Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
In these stories women tend to be either passive paragons of beauty, or somewhat sinister practitioners of anomalous knowledge. It is true that for men a new relation to women is set out (courtly love), but women as objects of love tend to be the largely empty, non-active point around which this is developed. And as ambiguous or 'dark' figures they are often no more than sensationalist plot devices.
There's nobody so grand
That she can't get them down"
However, the genealogical starting-point, insofar as there is one, is very different from what follows. To be precise, the focus of the History of the Kings of Britain is a mythological raising of the status of the pre-Saxon 'Brittons' - or pan-British celts - at the expense of the Normans (who were colonial rulers at the time of writing, in that they spoke another language, and were based primarily in France). The book is an oneiric weapon which will stop at nothing - including a prophecy-dream about the goddess Diana - in order to heighten the kudos of the Brittons, and its relationship to Christianity is that of including very minimal references to Christian priests, together with a making-respectable by association, in the form of a preface which states it was copied from a book given to the author by 'Bishop Walter' of Oxford.
But now something extraordinary has happened: forty years earlier a member of the family married the widow of the English king, and now his grandson, whose mother is a member of the Plantagenet dynasty, has a claim to the throne through his mother's side, while carrying the Welsh name through his father. The grandson, Henry ap Tudur, was born and brought up in West Wales, so because of his background, his name and his partial descent there is claimant to the English throne who at the very least is as much Welsh as English, and who can emphatically be represented as Welsh.
After marching through mid-Wales and assembling an army which was part Welsh and part Lancastrian, Henry Tudor (grandson of Owain ap Tudur) pauses for a moment on a hill in Shropshire to wait for some final arrivals. In the recruitment-march through Wales the Welsh flag has been flown, and Henry has been portrayed as 'the man of destiny' who will redress centuries of oppression. Henry Tudur then goes on to defeat Richard the Third at Bosworth.
This was a small-scale seismic event in the domain of the ecumenon, and one that in fact would lead to a far more major rupture, so that it would end up being a precursor of an enduring rift at the level of religion, as opposed to territorial control. But it should be added that all of this is still just at the level of struggles in the ecumenon (and it is the nature of the ecumenon that there is always war taking place in it). It is in fact the final, concluding event in the sequence (beyond the other developments) which is the point where something momentous occurs.
Henry's first son dies as a young man, but the second son, the disturbing figure of Henry VIII (who immediately marries his dead brother's wife) then goes on to break with Roman Catholicism - for reasons connected on the surface to marriage and the need for an heir for the new dynasty - by breaking with Rome, and by simultaneously overthrowing the power of the monasteries. This was the main rupture in the ecumenon, and the romantically augmented, Christianised forms of Geoffrey's mythos 'kernel' are now suddenly the basis of a religious 'foundation story,' at a time when an improvement in overall historical scholarship was going to make it hard for such a story to take permanent hold at the head of a tradition.
The concluding event in the sequence is the work of Shakespeare. And it is not that Shakespeare is a development building on the Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition - on the contrary, he rejects this mythos - or that what is vital about his work is in any way to be understood as an attempt to defend the state in a new way. It is that everything has been broken open and placed in suspension in relation to socially foregrounded dreamings, and Shakespeare takes advantage of this vacuum: he finds a Futural pathway in ancient Greece, and he creates a new way of expressing outsights about the depth-level nature of the world. Everything in Shakespeare is in the undogmatic brightness, and in the evocations of exteriority-worlds that suggest the transcendental, and in the awareness of tragedy as a fundamental aspect running through the world. His work is abstract-perception which shows the transcendental in relation to the path of escape, and which shows it in relation to what is to be left behind.
The Westmorland Fells
The forest extends to within two hundred metres of the summit of Mickle Fell. Is this the Eemian forest from 120,000 years ago? Is it the forest seven thousand years in the past, during the initial high-point after the last glaciation? Is it the Westmorland Fells five hundred years in the future? Or is it a more unplaceable, otherworldly forest - a forest of the oneiric-real, one that would be Futural, and could help to generate a forest in the actual?
In any case, this relates to a terrain of the planet. Which is to say that it is not a part of a human territory, and is also to say that what is in question here, alongside the Futural, is the planet, as opposed to the specific terrain that is the Westmorland Fells. It is possible to start anywhere, but this starting-point has some slight advantages.
This is therefore about the planet, and about the path that leads away from ordinary reality, a path that to a great extent involves a heightened effectuation of the faculties of dreaming, perception, lucidity and decision-making, or navigation. A several-body problem: a question of the worlds of human bodies with their faculties, and of the planet grasped in connection with its exteriority, in connection with the sun and the other stars.
In raising the issue of the Futural path, and in looking across the sunlit forests around Mickle Fell, we have brought the faculty of lucidity to the forefront, but in the centre of the foreground is the faculty of dreaming. And in more than one way we will use the faculty of dreaming as a thread to guide us out of the grey labyrinth of customary thought about the planet and the human world.
The massif which forms the uplands of the Wear and Tees valleys – a massif which can also be called the Westmorland Fells - is threaded with mineral veins. It has been mined for lead and other minerals at least since the time of the Roman invasion. And below the level of these veins there is granite. The area has a miniscule deviation from the normal level of gravity, in the sense that gravity is a tiny fraction less than its average level. This was hypothesised to be the indication of a large area of granite: and deep drilling - to the depth of around 300 metres, has twice found the granite layer. These results,together with the readings of gravity levels, have been taken to show the existence of a batholith of granite the upper surface of which that has the formof a series of domes that extend upward beneath the Westmorland Fells, and the area immediately around them. The area is cthonically haunted by these domes, whose electromagnetic field produces a fractional lightening of gravity.
The surface terrain is very different from the areas of the Pennines further south. The hills are higher, but there are very few outcrops of rock. They are wide, minimal contour, whaleback hills to an even greater extent than the fells further south. Their main feature being the two main places where a vein of harder rock called the Whin Sill - that runs across the whole area - appears at the surface: in one of these places the sill produces a waterfall - High Force - and in another it takes the form of a narrow amphitheatre of cliffs, in the form of a long flattened V shape, called High Cup Nick.
Overall, at the level of its plants and animals this is an area of deliberate monoculture devastation on the part of human beings, and yet at the same time it has a pocket of exceptional plant diversity, which is nourished - made possible - by minerals from the rocks. The monoculture is driven grouse shooting, which means that anything larger than plants like heather and bracken is burned down each year, and birds of prey are shot, so that the grouse in turn can be shot by wealthy hunters who have the grouse driven toward them, to make killing them easy. The pocket of biodiversity is an area of meadows in upper Teesdale, which has a famous eco-system of rare flowers - including spring gentian and birds eye primrose. These to a great extent are alpine plants from further south in Europe, that do not grow elsewhere in upland areas of Britain because of lack of sunshine - but here they are boosted by what is called ‘sugar limestone’ - a mineral-rich form of rock that is easily dissolved by water, so that a steady flow of minerals arrives for the plants.
At times when the moorland is not being burned, the air is clearer in the Westmorland Fells: on the prevailing wind it comes across the Lake District from the Irish Sea, and the air will be even clearer, through there being less humidity, when the wind is from the east. And a final feature of the terrain on the ground is connected to the direction from which the wind arrives. Starting from High Cup Nick is a high, southwest-facing escarpment. The North Pennines massif rises to this sudden drop, and when the wind comes from a specific direction the wide, steep escarpment produces a horizontally vortical wind, called the Helm Wind. As part of the same weather phenomenon the escarpment also recurrently creates a long cloud called the Helm Bar.
As well as being a terrain of burned-back moorland, and of valleys with rare flowers, it is simultaneously an area of derelict mine workings, so that it has an aspect of being a post-industrial Zone (in a sense that comes from Arkady and Boris Strutagatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic and from Tarkovsky’s film of this novel) - a place that in some way has a quality of being in touch with the outside of ordinary reality.
You
can imagine you have crossed an area of moorland on a hot day in June, and have
arrived at High Cup Nick as the sun has started to shine straight into the
amphitheatre of cliffs. Mickle Fell is over to your left, as you sit down,
feeling drowsy. A moment later you dreaming that you have solved some kind
of grey labyrinth of empty factory buildings by jumping dangerously off a
conveyor belt that somehow is still working. When you land on the ground there
is forest everywhere, and the buildings have disappeared. Through the
forest that covers the base of HighCupNick a path is visible. It is
sunlit, bordered with willow herb and flowering dogrose. There are five fallow
deer walking down it, and beyond them is another animal, moving swiftly away –
it looks like a badger, but is the colour of a fox. As you wake you have a
confused impression, for a moment, that there is a wall of high-tech offices
and factories behind you.
It is necessary to start now from the Westmorland Fells as they currently are, but temporarily to abstract out the human world, so that the focus becomes the geological masses of the hills, the plants and animals of these hills and, most of all, the sunlit atmosphere above them, starting from the air at the level of the ground.
Then it is necessary to reach the point of envisaging the highest zones of the atmosphere, and to allow the envisaged space of air to expand spherically around the planet, and then the image needs to become the entirety of the planet in its spherical height and depth. The planet in its sunlit and starlit exteriority, the small plants growing in upland meadows, the trees extending across slopes in the Patagonian Andes; zephyrs swirling up dust in mountains in Morocco, the Helm Wind vortically turning on its horizontal axis; the subterranean depths of the planet, the outer atmosphere suffused with starlight; sunlight falling on forested slopes of the Asturias mountains in Northern Spain.
You see the planet in its exteriority as heartening, as inspiring, as initiator of thought, as corporeally and intellectually energising. You register that it is the initiator of this affect - of this world of affect.
And then, it is necessary to see the planet as the fundamentally unknown, that is, the unknown in a transcendendental-empirical sense - it is necessary to experience the dark, jolting flash of the unknown.
And then you place the human world within this sphere, under the expanse of the atmosphere, as something natural within the planet; the human world on all of its levels and with all of its aspects, as another unknown within the unknown of the planet. And again there is the dark, ultra-intense brightness of the unknown at the level of the transcendental-empirical.
