UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism Greer, J.C. Publication date 2013 Document Version Final published version Published in Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Greer, J. C. (2013). Occult Origins: Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2013(2), 166-187. http://www.anarchist- developments.org/index.php/adcs_journal/article/view/73/76 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:14 Feb 2023 Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies ISSN: 1923-5615 2013.2: Ontological Anarché: Beyond Materialism and Idealism Occult Origins Hakim Bey’s Ontological Post-Anarchism Joseph Christian Greer ABSTRACT Convention concerning the beginning of Post-anarchist discourse locates its origin in Hakim Bey’s work in the 1980s; however, no commentator has sufficiently analyzed the thoroughly spiritualized anarchism upon which it is based, termed “Ontological Anarchism,” nor the group that promoted it, the Association of Ontological Anarchism. This article draws attention to the ways in which the interface between a starkly postmodern form of esotericism called Chaos Magick and the anarchist tradition produced Ontological Anarchism, and, further, to the implica- tions of this hybridity on the historiography of Post-anarchism. KEYWORDS post-anarchism, chaos magick, Hakim Bey, zines, discordianism INTRODUCTION Peter Lamborn Wilson once lightheartedly lamented, “Hakim Bey is more popular than I am” (Knight, 2012: 74). What makes this comment humorous is that Hakim Bey is a nom de plume for Wil- son. What makes this comment noteworthy is that Wilson used this nom de plume to initiate one of the most innovative develop- ments in the history of twentieth century anarchism. This devel- opment, which he termed Post-Anarchism Anarchy (now called Post-anarchism), arose from the confluence of esotericism and 1 anarchism in the 1980s zine network. Thus, in order to under- 1 The category of esotericism should be understood not as a cluster of historically linked occult or hermetic phenomena but rather as an instru- ment for historians to better understand marginalized spiritual currents OCCULT ORIGINS | 167 stand the origins of Post-anarchism we must locate it in the con- text of Bey’s work and the specific audience for which he was writing. While convention concerning the origin of Post-anarchism states that it began in Bey’s work in the 1980s (Call, 2010: 10; Newman 2010: 51, 71n.8), no commentator has sufficiently ana- lyzed the thoroughly spiritualized anarchism upon which it is based, termed Ontological Anarchism, nor the group that pro- moted it, the Association of Ontological Anarchism (AOA hence- 2 forth). The aim of this article is to draw attention to the ways in which the interface between a starkly postmodern form of esoter- icism called Chaos Magick and the anarchist tradition produced Ontological Anarchism, and, further, the implications of this hy- 3 bridity on the historiography of Post-anarchism. To this end, three related undercurrents run through this article. The first concerns the identification of primary sources with regards to Wilson/Bey and Ontological Anarchism. The second links these esoteric sources to a gap in scholarship on the prominence of esotericism within early Post-anarchist discourse, i.e., Bey’s On- tological Anarchism. The third concerns Lewis Call’s convincing argument concerning the role of “the Nietzsche effect” in laying the foundation for Post-anarchism (as mention is made through- out the article of Nietzsche’s strong influence on the esoteric dis- courses that predate as well as prefigure Bey’s Post-anarchist 4 Ontological Anarchism). The conclusions drawn are likewise which may or may not be related to occultism or hermeticism. See Hanegraaff, 2012 and fn.5. 2 The title of Leonard Williams’s article “Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchism” suggests that it would have provided some insight into this topic; however, in failing to grasp the spiritual context of Bey’s use of Chaos as ontology, the article ends up mistaking Ontological Anarchism for an “artistic practice” and in so doing fails to elucidate Bey’s innovative refashioning of anarchism. See Williams, 2010. 3 The term magick was coined by British occultist Aleister Crowley to separate his spiritual system and writings from the so-called superstitious magic of the occultists whom he considered his competitors. The fact that his term has persisted to this day, as evidenced by the Chaos Magick discourse, testifies to the continued relevance of his approach to spiritual and religious texts and practices. See Crowley, 1992. For an account of Crowley’s lasting influence see Bogdan & Starr (eds.), 2012. 