File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0407, message 48


Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 01:26:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Bleyer Interview With PL Wilson: "An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley"


 	

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley
in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson
with Jennifer Bleyer
>From the excellent Brooklyn Rail

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/07/27/2039205

It’s been nearly ten years since Peter Lamborn
Wilson—née Hakim Bey—looked at the pitiably
state-bound, rule-bound world around him and asked:
"Are we who live in the present doomed never to
experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on
a bit of land ruled only by freedom?" In a slim,
rattling volume called Temporary Autonomous Zone,
Wilson intoned that, in fact, freedom is already here.
Autonomy exists in time, he said, rather than space.
It’s in times of wildness, revelry, abandon and
revolution that for even just one brief jail-breaking
moment, as sweet as honey to the tongue, one is freed
of all political and social control.

Wilson rightly became celebrated as a kind of urban
prophet. It was an identity to add the others he bears
seamlessly and without contradiction: anarchist, poet,
public intellectual, psychedelic explorer, artist,
social critic, Sufi mystic. Six years ago he moved
upstate from the East Village to New Paltz, New York.
The setting is different, but the ideas have only
deepened—notably his critique of global capital and
"technological determination." In his green wood-frame
house, trees rustling overhead and birds chirping
outside, we drank tea and talked.

	

	
Jennifer Bleyer: You left New York City six years ago
and moved upstate to New Paltz. There’s a lot of art
happening here and in the Hudson Valley in general,
which seems pretty cool.

Peter Lamborn Wilson: The fact of it happening
anywhere makes it more interesting than a kick in the
face. But the fact of the matter is that America
doesn’t produce anything anymore. A couple of years
ago, we passed the halfway mark from being a so-called
productive economy to a services economy. What are
services? You tell me. Whatever it means, we don’t
make pencils. We don’t make cement. We don’t make
ladies garments or roll cigars. We don’t even
manufacture computers. In other words, we don’t make
anything,, especially not around here. There are a few
cement factories left up in Greene County, but
basically, industry died here in the fifties. It was a
long slow death, certainly over by the seventies.
There was a depression, so artists, who are certainly
blameless in this, discovered low real estate prices
and low rents, and they started to move up here. And
the gap between the artists and the real estate
developers has gotten very small in our modern times,
down to where it’s almost nothing.

So for a few years the artists and their friends came
up here and got bargains and moved in, and now
artists’ studios in Beacon sell for a quarter-million
dollars. And we’re talking about a one-room building
on a half-acre lot. You want a house? Half-a-million.
Do you know any artists who can afford that? The point
is that there’s a lot of boosterism for the arts in
the Hudson Valley because there’s no other economy.
It’s either that or "green tourism," which in my mind
is a disgusting term and something that I don’t want
to see promoted in any way. It’s a commodification of
nature, turning nature into a source of profit for the
managerial caste in the Hudson Valley. That’s not the
solution I’m interested in.

We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the
sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are
just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers.
"Sustainable development"—that means very expensive
houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from
New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable
economy or permaculture. They talk about agriculture,
they get all weepy about it, but they won’t do
anything for the family farms because family farms use
pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in
the minds of these people. So they’re perfectly happy
to see the old farms close down and build McMansions,
as long as they’re green McMansions, of course, with
maybe a little solar power so they can boast about how
they are almost off the grid. This is just yuppie
poseurism. It’s fashionable to be green, but it’s not
at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working
class and farming people and families that you’re
dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the
artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the
battle. If we would just honestly look at what
function we’re serving in this economy, I’m afraid we
would see that we’re basically shills for real estate
developers.

Bleyer: Which is really the case in Beacon, I suppose.

Wilson: Oh, absolutely. Dead Hudson Valley industrial
towns reinventing themselves as prole-free zones and
calling it art. Now, everyone I know is involved in
the arts, and I’m involved in the arts, so what I’m
saying here is a bit of a mea culpa. I don’t think
that we can consider ourselves guiltless and not
implicated in all this because we’re creative and
artsy and have leftist emotions. Where are our actual
alternative institution-building energies? Where are
our food co-ops? Where’s our support for the Mexican
migrant agricultural workers? Most people here are not
interested in that.

Bleyer: So where should people who consider themselves
radical be directing their energies?

Wilson: I think that a radical life is not something
that depends on Internet connections or websites or
demos or even on politics, like having Green mayors.
This may sound dull to people who think that having a
really hot website is a revolutionary act. Or that
getting a million people to come out and wave symbolic
signs at a symbolic march is a political act. If it
doesn’t involve alternative economic institution
building, it’s not. As an anarchist, I’ve had this
critique for years, and experience has only deepened
it. Here, there are people who are very concerned with
trying to preserve whatever natural beauty and
farmland exists in this region, and my heart’s with
them. But I think it’s done by and large without any
consciousness that this is already a privileged
enclave. We’re saying that this is our backyard and we
don’t want any cement factories. However, we’re not
saying that we volunteer to do without cement. What
we’re saying is cement is fine, as long as the
factories are in Mexico.