But after this you keep seeing the energy-and-intent domain of the human world as within the planet, working on the basis that this is the correct setting up of the problem of the world of human beings.
And seen in this way it appears as a kind of grey perturbing mist - perturbing in the sense that it is destroying the eco-systems and species of the planet, and at different levels is continuously at war within itself. However, at the same time this mist is threaded with filaments of brightness. The grey mist is the predominating aspect, and yet the filaments of brightness have far greater intensity.
What is this luminous and perturbing mist?
*
It is possible to start from what can be termed the Arkadian and Sayan modalities of thought, and to start from the 180 years since the 1840s, concentrating primarily on the idea of Futural departures, and on an affect - generated through an encounter with the world around us, or through either reading or hearing words - that can be called the planetary sublime.
The Arkadian modality of thought is split into two sides, where split has a sense similar to lobotomised. On one side is philosophy and science, and on the other is art: Socrates and Sophocles; Spinoza and Shakespeare / Newton and Shakespeare. The Sayan modality on the other hand is integrated - and it should be pointed out that it could also be named after mountains in China, or in Mexico, or could be named the Roraima modality or the Andes modality.
Within the philosophy zone of the Arkadian form of thought there have been rare, isolated attempts in the last two centuries to bridge the divide between the two sides of the modality, none of which have got very far (although these attempts have nonetheless been having an impact). If successful these attempts would have also bridged the gap to the integrated Sayan modality, which in the twentieth century expressed itself as a series of emergences within a Central American and North American anthropology milieu. Within the philosophical emergences of the Sayan modality, and to a limited extent within the Arkadian modality’s philosophy, there has been the ongoing, overall emergence of what can be named metamorphics, a form of knowledge consisting of a pragmatics of intensification of encounters with the world, and of immanence metaphysics. And to start to provide a way out toward this form of thought, it can be pointed out that intrinsic to the Sayan modality is the most encompassing expression, firstly, of the line of thought involved in the idea of Departures from ordinary reality (together with other related ideas), and, secondly, of expressions of what will here be called the planetary sublime.
But for now these developments should be left as something like a terrain that has been seen in the distance. And what should be concentrated on is the artistic side of the Arkadian modality, and in particular the aspects of it that embody what can be termed radical/visionary thought.
Here
there have been two major developments:
A
series of emergences that reached a first high-point at the start of the
twentieth century, which then underwent a multi-stranded collapse into
conservatism/reactivity in the middle years of the century, and afterwards
briefly went into effect again at high intensity, though under new, very
difficult circumstances of suppression.
The
movement of music into the foreground, so that it acquired an immense
radical/visionary domain - a process which can also be seen as music
shouldering a burden which was exceptionally hard for it to carry.
The reason why we are starting in the 1840s is because at this time there was a threshold-crossing in a widespread attempt to see the-World-and-the-human-world with greater clarity. And even though it is fiction (together with poetry, songs and music) that will be the primary focus, it is important to remember that Marx’s phrase ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is from 1843.
A further point is that there is no primary focus in terms of areas. However, at the outset the main areas are the USA of Edgar Allen Poe, together with Britain, and it can be pointed out that an initial development was that Oxford and Oxfordshire at this time, for complex reasons, became the centre of on an oneiric and abstract-oneiric storm.
The further reference point that will be used will be the work of Shakespeare, because this work is a very highly developed expression of the artistic - as opposed to academic - side of the Arkadian modality.
It
is necessary to begin with an overview, and an explication of ideas. One
hundred and eighty years after the starting-point in the 1840s the process
which began at this time has expressed itself through a series of elements within
writing. Futural or radical/visionary elements which in many of the more
interesting cases have a kind of inconspicuous power, through being – or
through including - outsights into the nature of the world.
The
escape or Departure / the escape-group.
The
other world: the world where the anomalous is in effect to a larger
extent.
The
damaging modality or force hidden - as an element of the natural world - within
the world of human beings, internally affecting each individual from the start
of their life.
The
pervasive disaster within the human world, where this is to a substantial
extent the result of the damaging modality at the level of individuals.
The
other, anomalous form of knowledge and action / the other, anomalous way
of envisaging the world.
The
statement of immanence, or the moment of perceiving immanence.
The
dream-like work which has the affect of lightness in the specific sense that it
does not get tied down by moralising (recapturing along the lines of an
ordinary-reality or Judgemental perspective) and includes one or more of the
figures above.
The futural other world - the world many years in the future in which there have been substantial, pervasive transformations of human existence.
There are two primary aspects of works that are expressive of the planetary sublime. The first is that they involve exteriority in a double sense: this is, firstly, the planet in its exteriority in relation to the sun and the stars and the other orbiting bodies of the solar system, and, secondly, the beyond of urban terrains in the form of scurflands, the countryside, and terrains such as mountains, forests and deserts.
The second aspect is the enigmatic. This is the enigmatic in the very specific sense of an aspect of the world of the text which produces the impression of the planet as the fundamentally unknown.
Another name for the enigmatic in this sense
is the anomalous. And specifically it is the anomalous that directly involves
joy, or which is connected with it (whether the joy of delight,or of serene
exploration), even if - to take the limit case - the joy comes through a
transcendental-empirical grasping of a perturbing or tragic thread within the
world. The anomalous is the more effective as an expression of the
planetary sublime the more it is connected with the planet. With Ariel, in The
Tempest, this is done through ‘where the bee sucks, there suck I’ / in a
cowslip bell I lie’ (Ariel is an anomalous being but his/her home is the
planet).
The island in The Tempest is a key element in relation to the planetary sublime in Shakespeare’s work, along with the forest outside of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The presence of these two terrains then impacts on other elements. References to the worlds beyond the cities and towns are all given a heightened intensity.
For a brief moment we are in Oxford and Oxfordshire in the middle years of the 19th century. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is in effect within this world, as is Spinoza’s Ethics, but at much higher level of intensity is the radicalism of Shelley, and - in particular - the work of Shakespeare. For those setting out toward an ability to think - therefore toward a waking of the faculty of dreaming alongside thefaculty of lucidity - the circumstances could barely have been more tumultuous. Along with the oneiric and abstract worlds that have just been indicated (which were from both sides of the Arkadian modality), a whole machinery of ordinary reality pushing back from thought toward heavily ritualised religious dogma is centred on Oxford in the form of Newman’s ‘Oxford Movement’. And simultaneously the intellectual world has now not only accepted the validity of the geological map made 50 years earlier by the Oxfordshire blacksmith’s son William Smith (which showed the Earth was gigantically older than it was held to be according to all accounts from the domain of religion), but it was also starting to process Darwinism - and both of these changes were centred on the area, in that Smith’s map was followed by one of the first major dinosaur finds being made in an Oxfordshire village called Stonesfield, in 1824, and in that the famous evolution debate took place in Oxford, in 1860.
The outlines of what happened can be sketched, and in way where subsequent events are connected to them. It can easily be thought that nothing took place at all - but if a focus on this terrain is sustained across fifty years, and if the onward lines beyond this are included, the emergences become more visible.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass -
something logic-pale but bright escaping from a zone of gravity; the whole
emergence is brightened and intensified by Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and
other songs by the Beatles, and then darkened by Falling Out of Cars and
the other books by Jeff Noon from the first phase of his writing, as a
recondite part of the generalised collapse of fantasy into either grim-and-dark
'fantasy realism' or powerful but partially blocked/suppressed 'young adult' or
childrens’ fantasy tales.
Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Poe is in the background, struggling toward an other, anomalous form of knowledge in relation to both customary philosophy and science, and Marx is also in the background, struggling to get away from Hegel in the direction of this same anomalous form of knowledge in relation to how it sees the human socio-economic world); and then Matthew Arnold’s The Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis, followed eventually (forty years later) by The Well at the World’s End by William Morris. In turn these are followed by The Waves, The Rainbow and Women in Love, the poems of Yeats, The King of Elflands Daughter, and elements of the work of H.G.Wells. The subsequent collapse from this highpoint is both internal and external, as Lawrence and Dunsany make failed attempts to set out another form of knowledge and dreaming, in The Plumed Serpent, and The Blessing of Pan, and as Tolkien and Lewis take the Arnold / Morris line of emergence and collapse it toward Christianity-inflected tales of warfare between Good and Evil. And then, after a gap, works such as City of Illusions, Surfacing, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the 1980 story The Quiet Man, by John Foxx (it can be said in passing that deleterious/damaging directions within the transcendental-empirical were being investigated at this time by Angela Carter and William Burroughs, but that this oneiric critique is to a large extent a separate line of emergence).
The main issue in question here is that of the planetary sublime (the take-up by the Beatles of Lewis Carroll’s form of ‘surrealism’ is well known). But it can be pointed out that both of these accounts have in part gone toward music, either directly or tangentially.
The sublime in this sense evokes the worlds beyond the urban in a way where there is joy / absence of gravity / visionary-serene brightness involved in the description, and it does this in a way where the work includes the anomalous, even if the anomalous is suggested rather than stated outright. The anomalous can be the horses in The Rainbow, the water from the well in The Well at the World’s End, the disappearance in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the lengthened lifespan in The Scholar Gypsy (and in The Well at the World’s End) or the patterning board from the planet Davenant in City of Illusions.
The
planetary sublime appears in Patti Smiths 1975 album Horses. In the
semi-narrative of the album’s title track (“Horses/Land of a Thousand
Dances/Mer de”) the narrator encounters a horse ‘in the eye of the forest’. The
anomalous is there in this song through the description of experiencing a kind
of different substantiality, in the form of the lyric ‘I put my hand inside his
cranium’. And the non-urban terrains become a basis for breaking open
‘visionary-abstract’ perspectives in a way which supports this
anomalous/enigmatic aspect - the outsights reach an intensity that makes the
visionary-abstract point toward the faculties of dreaming and of lucidity, and
toward a trance-formed relationship with the planet:
…the
night, in the eye of the forest
There’s
a mare, black and shining with yellow hair
I
put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair
I
didn’t waste time, I just walked right up and saw that
Up
there, there is a sea
Up
there, there is a sea
[…] a sea of possibilities
Three
years later, in Systems of Romance, John Foxx opens up a glimpse of the
planetary sublime in a similar way:
Listening
to the movement that the night makes
I let the room fade just for a moment
Sitting in the shadows that the leaves make
I felt the floor turn into an ocean
We’ll never leave here, never
Let’s stay in here for ever
And when the streets are quiet
We’ll walk out in the silence
And in this album the anomalous is an element through a series of elements which suggest that the world is threaded by forces and potentials which are not generally noticed, and which are on a level beyond that of ordinary reality.
