This is an excerpt of about the first 1/2 of the interview from Cyber-Psychos AOD #6.

HAKIM BEY: THE TAZ AND YOU
An Interview by Bruce Young

In 1991, Autonomedia released a small book called T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. This collection of anarchist essays soon swept through the more adventurous and enigmatic subcultures, creating a wave of comment and discourse. Its images of free areas, where people could act as they actually wished, and not as they're told, and reassurances that Chaos never died, but you received a forged invitation to the funeral stirred souls and planted seeds in many minds. The author, Hakim Bey, stayed away from his work after its release. No book signing tours, no public engagements to speak of, no word. Only referred to in cryptic morsels (hiding out in a Gulfstream trailer in New Jersey among others), Mr. Bey has preferred to let his words speak for themselves. Recently though, he teamed up with Bill Laswell to release a CD of readings from TAZ. With delicate tones flowing through the background, giving just a hint of far off places and wondrous scenes, he reads selections from the book. Far from, say, William Burroughs' Spare Ass Annie release, this is more of an audio sampler than an attempt to put interesting words on a dance floor. After a recent engagement, Hakim Bey agreed to a short interview to clear up a few things about the audio release and the book.

It seems most of your writings are released through Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia. Could you give a brief description of the 2 and the differences between them?

Hakim Bey: Well, it's the same company. Semiotext(e) is the magazine, founded in 1974 by Sylvere Lotringer, a French scholar working for Columbia University whose self-appointed task was to introduce the Paris of '68 radical French philosophers to America. That would include Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault, etc. And then, somewhere around 1982, Autonomedia became the umbrella book company. So there are some Semiotext(e) books, the little Foreign Agents series, and there are Autonomedia series books, but it's all the same company. And the gist of it is, we are not only not-for-profit, but the people who work for the company don't take salaries; some of the writers don't take royalties or turn some of them back over to the company. The reason for this is so the company does not have to face the world of commodity publishing, and in this way the prices are kept low. We do small paperbacks for $7 and large for $10 to $12, and these are prices which completely undercut any other publisher of critical theory or radical philosophy like Zone or whatnot. I mean give them credit, they're doing great work, but they're running it like a real publishing company and paying themselves salaries, royalties, and so forth. And it means they can't do as much as Autonomedia can do. In the past 2 years we've gone from 7 books to 20 books, which puts us well into the midrange, publishing a lot more than many so-called midrange publishers. We do this for specific political reasons, because we believe in what we publish, we want it out there, and we want it cheap. It's run as a collective and we have other sub- collectives that come in and make proposals to us. These people invariably work for nothing, they work on a project because they want to work on a project. It's important and, if we agree, we publish it.

So they get to see Autonomedia as a distribution opportunity?

Bey: Of course. We have an excellent distribution network. We've been in business for 20 years, we bloody well should have.

Your best known work is TAZ. What was the time span of the essays in it?

Bey: I guess around '84 to '88, something like that.

Now you have a tape and CD of selections from the book out. How did that come about and what are your goals for a CD release as opposed to a book release?

Bey: Well, first of all, it came about because Bill Laswell asked me to do it. He's seen our work and is extremely fond of Jim Koehnline's collages, he's bought several for his recordings, and he also apparently read my work and invited me to do this and I said, "Why not?". I have no goals for it whatsoever. If it gets out there... I never had any goals for the book either. I mean I meant to publish a book, but I never expected the book to do what it's done and I'm not even sure I like what's happened to the book.

What do you mean by that?

Bey: Well, I think there are a lot of people who are desperately seeking someone to tell them what to do, always a human factor, and somehow one way or another even though the pseudonym was meant to keep an ego trip or star factor out of this, it backfired. It worked the opposite of the way I thought it was going to work. The anti-copyright worked the opposite way I thought it would work too. I thought we would publish one edition of the book and after that people who were interested in it would go out and copy it themselves. But instead it makes people buy the book, like they're getting something from the book. Like they can copy parts of it out then and put parts of it in their zines or send it in letters to their friends. The book has sold a great deal more than I ever expected and the reason I don't make public appearances is because I don't like this whole star aspect of writing books on this kind of extropean, anarchist, cyberpunk, or all these kind of strains I'm pulling together. I don't want to be a star in any of these circles. That wasn't my intention at all. My intention was very much an anarchist one. Looking for ways to revivify anarchist theory, some contacts with Oriental spirituality on one hand and, on the other, European philosophy that had been so ignored in the Anglo-Saxon English speaking world. The point of the thing was to do it yourself, and not to fetishize the book or the author of the book. And not to make the book in any respect a substitute for one's own autonomy. The book was an experiment in my own autonomy, an exploration of my autonomy and my thoughts on autonomy and I hoped it would inspire people to do likewise, not become fans of the book. So after a few, to me, very unsatisfactory public appearances I finally decided, "This needs to be nipped in the bud". This is not what it's about. This tape may be the cause of more of these problems, but as I said it was Bill's idea, not my idea. I enjoyed working with Bill. He's really, really, good at this. It's an extremely tasteful job. I hope, so tasteful that people will find it boring. That this will give a bit of distance, what Brecht called alienation, which is so necessary to not get sucked into these authorial worlds. The author as authority is a deadly trap, at least in this endeavor. Actually the best response the book got was to be burnt in an art event in New York. I thought that was an appropriate response.

