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Last weekend, I cancelled my London plans and took the Eurostar to Paris to join tens of thousands of people on Sunday to march against Islamophobia.

It was the biggest anti-racist march France had seen since 1983, and the first one ever against islamophobia. 

I went because, as a French person, I cannot sit by and watch as my country descends into an ever-increasing spiral of hatred, racism and violence. 

I went because, as a child of North African immigrants, I cannot look away as hate speech is ever-more normalised and acts of aggression are legitimised. 

I went because, as a woman, I cannot stay silent while women’s right to choose is denied by both the left and the right, and feminism is manipulated and muddied into racist arguments. 

As a child growing up in the South of France, I witnessed Islamophobia up-close, in many of its insidious forms: from the micro aggressions in the classroom to the ubiquitous racism of the police. French society has been increasingly divided beneath cloak on suspicion, hostility and mistrust.

As perceived Muslims, we represent the internal enemy. In the media we are subjects for debate and derision. For neighbours, our trivial traditions, language and clothing become threats, even an incitement for violence.

‘Laicité,’ the principle of separation of Church and State which is meant to protect the practice of all religions, is used to discriminate against Muslims. It is the weapon brandished by those who want to ban the hijab, silence opposition to hate speech and justify discriminatory laws.

Indeed, on Thursday, the Minister of Education added even this weekend’s march to the long list of “threats to laicité”. On this fertile ground, the French-born theory of the “great replacement” took root and spread its poisonous seeds.

Last month, Emmanuel Macron described Islamism as a “hydra” of which the “entire nation” must be vigilant. His minister of interior, Christophe Castaner, gave us a glimpse of what this vigilance might look like in practice when he called on people to report those who have beards, or who “rigorously practice religion, especially during Ramadan”. 

In the subsequent weeks, a woman wearing a hijab was racially abused by a politician in front of her crying son, and the Minister of Education described the hijab as “not desirable in our society”. Two weeks ago, an 84-year-old man shot two Muslim men and attempted to burn down a mosque in Bayonne.

Despite the smear campaign in the mainstream media against the march, calling us “Islamists”, and death threats against one of the organisers, more than 20,000 people of us gathered and marched. 

What struck me about those marching was the diversity of people there. As well as grassroots Muslim movements, unions, leftist parties, the human rights league, Jewish organizations, queer activists, some Gilets Jaunes, there were thousands of ordinary people, many of whom were marching for the first time.

One Muslim woman at the march told me “I’ve never been on a demonstration before, but I’ve had enough. I’ve lived in Paris for 32 two years and things in France are getting worse and worse.” Another woman, speaking from the platform, told the crowd, “We are not here today to defend Muslims. We are here to defend the society in which we want to live.” 

The march ended at the Place de la Nation, and as the sun dipped below the Paris skyline, the crowd began singing with one voice a rousing chorus of La Marseillaise. “Arise, children of the Motherland, the day of glory has arrived”.

At that moment it felt that perhaps the healing had begun. That we had the energy to stand together for our dignity and equality. The energy to defeat the real hydra that stalks France. A multi-headed hydra of made up of the unexamined racism, unacknowledged Islamophobia and historical amnesia that are embedded deep in French society.

A new report shows that international sanctions imposed on North Korea are having adverse consequences on humanitarian aid and economic development in the country, with a disproportionate impact on women. The report, titled “Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea,” was commissioned by Korea Peace Now and produced by a panel of independent experts. Its authors say it is the first comprehensive assessment of the human impact of sanctions against North Korea. According to the report’s findings, existing U.N. mechanisms to exempt humanitarian-related items from sanctions have failed to prevent negative impacts, and delays and funding shortfalls may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. We speak with the report’s authors, Joy Yoon and Henri Féron, as well as Christine Ahn, the international coordinator of the campaign Korea Peace Now. She is also the founder and executive director of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War.