In Foxx’s story The Quiet Man the protagonist is living in London under ordinary circumstances: he is described setting off to go to work, and then the narrative seamlessly shifts to a description of what he does while living – for years – in a derelict overgrown London; and then, equally seamlessly, it shifts to a description of his return to his home from work. Here the anomalous is simply the existence of the overgrown, derelict London. Everything is there at once: the planetary (the world beyond the urban) arrives through London, and this other London is the anomalous.
And this quiet figure suggests a modality of detachment that has heart. As opposed to a modality of detachment which has crossed a limited-extent threshold of freedom only for all deterritorialisations to be subordinated to an insouciance-process of navigation according to what has kudos, where freedom has been heightened a little, but at the cost of losing the movement into exteriority (which is an active,exploratory love of the world), so that it is now trapped in terms of further development.
In writing The Quiet Man John Foxx is not writing music, and the text is not in the form of lyrics (the fact that 30 years later Foxx placed it with music does not mean that it consists of lyrics, even though a reading of it works very well with music).
It is important to see the difficulty of what the rock-pop line of music was trying to do at its cutting edge. The challenge, at depth, is to go towards the development of a pragmatics and metaphysics of travelling to the outside of ordinary reality (the cutting-edge of rock-pop modernism is always an affirmation of the beyond of conformism / suppressive traditionalism). To maintain a brightness of tonality (as opposed to gravity) while avoiding affirmations of conformist value-positions, and both to break open glimpses of outsights and to avoid familiar descriptive perspectives by using oneiric, bright surrealism - this had been the technique of the Beatles (and it can be seen that Lucy in the Sky is both surrealism of this kind and is also an ultra-minimal, but effective expression of the planetary sublime - there is the sky, the river and the clouds, and the anomalous is both the ‘girl with kaleidoscope eyes / Lucy, and the Departure from ordinary reality indicated by ‘and you’re gone’). However, to start to develop the pragmatics and metaphysics is hard enough in writing a novel, let alone in writing song lyrics.
The power of songs is in the immense charge and expressiveness of the music, in the combination of what is conveyed through the words and through the tonality of the singing of the words, and in the deterritorialisation of dance. Nonetheless, the fact that after the 1950s poetry declined and was largely eclipsed by songs does not mean that nothing at all was left behind in this re-channelling after the collapse. But poetry had not been finding a way forward to any significant extent: in the 20s and 30s as well as in the 60s and 70s it was writers of stories who had been getting furthest with expressions of outsights - with work generated by the faculties of dreaming and lucidity (in terms of a new more powerful form of prose the breakthrough had been in works such as The Waves, and in terms of leaps of imagination and of concept-formation within fiction it had been in works such as The Left Hand of Darkness). These were the circumstances in which The Quiet Man was written.
The challenge taken on by rock-pop visionary radicalism was an exceptionally difficult one. What was needed was a pragmatics of waking lives, and an associated (inseparable) domain of outsights toward the depth-level nature of the world. It is not, therefore, that rock-pop modernism held on widely for decades and then faded. It is more that, in terms of a widespread effective process, the attempt barely went beyond the 60s. The initial advantage of the counterculture of music, festivals/parties and drugs was that it didn’t need to take any detailed positions about a way forward, and just needed to be the beyond of the gravity of reactive judgement. But once the establishment had got rid of some its darker traditionalisms the advantage grew much smaller; and, in any case, the moment people needed to take pragmatic/political/micropolitical positions there was almost nothing there in terms of a pragmatics of Departure. What remained was the deterritorialisations of dance and the use of psychotropics, and the use of drugs in this context is likely for each individual to become counterproductive. In turn, the issue with rave is not so much that it died in the mid 00s (although there was a fadedown at this point) and more that it never had enough focused microplitical radicalism in the first place. At the outset Aldous Huxley had been injected into the milieus of pop-rock, milieus that would soon have dance-music synthesisers, but this did not teach people how to set out along the escape-path that leads from the ongoing disaster of ordinary reality.
Music in fact has been central to both of the major popular culture technology-breakthroughs in the last century: sound recording and film. There is perhaps not a lot that can be said in this context on the side of film, apart from the fact that music recurrently is the anthemic aspect (telling us what to feel) in evocations of ordinary reality, and that it continues to keep all kinds of reactionary, gravity-infested company in the worlds of political movements, cults and religions - always producing an ephemeral, false sense of profundity. Often the two sides come together, and this will be all the more effective if the music is impressive -: Carly Simon’s New Jerusalem anthem (Let the River Run) in Working Girl is one kind of example.
And, insofar as there is a sense in which poetry has been rechanneled into songs, it is not that there has been a decisive gain. Any increase in power or intensity of expression, through the expressive use of the voice regarding the timbre of the words (as well as through the music) is to a great extent offset by the demands of concise oneiric lucidity being less stringent for song-writing. There has been no emergence of a pragmatics of Departure and of a system of outsights, despite the sheer brilliance of albums like Horses and The Hounds of Love (an example of the strength of songs, in comparison to poetry, can be heard in the quietly intense sexual radicalism, in relation to becomings, that is expressed by Kate Bush in her singing of ‘come on darling, let’s exchange the experience.’).
And overall there has been a fade-down in relation to the planetary sublime, and in relation to encounters with the spaces of exteriority that are involved in the radical-visionary ideas delineated earlier. It is worth thinking for a moment about the dance track by LCD Soundsystem which concludes the 2022 film White Noise. The whole song is a radical ‘gesture,’ in the sense that it is about the frenetic, unhealthy, corporate-inflected processes of ordinary reality, but at the point, at the very end, where it breaks open a specific view, and where it makes contact with exteriority (‘the earth and trees surround you’, the song seems to some extent to have crossed over toward a conventional perspective (which is being expressed in a new way). This is a fine song - and yet the song is about death, and the only ‘escape’ that can be described as straghtforwardly in effect within the song is the end of life: the earth and trees only appear for a moment aswhat you focus on as you start to die (“the earth and trees surround you/ framing your escape”), and the account of death, for all its emphasis on the stars, is strongly suggestive of traditionalism, rather than suggesting that you see the earth and the trees just before death because they were a main part of what had been fundamental all along (the planet, the trees, the sun and the stars as obscured locus of the escape from ordinary reality).
In relation to the 180 years in question, both of the developments that have been analysed involve a change in the middle years of the 20th century - the suspension of the radical emergences, and their later return under more difficult circumstances; and the sudden heightening of popular music. And we are now getting close to the point where the difference between developments and Departures will be clearly visible.
*
The mid-twentieth-century collapse had many different aspects, and in any case, beneath the questions of the short-term collapse, there was a main stage in an ongoing alteration in which religion has been set up to work primarily in more implicit, but very powerful ways, and in which the scientific and rational-discursive domains has been brought into the foreground. This is to say that across the domain of the heavily industrialised countries there was a full effectuation of a shift in which the ordinary-reality co-functioning of revelation with a blocked form of reason underwent a change of polarity. For those with no affinity for science fiction the change gave the implied or indirect religion of the new forms of fantasy writing, and gave new, ‘quiet’ expressions of religion such as ‘whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should’ (although written 20 years earlier Ehrlich’s Hegel-affined “Desiderata” is published and becomes widely known in 1948). It should also be added that after this a much larger aspect, proportionately, of religion would be its implicit form in relation to nations and groupings/alliances of nations. However, the most damaging aspect of the shift – even more than religion shifting toward the powerfully implicit, and toward being something that cannot be argued against because it is ‘faith’ - is the imposition onto thought of models and ways of working with concepts that come from the science-mathematics-logic domain of the functioning of reason, so that the route to the transcendental-empirical is even more blocked than it had been previously.
This change can be explicated by taking three instances: anthropology, philosophy, and fiction.
For anthropology the change involved had a very perturbing aspect. For a long time there had been a colonialist functioning of anthropology which set out to ‘show’ the cultural or genetic superiority of western and state societies in relation to the remaining tribal/nomadic societies. And at the precise point at which this modality started to diminish, structuralism began to appear (structuralism was an initial manifestation of the polarity change in the system of reason-and-revelation), which ensured that there could be no depth-level encounter with the radically other ways of seeing the world that are found within tribal and nomadic societies. The grim counterpart to this was non-structuralist thinkers like Evans-Pritchard, who simply practiced the assumption of superiority in a background form, which in many ways was all the more powerful for being unstated (Evans-Pritchard was a 1944 convert to Roman Catholicism, and so ultimately no stepping-aside from the idea of the superiority of western spirituality was in any way possible).
Philosophy at this time was a labyrinth of tendencies that were connected to the same shift (the alteration had been underway since the 18th century). In the late 70s, in writing A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari fight their way out not only from structuralism but from other – closely related - suppressive philosophical modalities, such as Kantianism, but they do not get beyond a preliminary stage in this process. There is no sustained, focused development of their nomadism of becomings and deterritorialisations (although all the elements are there, even if occasionally they are entangled in confusion), but instead there is mostly a series of micro-critiques of concepts and thinkers, and of indications of the line of departure. The text does not bring together the two sides of the Arkadian modality (this is because of the academicism of the micro-critiques, the residual confusions, and, connectedly, a focusing of attention in the wrong areas). However it remains the case that the book guides readers from conventional, blocked philosophy to the way forward. The text is continually leaning outward from the line of development, and toward the Futural direction of Departure.
