In an interview and four additional essays, Hakim Bey explores how the blind panopticon of Capital remains most vulnerable in the realm of ‘magic’—the manipulation of images to control events, hermetic “action at a distance.”
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
bey is a genius, if a not entirely consistent one,
By
This review is from: Millennium (New Autonomy Series) (Paperback)
i love the work of hakim bey and consider it exciting, stimulating, and absolutely revolutionary. anyone who is anyone should read this, immediatism and TAZ, no doubt about it. but there is an inconsistency present in bey's thought, albeit not one that shoots him down completely. the very act of reading or talking about 'unmediated experience', that is, purely lived and taking place in the concrete, is itself a mediated experience. our entire lives are mediated, and everything exists only in the human mind. everything is intepretation, and bey seems to know this, but then he goes off on tangents about how we need everything 'unmediated' or purely experiential--and that itself is precisely a mediated experience. i'm willing to bet that most of his readers live more in the symbolic than in the external, day to day world, although i might be wrong. it is only in the privacy of the imagination that we are really free, although i hardly mean to imply that we can live entirely independent of the external world of day to day life. artaud, julian beck, and other revolutionaries have always wanted to completely banish every aspect of solitude and alienation from the human condition in their art and give the individual a totally lived life, and yet this is again another contradiction, since as human beings we know only the deliberations of our own consciousness and live entirely in our own subjectivity. the greatest and most intense experience we can have is the experience of intellectual and imaginative discovery and development, the increase of mental freedom and the release of our minds from fear and conventional ways of thinking. maybe i'm being overly critical of bey, and i repeat that i consider him a subversive genius who is dead right about everything else. despite this one glaring inconsistency, bey is a landmark in an age of commodified, artifical rebellion and manufactured dissent. he is the real deal and must read.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Resistance Is Possible,
By New Dawn Magazine http://www.newdawnmagazine.com (Melbourne Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Millennium (New Autonomy Series) (Paperback)
Hakim Bey is best known as the author of TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. His other books include Immediatism and Radio Sermonettes, all of which aim at a ’90s reconstruction of classical Situationist themes such as the spectacle, recuperation, specialisation, fragmentation, etc.Bey also writes under the name of Peter Lamborn Wilson and has written and edited several books dealing with subversive forms of Sufi spirituality (see Scandal and Sacred Drift Essays on the Margins of Islam) and a book on Pirate Utopias! Millennium opens with an interview concerning the release of Bey’s other works, Immediatism and TAZ. Millennium then moves on to an excellent discussion of the artistic and socio-cultural differences between American and European culture. There are few authors that can accomplish those kinds of insights, and that’s just in one chapter! Five years ago it was still possible to occupy a third position in the world, a third way between left and right. But now there is only one world, the triumphant ‘end of history’. The end of the unbearable pain of imagination. As Bey explains, a world where money decrees itself as a law of Nature, and demands absolute liberty, a society of ‘safety’, where creativity must be priced and the very process of resistance against this expropriation turned to profit ("Be a rebel – buy a Toyota!"). This refreshing approach to the all pervasive capitalist state provides a stark analysis of the reality of our world. In a one world mono-culture of global capital there can be no "third way". As a result, one is either absorbed into the system, or else enters into opposition. Millennium is not about systems or ideology; it is a prophetic and timely re-evaluation of what one means by saying one is left or right. It provides a basis, a millennial manifesto for the 21st century, a vision for an "enlightened anarchy" (to quote Gandhi) – a non-violent holy war for peace. In a world of neo-liberal free market internationalism and global centralisation, Millennium sees nationalism on a collision course with capitalism which now no longer needs either the state or establishment religion to maintain its power base. Here Bey comes close to seeing a limited role for the state or minimalist government as an institutional type of "custom and right", which a nation or society can wield paradoxically against the ultimate power of liberal totalitarianism/anarcho-capitalism and international finance – "an apotheosis of cybernetic social Darwinism". In fact, as multinational corporations undermine the sovereignty of nation states, the national state becomes "increasingly irrelevant as a focus of opposition". The most important contribution Millennium makes is in its chapter concerning religion and spirituality which – without conceding to theological liberalism (anything goes, so nothing goes) or right-wing bigoted fundamentalism – occupies the middle ground of "subversive orthodoxy". Millennium concludes with speculative thoughts concerning a reinterpretation of Proudhon’s mutualism, the most consistent and paradoxical of early anarchist thinking. Bey suggests that in western Europe the European Union must be opposed: Celtic secessionism should be encouraged in Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall and the Isle of Man; in Northern Ireland an independent Ulster based on socialist anti-sectarian solidarity might be a possible solution to the troubles, coupled with principles of regionalism, devolution and organic democracy.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An extended discussion of Bey's motivations, among others,
By A Customer
This review is from: Millennium (New Autonomy Series) (Paperback)
"Millenium" opens with an interview concerning the release of "Immediatism" and "TAZ" in Germany, and goes into an excellent discussion of the artistic and socio-cultural differences between American and European culture. There are few authors that can accomplish those kinds of insights, and that's just in the first section! As always, pull out your dictionary and brush up on your off-the-cuff etymologies - Bey's creative vocabulary will have your English teachers reeling.
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