Temporary Autonomous Zone Research Articles

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ ФИЛОСОФИЯ И ОНТОЛОГИЯ АВТОНОМНЫХ ЗОН

The article reveals the content of the Temporary Autonomous Zones’ conception (TAZ), proposed by the American anarchist thinker and poet Hakim Bey (real name – Peter Lamborn Wilson, 1945–2022) and rather poorly represented in Russian-language scientific publications. The political and intellectual contexts within which this concept was formed and formulated, as well as its ontological roots, theorized by Hakim Bey himself, are highlighted. A brief overview of the main provisions of this concept, a critical reaction to it from other anarchist authors (M. Bookchin), as well as counterarguments by post-anarchist theorists R. F. Day and S. Newman are presented. The relevance of this work is due to the fact that the trends of instability and non-linearity, fixed both in the modern post-non-classical world picture (reflected in philosophy) and in current global politics, though not identical, but in a certain way correlate with anarchist approaches to understanding reality in general and political reality in particular. The purpose of this articleis attempt to incorporate the concepts of ontological anarchy and autonomous zones, developed by Bey in the 80s of the 20th century, into the context of the latest theoretical approaches in ontology, namely those presented by Q. Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, L. R. Brynt’s object-oriented ontology (onticology) and B. Latour’s actor-network theory. This also determines the scientific novelty of this work, achieved by methods of historical and philosophical description and comparative analysis and also thanks to the involvement of a number of rare English-language sources devoted to the scientific consideration of the work of Hakim Bey. The results of the work include the detection of theoretical approaches to the development and articulation of an anarchist political ontology, which may be associated with further areas of scientific research. In addition, as a conclusion, those nuances of the concept of autonomous zones that seem to be the most relevant today are outlined.

The League of Endarkenment: Hakim Bey and the Way of Disappearance into Nature

AbstractAmong his later works, Peter Lamborn Wilson—known to many as Hakim Bey—began performing ritual art pieces in Upstate New York, which he referred to as acts of “Endarkenment.” This paper explores Endarkenment from the beginning of its organic growth in the fertile soil of The Temporary Autonomous Zone, to its blossoming as fully‐realized ritual art, nourished by Bey's intention of returning enchantment back to the land. Through parallels in the works of antiquity, Surrealism, Georges Bataille, Giordano Bruno, Djuna Barnes, and others, an adumbration of the body of Endarkenment comes into view at the very moment of its disappearance into Nature, giving an idea of what Endarkenment could be as a fully realized form of internal transformation.

‘Squat City’: Dublin’s temporary autonomous zone. Considering the temporality of autonomous geographies

‘Squat City’ was an autonomous social centre and squat that was open for nearly three years in Dublin, Ireland, and the space played a key role in the development of autonomous and anarchist politics in the city. In framing my research, I began with the concept of ‘temporary urbanism’, a well-developed area in urban studies, cultural geography, and planning, that focuses on the temporal aspects of short-term places and spaces. I noted that the concept of autonomous geographies was important to understanding the politics and culture of short-term uses of space like squats, direct actions, protests, and social centres, but that temporary urbanism was not discussed in tandem with autonomous geographies. Using Squat City as the case study, I bring these two ideas together, to create a meaningful discussion based on the similarities between them. The reasons why urban actors are motivated to create these short-term projects can vary greatly, including the urban actors involved in squats, autonomous social centres, direct actions, and protests. What can we learn about city residents’ motivations and politics, how urban spaces are used in the city, and how can we consider the timeframes of autonomous geographies? By focusing on the everyday scale and use value of cities, how do alternative urban practices challenge what we may understand as the normal workings of cities? In this article, I discuss Squat City as a temporary autonomous zone to think about the temporality of radical practices.