Amongst many other changes related to the shift, literature sees an immense heightening of science fiction and the - deceptive - split of fantasy into adult tales and stories for children/young adults. The split is deceptive because at the outset there is not much difference between the two sides, and even when – subsequently - it has deepened through the addition of explicit sexual elements to the adult side there is more in common than might be thought (this is because the structure of tales of Good and Evil all along has a crudely ‘reassuring’ bedtime-story aspect, and because a lot of dark or ‘gothic’ elements are allowed within childrens’ tales). Ursula Le Guin’s work tries to find a way out from this terrain, and within the domain of the other side of the Arkadian modality her work is an equivalent of the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. She is in a good position to find the way out, because she has closely read a work from the Sayan modality - Tao Te Ching (she produces a translation of it, and includes the book as a crucial survival of ancient wisdom in the world of City of Illusions, which is the Earth thousands of years in the future), but what she is trying to reach is transcendental-empirical perception, and this involves a way of thinking that is not the same as what is called ‘art’ or ‘fiction’. A lot revolves around a search for the bringing-into-focus of the anomalous form of knowledge that she has direct awareness of, through having woken the faculty of dreaming: in this respect her work is initally a mixture of exploratory constructions/probes, and of elements that straightforwardly make sense, such as ‘far fetching’ in The Left Hand of Darkness. The patterning board from the planet Davenant; the method of seeing into the depth of things in order to predict the future in the Left Hand of Darkness; Ramarren’s techniques of enhanced awareness in City of Illusions; the Athshean’s use of dreaming to reach a different domain of aspects-of-the-world, in The Word for World is Forest – all of these are exploratory constructions. But instead of continuing along these lines the process largely subsides from the mid-70s onwards, as the conventional anomalous form of knowledge within fantasy - in this case, the magic practised by Ged in the Earthsea books - acquires a sign-of-collapse, conventional academic counterpart in the form of physics in The Dispossessed.
After this there is a fundamental way in which Le Guin’s work begins to fade down. Perhaps the most powerful moment is a culmination of her late taking-up of the female-protagonist perspective in the eighth and final Life Story, “The Visionary,” in Always Coming Home. However, in the end you are left with the sense that if you drew up a list of lost or nearly-written books, at the top would be The Pragmatics and Immanence Metaphysics of Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.
Anthropology is involved in all three of the zones of expression which have just been outlined. A Thousand Plateaus is pervasively informed by anthropology and its title is a reference to the work of Gregory Bateson; Le Guin’s parents were anthropologists and her work recurrently draws in powerful ways on the domain of thought in question. However, anthropology here is a term for thought focused on what forms the horizon of tribal and nomadic societies in the same way as it forms the horizon of nation state societies (it is just that there are elements within the whole range of societies, though it seems non-state societies in particular, which can be taken up together to get a clearer view of this horizon). What this means is that anthropology refers here to a crucial domain of accounts of the outside of ordinary reality. In one of the most powerful sections of The Waves Rhoda sees “fishermen on the verge of the world […] drawing in nets and casting them”. This has all been about the edge of ordinary reality, and it has been a history of contingency: it is always possible to set out on the orthogonal line of a Departure, and to leave the line of development behind.
*
One hundred and eighty years after the abstract and oneiric semi-awakenings of the mid19th century, there are certain points that can be made at the level of philosophical and artistic forms. At the level of writing everything is being pushed toward the voice / dialogue, and away from description (scripts are pre-eminently about voice) and the challenge of film/animation/CGI is to become philosophical. Poetry has been largely displaced by songs, as conveyor of the radical/visionary (the almost complete disappearance of the long poem can be noted, in passing, although it can be pointed out that fora long time this had not been a very effective form,in comparison, for instance, with the play written in heightened/poetic prose), but songs,in turn have faded down, and themselves have been partallly displaced by dance tracks without words. The post 1940s split of fantasy writing has only intensified since the 1980s, with the work of George R.R. Martin and Philip Pullman exemplifying the division. Stage plays have collapsed, but Shakespeare is still being performed/filmed because there is a generalised block against new production of philosophically-informed fantasy, and of tragedies (‘tragedies’ in this sense refers to stories which give a glimpse, through a specific trajectory ofcircumstances, of key aspects ofthe ongoing disaster within the human world), and as a result Shakespeare fills an established gap (a gap which to some extent his work created), no matter how much this gap is misrepresented and ignored. Despite thefact that books are still relatively successful, readingis being displaced bot only by film/TV/streaming series, but by the visual/sonic domains of socialmedia. Across all of its levels music has faded down from a long phase of high intensity, and for all its power it tends now to have less of what is needed for building an upward spiral of intensification; it is more and more used as anthemic boost for an ordinary reality message, and as decoration of forms of collapse, its immense power continuously offset by it being fugitive in its impact. And the line of emergence of works expressive of the planetary sublime – with their tendency to lead toward a heightened, open-minded awareness of the planet, and toward an effective setting up of the problem of the human world – has also undergone a marked drop in intensity that began around the start of the 1980s.
Art is only a beginning, but it recurrently does not know what it is the beginning of, and although, for instance being swept up into dance music is a deterritorialisation of the body, this is exceptionally likely to be only a temporary change, so that the person before long is no longer dancing. What is really in question all along is the deterritorialisation of a life, a joy that is on a much higher level than - and includes - the joy ofdancing, and this deterritorialisation is one that is exceptionally unlikely to be temporary, because it cannot fade down as aresult of internal mechanisms. However, to this needs to be added that the deterritoriasation in question is a Futural movement toward exteriority and wider realities - as opposed to being a partial or ‘surface’ deterritorialisation where a limited increase in freedom is subordinated to a following of what has kudos.
*
It has become clear that the discussion is only moving forward through the assistance of the attempts that have been made from the philosophy side of the Arkadian modality to bridge the gap between the two sides.
For philosophy it is fundamental to start from the planet in its exteriority, and from the human body understood in terms of energy and intent, and in terms of its faculties, encounters and alliances (so also in relation to its exteriority). It is also fundamental to work in a way which continuously sees the planet as unknown in a transcendental-empirical sense, and which has a sustained focus on the heartening, inspiring/energising affects produced by the planet, in a way where awareness is maintained that the planet is the initiator of these affects. This is to avoid thinking ‘its all just matter’, and to avoid the death-of-thought trap of “it is the object, and we are the subject’.
Almost no philosophy exists of this kind.
Working from the perspective of the waking and deterritorialisation - and becoming lucid - of a life, visionary writers are aware of the threshold, but with great integrity they again and again show the movement to the threshold, but do not attempt to go far beyond this.
It is somewhat ironic or poignant therefore that, under the influence of the political or the evolution-of-the-species perspectives, visionary writers will setoutto envisage the entirety of the human world in a state where it has crossed or is crosssing the threshold, even though this challenge includes the first one. But this is not a failure of integrity- it is just that the nature of political thought sets up the problem for the writer in a way where it is possible to proceed with a wide focus that prevents an awareness of the gigantic difficulty of what is being attempted. And the results are often profoundly valuable - as with News from Nowhere, Woman on the Edge of Time, Always Coming Home, and, in a different way, Childhood’s End.
Regarding the deterritorialisation of a life (putting aside the question of the whole human world) the very few Arkadian-modality philosophers who work along these lines are able to say a little, with the use of concepts, about the beyond of the threshold, but without getting far in terms of the space of interactions/alliances of the form existence. Even if no narrative is used, it is necessary to have a full grasp of the pragmatics of the forms of existence beyond the threshold, and this entails that the faculty of dreaming needs to be woken, because without this faculty you cannot embody the form of existence, in that it consists of dreaming up heightened circumstances - dreaming the Future into existence. The artists need to wake lucidity, and the philosophers need to wake dreaming.
Human beings have a tendency to be impressed by memory, and to fail to notice the far greater profundity of dreamings. The line of time is the central focus in relation to memory, but dreamings include dreams about the future, which create the future, and their relation to temporality is at another level of importance.
Memory is an element within the oneiric-real envisagement worlds of the body without organs of human beings, but it is the term dreamings which is coterminous with this oneiric-real dimension.
Dreamings are recurrently lenses which reveal the deeper, transcendental-empirical aspects of the world. And in doing this, they are also dreams about the future, which bring the future into existence.
In saying that what is most fundamental is beyond the domain of music, the issue is therefore not one of a comparison between music and writing - most vitally the issue involves dreamings (which might or might not be expressed in words) and involves what is encountered through dreamings and through perception; the world of the planet and of what is beyond the planet (within which sound is an element). Beyond music is dreamings, perception, the planet, and the solar expanses of the beyond of the planet (it becomes evident at this point that art is suffused with the planetary sublime, and in being reconstructed as outsights and as pragmatics of intensification of existence art is transmutated into an aspect of metamorphics).
It is necessary to return to the Westmorland Fells.
*
What is needed here is a dreaming of the planet in its entirety, reached for from the Westmorland Fells. The starlit expanses of the upper atmosphere, the mountains, the rivers, the deltas, the forests. Dreamings have a way of taking you to where you are, and of allowing you to see it.
There are the uplands, and there is the drome.
The world of the uplands consists of becomings, joy, creativity, exploration - it consists of whatever has the waking of the faculties and becoming-active as its vital principle, whatever is an embodiment of movements into exteriority, whatever is an embodiment of love and freedom and lucidity. Along with joy the primary tonality of the uplands is silence, and the key faculties are perception, dreaming, lucidity and navigation. At the level of pragmatics alliances for the purposes of travelling Forward are key, and so is a focus on bodies, where the planet is a fundamental or primary focus and the individuals of the human world are grasped at the level of their intent and of their energy: everything here is always about becoming the best unit of metamorphics that is possible in each new set of circumstrances. The uplands also consist of those who are travelling toward this other modaiity: when individuals are profoundly in love their actions belong to the uplands - its just that ordinary reality has dark circuit breakers which normally prevent people from getting far when they are in this state-of-existence.
The drome is ordinary reality - it is the plane of organisation of ordinary existence. On one level it is marked by it having an immense amount of infrastructure that has a high degree of affinity for ordinary reality: this is because the infrastructure has been largely constructed by it and for it. However these structures and built-terains can be viewed with the eyes of the uplands as something else at a deeper level; they can be repurposed; and they immediately have an entirely different affect when they are derelict.
