Peter Lamborn Wilson


Peter Lamborn Wilson was an American anarchist author and poet, primarily known for his concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, short-lived spaces which elude formal structures of control. During the 1970s, Wilson lived in the Middle East and worked at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy under the guidance of Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr, where he explored mysticism and translated Persian texts. Starting from the 1980s he wrote numerous political writings under the pen name of Hakim Bey, illustrating his theory of "ontological anarchy".

Life

Wilson was born in Baltimore on October 20, 1945. While undertaking a classics major at Columbia University, Wilson met Warren Tartaglia, then introducing Islam to students as the leader of a group called the Noble Moors. Attracted by the philosophy, Wilson was initiated into the group, but later joined a group of breakaway members who founded the Moorish Orthodox Church. The Church maintained a presence at the League for Spiritual Discovery, the group established by Timothy Leary.
Appalled by the social and political climate, Wilson decided to leave the United States, and shortly after the assassination of [Martin Luther King Jr.], in 1968 he flew to Lebanon, later reaching India with the intention of studying Sufism, but became fascinated by Tantra, tracking down Ganesh Baba. He spent a month in a Kathmandu missionary hospital being treated for hepatitis, and practised meditation techniques in a cave above the east bank of the Ganges. He also allegedly ingested significant quantities of cannabis.
Wilson travelled on to Pakistan. There he lived in several places, mixing with princes, Sufis, and gutter dwellers, and moving from teahouses to opium dens. In Quetta he found "a total disregard of all government", with people reliant on family, clans or tribes, which appealed to him.
Wilson then moved to Iran where that he developed his scholarship. He translated classical Persian texts with French scholar Henry Corbin, and also worked as a journalist at the Tehran Journal. In 1974, Farah Pahlavi Empress of Iran commissioned her personal secretary, scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, to establish the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. Nasr offered Wilson the position of director of its English language publications, and editorship of its journal Sophia Perennis, which Wilson edited from 1975 until 1978. He would go on to also publish on the Ni'matullāhī Sufi Order and Isma'ilism with Nasrollah Pourjavady.
Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Wilson lived in New York City, sharing a brownstone townhouse with William Burroughs, with whom he bonded over their shared interests. Burroughs acknowledged Wilson for providing material on Hassan-i Sabbah which he used for his novel The Western Lands.
In later life, Wilson lived in upstate New York in conditions he termed "independently poor". He has been described as "a subcultural monument".
Towards the end of his life, he showed an interest in the Bābī religion, especially in its Azali form. This was mentioned in his two final books published in early 2022.
Wilson died of heart failure on May 22, 2022, in Saugerties, New York.

Pen name

Wilson's occasional pen name of Hakim Bey was derived from il-Hakim, the alchemist-king, with 'Bey' a further nod to Moorish Science. Wilson's two personas, as himself and Bey, were facilitated by his publishers who provide separate author biographies even when both appeared in the same publication.

Ideas

Ontological anarchy

In Immediatism, a compilation of essays, Wilson explained his particular conception of anarchism and anarchy, which he called ontological anarchy. He posits that since absolute certainty about the "true nature of things" is impossible, all human endeavors are fundamentally "founded on nothing". This perspective embraces chaos not as an absence, but as the essence of life and becoming, contrasting it with order, which is seen as death or cessation.
Unlike traditional anarchism, which might seek a new form of order, ontological anarchy asserts that no "state" can truly exist within chaos, rendering all governance impossible. The goal is not a "Revolutionary" institution, but a continuous evasion of power and a pursuit of the excessive and strange. In the same compilation, Wilson discussed his view of individuals' relations to the outside world as perceived by the senses, and a theory of liberation that he called "immediatism."

Temporary Autonomous Zones

Wilson wrote articles on types of what he called temporary autonomous zones, of which he said in an interview:
... "the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary's commune in Millbrook... Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation—and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well. I've noticed that the exciting ones tend to disappear, and as I began to further study this phenomenon, I found that they tend to disappear in a year or a year and a half.

He wrote about TAZs at length in the book TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, published by Autonomedia in 1991. At the time of his death the book had sold over 100,000 copies and was the publisher's perennial bestseller.

