The temporary autonomous zone

 

21

3.  The apparatus of Control--the "State"--must (or so we must assume) continue to 

deliquesce and petrify simultaneously, must progress on its present course in 

which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss of 

power. As power "disappears," our will to power must be disappearance.  

We've already dealt with the question of whether the TAZ can be viewed "merely" as a 

work of art. But you will also demand to know whether it is more than a poor rat-hole in 

the Babylon of Information, or rather a maze of tunnels, more and more connected, but 

devoted only to the economic dead-end of piratical parasitism? I'll answer that I'd rather 

be a rat in the wall than a rat in the cage--but I'll also insist that the TAZ transcends these 

categories. 

 

A world in which the TAZ succeeded in putting down roots might resemble the world 

envisioned by "P.M." in his fantasy novel bolo'bolo. Perhaps the TAZ is a "proto-bolo." 

But inasmuch as the TAZ exists now, it stands for much more than the mundanity of 

negativity or countercultural drop-out- ism. We've mentioned the festal aspect of the 

moment which is unControlled, and which adheres in spontaneous self- ordering, 

however brief. It is "epiphanic"--a peak experience on the social as well as individual 

scale. 

 

Liberation is realized struggle--this is the essence of Nietzsche's "self-overcoming." The 

present thesis might also take for a sign Nietzsche's wandering. It is the precursor of the 

drift, in the Situ sense of the derive and Lyotard's definition of driftwork. We can foresee a 

whole new geography, a kind of pilgrimage-map in which holy sites are replaced by peak 

experiences and TAZs: a real science of psychotopography, perhaps to be called "geo-

autonomy" or "anarchomancy." 

 

The TAZ involves a kind of ferality, a growth from tameness to wild(er)ness, a "return" 

which is also a step forward. It also demands a "yoga" of chaos, a project of "higher" 

orderings (of consciousness or simply of life) which are approached by "surfing the wave-

front of chaos," of complex dynamism. The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild 

but gentle--a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not 

an eschatologist. 

 

Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified 

desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality 

and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" 

we've mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth 

fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism--and who knows 

what we might attain? 

 

--Spring Equinox, 1990  

Appendix A. Chaos Linguistics 

NOT YET A SCIENCE but a proposition: That certain problems in linguistics might be 

solved by viewing language as a complex dynamical system or "Chaos field." 

 

Of all the responses to Saussure's linguistics, two have special interest here: the first, 

"antilinguistics," can be traced--in the modern period--from Rimbaud's departure for 

Abyssinia; to Nietzsche's "I fear that while we still have grammar we have not yet killed 

God"; to dada; to Korzybski's "the Map is not the Territory"; to Burroughs' cut-ups and 

"breakthrough in the Gray Room"; to Zerzan's attack on language itself as representation 

and mediation. 

 

 

22 

The second, Chomskyan Linguistics, with its belief in "universal grammar" and its tree 

diagrams, represents (I believe) an attempt to "save" language by discovering "hidden 

invariables," much in the same way certain scientists are trying to "save" physics from 

the "irrationality" of quantum mechanics. Although as an anarchist Chomsky might have 

been expected to side with the nihilists, in fact his beautiful theory has more in common 

with platonism or sufism than with anarchism. Traditional metaphysics describes 

language as pure light shining through the colored glass of the archetypes; Chomsky 

speaks of "innate" grammars. Words are leaves, branches are sentences, mother 

tongues are limbs, language families are trunks, and the roots are in "heaven"...or the 

DNA. I call this "hermetalinguistics"--hermetic and metaphysical. Nihilism (or 

"HeavyMetalinguistics" in honor of Burroughs) seems to me to have brought language to 

a dead end and threatened to render it "impossible" (a great feat, but a depressing one)- 

-while Chomsky holds out the promise and hope of a last- minute revelation, which I find 

equally difficult to accept. I too would like to "save" language, but without recourse to any 

"Spooks," or supposed rules about God, dice, and the Universe. 

 

Returning to Saussure, and his posthumously published notes on anagrams in Latin 

poetry, we find certain hints of a process which somehow escapes the sign/signifier 

dynamic. Saussure was confronted with the suggestion of some sort of "meta"-linguistics 

which happens within language rather than being imposed as a categorical imperative 

from "outside." As soon as language begins to play, as in the acrostic poems he 

examined, it seems to resonate with self- amplifying complexity. Saussure tried to 

quantify the anagrams but his figures kept running away from him (as if perhaps 

nonlinear equations were involved). Also, he began to find the anagrams everywhere, 

even in Latin prose. He began to wonder if he were hallucinating--or if anagrams were a 

natural unconscious process of parole. He abandoned the project. 

 

I wonder: if enough of this sort of data were crunched through a computer, would we 

begin to be able to model language in terms of complex dynamical systems? Grammars 

then would not be "innate," but would emerge from chaos as spontaneously evolving 

"higher orders," in Prigogine's sense of "creative evolution." Grammars could be thought 

of as "Strange Attractors," like the hidden pattern which "caused" the anagrams--patterns 

which are "real" but have "existence" only in terms of the sub-patterns they manifest. If 

meaning is elusive, perhaps it is because consciousness itself, and therefore language, 

is fractal. 

 

I find this theory more satisfyingly anarchistic than either anti-linguistics or 

Chomskyanism. It suggests that language can overcome representation and mediation, 

not because it is innate, but because it is chaos. It would suggest that all dadaistic 

experimentation (Feyerabend described his school of scientific epistemology as 

"anarchist dada") in sound poetry, gesture, cut-up, beast languages, etc.--all this was 

aimed neither at discovering nor destroying meaning, but at creating it. Nihilism points 

out gloomily that language "arbitrarily" creates meaning. Chaos Linguistics happily 

agrees, but adds that language can overcome language, that language can create 

freedom out of semantic tyranny's confusion and decay.  

