Immediatism by Hakim Bey

Author:Hakim Bey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Peter Lamborn Wilson, ontology, taz
Published: 1994-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Imagination

There is a time for the theatre.—If people’s imagination grows weak there arises in it the inclination to have its legends presented to it on the stage: it can now endure these crude substitutes for imagination. But those ages to which the epic rhapsodist belongs, the theatre and the actor disguised as a hero is a hindrance to imagination rather than a means of giving it wings: too close, too definite, too heavy, too little in it of dream and bird-flight.

— Nietzsche

But of course the rhapsodist, who here appears only one step removed from the shaman (“…dream and bird-flight”) must also be called a kind of medium or bridge standing between “a people” and its imagination. (Note: we’ll use the word “imagination” sometimes in Wm. Blake’s sense & sometimes in Gaston Bachelard’s sense without opting for either a “spiritual” or an “aesthetic” determination, & without recourse to metaphysics.) A bridge carries across (“translate,” “metaphor”) but is not the original. And to translate is to betray. Even the rhapsodist provides a little poison for the imagination.

Ethnography, however, allows us to assert the possibility of societies where shamans are not specialists of the imagination, but where everyone is a special sort of shaman. In these societies, all members (except the psychically handicapped) act as shamans & bards for themselves as well as for their people. For example: certain Amerindian tribes of the Great Plains developed the most complex of all hunter/gatherer societies quite late in their history (perhaps partly in thanks to the gun & horse, technologies adopted from European culture). Each person acquired complete identity & full membership in “the People” only thru the Vision Quest, & its artistic enactment for the tribe. Thus each person became an “epic rhapsodist” in sharing this individuality with the collectivity.

The Pygmies, among the most “primitive” cultures, neither produce nor consume their music, but become en masse “the Voice of the Forest.” At the other end of the scale, among complex agricultural societies, like Bali on the verge of the 20th century, “everyone is an artist” (& in 1980 a Javanese mystic told me, “Everyone must be an artist!”).

The goals of Immediatism lie somewhere along the trajectory described roughly by these three points (Pygmies, Plains Indians, Balinese), which have all been linked to the anthropological concept of “democratic shamanism.” Creative acts, themselves the outer results of the inwardness of imagination, are not mediated & alienated (in the sense we’ve been using those terms) when they are carried out BY everyone FOR everyone—when they are produced but not reproduced—when they are shared but not fetishezed. Of course these acts are achieved thru mediation of some sort & to some extent, as are all acts—but they have not yet become forces of extreme alienation between some Expert/Priest/Producer on the one hand & some hapless “layperson” or consumer on the other.

Different media therefore exhibit different degrees of mediation—& perhaps they can even be ranked on that basis. Here everything depends on reciprocity, on a more-or-less equal exchange of what may be called “quanta of imagination.

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