Man, but that’s just accidental, because I’ve given up travel. As far as I can tell it’s a lovely thing. I call those things “periodic autonomous zones.” The thing about the TAZ is I didn’t invent it, I just gave it a name. I think it’s a sociological reality that groups of people will come together to maximize some concept of freedom that they share as naturally as breathing. When all the potential for the emergence for a TAZ is maximized, either because you’ve helped to maximize it or because your local situation has arrived at a certain point where it becomes possible, you’ll do it. Like I’ve said before, a TAZ is anywhere from two to several thousand people, who for as little as two or three hours or for as much as a couple of years manage to keep that mood going. And it’s incredibly vital. It’s vital that every human being should have some such experience, or else they’ll never know that another world is possible. So Burning Man is a kind of periodic autonomous zone. As soon as the first hint of commercialization or tiredness appears, then I would think the best thing to do is to close it down. Move on, reappear somewhere else. And ultimately, I do believe that another world is possible and that permanent changes could be made. But that’s different. That’s a revolution.

Bleyer: You lived abroad for about 12 years, mostly in the Islamic world. What’s your perception of Islamic fundamentalists, “terrorists” and otherwise?

Wilson: Certainly, these Islamic fundamentalists are of no interest intellectually. They have no ideas, they’re not anti-capitalist; they love technology and money. Ideologically, they’re not offering any alternatives to anything. By and large, they’re an imagistic froth that has very little to do with most people’s experience of Islam. In their manifestations as tiny terrorist groups, they don’t have much of a social role, only as symbolic figureheads, and that’s why their actual support in the Muslim world is rather shallow. Right now it depends largely on the fact that the Bushies have made the name of America stink forever in the nostrils of the world. When I was traveling in the East, I was always amazed at the unearned reservoir of goodwill toward Americans. It existed everywhere. Now I reckon they’d throw rocks at you.

Bleyer: And do you think that’s irreparable?

Wilson: Almost irreparable. Even the Vietnam War, which was still going on when I began my travels, never aroused this much hatred and unpopularity.

Bleyer: Is there anything you could see altering the current course of the American empire?

Wilson: Yes. If all our emotion for resistance could somehow pull us together instead of apart. This is the brilliant thing they’ve managed to do–set us all at each other’s throats. If I think of the anarchist movement, we spend all our time screaming at each other over various sub-sectarian impurities we perceive in each other’s writing. That is what anarchist activity now boils down to. But it’s not entirely our fault–when there’s no movement, there’s no movement. But a new coherence could appear. Frankly, I think it would have to be of a spiritual nature. It would have to involve a kind of fanaticism that would involve real sacrifice–sacrifice of comforts, sacrifice of cell phones, sacrifice of this privileged life in the belly of the beast that we all acquiesce in. There’s a lot of symbolic discourse, but no action. I suppose that could come back, which is why I’m ready to cut slack for spiritual movements, which have nothing necessarily to do with religion.

Bleyer: I’m curious about this intersection between the political and spiritual.

Wilson: There are those of us who are usually called spiritualist anarchists. I’m willing to accept that label if I can have other labels as well. It’s a well-known fact that there’s no secular Luddite community anywhere. The only Luddite communities are Anabaptists–Amish, Mennonite, seventh day Baptists, all those kind of Germano-Anabaptist groups that originate in Pennsylvania. I guess it’s religious fanaticism. Well, we need some equivalent of that. I can only see that coming from what people would identify as a spiritual movement. Nowadays it would probably have to have a neo-pagan shamanic quality to it, but I think it would also have to keep the door open to people in the established religions who are rethinking their positions, including some Catholics. It would have to be very inclusive, non-dogmatic, and not involve any central cult of authority. It would have to be a spontaneous crystallization of all the pagan-LSD stuff we’ve been going through since the sixties. It will have to crystallize and provide this psychic power for self-sacrifice.

Bleyer: Are you still a Sufi?