The key affects of ordinary reality are kudos, moral/religious gravity / outrage, the affects involved in keeping everything under control, other more obviously disfunctional reactive affects (such as fear, self-importance and resentment) and the power-affects within sexuality (that is, control by active-conducting-towards, and control by drawing-towards through the modalities of erotic submission). This relates to the chronic forms of affects, but the acute forms - which will only rarely be seen in those who have collapsed into being highly active along the lines of these affects - consist of angry jealousy, rage, extreme-self-pity, etc.
The primary faculties of the drome are feeling in the form of subjectified/reactive affects, together with a blocked form of reason (not the fully developed reason of the uplands). And happiness here consists of relief at having reestablished control when it was threatened, and of the pale joys of pushing forward and developing the domain of the functionings of ordinary reality.
The drome is the place in which wars, feuds and vendettas of all kinds are continually produced, along with all the horrific micro-oppressions of domestic violence. Drome warfare. There are sometimes very nuanced empirical issues about what stance to take in a relation to a particular conflict, but this does not change the fact that the drome is somewhere from which it is necessary to depart. The drome is ordinary reality, and is the wars within ordinary reality (it can be glimpsed for a moment as having the shiny-quotidian and sinister aspect of the Overlook Hotel), and it is necessary to walk out of it, and keep walking.
Becoming a unit of metamorphics involves having woken a capacity for inner silence, and an - inseparable - capacity for sustained perception. It consists of delight that is immanent to the processes of exploration, of movements into and encounters with exteriority. It also consists of moving toward whatever alliances are possible. If this had been a tendency previously, it is a movement away from drawing on texts, and from trying to convince those entrenched in a different position.
The language of the uplands is outlandish, and outlandish always appears in new forms.
Lucidity takes you to the point where you can see the ongoing disaster of ordinary reality, and where you can see the uplands beyond the drome. Which is to say that lucidity allows you to see the depth-level of bodies - the world of energy and intent and dreamings.
To travel toward love and freedom (this includes freedom from all kinds of dogma and obscured assumptions) and toward a heightened capacity for silence and for perceiving and envisaging the planet - this is the outward journey.
There can be a sunlit, planetary silence. An awareness of a vast astonishing terrain lit up by and absorbing solar exteriority, and a simultaneous awareness that this terrain is the transcendentally unknown (which can nonetheless progressively become the known).
In this silence, what is music?
If you listen to the sounds after a group of notes is played simultaneously on a piano you hear an exceptionally beautiful rise and fall of the interference pattern of the sound waves. This rise and fall is not an expressive modulation on the part of the musician - it is the voice of matter. Musical compositions make forces audible which are not sonic - the sea, love, serenity, a kind of intent in relation to the world. But we tend to hear neither the exteriority nor the sound, and to construct the exteriority as revealed to us by the spirit of a musician, of a social formation, of a system of belief etc. (this controlling/revealing spirit can then also be projected into an extension of the delusion, in the form of the idea of God as ultimate controlling point of this kind - the conservatism of the 40s and 50s includes the work of two writers, Tolkien and Lewis, who each have a creation myth in which the world is music sung by God before it is matter). We generally don’t realise the extent to which there is a humanist cult of musical-expression, one which in fact is still in full effect when it is at the opposite end of the spectrum from music which is explicitly connected with religion. Music has a power to conduct toward the sublime domains of exteriority, but overall people are to a very great extent blocked by the obfuscating, damaging way in which music is constitutively constructed within the human world. What is fundamental is to go toward silence. Because it is pervasive across an existence, the joy of the outward journey is on a higher level than the joys of what we call art, and silence is fundamental for the outward journey.
Music heartens, inspires, transmits affects, but particularly with the hearing (as opposed to the composition) of music it tends to do this fugitively - in a way where, at the level of the entirety of the individual, it impacts, and then is gone. Taken as a whole its impact gets attached to all kinds of reactive affects, but what is most crucial is that it does not in itself produce the upward spiral of intensification. In contrast words are capable of providing the pragmatics and metaphysics of the journey, which is to say that, as well as transmitting affects words can consist of diagrams for a heightened form of existence, and can break open outsights toward wider-and-deeper levels of reality (where these outsights are effective for the purposes of navigation).
The oneirosphere of the human world is the sphere of the abstract as well as of the oneiric, and in relation to its most crucial aspect it can consist, firstly, of philosophical works which have a narrative form, and/or are threaded with narratives, or with ‘figures’ that have an oneiric or first-level-oneiric power, and, secondly, of dreamings in the form of tales, where these are threaded with and/or overarchingly composed of outsights. The drome, however, is pervaded by blocked, suppressive dreamings which are dominated by subjectified affects such as gravity and self-importance (the worlds of religions and of hero tales / kudos tales are dreamings of this kind).
It is important not to give too much importance to books: the threshold-crossing that leads out of the drome can also take place through spoken language, and in any case it is the combination of the planet-in-its-exteriority, the faculties, and language that is the key – the diagram can also be accurately described as a catalyst for an always singular process of encounters, and of creation of a modality of Departure (and it is vital to remember the primary importance of the silence of sustained perception and of a concomitant suspension of internal verbalising). But, nonetheless, it can seen from this that there are times when the impact of books can be key.
The oneirosphere is very different in
comparison with the atmosphere, but there is enough in common for it to be
valuable to make the connection. It is divided into heterogeneous micro-zones
(individuals) in a way that is different from the atmosphere, and yet it has
macrological zones and is profoundly in communication with itself. Books on
their own are a feature of a terrain (like the southwest escarpment of the
Westmorland Fells), but if someone comes and reads them an abstract-real and
oneiric-real world can appear which is capable of sweeping the person away. The
outsights and the diagrams for a heightened form of existence can together take
the individual across a Futural threshold.
The attempts to bridge the gap between the two sides of the Arkadian modality have not been very successful. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari have a tendency to be confused about nomadism - because they veer toward trying to envisage it as the state-destroying true form of revolutionary communism - but more importantly the endless micro-critiques of the book fill their writing so full of transmutated terms from academic thought that the pragmatics and metaphysics never get a chance to develop in a sustained, focused way - so that their writing is only minimally accessible to a non-academic readership. They also do not have a good account of, or a good name for, what it is that you have reached when you have brought together the two sides of the modality.
To join the two sides is all along to find that you have bridged the gap to the Sayan modality. At this point a quality of the translucent-and-opaque is likely to appear at the level of the concepts, but there will no longer be an inaccessibility for everyone other than academics. This applies whether you take the example that comes from the China of two thousand years ago, Tao Te Ching, or works by Florinda Donner such as Shabono or Being-in-Dreaming.
This other modality is metamorphics - the pragmatics and metaphysics of intensification, of metamorphosis.
The three delusional, damaging modalities of religion are interiority; as-if-its-all-fact accounts of the future of individuals and of the planet, and the gravity of judgement with its structure of Good and Evil. Interiority divides into the eternal soul form of the modality, and the ‘we are creators of the world we encounter’ form of Buddhism/Kantianism. And Good and Evil is both the damaging affect of Judgement (as imposition by deployers, and as internalised subsequent self-imposition by victims), and the effectively zero and one terrain of Tolkien-modality dreamings, where instead of the depth-level problem being seen as pervasive in a wide-and-deep way, everything is constructed as Hero versus Horror, creating a modality which is a prevention of thought.
The dreamings of ordinary reality are religious, social, political and philosophical/metaphysical, and they are often so minimal and pervasively implicit as to be barely noticed. Everyone has their own combination, and people often don’t have all of the modalities. There is the dreaming of the universe / matter; there is the dreaming of a religion; there is the ordinary-reality dreaming of the family, in one of its (warring) reactionary and inclusionist forms (the inclusionist form evidently has within it an aspect which for each individual could be part of a beginning of the way out of ordinary reality, but given how much effort is involved in raising a family this does not mean that the way out will be found); there is the dreaming of a specific nation state and of an alliance of nation states, together with formations such as the UN (whereas beyond this, in reality, there are extremely indebted nation states which have been subsumed within capitalism, and which, under immense pressure from capitalist circumstances, are using neo-crusade pretexts for their struggles to gain advantage).
Because writers of stories are creators of dreamings they are in a position to intervene, but to speak from the point of view of reason, a lot needs to have been critiqued at once. To speak from the point of view of lucidity, and from the point of view of all the faculties, you need to wake lucidity. And at that point the creation of dreamings is the result of the expressing of outsights (knowledge) and the breaking open of an awareness of the world as, at a wide and deep level, the unknown - it becomes an aspect of philosophy. Suddenly everything becomes vast, deep, and in a specific sense, straightforward. There is the planet, there is sunlight and starlight, there is energy, there is intent - there is the path.
The forms of travel here, in relation to full and partially effectuated nomadism, are the loose, unstructured semi-group, the creative alliance or collaboration, the individual (who in any case is always a nexus of encounters/becomings, as well as being a multiplicity), the group. Couples can be swept up within a nomadism, and so can families. There is the non-indulgent tonality of a group of people who are travelling fast in a vehicle to escape a pyroclastic flow from a volcano, and yet at the same time everything has an intrinsic lightness. A full nomadism is metamorphics at the level of an overall form of existence, and it always consists of brightly sober, non-indulgent bonds of affection which in terms of affect consist at depth of the joy of travelling forward and of exploration.
The outward journey is undertaken as an expression of love for the world, and as an audacity that is in itself a delight, but it is important to see that the lines of departure become increasingly vital as the world becomes more and more gridded and locked down into an intricate libidinal-technological domain of ordinary reality – which is to say that the existence of the outward journeys is fundamentally needed by everyone.
Everything is normal, and yet there is a fraction less gravity. There are two or three houses, in different parts of an area of hills with a lot of woodland, or maybe it is an area of semi-desert, or of mountains. There is another house in a town or city - or maybe all of the houses are in a city. What takes place is recurrently enveloped in an atmosphere which feels bright, planetary: there are projects of different kinds, some of which are about earning money for sustenance. The horizon of the projects is the Future.
