The temporary autonomous zone

 

5

and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of 

women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band 

is open--not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond 

of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of 

custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc. (American Indian 

society preserves certain aspects of this structure even now.) 

 

In our own post-Spectacular Society of Simulation many forces are working--largely 

invisibly--to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the 

structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home and unit-family. 

One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at different 

jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The 

nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic 

secret implosion of split atoms--and the obvious counter-strategy emerges 

spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more 

post-industrial possibility of the band. 

 

2. The TAZ as festival. Stephen Pearl Andrews once offered, as an image of anarchist 

society, the dinner party, in which all structure of authority dissolves in conviviality and 

celebration (see Appendix C). Here we might also invoke Fourier and his concept of the 

senses as the basis of social becoming--"touch-rut" and "gastrosophy," and his paean to 

the neglected implications of smell and taste. The ancient concepts of jubilee and 

saturnalia originate in an intuition that certain events lie outside the scope of "profane 

time," the measuring-rod of the State and of History. These holidays literally occupied 

gaps in the calendar--intercalary intervals. By the Middle Ages, nearly a third of the year 

was given over to 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'etat, 

a mapping of the year, a seizure of time itself, turning the organic cosmos into a 

clockwork universe. The death of the festival. 

 

Participants in insurrection invariably note its festive aspects, even in the midst of armed 

struggle, danger, and risk. The uprising is like a saturnalia which has slipped loose (or 

been forced to vanish) from its intercalary interval and is now at liberty to pop up 

anywhere or when. Freed of time and place, it nevertheless possesses a nose for the 

ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci; the science of psychotopology 

indicates "flows of forces" and "spots of power" (to borrow occultist metaphors) which 

localize the TAZ spatio-temporally, or at least help to define its relation to moment and 

locale. 

 

The media invite 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. "Fight for the right to party" is in fact not a parody of the radical struggle but a 

new manifestation of it, appropriate to an age which offers TVs and telephones as ways 

to "reach out and touch" other human beings, ways to "Be There!" 

 

Pearl Andrews was right: the dinner party is already "the seed of the new society taking 

shape within the shell of the old" (IWW Preamble). The sixties-style "tribal gathering," the 

forest conclave of eco-saboteurs, the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist 

conferences, gay faery circles...Harlem rent parties of the twenties, nightclubs, banquets, 

old-time libertarian picnics--we should realize that all these are already "liberated zones" 

 

6 

of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner 

party, or to thousands of celebrants, like a Be-In, the party is always "open" because it is 

not "ordered"; it may be planned, but unless it "happens" it's a failure. The element of 

spontaneity is crucial. 

 

The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans synergize their efforts to 

realize mutual desires, whether for good food and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of 

life; perhaps even for erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork, or to attain the 

very transport of bliss-- in short, a "union of egoists" (as Stirner put it) in its simplest form-

-or else, in Kropotkin's terms, a basic biological drive to "mutual aid." (Here we should 

also mention Bataille's "economy of excess" and his theory of potlatch culture.) 

 

3. Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call 

it, "rootless cosmopolitanism"). Aspects of this phenomenon have been discussed by 

Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and 

by various authors in the "Oasis" issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term "psychic 

nomadism" here rather than "urban nomadism," "nomadology," "driftwork," etc., simply in 

order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the 

coming- into-being of the TAZ. "The death of God," in some ways a de-centering of the 

entire "European" project, opened a multi-perspectived post- ideological worldview able 

to move "rootlessly" 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. 

 

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 place is as good as another." This paradox 

creates "gypsies," psychic travellers driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow 

loyalties (in fact disloyal to the "European Project" which has lost all its charm and 

vitality), not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and 

adventure...This description covers not only the X-class artists and intellectuals but also 

migrant laborers, refugees, the "homeless," tourists, the RV and mobile-home culture--

also people who "travel" via the Net, but may never leave their own rooms (or those like 

Thoreau who "have travelled much--in Concord"); and finally it includes "everybody," all 

of us, living through our automobiles, our vacations, our TVs, books, movies, telephones, 

changing jobs, changing "lifestyles," religions, diets, etc., etc. 

 

Psychic nomadism as a tactic, what Deleuze & Guattari metaphorically call "the war 

machine," shifts the paradox from a passive to an active and perhaps even "violent" 

mode. "God"'s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time--

in the form of Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism, for example--that there's still a lot 

of "creative destruction" to be carried out by post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean 

commandos or apaches (literally "enemies") of the old Consensus. These nomads 

practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire 

for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases 

along secret caravan routes, "liberated" bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black 

markets, and underground bazaars. 

 

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 political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially 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. The resultant grid comes to life, animated 

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