Reception and influence

Wilson took an interest in the subculture of zines flourishing in Manhattan in the early 1980s, zines being tiny hand-made photocopied magazines published in small quantities concerning whatever the publishers found compelling. "He began writing essays, communiqués as he liked to call them, under the pen name Hakim Bey, which he mailed to friends and publishers of the 'zines' he liked.... His mailouts were immediately popular, and regarded as copyright-free syndicated columns ready for anyone to paste into their photocopied 'zines'..."
His Temporary Autonomous Zones work has been referenced in comparison to the "free party" or teknival scene of the rave subculture. Wilson was supportive of the rave connection, while remarking in an interview, "The ravers were among my biggest readers... I wish they would rethink all this techno stuff — they didn't get that part of my writing."
According to Gavin Grindon, in the 1990s, the British group Reclaim the Streets was heavily influenced by the ideas put forward in Hakim Bey's The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Their adoption of the carnivalesque into their form of protest evolved eventually into the first "global street party" held in cities across the world on May 16, 1998, the day of a G8 summit meeting in Birmingham. These "parties", explained Grindon, in turn developed into the Carnivals Against Capitalism, in London on June 18, 1999, organized by Reclaim the Streets in coordination with worldwide antiglobalization protests called by the international network Peoples' Global Action during the 25th G8 summit meeting in Cologne, Germany.
Some writers have been troubled by what they took to be Bey's endorsement of adults having sex with children, which included writing for NAMBLA's newsletter. Michael Muhammad Knight, a novelist and former friend of Wilson, stated that "writing for NAMBLA amounts to activism in real life. As Hakim Bey, Peter creates a child molester's liberation theology and then publishes it for an audience of potential offenders." In a compilation of memorial tributes in The Brooklyn Rail published a few months after Wilson's death, many writers defended Wilson and rejected the accusation of pedophilia. Kalan Sherrard wrote that after "meeting tons of young people who grew up with him it became totally evident he had never hurt anyone / and people were just freaked out by his writing".
Murray Bookchin included Wilson's work in what he called "lifestyle anarchism", where he criticized Wilson's writing for tendencies towards mysticism, occultism, and irrationalism. Bob Black wrote a rejoinder to Bookchin in Anarchy after Leftism.
John Zerzan described Bey as a "postmodern liberal", possessing a "method" that was "as appalling as his claims to truthfulness, and essentially conforms to textbook postmodernism. Aestheticism plus knownothingism is the formula; cynical as to the possibility of meaning, allergic to analysis, hooked on trendy word-play", and "basically reformist".

Works

  • The Winter Calligraphy of Ustad Selim, & Other Poems
  • Science and Technology in Islam
  • Traditional Modes of Contemplation & Action
  • Nasir-I Khusraw: 40 Poems from the Divan
  • DIVAN
  • Kings of Love: The Poetry and History of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order of Iran
  • Angels
  • Weaver of Tales: Persian Picture Rugs
  • Divine Flashes
  • Crowstone: The Chronicles of Qamar
  • CHAOS: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism
  • Semiotext USA
  • Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy
  • The Drunken Universe: An Anthology of Persian Sufi Poetry
  • Semiotext SF
  • The Universe: A Mirror of Itself
  • Aimless Wanderings: Chuang Tzu's Chaos Linguistics
  • Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam
  • The Little Book of Angel Wisdom
  • O Tribe That Loves Boys: The Poetry of Abu Nuwas
  • Immediatism: Essays by Hakim Bey
  • Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes
  • Millennium and Garden of Delight )
  • "Shower of Stars" Dream & Book: The Initiatic Dream in Sufism and Taoism
  • Escape from the Nineteenth Century and Other Essays
  • Wild Children
  • Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in the City & the World
  • Ploughing the Clouds: The Search for Irish Soma
  • TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Second Edition
  • Orgies of the Hemp Eaters
  • rain queer
  • Cross-Dressing in the Anti-Rent War
  • Gothick Institutions
  • Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology;
  • Black Fez Manifesto as Hakim Bey
  • Atlantis Manifesto Shivastan Publishing limited edition
  • Abecedarium
  • Eclogues
  • Nostalgia/Utopia with Francesco Clemente
  • Spiritual Destinations of an Anarchist
  • Spiritual Journeys of an Anarchist
  • Riverpeople
  • Opium Dens I Have Known with Chris Martin Shivastan Publishing limited edition
  • Eclogues
  • Anarchist Ephemera
  • False Documents
  • Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art
  • School of Nite with Nancy Goldring
  • Night Market Noodles and Other Tales
  • The Temple of Perseus at Panopolis
  • Vanished Signs
  • Lucky Shadows
  • The New Nihilism
  • Utopian Trace: An Oral Presentation
  • The American Revolution as a Gigantic Real Estate Scam: And Other Essays in Lost/Found History
  • Cauda Pavonis: Esoteric Antinomianism in the Yezidi Tradition
  • Hoodoo Metaphysics with Tamara Gonzales
  • Polyphony
  • Mohawk Anglican Freemasons
  • False Messiah: Crypto-Xtian Tracts and Fragments
  • ''Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis''