Saturday, September 24, 2005

Hakim Bey

From: Chris Case Date: Thu Jul 1, 1999 8:04am


"Sculptor" alluded to Hakim Bey;

Synchronistic of you to mention Hakim Bey. I just yesterday finished making the attached "sample sequence", which is like the verbal equivalent of a DJ mix, in which one uses samples from (in this case one) author's writings, edited and sequenced to make a certain continuity.

This was made for an article in the forthcoming issue of Zavtone Magazine; I've made five or six such mixes for this article, which is in the subject of Beyond 2000 (as indeed is the whole Zavtone next issue), The other writers similarly victimised are Dane Rudhyar, Antero Alli, David Kubiak, Natasha Vita More, Terence McKenna, and an 11-year-old Malaysian girl.

Anyway, heeeeeeeeeere's Hakim:!

Hakim Bey anticipates:

An anti-authoritarian movement capable
of lumping together the mess of
anarchist, libertarian, syndicalist,
council communist, post-situationist, primitivist,
extropian and other "free" tendencies.

This "union-without-uniformity" will not be
driven by ideology, but by a kind of
insurrectionary "noise" or chaos
of TAZ's, uprisings, refusals, and epiphanies. ...

It will release a hundred blooming flowers,
a thousand, a million memes
of resistance, of difference,
of non-ordinary consciousness --
the will to power as "strangeness".

And as capital retreats deeper and deeper
into cyberspace, or into disembodiment, ...
we will begin to see the re-appearance
of the Social.

The desire for wilderness will be
gratified at a level undreamed of
since the early Neolithic,
and the desire for creativity will be
gratified at a level undreamed of
by the wildest science fiction.

In both cases the means for this enjoyment
can only be called appropriate techné --
green, low energy, high information....--
and this, however untidy,
I would call utopia.

Perhaps we shall experience
not a return *to*
the Stone Age,
but a return *of* the Stone Age ...

A few decades ago civilized ears
literally could not hear
"primitive" music except as noise,
the non-harmonic classical music of India or China
except as meaningless rubbish.

Civilization was defined by
rational consciousness, rationality was defined
as civilized consciousness -- outside this totality
only chaos and sheer
unintelligibility could exist.

But now things have changed -- suddenly, just as
the "primitive"and the "traditional" seem
on the verge of disappearance,
we can hear them.
How?
Why?

If the utopian trace in all music
can now be heard, it can only be
because the "broken order" is now
somehow coming to an end. ..

The reign of the commodity is
threatened by a mass arousal from
the media-trance of inattention.

A taste for the authentic appears,
suffers a million tricks,...
a million empty promises --
but it refuses to evaporate.
Instead it condenses --
it even coagulates.

Neo-shamanic modes of awareness......
Psychedelics and oriental mysticism
sharpen ears
to a taste for the unbroken,
the order of intimacy, and
its festal embodiment.

Of course, everyone is free to play
this game of utopian poetics
with different "rules", and different results.

After all, the future does not exist...
the reification of the eschaton
(either in the future or the past)
devalues the present, the "place" where we
are actually living our everyday lives.


Samples sequenced from various writings
by HAKIM BEY

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