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)
The bus is going around
a circuit-road through the undemonstrative modern buildings of Warwick
University. The campus has a lot of areas of grass, and a few trees, including
some cherry trees.
The outside is
circumambient – spheroambient – and what is more it suffuses all of the inside.
1993, like every
year, is a world of the planet (and the sun and the cosmos), and the human world
is just a zone of elements spread out finely within the planet. The place
through which the bus travels is pre-eminently the World of the planet, and
then there is also the human world - an aspect of the planet.
The immediate
point of saying this is to fend off, in advance, any confusion that could occur
in pointing out that in 1993 the "western" zones of the human world are in a
relative low-phase – relative to a long phase of higher intensity that lasted
roughly from 1962 to 1982. It is valuable to see this differential, but it is
necessary to hold in mind that the zones of the human world are always going up
and down, and that at any time it is straightforwardly possible for individuals
and groups to set out toward the higher-intensity – toward the Future – whether or
not the overall human world is in a more high-intensity phase.
In fact in 1993 there is a line of continuation - of sustained development - from an emergence in the earlier phase. This emergence was of a new, very highly-focused form of metamorphics, which can be defined as the pragmatics and metaphysics of metamorphosis, where metamorphosis concerns the process - consisting of becomings - of travelling into wider realities.
The cherry trees are now one tree amongst hundreds of other kinds of tree, there are mountains in the distance, there are deserts with trees encroaching on them, the plains are covered in forests, there is an eerie sunlit dereliction threaded almost everywhere through the plains and coastlands, and here and there are clusters of houses where humans are living, often on the edge of the mountains.
There is a distant sound of talking and of bright laughter, in which womens' voices predominate. There has been a walking-away, that began around twenty years earlier, and there is communication across the gap of that journey, in the form of something that is akin to occasional radio transmissions which are recorded and distributed: one transmission, then another, with the intensity increasing as the journey continues, and with the degree of immediate impact declining as the communication comes from further away from ordinary, deadened reality. Metamorphics is a focused transcendental awareness which expresses itself as much through pragmatics as through transcendental-empirical accounts of the world, and which, in mapping terrains of intent and energy (and in providing diagrams for heightened forms of existence) uses - always in different ways - concepts and oneiric (virtual-real) worlds which consist of transcendental-empirical outsights. The perspectives of metamorphics form the horizon of Shakespeare's works, so that a primary aspect of his plays and poems is an attempt to draw attention toward this horizon. Shakespeare's work relates to a place which is just beyond the edge of ordinary reality. In 1993 the walking-away has reached a point which is substantially more distant, but the occasional broadcasts continue, emplacing themselves as enigmatic beacons within the ongoing disaster. Beyond ordinary reality's Overlook Hotel there is a sunlit-and-starlit Planetary World from which these broadcasts arrive.
I only have have a minimal ability to bring this Futural direction into focus. But although I can feel the difference in intensity from the earlier phase, it is also true that there is a kind of thin zone of higher intensity at this time, in the form of radical, alternative-culture perspectives, and I am starting to be aware that in some sense I am on kind of a raised terrain. In 1993 the local (western-society) human world is predominantly continuing a slow slide of capitulation to conventional values, but a liminal zone has appeared, a kind of platform from which it easier to see the Future. But even this raised terrain (which consists to a great extent of rave or "dance" milieus, but which also involves a philosophical element, and a thread of fiction, as with Noon's Vurt) is minimal in comparison to the heights of
the long - twenty-year - plateau left behind in the early 80s. The key varying element here is the extent to which people feel that there is another,
fundamentally better way of living, in comparison with ordinary capitalist reality. It is the feeling that, in a crucial direction of the unknown, there is a whole other form of existence that- however hard it might be to reach it - is at a higher level of lucidity, poise, and love-for-the-world than the world of conventional values. It is true that high-intensity phases are horribly suffused with forms of reactivity, suffering, and
dogmatic mis-use of the heightened energy (they are the ongoing disaster, just
like low-intensity phases, only with the difference that the Future is a little closer). But specifically
what was left behind ten years before (something that is still
deeply but quietly in effect, despite the collapse) was a conjunction-event, or a kind of multi-stranded incursion-event - a incursion in which maps and diagrams were lodged within
the overall human world, and were even lodged, to different degrees, within the
central zones of the interiority.