As anti-government protests rage across the globe, from Chile to Hong Kong to Iraq, we look back at this year’s historic demonstrations in Puerto Rico that ousted Governor Ricardo Rosselló in July. The protests were propelled in part by the reporting of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico, which published hundreds of pages of chats between Rosselló and other government officials. The exposé was known as “RickyLeaks.” The leaked documents exposed rampant corruption within the Puerto Rican government and revealed Rosselló had mocked victims of Hurricane Maria. The messages also included violently misogynistic and homophobic remarks. We speak with three members of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico: executive director Carla Minet, journalist Luis Valentín and development director Rigel Lugo.

The Supreme Court begins hearing arguments on DACA this week; Sen. Cory Booker participates in the first-ever Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice; Rodney Reed is scheduled to be executed next week despite growing evidence that he is innocent.

Jerusalem at Night
Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall taken from Hass Promenade (Credit: Joiseyshowaa/Creative Commoms)

Those who know me know I have a particular penchant for science fiction, so imagine my surprise and delight at finding a newly published collection which imagines Palestine a hundred years after the 1948 Nakba (‘catastrophe’), all told through the lens of twelve incredible Palestinian sci-fi stories.

The dozen writers of these stories have done an incredible job of capturing the fears, hopes and dreams of their fellow Palestinians, reimagining them through incredible tales of fantastical technology and parallel universes.

From the introduction, the editor, Basma Ghalayini, sets the tone for the collection, reminding the reader that the Nakba was only begrudgingly accepted as being a quasi-permanent state of affairs by the Palestinian refugee community — and would come to embody their experiences through the creation of a worldwide diaspora. Being Palestinian, in other words, has always been linked to both the Nakba and the longing for Return:

“Palestinian refugees are, in this sense, like nomads travelling across a landscape of memory. They carry their village in their hearts, like an internal compass where ‘north’ is always Palestine. They pass this compass down to their children, who sketch in the details on an ever-fading map – the hills and trees and wadis – from their own imagination.” [p.viii]

This may be a sci-fi collection, but it is riddled with the deep scars of reality. In ‘A suicide in Gaza’, Saleem Haddad reminds us of three Palestinian boys killed on a beach, not too dissimilar to real events in the not too distant past — because even in fiction, Palestinians will never betray the experiences of their own. Whether it is within the realm of utopia or dystopia, Palestinians’ actual suffering is privileged above and beyond any desire for facile artistry.

I loved every story in this collection, not least because they aren’t always told from the perspectives of Palestinians, but at times offer those of Israelis, such as the ‘The Key’, written by Anwar Hamed, which leaves the reader with a sense of a future haunting those who engage in new forms of technological Apartheid. During my own travels in the West Bank, “the key” was such a powerful motif wherever I went. Hamed’s ghost story, of the haunted lives of Israelis who can never truly know peace as occupiers, is just the perfect ode to the spectre of Palestinian loss.

Emad el-Din Ayesha’s ‘Digital Nation’ brings into being the long-awaited Palestinian nation, even if it is through hacking the virtual reality headsets of Israelis. This act of historical subterfuge forces Israelis to confront the horrors of their own project, and the true extent to which the reality they have been taught is, in fact, a violent revision of true history:

“The Palestinians finally had a single government, free floating in a digital sea, with kids around the world learning from them and grappling passionately with their historical challenges. The game infected every console in Israel, and tracked its way to every player whose medical records showed Levantine blood (dated to 1948, including Jewish and Christian players, of course). The slogan that appeared on their screens as it downloaded read, ‘It’s time to come home.’” [p.89]

There are so many directions in which the plight of the Palestinian people can be raised that perhaps we take these framings for granted — due to our own reductive recasting of their experiences into very narrow registers of trauma. In ‘Application 39’, Ahmed Masoud forces us to consider the Palestinian condition beyond the usual tropes, by treating us to a morbidly clever story, in which Gaza attempts to host the Olympic Games:

“To pay a visit to this prison, Ismael thought; its first ever, in order to watch people running, jumping and throwing things!” [p.129]

There is no shortage of irony or cleverness in this collection. If anything, Palestinians have become experts in the deployment of these devices. The entire world, and history itself, have seemingly conspired against them. So when it comes to irony, there is sadly no shortage of material for them to draw upon.