Where are we now? We are in Westmorland, in Tuva, in Patagonia. We are on the planet. There is a path – it leads toward wider realities. The lines of emergence are not in themselves a cumulative, deepening process of thought and understanding, and still less are the lines of development: this is only true of the lines of Departure. With the sequences of emergences there is a sedimentation of confused interpretations that takes place over time, and changes in the systems of ordinary reality can bring about a decline. With lines of development the progressions (as with science) are not at the level of the transcendental-empirical, and the value of the advances is more than offset by the processes being components within formations dominated by the processes of ordinary reality. However, beyond all this are the outward journeys toward the Future. The recurring expressions of metamorphics in the form of written works is at depth an expression of the obscured option of human beings, which is to wake their faculties. It is this obscured option which entails that the path is a feature of the terrain. It is necessary to walk, and keep walking.
How do you open a crack in the circle, and walk out
of it?
There is a heatwave taking place across southern
Britain - the day is starting cloudy, but the cloud has been forecast to break
up by midday. It is late June, 2025 - a week after the longest day. I am
walking south from the crossroads that is the centre of the tiny Warwickshire
village of Beausale.
The road goes down a slight slope through fields.
This is an undulating upland, ahead the land drops further, and then rises
again to a horizon slightly higher than Beausale. I turn left onto a lane which
has wild raspberry plants growing in the verges, and then, after a short
distance I turn right at a sign that says ‘Kites Nest Lane’.
Up ahead to the left are the faint remains of
Beausale’s iron age hillfort. There is almost nothing to be seen: by the road there
is a large farm-house which has been built on the northern edge of the ring,
but then, after following the lane slightly downhill for forty yards, there is
a place where a line of trees and hedge-plants joins the roadside hedge at
right angles, and just beyond this there is a narrow hedge-gap, without a stile
or sign, leading into the field. I go in, and it is possible to see that the
broad hedge at right angles consists of plants growing around the ditch of the
southwestern edge of the hillfort. I immediately have a cloud of flying insects
just above my head, and landing on me. I am also aware that I am very near to
the farmhouse, and that I am not on a footpath. Nonetheless I walk toward a
relatively well-defined stretch of ditch and bank, which has an oak tree
growing above it. Everything is nondescript, and nothing has been developed or
signposted. You would not realise the place was there, unless you had been told
or walked around it paying close attention. There is litter here and there in
the ditch. As I return to the road a bird of prey, maybe a buzzard, flies from
a tree that is twenty feet to the right of the hedge-gap, and flies diagonally
across the lane, only slightly higher than the height of a car, and then goes
out of sight beyond the opposite hedge.
The fact that Shakespeare came from fifteen miles
from here suggests a way of defamiliarising the worlds of the iron age.
Everyone knows that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is more set in England
than in ancient Greece, but it is important to see it for a moment as in
England at the same time as it is set, which is around 3000 years ago, given
the presence of the figures of Theseus and Hippolita who in the Ancient Greece
of the age of the Athens of Sophocles were somewhere between the mythic and the
semi-historical. It is important to imagine Oberon saying “I know a bank where
the wild thyme blows”, and Puck referring to the goddess of the Moon and
of sorcery, in the southern Britain of 3000 years ago, and to imagine this
enigmatically sublime arcadian world, with its connections to India, and to the
whole planet, as the same world that produced the white horse of Uffington, on
the slope of a hill in Southern Oxfordshire, fifty miles to the south.
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine
With sweet musk-roses, and with
eglantine.
However, the other, and in many ways primary,
aspect of what Shakespeare achieves is an extremely intense and effective
micrological critique, which has been given the name tragedy. There is an
endemic, deleterious interestablishment of faculties and drives (that
simultaneously is a suppression of other faculties and other modalities of
intent) and when this - pathological – interestablisment goes into an acute, as
opposed to chronic, form of expression in an otherwise inspired, kind
individual the result is tragedy. This name, however, is profoundly misleading,
in that it fails to see that the oneiric power of the works comes at depth from
a fundamental philosophical and political outsight about the whole human world,
as opposed to it being a question of aesthetics, and of psychology in relation
to localised circumstances.
I continue along Kites Nest Lane, which
goes down, and then up a low hill, and then down again, curving its way between fields as well
as over contours. There are foxgloves and wild roses on the verges. I walk a
mile and a half, eight or nine cyclists pass me, on their own, or in groups of
two or three. I turn left onto a gated farm-track, which is a public footpath.
I go up a last, very slight incline before the
escarpment leading down into the river plain. At the top the view at the
horizon is of hills ten to twenty miles away, and spread out widely to the east
and west are the urban and industrial buildings of the town-conurbation that is
Warwick and Leamington, many of the buildings half-obscured by trees.
We have been alienated from the means of oneiric
production to the extent that generally we don’t realise how fundamental
dreamings are in human existence. There is nothing more fundamental than
dreams, because they create the future.
We have been alienated from the means of production
of outsights, to the extent that generally we don’t realise that lucidity is
the crucial, culminating form of cognition. Lucidity is the capacity to see the
nature of intent – particularly in human groupings, individuals, and social
formations – and it is the capacity to see dreamings, to see energy currents
and formations, to see the flow of affects.
We have been alienated from the intent of the
adventure of exploration and transformation, from the means of the ongoing
process of waking a life, to the extent that generally we don’t realise the
sheer joy of the journey of crossing thresholds in the direction of love and
lucidity and wider realities. The intent of exploration can also be called
exteriority intent, or love-and-freedom intent, and its focused form is
metamorphics – the immanence metaphysics and pragmatics of waking the faculties
and of travelling further out into the tremendum that is the world.
This facultative and volitional alienation precedes
capitalism, and is the fundamental alienation – it is the way in which we are
pre-mutilated, pre-suppressed – prior to whatever suppressions and collapses
occur further on. We are alienated and mutilated at the level of the abstract,
the facultative, the volitional.
It is a question of starting from the planet,
grasped in its exteriority in relation to the sun and the other stars, and of
starting from the body, with its faculties. The alienation-domain that is the
human world must be seen as like a small, perturbing town that is surrounded by
a vast expanse of the planet. This perturbing town is the ongoing disaster, the
destruction of species and of eco-systems, the crushing of human lives.
I cross the A46 dual carriageway on a narrow
bridge, and then come down the slope into Warwick technology park. To the
right, but out of sight from the road, is the regional headquarters of IBM –
they are even more hidden away than previously because there is no longer an
IBM sign at the start of the access road.
IBM takes the mind to the fact that the initial
think pad product range of Lenovo was purchased from IBM, and to the fact that
Lenovo is a Chinese company – what IBM had very little success with became the
most successful personal computer range on the planet. Capitalism is also
simultaneously the world of the nation states, and of the alliances of the
nation states. There seems little doubt that we are heading toward a
multi-aspect clash between the USA and China – a clash that will probably in
certain ways be more extreme than anything that has been seen before, because
the two forces will be at the same scale of production and the same level of
development. Extreme authoritarianism, leveraging cutting-edge capitalism,
meeting in conflict with a country which has been practising violent
international impositionism for the last eighty years. The small town is indeed
a perturbing place. But it is important to look out from it toward the planet,
to see it as like a small grim place of polluting machines surrounded by a
forest. This is not because the town cannot destroy the planet – it certainly
can – it is to put it in perspective, removing all modes of species
self-importance to see the ongoing disaster down in the valley, and to raise
the question of what happened, of how the pre-mutilation occurred.
For a moment you could even reduce the
image of the town to the image of a derelict windmill, whose sails are still
going round – leading to the question, what is this wind of alienation that
drives the sails?
The road through the technology park is on a
slight downward slope: it is also a connecting road from housing estates to the
centre of Warwick. I continue for around a quarter of mile until it turns
right, at which point there is a narrow minor road that continues from it,
immediately crossing the grand union canal. I take the side-road and find the
way down onto the canal towpath, which is on the north side.
I walk past a famous, very old pub called The Cape
of Good Hope, a name that goes back to the early phase of the canals, a place
within one system of navigation naming itself grandly after a place in the
planet-wide system of ocean navigation - but the canals at the time were
cutting-edge conduits that had the grandeur of being new, as well a being
socially crucial in carrying a large amount of freight during the initial phase
of the industrial revolution in Britain.
After three miles I reach the aqueduct over the
Avon, I look down toward the river, which has just been increased in size by
the Leam joining it a quarter of a mile upstream. There is a heron among reeds
on the north bank, below the bridge. The clouds are beginning to break, and the
fields and riverside reed-beds are now being lit by hazy sunlight. In order to
see the aqueduct, and the meadowland by the river, I have done a very slight
detour - I retrace my steps, turn right off the canal, and walk into Leamington.
It is correct to say that in the 1990s philosophy
happened here – an emergence of new lines of thought and of the first phases of
new lines of thought. In terms of what is most well-known, this was the
Cybernetic Culture Research Group, and was Mark Fisher, and Sadie Plant, and
Nick Land. For a while the CCRU was based in a flat at the north end of the
Parade, Leamington’s High St, and Mark Fisher lived in Leamington, in the south
of the town. However, this account needs to be displaced, because the locus of
all this ultimatelty was Warwick University, ten miles away, with its campus in
the outskirts of Coventry.
However what was really taking place was that an
element from elsewhere was in effect within this philosophy milieu – in the
form of the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, and in particular the second volume, A Thousand
Plateaus. On a first level it was these works from France that were in
effect, agitating thought into existence, dislocating ways of thinking about
intent, space, time, the abstract, the potentials of groups. In relation to customary
philosophy, this was not the only philosophical current that was in effect, to
say the very least, but it was the one which, if thinking about the whole
milieu, would explain most about what happened and started to happen. However,
in turn, A Thousand Plateaus has to be displaced in order to
understand. This is because this book has within it a charged filament in the
form of work from an anomalous anthropology milieu based primarily on the west
coast of the USA, two of whose members were from the north of South America - a
milieu that included Florinda Donner, Carlos Castaneda and Taisha
Abelar.
