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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Hyperchaos
  • Erik Davis compared it to Hakim Bey's ontological anarchism and Discordianism.
    • We can now claim to have passed through the correlationist circle - or at least to have broken through the wall erected by the latter, which separated thought from the great outdoors, the eternal in-itself, whose being is indifferent to whether or not it is thought. We now know the location of the narrow passage through which thought is able to exit from itself - it is through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able to make our way towards the absolute. Yet even were one to grant that we have indeed broken the circle, it would seem that this victory over correlationism has been won at such a cost, and with so many concessions to the latter, that ours is actually a Pyrrhic victory. For the only absolute we have managed to rescue from the confrontation would seem to be the very opposite of what is usually understood by that term, which is supposed to provide a foundation for knowledge. Our absolute, in effect, is nothing other than an extreme form of chaos, a hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable. This absolute lies at the furthest remove from the absolutization we sought: the one that would allow mathematical science to describe the in-itself. We claimed that our absolutization of mathematics would conform to the Cartesian model and would proceed by identifying a primary absolute (the analogue of God), from which we would derive a secondary absolute, which is to say, a mathematical absolute (the analogue of extended substance). We have succeeded in identifying a primary absolute (Chaos), but contrary to the veracious God, the former would seem to be incapable of guaranteeing the absoluteness of scientific discourse, since, far from guaranteeing order, it guarantees only the possible destruction of every order.
from free speech
  • America has freedom of speech because all words are considered equally vapid. – Hakim Bey
from Weird Studies/Holiday Memories
  • Interdisciplinarity as like anarchist paradise, they do mention Hakim Bey's observation that everything accrues structure and eventually collapses under the weight. Derrida and Foucault used to be revolutionary, now they are just an alternative establishment.
    • Amen, the best academic thing I ever did was to carve out a little interdisciplinary TAZ Narrative Intelligence
from Hakim Bey/Satanic Mills
    • He's making an argument against technology, in part by resurrecting older ones (Luddites, Blake, the Lunar Society romantics like Coleridge and Wordsworth).
    • Really doesn't like computers or computer people and I can't say I blame him, he sneers at those who think computers will make us smarter.
    • Defense of the Luddites, citing that Kirkpatrick Sale book, Rebels Against the Future. They weren't anti-technology, just anti- having their livelihood destroyed and turned from a craft into factory enslavement.
    • in fact all technology tends towards oppression and immiseration. It may increase wealth (for a few) but it cannot free the human spirit because in essence it consists of the opposite of the free spirit. (p 50)
      • Sigh, not only wrong, pretty trite.
from Future Fossils/Weird Studies
  • WS will die if there is ever a WS department...WS is what escapes the episteme. Compared later to TAZ theory of Hakim Bey – as soon as utopia is identified it becomes distopia.
from Technic and Magic
  • Just hit me; he reminds me most of Hakim Bey, another anarchistic poetic advocate of radical alternative realities, with occasional exotic Sufi references.
Twin Pages

Hakim Bey

23 May 2022 - 26 Oct 2025
Open in Logseq
    • Anarchist writer and mystic-anarchist-chaos-poet, recently (as of May 23rd, 2022) deceased. AKA Peter Lamborn Wilson, and also apparently a notorious pedophile. The reaction to his death has been very polarized, he was both intensely loved and despised in the counterculture. Here's a thorough airing of the charges and critiques: Leaving out the ugly part - Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson | libcom.org.
    • I've admired his work and been inspired by it, do I have to hate it now? That seems ... I don't know, dumb? Maybe his personal behavior cancels all of his work. It certainly isn't unrelated. I am confused and don't know how to react, but maybe that's OK. It is possible for someone to create worthwhile work while being a terrible person.
    • OTOH: aside from the personal behavior, his work has always advocated a kind of romantic and personal version of anarchism, a free-your-mind sort of approach that bypasses or ignores oppression without actually addressing it, and he's been critiqued for it by the more political and boring kinds of anarchists like Murray Bookchin in Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. It's almost literally poetry vs the prosaic, and that there should be monstrosity lurking on the poetic side is almost to be expected.
    • His best-known concept was the Temporary Autonomous Zone, a sort of short-lived bubble of alternative reality where humans could live as they were supposed to, free of oppression. Burning Man is a TAZ, or was thought to be, it may have accumulated too much structure by now. A party is a TAZ, partly because (as Prince sang) they aren't meant to last.
    • Ontological Anarchy in a Nutshell | Hakim Bey
      • Since absolutely nothing can be predicated with any real certainty as to the "true nature of things", all projects (as Nietzsche says) can only be "founded on nothing. " And yet there must be a project — if only because we ourselves resist being categorized as "nothing." Out of nothing we will make something: the Uprising, the revolt against everything which proclaims: “The Nature of Things is such-&-such. "
      • In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all riot of color, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos. From this point of view, Order appears as death, cessation, crystallization, alien science.
      • The logic of Passion leads to the conclusion that all "states" are impossible, all "orders" illusory, except those of desire. No being, only becoming—hence the only viable government is that of love, or "attraction." Civilization merely hides from itself—behind a thin static scrim of rationality—the truth that only desire creates values . And so the values of Civilization are based on the denial of desire.
    • Immediatism
      • "Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill" - not an abstract noun. A process, not a "state" - a movement, not a form of governance. The Land of the Dead knows that perfect Order from which the organic and animate shrink in horror-which explains why the Civilization of Slippage is more than half in love with easeful death. From Babylon and Egypt to the 20th Century, the architecture of Power can never quite be distinguished from the tumuli of the necropolis.
    • Aimless Wandering
      • Does Taoism have a "metaphysics"?....Well, yes and no...Chuang Tzu not only has no metaphysics, he actually condemns and derides metaphysics. Supernaturalism and materialism both appear equally funny to him. His only cosmogonic principle is "chaos". Oddly enough the only philosophical tool he uses is logic - although it is the logic of dream. He makes no mention of divine principle, of the purpose of being, or personal immortality. He is beyond Good and Evil, sneers at ethics, and even makes fun of yoga.
      • "Sneering at ethics" might be part of the problem.
      • The universe comes into being spontaneously; as Kuo Hsiang points out, the search for a "lord" (or agens) of this creation is an exercize in infinite regress towards emptiness. The Tao is not "God", as some Christian translators still believe. The Tao just happens.
    • his last interview
      • Against whig historicism of Berlin, Pinker: romanticism had left and right wings (he's defending the left version)
      • remarkably straightforward intellectual history at least at the start. "the fetiishization of rationalism" man you don't even know. "the cruel instrumentality of reason". He is against cruelty...1968 movement was anti...now the right has picked up on cruel irrationalism. The whig version of anti-Trumpism – Trump isn't a moron, he's a genius chaos magician.