Crucially, the stories in the collection never lose sight of what it means to be Palestinian in the now, even when you are dragged into a Matrix-esque pseudo reality — the links to the present are viscerally there. The writing, with its persistent linking of the past to the present reminds us that for Palestinians, even in 2048, the Nakba will still be and feel, unshakably real:

“Maybe the image travelled into his subconscious through his upbringing. It’s a bitch, that thing they call an upbringing. We’re only aware of the very end of its tail but its smooth slippery body stretches under our clothes and its head bites our children with poisonous memories, with images we spent a war and a lifetime trying to bury.” [p.44]

Palestine + 100
Edited by Basma Ghalayini

Featuring Talal Abu Shawish, Tasnim Abutabikh, Selma Dabbagh, Emad El-Din Aysha, Samir El-Youssef, Saleem Haddad, Anwar Hamed, Majd Kayyal, Mazen Maarouf, Abdalmuti Maqboul, Ahmed Masoud & Rawan Yaghi

Comma Press, August 2019

Democracy Now! 2019-11-14 Thursday

• Headlines for November 14, 2019
• In First Public Impeachment Hearing, Trump Implicated in Effort to Pressure Ukraine to Probe Bidens
• "This Is Unacceptable": Ex-Congresswoman Who Voted to Impeach Nixon Says Trump Is a Rogue President
• Chilean Activist: Same Elites Who Caused Social Crisis Can't Be Trusted to Write New Constitution
• CodePink Founder Medea Benjamin Threatened with Arrest After Protesting U.S. Foreign Interventions

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“Nothing is ugly or beautiful if no one is watching it” — Javier A. Bedrina (Photo credit: Javier A. Bedrina/Creative Commons)

Hakim Bey’s general strategic perspectives, such as the TAZ, are complemented by a range of tactical proposals for political action.  In this essay, I will explore the strategic underpinnings for Bey’s political proposals, and will examine his focus on resisting recuperation, his emphasis on “empirical freedoms” as means to liberation, and his theory of immediatism.

Bey’s strategic approach

There is a transformative strategy at work in Bey’s theories, which stems logically from his ontology and his view of the dominant system. He favours a range of tactics which produce altered consciousness and peak experiences. In his theory, peak experiences provide a means to transform values. They are also a challenge to the Spectacle, which is unable to provide them.

This strategy is based on Bey’s ontology of chaos. His approach is driven by the ‘desire for desire, for Eros son of Chaos‘. No ideology or normativity is adequate today. An adequate ethics must be situational. Peak experience is part of this. However, peak experience is not a goal in itself. TAZ is not purely hedonistic, but insurrectionary in intent – seeking to infect or become the ‘social‘. Experiences such as those of a TAZ can serve as the matrix for a Sorelian myth of uprising. (In Sorel, a myth is a mobilising idea which inspires action, regardless of its truth). The point is to provide the hope, the morale, necessary for transformative struggle and personal enjoyment. ‘Whether or not you believe you’re going to save the world, you have to act like you believe it or your life will be crap’.

Chaos is ontologically primary. Therefore, every social order is ultimately illusory.  It is made real only by coercion. Even so, fighting the system’s agents is less important than breaking down the self-alienation which underpins it. There is a danger that fighting the state helps sustain it as an effective illusion.

This leads some of Bey’s critics and supporters to interpret him as opposing social struggle. Despite these concerns, there is a recurring orientation to insurrection, or the ‘Uprising’, in his work. The ‘Uprising’ is a moment, like Sorel’s General Strike, when the TAZ comes to encompass all of social life, and becomes permanent. 

Bey insists on altered consciousness against consensus reality. But it is not necessarily a rare occurrence. Esoteric, mystical and magical forces are found in unusual, everyday places. Ice-cream, for instance, is a mystical mixture of ice, fire, ocean and space, holding natural appeal for children. It has its origins in Persian hermeticism and the discovery of rock-salt.

Resisting Recuperation – Exodus not Revolution

Resisting recuperation is a central aspect of Bey’s strategy. The Spectacle is a trap for revolt, because rebellion can also be turned into an image or a product. People are failing to create an outside because they are too glued to, or hypnotised by, televisions and computers. Visible militancy can become an image of itself and be recuperated by the media.

