TAZ and Other Cartoons
Categories: spiritual-journey, protest, punk-theology, greenbelt, books
Date: 23 July 2010 18:50:00
Sometime last year we got, momentarily, into the "Pirate Debate". The words flowing back and forth across cyberspace eminated from a Greenbelt session and subsequent set of posts from Kester Brewin. Well now it's contextualised into his latest book "Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures.
I picked the book up at Buckfast Abbey's bookshop last weekend and started getting over excited as I flicked through. This was a theologian engaging with TAZ theory. Now before I go any further it appears events in the blogesphere have over taken me and Jonny B and Kester have been debating this stuff. For reasons which will become clear later in this post I am going to enter that debate but not until next week.
On one hand the book over all is a bit of a let down. Parts one and two read way too much like either a undergrad lit review or a Guardianista justifying themselves through what they'd read elsewhere. However, part three onwards got far more engaging. Mind you TAZ theory is like that, you either get excited by it or think it's pretentious bollocks. Me I remember exactly where I was when I first came across it. It was Spring 2000 and I was sitting in some comfy chairs in a classroom in Barking, coming towards the end of my course in Political Activism and Social Movements, when we got the handout. Anyway cutting the reminicing and getting back to Brewin, in the book he was relating this every so often to Greenbelt and so bringing GB together with TAZ I was hooked on the second half of the book.
Right I will basically explain TAZ theory here. It is the idea that spaces can temporarily be taken over and changed as acts of resistance. Think Guerilla Gardening or Reclaim the Streets as examples. Well in this book Brewin seeks to argue that it might be a useful concept to engage in when we are looking at church and/ or worship. Me I think he's sort of right and sort of wrong. As I indicated for anybody who is interested in this I will be doing a sensible critique of Brewin's conclusions on this next week, possibly over a couple of posts because I think it is too complex to do justice to in this post.
If you think you're interested in what Brewin is saying and want some complementary secular easy read books to help you develop your own thinking on this type of area further I would recommend the following. They go beyond TAZ but all fit into the whole DIY culture, social movement theory bracket.
DIY: the rise of lo-fi culture by Amy Spencer
The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen
The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason
Practically anything by George McKay, but particularly DIY Culture: party and protest in nineties Britain