Zines, Community, & These Fucking Lefty Liberals - Hakim Bey - Babyfish Interview 1994

 Zines, Community, & These Fucking Lefty Liberals 

from interview in Boulder, July 1991

Originally published in Babyfish #6 (1994)

ON THE ZINE SCENE: What’s good about that is the dichotomy between producer and consumer gets erased. Everybody who gets a zine tends to be a zine producer themselves. Did you ever see [Ivan Stang’s Church of the Subgenius’] High Weirdness by Mail?

Well, that was the wrong idea, because, for example, my little Association for Ontological Anarchy got listed in that, and it was listed in a section where basically what Stang said was ‘all these people are crazy, and if you send them an SASE, they’ll stuff it full of rants and send it back for nothing.’ So I’ve got all these fucking ‘Bob’-ies writing to me all the time with SASEs like form letters. ‘Dear Hakim, I’m very interested in your theories, could you please fill this SASE?’ And it’s fucking Stang’s fault, you know, these suckoff types.

That’s not the way you play the game. These people are trying to be consumers; they have to amuse me first, that’s the way it works. 

Generally speaking, especially from the Factsheet Five network, where things are explained more clearly, this a participatory, horizontal network, and is not a vertical network, where producers fill up your little empty brains with thoughts. You have to have something going to participate in this game, even if it’s a pro-wrestling zine. 

The good thing is that you can always find two or three hundred people in the world who are interested in what you’re interested in, no matter how fucking far out it is. It’s funny, when I write for a big, slick magazine, and get paid lots of money, I get no feedback -- none, ever. Whereas, when I appear in--like, probably when I appear in your zine, that will turn somebody on who will then write to me and send me his little zine, or his little chapbook, or her little essay on whatever. 

This is what’s exciting about the zine network. It is different from other kinds of publishing. People who get the wrong idea and start a zine and think that they’re going to make money at it, and people will subscribe to it, that’s wrong. Everyone who reads a zine should also be an artist.

ON ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM: Ontological Anarchy is my little joke; it’s not meant to be a movement or anything. What I mean by it is that there’s a metaphysics of anarchism.

You get tight-assed materialist atheists [who[ equate religion with altered states of consciousness . . . this idea that human reason is the ultimate state of human consciousness. I don’t believe that. I think there are all kinds of other states of consciousness, and I think that many of them were developed by what we call spiritual or religious traditions. I’m interested in ransacking these traditions, getting rid of what you would consider ethnic limitations, artificial boundaries between religions and schools of thought, getting rid of authority figures, getting rid of dogma, getting rid of most doctrine, and getting down to some kind of nitty-gritty that has to do with consciousness.

That’s why I’m interested in spiritual traditions, and that’s why I’m interested in the neo-pagan movement, and what I call the fourth wave, like Discordianism and Sub-Genius and what have you. At last, finally, we’re on the verge of being able to separate religious bullshit from valuable information about the mind and the spirit. 

To be prejudiced, or to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that comes clothed in religious language, is to miss a lot of valuable data. That’s why in Chaos, I brought in all these Chinese and Hindu and Islamic sources, trying to contextualize some of this data in an anarchist way.

ON THE MEN’S MOVEMENT AND FEMINISM: I’m no more interested in the rule of Mom that I was interested in the rule of Dad, and I don’t want to rediscover the father, and I think [author Robert] Bly and these people are looking for authority figures, and they’re dangerous; they’re crypto-fascists, just like a lot of feminists are. Anarcha-feminism, that’s fine, but feminists who try to get laws passed, to oppress people they think are oppressing them, you know, these revenge fantasies, carried out through the law in this country.

In America, whenever a social issue is noticed, the immediate response is to pass a law about it, and then we can stop discussing it. This, of course, from an anarchist point of view, is total nonsense, a real counterproductive attitude. Every time you pass a law, you end up oppressing some new minority.

This complicated thing that’s going on now with ‘political correctness,’ these liberal leftists got all these laws passed and these rules put in universities, and it’s crap. It’s oppressive crap. 

And now Bush and the New York Times can seize on this discontent that was caused by idiotic leftists getting laws passed, to turn the clock back to 1952, and get rid of all the positive gains that were made by anarcha-feminism and queer liberation. We’ve all been pushed six steps back for every one step forward by those fucking leftists and their infatuation with the law. They’re all cop worshippers, and you’ve got to watch out for them; they’re dangerous.