If mediation is the main enemy, the system’s main means of control, then effective resistance takes the form of disappearance, disengagement, immediacy (instead of mediation) and presence (instead of representation). Refusal to be mediated, or to engage with the Spectacle, creates spaces which are outside the system. While Bey also argues periodically for sabotage, reappropriation, and tactical use of the media, refusal seems to be the privileged tactic. His tactics are similar to the tactics of détournement used by Situationists. In an interview, Bey suggests that a strategy irrecuperable by the system has to involve altered consciousness. Altered consciousness or peak experience is irrecuperable because it cannot be represented, or reduced to mediated forms.

Strategically, Bey opposes a head-on collision with the state for two reasons. Firstly, he thinks it is futile. Secondly, he thinks the state is ‘terminal‘, or dying of its own accord. The system is violently spasming in its death throes. In this context, there is no point confronting a power-system which has lost all meaning and is just a simulation. The best tactic is to avoid this spectacular violence which cannot reach the substance of social life, instead disappearing.

Insurrection and armed action are tragically counterproductive, because they are recuperated by the Spectacle. Also, radical action or organising should not be a sacrifice, but self-liberation with immediate psychological reward. Struggles against the system risk recuperation. As an alternative, Bey proposes personal and cultural actions. His alternative is to live as if the struggle were already won, to realise alternatives immediately, in the present. He discourages purely destructive acts (without a constructive element), and direct attacks on people. Instead, he defines the task of radicals as finding cracks in the system’s power and images, chipping away at the Spectacle and its influence. With enough success, such tactics might cause the system to lose its coherence and assurance, and thus also its power.

Armed attacks are ‘tragically counterproductive’. What counts today is personal/cultural action and ‘bearing witness‘. Attacks like 9/11 are ‘automatically recuperable‘ and always produce the opposite of their intended effect, because they are incorporated in the system’s internal image of the enemy. On another occasion, Bey reportedly expressed disapproval of the mass murders, but called 9/11 a ‘brilliant piece of artwork’ falling into the broad category of ‘bad shamanism’ which underpins reactionary movements. 

Bey feels there is an obligation to feel joy, and not postpone it until the future or the afterlife. Feeling joy is necessary both to do justice to oneself, and to deal fairly/beautifully with others. Bey seeks to tap the energy of insurrection, without risking martyrdom or capture by the image. Insurrection must relate to the media today as it used to relate (in Bey’s historical examples) to religion as heresy. It is effectively a heresy against the Spectacle.

Resistance to the Spectacle occurs mainly through images and imaginaries. Simply being conscious of the Spectacle, sameness, and alienation cannot overcome them. Rather, opposition needs ‘counter-imagery‘ and a kind of spirituality or marvel. In Millennium, Bey suggests that there is a lack of an inspiring ‘myth’ or ‘metanoia‘, a focal point for dissident energies, both in above-ground radical movements and in countercultures and underground groups. The present task as he sees it is to build an anti-capitalist resistance movement out of the remaining fragments of radical movements.

In line with this perspective, Bey proposes a range of different tactics, the goal of which is to free desire from a state of capture or bondage to the system. Everyday life is the main field for insurrectionary self-empowerment against the system. Bey suggests that everyone knows what is going on and what to do, provided s/he can break free of ‘false consciousness‘, the Spectacle, interpretation, or scarcity. Bey calls for a type of resistance which melts into the wider resistance of the excluded. It avoids confrontation on unequal terms, but breaks down the system’s monopoly on violence. It occupies cracks in the system of control and reproduces techniques of indigenous warfare.

Viewed as a general strategy, this is not a strategy of resistance at the level of theory or art alone. Rather, it seeks dis-alienation through the strategic use of images, culminating in an alternative consciousness geared towards the Uprising. However, some of the tactics do focus on theory or art. Before the world can be changed, we need to destroy the dominant archetypes, the ‘cops in the head’. This is the only practical insurrection possible today.

