Temporary Autonomous Zone

Definition

Temporary Autonomous Zone is a book by anarchist writer Hakim Bey published in 1991 by Autonomedia, one of the main North American publishers of radical theoretical works.

The book describes the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control.

The full title is T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Hakim Bey was a pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson (1945–2022).

The Argument

Bey's premise is a strategic concession. Revolution, understood as the permanent overthrow and replacement of a state, has a poor record: successful revolutions produce states, and the new state reconstitutes the apparatus of the old one. Rather than pursue a permanence that reliably curdles, Bey proposes uprising — the temporary seizure of a space, held for as long as it can be held, dissolved before it is crushed or institutionalised, and reconstituted elsewhere.

The TAZ is that space. Its defining features are that it is temporary by design rather than by failure; that it is invisible to the mapping apparatus of the state, occupying gaps rather than confronting borders; and that it dissolves voluntarily, which is what preserves it from both suppression and ossification.

Bey's historical model is the pirate utopia — the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century island enclaves outside any jurisdiction, which he treats as intentional communities rather than merely as criminal bases. His contemporary examples run to the festival, the occupation, the temporary encampment, the party, and the bulletin board system.

The Web and the Net

The book contains an early and much-quoted passage on networked technology, distinguishing the Web — the horizontal, unofficial, alternative flow of information between people — from the Net, the totality of official and controlled information transfer. Bey's argument is that the TAZ can use the Web as a nervous system: a means of coordinating a physical gathering, of dispersing before it is closed, and of reconstituting elsewhere.

He is explicit that the TAZ is not itself virtual. The connection is a tool for a physical event, not a substitute for one — a position that separates him from most 1990s cyber-utopianism and that has aged better than the alternative.

Influence

T.A.Z. was distributed as anti-copyright and circulated widely online, which made it one of the most-read texts in 1990s network culture. Its vocabulary was taken up by the rave and free-party scenes, by Burning Man, by Critical Mass, by the alter-globalisation movement, and by hacker and maker communities. Its influence on how temporary gatherings understood themselves is difficult to overstate.

Criticism

• TAZ is escapist — a party that leaves the structures it evades entirely intact, and that its temporariness is a way of never being tested.
• TAZ is politically available to anyone, and has been used to describe corporate offsites and festivals with entry fees.
• Bey's ontological anarchism is a poetics rather than a politics, offering no account of how anything is sustained.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The TAZ is a useful concept for describing online formations that work precisely because they do not persist — a channel, a thread, a raid, a group chat, a conference backchannel — and whose value would be destroyed by institutionalisation. Compare Turner's communitas, which makes the same observation from anthropology and reaches the same conclusion about durability: the intensity and the temporariness are the same fact.

Related Reading

• Victor Turner
• Belonging
• Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age
• Locative media: geoplaced tactics of resistance
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism