The THEME for this month's quickly mutating EPN CONTENT CHALLENGE is:
TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (T.A.Z.)
A term used by pretentious mystical cultish anarchist beat writer Peter Lamborn Wilson a.k.a. HAKIM BEY in his book by the same title.
T.A.Z. Book On-Line
Wikipedia Article
I don't want to tell you what it is, but it basically talks about spontaneous, unstructured, and impermenant get-togethers as the only solution to political and artistic oppression. He concludes that the ultimate expression of the TAZ must necessarily be an act of "Poetic Terrorism."
I know it's not fun to read a book on-line, but please check out at least a few paragraphs as the writing (let alone the idea) is very exciting - you may want to read more. Bey is infamous for his mystic spiritualism and incomplete aversion to violence, as well as the obscurity (read: non-westerncapitalcentricism) of the origins of his ideas.
If you can't read, here is a speech with parts of the book (it's not entirely on topic - but check it out):
MP3 with talktalking
As a disclaimer, I must say that I am attracted to these ideas not because they are central to my way of working, but because they are uncompromisingly far-out and inalterably non-mainstream. They do not fit in to any of the themes we've been talking about recently on EPN - they are undeniably political, transcendental, religious and irrational. But in a persuasive and kick-ass way that offers us a true "challenge."
So my question is - what do you get from these ideas? What is interesting to you about them? What is yucky? How does it relate to your work? How does it relate to the idea of the EPN? Is there anything in these ideas that we can use?
And finally, because this is a CALL FOR CONTENT - what can you share that relates to these ideas? Or perhaps contradicts them? Or is shown in a new light by them? It could be something directly related that you find on-line, or it could be something only obliquely relevant that you can tie in with your bullshitting skills.
If this doesn't work, we'll go back to the more freeform general call-for-content next month.
I leave you with an article about a very fresh, simple, and demented act of Poetic Terrorism. The intentionality of the "switcheroo" decsibed herein is unknown (I prefer to imagine that it was on purpose), but the outcome is the same.
Article
P.S. - Note to Feds et al - the EPN is just reading about this crap. Do your homework and spy on someone else.
12 comments:
Did you read the article? Ignore the TAZ at your own risk, but don't ignore the article yo!
ok...i didnt read the book...i think i am going to, but for right now i think i will comment about the last part of the post...the whoopsies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_men
this is a group called the yes men...i think probably most of you have heard about them...they basically purposfully do things like the mistake from the movie theatre. it doesnt mention it in the wikiarticle, but the prank that i am most familiar with is the one where they switched the voice boxes in barbie toys with GI Joe dolls....they have tons of stuff like this...on varying scales...there is probably a better link than the wikiarticle....hmm...oh...i have an idea...the official page.
http://www.theyesmen.org/
also there is a movie about them. i think the funniest thing about it is that its real...like..its not punk'd...like there is no punchline.
do you think this call for content is too focused? isnt there usually a lot of action on these posts? maybe we should have a more general "check this out" post...i think people should make more "check this out" posts...i mean most people spend shitloads of time on the internet...they cant be looking at porn the WHOLE time...hey yo! i think if you find something cool then just link it on up...you dont really have to write anything...but i want to know about cool stuff.
i've fairly familiar w/ hakim bey and TAZ (i've read the bulk of what is available online).
skip all the ontological anarchy shit - it's incoherent and cripplingly mystically-bent (but kind of funny)...skip straight to the pirate utopias....
i am tentatively planning out a mix (of mp3's) tracing early 80's dutch anarcho-squat minimal electronic pop (ie: ensemble pittoresque) through the dutch squat-acid techno scene in the early 90's, as well as the spiral tribe hardcore rave movement (a movement built around 3-7 day long free raves, and who were quite explicitly inspired by hakim bey and TAZ)...it'll probably take me another week or so to assemble, and probably won't be nearly as interesting as i'm imagining...
farley, thanks for turning me on to this. really interesting. important. In a way, I think the Tuesday Night Music Club sessions approached a TAZ (not in a let's pat ourselves on the back way, just whatever), or at least worked on some of the principles, like spontaneous organization. I don't know what to submit for content, and i think to create work that embodies these principles might at first take a bit of real effort to sort of reorganize (unorganize) the approach to a piece. because it can't really just comment on the TAZ. it's gotta be it. right? it seems like it would be a real challenge to produce something outside or as invisible as bey talks about, even though in principle, it should probably be one of the easiest things in the world. i don't know. how are people reading this guy?
H - I guess a kind of regular call for content might work as well. Just that - I know that that will work - so I wanted to try something that I didn't know if it would work or not... Cause of experimental. But since the regular call for content works, maybe it would work. Work Work Work.
TCD - yeah - TAZ was big with the rave scene I hear. Pirate Utopias and poetic terrorism are fun. I'm into the fantasy mystic stuff just because it's so energetic and the prose is pretty wild - not because it rings super true. I mean, any time anyone says anything in an interesting way I can get into seeing how they think it is true - or how they have constructed a self-referential system of thought. It's like reading The Watchtower is a real trip. Cause of tue and boring is not as good as false and exciting.
Anyway, I'm still thinking of content for this - I'm into the Yes Men - but need to learn more. I'd like to listen to the awesome rave music. Anyway.
TAZ experiment of a sort
i would like to see some more content links in this section...im sure there is a lot out there.
Thanks EFF, That Joshua Bell / rush hour piece by the post is incredible.