Bey suggests that it may also change the landscape around us. An insurrection against false consciousness will sweep away the power, the technology, of oppression. Attacking power is no longer possible because it is no longer ‘there’ – is is pure spectacle. The state, as an outer institution, is increasingly irrelevant as a focus, because of the spread of virtual capital. Yet spaces cannot be neutral. Either a zone is part of capital, or it is in opposition.

Bey’s position leads to certain general propositions. In ‘Post-Anarchism Anarchy‘, he provides a nine-point manifesto which includes ‘Zerowork’ or anti-work, opposing the education system and the ‘serfdom of children’, promotion of sexuality, and addressing the issue of land in the context of de-spatialisation of capitalism. However, Bey also critiques single-issue politics as playing into the commodification of opinions. Specific oppressions cannot be separated out from the general problem of the system.

Strategies and Contexts

In some ways, this is a consciously anti-strategic strategy. Politically, Bey criticises the idea of revolution as a goal, instead valuing insurgence, uprising, or insurrection as an inner process of rejecting power. There is no overarching programme for revolution. Worthwhile struggles are always for ‘empirical freedoms‘, rather than ideology. ‘Strategic autonomy is made up of tactical incremental empirical freedoms not ideology’. He theorises uprisings as an equivalent at the social movement scale of peak experiences at the individual level. The aim is to get outside mediation by creating different ways of being. 

In this context, the TAZ is not only a tactic, it is also a ‘psychospiritual state’ or ‘existential condition’. The physical TAZ is a way to sample this state of being. It is a way to create a psychological and political ‘outside‘ – from which resistance can happen. Sometimes the insurrection itself is a zone of freedom, regardless of whether it is successful. Its temporary nature can be a virtue. The process of revolt is arguably preferable to the sleepiness of a realised social form.

In a sense, even dropping or reforming repressive rules is unnecessary, since rules and the morality of the herd are there to be overcome. They are something to prove and measure oneself against. Bey’s main point here is that one should break the rules, instead of trying to reform them. The imperative to resist does not disappear even in miserable conditions. If rebellion is not possible, then Bey advises what he calls a ‘clandestine spiritual jihad‘, or struggle to disalienate life and culture.

Bey’s strategies vary greatly with context. Each situation has a particular strategic structure and needs to be approached situationally to find sources of power. ‘Situation’ here seems to mean something like a social structure or opportunity structure in relation to which strategies and tactics are formulated to create autonomy or conditions for its emergence. In his early work, Bey cocneived of TAZ in Deleuzian molecular terms, as a tactic used as part of a worldview distrustful of strategy. In his later work, faced with the totalising effects of the post-Cold War ‘end of history’, he suggests that he’s now forced into trying to formulate a strategic position, without the authoritarian implications of strategy (Interview, Sakhra).

At various points, Bey also calls for creating alternative economic institutions, and for anarchist involvement in wider social movements. For example, the strategic position of TAZ changes a lot through Bey’s writings. In the book TAZ, Bey wishes for the ‘eruption of the marvellous into the ordinary‘. This means spiritualising everyday life. For Bey at this time, spiritualisation is the most tumultuous and urgent political demand. In Immediatism, Bey claims that he staked and ultimately lost on this position. He now seeks to find hidden treasure instead. This later position suggests that the marvellous is contained mainly in secretive small groups. In ‘The Occult Assault on Institutions‘, he argues for a strategy to optimise conditions for TAZ’s to emerge. 

There are thus major differences in Bey’s strategic perspective over time. Overall, however, his varying strategies and tactics pursue a consistent goal of immediacy, intensity, and altered consciousness. In Escape from the Nineteenth Century, he argues that capital is based on sameness and separation. The antidotes are therefore difference and presence. In an interview, he counterposes ‘real immanence’ to the ‘false transcendence’ offered by the Spectacle.

In ‘Post-Anarchism Anarchy‘, Bey argues that anarchism is caught between a tragic Past and a utopian Future, but it needs to find a present in ‘true desires’ and things we can do ‘before it’s too late’. It starts from the question, ‘What is your True Desire?’ A first step in ‘utopia’ is always to look in the mirror and demand to know one’s true desire. This requires at least temporarily overcoming anxiety, or fear of one’s shadow.