Appendix B. Applied Hedonics 

THE BONNOT GANG WERE vegetarians and drank only water. They came to a bad 

(tho' picturesque) end. Vegetables and water, in themselves excellent things--pure zen 

really--shouldn't be consumed as martyrdom but as an epiphany. Self-denial as radical 

praxis, the Leveller impulse, tastes of millenarian gloom--and this current on the Left 

shares an historical wellspring with the neo-puritan fundamentalism and moralic reaction 

of our decade. The New Ascesis, whether practiced by anorexic health-cranks, thin-

---

 

23

lipped police sociologists, downtown straight-edge nihilists, cornpone fascist baptists, 

socialist torpedoes, drug-free Republicans...in every case the motive force is the same: 

resentment. 

 

In the face of contemporary pecksniffian anaesthesia we'll erect a whole gallery of 

forebears, heros who carried on the struggle against bad consciousness but still knew 

how to party, a genial gene pool, a rare and difficult category to define, great minds not 

just for Truth but for the truth of pleasure, serious but not sober, whose sunny disposition 

makes them not sluggish but sharp, brilliant but not tormented. Imagine a Nietzsche with 

good digestion. Not the tepid Epicureans nor the bloated Sybarites. Sort of a spiritual 

hedonism, an actual Path of Pleasure, vision of a good life which is both noble and 

possible, rooted in a sense of the magnificent over-abundance of reality. 

 

Shaykh Abu Sa'id of Khorassan 

Charles Fourier 

Brillat-Savarin 

Rabelais 

Abu Nuwas 

Aga Khan III 

R. Vaneigem 

Oscar Wilde 

Omar Khayyam 

Sir Richard Burton 

Emma Goldman 

add your own favorites  

Appendix C. Extra Quotes 

As for us, He has appointed the job of permanent unemployment. 

If he wanted us to work, after all, 

He would not have created this wine. 

With a skinfull of this, Sir, 

would you rush out to commit economics? 

 

--Jalaloddin Rumi, Diwan-e Shams 

 

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, 

A flask of Wine, A Book of Verse--and Thou 

Beside me singing in the Wilderness-- 

And Wilderness is Paradise enow. 

Ah, my Beloved, fill the cup that clears 

To-day of past Regrets and future Fears-- 

Tomorrow?--Why, Tomorrow I may be 

Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years. 

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire 

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 

Would not we shatter it to bits--and then 

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire! 

 

--Omar FitzGerald 

 

History, materialism, monism, positivism, and all the "isms" of this world are old and rusty 

tools which I don't need or mind anymore. My principle is life, my end is death. I wish to 

live my life intensely for to embrace my life tragically. 

 

 

24 

You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you will be 

ready (God, what an endless wait!) I won't mind going along with you for awhile. But 

when you'll stop, I shall continue on my insane and triumphal way toward the great and 

sublime conquest of the nothing! Any society that you build will have its limits. And 

outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild 

& virgin thoughts--they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts 

of rebellion! 

 

I shall be among them! 

 

And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows: "So turn to 

yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring 

it to light; show yourselves!" 

 

Because every person; who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was 

mysteriously hidden therein; is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which can exist 

under the sun! All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of the tramps, the 

inaccessibles, the uniques, the rulers over the ideal, and the conquerors of the nothing 

resolutely advances. 

 

So, come on iconoclasts, forward! 

 

"Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!" 

 

--Renzo Novatore Arcola, January, 1920 

 

PIRATE RANT

 

Captain Bellamy 

 

Daniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote what became 

the first standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and 

Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, pirate 

recruitment was most effective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and 

transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class 

inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the 

captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant 

vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates. 

 

I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, 

when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of 

use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be 

governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly 

whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye 

altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel 

of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this 

difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich 

under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than 

sneak after these villains for employment? 

 

When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws of God 

and man, the pirate Bellamy continued: 

 

---

 

25

You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to 

make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army 

of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with 

such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure. 

 

THE DINNER PARTY

 

The highest type of human society in the existing social order is found in the parlor. In the 

elegant and refined reunions of the aristocratic classes there is none of the impertinent 

interference of legislation. The Individuality of each is fully admitted. Intercourse, 

therefore, is perfectly free. Conversation is continuous, brilliant, and varied. Groups are 

formed according to attraction. They are continuously broken up, and re-formed through 

the operation of the same subtile and all-pervading influence. Mutual deference pervades 

all classes, and the most perfect harmony, ever yet attained, in complex human relations, 

prevails under precisely those circumstances which Legislators and Statesmen dread as 

the conditions of inevitable anarchy and confusion. If there are laws of etiquette at all, 

they are mere suggestions of principles admitted into and judged of for himself or herself, 

by each individual mind. 

 

Is it conceivable that in all the future progress of humanity, with all the innumerable 

elements of development which the present age is unfolding, society generally, and in all 

its relations, will not attain as high a grade of perfection as certain portions of society, in 

certain special relations, have already attained? 

 

Suppose the intercourse of the parlor to be regulated by specific legislation. Let the time 

which each gentleman shall be allowed to speak to each lady be fixed by law; the 

position in which they should sit or stand be precisely regulated; the subjects which they 

shall be allowed to speak of, and the tone of voice and accompanying gestures with 

which each may be treated, carefully defined, all under pretext of preventing disorder and 

encroachment upon each other's privileges and rights, then can any thing be conceived 

better calculated or more certain to convert social intercourse into intolerable slavery and 

hopeless confusion? 

 

--S. Pearl Andrews The Science of Society