Yeah - I should have said more about it... The "TAZ experiment of a sort" link above is to an article where this top-notch violinist was commissioned to play his Stradivarious in the subway in Washington DC to see if anyone would stop and listen. This is actually a pretty classic punk/dada thing to do, even if it uses classical music and violin, which may seem stodgy. Yes, perhaps nobody listened cause of violins sound like cats having cat sex. And this article is a little serious, but it is pretty awesome nonetheless. Can no one appreciate beauty in the machine age? Or is it just that classical music is an out-moded form of expression? What does it take to get through to people?
the ever-excellent simon reynolds on rave, pirate radio, and TAZ.
taken from this article: http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/simonreynolds2.html
PIRATE UTOPIAS
The rave and the pirate radio show (the "rave on the air") are exemplary real-world manifestations of two influential theoretical models, Hakim Bey's "temporary autonomous zone" or TAZ, and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's "desiring machine." Described as an "acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system ... defined solely by a circulation of states," the desiring machine is characterised by flow-without-goal. ("Go with the flow" is one of the MC's big buzzphrases, as is the non-sequitur "just passing through"). Powered by E-lectricity, the rave sound-system or pirate radio is a noise factory; the feedback-loop of the phone-in sessions makes me think of Hakim Bey's vision of the TAZ as a temporary "power surge" against normality, as opposed to a doomed attempt at permanent revolution. A power surge is what it feels like--like being plugged into the National Grid. A great MC's effect has a literally electrifiying effect on the listener; the audience is galvanised, shocked out of the living death of normality. "Come alive, London!"
'Ardkore jungle itself is a desiring machine, a rhythm engine constructed out of cannibalised components. 'Ardkore is where rave's anti-politics of rapture (techno as euphoria-generator without pretext or context) meets hip hop's cut'n'mix (Deleuze & Guattari's "principle of asigynifying rupture"). As if individual tracks weren't crudely collaged enough already, the DJ's spin in rough-and-ready bursts from other records, creating a relentless but far from seamless inter-textual tapestry of scissions and grafts. In the mix, two records become a meta-track: beats mesh and clash, atmospheres collide and hemorrhage. The combination of the DJ's inexhaustible, interminable meta-music pulse and the MC's variations on a small set of themes, has the effect of abolishing narrative: instead of tension/climax/release, 'ardkore offers a thousand plateaux of crescendo, an endless successions of NOW's. Over and over, again and again, the DJ and the MC reaffirm "we're here, we're now, this is the place to be, you and I are we".
This radical immediacy fits Hakim Bey's anarcho-mystical creed of "immediatism," so named to spell out its antagonism to all forms of mediated, spectacular, passivity-inducing leisure and culture. The rave could be seen as a TAZ-machine, a mechanism for generating a series of heightened here-and-now's, a concatenated flow of sonic singularities and ultra-vivid tableaux. The TAZ is also a milieu-machine designed to circulate a large number of bodies until they lose their alienated self-consciousness and achieve collective conciousness, become a "massive".
If the illegal rave comes closest to Bey's conception of the TAZ (which must always be a physical, tangible location), the pirate radio station works both as a "virtual" TAZ-surrogate, and as an informational web that provides logistical support for the creation of future, geographically-realized TAZ's. Both these functions help to stoke the fires of anticipation and keep alive the dream that the TAZ will soon be reconstructed. While pirate stations provide ads and news about raves and clubs, this ancillary, logistical role of radio was most pronounced during 1991-92, when DJ's like the Rough Crew provided ravers with information, phone-line numbers and travel directions concerning Spiral Tribe's free parties, and even appealed for lifts for those without cars.
Perhaps what's most subversive about the pirates resides not in its advertising of illegal raves, or even in its own crimes of trespass on the airwaves, but in the way they transgress the principles of exhange-value, commodity-fetishism and personality-cult that govern the music industry. The pirates fill the air with an endless, anonymous flow (DJ's and MC's almost never identify tracks or artists) of free music (you can tape all the new tunes, long before their official release). In The Revolution of Everyday Life, the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem argued that a new, utopian reality "can only be based on the principle of the gift". With their sacrificial expenditure of energy into the ether, their amateur pay-to-play ethos, the radio pirates have more than a whiff of the utopian about them. You can taste the freedom.
As it happens, the very first section of Bey's manifesto "The Temporary Autonomous Zone" is titled "Pirate Utopias," in homage to the island havens and coastal hide-outs established by the sea-rovers, buccaneers, corsairs and renegados of the 16th and 17th Centuries: anarchist settlements and city-state republics like Sale in Morocco, Hispaniola in Santo Domingo, Libertatia and Ranter's Bay in Madagascar. Just as 'ardkore junglists speak a creole slang-uage equal parts Jamaican, Bronx and Cockney, similarly the corsairs of the Barbary Coast and the pirates of Libertatia used a polyglot tongue woven from a multiplicity of European and Arabic sources.
The renegados --Christian pirates who converted to Islam and preyed on European cargo ships in the Mediterranean from bases on the North African coast-- were renegades in the original sense of the word: deserters from one faith, cause or allegiance to another. "Renegade" is a major buzzword in jungle lingo, appearing in song-titles (Omni Trio's "Renegade Snares"), as a band name (Renegade, one of producer Ray Keith's pseudonyms), a compilation series, and so forth. Something of the word's original treasonous connotations survives, in the sense that junglists defected from the mainstream of British (rave) culture and re-affiliated themselves to the alien folkways of Jamaican reggae and African-American hip hop. Junglist youth constitute a kind of internal colony within the United Kingdom: a ghetto of surplus labour, whose denizens are guilty-until-proven-innocent as far as the Law is concerned. Pirate radio is their audio insurrection against Babylon.
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