In some works, Bey redefines the Islamic concept of jihad in terms of the struggle against alienation. The greater jihad is the struggle against the separated self and the suffocation of the true self. The lesser jihad is the struggle against the Spectacle. In ‘Jihad Revisited‘, Bey suggests that he was hoping for a kind of ‘Islamic Zapatismo’ when he wrote Millennium, possibly derived from neo-Sufism. This jihad he imagined has not come to pass and it is ‘probably too late’.

Immediatism: Tactical Resistance to Mediation

Bey sees mediation as a central aspect or cause of alienation. All experience is mediated, but mediation differs in degree. Embodied experiences are the least mediated. Certain sensory experiences – such as taste, touch, and sexual pleasure – are less mediated than others. Live or performance arts are less mediated than recorded arts. Even among recorded arts, there are degrees of mediation depending on how much imaginative participation each work demands. When hearers or readers play an active role in imagination or dreaming, there is less mediation.

Books draw on the reader’s imagination, but involve a hierarchical relationship between producer and consumer. Spirit-possession is less mediated than theatre, which is less mediated than film, and television is especially mediated and in need of overcoming. However, the point is not to do away with any means of artistic production. The more imagination is freed or shared, the more useful the medium. In other words, mediation is a continuum, ranging from the barely-mediated to the extremely mediated, with many shades in between.

The idea of mediation is central to Bey’s analysis of art. Capitalism propels art towards increasing mediation, and recuperates art increasingly rapidly today. Authentic art is play. Play is one of the least mediated experiences. Bey seems to connect artistic creativity with peak experience. Immediatism is a means of creative, liberatory and playful energy-production, without alienation or mediation. Today’s art and advertising promote endless images of death and mutilation.

On the other hand, images of life are sometimes punished. Bey argues that art cannot exist for itself. Art functions as political power, a way of expressing or changing the world. Even if there is such a thing as art without political content, it would still be political in its means of production and consumption. Immediatist art expresses its radicalism in its means of production and consumption. It is kept within a small group of friends and ideally leaves no trace at all, except self-transformation.

In the 1990s, Bey theorised disappearance as desirable, to avoid recuperation. Disappearance is a way to save something from dying of mediation. Capitalism has created a kind of closure in which a single image of the world dominates. Other images cannot emerge because of the hegemony of this image. This leads to a dead process of endless reproduction of sameness. Any image which ruptures this hegemony would have to come from outside. And it would have to be asserted as a kind of ‘Image War‘.

The ‘outside’ here is presence, or the gift economy, as something which cannot be represented. In Riverpeople, Wilson claims that publication sometimes ‘profanes’ (dirties or despiritualises) secret knowledge which is better transmitted in less-mediated forms, such as manuscript or word-of-mouth. These less-mediated forms retain a small chance of enchantment, of becoming ‘Poetic Facts’ with truth in the archetypal world as well as the real world. In contrast, mass-published facts become mere data or information. They lose any relationship to the imaginal world. Bey also claims that ‘secrets still exist’. Secrets are powerful, against the system’s claims to see and represent everything. Secrecy is central to the tong, immediatism, and Bey’s conception of ‘tact’. 

In ‘Media Creed for the Fin de Siécle‘, Wilson argues that the mass media alienates whatever it captures. One cannot express one’s true subjectivity in the media. Instead, what is expressed is rendered meaningless. Therefore, he calls for a refusal to let the media possess one’s image and extract ‘vampiric power’ from it. Instead, one should invest energies in intimate or subjective media, and either evade or destroy mass media.

Virtual reality failed because human reaction times are faster than vision. VR caused sickness and illnesses by separating embodied and visual experiences. In ‘The Obelisk‘, Bey argues that voluntary self-restraint in relation to the world of representation and images can lead to flows of power to the autonomous imagination. The point is to imagine ourselves, rather than to allow ourselves to be imagined through words or images. Things which are unrepresented and unseen – deliberately or fortuitously – tend to maintain their lived meaning. This in turn creates optimal conditions for the emergence of the ‘marvelous’ in lived experiences (or of altered consciousness). 

