This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
A flat in a city, in early autumn.The flat is near the top of a long, gentle slope, a mile from the city’s centre, and two or three miles from the city’s edge. The place is Coventry. It is 1993.
Out in the surrounding – Warwickshire - countryside the
leaves of the trees are still mostly green, and on the road-verges the annual micro-jungles of wild plants have not completely subsided. This countryside is to a great extent a denuded midlands terrain of industrial arable farming, with
very few areas of woodland, although – as I will discover
- in areas of hills to the south and west there are some exceptionally
beautiful places (some of which are terrains where an industrial-revolution
development of some kind has become derelict, creating an island on which huge
numbers of wild species congregate).
It is early evening, though still daylight. I am on a bus
travelling through countryside from Leamington Spa to Coventry. The bus has
just crossed the river Avon, and is now going around a roundabout above a dual
carriageway, before going into Kenilworth (Leamington is fifteen miles south from Coventry, and Kenilworth is
roughly half way between).
In relation to the oneirosphere, where is this
terrain?
An
effective initial answer is that it consists of a fault-line region between
Shakespeare on the one side, and on the
other side, George Eliot and Philip Larkin. George Eliot came from Nuneaton,
ten miles north of Coventry, Larkin came from Coventry, and Shakespeare’s place
of origin is fifteen miles southwest from Leamington. To the northeast
of this divide – two different modes of extremely intelligent, visionary bleakness. To the southwest – eerie expanses of brightness.
To understand this
difference properly it is necessary to explicate two different kinds of
“awareness” or abstract perception: empirical awareness and transcendental
awareness. For Shakespeare, George Eliot and Philip Larkin the real difference
across the divide involves a different distribution (such that a different form
of awareness is central) but for now it is the two instances that must be
brought into focus (a process that will lead to a proper understanding of the
oneirosphere as a dimension of the abstract).
The empirical is
a "line-world" of dead time - of chronic time: the time in which transformations of matter occur, predictably or not, and in which the
human world pulls knowledge into existence, so that the unknown is thought in
terms of a human actor and in terms of the future as locus of discoveries on
the part of the method-applying actor. For empirical attention the only
fundamental actors are human beings and the overall human world, and the
unknown is pre-eminently a question of the future (the “space” in which
progress will – or will not – happen, in which predicted and unpredicted events
will occur, and in which new discoveries and social developments will take
place).
The
transcendental – by initial emphasis - is the world of space, but space as a
terrain of co-emplaced intents, co-emplaced forces and co-emplaced zones of the
unknown: here the unknown is all around you, perhaps in some cases looking
toward you. This forest of intents and forces is well-modelled, as Shakespeare
discovered, if you start from the ancient Greek zone of the oneirosphere, with
its many different anomalous forces existing alongside the
forces of the ordinary-reality side of human existence, all involved in subtle struggles and alliances with each other (Shakespeare’s achievement is to take this eerie arcadia, but not be governed by its elements, with their
religious piety, so that he fills it up with Puck and the other inorganic entities,
beings from his local zone of the
oneirosphere).
The background issue here is
that you can take anything as a lens or “model” for seeing the world: even a
straight line. In its crippled form reason takes a straight
line, and sets out from there, on a very constricted and damaging path. In contrast lucidity takes a forest of forces
and formations of intent, and initiates a process of a deepening abstract
perception of the world. And time here is no longer dead, geometry time. Our
failure to be Spinozists must be overcome in relation to the vastnesses of
intent and energy (substance) that surround us: the only effective models for
time are thought and dreaming.
Shakespeare includes what is necessary, using a subtle minimum of elements. There are forests
and hinterlands beyond the human world, and these places are populated with
anomalous beings (Puck, Ariel etc) whose actions have an impact upon humans
(the human is not the only actor). The unknown is all around us, and it is not
unknown in a sense that is less profound than the unknown of the human world -
on the contrary, the suggestion is that it is more profound, through it having
more brightness, more freedom from the the grim, judgemental world of “gravity”. And for Shakespeare
everything revolves around questions of love, freedom from constraint, and
dominatory power - which is to say that everything is about spaces of intent (but
spaces of intent in the horizon of the cosmos, not in the horizon of the human).
For George Eliot and Larkin there are no hinterlands. In
their very different ways they have both been swept away into the post-Hegelian
world of psychology and sociology, in which the only real objects of (a denuded) transcendental awareness are human love and creativity.Their immense pseudo-integrity (for most of its span a genuine integrity, but
which fails at the fundamental point) does not direct itself toward the planet, and its
other non-human beings; it does not direct itself sufficiently toward the brightness of
femininity and a depth-understanding of the libidinal (with all due respect for
figures such as Dorothea Brooke), and it also does not direct itself sufficiently toward the abstract, in that it does not engage with space as a circumambient and eerie world of the unknown (unknown overall, but always with elements that can become the known) - a world of forces, and of formations of intent.
The bus has just passed the ruins of Kenilworth castle, and is now in countryside again. It will soon be going round the campus of Warwick University, on the outskirts of Coventry. I am a postgraduate philosophy student at the university, but today I am not going to get off the bus at the campus.
I am looking out at the fields and the cloudy, early-evening sky. Something is about to happen. Something is very definitely about to happen.
* * *
