NoGoZone
By Hakim Bey
Is theory a crystal ball? Is there any magic in theory? (Originally, the word meant "vision", which certainly suggests the mysterious.) Can Ontological/Anarchic Theory be used to predict the future like a Ouija board in some degree of that clarity with which it describes the present or "predicts" the past? Is specto-simulo-commodity-ism on its last legs, like "Marxism" in the 80's? What would cause it to collapse? What about "resurgent" Islam -- unifying ideology of the "South", or cultural death rattle? Religion in general? Various sci-fi scenarios? The police as the final simulacrum of power, final organ of disappearance? Balkanization and ethnic cleansing? Is theory a zodiac we can skry? Can we make some New Year predictions, like the National Enquirer?
I don't see Capitalism vanishing overnight like Communism -- it's too organic, too closely linked up with "what's really going on". Marxism fell because it had entered a state of abstraction and denial -- failed to embrace the Spectacle as the true site of power -- but Capital didn't make this mistake. Capital will disintegrate or deliquesce, rather than undergo sudden implosion. The signs of disintegration will become more and more obvious to experience and theory, but will not erase the simulacrum of the totality with any "revolutionary" collapse. The murky clouds in the crystal are starting to drift and clear. Suddenly, a concept: social triage. And immediately a corollary: the no-go zone.
The state, as the last spectacular locus of the world of simulation, will be forced to practise social triage, letting go of real control over zones which fall beneath the level of adequate involvement in the empty discourse. Zones: classes, races, marginalized groups, and to some extent actual geographic areas. Triage: gradual and imperceptible letting-go of "services", leading to the emergence of no-go zones where "control" is reduced to purely simulated means (e.g. TV as social glue). Zones which have been economically abandoned (the homeless, small farmers, migrant workers, "welfare classes") will gradually be eliminated from all other networks controlled by the spectacle of the state, including the final interface, the Police. Officially of course this policy will not exist and the specto-state will continue to claim jurisdiction and proprietorship of these zones -- no political autonomy will be permitted, and occasional terror acts will be broadcast in the spectacle to provide a veneer of control-simulation. But in stark economic reality these zones will have been sacrificed, like passengers thrown out of the troika of History to the wolves of Memory.
Inasmuch as this process is already under weigh, the study of demographics provides a clue to the future: -- where are the classes leaving, where are they going? Mike Davis has analyzed this movement in the microcosm of Los Angeles, where a complex pattern of triage and terror has already emerged to prove him a prescient prophet, whose brand of geomancy reads the bones of buildings and entrails of urban space rather than "natural" features of animals or landscape. (Inasmuch as "culture" has an unconscious it disgorges magic signs and symbols -- not the smoke of burnt offerings but of burning cop cars.) I believe this process will speed up to the point where it will be quite obvious, in 5 to 10 years, that portions of "America" are no longer on the map. They will produce no "growth", neither will they "consume", and they will no longer be serviced by any of the spectacle's vanishing bureaux -- IRS, Healthcare, military/police, social security, communication and education. These areas (economic/social/geographic) will cease to exist for all practical purposes of control. The consuming classes will leave these areas and move "elsewhere", either socially or geographically or both simultaneously.
Having been seduced by the commodity, we will be abandoned by it -- or rather, "they" will be abandoned, the alien others who were never really part of it in the first place. Interestingly, however, this "them" will gradually come to include more and more individuals and groups who now think of themselves as "us" -- the heirs of that great Bourgeois Rational sun-lit world which the spectacle still simulates and preserves -- the ones with "rights", the ones who are "safe" and destined to "survive". Triage will be practised in these zones as well. The cracks in the monolith will widen, and a lot of "us" will miss that last helicopter out of town. I could move to Boulder or Portland now, hang on to my rentier status, survive as a licensed clown on the margin of the spectacle -- and believe me the temptation is real enough. Those no-go zones are not going to be very comfortable -- they're not going to be utopias -- they might even end up nasty as the resurgent fascist statelets of E. Europe in the wake of 1989. Who would volunteer to live in Bosnia (or South L.A.) simply because disorder and violence can produce "wild freedoms" as well as sheer panic and genuine horror? As for specto-simulo-capital itself, its next (and perhaps final?) stage will consist of the Empire of pure Speed --the instantaneity of communications technology, elevated to the status of transcendent being -- (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence): -- a kind of TechGnosis in which the body (earth, production) will be "transcended" under the sign of pure spirit ("information"). This will unveil the terminal false transcendence or totality of the commodity: the final disembodiment of desire, the absolute flotation of the signifier -- language as gnostic prison, and death the last bargain holiday special. The "lines" of this structure are already being laid, and a map of these lines transforms itself into a map of the future, or at least of future "History". If we study this embryonic or ontogenic map we can see clearly that the "South" has already been cut out of the pattern, by an act of cartomantic imperialism that denies meaning to the same areas which have been denied "access" to the Commlinks. The South will not enter the paradise of information -- for information is glacial crystalline ice, while the South is the realm of fire and noise.
