criminal bee

The Criminal Bee

by Hakim Bey

(SOME THINGS TO THINK ABOUT. AS WE MOVE FORWARD AND CONSIDER/DEFINE/EXPERIENCE WHAT WE ARE DOING/MAKING/CREATING. THE FOLLOWING ARE JUST SOME EXCERPTS, THE WHOLE OF WHICH IS EASILY FOUND ONLINE. PLEASE FORWARD TO OTHERS. AND, ALSO, PLEASE SEND TO ME NEW EMAIL ADDRESSES YOU'VE SENT STUFF TO. --DUFF)



The Gathering

Considered as a TAZ. The gathering can be called and held without any computer assistance which is indeed fortunate because the gathering is a vital necessity. Now, today. And it is already evolving spontaneously, out of this need. A numer of kind of gatherings aspire to manifest as TAZ: the neo-pagan festivals, the Rainbow camps, collaborative art events, open conspiracies such as Queer Nation or WACK, Raves, anarchist collectives, hypercultural international communities, secret societiesm meeting for risky or illegal or insurrectionary goals etc., drug dealers.

These groups or gatherings constitute the only viable immediate means of realizing passional series in real-time, every day life. In opposition to the forces of dissipation, alienation and suffocation by which the consensus visciates & dissolves all human aspiration to solidarity & festal values. Any critique leveled at these existing groups or gatherings therefore is meant as constructive in every sense of the word. The problems lie in 2 areas: philosophical & organizational. Some groups fail to realize the full impilcations of their reaction against the spectacle, which remains instinctual & hence philosophically unsound. For example, the 1960's delusion that we can use the media for our own ends still persists so that many groups are ruined by the very publicity they thought they needed in order to attain their goals. Once such a group allows itself to become recuperated as part of the spectacle of counterculture dissent, the Pnuch & Judy Show, starts. The Insurrection.

I'd like to answer those critics who've accused the TAZ of being an evasion or a postponement or a substitute for the insurrection or even for the revolution. In part these criticisms come from Latin American commarades who seem to uneasy about the adventurous aspect of the TAZ and from North Americans who called it "anarchist Club Med." Both critiques are important. The TAZ is not and idea or an ideology but something that is happening: as such, it needs good criticism. On the contrary, I've tried to emphasize over & over again: the TAZ is another way of building the kernel of the new society within the shell of the old (as the Wobblies used to say). And that the TAZ should serve as the matrix for the emergence of a Sorelian model of uprising (Georges Sorel, I highly recommend it).

However, it must be also be repeated that the USA, at any rate, can scarcely be described in 1993 as a pre-revolutionary cosiety. The election of a corrupt, venal pseudo-liberal regime which will smooth over the few rough spots in the spectacle while the Republicans reorganize to continue building the New World Order in 1996 makes the possibility of an American uprising even less likely. Are we to postpone all liberatory action until things get worse again? This would scarcely be logical or creditable. Those of us who feel so irrationally unhappy with the wondeful world of commodities & neo-puritan reaciton cannot justly be denied the chance of local & transient experiments of Utopian realization now, or as soon as possible. In our lifetimes, in our lives. And this struggle is not without relevance to those people elsewhere in the world whom we mau consider our natural allies, such as indigineous & tribal groups or revolutionary movements. In this sense the Temporary Autonomous Zone is like a pre-echo of the insurrection. A foretaste of its great liberatory energies and can even be seen as a neccesary step toward the revolution which wil realize the Utopia.

Thus it should be emphasized that the TAZ has not only a festaludic, celebratory or material bodily principle in view, but also like yang to yin, an inevitable measure of insurrectionary risk and intention to remake the world. The TAZ cannot be realized solely as a hedonic exercise (any more than the revolution can be realized without dancing, as Emma Goldman put it) which would lead to just charges of Club Med-ism or even crypto-fascism. The TAZ goes beyond the merely hedonic because it wants to expand & multiply until it infects or even becomes the social. And therefore even though the TAZ may be secret & closed & intensely pleasurable for its members, it must be seen as a struggle which opens itself potentially to all kindred spirits & fellow warriors. Most of the TAZ-like groups, gatherings known to me fail to measure up in one or other of these areas. The political groups have still not mastered the pleasure principle, while the lifestyle groups have still not mastered politics. Political praxis of some sort of course addsss to the risk involved in the TAZ, and therefore increases the need for tact. Bit it also increases the pleasure. The group jouissance, the group coming, within TAZ - this pleasure results from the very sense of overcoming, first mentioned by Nietzsche, when he spoke of the free spirits' joy at evading the law of the herd. And if this sounds eletist, remember, from the anarchist point of view, the heard consists precisely of those who agree to be herded. After the revolution, no doubt, free spirits would find some other sources for overcoming.
However, until then, the law still exists as an edge to sharpen our lives. But revolution in a certain sense can be said not to exist, since it has not happened within the history it wishes to claim as its field of activity. As for the law, it exists only as spectacle and as a pattern of spasms of terror. But the TAZ is rooted, however evanescently, within the life we live, within the material and imaginal worldwhich WE have our genuine being, however fragemtary and even tragic. And within the celebratory mode of pleasure enhanced by doubling and redoubling whichis the only excuse for society we know. Rather than crime, it might make more sense, or better poetry, to speak to sorcery which has all the connotations of secrecy and power we desire for the emerging TAZ. An air of menace, of invisibility & of the realization of desire. As for illegality, well, a quilting bee is not illegal yet it can be a perfect TAZ. Sooner or later, however, even a quilting bee runs the danger of becoming the object of tourism. It will become a banal imitation of itself, unless it can create, at least for a moment, an economy of life capable ofpersisting even if only briefly outside the prison of work, consume, die. And that economy by its very nature threatenes the spoof worldof control. Eventually the bee will be illegal, since it's already considered insane. And so the... quilting bee should beign now to act as if it's already illegal,to embrace a philosophy of illegalism. Today quilt, tomorrow, perhaps the uprising. Our kind of bee might be devoted to sex, info exchange, tax evasion, hashish farming or even to orgies, credit scams or gun running. It will still have the structure of the... quilting bee. And so the ... quilting bee should already anticipate a possibility to run guns or stage orgies. It should be prepared to act within the cracks of the monolith of simulation like a true gang of Johnsons. Like a swamp of Callahads. Like conspirators whose purpose is really to brath together. Like criminals for the human race. Like pirate Utopians for peace. Like guerillas for harmony.