Customer Reviews

T.A.Z. the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New Autonomy Series)

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I discovered this book years ago through an ex-marine turned anarchist with drill bits glued to his beard. Wow! What a masterpiece. How can such a tiny book create such havoc in my brain? I now understand the (ir)rationale for the drill bits.

Hakim Bey writes in a beautifully poetic style. The book begins with a series of essays on chaos, art, sorcery, etc. Examples of what he calls poetic terrorism: Break into someone's home and leave a bizzare object behind, kidnap someone and make them happy, put up a commemorative plaque where you've had memorable orgasm, etc. Hillarious! If ever you're feeling down just pick a page at random and I promise you'll never find better medecine.

The final portion of the book consists of a long essay entitled The Temporary Autonomous Zone. A T.A.Z. is a virtual/physical space beyond the reach of the Spectacle where no rules exist. It is temporary and constantly changing because only this way can it avoid absorbtion by the Beast/Empire/Spectacle/Choronzon, whatever you choose to call it. Ultimately though, any attempt to describe what the T.A.Z. "is" becomes a lie, like trying to define God or Tao.

Another great thing about the book is that it is small enough to carry in your pocket. I have it with me everywhere I go, and I always keep a backup copy at home in case I loose it or give it away.

Anyway, if you value your life and (in)sanity forget this garbage review you just read and buy/steal your own copy of T.A.Z.

The work of Hakim Bey is well-known in that other american world, the "underground" society, the one of subculture, silent resistance and anarchy. But slowly it has been bubbling to the surface, often in unexpected places. The novel and film Fight Club, surely shows an affection for poetic terrorism, an idea rooted in Bey's ontological anarchism and closely related to the situationist tactic of detornement. T.A.Z. is not the property of any philosophy but chaos and elegant disorder. Sure, there are aspects of anarchism, chaos thinking, situationist leanings, but that is just a symptom of the spectacle and is such precisely because of it. These essays all point to a way out of this spectacular society, but the first step comes with the mere recognition of it. This is harder than it sounds, or perhaps easier. TV and the media are always easy components to recognize, the real challenge is to recognize how the spectacle, i.e., the prefabricated, artificial, consumerist milieu penetrates, influences and shapes even our most intimate thoughts--which we often mistake for our own desires, wants and needs. In T.A.Z. Bey offers suggestions on how we can extricate ourselves from this structure and start creating our own temporary autonomous zones, within this system of economic, social and cultural oppression. Immediatism, Poetic Terrorism, and the embrace of Chaos are just a few of the strategies that he advises, all of which presuppose a new dialectic with reality.

This is only an outline, a mere review, I leave discerning and interpreting the details to you...Get this book today (also available in spoken word from axiom records).

I am surprised that the sort of people attracted to such a work--to guess from previous reviews--are still apparently apt to want to swallow the thing wholly, assertions that "they lied to you, sold you ideas" and all. Personally i reckon that we are in the midst of a conspiracy, yes...but most likely an unconscious one--the aggregate of fear & complacency & ignorance & such things, that is, resulting insidiously in the effects of a sort of conspiracy. What sort of result, for example, would one really expect from blowing up a transmission tower? A sudden enlightenment of the populace? No: most people would likely become even more reactionary when faced with causes for alarm.

Essentially this book, in spite of its claims to the contrary, seems to me a variety of art movement and not the "ultimate" anything, but as with anything so incendiary and beautiful its value can still hardly be overestimated. Who can resist Poetic Terrorism or Bey's felicity with language (eg. Chaote art)? The language and imagery are colourful and bursting full. Imagine a feast laid out on a table with barely enough room for the feasters' plates--and certainly not enough for their elbows--and everyone seated around it wearing purple plumage or velvet saris or nothing at all & laughing with food in their mouths.

I'll take what i need and leave the rest, as it goes. Implicit in most of the writing is criticism of those who would reject any part of the "freedom" described, but who's afraid of Hakim Bey? I'm glad he wrote even if i won't be taking all of what he wrote to heart.

This book is great. It also is not copyrighted and the entire text is available online. If you haven't read this yet I recommend taking a look at some of it. A good search engine like Google.com or Yahoo will turn it up quite quickly. If you like it you will probably want a hard copy (makes for much more enjoyable reading). So if you can't print it out you will definitely want to buy one. Cheers.

My life and perceptions were changed forever by this book. If you have the nagging feeling that something's wrong with your reality, or if you find yourself inexplicably angry and hungry for something that you can't name, or if you simply want to take a crowbar to your worldview, read this book. Please.

For those who are a little shy of cash, there are a couple of electronic versions of the book floating around the net. But really, if you have any cash, you should give a little to Hakim Bey by buying the book.

Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone" is a personal favorite of mine, and although many despise it and mistakenly write it off as mystification or the work of a phony posing as an avant garde philosopher, I am convinced it is an underground classic. This will shake your banal perceptions and your begrudging acceptance of the monotony of everyday life by advocating a form of rebelliousness and hatred for the ordinary the like or equal of which I've never seen in any other medium. Although I am in definite disagreement with his misguided denunciation of surrealism, without which he never could have written this book, Bey has created one of the most unique and fascinating revolutionary manifestoes written for decades. "Poetic Terrorism" is the most exciting idea I've encountered in a long while, and after your first read you'll be eager to start 'terrorizing' the norm yourself, even if you're the most self controlled and mild mannered person imaginable. The beauty of this tiny molotov cocktail is it's insistence that personal rebellion, rather than superficial political activism, is the real way to freedom, a conviction I've held firmly for a good deal of my life. Only through a reordering and a total recreation of the individual's perceptions can he or she be truly free, and even then the mental discipline necessary for true liberation must be maintained with the greatest vehemence. Talk about real postmodernism! This is rebellion itself. A must for anyone who distinguishes themselves from the conforming masses.

Hakim Bey borrows from Situationism, dada, the occult, and a few other sources to create Ontological Anarchism. The result is a very strange and very wonderful pattern for a revolution that starts now. Bey is not interested in whether the dialectic has reached its head. This is a personal revolt, an insurrection in everday life.

The first section deals with Poetic Terrorism, an extension of Situationist praxis beyond street theatre. Basically, any action taken against the spectacle fits into this, but especially those aimed at institutions of misinformation. The second part is comosed of broadsheets detailing everything from surrealism to black magick. The third is TAZ proper, or improper as the case may be. Bey includes some fascinating information on pirate utopias and the lost Roanoke colonies that were almost certainly left out of your high school history book.

The book does not so much suggest techniques as it does evoke a spirit of revolt. This is anarchy for those who like their insurrections occult and their politics way outside the mainstream.

The idea of a "beautiful" and "poetic" treatise on anarchism may seem unbelievable, but then so is Hakim Bey's "TAZ." Bey proposes an anarchism of the mind, a realm as byzantine and fantastic as an opium fever-dream and every bit as "real" as any humdrum consensus reality we have ever been expected to deal with. An all-around wonder, "Temporary Automonous Zone" even includes recipies, helpful hints on parade themes and firework displays-- fun for kids and adults alike-- plus handy tips on how to build your own arabesque reality. If you read only one book on anarchism this year, "TAZ" is the one to buy.

This is one of those pieces of literature that you simply cannot afford to miss. It's like discovering Marge Piercy at the tender, malleable age of 12, or finding Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, worn and well-loved, after a ten-year marriage filled with abuse. Except, TAZ doesn't require you to be at any particular phase of your life to change it. It just does. Sometimes, it's not immediate. Sometimes it sits quietly in the back of your mind, bubbling up curt replies to oppressive corporate and societal forces that occasionally - tragically infrequently, to begin with - with issue forth from your mouth and cause bank tellers to go pale with shock.

Temporary Autonomous Zones are nets of co-conspirators, ready to take the mass of over-bearing government and the thin veneer of so-called civilization down, not through bloody revolution, but rather through obsolescence. If we do not respect the right to control us, if we have our own power back to do our own work, only then are we our own people. And moreover, in "Ontological Anarchism", we find the suggestion that we do not have to define ourselves by ANYTHING other than what WE feel we are. We are "supposed" to be productive, civilized, friendly, codependent, well-dressed, well-paid, well-fed and easily coddled. But humans are NOT that - we are animals, base creatures of a triple nature, as gods are, as goddesses are. And in each as our own deity, we cannot be truly shaped by anyone else but our own ineffable nature.

And that's just the beginning....

Have a couple of dictionaries standing by, or be sure to have a few dozen bookmarked online while reading this, for if you're to appreciate Bey's prose, you're likely to need 'em. He writes in a strange way, obviously highly intelligent, but rambling, and if you're not quite sure what he's on about, it's just going to seem worse.

There are a lot of ideas in here, based on things I'm not very familiar with, such as Sufism and dadism - some of which are at least partially explained, but this is one of those books you need to read, and then come back to later and see how it compares. Certainly on the first go struggling somewhat to get a feel for how his mind works on paper.

It's a very inspiring work, which he may loathe to hear, but I intend to do something about it. I recommend reading it to anyone interested in expanding their interests and testing the limits of one's mind. Agreeing with everything he presents isn't necessary, but thinking about it is - doing even better. Highly recommended reading.