Temporary Autonomous Home: Free parties and migration on the margins of the urban night

This article explores the relationship between migration, do-it-yourself late-night leisure and integration in the margins of the urban city. While the study of migration and leisure has been widely addressed, a focus on underground tekno ‘free parties’ within migrant communities remains unexamined. This article draws on the notion of ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’, which grasps the horizontal and momentary time-spaces of self-organization, creativity and freedom that articulate the tekno ‘free party’ culture. Departing from this notion, the concept of TAH (‘Temporary Autonomous Home’) explores the night and how these are felt and articulated for a group of migrants from southern European countries in the city of Bristol (United Kingdom). Using the TAH as a live metaphor, this article argues that these are non-traditional ways of participating in the foreign culture that pluralizes the processes of integration in contrast with the scarce sense of integration participants otherwise feel.

What Is Street Art?

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colourful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practising the city, while creating a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control over the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favouring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art (i) significantly differs from official public art; (ii) includes graffiti as its original and most radical style.

Temporary autonomous zones, control and security simulations: With regard to the Aguas Blancas (Argentina) – Bermejo (Bolivia) border

A remarkable change in security matters set the course for politics in Latin America in recent years. The putative causal relationship between migration and crime cyclically sustains the discourses that require more safety and police force intervention, police autonomy to suppress, and reduction of the age of criminal responsibility. This panorama, accompanied by the state postponement of prison and security infrastructures, is framed and worsened by the tendency to criminalize borders, which are seen as porous and dangerous zones. The notion that these spaces favor the contamination and corrosion of the nation-state promotes rhetoric about borders that need to be disassembled. Simultaneously, an odd growth of the technological market specialized in border security, suggests specific forms of relationships between the social and environmental conditions, illegal markets, security policies and nationalist discourses in favor of sovereignty. I analyze the municipality of Aguas Blancas, bordering with Bolivia, where the transit between the legal and the illegal shapes specific ways of life and exposes the nets woven through the managing of illegalisms at diverse scales (Goldman 1999; Foucault 2014). My analysis connects ‘simulations’ in Baudrillard’s (1978) sense, performances of imaginary scenarios that become reality, with ‘temporary autonomous zones’ in security matters, areas outside routine legal-administrative governance (Bey 1996). The anthropological approach in this work was based on in situ interviews and observations aimed to understand the relationship between illegal practices and security.

Remembering the Dead and Say Their Names

This essay considers the role of sound, as in spoken voice, in two multimedia memorials to individuals killed by violence in the United States. The first is Remembering the Dead, a memorial to victims of mass shootings from the 1880s to the present. The second is Say Their Names, a memorial to victims of police violence and brutality. The use of sound (the speaking aloud of victims' names) in both these installations is meant to create and extend a space, a temporary autonomous zone that offers—through thoughtful listening to the names of victims spoken aloud—perceptual, phenomenological, and sensory engagements with the act of remembrance to provide witness and memorial for those killed and to promote meaningful social and civic justice to stop the killings. In this regard, both projects were conceived and developed as media activism.

Art State, Art Activism and Expanded Concept of Art

Abstract: Contemporary post-aesthetic art implies an expanded concept of the work of art that also includes political functions. Beuys’s concept of social sculpture and Marcuse’s idea of society as a work of art can be complemented by Abreu’s project of a musical orchestra as a social ideal (the Venezuelan example of the music and education project El Sistema) and the Neue Slowenische Kunst transnational state formed from the core of art. These concepts are close to the views of Hakim Bey (Temporary Autonomous Zone), with D’Annunzio also touching upon them with his State of Fiume (1919–1920), for which he wrote the constitution and defined music as its central governing principle. Although the art state is a utopian project, art can serve a variety of emancipatory functions even in the dystopian present to intervene in and change the political. In this article, we also discuss the case of art activism in Slovenia, where culture (with many engaged artists) has become a central part of civil society oriented towards social change. Art activism contributes to an expanded concept of the political, which includes new subjects and new forms of antagonisms. Likewise, such repurposing of art emphasises its role in research.

