Coming back to our current preoccupations, I wanted to bring up a little idea R. and I had one night: re-shaping the concept of TAZ into a tool for experimental practices that are not just those of the free party.
Sturm und Drang party
When challenged to put into words my fundamental fantasy I have realised that, for some years, my desire has been chasing some vague idea of “unusual intensities”, a murky fantasy of unpredictable, strange, breath taking, startling even, experiences. Having such an exalted romanticist fantasy is an awful realisation for one who fancied themselves as a sarcastic agro-nihilist with a penchant for mocking humanism’s demiurgic elations. But that was it: fumes of Sturm und Drang were apparently filling the cracks of my cynicism. Well, nothing left to do except hiding this ignominy behind a curtain of nihil-tekno, anti-humanist Sturm und Drang.
At some point, the search for unusual intensities pulled me out of the specialised, professionalised “radical” environments; at another, it pulled me into the weirdness of the free party. The free party is a strange thing. Its organisation and form are by now ritualistic; however, there is something within it that transcends the framework. Like in the carnival, the ritual setting opens up a space where people can become unusual: where their ways of relating to the others, to themselves and to the world – of being in the world and of creating an account of themselves – is anomalous. In my fantasy, this disturbance of the predictable trajectory of libidinal particles forms swirls and storm clouds of intensities. And, maybe, opens the passage towards metamorphoses.
Hakim Bey was talking about the saturnalia that has unhinged itself from the official calendar, breaking away from the function of release valve given to it by authorities. These unhinged saturnalia that err blindly, like cyclones carrying around the seeds of the unusual, is not a bad image of the party’s TAZ.
Unhinged molecules of freedom
But what if this erring TAZ starts criss-crossing other territories besides those of the free party? What if we would summon such spaces through some occult ceremonies? I cannot imagine any of my territories being fully freed from the governing dispositifs that create their various aspects and subjectivities. But I can persuasively fantasise about momentarily liberating bits of myself, my imagination, my ecstasies and of the spaces I dwell in or traverse from the grip of governing. I cannot wait, as true believers do, for the molar, centralising moment of rupture that, in one push, will break open the gates of this monolithic reality and have it flooded by post-insurrectional existential heterogeneity. At the moment, what I can happily act towards is the creation and multiplication of TAZ in all possible forms and locations: in psychic universes, erotic landscapes, coves of relationships, horizons of imagination and focal points of practices. I am moved by the possibility of clawing out bits from the tightly governed environment of the everyday while laughing like hyenas. If we need to burn something, I would rather burn out holes in the fabric of the dominant reality, creating fleeting areas of emptiness where intensities can flare. I can see how those can be joyous practices; but am no longer able to feel intensity, not even a pulse, in the fantasy of pushing, inch by inch, the sad and hostile megalith of bourgeois reality towards the insurrection, revolution, etc. Indeed, if we define victory not as the total and definitive liberation of the “world” but as the small eruption of the TAZ, the gates open to any praxis we please and any energy that might burst out of it. Those instants, no matter how brief, might allow the unusual to take form and hold in my everyday life.
How to make the TAZ a laboratory for the mutations of the everyday, rather than a form of escapism, is to be seen. The relationship between TAZ and a form of life is, probably, something that takes shape as a practice and not as a moment of analysis that precedes the practice. Not that practice is ever distinct from a symbolic economy, a field of fantasy, an imaginary territory, etc.; but I cannot think of the TAZ as a form of futurism, a projection of hope. The TAZ, for me, is the fantasy of a perpetual now, where the future is simply the next step one takes while walking. Its’ meaning comes out of the post-hoc making sense of what has happened rather than from an initial, well-laid plan. And this is why the TAZ, in my little cosmogony, thrives in the post-apocalypse.
Attack of the post-apocalyptic barbarians
Indeed, the TAZ, to my mind, is the territory of predilection of the post-apocalyptic barbarians. The post-apocalypse is a fantasy I am playing with and I will write more on it shortly. It is a world without hope and without future, a world of permanent presence, of the perpetual now, an eternal storm in which one is busy chasing archipelagos of light, rains strobes and warm winds rather than trying to predict when and where the storm starts or ends, where it goes or how the world will look like after it.
As to the barbarian, it is my fetish, mythical anti-bourgeois figure and I have sketched elements of it in all three numbers of Demoni Danzanti. I will come back to this as well, at some point.
Anyway, to keep it brief: an expedition against the enemy planned from within the TAZ by post-apocalyptic barbarian tribes might have a different form from our usual struggles, because it is not imagined as part of a coherent strategy of permanent and total war that must be won or lost, but like an absurdist, sarcastic, nihilist attack on the bourgeois dispositifs of pleasure. Not just to pillage and scorch. But also to give the respectable citizens an ulcer or cramps, make them look stupid and stuffed, outrage, repulse, terrorise, sabotage and make them uncomfortable; give them a panic attack, pass germs, spit in their ice-cream, paint their windows black, scratch their cars, flood their theatres, vandalise their monuments, slash the screens of their cinemateques, piss in their basil pots, pour laxatives in their beer glasses, steal their bike, puke on their staircase, inconvenience, slander, insult, abuse and generally spoil their enjoyment. Just for fun. Before returning wherever we came from. Or something on these lines…
I would be interested in thinking about such expeditions. And in thinking about our future meetings as the creation of a TAZ, a space where we can be unusual in interesting ways. Creating the kind of environment that is conducive to such forms is not an easy task and it is something that we need to carefully work towards together.