The following quotes are taken from:
Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia 2003.
“History says the Revolution attains ‘permanence,’ or at least duration, while the uprising is ‘temporary.’ In this sense an uprising is like a ‘peak experience’ as opposed to the standard of ‘ordinary’ consciousness and experience. Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day—otherwise they would not be ‘nonordinary.’ But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns—you can’t stay up on the roof forever—but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred—a difference is made.
You will argue that this is a counsel of despair. What of the anarchist dream, the Stateless state, the Commune, the autonomous zone with duration, a free society, a free culture? Are we to abandon that hope in return for some existentialist acte gratuity? The point is not to change consciousness but to change the world.
I accept this as a fair criticism. I’d make two rejoinders nevertheless; first, revolution has never yet resulted in achieving this dream. The vision comes to life in the moment of uprising—but as soon as the ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed. I have not given up hope or even expectation of change—but I distrust the word Revolution. Second, even if we replace the revolutionary approach with a concept of insurrection blossoming spontaneously into anarchist culture, our own particular historical situation is not propitious for such a vast undertaking. Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head-on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry finds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark in an ectoplasm of information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and the absorbant eye of the TV screen.” 98-99
“‘Uprising,’ yes—as often as possible and even at the risk of violence. The spasming of the Simulated State will be ‘spectacular,’ but in most cases the best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence, to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear.” 100
“First, we can speak of a natural anthropology of the TAZ. The nuclear family is the base unit of consensus society; but not of the TAZ. (‘Families!—how I hate them! The misers of love!’—Gide) The nuclear family, with its attendant ‘oedipal miseries,’ appears to have been a Neolithic invention, a response to the ‘agricultural revolution’ with its imposed scarcity and is imposed hierarchy. The Paleolithic model is at once more primal and more radical: the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, ‘children’s republics,’ and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance—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—to 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.)” 102
“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’ of a sort, or at least potential TAZs. Whether open only to a few friends, like a dinner paety, 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 part: 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.’” 104
“We were taught in elementary school that the first settlements in Roanoke failed; the colonists disappeared, leaving behind them only the cryptic message ‘Gone to Croatan.’ Later reports of ‘grey-eyed Indians’ were dismissed as legend. What really happened, the textbook implied, was that the Indians massacred the defenseless settlers. Howerver, ‘Croatan’ was not some Eldorado; it was the name of a neighboring tribe of friendly Indians. Apparently the settlement was simply moved back from the coast into the Great Dismal Swamp and absorbed into the tribe. And the grey-eyed Indians were real—they’re still there, and they still call themselves Croatans.
So—the very first colony in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (Dee/Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became ‘Indians,’ ‘went native,’ opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London.
As America came into being where once there had been ‘Turtle Island,’ Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed—and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes—all the burdens of civilization—and ‘go to Croatan’ in some way or another.” 115
“Throughout the 18th century, North America also produced a number of drop-out ‘tri-racial isolate communities.’ (This clinical-sounding term was invented by the Eugenics Movement, which produced the first scientific studies of these communities. Unfortunately the ‘science’ merely served as an excuse for hatred of racial ‘mongrels’ and the poor, and the ‘solution to the problem’ was usually forced sterilization.) The nuclei invariably consisted of runaway slaves and serfs, ‘criminals’ (i.e. the very poor), ‘prostitutes’ (i.e. white women who married non-whites), and members of various native tribes. In some cases, such as the Seminole and Cherokee, the traditional tribal structure absorbed the newcomers; in the other cases, new tribes were formed. Thus we have the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, adopting runaway slaves, functioning as a way station on the Underground Railway, and serving as a religious and ideological center for slave rebellions. The religion was HooDoo, a mixture of African, native, and Christian elements, and according to the historian H. Leaming-Bey the elders of the faith and the leaders of the Great Dismal Maroons were known as ‘the Seven Finger High Glister.’” 118
“The ‘isolate communities’—at least, those which have retained their identity into the 20th century—consistently refuse to be absorbed into either mainstream culture or the black ‘subculture’ into which modern sociologiests prefer to categorize them. In the 1970’s, inspired by the Native American renaissance, a number of groups—including the Moors and the Ramapaughs—applied to the B.I.A. for recognition as Indian tribes. They received support from native activists but were refused official status. If they’d won, after all, it might have set a dangerous precedent for drop-outs of all sorts, from ‘white Peyotists’ and hippies to black nationalists, aryans, anarchists and libertarians—a ‘reservation’ for anyone and everyone! The ‘European Project’ cannot recognize the existence of the Wild Man—green chaos is still too much of a threat to the imperial dream of order.
Essentially the Moors and Ramapaughs rejected the ‘diachronic’ or historical explanation of their origins in favor of a ‘synchronic’ self-identity based on a ‘myth’ of Indian adoption. Or to put it another way, they named themselves ‘Indians.’ If everyone who wished ‘to be an Indian’ could accomplish this by an act of self-naming, imagine what a departure to Croatan would take place. The old occult shadow still haunts the remnants of our forests…” 119-120