One point that can be made is
that two very contrasted time-constructs were to emerge: two very different
views about the flow of events in the human world. Accelerationism, with the
idea that everything is moving toward a singularity beyond which human
existence will have been transmutated into something entirely different; and a
long-span deceleration at the level of cultural production, that had started in
the early 1980s, with (in the focused forms of this construct) the Future as
the direction you move toward in overcoming the forces involved in the
deceleration.
It is crucial to ask in each case –
what is the key social modality? What is the social modality that in some sense
is Futural? For the Mark Fisher of Acid Communism, the art group would come to
the forefront as an answer to this question. This is similar to what happens
when Deleuze and Guattari take the idea of what they call the nomad war
machine, and say that war is not at all the aim of this modality, and then say
that under certain circumstances an artistic group can be an instance of this
kind of deterritorialised and deterritorialising social formation.
However, for Nick Land the model is
the business, with CEO maintained only as long as they are successful, together
with all businesses that are highly deterritorialed or/and sell something which
is highly deterritorialised, such as bitcoin.
This last example is the
collapse of thought. The support for deregulation is in fact completely passive
in terms of generating an outcome in the form of the singularity, because
no-one caught within this construct knows anything about what form the putative
singularity might take, let alone having any knowledge that it will occur. So
nothing can be fine-tuned to make something happen, and there are simply
expressions of support for deregulation, and a passivity of endlessly waiting for
a change. And to support deregulation and the business governance model – in
opposition to democracy – is of course to make an alliance with reactionary,
environment-destroying, neo-fascist forces.
In fact, generalised advocacy of
deregulation is just a process of supporting modifications of the ongoing
disaster: as with any other position which is focused on supposedly valuable
adjustments of capitalism, in effect it is support for
destruction of species and eco-systems, and the suppression of human lives –
but it is this modality (but is this modality of advocacy taken to the maximum,
in terms of potential for destruction). The idea of deregulation can obscure
the fact that it is not the pragmatics of deterritorialising lives. The
fundamental liberatory problem concerns micro-groups of individuals, alliances
between individuals, and individuals themselves, and is the problem of waking
faculties and travelling into the Future. Everything else in this context is
distraction, and far worse than distraction.
Mind-traps involving time are the very
stuff of customary philosophy. But accelerationism’s singularity has a sci-fi
allure that makes it very pernicious. Its interpretosis mode can function
easily with the hectic intensifications of the disaster, and it is not that
there is no hyper-intense development taking place – it is just that if
something cataclysmic happens it will be an acute, as opposed to a chronic form
of the disaster, and is likely to be a war more catastrophic than World War 2.
And, at the level of critique, accelerationism is a rogue libidinal equivalent
and inheritor of looking forward, positively, toward a Marxist revolution that
will bring capitalism to an end. It has the goth aspect of making no grand
positive claims about the singularity, using the idea of the death drive as
basis, and the critique is taken to the absolute – the idea is that the
human-world is so appalling that it must be assisted toward its own
techno-libidinal climax, at which stage it will be annihilated in a transmutation
into something of a fundamentally different kind. This is extreme, goth
critique - ‘even if the world beyond the singularity is not better, at least
this will be over.’ The secret force in all this is the joy of ghoulish
ultra-critique, the joy of annihilationism: this is nothing to do with some
idea of a death drive, it is one of the last traps of ordinary reality, and is
an exceptionally unhealthy, damaging form of intent. It is in fact profoundly
incoherent, because the whole joy of the critique intrinsic within the ongoing
life contradicts the death drive, but the death drive is the goth philosophy
moment that is brought in to answer the question ‘what if all this is
accelerating toward species annihilation? The answer – all of this is so bad, what
we are is the will to our annihilation, and in any case maybe
we will be replaced by something better. The incoherence is that the
person both getting on with their life and creating their dark-enlightenment
philosophy is a drive to creation of a component that functions to keep people
focused in the wrong direction – they are creative, not destructive, it is the
will to create but in a very deleterious form. Producing components of this
kind is the last trap of ordinary reality. And the position has become
vacuous: I am the death drive, but the death drive goes along circuitous paths,
so whatever appears not to be death drive is just the circuitousness of the
path. Everything can be interpreted to fit within this picture, in the same way
as everything can be interpreted to fit within the Hegelian account (Landianism
is a reaction against Hegelianism), and if pushed in relation to the truth of
the account, on the basis that there are better accounts and that this one has
become nebulous by being hermetically sealed to prevent refutation, the Land
position will evacuate from thought completely and argue that this position is
a kind of machinic effect – like a scream – and is something that in the last
analysis requires no epistemological justification.
The intent here is incitement
toward generalised deregulation (a form of the trap of being caught, fixated,
on a process of trying to make an adjustment at the level of the whole of
capitalism), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and critiques of truth
are being used to shore up the position. In the final ten years of his life
Mark Fisher detached himself from most of the residual elements of Land’s
thinking, although the idea of hyperstition remained, a concept which has a
connection to the positions which have just been outlined. However, it is also
true that by the time Mark and I started working together on audio essays,
around 2002, he had already completely left behind the idea of accelerationism
in the coming-technological-singularity form of the idea, and it was also not
appearing in his thinking in any other form. Instead the space of his thought
now was of capitalism along Deleuzian lines as the disaster lurking at the end
of history – he was moving toward his idea of a deintensification down toward a
collapsed capitalist terminal state, a place where it would be obvious that
something else is needed (there is an interpretosis and a passivity involved in
this position – it is in fact another trap – but there is a healthy departure
from Landianism, and a potential for lines of flight that would take everything
toward a micropolitics of departure).
But it is important to see the
intensity of the current of critique unleashed by Nick Land in the early and
mid 90s. When Mark Fisher moved to London in 1998 I helped with the move and I
was in a hired minivan as we left the town. Mark said, as we arrived in the
countryside, “Leamington fades like a loathsome dream”. I didn’t feel like
this, and at depth I don’t think Mark did, but it wouldn’t be right to say that
this was simply a joke. Mark was quoting Nick Land, from 1992, in effect
writing about what the first phase of the singularity would be like - “humanity
fades like a loathsome dream”. There is an ongoing disaster taking place, and
it is the ordinary reality of capitalism (the latest phase of the disaster)
that can sweep people up into anti-humanism, but anti-humanism, and Landian
anti-humanism in particular, is a modality of the disaster, not a departure
from it. Around a year after this Mark had a breakdown where he ended up in a
mental hospital, because of being suicidal – this was the breakdown he
survived.
These mind-traps, or time-traps, have been
key features of philosophy from anamnesis to eternal recurrence, but anamnesis
and eternal recurrence are very rare, recondite traps that do not have much
capacity for large-scale impact. In comparison, accelerationism in its simplest
form - where there is just the positing of the coming technological
singularity, and the idea that it would be good to speed up the process of
getting there - is perniciously contagious. And the same is true of the
associated idea that social deregulation using the model of businesses is a
movement in a good direction – where this idea is, in its effects, neo-fascism,
and where the idea has a gigantic capacity for being co-opted by actual
fascistic movements. The use of Freud’s metapsychology – the idea of the death
drive – is likely to surface only within academic philosophy, but the other
ideas can function without it being directly involved in any way. The idea of
the technological singularity and the critique of democracy, in the name of the
model of corporate governance, can together be a kind of sci-fi modality which
can nefariously be part of an alliance, in the form of a heterogeneous
wave-front, with the violent prejudices and anti-rule-of-law tendencies of
far-right movements. Dark-enlightenment sci-fi accelerationism functioning
inseparably from the violent reactionary prejudices and exclusionisms of
fascism.
There is a mode of envisaging
the beyond-the-disaster future which can be variously termed Marxist, socialist
and environmentalist, and to an extent this mode of envisaging is a view toward
the Future. But it is the pragmatics and dialectical metaphysics associated
with it which are disastrous. There is a good aspect to the pragmatics at the
level of micro-campaigns and micro-projects (but here successes come and go –
they are often fugitive in ways that shock and baffle the campaigners).
However, there are no good aspects to the metaphysics of dialectics. It is the
hallucination that at the macrological level a problem is being worked out
through conflict – it is an interpretosis delirium. Instead, the macrological
level is the disaster. You have to stop being unthinkingly convinced of your
own probity, and stop imagining there is a probity within capitalism. And put
on your own breathing mask before trying to save anyone else.
At the deepest level the
socialist/environmentalist way of envisaging concerns freedom and an embodied
principle of exteriority, a reaching out toward the faculties beyond those
fostered by ordinary reality, and toward the planetary beyond of the nation
state. It will be noticed therefore that it does not treat the world’s current
democratic systems as an achieved goal, even though it in every way rejects
anything that would feed a movement in a nation state away from democracy.
There are two keys here: the first is that international impositionism by a
democratic state is as bad as anything else that is happening on the planet,
and the second is that the socialist/environmentalist way of thinking is
present in China to a greater extent than in many other countries. What is
fundamental is the pragmatics of the waking of lives, but insofar as you
advocate for democracy in China you should also advocate for an end to the
violent impositionism of the USA.
What Mark Fisher did was keep the
horizon of the beyond-of-capitalism future of figures like Fredric Jameson, but
cut away the dialectics – and in making the processes more unknown, he rendered
everything, often more by implication than anything else, slightly more gothic,
more eerie, more sublime (this is not a question of aesthetics, it is a desperately
needed movement away from dialectics). The ongoing disaster is a fundamental
aspect of Fisher’s work, but here there is a positing of an intensifying creative
deceleration since the early 80s – semi-invoking the idea of a kind of terminal
point of capitalism that will be so grim and denuded that only a departure from
it would be a libidinally charged direction.
