Immediatism
From Infoshop OpenWiki
Immediatism is a practice named by Hakim Bey. Immediacy means to act with haste and directness in the present or near future. Individuals come together to create situations or groups that share the same immediacy and imagination for the length of its existance.
According to Hakim Bey, The goals of the Immediatist organization are:
A) Conviviality: To have and create fun.
B) Creation: Shared collaboration in projects and/or situations of beauty.
C) Destruction: To create anything of beauty, the ugliness which is not itself must be destroyed.
D) The Construction of Values: By participating in an immediate group, Bey says the individuals may share something akin to a Maslovian "peak experience", where individuals experience moments of intense happiness, harmony and connectedness with existence. Sometimes this is referred to as feeling oneness or enlightenment individually, but is shared within the immediatist organization.
Immediatism, according to Hakim Bey, is a game or martial art that can be practiced by artists, nonrevolutionaries and revolutionaries. It's purpose is "is to optimize conditions for the emergence of the TAZ (or even the Insurrection)". Though the immediatist group is geared towards having fun, the immediatists are at their "highest" when they are also creating and destroying. The tactics of immediatist groups stictly avoid forms of mediation, seeing it as the antithesis of immediatism. The actions of the immediatist group must be, in potential, both "aimed at the goal and identical with the goal."
Bey refers to the gathering, the potlach, the bee and the tong when defining immediatist groups. Gatherings are just that, even the immediatist group is a gathering. A potlach is a one time event where a group of people get together to share gifts. The Bee is a collaborative group that creates projects together. When a Bee becomes on-going and is shared for a length of time with the same individuals beyond more than one project, it can either become a club or a Tong. A club is open, but in danger of institutionalization and counter-productivity. A Tong is clandestine, also in danger of insitutionalization, but is "built" to "auto-destruct" when it is no longer capable of serving its purpose. Bey refers to the Tong as the highest form of immediatist group.
Bey suggests immediatists make an enemy out of the media (an opponent in the game), seeing them as controllers of the "spectacle" or spectacular situations through images. Immediatist direct action attempts to break through abstractions that define the enemy, choosing specific, identifiable nodes of real time power or a nexus of power for their strategy. Immediatist strategy aims to destroy real or imaginal time/space of the enemy while simultaneously creating the potential for a peak experience or "adventure" for its participants. These actions aim towards the potential to appropriate and turn the enemy's space against itself with the further possibility of occupying and transforming it.
According to Bey, in the present immediatists should avoid violence because violence has been monopolized by institutions, saying "(t)here's no point in sticking one's head up and waving a gun if one is facing a star war death beam satellite." Bey suggests that immediatist actions are counter-productive if they are simply destructive because at most it would leave another spectacular image for the media to control. Rather, the immediatist should aim towards truly creative destruction. The immediatist should make a point of simultaneously providing valuable information, beauty, and a sense of adventure to their tactics. The more ingeniously creative tactics are those that fail to be appropriated by the enemy and even if attempted, "it will carry an unexpected "viral" subtext which will infect all attempts at recuperation with a nauseating malaise of uncertainty".
Sources
The Occult Assault on Institutions by Hakim Bey
This term is part of the Infoshop Glossary