Wilson: That’s a hard question to answer. No, I’m not a practicing Muslim. I don’t spend a lot of time saying my beads, but I don’t consider myself utterly broken away from all that. In fact, I have very good friends and allies within the Sufi movement.

Bleyer: Who among other anarchist thinkers do you admire?

Wilson: Rene Riesel in France is an admirable character. He’s faced with a jail sentence now in France for a heavily militant action–destroying genetically manipulated crops and possibly other things as well. Some of his followers are engaged in blowing up electric power lines. And Jose Bove, the farmer from the south of France, has done a lot of interesting stuff.

Bleyer: What are you studying now?

Wilson: I’m very interested in early Romanticism now. To me, the Romantics were the first people to consciously deal with these issues. Some of the most interesting aspects of this come from the early Romantic movement in Germany around 1795. The early German Romantics have been forgotten as a source for our movement, especially from an artistic point of view. They informed all the art movements since then, the ones that tried to do what Hegelians call the “suppression and realization of art”–suppressing art as an elitist consumption activity of the wealthy, suppressing it as something that alienates other people who aren’t artists and makes them less important or less significant, and somehow universalizing it. That’s the realization or art, so that somehow or another everyone is an artist or some sort, fully free and encouraged to be as creative as possible. There’s no privileged position to the art that ends up in galleries or museums. That would be the suppression and realization of art, and that was basically a Romantic program and a program of every avant-garde art movement since then. They’ve all begun by saying, “We hate art as alienation, we want to restore it somehow to the kind of universal experience that we sense, for example, among a tribe of pygmies, where everyone is a singer and no one leads the singing.” That goal has been there for every single art movement since Romanticism.

Bleyer: What have you experienced personally of TAZ realities, lately?

Wilson: A lot of people tell me that they have enjoyed or benefited from my work, for which I’m naturally very pleased. But in a lot of cases they have very different tastes than I do. I’m a sixties guy. I don’t like industrial music or even rock ‘n’ roll. I am willing to accept rock ‘n’ roll as an orgiastic music, but I think it’s disgusting that I have to have orgiastic music spewed at me from every single orifice of modern civilization, all the time, nonstop, to make me buy more products and lose my intellectual acuity and start shopping. I also don’t like the drugs that they use–I prefer mushrooms and pot. I don’t enjoy raves. The ravers were among my biggest readers–they’re now getting a little old themselves. Personally, I don’t enjoy those parties. This is a matter of taste. I’m happy that they’re happy, but I don’t want to go to the party. I’m not 20-years-old anymore, I get tired. But fine for them. Terrific. I wish they would rethink all this techno stuff–they didn’t get that part of my writing. I think it would be very interesting if they took some of my ideas about immediatism and the bee. Small groups should do art for each other, and stay out of the media as much as possible, and this will eventually cause a buzz and make people want to be part of it. I’m waiting–maybe before I die there will be a hip Luddite movement. I’ll probably like their parties and go to them. But it’s not happening. Most of the people interested in TAZ tend to be very techno-oriented. But as I say, if they’re having a good time, God bless them. Allah bless them. Goddess bless them. Just bless them. I think that’s terrific. It’s important to have those TAZ experiences. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t know what there is to struggle for.

Wilson’s books are available from Autonomedia, http://www.autonomedia.org. His next book of essays, Lost Histories, will be out this fall.

Jennifer Bleyer is a journalist and activist who lives in Fort Greene. She is the founder and former editor of Heeb Magazine.

ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHY IN A NUTSHELL.

by Hakim Bey

Since absolutely nothing can be predicated with any real certainty as to the ìtrue nature of thingsî, all projects (as Nietzsche says) can only be ìfounded on nothing.î And yet there must be a projectó if only because we ourselves resist being categorized as ìnothing.î Out of nothing we will make something: the Uprising, the revolt against everything which proclaims: ìThe Nature of Things is such-&-such.î We disagree, we are unnatural, we are less than nothing in the eyes of the Law ó Divine Law, Natural Law, or Social Law ó take your pick. Out of nothing we will imagine our values, and by this act of invention we shall live.