4 Quoting Keith Ansell-Pearson, Call describes “the Nietzsche effect” as the consensus opinion amongst scholars that the most fertile aspect of Nietzsche’s work is not so much its content but how its performative 168 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER threefold: first, that the history of Post-anarchism cannot be writ- ten without considering the contribution of occultism; second, that Bey’s work itself will remain misunderstood if the esoteric themes that it addressed, and physical mediums through which it first appeared, remain unexamined; third, through acknowledging the esoteric foundation of Bey’s Ontological Anarchism, an even earlier form of Nietzsche-inspired, anarcho-occultism called Dis- cordianism can be read into the multiplicity of discourses that 5 compose the pre-history of Post-anarchism. At the heart of this article is the correction of an inaccuracy, namely, that Bey’s 1991 text, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (hereafter TAZ) pub- lished by Autonomedia constitutes the origin of Post-anarchist discourse. This is not to deny the centrality of the texts that com- pose the book TAZ, but rather to draw attention to the fact that TAZ is an anthology of previously published works. Mistakenly identifying the origins of Ontological Anarchism in TAZ effec- tively neglects the original primary sources which first intro- duced Bey’s idea of Ontological Anarchism, as well as the milieu in which it was initially, developed, critiqued, and revised. The glossy publication produced by Autonomedia in 1991 entitled TAZ does not represent the origin of Ontological Anarchism; ra- ther, it is a redacted volume assembled to popularize Bey’s work. In order to illustrate the implications of the failure to recognize TAZ’s provenance, this article focuses on the Chaos Magick mi- lieu in which Bey first developed Ontological Anarchism. The TAZ text itself is broken into three sections which corre- spond to three distinct works composed by Bey at various times. The first section of the book is the verbatim reproduction of a prose-poetry zine entitled Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchy, first published in 1985. The most rigorous development of Ontological Anarchism followed after the publication of Chaos in a number of zines, but most regularly as a series of letters and essays in a Chaos Magick zine from the years 1986–1988. These letters and essays would come to be collected as the second and largest section of TAZ and were titled Communiqués of the Associ- ation for Ontological Anarchy. The essential aspect of this devel- quality deconstructs the logocentric bias of Western thought and reason. See Call, 2001: 51–52. 5 Debate continues to rage over how to define “occultism” with Marco Pasi’s historiographic definition standing out as the most workable. See Pasi, 2012; Hanegraaff, Brach, Faivre, & van den Broek, 2005: 884–889; Hanegraaff: 2012. OCCULT ORIGINS | 169 opment, as will be shown, concerns the way in which the com- muniqués were written largely in response to issues prominent in the anarcho-queer-magickal milieu, which heralded Bey’s Chaos as essential reading for the nascent Chaos Magick movement. The last section of TAZ is a collection of writings which focus on the formation of moments where Ontological Anarchism has flourish, termed Temporary Autonomous Zones, and from whence the title of the book is derived. As will be made clear in what follows, TAZ was not the primary source from which Post-anarchism originat- ed, and thus, much stands to be gained by both subverting this monolithic origin point and reasserting the radical hybridity of its origins for historians of Post-anarchism and esotericism alike. As Bey’s writings on Ontological Anarchism first appeared in his zine Chaos, and developed into “communiqués” published in a number of influential zines, the first section focuses on setting Ontological Anarchism within what Bob Black termed the “mar- ginal milieu” and, in particular, clarifying its relationship to Joel Biroco’s influential Chaos Magick zine Kaos (Black, 1994). The second section offers an in-depth description of Bey’s explicitly Nietzschean reading of Chaos and how this functioned as the basis of Ontological Anarchism. The conclusion takes up the sig- nificance of citing Ontological Anarchism as the origin of Post- anarchism. Essentially, it will be argued that Bey’s role in the formation of Post-anarchism obliges scholars to recognize why he, and others, perceived natural affinities between anarchism and esotericism. Finally, brief mention is made of a slightly earlier syncretism of Chaos ontology, Nietzschean philosophy, esoteri- cism, and anarchism termed Discordianism, which heavily influ- 6 enced Bey’s formulation of Ontological Anarchism. It will be argued that the inclusion of Discordianism in the early historiog- raphy of Post-anarchism will lead scholars to recognize how the origins of Post-anarchism in an occult milieu is not simply an oddity or an aberration, but representative of a grossly underap- preciated historical alliance between anarchism and esotericism beginning from the late 1950s onward. 6 Just as scholars of Post-anarchism have neglected to explore the sources anthologized within TAZ, so too have scholars of Discordianism failed to examine its origins in the zine scene. Carole Cusack’s work on Discordianism exemplifies this unfortunate trend. See Cusack, 2010 and ibid, 2011. 170 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER DISCURSIVE TRANSFERS “BENEATH THE UNDERGROUND” In olden days I was a Prophet, today I am a rabble-rouser. Joel Biroco, “Renegade” Today, it is no secret that Wilson and Bey are the same individu- al. However, when Bey’s Chaos and the AOA communiqués were printed in the mid-1980s zine network, this secret was closely 7 guarded. Similarly, while the AOA’s greatest asset was the force- ful eloquence of the provocations issued by its only public repre- sentative, Bey, the mystery concerning its size and militancy lent it an undeniable mystique. In hindsight, Bey seems to have been its only official member; yet, as mentioned he too was a mystery at that time. The most plausible explanation as to why Wilson adopted his pseudonym after his return from Iran following the 1979 revolution, was so that he could safeguard the respectability of his academic work which he continued to be publish under the name Wilson. As Bey, Wilson’s writings were unapologetically radical in both style and content. Understanding the difference between the once-separate identities of Wilson and Bey is the key to understanding how Ontological Anarchism was formed. While Wilson was an independent, Traditionalist scholar of Islam and Persian poetry, Bey, the prolific anarcho-mystic and man-boy- love propagandist, was a prime mover in a vibrant, “sub- underground” known as the “zine scene” that flourished in North 8 America and the UK from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. This milieu can most accurately be described as a network of political, sexual, and spiritual non-conformists, all of whom communicated through small-circulation hand-made magazines called fanzines, abbreviated to zines, as well as taped letters, self-recorded music, mail-art, and “comix” sent through the mail. Named after the company that allowed for the cheap production of these publica- tions, xerography established itself as the central pivot of this outsider milieu. Aside from a general, but by no means totalizing acceptance of anti-authoritarianism and the rejection of censor- 7 This is exemplified in the video recording of Joseph Matheny’s “T.A.Z.” event that featured Robert Anton Wilson and Hakim Bey as speakers. Whereas Robert Anton Wilson’s part was filmed with only minimal distortion effects, Wilson, performing as Bey, is blurred out almost entirely with the use of psychedelic colors and patterns in the video (Matheny, 1993). 8 For a detailed overview of the Traditionalist context where Wilson began his academic writing career see Sedgwick, 2004: 147–160, and Versluis, 2010. OCCULT ORIGINS | 171 ship, those who participated in this network were anything but homogeneous in taste, opinion, and areas of interest (Black, 1994: 4). As an embedded authority, Bob Black described the milieu stating: “abhorrent topics, from space colonization to Holocaust Revisionism, are taken in stride” and it was not uncommon to have ads for Situationist or queer zines in magick publications and vice versa (Black, 1994: 6). Both thematically and aesthetically, labels like punk, queer, anarchist, and magick do more to misrepresent the material with- in the zines than categorize them, as each of these elements were routinely reconfigured in any number of ways throughout the network. This is clearly true for Chaos Magick publications like Salvation Army and Kaos, both of which were embraced by both anarcho-queer individuals disenfranchised with what they saw as the commodification and banalization of homosexuality as a fixed identity, and anarchists whose esoteric worldviews ran afoul of 9 their atheist materialist comrades. Certainly, the zine scene was an exceptionally fecund network in regards to the cross- pollination of radical politics, illegal sexualities, and esotericism, and as such stands as “an undiscovered continent” of primary source materials for scholars of contemporary anarchism, cultural studies, and esotericism (Wobensmith, 2012). The Acknowledgments page of TAZ indicates the extent to which vastly different discourses overlapped in the rhizomatic zine network, which inspired and disseminated the writings that would be collected as Communiqués of Ontological Anarchism. The list of publications on the Acknowledgments page reads as a who’s who of the most influential zines in the network. Of par- ticular note is Joel Biroco’s Kaos, Mike Gunderloy’s Factsheet Five, R.U. Sirius’ Mondo 2000, and Popular Reality. These titles bare mention because aspects of each (magick, cyberpunk, alternative sexuality, etc.) are essential components in Bey’s Ontological An- archism and characterize the major themes within the zine net- 10 work more generally. 