Bleyer: Or in Sullivan County.

Wilson: Or Sullivan County. Although Sullivan County
is fast reinventing itself, too.

Bleyer: You mentioned hot websites. I’m curious about
your thoughts on the web now, because ten years ago
you seemed optimistic about its potential.

Wilson: Well, I wouldn’t say I was an optimist. I was
curious and attempted an anti-pessimist view. I went
to about 25 conferences in Europe in seven years, and
in all that time, I never had a computer or was on the
Internet myself. I never have been. So I went to these
conferences as the voice of caution, the one guy who
doesn’t own a computer. Little by little, my talks at
these conferences would become more and more Luddite,
sounding the knell of warning about mechanization of
consciousness and alienation and separation. There was
a time when everything was so confused and chaotic
that it was easy to believe that this technology would
be an exception to all the other technologies, and
instead of enslaving us, it would liberate us. I never
actually believed that, but I was willing to talk to
people who did. Now I’m not willing to talk to them
anymore. I have no interest in this dialogue. It’s
finished. The Internet revealed itself as the perfect
mirror image of global capital. It has no borders?
Neither does global capital. Governments can’t control
it? Neither can they control global capital. Nor do
they want to. They’ve given up trying, and now they
basically serve as the mercenary armed forces for the
corporate interstate—the 200 or 300 megacorporations
that actually run the world. Fine. But let’s not call
this radical politics, and let’s not call this
liberation, and let’s not talk about cyberfeminism or
virtual community. Basically, I’m a Luddite. Certain
technologies hurt the commonality, as they used to say
in the early 19th century. Any machinery that was
hurtful to the commonality, they took their
sledgehammers out and tried to smash. Direct action.
That’s the Luddite critique—you do it with a
sledgehammer. What it means now to live as a Luddite
seems to me to involve a strict attention to what
technologies one allows into one’s life.

Bleyer: And I guess the Internet has really come to be
the pinnacle of this hurtful technology, in our age.

Wilson: Yes. You’re slumped in front of a screen, in
the same physical situation as a TV watcher, you’ve
just added a typewriter. And you’re "interactive."
What does that mean? It does not mean community. It’s
catatonic schizophrenia. So blah blah blah,
communicate communicate, data data data. It doesn’t
mean anything more than catatonics babbling and
drooling in a mental institution. Why can’t we stop?
How is it that five years ago there were no cell
phones, and now everyone needs a cell phone? You can
pick up any book by any half-brained post-Marxist
jerkoff and read about how capitalism creates false
needs. Yet we allow it to go on.

Bleyer: But isn’t there something to be said for the
subversive use of technologies?

Wilson: We believed that in the ’80s. The idea was
that alternative media would allow us the space in
which to organize other things. Even in the ’80s I
said I’m waiting for my turkey and my turnips. I want
some material benefits from the Internet. I want to
see somebody set up a barter network where I could
trade poetry for turnips. Or not even poetry—lawn
cutting, whatever. I want to see the Internet used to
spread the Ithaca dollar system around America so that
every community could start using alternative labor
dollars. It is not happening. And so I wonder, why
isn’t it happening? And finally the Luddite philosophy
becomes clear. We create the machines and therefore we
think we control them, but then the machines create
us, so we can create new machines, which then can
create us. It’s a feedback situation between humanity
and technology. There is some truth to the idea of
technological determination, especially when you’re
unconscious, drifting around like a sleepwalker.
Especially when you’ve given up believing in
anti-capitalism because they’ve convinced you that the
free market is a natural law, and we just have to
accept that and hope for a free market with a friendly
smiling face. Smiley-faced fascism. I see so many
people working for that as if it were a real cause.
"If we have to have capitalism, let’s make it green
capitalism." There’s no such thing. It’s a
hallucination of the worst sort, because it isn’t even
a pleasurable one. It’s a nightmare.

Bleyer: I’m curious if you think we’re hallucinating
more now than ever before—if the psychic energy for
liberation is gone.