As we meditate on the nothing we notice that although it cannot be defined, nevertheless paradoxically we can say something about it (even if only metaphorically): ó it appears to be a ìchaos.î Both as ancient myth and as ìnew scienceî, chaos lies at the heart of our project. The great serpent (Tiamat, Python, Leviathan), Hesiodís primal Chaos, presides over the vast long dreaming of the Paleolithic ó before all kings, priests, agents of Order, History, Hierarchy, Law. ìNothingî begins to take on a face ó the smooth, featureless egg-or gourd-visage of Mr. Hun-Tun, chaos-as-becoming, chaos-as-excess, the generous outpouring of nothing into something.

In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all riot of color, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement ó is chaos. From this point of view, Order appears as death, cessation, crystallization, alien silence.

Anarchists have been claiming for years that ìanarchy is not chaos.î Even anarchism seems to want a natural law, an inner and innate morality in matter, an entelechy or purpose-of-being. (No better than Christians in this respect, or so Nietzsche believed ó radical only in the depth of their resentment.) Anarchism says that ìthe state should be abolishedî only to institute a new more radical form of order in its place. Ontological Anarchy however replies that no ìstateî can ìexistî in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos (which however is undetermined), and therefore that governance of any sort is impossible. ìChaos never died.î Any form of ìorderî which we have not imagined and produced directly and spontaneously in sheer ìexistential freedomî for our own celebratory purposes ó is an illusion.

Of course, illusions can kill. Images of punishment haunt the sleep of Order. Ontological Anarchy proposes that we wake up, and create our own day ó even in the shadow of the State, that pustulant giant who sleeps, and whose dreams of Order metastasize as spasms of spectacular violence.

The only force significant enough to facilitate our act of creation seems to be desire, or as Charles Fourier called it, ìPassion.î Just as Chaos and Eros (along with Earth and Old Night) are Hesiodís first deities, so too no human endeavor occurs outside their cosmogeneous circle of attraction.

The logic of Passion leads to the conclusion that all ìstatesî are impossible, all ìordersî illusory, except those of desire. No being, only becoming ó hence the only viable government is that of love, or ìattraction.î Civilization merely hides from itself ó behind a thin static scrim of rationality ó the truth that only desire creates values. And so the values of Civilization are based on the denial of desire.

Capitalism, which claims to produce Order by means of the reproduction of desire, in fact originates in the production of scarcity, and can only reproduce itself in unfulfillment, negation, and alienation. As the Spectacle disintegrates (like a malfunctioning VR program) it reveals the fleshless bones of the Commodity. Like those tranced travelers in Irish fairy tales who visit the Otherworld and seem to dine on supernatural delicacies, we wake in a bleary dawn with ashes in our mouths.

Individual vs. Group ó Self vs. Other ó a false dichotomy propagated through the Media of Control, and above all through language. Hermes ó the Angel ó the medium is the Messenger. All forms of communicativeness should be angelic ó language itself should be angelic ó a kind of divine chaos. Instead it is infected with a self-replicating virus, an infinite crystal of separation, the grammar which prevents us from killing Nobodaddy once and for all.

Self and Other complement and complete one another. There is no Absolute Category, no Ego, no Society ó but only a chaotically complex web of relation ó and the ìStrange Attractorî, attraction itself, which evokes resonances and patterns in the flow of becoming.

Values arise from this turbulence, values which are based on abundance rather than scarcity, the gift rather than the commodity, and on the synergistic and mutual enhancement of individual and group; ó values which are in every way the opposite of the morality and ethics of Civilization, because they have to do with life rather than death.

ìFreedom is a psycho-kinetic skillî ó not an abstract noun. A process, not a ìstateî ó a movement, not a form of governance. The Land of the Dead knows that perfect Order from which the organic and animate shrink in horror ó which explains why the Civilization of Slippage is more than half in love with easeful death. From Babylon and Egypt to the 20th Century, the architecture of Power can never quite be distinguished from the tumuli of the necropolis.

