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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"
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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