9 As leading lights in Chaos Magick, the alternative sexualities of Aleister Crowley and William S. Burroughs are cited by numerous Chaos magicians as evidence that sexual nonconformity is magical by nature: See Hine, 2003. The Church of the Subgenius and Discordinaism are two religious groups whose reworking of anarchism through religious language, humor, and esoteric symbolism effectively excludes them from consideration as part of contemporary anarchism. 10 Scholars looking to reconstruct the most notable individuals and pub- lications within the zine network could scarcely find a better resource 172 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER As space constraints prohibit a broader analysis of Ontologi- cal Anarchism’s development across a number of zines, focus shall here be on one zine, Joel Biroco’s Kaos, as it not only served as the most influential platform for non-sectarian discussions on Chaos Magick, but also because it printed much of what later 11 became the Communiqués of Ontological Anarchism. Before link- ing the contents of Kaos to the development of Ontological Anar- chism, though, a few descriptive issues regarding Kaos and Chaos Magick merit addressing. As to the latter, providing a brief out- line of an entire magical discourse is difficult enough, and this especially so for one oriented in the postmodern project of desta- bilizing essentialist positions so as to align the magician with the Chaos thought to undergird reality. Suffice it to say that Chaos Magick is a largely existentialist worldview initiated in the late 1970s by two British magicians, Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin, that is based largely on Nietzsche’s “theory of magical science” concerning the will to power, Crowley’s religious teachings, and the English mage A.O. Spare’s sigilization technique (Rocket, 12 1988: 18). Essential to Chaos Magick is the meta-belief that be- lief and identity are tools, indeed “magickal force[s]”, that can be used to manipulate reality according to one’s will (Caroll, 1987: 39–41). As for the zine, issues of Kaos open with incendiary edito- rial introductions by Biroco, which are followed in no particular order by letters-to-the-editor, longer essays, pirated and original art, book reviews, and a mail-order listing of other zines. Based on both the belief that letters-to-the-editor retained a vitality lost in other modes of writing and Biroco’s policy of printing every- thing, Kaos had an exceptionally long and patently polemic let- ters-to-the-editor section. The result was that passionate discus- than TAZ’s acknowledgment page and back-cover. These pages link the most influential agents in the zine sub-underground to the aging cultural icons who paved the way for them, including Burroughs, Leary, and Ginsberg, all of whom have blurbs on the back cover. 11 Kaos changed it name from Chaos in issue 7 to distinguish itself from another Chaos Magick zine, Chaos International. 12 Two articles in Kaos 11 illustrate the way in which Crowley’s influence in Chaos Magick is denigrated to the point of being lamentable, whereas Nietzsche’s is elevated to the highest possible rank. Ramsey Duke’s claim that, “Nietzsche [XXX] was my prophet: I preach the Superman, and the Death of God” encapsulates the latter, while Yael Ruth Dragwyla’s statement “Crowley was . . . a young and soul-crippled child” articulates the former. Nearly every account of Chaos Magick cites A.O. Spare its first and the most significant theorist. Duke, 1988: 26; Dragwyla, 1988: 20. OCCULT ORIGINS | 173 sions and vitriolic diatribes alike often extend over a number of issues, and as a primary contributor, Bey’s work was both con- stantly referenced, celebrated, and disparaged. As Kaos operated under a print-everything standard, its inter- national audience encompassed a wide-spectrum of the “lunatic fringe” and topics were often revisited from a number of perspec- tives. Kaos 6 illustrates this point well, as it features an anarchist analysis of language by post-left anarchism luminary Bob Black that responded to an earlier piece by the zine’s editor, Biroco, about the language of magick, which was then referenced later in issue 