Wilson: The answer would have to be extremely complex,
because I don’t have any snappy aphorisms to explain
this. You might say that it wouldn’t matter if every
government in the world was taken over by screaming
green socialists tomorrow morning, they couldn’t
reverse the damage. I don’t know. It seems clear that
in human society, despite the best intentions,
technology has alienated people to such an extent that
they mistake technological and symbolic action for
social/political action. This is the commodity stance.
You buy a certain product, and you’ve made a political
statement. You buy a car that runs on salad oil. It’s
still a car! Or make a documentary. Where did we cross
that line where we forgot that making a documentary
about how everyone would like to have a food co-op is
not the same as having a food co-op? I think some
people have lost that distinction. Now, about art in
the service of the revolution: There is no art in the
service of the revolution, because
if there’s no revolution, there’s no art in its
service. So to say that you’re an artist but you’re
progressive is a schizo position. We have only
capital, so all art is either in its service or it
fails. Those are the two alternatives. If it’s
successful, it’s in the service of capital. I don’t
care what the content is. The content could be Malcolm
X crucified on a bed of lettuce. It doesn’t matter.

Bleyer: But what about the growing protest movement of
the past five years, which really does seem
significant?

Wilson: You mean people who are building puppets and
going around the world being radical tourists?

Bleyer: The perhaps one million people coming to the
streets of New York to protest the RNC in August, for
example.

Wilson: Well, make it two million. It can be like the
biggest anti-war marches ever held, they were
forgotten five minutes later. All they’re doing is
assuaging their conscience a little. At best, it’s
symbolic discourse and it never goes beyond that.
Especially in North America. It’s not going to save
the world to dump Bush and these people are deluded.

Bleyer: What do you think about Burning Man and other
events that are in essence Temporary Autonomous Zones
(TAZ) but don’t necessarily dismantle the power
structures of global capital?

Wilson: I’ve never been to Burning Man, but that’s
just accidental, because I’ve given up travel. As far
as I can tell it’s a lovely thing. I call those things
"periodic autonomous zones." The thing about the TAZ
is I didn’t invent it, I just gave it a name. I think
it’s a sociological reality that groups of people will
come together to maximize some concept of freedom that
they share as naturally as breathing. When all the
potential for the emergence for a TAZ is maximized,
either because you’ve helped to maximize it or because
your local situation has arrived at a certain point
where it becomes possible, you’ll do it. Like I’ve
said before, a TAZ is anywhere from two to several
thousand people, who for as little as two or three
hours or for as much as a couple of years manage to
keep that mood going. And it’s incredibly vital. It’s
vital that every human being should have some such
experience, or else they’ll never know that another
world is possible. So Burning Man is a kind of
periodic autonomous zone. As soon as the first hint of
commercialization or tiredness appears, then I would
think the best thing to do is to close it down. Move
on, reappear somewhere else. And ultimately, I do
believe that another world is possible and that
permanent changes could be made. But that’s different.
That’s a revolution.

Bleyer: You lived abroad for about 12 years, mostly in
the Islamic world. What’s your perception of Islamic
fundamentalists, "terrorists" and otherwise?

Wilson: Certainly, these Islamic fundamentalists are
of no interest intellectually. They have no ideas,
they’re not anti-capitalist; they love technology and
money. Ideologically, they’re not offering any
alternatives to anything. By and large, they’re an
imagistic froth that has very little to do with most
people’s experience of Islam. In their manifestations
as tiny terrorist groups, they don’t have much of a
social role, only as symbolic figureheads, and that’s
why their actual support in the Muslim world is rather
shallow. Right now it depends largely on the fact that
the Bushies have made the name of America stink
forever in the nostrils of the world. When I was
traveling in the East, I was always amazed at the
unearned reservoir of goodwill toward Americans. It
existed everywhere. Now I reckon they’d throw rocks at
you.

Bleyer: And do you think that’s irreparable?

Wilson: Almost irreparable. Even the Vietnam War,
which was still going on when I began my travels,
never aroused this much hatred and unpopularity.

Bleyer: Is there anything you could see altering the
current course of the American empire?

Wilson: Yes. If all our emotion for resistance could
somehow pull us together instead of apart. This is the
brilliant thing they’ve managed to do—set us all at
each other’s throats. If I think of the anarchist
movement, we spend all our time screaming at each
other over various sub-sectarian impurities we
perceive in each other’s writing. That is what
anarchist activity now boils down to. But it’s not
entirely our fault—when there’s no movement, there’s
no movement. But a new coherence could appear.
Frankly, I think it would have to be of a spiritual
nature. It would have to involve a kind of fanaticism
that would involve real sacrifice—sacrifice of
comforts, sacrifice of cell phones, sacrifice of this
privileged life in the belly of the beast that we all
acquiesce in. There’s a lot of symbolic discourse, but
no action. I suppose that could come back, which is
why I’m ready to cut slack for spiritual movements,
which have nothing necessarily to do with religion.

Bleyer: I’m curious about this intersection between
the political and spiritual.