In Immediatism, Bey proposes to practice art in secret, so as to avoid ‘contamination’ by mediation. All spectators should also be performers. Artistic products should be shared with participants only, and never sold. Techniques involving physical presence are preferred. This practice is framed as a response to alienation and to the ‘death of art’ due to mediation. 

Art should be created from inspiration, as a free gift, which may or may not be reciprocated. Today, instead, it is produced for money. Art is meant to provide a kind of ‘healing laugh‘, which is serious, but not sober. It is to be a boast, not an excuse. Bey suggests that art which is not produced through alienation is today classified in terms such as ‘insane’ and ‘neo-primitive’. It appeals because of its imaginal presence. 

As an example of an immediatist project, Bey proposes a variety of the potlatch, or ritual feast. It should be made without ready-made ingredients. The main point is to give and receive gifts.  Another piece, ‘A Lunar Garden of Legal Phantastica‘, suggests modern items for creating a Greek pantheon. Priapus could be a garden gnome with a painted-on penis; Mercury a hood ornament from a car, or the Western Union logo.

Similarly, in ‘The Occult Assault on Institutions‘, Bey argues that actions to promote TAZ should avoid mediation, directly realising their goal. They should also add up to more than the sum of their parts. Such actions should both ‘damage or destroy some real and/or imaginal time/space of “the enemy”‘, and create a strong chance of a peak experience. In terms of enemies, abstractions like ‘the state’ are of little use. Resistance must target specific functionaries. The aim is to provide a particular ‘occult effect’, projecting power back at the media.

One way to avoid recuperation by the Spectacle is to ensure that symbolism has depth or ‘fractal dimensions’ which cannot be reduced to the flat imagery of the Spectacle. In such cases, even when others try to recuperate an image, it will continue to carry an uncertain, anti-systemic subtext. Sabotage, for instance, is too easily recuperated by being classified as crime. It might avoid this if combined with information, beauty, or adventure, provided one does not get caught.

For instance, media employees might be sent powerful imagery or magic art-objects which are said to carry a curse. The curse is that it will cause them to realise their true desires. The aim of such a tactic is to infiltrate the images into their dreams and desires, to make their jobs seem boring and destructive. 

For the other essays in the series, please visit the In Theory column page.

Editor’s note: With regards to Hakim Bey’s controversial personal stances, these will be discussed in Part 10 of this series. In the meantime, please read our ‘Note to readers’ at the end of the introductory essay of the series.

In Bolivia, right-wing Senator Jeanine Áñez declared herself president Tuesday night despite a lack of quorum in Congress, amid a deepening political crisis in the country. Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, left the country Monday after being granted asylum in Mexico. Morales announced his resignation Sunday, shortly after the Bolivian military took to the airwaves to call for his departure. His Movement Toward Socialism party is refusing to recognize Áñez as president, calling her claim illegal and decrying Evo Morales’s resignation over the weekend as a military coup. We continue our conversation with Pablo Solón and Kevin Young about the political crisis in Bolivia. Solón, who served as Bolivia’s United Nations ambassador under former President Evo Morales, says Morales’s ouster was not a coup. Young, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, disagrees.

Democracy Now! 2019-11-13 Wednesday

• Headlines for November 13, 2019
• Democracy on Trial: Bill Moyers on Impeachment Inquiry & Why PBS Should Air Hearings in Primetime
• Bill Moyers on Impeachment: All Presidents Lie, But Trump Has Created a Culture of Lying
• A Coup? A Debate on the Political Crisis in Bolivia That Led to Evo Morales's Resignation

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Democracy Now! 2019-11-12 Tuesday

• Headlines for November 12, 2019
• The Edge of Democracy: Lula is Freed in Brazil In Victory for Movement to Resist Bolsonaro
• Vowing to End Cash Bail & Reform Justice System, Chesa Boudin Wins San Francisco DA Race
• "Seattle Is Not For Sale": Voters Rebuke Amazon, Re-electing Socialist Kshama Sawant

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Human rights groups are condemning the Indian government for carrying out widespread torture, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and other crimes in Kashmir after the region’s special status was revoked in August. We speak to the acclaimed Indian author Arundhati Roy about the crackdown in Kasmhir, rising authoritarianism in India and other issues.