It is necessary to
delineate this conjunction-and-incursion in order to provide the context for 1993.
It takes place during and around the years from 1980 to 1982, and at it has the four following primary elements, spread across several different areas of oneiro-abstract
production: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and
Alexander (1982), Florinda Donner’s Shabono (1982), Carlos Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift (1981).
What these four
works share is that they are all either works of metamorphics, or are works which have a very close degree of affinity with metamorphics. 1980 to 82 is like an energy-flare where diverse traditions are involved. It is an incursion of the transcendental-empirical.
Many other works are part of the event, with varying degrees of affinity to metamorphics. Ursula Le Guin wrote Always Coming Home across five years, starting in 1980, and in paricular her story, The Visionary, in this book, is part of the conjunction. The same is true of Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, from 1980. The conjunction-event is a point where anthropology becomes philosophical, and where the effective, required name for this form of philosophy is metamorphics.
Everything here concerns the unknown and the depth-level knowable in a transcendental-empirical sense. It is the unknown of the spatium of forces that is the world, and in a way where the abstract as energy and affect, and, most specifically the abstract as intent, is fundamental in relation to the encounter with the unknown. This is not the empirical unknown of time (as in, we don't know what will happen a year from now) or the empirical unknown of absence of data about an object (we don't know the chemical composition of X), but is the unknown of the spatium of energy and intent - the unknown of worlds of abstract dynamics. But this unknown is not the unknowable - it is the unknown which is knowable.
A work is a work of metamorphics if it constitutively assists in bringing zones or domains of the unknown in this sense to the point of being known: if in part it consists of accounts which can be immediately validated, and of an effective pragmatics. There is no end to the unknown which is knowable, and the horizon is the unknown which is not knowable, in relation to which there is a point - just before this horizon, where expressing what has been perceived places the production of concepts under maximal pressure. Whatever else the work consists of is not an issue: the accounts which remain enigmatic can be placed to one side as either relating to the next levels on the unknown which is unknowable, or to the border before the limit point of the unknown which cannot be known.
Metamorphics, defined in this way as a pragmatics and metaphysics of the intensification of existence, is not to be understood as something new - it is a fundamental human option. But this emergence of works of metamorphics goes back to the mid 1960s, and there are five figures who are central to the overall emergence - Florinda Donner, Carlos Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. And it is also important to see that the emergence is primarily the work of the first three writers, but also that at a crucial point it is profoundly supported by works from two other traditions - western philosophy, and the world of tales - of literature.
In A Thousand
Plateaus the support is explicit, in that Deleuze and Guattari point out in detail that
in fundamental ways their metaphysical account of the world is the same as the one
found in the works of Castaneda (and it is valuable to point out that in this
book the idea of “abstract machines” is central, and that Donner, Abelar and
Castaneda will later take up the term "abstract", and use it in the same way, as
a term for the wider and deeper aspects of the world). A Thousand Plateaus is liminal: in part it is metamorphics, and it is very definitely the point where western philosophy leads to this other world of knowledge and exploration. And Fanny and Alexander is a re-effectuation of the Shakespeare abstract machine which consists to a great extent of transcendental-empirical perspectives, and which opens up the wider view of the transcendental-empirical unknown in part through the re-creation of Prospero as Uncle Isak.
It can be seen that the conjunction is more than a random alignment, because of the references to Castaneda in A Thousand Plateaus. But it is not possible to say much in relation to the idea of a crucial point in relation to the conjunction. The main point that can be made is that it is in The Eagle's Gift that women, as explorers of the unknown - as practitioners of the anomalous - come into the foreground (after this point they will always be in the foreground) and that this is the point where a female writer of works of metamorphics publishes her first book. There is a sense of a current here: in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari say that for both men and women a process of 'entering into becoming' with women (where becoming is depth-level learning) is the key to all the becomings. And in Fanny and Alexander the entire film shifts its focus steadily toward women.