This article was published some time ago. Some of its claims cannot be verified. Joe Ambrose is a writer who worked with Psimurgh on a spoken word + music album. Terry Wilson is a writer most known for his work with Brion Gysin (Here to Go). I post this to SPAZ.org to encourage discussion, and multiplicity in analysis.

WHY HAKIM BEY/PETER LAMBORN WILSON IS A COUNTERCULTURE CRIMINAL by

Joe Ambrose / Frank Rynne / Terry Wilson

We met Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson when he came to Dublin to participate in The Here To Go Show, an event we organised to bring the revolutionary ideas of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs into contact with a new counterculture, manifested in stuff like hip hop, photocopy art, skate kids, anti-copyright. Guests included the Master Musicians of Joujouka, Sufi Moroccan Trance exponents, Beat photographer Ira Cohen, and painter Mohamed Hamri, the only Moroccan intellectual to participate as an equal in the Tangier Beat scene of Timothy Leary, Burroughs, and Brian Jones. Here To Go was sponsored by Gordon Campbell, a millionaire Dublin clothes retailer and close friend of international drug smuggler Jim McCann. Campbell spent his time in the weeks leading up to the Show trying to get the logo of his company - THE GAP - bigger on all material to do with the Show, and trying to claim copyright on a book we'd wrote to tie in with the event, MAN FROM NOWHERE. Here To Go came and went. While we partied with the Master Musicians, Hamri, and the kids who showed up to check it out, Campbell threw a series of lavish dinner parties in the Clarence Hotel, owned by his multimillionaire property developer pal Harry Crosby and by U2. Attendees at these dinners included fashion designer Lainey Keogh, Jumper Queen of Dublin, various business fatcats, and Hakim Bey who made it quite clear, before returning to New York, that he was determined to strike up a close friendship with Campbell, because he was loaded with money. The Master Musicians did about 15 concerts during the week of the Show. They're desperately poor and illiterate peasants who eke out a subsistence living by farming and playing music. When the time came for them to go back to Morocco, Campbell gave them $140 to share between 5 men with families to support. They left Dublin in tears, saying they'd have been better off in prison. Campbell then seized the entire stock of our book MAN FROM NOWHERE - the deal with him had been that it should go into international distribution after the Show, profits being shared between him and us. We told Campbell that we would not let the Joujouka Musicians matter rest, and campaigned for an ethical amount of money to be sent to them in. We sought the support of the participants in the Show. When Hakim Bey was contacted he told us that he didn't want to get involved, that his relationship with Campbell was more important than the rights and wrongs of paying the Musicians. "Anyway, $140 is quite a lot of money in Morocco.", he said. He told us that we were stupid to upset Campbell, that we'd get a lot more money out of him if we humored him. About 2 months later we heard that Autonomedia - the pseudo-cooperative publishing company that Hakim Bey owns - were distributing MAN FROM NOWHERE in America. Campbell gave Bey the entire stock and told him to keep whatever money he got for it for himself. This Bey proceeded to do even though we appealed to him as fellow writers, explaining that his actions disenfranchised us - we never got a penny for the book, we never got the benefits of seeing it distributed in Europe, we don't even have copies of our own work. Then we got caught up in a cultural fraud instigated by Bey/Autonomedia. They turned the copies of our book into a fraudulent "limited edition". The "limited edition" was supposed to consist of 50 numbered copies. 3000 copies of the book were printed, and Autonomedia sold a "limited edition" of 50 to every major city in America, turning MAN FROM NOWHERE into an elitist "high ticket" item, ripping off purchasers, bringing out our work to the attention of prosperous fatcats like Campbell rather than to the real fans of revolt and alienation which the book was aimed at.

What exactly was Peter Lamborn Wilson doing in Iran in the time of the Shah, working for a body sponsored by the Royal Family? We believe that, like all other Americans working for the Shah's regime, he was a C.I.A. agent. We believe that he still works for the CIA. His task is to soak out - via his Internet agitations, his Zine superstardom, his involvement in anarchist counterculture activities - information on the brightest and best people who are altering our society. We believe that Autonomedia and affiliated organizations exist to soak up the energy of the counterculture and to disenfranchise it. The number of radical publications and magazines who've gone broke because they've been unable to get royalties/payments from these people is infamous. Lamborn Wilson is a fundamentally corrupt individual. What was his association with MARTEN, a Berlin journal which featured lengthy extracts from his writings? It subsequently emerged that was funded by the East German secret police - the Stasi. Hakim Bey now owns with Gordon Campbell a pseudo-anarchist bookshop and coffee shop - Garden of Delights - which attracts in progressive and radical kids who think they're in a free space, a squat, or some sort of radical perspective. In fact they're in a money-maker owned by The Gap and Peter Lamborn Wilson. We're happy to discuss and defend these views and this information with anybody who is interested. Get in touch.

Joe Ambrose / Frank Rynne / Terry Wilson