ON POLITICAL ACTION; I personally feel that the only point to having political demonstrations is the satisfaction of going out and yelling a bit; I don’t think it’s accomplishing anything, and I think we have a perfect example of how it doesn’t accomplish anything in the [Persian Gulf] war. 

In the 60s, everybody got into this idea that if your demo got on the evening news, it was a successful demo, and it would help change consciousness. Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn’t true; it’s certainly not true anymore. I mean Bush actually said there is no peace movement; that’s a direct quote. And in effect, he was right, because the peace movement is a media concept, and since the media dumped that concept, it doesn’t exist anymore. 

I do think that disappearance is an important tactic, now. Appearance is not an important tactic--appearance on the news, appearance in front of the White House. What does it accomplish? Especially if you don’t appear on the news, or if you do, you’re turned into a freak. Or, at best on public television, they’ll say, ‘and now, we must hear from the other side.’ So what are you? You’re ‘the other side.’ So that’s all a waste of time, it seems to me; we shouldn’t be ‘the other side’; we should be the side.

ON TECHNOLOGY:  It’s a question of desire. How badly do you want it? Are you willing to take part in that production, in order to have something, or is it not that desirable to you? Is it something that you will use as long as it’s there, but as soon as it disappears you don’t have any urge to go out and recreate it? It’s as simple as that. The technology which satisfies desire will survive; the technology which alienates will not survive.

ON WORK: Even though everybody in the collective is busy as hell -- is ‘working’ all the time, it isn’t work because it’s play. Work which is play is not ‘capital W’ work, so we should have a different term for it. ‘Zero work’ doesn’t mean no activity -- although it certainly means that laziness will be considered as a positive value -- but it doesn’t mean no activity.

ON COMPUTERS: If people want computers enough, in a hypothetical, zero work, postindustrial society, then they will produce computers. This is why hacking is important, because in the perhaps unlikely event of such a revolution occurring in the near future, and the discovery that we do need computers to make the zero work society run, then people will desire them enough to make them. And they’ll be cottage industry computers. But, as I said in TAZ, ‘where are my turnips’? Information is not enough, and I criticize hackers for being information-obsessed, and for not actually providing service, for not actually serving a community. It would be much more interesting to me to use computers as tools for some kind of exchange of goods and services, which is the only way that an alternative society will really emerge. We will not emerge from information, because you do not live in cyberspace; you live in physical space, and we need food!

ON PRIMITIVISM: I’m not interested in bombing myself back to the stone age; what interests me is psychic paleolithism, psychic hunter-gathering.

ON COPS: The pigs aren’t interested in sentencing you anymore, because they can ruin you just by charging you with a crime. If you get off, it’s no skin off their teeth, but you’ve spent all your money and time, and been ruined, fired from your job, your neighbors won’t talk to you, and they’re burning crosses on your lawn. 

ON THE FUTURE OF ZINES: I think it;s time to go beyond the zine network now. We’ve had a good decade of experiments and we know that it works. But what it doesn’t do is get people physically in touch with each other, in an interesting way. Mike Gunderloy [founder and ex-publisher of Factsheet Five] had parties where he invites all the zineoids twice a year, but it doesn’t result in what Paul Goodman called communitas, the principle of community, of being together. That’s a very high value for me, and it’s getting to be a higher and higher value, because I see that, in a sense, the zine network is still reproducing some of the alienation of media, because, literally, we aren’t in touch with each other. Yeah, we’re in touch with each other in the mail, which is a medium, which separates you.

This has been a great thing for us, to break down the commodity relationship of publishing that i was talking about before, but we still have the problem that we’re not in touch, that we don’t have an alternative economy; this is very important. 

I’m not saying give up on zines, because zines, clearly, can be an extremely valuable tool for moving on to the next step. But what I’m interested in is expressions in living, rather than experiments in aesthetics. Festivals are very important, now, for us, because the commodity world, in general really tries to keep people separated. We’re at a watershed in the anarchist movement, with the problem of organization, and that’s another reason why I’m talking about more physical contact, rather than just zines.