O corpo-quebrada como elemento de criação de espaços de possibilidades na comunidade da Rua do Ouro

Desde 2018, o ECOLAB investiga as possibilidades performativas de criação de Zonas Autônomas Temporárias (ZAT), na comunidade da Rua do Ouro, em São João del Rei, buscando aplicar uma metodologia própria, baseada na abordagem cartográfica-somático-performativa-ecopoética para a criação de espaços de possibilidades.

LOST IS FOUND

The tenure track is a contentious space in which pre-tenure faculty are asked to navigate the corporatization of the university, and uncertainty with regards to the expectations of success to achieve tenure. In this article, we frame the period of pre-tenure as a liminal space, not as a space of inadequacy but as a necessary shelter of respite. Living in a temporary autonomous zone, we find ourselves challenged to lose and find varying aspects of our professional identities as faculty. We use arts-based narratives in the form of micro-storymaking as well as Solnit’s (2005) discussion of what it means to be lost to locate and (re)frame our stories of navigating the tenure track. We argue that the liminal space of pre-tenure, in the context of the “slow” movement is a time of openings that prepare us to embrace and engage in passionate artistic practices as we enter mid-career.

The artwork’s community

ABSTRACT The paper explores the inherent political dimension of art, theorized as the artwork’s community: the community structurally constitutive of the work of art as a phenomenon. I distinguish between two major paradigms of the artwork’s community: the Kantian and the Heideggerian. The Kantian is a transcendental aesthetic community, evoked in aesthetic judgment, which thus claims the possibility of emancipated political existence. The Heideggerian, in contrast, is an actual community, sharing the understanding of reality inaugurated by the truth-disclosing event of art. I further distinguish between two possible interpretations of the Heideggerian artwork’s community. The orthodox interpretation conceives of it in terms of Volk, which renders it largely irrelevant for the art of our age. I suggest a new interpretation of the Heideggerian artwork’s community, which keeping with the historical actuality as its essential treat, reduces its scale to the type of community defined by Hakim Bey as temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). I undertake a comparative analysis of two contemporary artistic phenomena, which seem to be informed by an interpretation of the artwork’s community in terms of the latter paradigm: the participatory practices of contemporary art (also known as relational art) and the psytrance dance movement. I show that while psytrance indeed embodies the Heideggerian artwork’s community in its TAZ-version, participatory art operates within the Kantian paradigm, while taking TAZ as the privileged medium of its aesthetic operation.

Do Texto ao Têxtil

O artigo busca desvendar as cooperações possíveis da cena/ção Festormance com a futura intervenção artivista Renda-se. Analisaremos o texto/têxtil à luz de Schechner, da performatividade imersiva, do “fio de Ariadne por Nietzsche” aos olhos de Deleuze e do encontro dionisíaco e político entre Schechner, Nietzsche e Hakim Bey como estratégias para imersão e participação em uma pesquisa em artes, urbanidades e sustentabilidade, com cunho artivista, educomunicativo e fomentador da criação-coletiva como ação para uma consciência do Ser.
 
 
 Palavras-chave: performance artivista; fio de Ariadne; zona autônoma temporária; criação coletiva; consciência vestível.

Frames and community in Arizona’s All Souls Procession

ABSTRACTIn the All Souls Procession, a large event in honor of the dead in Tucson in the southwestern U.S. borderlands, locals construct community through the Procession, while presenting its historic and cultural complexity through diverse collective performances. In this ethnographic work we interpret these performances through frames – genres of performance replayed as community expression – and we analyze salient Procession frames including community ritual, inclusion, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Day of the Dead fantasy, and parade. We offer our heuristic for the study of frames in participatory performances as a method to disentangle social dynamics in communities and collective identities.

Happiness and freedom in direct action: critical mass bike rides as ecstatic ritual, play, and temporary autonomous zones

ABSTRACTMost leisure research does not consider collective action and social change, while most social movement research overlooks carnivality and spontaneity. A counter-example is the alternative bicycling movement critical mass (CM), a rebellious, liberatory leisure and cultural event. CM is goal-oriented and a libidinal expression of participant desire. This paper investigates CM’s production of happiness and freedom via three heterodox theories. Ecstatic rituals are repetitive, cathartic collective events that people engage in to express joy and flaunt convention. Political theories of play interpret individual’s physically-embodied, creative, and performative actions. Temporary autonomous zones are spatial locations of resistance to authority that evade state detection and suppression. CM – unlike standard bike races or conventional movement protest – transcends the limitations of physical exercise, lackadaisical leisure, and militant direct action. Instead it is a hybrid form of collective action, combining premeditated ritual, rebellious play, and mobile freedom-seeking.

Like so many things I both know and don't know

In 2014, I was commissioned to make a new work for Survival Kit Festival, Umea, Sweden. The outcome, I begin alone in this action: a series of sounding zones, was a number of outdoor long duration sounding performances in the city and surrounding rural area. In eight different locations, I undertook a series of eight-hour DJ performances with a bespoke and portable, self-powered sound system, and a selection of domestic playback equipment. This site-specific set of actions proposed to explore bodily endurance in performance; the socio-cultural role of the soundsystem as a viable tool to create what Bey termed the “temporary autonomous zone” (1985); the fringes or limits of what skills and sites might be considered DJ practice. I have continued to investigate site-specificity in DJing through collaborative practice; in 2015 artists Ruthie Woodward, Francine Perry and I formed the ensemble, The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe. In our performances we also worked without mains electricity and “off stage” at festivals and gigs on the UK DIY scene. We developed interests in blurring the lines between experimental live improvisation and more traditional mixing practices; using our live sung voices in our mixes; and investigating plurivocal and collectivised structures inspired by various moments in feminist activist histories. This article brings together textual and material fragments to illuminate this process; and reflects on strategic affinities with feminist histories, improvising feminism, opting out of hegemonic narratives and spaces and exploring norm-criticality in sound as a feminized and feminist practice, ‘edge-walking’ and inhabiting liminal spaces, the female voice in the the DJ mix, and vulnerable and confrontational bodies.

We are all foreigners in an analogue world: cyber-material alliances in contesting immigration control in Stockholm’s metro system

Public spaces are often contested sites involving the political use of socio-material arrangements to check, control and filter the flow of people. In Sweden, the recently established police project (REVA) in is an attempt to strengthen ‘internal border’ controls. This paper discusses the emergence of practices in which activist groups organized and performed resistance through the use of counter technologies in the transport sector. We explain how a hybrid alliance of human and nonhuman others generated new virtual and urban spaces and provided temporary autonomous zones, to groups of undocumented immigrants. REVA Spotter, for example, was a tool, a manifesto and a peaceful means of resistance to the REVA policing methods through continuous Facebook status updates on identity checks at metro stations in Stockholm. The technology enabled reports on location and time of ticket controls to warn travellers in real time. Attempts by authorities to exert control over the ‘spatial’ underground were thereby circumvented by the effective development of an alternative infrastructural ‘underground’ consisting of assemblages of technologies, activists, undocumented immigrants, texts and emails, smart phones and computers. Based on ‘netnographic observations’ and interviews, the paper utilizes the case of the REVA to illustrate processes and practices that simultaneously configure the powerful surveyor, the discriminated and those who contest these politics through hybridities of cyber/material, human/nonhuman and urban/virtual space. The paper argues that by configuring such hybrid alliances, activists provided cyber-material autonomy to undocumented immigrants and other travellers in the metro, thereby creating new virtual and urban spaces for mobility and flows.

