Canvas or Concrete – Is Occupy a TAZ?

With the shift from a tented village towards the solid structure of the Bank of Ideas, it seems that the Occupy London movement has another step forward in the quest to be taken seriously. It’s been months now since the first protests began, and momentum has not dwindled, and interest has not seeped away, and new possibilities are opening up. The physical and material changes are not insignificant: the partial move from under canvas to under ceilings serves as a metaphor for how far a disparate group of ideas and grievances have begun to solidify into an agenda for change at the highest level.

But as offices are set up and rotas are formed and constitutions are written, I think it’s worth pulling back for a moment and considering some of the pitfalls of these small steps towards what could be seen as an attempt at permanence. Does Occupy want to move in that direction? Though currently fluid and flexible, is it looking to solidify into a fully-fledged political movement, with elected representatives and furnished offices and, eventually, an annual conference by the sea? It may seem far fetched, but don’t forget that the Labour Party – formed in 1900 – took hold of Downing Street within just 25 years.

All movements face a similar decision at some point in their lifespan. Given that they basically have an essentially utopian vision – wanting to make the world a better place – the question of how to bring about that utopia generally leads to two solutions. The first is to believe that changing the whole world is impossible, so the focus becomes creating a small, purified space, from which all the trouble and ‘dirt’ of the outside world can be expelled. The second is to believe that as pure saints we have a duty to march out to get rid of impurities wherever we find them.

The first impulse we can see in the tragic case of the Waco cult; the second in the debacle of the Iraq war. Both were attempts to create permanent utopian spaces by ‘cleansing’, but what they show us is that the drive to permanence leads to violence. If walls are built, they must be defended. If impure people are found, they must be expelled. Writing about these utopian visions, Anthony Dworkin notes that ‘they cannot fulfill their objectives without attempting to remake human nature, or eliminate groups within society that are seen as agents of corruption or reaction.’  He then goes on to argue that ‘the real harm came in the 20th Century, when utopians abandoned the idea of withdrawing from the world and instead attempted to remake it.’

So if violence is going to result whether we go for big visions or small, should we even attempt to remake the world at all? If engaging with the powers that be means that we are going to either face conflict from within, or initiate conflict marching out, should we be bothering to attempt change at all?

The American anarchist Hakim Bey suggests that there is a way out of this conundrum. Rather than aiming at permanence, movements should begin by engaging the state in deliberately temporary ways. Instead of trying to build utopian communities, movements should aim for temporary eruptions of those utopias, in what Bey has famously called TAZ – or Temporary Autonomous Zones.

The TAZ, he writes, ‘is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. […] It envisions an intensification of everyday life, or as the Surrealists might have said, life’s penetration by the Marvellous.’

A flashmob is a TAZ: a momentary intensification of life that leaves those who experience thinking ‘what just happened there?’ It refuses to force this intensification as a permanent mode of being, but is happy to simply suggest that another, more marvellous life, is possible.

A festival can be a TAZ too. Glastonbury is great for a few days… but to try to sustain that space as a permanent place would likely lead to violence: arguments over space, people getting exhausted, disputes over resources.

What Bey understood was that the temporary can be more powerful than the permanent. (Oddly this is borne out in the old Hebrew scriptures, where God expresses frustrations with the Israelites for wanting to replace the canvas tabernacle with a stone temple, and it’s interesting in the interactions with St Paul’s Cathedral to see the effect that this petrification has had on Christian belief too.) So here’s a word of caution, and encouragement, as Occupy moves into a new phase.

The caution is that the move into solid structures – politically and materially – will need to be taken with care, and with the foreknowledge that more disputes may well result.

The encouragement is that, as a TAZ, the Occupy movement does not need to ‘win’ every round. If evictions succeed, so be it. Violence will not be required to resist, simply a determination and joyous belief that a new space will be liberated, somewhere else, at some time, and that as people experience – for short bursts only perhaps – the marvellousness of this life penetrated by equality and liberty, then things will begin to change.

By Kester Brewin,  a teacher and writer from South East London. @kesterbrewin // kesterbrewin.com