Nomadism, and the Uprising, provide us with possible models for an ìeveryday lifeî of Ontological Anarchy. The crystalline perfections of Civilization and Revolution cease to interest us when we have experienced them both as forms of War, variations on that tired old Babylonian Con, the myth of Scarcity. Like the Bedouin we choose an architecture of skins ó and an earth full of places of disappearance. Like the Commune, we choose a liquid space of celebration and risk rather than the icy waste of the Prism (or Prison) of Work, the economy of Lost Time, the rictus of nostalgia for a synthetic future.

A utopian poetics helps us to know our desires. The mirror of Utopia provides us with a kind of critical theory which no mere practical politics nor systematic philosophy can hope to evolve. But we have no time for theory which merely limits itself to the contemplation of utopia as ìno-place placeî while bewailing the ìimpossibility of desire.î The penetration of everyday life by the marvelous ó the creation of ìsituationsî ó belongs to the ìmaterial bodily principleî, and to the imagination, and to the living fabric of the present.

The individual who realizes this immediacy can widen the circle of pleasure to some extent, simply by waking from the hypnosis of the ìSpooksî (as Stirner called all abstractions); and yet more can be accomplished by ìcrimeî; and still more by the doubling of the Self in sexuality. From Stirnerís ìUnion of Self-Owning Onesî we proceed to Nietzscheís circle of ìFree Spiritsî and thence to Fourierís ìPassional Seriesî, doubling and re- doubling ourselves even as the Other multiplies itself in the eros of the group.

The activity of such a group will come to replace Art as we poor PoMo bastards know it. Gratuitous creativity, or ìplayî, and the exchange of gifts, will cause the withering-away of Art as the reproduction of commodities. ìDada epistemologyî will meltingly erase all separation, and give rebirth to a psychic paleolithism in which life and beauty can no longer be distinguished. Art in this sense has been camouflaged and repressed throughout the whole of High History, but has never entirely vanished from our lives. One favorite example: ó the quilting bee ó a spontaneous patterning carried out by a non-hierarchic creative collective to produce a unique and useful and beautiful object, typically as a gift for someone connected to the circle.

The task of Immediatist organization can be summed up as the widening of this circle. The greater the portion of my life that can be wrenched from the Work/Consume/Die cycle, and (re)turned over to the economy of the ìbeeî, the greater my chance for pleasure. One runs a certain risk in thus thwarting the vampiric energies of institutions. But risk itself makes up part of the direct experience of pleasure, a fact noted in all insurrectionary moments ó all moments of waking-up ó of intense adventurous enjoyments: ó the festal aspect of the Uprising, the insurrectionary nature of the Festival.

But between the lonely awakening of the individual, and the synergetic anamnesis of the insurrectionary collectivity, there stretches out a whole spectrum of social forms with some potential for our ìprojectî. Some last no longer than a chance meeting between two kindred spirits who might enlarge each other by their brief and mysterious encounter; others are like holidays, still other like pirate utopias. None seems to last very long ó but so what? Religions and States boasts of their permanence ó which, we know, is just jive… ; what they mean is death.

We do not require ìRevolutionaryî institutions. ìAfter the Revolutionî we would still continue to drift, to evade the instant sclerosis of a politics of revenge, and instead seek out the excessive, the strange ó which for us has become the sole possible norm. If we join or support certain ìrevolutionaryî movements now, weíd certainly be the first to ìbetrayî them if they ìcame to powerî. Power, after all, is for us ó not some fucking vanguard party. In The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, NY, 1991) there was a discussion of ìthe will to power as disappearanceî, emphasizing the evasive nature and ambiguity of the moment of ìfreedomî. In the present series of texts [Immediatism, 1994, AK Press, originally presented as Radio Sermonettes on an FM station in New York, and published under that title by the anarchist Libertarian Book Club], the focus shifts to the idea of a praxis of re-appearance, and thus to the problem of organization. An attempt at a theory of the aesthetics of the group ó rather than a sociology or politique ó has been expressed here as a game for free spirits, rather than as a blueprint for an institution. The group as medium, or as mechanism of alienation, has been replaced here by the Immediatist group, devoted to the overcoming of separation. This book might be called a thought-experiment on festal sodality ó it has no higher ambitions. Above all, it does not pretend to know ìwhat must be doneî ó the delusion of would-be commissars and gurus. It wants no disciples ó it would prefer to be burned ó immolation not emulation! In fact it has almost no interest in ìdialogueî at all, and would prefer rather to attract co-conspirators than readers. It loves to talk, but only because talk is a kind of celebration rather than a kind of work.

And only intoxication stands between this book ó and silence.

Pirated from the anti-copyrighted book Immediatism (1994) by Hakim Bey. AK Press, Edinburgh and San Francisco.

Bey on tragedy and meaning.

9/11 and the Crisis of Meaning
Peter Lamborn Wilson [aka Hakim Bey]

A few days after the “event,” the NY Times ran an interesting article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems impossible to have advertising at all. It seems massively “inappropriate” to move product as per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience & peeping; with hate & envy masked as fashion, with greed thinly disguised as freedom of choice.

Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasn’t advertising ever seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media — which cannot utter a sound without puking up a cliche — speaks now of the waking of a sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer tolerate terrorism etc.) — but what was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame?

Last week, it seems, we were willing to admit that our highest social values could be expressed in price codes ( the “mark of the Beast” as the cranks say, the “prophets of doom”). This week, we feel shame. In a Times interview a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any significance and wondered if she could go on with it. The fashion industry is also ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed; even the news media expressed some fleeting longing for decorum & dignity & decency.

Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our mean-spiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry & “information”, our degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on? — or should we defend all this as “freedom” and “our way of life”?

Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will mediate for us with the forces of “evil”. But what exactly is this normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame?

Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what it means that the terrorists were willing to die, to kill themselves; and their teachers evade the question, saying that “we don’t understand.” And the ad execs, they don’t understand either — they’re bewildered. Awake but confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning?

A hyperfashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products. Photographs — even huge billboards –showing people dying of AIDS or waiting to be executed — designed to sell woolly jumpers. Is this life as normal? Should we return to it?

For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass speakers rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no “Madison Avenue Choirs” hymning the celestial delites of commodities or vacations in the midst of other peoples’ misery.

For a few hours or days there appeared no official spin on the event, no slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning. We watched the cloud drift around the city, first to the East over Brooklyn, then up the west side of Manhattan, finally over the east side as well. With the smell and the poisonous haze around the moon came a nightmare about the occult significance of the cloud: — angry bewildered ghosts in a vast white cloud. And we breathed that cloud into us. We’ll never get it out of our lungs. What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a meaning.

But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its answer — “Attack on America”, on our freedom our values, our way of life, carried out by “cowards” who were nevertheless not “physical cowards” (as some official explained to the Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He didn’t say.

Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent answer. Do “they” hate “us” because we use up 75% of the world’s resources even though we only constitute 20% of its population? because we bomb Baghdad & Belgrade without risking even one American life? because we refuse to discuss pollution or racism? because we demand the destruction of the Alaskan wilderness to fuel our SUVs for thirty more days? because we export a vapid sneering meanspirited culture to the world, video games about death, movies about death, TV shows about death, commodities that are dead, music that kills the spirit? because we’ve made advertizing our highest artform? because we define “freedom” as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money?

The politicians have told us that “they” envy us and our way of life and therefore wish to destroy it. Envy — yes, why not? The whole system of global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire. No desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global capital, q.e.d. But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers & sports teams & entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame?

Any why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend, and waste? What does it mean?