At Friday’s Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice, Amy Goodman asked Senator Elizabeth Warren if Iowa and New Hampshire — two of the whitest states in the country — should always hold two of the first votes in the presidential primary season. Warren responded, “I’m just a player in the game on this one.”

Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, resigns following what he described as a military coup; A conversation with Senator Elizabeth Warren about the climate crisis at the first-ever Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice.

Civil rights photographer Cecil Williams recalls photographing the aftermath of the 1968 Orangeburg massacre when three unarmed black students were shot dead at South Carolina State University. The nine officers who opened fire that day were all acquitted.

Three months ago, massive celebrations took over the streets of Puerto Rico as Governor Ricardo Rosselló announced he would resign, following 12 days of enormous protests on the island. The protests began after Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism published close to 900 pages of text messages between Rosselló, staffers and advisers. The group chat messages were riddled with misogyny, homophobia, profanity and violence. Some of the messages mocked victims of Hurricane Maria. Some of Puerto Rico’s biggest artists were at the forefront of the demonstrations that ousted Rosselló, and the song “Afilando los Cuchillos” — sharpening the knives — became an anthem of the protests. We recently sat down to discuss music, activism and Puerto Rico with Ileana Cabra Joglar, better known as iLe. She co-wrote and performed “Afilando los Cuchillos” along with fellow Puerto Rican artists Residente and Bad Bunny. The Grammy-winning Puerto Rican singer, composer and vocalist was a member of the group Calle 13 for over a decade. Her first solo album “iLevitable” was released in 2016 and won a Grammy in the category Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album. iLe was also nominated that year for the Latin Grammy Awards as “Best New Artist.” Her sophomore album “Almadura” is an ode to Puerto Rican resistance, struggles and fight for freedom from U.S. colonialism, and the single “Contra Todo” was nominated for a 2019 Latin Grammy.

The first-ever Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice is being held at South Carolina State University Friday night in Orangeburg. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman will co-moderate the event with former Environmental Protection Agency official Mustafa Ali. Leaders from frontline communities will attend tonight's forum, including Reverend Leo Woodberry, who has been fighting against environmental racism in South Carolina for years. We speak to him about environmental injustices in the state and where the candidates stand on the issues. Rev. Woodberry is a pastor of Kingdom Living Temple in Florence, South Carolina, and the Environmental Justice Chair of the Sierra Club’s Ready For 100 campaign. He is also the executive director of the nonprofit New Alpha Community Development Corporation.

Democracy Now! 2019-11-08 Friday

• Headlines for November 08, 2019
• Warren, Booker & Steyer to Take Part in First-Ever Presidential Forum on Environmental Justice
• "We Can't Afford to Wait for the DNC": Why Black Lawmakers Organized an Environmental Justice Forum
• Remembering the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre When Police Shot Dead Three Unarmed Black Students

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Democracy Now! 2019-11-07 Thursday

• Headlines for November 07, 2019
• Algerian Protesters Are Still in the Streets, Months After Pushing Out Longtime President Bouteflika
• Ex-Twitter Workers Charged with Spying for Saudis as part of Kingdom’s Growing Crackdown on Dissent
• "The Pollinators": New Film Shows How Decline of Bee Colonies Could Mean Collapse of Food Chain

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Longtime immigration activist Marco Saavedra faces his final asylum hearing in New York on Thursday. He is requesting asylum, saying his life would be at risk if he is sent to Mexico. Saavedra has been involved in several high-profile immigration actions. In 2012 he purposely got arrested by federal authorities to infiltrate the privately owned Broward Transitional Center in Florida. A year later, he and eight other DREAMers “self-deported” to Mexico to protest the separation of immigrant families under the Obama administration.

Democracy Now! 2019-11-06 Wednesday

• Headlines for November 06, 2019
• Is Texas About to Execute an Innocent Man? Rodney Reed's Family Demands Retrial Amid New Evidence
• Dems Win Big on Election Day, Flipping Virginia Legislature & Ousting Trump-Backed Kentucky Gov.

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