Temporary Autonomous Horseshit

I thought the idea of a “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ) had gone the way of “cyborg bodies” and other painfully ‘90s technobabble cultural studies bullcrap, but it’s been popping up the damnedest places.

I’ve come to loathe most of that camp of academe that fed parasitically off of technological developments it neither understood nor put to good intellectual ends, instead justifying the fluffy logic of the postmodernist movement with psuedoscience (see anything Arthur Kroker has touched, for example). The idea of TAZs is kicked around a lot in texts of that sort, but I buy it neither culturally nor politically; an artificially cordoned-off social and/or physical space in the domain of local, national, and international law is hardly autonomous, nor does it stand alone from the binds of the culture at large. Of course, like so many gutless postmoderns, the originator of the TAZ concept, Hakim Bey, would rather pass his work off as mere fancy than produce something worthy of real criticism: “I am not trying to construct political dogma. In fact I have deliberately refrained from defining the TAZ—I circle around the subject, firing off exploratory beams.” (from here)

I’ll tell you where you can fire your exploratory beams… But seriously, I wish floggings on the people who got academic jobs pushing this brand of crap.