After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers said that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently. We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before. It may not mean anything. But we have it. And who could have dreamed at the gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have — Nike ads or sitcoms about lawyers?

Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning tragedy ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our leaders “seek closure” — perhaps by killing many Afghan children — perhaps by a new Crusade against the Saracens — and of course by a return to normal. We’ll show “them” — by refusing meaning. We will sleep because it is our right not to awake to confusion & shame.

Our sleep will be troubled. We’ll have to “sacrifice a few freedoms” to protect Freedom. We’ll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or months we will have buried even the fear & hate, or rather we will have transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the media, our externalized unconscious. We’ll have sitcoms again and gangsta rap and arguments about our right to download it all for free into our home computers. We’ll get those airplanes flying, once again polluting “our” skies with noise & carcinogens. We’ll overcome our shame. And that will constitute our revenge. That will be our meaning. Our morality.

The Luddite critique.

from the Brooklyn Rail

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley
in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Jennifer Bleyer
July 2004

It’s been nearly ten years since Peter Lamborn Wilson–nee Hakim Bey–looked at the pitiably state-bound, rule-bound world around him and asked: “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?” In a slim, rattling volume called Temporary Autonomous Zone, Wilson intoned that, in fact, freedom is already here. Autonomy exists in time, he said, rather than space. It’s in times of wildness, revelry, abandon and revolution that for even just one brief jail-breaking moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is freed of all political and social control.

Wilson rightly became celebrated as a kind of urban prophet. It was an identity to add the others he bears seamlessly and without contradiction: anarchist, poet, public intellectual, psychedelic explorer, artist, social critic, Sufi mystic. Six years ago he moved upstate from the East Village to New Paltz, New York. The setting is different, but the ideas have only deepened–notably his critique of global capital and “technological determination.” In his green wood-frame house, trees rustling overhead and birds chirping outside, we drank tea and talked.

Jennifer Bleyer: You left New York City six years ago and moved upstate to New Paltz. There’s a lot of art happening here and in the Hudson Valley in general, which seems pretty cool.

Peter Lamborn Wilson: The fact of it happening anywhere makes it more interesting than a kick in the face. But the fact of the matter is that America doesn’t produce anything anymore. A couple of years ago, we passed the halfway mark from being a so-called productive economy to a services economy. What are services? You tell me. Whatever it means, we don’t make pencils. We don’t make cement. We don’t make ladies garments or roll cigars. We don’t even manufacture computers. In other words, we don’t make anything,, especially not around here. There are a few cement factories left up in Greene County, but basically, industry died here in the fifties. It was a long slow death, certainly over by the seventies. There was a depression, so artists, who are certainly blameless in this, discovered low real estate prices and low rents, and they started to move up here. And the gap between the artists and the real estate developers has gotten very small in our modern times, down to where it’s almost nothing.

So for a few years the artists and their friends came up here and got bargains and moved in, and now artists’ studios in Beacon sell for a quarter-million dollars. And we’re talking about a one-room building on a half-acre lot. You want a house? Half-a-million. Do you know any artists who can afford that? The point is that there’s a lot of boosterism for the arts in the Hudson Valley because there’s no other economy. It’s either that or “green tourism,” which in my mind is a disgusting term and something that I don’t want to see promoted in any way. It’s a commodification of nature, turning nature into a source of profit for the managerial caste in the Hudson Valley. That’s not the solution I’m interested in.

We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. “Sustainable development”–that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture. They talk about agriculture, they get all weepy about it, but they won’t do anything for the family farms because family farms use pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in the minds of these people. So they’re perfectly happy to see the old farms close down and build McMansions, as long as they’re green McMansions, of course, with maybe a little solar power so they can boast about how they are almost off the grid. This is just yuppie poseurism. It’s fashionable to be green, but it’s not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we’re serving in this economy, I’m afraid we would see that we’re basically shills for real estate developers.

Continue reading →