*
We have to escape
from the cave of the interiority. Inside the cave the shadows on the walls we
have been taking for reality are perceptions filtered and radically distorted
by a constrictive mental functioning. When we manage, in moments of lucidity, to reach the outside, we perceive that
we are surrounded by intent, feeling, energy and awareness – we are surrounded
by the abstract. It is also clear that there is a momentously positive
direction or current within the outside that can be called the south-outside, Love-and-Freedom, or impersonal intent (intent-toward-intensification).
Plato’s version of this story is to a great extent the opposite of what it appears to be. The issue is his valorising of
mathematics, with its "forms" that provide the model for knowledge, and his associated failure to see the fundamental role of
the senses in reaching and perceiving the abstract. Plato has taken what could be called a liberatory tale and has twisted it so that it becomes something disastrous: a primary aspect of the cave we are trapped within is the way of thinking which Plato embodies.
The questions become "what is a social-formation or individual at the level of intent?' What are the abstract dynamics or intent-dynamics of this form of dreaming, or this modality of thought?' 'In what way does this zone or formation hearten, inspire and energise?' 'Of what outsights and affects does the encounter with it consist, at the level of thought, dreams and feelings?'
*.
The bus is at a bus stop where the student union is on the left and and the arts centre is on the right.
It was at the arts centre, four months
before, that Derrida gave a lecture about philosophy being in a state of mourning
for Marxism. But while it is true that the inspirational problem of “there is a
better way of living, and what exactly is it?” had been given an energising milieu
by Marx’s best ideas, these ideas had not been at the centre of what had created the 20 year phase of higher intensity (it is true that a main current form of the trap of ordinary reality is being a wage slave; and, in a way that is not really connected to Marx's thought, that we are alienated from the means of waking our faculties, and of becoming-active). The primary shift of the early 60s was the appearance of a non-dogmatic brightness that suggested and indicated that there was a whole other way of living beyond reactionary, traditionalist values, and which primarily, in looking toward love and freedom, looked toward intent. This way of being became a deepening encounter with the transcendental-empirical unknown, and its constitutive open-minded brightness was something very different from the dialectical delusions and oppressive gravity of Marxist activism.
At depth any mourning of this kind was an inchoate sense of loss in relation to a time when it had been easier to get glimpses of the Future, through the idea of there being another way of living, beyond ordinary reality.
*
At this time I have not read any of the books from the Donner/Castaneda/Abelar milieu. But the radical currents of the Warwick philosophy milieu within which I have lodged myself, together, and inseparably, with the currents of the charged counterculture of the mid 90s, are ensuring that melancholy of this kind is not something I am experiencing, despite my awareness of an overall drop in intensity since the 60s and 70s.
*
On and around the
bus it is the compelling, eerie Now of the planet, and of the World in which
the planet exists. The bus has left the stop and is heading toward the exit
from the campus.
I am relieved that
no-one has got on who knows me (I have already been at Warwick for four years, doing a BA and an MA, and I know a lot of people). It is Friday evening, and I do not
want to be caught up in having to turn down an invitation to go to a pub.
I have found a
path, and I have found a direction (my current situation pertains in fact to movement along a dangerous and circuitous alternative route that leads in the end in the direction involved, if you "survive" it). Part of what is central to me having found the path is that
I am now studying A Thousand Plateaus for a Ph.D. The other main element
is any tendency I have (and at this point the ability is only in effect to a minimal degree)
to direct myself toward the process of
becoming-active, a process that eventually necessarily leads to the becoming
active of perception, and to the fostering of the silence in which abstract
perception – lucidity – can at last begin to focus itself.
I am not at all
sufficiently aware that pre-eminently I need sobriety, and an implacable
process of stripping-away indulgent behaviours. Most fundamentally the
mountains across which the path leads are the barrier of self-importance, and
of control-fixated behaviour (the embedded machineries of not letting go toward
perception and action – toward Love-and-Freedom), a barrier that prevents the upward spiral of an accessing of energy. Having found a path does not mean at all that you will get far along it. Many
years later, as I write this, I have still not got across the barrier. But my
sobriety has increased a little, and I have reached the point where I can
perceive that the primary domains or aspects for understanding the path in question are brightness, the planet and the abstract.
