I've been getting increasingly annoyed by the word-salad
posturing of Bey
and find "Primitives & Extropians" one of the weaker
offerings yet from
this postmodern liberal. I will confine myself to some
of the stand-out
dopiness from what is shot through with inaccuracies,
evasions,
pontificating, ego- stroking, and shallowness.
On the level of content "Primitives & Extropians"
is little short of
absurd. He pitches his piece, most basically, as a comparison
of two
viewpoints, "two anarchist tendencies." But how even
the most air-headed
could make the extreme techno- fascist imperialism of
extropy into an
"anarchist" tendency is quite beyond me. In fact, it
worships every
high-tech manifestation of the total mastery of nature
and the obliteration
of every trace of the sensual, autonomous individual.
To quote from one of
its priests, Carnegie-Mellon's Hans Moravec, "The final
frontier will be
urbanized, ultimately into an arena where every bit of
activity is a
meaningful computation: the inhabited portion of the
universe will be
transformed into a cyberspace ... We might then be tempted
to replace some
of our innermost mental processes with more cyberspace
- appropriate
programs purchased from Artificial Intelligence, and
so, bit by bit,
transform ourselves into something like them. Ultimately
our thinking
procedures could be totally liberated from any traces
of our original body,
indeed of any body." (Extropy, #10, 1993). To term something
so viciously
evil "anarchist" suggests stupidity compounded by bad
faith.
Bey's method is as appalling as his claims to truthfulness,
and essentially
conforms to textbook postmodernism. Aestheticism plus
knownothingism is the
pm formula; cynical as to the possibility of meaning,
allergic to analysis,
hooked on trendy word-play, "Primitives & Extropians"
displays these
features exquisitely.
A point of view that tries to be consistent, well- researched,
tentative
exploration is deemed absolutist, rigid, aggressive,
the product of a
"presumptive vanguard of the pure." Bey, however, is
inconsistent, messy,
open, impure, non- exclusive, etc. He elevates diversity,
the multiplicity
of situations, the refusal of the world to conform to
simple formulations.
What is galling is how stark and even nightmarish our
situation really is,
hip verbiage aside. Frederic Jameson put it ably in his
Seeds of Time
(1994): "How is it possible for the most standardized
and uniform social
reality in history. by the merest ideological flick of
the thumbnail ... to
reemerge as the rich oil-smear sheen of absolute diversity
and of the
unimaginable and unclassifiable forms of human freedom?"
Bey completely buys into the pm illusion that society
is too "complex" to
yield to any profound indictment. A further unveiling
of our trendy author
reveals a liberal, whose "utopian" future might well
include, he discloses,
"wrangling about 'acceptable emission standards' or forest
preservation."
Further, the "human (animal/animate) scaling of economy
and technology --
this, however untidy, I would call utopia." How basically
reformist! It is
little wonder that Bey opens this whole mess of an article
by declaring
that "the anarcho- primitivists have backed themselves
into a situation
where they can never be satisfied without the total dissolution
of the
totality."
A liberal like Bey has really no quarrel with the totality,
whereas I
foolishly have thought that the threshold definition
of a radical, of one
who yearns for a qualitative break with the whole deranged
setup, is
precisely dissatisfaction with the totality.
More than half of this pathetic exercise is Bey peddling
his patented
Temporary Autonomous Zone prescription. The TAZ "seems
to be the only
manifestation of the possibility of radical conviviality,"
is bigger than
"mere ideas," is able to "reconcile the wilderness and
cyberspace ... in
fact, has already done so." Reads to me like it is Bey
who advances his
candidacy for Absolute Rightness, not those who seek,
in an
anti-ideological and visionary spirit, to learn from
our origins and
identify the basics, in reality, of our deep imprisonment.
Liberatory
analysis and practice have, I would say, far better chances
for success
from clear thinking and unlimited desire than from stylistic
mantras about
the glories of inconsistency and hip- sounding, three-word
solutions in
capital letters.