Wilson: There are those of us who are usually called
spiritualist anarchists. I’m willing to accept that
label if I can have other labels as well. It’s a
well-known fact that there’s no secular Luddite
community anywhere. The only Luddite communities are
Anabaptists—Amish, Mennonite, seventh day Baptists,
all those kind of Germano-Anabaptist groups that
originate in Pennsylvania. I guess it’s religious
fanaticism. Well, we need some equivalent of that. I
can only see that coming from what people would
identify as a spiritual movement. Nowadays it would
probably have to have a neo-pagan shamanic quality to
it, but I think it would also have to keep the door
open to people in the established religions who are
rethinking their positions, including some Catholics.
It would have to be very inclusive, non-dogmatic, and
not involve any central cult of authority. It would
have to be a spontaneous crystallization of all the
pagan-LSD stuff we’ve been going through since the
sixties. It will have to crystallize and provide this
psychic power for self-sacrifice.

Bleyer: Are you still a Sufi?

Wilson: That’s a hard question to answer. No, I’m not
a practicing Muslim. I don’t spend a lot of time
saying my beads, but I don’t consider myself utterly
broken away from all that. In fact, I have very good
friends and allies within the Sufi movement.

Bleyer: Who among other anarchist thinkers do you
admire?

Wilson: Rene Riesel in France is an admirable
character. He’s faced with a jail sentence now in
France for a heavily militant action—destroying
genetically manipulated crops and possibly other
things as well. Some of his followers are engaged in
blowing up electric power lines. And Jose Bove, the
farmer from the south of France, has done a lot of
interesting stuff.

Bleyer: What are you studying now?

Wilson: I’m very interested in early Romanticism now.
To me, the Romantics were the first people to
consciously deal with these issues. Some of the most
interesting aspects of this come from the early
Romantic movement in Germany around 1795. The early
German Romantics have been forgotten as a source for
our movement, especially from an artistic point of
view. They informed all the art movements since then,
the ones that tried to do what Hegelians call the
"suppression and realization of art"—suppressing art
as an elitist consumption activity of the wealthy,
suppressing it as something that alienates other
people who aren’t artists and makes them less
important or less significant, and somehow
universalizing it. That’s the realization or art, so
that somehow or another everyone is an artist or some
sort, fully free and encouraged to be as creative as
possible. There’s no privileged position to the art
that ends up in galleries or museums. That would be
the suppression and realization of art, and that was
basically a Romantic program and a program of every
avant-garde art movement since then. They’ve all begun
by saying, "We hate art as alienation, we want to
restore it somehow to the kind of universal experience
that we sense, for example, among a tribe of pygmies,
where everyone is a singer and no one leads the
singing." That goal has been there for every single
art movement since Romanticism.

Bleyer: What have you experienced personally of TAZ
realities, lately?

Wilson: A lot of people tell me that they have enjoyed
or benefited from my work, for which I’m naturally
very pleased. But in a lot of cases they have very
different tastes than I do. I’m a sixties guy. I don’t
like industrial music or even rock ’n’ roll. I am
willing to accept rock ’n’ roll as an orgiastic music,
but I think it’s disgusting that I have to have
orgiastic music spewed at me from every single orifice
of modern civilization, all the time, nonstop, to make
me buy more products and lose my intellectual acuity
and start shopping. I also don’t like the drugs that
they use—I prefer mushrooms and pot. I don’t enjoy
raves. The ravers were among my biggest
readers—they’re now getting a little old themselves.
Personally, I don’t enjoy those parties. This is a
matter of taste. I’m happy that they’re happy, but I
don’t want to go to the party. I’m not 20-years-old
anymore, I get tired. But fine for them. Terrific. I
wish they would rethink all this techno stuff—they
didn’t get that part of my writing. I think it would
be very interesting if they took some of my ideas
about immediatism and the bee. Small groups should do
art for each other, and stay out of the media as much
as possible, and this will eventually cause a buzz and
make people want to be part of it. I’m waiting—maybe
before I die there will be a hip Luddite movement.
I’ll probably like their parties and go to them. But
it’s not happening. Most of the people interested in
TAZ tend to be very techno-oriented. But as I say, if
they’re having a good time, God bless them. Allah
bless them. Goddess bless them. Just bless them. I
think that’s terrific. It’s important to have those
TAZ experiences. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t know what
there is to struggle for.

Wilson’s books are available from Autonomedia. His
next book of essays, Lost Histories, will be out this
fall.

Jennifer Bleyer is a journalist and activist who lives
in Fort Greene. She is the founder and former editor
of Heeb Magazine.

===="What war is not a private affair, and, inversely, what wound is not a war that comes from society as whole?"

- Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (1969)


		
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