I’ve been writing lately about Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey. Well here are some more tidbits of incendiary insight from the poet laureate of “ontological anarchy”…

First up, an incredible interview from 2005 where he speaks his mind about peak oil, gentrification, organic food corporatism, the sad state of the anti-war movement and more. There’s so much here I find myself agreeing with, and to hear Wilson talk plainly and lucidly about current events - a topic he doesn’t usually address but which is obviously unavoidable - is very refreshing. A taste:

“I went to a Peace March yesterday – it was the anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. I swear it was like being back in the 60s again: same clothes, same slogans […] We’ve been saying this for 40 years and we still haven’t realized that symbolic action and symbolic discourse is NOT Action! And this is even better: there was a counter-demonstration, and the anti-demonstrators were yelling at us that we were communists! This is like a civil war reenactment; it’s like people in medieval costumes pretending to be knights and ladies. Totally bizarre. […] And this is it! You go, you have a march, you say: ‘Not in my name!’ And then you go home and watch TV. You don’t then go out and start an alternative institution: a church, a farm, a commune…”

Having just spent part of my weekend in Woodstock, NY, I can wholly sympathize with that sentiment. Secluded in the woods of upstate New York, swamped with peace poles, aging folk musicians, and overpriced Bob Dylan t-shirts, it’s hard to imagine these people actually think that their endless chants of “peace peace peace” are actually accomplishing anything. Just as Bey’s experience with peace marches felt to him like a civil war re-enactment, I couldn’t help feeling as if the entire town of Woodstock was part of some new kind of Renaissance Fair or living museum - a Colonial Williamsburg for the 20th century; historical interpreters acting out the summer of love in miniature for all eternity, now surrounded by camera-clad tourists and yuppies in their country homes. (Coincidentally, Momus wrote a blog entry about a very similar phenomenon of cultural time warp just last week.)

Moving on… this essay by Bey, originally published in The Fifth Estate, was such a mindfuck the first time I read it that many of its ideas have now formed (in part) the basis for a film I’m currently working on. The essay’s main thesis posits the invention of money as “humanity’s one really totally successful experiment in magic”:

“In the form of money, the exterior soul, shattered into fragments, so to speak, can be put into circulation ([exchanged for desire, passed on to heirs like an immortal virus, or, rather like a dead thing that magically contains life and “begets” itself endlessly in usury]) but also stolen, monopolized, guarded by dragons, so that some unlucky humans can be stripped of all soul, while others gorge or hoard up soul-bits of ancestors and victims in their goulish caves or ‘banks,’ etc.”

In exploring this idea, he touches upon Proudhon, Midas, cargo cults, Mauss’ gift economy, and Jack and the Beanstalk. Also intimately related is this lecture on the history of money he gave less than a year ago. I haven’t been able to find any transcriptions or recordings of it, so the summary given on that blog will have to do.

And if you’re looking for more, I’d hope you’d ignore the god-awful web design and take a look at deoxy, leftbank.org, and gyw.com where a ton of his writings are available for free. Icing on the cake: it seems like that last one is hidden within the website of some Finnish chemical processing risk assessment firm - how subversive!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Anarchism, Politics/News, Socio/Anthro, Utopia/Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.