T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism

Hakim Bey's T.A.Z. proposes the temporary autonomous zone, a short-lived space that slips past formal structures of control, as a tactic for anarchist thought and action.

The book has three parts: “Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism”, “Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy” and the title essay. That essay is divided into sections on pirate utopias, revolutionary waiting, everyday psychotopology, information networks, musical organization and strategies of resistance. Autonomedia published it in 1991 as part of its New Autonomy Series.

Hakim Bey is the pen name of Peter Lamborn Wilson, an anarchist author and poet. Bey later conceded that some autonomous spaces turn out to be less than temporary, and he returned to the idea in Permanent TAZs (1994). The book was reissued by Autonomedia in 2003 and by Pacific Publishing Studio in 2011, and it has been influential in post-left anarchist thought.