In 1991, American anarchist-philosopher Hakim Bey published The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism. In his dense, incendiary text, the pseudonymous Bey argued that in a free-market economy policed by surveillance technologies, one way to resist is to create enclaves of cultural or social liberation where more vital, chaotic life can flourish, albeit briefly, away from the dead hand of authority: Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ).
A TAZ, writes Bey, is "a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it." TAZs blossom in cracks in the map, "outside the cartography of Control." They might be secret societies, nomadic caravans or festal cultures - "The '60s-style 'tribal gathering', the idyllic Beltane of the neo-pagans, anarchist conferences, gay faery circles ... nightclubs, banquets, old-time libertarian picnics." Bey sought to offer the TAZ as a tactic, not to define its form. "If the phrase becomes current," he said, "it would become understood without difficulty ... understood in action."
In the last five years, this is exactly what has happened. The TAZ has become the model for dissident, post-rave technoculture. This is partly because of its sweet reconciliation of hedonism and politics - the uprising as "peak experience" - and partly because, unlike the myths that have driven counterculture for the past 30 years, Bey doesn't deny that routes to utopia will be punctuated by pain and violence.
The legacy of the '60s casts a long, suffocating shadow over contemporary culture. Initially, the pioneers of the dance/drug formula that shaped the youth culture of the '90s tried to explain it using the nearest model to hand: the hippy, or rather a mediated, received image of "hippy". Seeing a new underground that appeared to define itself through the prism of '60s ideology, older psychedelic prophets began to give "rave" their own spin. Timothy Leary suggested a "New Breed" of MTV online technohippies: "alert, cheerful, self-confident, individualistic, Zen opportunists". Terence McKenna digitised his eco mushroom riff, casting raves as technologically-updated be-ins, shamanic rites capable of generating telepathically-bonded communities.
But although the rave-as-spirituality refrain got maximum rotation, there was something missing. These guys were laying their own trip on us. Their ideas were born of a more optimistic age, when civil rights still seemed achievable, when nirvana was just a microdot away. But the '90s technocultural generation is living through darker times, and the '60s paradigm offers few clues for negotiating the struggle, the fallout, the comedown.
Sometimes it feels like the walls are closing in on British counterculture. The Criminal Justice Act, family values, the Job Seekers' Allowance, the enforcement of quiescent conformity and sanitised, commodified leisure. A sense of panic and claustrophobia echoes around the fringes of British pop, in the spooked sativa visions of Tricky or the paranoid cacophony of Ed Rush. Amid the breakdowns and crackdowns, the TAZ makes sense to a generation that feels like it is fighting its diminishing corner rather than expanding into the oceanic. The TAZ is a quick blast of anarchic joy, then away into the darkness, like an illegal rave, like the Reclaim the Streets protest/parties, like the short-lived eco communes of the Pure Genius and Wanstonia villages. Realistic but achievable: a little victory, not in post-human, technological transcendence, but here and now.
Bey also has some prescient criticisms for wider technoculture. "Technology," he cautions, "is not neutral." He's worried by definitions of the body as "meat" that should be "left behind". He sees the Net not as an autonomous zone but as a potential weapon, a battleground rather than a playground: "It began in war and it will continue in war, and if we are on the Net we are in that struggle."
In the recent book, Pirate Utopias, Peter Lamborn Wilson, a chronicler of Sufism and anarchism whose work is closely linked to that of Bey, attempts to give the TAZ some historical grounding. He suggests another model for counterculture: communistic cells of Moorish corsairs and European "renegadoes" (converts to Islam), heretical agents who lived off the fat of colonial imperialism and established an insurrectionary enclave at Salé on Morocco's Barbary Coast between the 16th and 19th centuries. Salé was populated by outcasts, criminals, buggers, mystics, apostates and visionaries, and denounced as treasonous and barbaric just as today's activists are targeted as "terrorists" by MI5. It's a bravura account, lashed together from what few documents of these shadowy buccaneers still exist. In this reappraisal of the past, Lamborn Wilson understands apostasy as a means of cross-cultural transfer, and as resistance to slavery, repression and privilege; he views heresy as an insurrectionary force. He concludes with the hope that lost stories of this unruly vanguard will one day "re-enter the uneasy dreams of civilisation."
Perhaps they already have. Last summer, at a party outside the village of Hostomice, near Prague, there were echoes of Salé and of Bey's romantic vision. "Camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, 'liberated' bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets and underground bazaars." This "Teknival" encampment - illegal, free; peopled by nomads, freaks, sonic hackers, criminals, Bohemians of many nations - was a conscious attempt to conjure a TAZ: a collective exorcism of control. For a few short days, it burned with passionate inten-sity, and then was gone, tyre tracks in the grass the only sign that it ever existed at all. But like the pirate utopia of Salé, its dreams remain.
Matthew Collin is the author of Altered States, a forthcoming book on drugs and the dance culture.
The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism, by Hakim Bey: on the Web at www.memoria.com/bey. Pirate Utopias, by Peter Lamborn Wilson: £5.99 (Autonomedia).