Bunu da yaz hakim bey biography

By the s the village was completely abandoned, and so I did a piece there in honor of this woman, who was called the Lady in Gray. HB: Her ghost was still seen in the s, and a few of her followers were still around then. Their descendants still live here, but they no longer live like they used to. It took me months to find it. HUO: Could you speak a bit about your work as an artist?

So basically I devised this idea to do what I call vanishing art, which means that the art comes into existence in the very moment that it disappears. For example, the first piece I did involved throwing gold rings into a river—like the ancient druids used to do. Each of these works is based on a place in the region where I live, and each one is based on a historical event or person that I find inspiring, either because they were mystical or revolutionary, or for some other reason.

In each case I find a way to do an artwork that vanishes, either immediately or over the course of a few days. I want to get into pyrotechnics. And then in each case, I make a map similar to the one that you have, using collage, which is meant to be a sort of magical manipulation of the toposphere, of the map world, the image of the place. I use photographs and found objects and so forth to make these, and I also keep a box of documentation for each one, with photographs, drafts, essays, poems, souvenirs, and so forth.

So even though the art disappears, the map and the box remain behind as a record of the work. The one that I sent you originated as a nineteenth century Hudson River navigation chart.

Bunu da yaz hakim bey biography

The important place there is Esopus Island, which is where Aleister Crowley camped out in So Bill Breeze and I hired a sailboat for the day and went to that island and explored it. We had a nice time, came back, had a nice dinner, and that was pretty much the start of this whole series of works. Maybe sometime I will have an exhibition of the maps.

HUO: So if you were to look back at your work over these many decades, what would you say were the moments of epiphany? HB: There are big epiphanies and small epiphanies. The vision told me to end my association with orthodox Islam and become a heretic, which I then did. That would be a moment of epiphany. HB: Well, I always say that we have to be careful about our terms here.

Maybe the oldest. They always have a spiritual view of things. Take shamanism, which is a broad and hard-to-define term, but it is not religion, because it has no dogma. And in any case, those rules would only apply to the shaman and not to anybody else in the tribe. Having said that, we can begin to discuss ways in which even organized religion can be interesting.

I often say that what I really am is a historian of religion or religions. For example, another one was a member of the local Indian tribe who was called Big Indian because he was seven-and-a-half feet tall. Now it was actually fairly common for Native Americans to have these giants among them, there are many examples known to archaeologists, and this was the real thing.

He was queer, and his real companion was not a white woman but another Indian man, who was short, older than him, and was probably what they call a berdache, a cross-dressing shaman. But the relationship itself was not speculation, and is acknowledged not only in history, but also in oral tradition amongst what remains of the native population around here, which is not much.

So I did a piece to commemorate him up in the mountains, in the beautiful forests full of hemlock where there are four waterfalls called Otter Falls. Critics would say that my relationship to nature is reflected through layers of literature and art and class relationships and so forth, and this is true. Yet there is something strange and queer about falling in love with nature in the modern world, and it seems that the landscape itself is in need of a queering of some kind.

That actually has nothing to do with it. So in this sense, Big Indian became a great hero for me. I have a picture of myself next to this statue. HUO: It sounds like these mapping projects have a lot to do with memory. The historian Eric Hobsbawm always speaks about a protest against forgetting, and Rem Koolhaas suggested to me recently that amnesia might be at the very core of the digital revolution.

It seems that with more and more information, there might be less and less memory. Would you agree? Has it become urgent now to protest against forgetting? HB: I think so. I mean, I probably have a much more dire view of cyberspace and the internet than Rem Koolhaas. I think of it as a black hole of memory, and I think memory is disappearing at an alarming rate, thanks to this idea that everyone now has a prosthetic memory.

The idea is that this prosthetic memory means that no one needs to remember anything anymore. You just push a button and get any information you want. Well, you first of all need to know what questions to ask. But was there any moment when you believed that the internet would provide possibilities for new forms of freedom? Did you always have this position that the internet is a black hole?

