The temporary autonomous zone

 

19

America, and provide a growing "fourth way" outside the mainstream churches, the 

televangelical bigots, and New Age vapidity and consumerism. It might also be said that 

the chief refusal of orthodoxy consists of the construction of "private moralities" in the 

Nietzschean sense: the spirituality of "free spirits." 

 

The negative refusal of Home is "homelessness," which most consider a form of 

victimization, not wishing to be forced into nomadology. But "homelessness" can in a 

sense be a virtue, an adventure--so it appears, at least, to the huge international 

movement of the squatters, our modern hobos. 

 

The negative refusal of the Family is clearly divorce, or some other symptom of 

"breakdown." The positive alternative springs from the realization that life can be happier 

without the nuclear family, whereupon a hundred flowers bloom--from single parentage to 

group marriage to erotic affinity group. The "European Project" fights a major rearguard 

action in defense of "Family"--oedipal misery lies at the heart of Control. Alternatives 

exist--but they must remain in hiding, especially since the War against Sex of the 1980's 

and 1990's. 

 

What is the refusal of Art? The "negative gesture" is not to be found in the silly nihilism of 

an "Art Strike" or the defacing of some famous painting--it is to be seen in the almost 

universal glassy-eyed boredom that creeps over most people at the very mention of the 

word. But what would the "positive gesture" consist of? Is it possible to imagine an 

aesthetics that does not engage, that removes itself from History and even from the 

Market? or at least tends to do so? which wants to replace representation with presence? 

How does presence make itself felt even in (or through) representation? 

 

"Chaos Linguistics" traces a presence which is continually disappearing from all 

orderings of language and meaning- systems; an elusive presence, evanescent, latif 

("subtle," a term in sufi alchemy)--the Strange Attractor around which memes accrue, 

chaotically forming new and spontaneous orders. Here we have an aesthetics of the 

borderland between chaos and order, the margin, the area of "catastrophe" where the 

breakdown of the system can equal enlightenment. (Note: for an explanation of "Chaos 

Linguistics" see Appendix A, then please read this paragraph again.) 

 

The disappearance of the artist IS "the suppression and realization of art," in Situationist 

terms. But from where do we vanish? And are we ever seen or heard of again? We go to 

Croatan--what's our fate? All our art consists of a goodbye note to history--"Gone To 

Croatan"--but where is it, and what will we do there? 

 

First: We're not talking here about literally vanishing from the world and its future:--no 

escape backward in time to paleolithic "original leisure society"--no forever utopia, no 

backmountain hideaway, no island; also, no post- Revolutionary utopia--most likely no 

Revolution at all!-- also, no VONU, no anarchist Space Stations--nor do we accept a 

"Baudrillardian disappearance" into the silence of an ironic hyperconformity. I have no 

quarrel with any Rimbauds who escape Art for whatever Abyssinia they can find. But we 

can't build an aesthetics, even an aesthetics of disappearance, on the simple act of never 

coming back. By saying we're not an avant-garde and that there is no avant- garde, 

we've written our "Gone To Croatan"--the question then becomes, how to envision 

"everyday life" in Croatan? particularly if we cannot say that Croatan exists in Time 

(Stone Age or Post-Revolution) or Space, either as utopia or as some forgotten 

midwestern town or as Abyssinia? Where and when is the world of unmediated 

creativity? If it can exist, it does exist--but perhaps only as a sort of alternate reality which 

we so far have not learned to perceive. Where would we look for the seeds--the weeds 

 

20 

cracking through our sidewalks--from this other world into our world? the clues, the right 

directions for searching? a finger pointing at the moon? 

 

I believe, or would at least like to propose, that the only solution to the "suppression and 

realization" of Art lies in the emergence of the TAZ. I would strongly reject the criticism 

that the TAZ itself is "nothing but" a work of art, although it may have some of the 

trappings. I do suggest that the TAZ is the only possible "time" and "place" for art to 

happen for the sheer pleasure of creative play, and as an actual contribution to the forces 

which allow the TAZ to cohere and manifest. 

 

Art in the World of Art has become a commodity; but deeper than that lies the problem of 

re-presentation itself, and the refusal of all mediation. In the TAZ art as a commodity will 

simply become impossible; it will instead be a condition of life. Mediation is harder to 

overcome, but the removal of all barriers between artists and "users" of art will tend 

toward a condition in which (as A.K. Coomaraswamy described it) "the artist is not a 

special sort of person, but every person is a special sort of artist." 

 

In sum: disappearance is not necessarily a "catastrophe"-- except in the mathematical 

sense of "a sudden topological change." All the positive gestures sketched here seem to 

involve various degrees of invisibility rather than traditional revolutionary confrontation. 

The "New Left" never really believed in its own existence till it saw itself on the Evening 

News. The New Autonomy, by contrast, will either infiltrate the media and subvert "it" 

from within--or else never be "seen" at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but 

also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the 

understanding of the State, beyond the State's ability to see. 

 

 

Ratholes in the Babylon of Information 

THE TAZ AS A CONSCIOUS radical tactic will emerge under certain conditions: 

 

1.  Psychological liberation. That is, we must realize (make real) the moments and 

spaces in which freedom is not only possible but actual. We must know in what 

ways we are genuinely oppressed, and also in what ways we are self- repressed 

or ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us. WORK, for example, is a far 

more actual source of misery for most of us than legislative politics. Alienation is 

far more dangerous for us than toothless outdated dying ideologies. Mental 

addiction to "ideals"--which in fact turn out to be mere projections of our 

resentment and sensations of victimization--will never further our project. The TAZ 

is not a harbinger of some pie-in-the-sky Social Utopia to which we must sacrifice 

our lives that our children's children may breathe a bit of free air. The TAZ must be 

the scene of our present autonomy, but it can only exist on the condition that we 

already know ourselves as free beings.  

2. The counter-Net must expand. At present it reflects more abstraction than 

actuality. Zines and BBSs exchange information, which is part of the necessary 

groundwork of the TAZ, but very little of this information relates to concrete goods 

and services necessary for the autonomous life. We do not live in CyberSpace; to 

dream that we do is to fall into CyberGnosis, the false transcendence of the body. 

The TAZ is a physical place and we are either in it or not. All the senses must be 

involved. The Web is like a new sense in some ways, but it must be added to the 

others-- the others must not be subtracted from it, as in some horrible parody of 

the mystic trance. Without the Web, the full realization of the TAZ-complex would 

be impossible. But the Web is not the end in itself. It's a weapon.  

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