Le cybermunicipalisme devant l’espace-monde

Cybermunicipalism in front of world-space
 American scholar George Landow saw in hypertext a great potential for decolonization of knowledge. However, the latter was quickly subjected to new control dynamics that were previously unsuspected. At the same time, its content has also been "commodified" by hegemonic forces. (George Landow 2006) Our question is: to what extent could we free hypertext from the constraints imposed by Capital? Nico Carpentier underlines the importance of cities as an interface in the face of globalization, thanks to community hypermedia, in what he calls "translocalism". What he is proposing is, in our opinion, constitutes cybermunicipalism. (Nico Carpentier, p. 3) In fact, we would like to address this possibility in the present communication. From my perspective as a translator, I would like to address the issue by mobilizing, among other things, the concepts of "mechanized reproduction" by Walter Benjamin (1939) and "temporary autonomous zones" by Hakim Bey (1985), in order to establish certain avenues of meditation to abolish, in the twinkling of an eye, the dichotomy between global and local.

일시적 자율 지대와 법 바깥의 주체 = Temporary Autonomous Zone and a Subject Outside the Law

Narratives of historical shifts by a collective, united subject such as a class tend to denunciate small-scale, diversified struggles. But as we know, revolutions have no history of success and others have no history of being fairly evaluated. This article aims at examining and evaluating one of the 'others,' Temporary Autonomous Zones conceptualized by Hakim Bey, who proposed to give up a direct confrontation with the power which became a simulation and to constitute sporadic and temporary communities as a means of struggle. It has been criticized as an escapism by political critiques such as Bookchin and Armaitage, or even as giving up of the struggle itself. But opening up a T.A.Z. never amounts to a mere escapism, but an experiment with producing subjects outside the law who do not conform to the existing system. Conflicts and antagonisms which would remain even after a revolution around a single theme e.g . economic class could disappear in a T.A.Z. For example, people hanging together regardless of their ages are establishing a T.A.Z. which works outside the ageist system. Although T.A.Z. guarantees no utopia without any oppression, it shows possibilities of living alternatively. Rather than being a negation of the need for a revolution, even not of its possibility, T.A.Z. is an urge for a subject to revolutionize oneself first, which is possible now-and-here, even without a revolution. It is an experiment and an exercise for a total revolution which should abolish not just an economic oppression but also any kind of it.

Atos como Performance na Ocupação do Espaço Urbano: contra um modelo de cidade para os megaeventos

Resumo: Esta pesquisa se move entre junho de 2013 e julho de 2014, observando os atos que tomaram as ruas do Rio de Janeiro, em perspectiva a um só tempo estética e política, não apenas como crítica ao modelo de cidade para os megaeventos, mas como proposição de outros modos de habitar a urbe. A partir da percepção da pluralidade de formas de expressão acionadas e da centralidade das ações diretas na prática dos manifestantes, relacionamos os atos à noção de performance, com atenção especial aos corpos que ocuparam o espaço urbano, com suas coreopolíticas, seus teatros de invasão, seus coros polifônicos, suas escritas múltiplas, e a criação de Zonas Autônomas Temporárias, sempre prontas a re(in)ssurgir.

In a box: a narrative of a/n (under)grounded Iranian musician

ABSTRACTDue to years of precarious sociopolitical circumstances before and after the 1979 revolution, Iranian youth developed an acute sense of music making and learning unique to their locales, representing their deep-rooted desire to make their own music, and to move away from the state’s heavy-handed intrusion into their act of music making, and years of continuous religious/national identity crisis. Through narrative inquiry, the current research examines the life stories of Raam, an underground rock musician, who started his musical career unofficially in Iran with the assistance of his peers and family members, but later left the country to pursue his musicianship officially and outside the imposed regulations. During these years, Raam, along with fellow Iranian musicians, created an underground music scene that followed the sentiments of anarchism, do-it-yourself, and the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). This scene became one of Iran’s core music learning and teaching platforms where creativity, collaboration, and sense of camaraderie set the tone for the movement, striving for change and self-expression. Through Raam’s life stories, one can read the story of a generation of Iranian youths’ inevitable political music education; one in which local activism is of great significance, and hides small but steady acts of subversion.