HB: Well, I have to admit that, like everybody else in the s, I was much more optimistic about these things. And in some of my writing I may have given the impression that I would become some sort of cyber libertarian. I have many friends in that camp, but then as time went on, I became more of a Luddite. I believe that technology should not consist of an attack on the social.

And if you think about the symptom that everybody talks about, the loss of privacy, or even the redefinition of what privacy could possibly be, well, I see this as an actual attack on society. To me, the individual also loses in this formula. Capital itself wants everyone to have everything. And by the way, the US has achieved this—we now have one car for every adult in the country.

Capital wants everybody to have to own everything, and to share nothing. And the social result of this is ghastly. With: Hakim Bey. Also, the jihad is on those who would make life obey rules. Sources: www. Postanarchists such as Saul Newman and Simon Critchley generally maintain that there is no overarching social system. As a result, they orient politically to a practice of small transgressions rather than systemic ruptures.

They are influenced by Laclau, Foucault and Derrida, and see power as partial and diffuse. They value reformist, non-separatist strategies. These strategies operate on the inside of a system considered to have no outside. Revolution and exodus are dismissed with a hundred labels moralist, purist, abstract, dualistic, irrelevant to the people… The point of post-anarchist practice is not to overthrow the system, but to subvert the self, or the authority of the text.

There is thus a negative, fatalistic quality to the poetics of post-anarchism. Its orientation is insurrectional even when its tactics are not. Derridean and postcolonial approaches also arguably value a kind of shamanic altered consciousness. They arguably seek to attain it through the failure and dismantling of the self. Bey, like Stirner, Deleuze and Nietzsche, derives a politics of affirmation, desire, power, creativity, and ecstasy.

The continuity of true Self and divinity leads to antinomianism and affirmation of life whatever form it takes. This leads to affects of euphoria, intensity and rebellion. On the other hand, Derrida and postanarchism tend to produce affects of humility and lack. They situate divinity mainly in the Other rather than the Self. The idea of TAZ has inspired groups such as ravers, computer hackers, squatters and countercultural activists.

Events like Reclaim the Streets and Carnivals against Capital , as well as the rise of social centres and small-scale, informal political groups, are partly inspired by the idea of the TAZ. There is also an event video based on the TAZ idea. For more essays in the series, please visit the In Theory column page. While there is some disagreement over what exactly he believes, it is clear that at the very least, he has provided apologia for child sexual abuse.

I believe he takes this position seriously, and is not just engaged in playful provocation as some supporters claim. However, most of the theorists covered in this column take at least one position which is oppressive or problematic Aristotle supported slavery, Bakunin was anti-Semitic, Aquinas was homophobic, Althusser killed his wife…. I have therefore generally refrained from omitting thinkers from the series based on single oppressive position, if I feel their theory is otherwise useful.

He has recently published a series of books on Homi Bhabha. His 'In Theory' column appears every other Friday. Bey has supported sexual relationships between men and boys. I find it amusing that theorists of anarchism can on the one hand struggle against all present institutional systems, while on the other hand uphold the strictest conceptual regime.

It really reveals what your brand of anarchism is: very establishment, maybe established in the very place of your apparent discomfort. The conceptual blind spot this reveals strongly suggests that you lack the capacity to think your politics down into the basement. You want the thrill of the Temporary Autonomous Zone without its consequences.

In that way, you are like a conceptual police man putting up a cordon. And who do you exclude from your Temporary Autonomous Zone? Why, Mr. Hakim Bey. I literally laughing at how hopeless your life must be. You work for the totalitarian system. You are one of its double-think drones. But you offer yourself up as a thinker pushing the boundaries at the vanguard.

How brainwashed you are. It should appeal to alternative thinkers and punks everywhere, as it celebrates liberation, love and poetic living. The new edition contains the full text of Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism, the complete communiques and flyers of the Association fo Ontological Anarchy, the long essay 'The Temporary Autonomous Zone,' and a new preface by the author.

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