6 by Stephen Sennitt, the creator of the influential zine NOX, in an article about the interface between esotericism and linguistic psychology and physics. However, for all of the variety within each issue, opinions concerning the nature of Chaos and in particular the means by which it was to be used magically were central in every issue. While it would be impossible to prove Bey’s formulation of Chaos was the most influential of those pre- sented therein, it can be said that Ontological Anarchism was amongst the most discussed approaches in the zine; accordingly, the origins of the formal Post-anarchist discourse cannot be un- derstood outside of the competition between leading schools within the Chaos Magick discourse, and thus informed by Onto- logical Anarchism’s competitors, namely, Thelema, and Genesis 13 P. Orridge’s Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. If we are to read Ontological Anarchism against competing influences within the Chaos Magick discourse, it is necessary to first characterize their common assumptions. Basically, they all shared the belief that the experience of “gnosis” through magical techniques, rituals, and psychedelics, revealed the anarchic, yet malleable, interplay of the forces that structure reality. Addition- ally, it was believed that the structure of reality was actively ob- scured by the “barrage of psychic propaganda” frequently identi- fied in Situationist language as the “Spectacle” (Alistair, 1986; Jackson, 1986). The difference between the competing interpreta- tions of Chaos Magick was in the course of action suggested by 14 the gnostic experiences of Chaos. Far from undisputed, Bey’s 13 Arguments over these approaches to Chaos Magick are commonplace in Kaos; see Paul B., 1986: 15; Rocket, 1988: 18; Biroco, 1986: 35 and 1988: 35. 14 While it has been suggested that the term Gnosticism be abandoned altogether, debate over the correct ways in which the term gnostic can be used remains heated. The best introduction to the dispute is Williams, 1999. It is set with scare-marks to indicate its emic use in Kaos. 174 | JOSEPH CHRISTIAN GREER conclusions concerning these experiences—which appeared many times within a number of issues—were attacked for being every- thing from the ramblings of a post-psychedelic airhead to the fearful poses of an intellectual dilettante (Bey, 1988: 9). The ma- jority of critiques directed towards Bey stemmed from his insist- ence on reading Chaos as a primarily generative force wherein “the Way & the Great Work”, or the path of the Chaos magician, was to manifest his imagination in such a way that encompassed the desire of others and in so doing transcend the forces of “than- atos” which in his estimation belong exclusively to the Spectacle (Bey, 1986; 1987a; 1987b; 1978c; 1988). As mentioned, Ontological Anarchism was a heated topic within the pages of Kaos. Bey’s strident optimism was in the mi- nority amongst contributors who reveled in pessimistic nihilism, and specifically the exaltation of murder, torture, and the end of the world (Bey, 2003; Biroco, 1988). As evidenced in a text that later became communiqué #4 in TAZ (but was entitled “The End of the World” in Kaos 6), as well as the text that would become communiqué #5, “Intellectual S / M Is the Fascism of the Eight- ies—The Avant-Garde Eats Shit and Likes It”, it was pure revul- sion that spurred Bey, and by extension the AOA, to the position summarized in the line: “Ours is no art of mutilation but of ex- cess, superabundance, amazement” (Bey, 2003: 37). In defining himself against those who were “queer for death” insofar as they celebrated not conviviality but “thanatosis” and Schadenfreude, Bey increasingly altered his theorizing in the mirror of the other authors published in Kaos (Bey, 2003: 38). The tension between these two camps—with Bey’s “self-realization, beauty, and adven- ture” approach to Chaos set against the “gnostic fascism” of Rabbi Rabinowitz and Stephen Sennitt (to name only two representa- tives)—came to a head across four issues on the topic of using the image of the murderer, and specifically Marquis de Sade, in black magick practice and Chaos Magick in general. The numerous responses from Bey contained in each issue reflected the devel- opment of Ontological Anarchism over and against those enticed by the power of the darker aspects of Chaos Magick. Considering that Bey’s responses, many of which underwent no editing from the original form they possessed in Kaos, were collected years later as the Communiqués of Ontological Anarchism and inserted as the middle section of TAZ, it is not an overstatement to claim that in neglecting their original context, historians cannot under- stand what Ontological Anarchism is or to what it was respond- ing.