10.

Explorations



This blog is a three-part book 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 book is 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).


Part One: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Part Three: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

  Once perceived, the oneirosphere is a space in which the presence of unknown elements can perhaps be discovered. To look at this another way, it becomes clear that the oneirosphere is transected by dreamings of very different kinds (and the question becomes to what extent these dreamings belong to the depth-level intent of human beings, and to what extent they are anomalous, deleterious emergences).

    There are dreamings which are expressions primarily of love, freedom and awareness of wider realities.

   Then there are the dreamings of everyday existence – of the tyranny of moods. Anguished projections, fears, distressed hopes, resentful reveries, fantasies of revenge, angry, agonised, or neurotically fixated “re-playings” in the mind of events etc. – together with the fictions and historical stories that belong here, including the story of the billions of years of the existence of the ordinary world. Along with all of these there are the worlds of sexual fantasies, worlds which tend to be quite different between men and women, as witnessed by sales of pornography and romantic fiction. It is not that women are beyond the functionings of the control mind: it is that women have retained a greater awareness of love and the abstract (the outside) and it is that men are primary carriers of the control-mind modality, and primary enforcers of it (the beings who were a bit more set up to defensively circle the perimeter within the world of the outside have instead become the main prison-guards of the interiority, preventing any escape toward the Future).

   Then, again, there are dreamings in the form of the new oneiric-worlds that are taken up within the system of reason-revelation (this system is a primary productive feature of the interestablishment or interiority). On the side of revelation these dreamings always fundamentally involve some combination of the ideas of transcendent-power and of interiority or valorising of "inner-life" above “nature” (along with a centrality of the male) and they come in the form of original texts and subsequent paratexts, or supplementary dreamings. It is also the case that the original story is always supposed to be the ultimate story, such that it is immediately heresy to suggest that there is a story which expresses fundamentally deeper, wider aspects of reality. On the side of “reason” the dreamings take the form of systems of valid abstraction which are produced by reason, but which are enveloped in a field of confusions and delusory mis-constructions which together function to suppress lucidity, and to suppress any sustained awareness of the outside (both Kant and Hegel are key examples here, and given their inclusion of religion within their philosophies it will be seen how the system of reason-revelation is indeed a system).

    The spheroambient eerie begins to insist. To the South there is Love-and-Freedom. And looking in the other directions a feeling  emerges that the human world is an immensely haunted place – and haunted in at least two separate ways. When someone begins to escape - into a becoming-active – from fear and neurosis and self-reflection there is something else waiting for them in the oneirosphere, such that, if they are taken over by it, their creative freedom will be channelled into them producing a new religion, or a new paratext of a religion (whether explicit, or in the form of a dreaming intrinsically inflected and pervaded by a religion, but which is taken up as “art”), or into the production of a new system of abstractions that functions to shut down awareness of the outside - awareness of the world as energy and intent. And the dreaming that has been produced, which was supposed to provide a solution to the human predicament, then in fact becomes a profound exacerbation of it – as if the second force or element both draws people toward it, and manifests itself as a production of materials that can then be taken up by the first one (the interestablishment, the control-mind as it appears in the domain of the tyranny of moods).

    With individual worlds of dreamings this is not a binary picture of inclusion and exclusion in relation to these zones. For instance oneiric worlds recurrently have a profound, intense line of contact with Love-and-Freedom (the river runs through them) even though at the same time they are primarily focused somewhere to the side of the south-outside.

     But to return to a focus on the system of reason-revelation (and the de-subjectified but still-constrained creative modality) it can be seen how what is supposed to be the cure then becomes both the initiator of religious and political wars and the crushing of lucidity. The tyranny of control-mind moods, and the relative freedom of the creator of vast but fundamentally suppressive dreamings. And then the adoption within ordinary reality of these dreamings (which properly defined are all oneiro-abstract systems, but of two different kinds).

     It is vital to concentrate attention primarily on the south-outside. But simultaneously it must be asked - what forces are haunting the human world?

Note

The key is the interestablishment - the ordinary-reality facultative system. 

The ecumenon, or - more accurately - the domain of the ecumenal fields, is the definitively ruptural world of human ordinary-reality organisations, from nation states to businesses/corporations, and from the organisations of religions to the institutions of capitalism. In different ways, and on different levels, there is always war in the ecumenon.

The socius, or the sphere of the socius worlds, is a disparate sliding world consisting of the profoundly permeative - but ultimately not dominant - expression of the interestablisment in relation to the cognitive, oneiric, libidinal, epistemological, emotional, navigational/habitual and facultative levels of human existence. This is a poignant, disturbing world, consisting as much of delusional/fixational dreamings as of blocked/denuded ways of seeing the world, and as much of libidinal/emotional modalities as of depth-level structures of placement of attention and of action within, and forming, territories; where all of this is always threaded with paths toward the Future, in the form of the current of alterity - the functioning of exteriority intent.

   The two fundamental mistakes in relation to the socius are, firstly, thinking that you can get beyond it simply by constructing it as an ideology and thinking your way past it (which cannot work because unless you have woken your dormant faculties you will have nothing with which to think, and because unless you have detached yourself from it in relation to its libidinal, emotional and fixational/habitual aspects, you will have no chance of waking the dormant faculties to an extent that would make the difference), and, secondly, thinking that it has probity in the sense that in some way it ultimately is the working out of the problems of human existence. This last idea, whether understood in a 'materialist' way, or in relation to the human mind or 'spirit,' is an interpretative and religious delusion that is a main component of the join-point within the system of reason-and-revelation. What is actually taking place is something far more disturbing and haunted, a disparately technology-locked facultative and libidinal downward slide and collapse.

   This is why the key is the interestablishment - specifically the functioning within you of the instance of the facultative system of ordinary reality. It is the key, because you have the capacity to overcome it. Our instinct is to want to be part of an immense avant-garde, that is either fully formed, or is just forming. Instead of looking for this avant-garde within the socius, you have to get on with the process of leaving behind the interestablishment - starting by waking the faculties of perception and dreaming.




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