So what exactly is an 'Autonomous Zone'?

dublin | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Wednesday July 16, 2003 11:55 by King Mob

Some theory about autonomous zones - seeing as how Dublin experienced its first one in recent times.

Recently there's been an upsurge in interest in the concept of an 'Autonomous Zone', and the Disco Disco collective openly hung banners from the windows of 41 Parnell Square West proclaiming it to be such.

The term has come into recent use from an essay by American anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey, entitled "The Temporary Autonomous Zone" (TAZ), published by Autonomedia in 1991.

What is the TAZ? It is a tactic of insurrection against the state that is temporary and clandestine. Perhaps this is where the Disco Disco people failed in their attempt to establish an autonomous zone - they did not understand the concept of it and the tactics behind it.

From the TAZ:

Absolutely nothing but a futile martyrdom could possibly result now from a head- on collision with the terminal State, the megacorporate information State, the empire of Spectacle and Simulation. Its guns are all pointed at us, while our meager weaponry finds nothing to aim at but a hysteresis, a rigid vacuity, a Spook capable of smothering every spark in an ectoplasm of information, a society of capitulation ruled by the image of the Cop and the absorbant eye of the TV screen.

...The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can "occupy" these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace. Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves--because they never intersected with the Spectacle, never appeared outside that real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation.

...As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle. The TAZ is thus a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.

...FOUCAULT, BAUDRILLARD, ET AL. have discussed various modes of "disappearance" at great length. Here I wish to suggest that the TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance. When the Theorists speak of the disappearance of the Social they mean in part the impossibility of the "Social Revolution," and in part the impossibility of "the State"-- the abyss of power, the end of the discourse of power.

The anarchist question in this case should then be: Why bother to confront a "power" which has lost all meaning and become sheer Simulation? Such confrontations will only result in dangerous and ugly spasms of violence by the emptyheaded shit-for-brains who've inherited the keys to all the armories and prisons.

...disappearance is not necessarily a "catastrophe"-- except in the mathematical sense of "a sudden topological change." All the positive gestures sketched here seem to involve various degrees of invisibility rather than traditional revolutionary confrontation. The "New Left" never really believed in its own existence till it saw itself on the Evening News. The New Autonomy, by contrast, will either infiltrate the media and subvert "it" from within--or else never be "seen" at all. The TAZ exists not only beyond Control but also beyond definition, beyond gazing and naming as acts of enslaving, beyond the understanding of the State, beyond the State's ability to see.

--

If future experiments with autonomous zones in the city are to go ahead, then the tactic of disappearance must be investigated.

For more reading:

The TAZ in full (with Ontological Anarchy): http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/taz/taz.htm