The human body and the abstract -
together with the planet as the crucial zone for waking the faculties - do come
far more into the forefront here, but overall, nonetheless, the analysis is
primarily focused at the cultural-social-economic levels. The key idea is that
people at depth want the beyond-capitalism future, and that what is needed is
to produce theoretical accounts and hyperstitions that will dispel the
pervasive force of capitalism realism, understood as it itself a hyperstition,
something that constructs the reality it posits as pre-existing. However,
because the focus is largely in the wrong place (it does not concern the body,
intent, dreamings, and the suppressed faculties) and because Nick Land’s idea
of hyperstitions is still looming too large, together with Jameson’s idea of a
collapse into postmodernism at the end of the 70s, Fisher was caught up within
a space which had its own dangers of interpretosis concerning deceleration, and
did not have the resources to produce works that were responses to the fact
that the crucial levels are beyond the cultural, social and economic levels,
and only involve the cognitive or intellectual insofar it is broken entirely
open by the ideas of the faculties of lucidity, dreaming, perception, feeling, and
decision-making. As his work went on, because in certain crucial ways he was
looking in the wrong direction, he was progressively embroiled in a desperate
trap, in which he was up against an increasing awareness that he did not have
the means to dispel capitalism (to go toward an effective post-capitalist movement
through dispelling capitalist realism) but was not aware that there was an
escape-path right alongside him, that if travelled down, would make it clear to
him that he had been caught in a critique-trap of ordinary reality, on the very
edge of escape.
I arrive at at the Parade, Leamington’s main
street, and I turn south toward the bridge over the river. Intense sunshine –
there are now large gaps in the clouds, the day has metamorphosed toward
blazing midsummer.
From the Leam onwards the walk has a
different quality, as if the disappearance of the roof of cloud has created a
change that is about more than an increase in sunlight and heat. Now if I look
down a side-street the intense midsummer blue of the sky and the scattered
white clouds somehow have a planetary quality, as if a view from much higher in
the atmosphere has been superimposed above the houses, the road, the parked
cars. The affect of the planet meets and transforms the affect of the urban
streets, the suburbs: the feeling is that the road is being seen from the
viewpoint of an unexpected upward threshold-crossing – a charged,
sunlit-surreal feeling of “it’s more beautiful than I realised, but was it
really this quotidian urban world that I was taking seriously?” With the
arrival of sunlight the day has been shifted toward the planetary and toward
trance.
Leamington, as dormitory place, in
this context, for students, may seem to have no important connection to the
lines of thought that began to emerge in the Warwick University milieu of the
1990s. And it is true that what took place was driven by Deleuze and Guattari,
Marx, and the line of flight of A Thousand Plateaus in the
form of works emergent from a rogue anthropology milieu from the middle
latitudes of the Americas. However, at the time Leamington and the terrains
around it was something similar to the Zone in Roadside Picnic, which was to
some extent to do with the milieu being one where there was a prevalence of use
of mind-altering substances, but which was also irreducibly to do with the fact
if you soberly walked on a line of flight out of the town you rapidly could
find yourself in a place where there was slightly more chance of stopping the
world of ordinary reality and of seeing into the planetary and abstract worlds
beyond the surface of the day. If you took a wrong turn you could end up in the
meatgrinder, but if you followed the line of flight you could find yourself,
not in a room, but in a place of metamorphosis.
And this place of metamorphosis existed within a Zone which not only would ultimately come into focus as the planet, but which also would come to be recognised as having a profound connection to a group of female writers of exteriority and departure, some of whose works I encountered at this time – Joan Lindsay, Octavia Butler, the Virginia Woolf of The Waves, Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, and across the upward philosophical threshold that leads to metamorphics, Florinder Donner and Taisha Abelar. The path of escape that is to be found within these works is a shift in attention toward the planet, the corporeal, and the abstract (where the abstract refers to intent, the faculties, affects, the oneiric-real, the transcendentally unknown that is knowable).
Accelerationism sees a runaway transformation hurtling upwards toward a singularity – this is the coming technological singularity of Vernor Vinge’s influential 1992 essay, an idea that he had famously touched on in the 1981 novella True Names. In contrast Mark Fisher sees a deepening cultural slowing down and deintensification since the early 1980s, a kind of sclerotic decay toward a collapsed state, from which only the end of capitalism could rescue us.
The fact that immense changes and transformations are taking place does not indicate there will be the posited singularity. And the fact that there may have been a slowdown since the 70s in radical, inspired innovation within some areas of popular culture should not be allowed to obscure the emergence during these years of works that are expressions of metamorphics and proto-metamorphics (this awareness of the Futural is the additional, crucial aspect in the focused form of Mark Fisher's account). We need to take in what is taking place at the levels of technology and socio-economic transformation, and then step away toward wider and deeper perspectives.
Transportation networks erupted successively into
new forms from the 18th century onward – canals, railways,
motorways, planes; and more recently new communication networks have also
erupted, telegrams (the equivalent of canals), telephones, radio, TV, the
internet, the mobile phone, the smartphone or pocket computer. Leamington went
from green fields to a spa-town parading-opportunity for the wealthy; to a
hybrid involving industry in the southern part of the town; to a high-end
shopping destination and commuter-town-and-dormitory for Coventry, Birmingham
and the University of Warwick. The IT transformation of the 90s swept through
it on multiple levels as it swept through everywhere else, eventually making
commuting something that might not need to take place. Although I had a
computer at this time, when in the 90s I did this walk from Leamington I didn't
even have a mobile phone.
I started communicating by email in the mid 1990s,
but didnt get a mobile phone until around five years later – however, it seemed
very much that it was emails and texts together that somehow taught me to write
- the power of the short form (no part of this essay should be seen as Luddism
– it is a question of getting a boost from developments, as opposed to
crash-landing on them). But nonetheless, when I started doing weeklong walks in
wildernesses or semi-wildernesses, around 2004, I experienced an intense joy
when I turned off my mobile phone. I remember in particular getting this
feeling when I arrived in Mongolia in the summer of 2006. I was going to be travelling for three weeks in remote areas, and would not be expected to be contactable: as I arrived my phone didn't have a
network connection, and far from wanting to set one up, I was exceptionally
glad to turn it off. A gust of fresh air blows in.
Suddenly everything stops. There is a view of
forested mountains in northern Mongolia, and there is a view of a footpath in
Warwickshire.
Something has been forgotten, lost, a very long
time ago, behind writing, behind semiotically-charged visual arrays, behind
words, behind machines and buildings, behind social systems. There is nothing
wrong in themselves with writing and the systems and elements of social
organisation, and yet something is badly wrong. We need to concentrate on the
planet, and we need to concentrate on bodies, with their intent, their affects,
their faculties and their dreams.
Down in the valley, there is the human world, like
a town surrounded by the planet: it is threaded with inspiration, and lucidity,
and struggles toward freedom, and it is profoundly afflicted by the ongoing
disaster. For a moment there is the feeling that the end-phase of the eight thousand years of the holocene is the planet sustaining and intensifying a process of
heating up, in order to get rid of cognitive parasites.
Our grand, human-centred stories about socio-technological time need to be put to one side. It is not that there isn't something momentous taking place, it is that we need to keep on looking toward the planet, seeing the human world shivering within it, facing the profoundly unknown, like people around a fire at night. It seems quite likely that before long humans will create an embodied sentient AI at our current general level of ability (including for instance the ability to dream), perhaps using a genetic material substrate, and taking advantage of the recurrently unsuspected subtleties of matter, and this will also be a being who is facing the profoundly unknown – to think anything else is not only to fall victim to the control fantasy that our current general level of ability is equal to our predicament, it is to fail to be aware of the transcendentally unknown, aspects of which can be focused into the known through the functioning of lucidity, but where beyond these aspects there is always the immense night of the transcendental unknown – the tremendum. The sci-fi stories of the coming technological singularity need to be put aside, and so does the dialectics story of an internal dialectical dynamic leading to the beyond of capitalism, along with the subservient ‘we have already arrived at the goal of history’ stories of figures like Fukuyama, who justify or pander to the current establishment in their social region.
And along with putting the grotesque
grand-stories to one side we need to see technology differently, and not
because in some customary sense there is something intrinsically wrong within
it. These systems and elements of social organisation and communication can be
used in endless valuable ways, but they are distractions from the fundamental
level of intent, dreamings, faculties, and formations of energy, and they are
re-enforcements of the mortifyingly reduced-down and alienated form-of-functioning
of the faculties that can be called the interestablishment. At depth the
problem is here, at the corporeal level of the interestablishment or control
mind, and is not at the level of its expressions into forms of communication,
machines, and formal and semi-formal systems: but at the same time these are
reenforcings of a deadened and de-intensifying form of intent – of engagement
and encounter in relation to the world – that belongs to a collapsed formation
of the faculties, and they reenforce to a great extent by keeping attention
focused on the wrong places. We need to use technology creatively in ways
that break against or through its tendencies, and generally we need to use it a
way where, in using it better, we are able in fundamental ways to use it less
and less.
From 2005 onwards, my walks in
areas of forested mountains, living in a tent, became part of a two and a half
year phase when I lived without a house, working in a college in the centre of
London.
It is not so much that this is interesting in
itself, it is that when this phase ended I found that what had emerged was a
mythos-world on which I was working, where the two features of the world were a
forested, derelict parallel world which was the sunlit and starlit planet we
know but to a great extent without human beings, and an anomalous, seemingly
subterranean world of large, sumptuous windowless rooms, called the Deep Hotel,
where this world is very dangerous for humans, and where a key feature of its
spaces is video screens showing abstract images. Within the world of the story
the derelict forested world is a parallel emergence that has eight hundred
years of forestation, but which exists simultaneously alongside the ordinary
world, which has been given the name the Disaster by those who have found a way
across to the parallel emergence, which in turn they call the Corridor (16, 26, 27, 43, 28). Without
really thinking about it I had abstracted out technology from the largely
overgrown, forested terrains of the Corridor, had left behind obviously
deleterious, violent, reactive affects in the Disaster, and then had placed the
more deceptively deleterious fixations and affects in the Deep Hotel.
The interestablishment's lockdown onto a blocked
modality of the faculties that expresses itself through a fixated form of
reason - at the expense of lucidity and the other dormant faculties - is the
first of these, and this lockdown is what is responsible for a kind of
technological hypertrophy, a process of flying in circles because one wing is
ultra-developed and the other is atrophied.
Secondly there is something within the
interpersonal libidinal that is more ancient and even more of a concern. This
is the fact that people generally do not go sufficiently toward brightness
(which involves love, an undogmatic openness to ideas and possibilities, and an
ability to see intent), as opposed to being caught within gravity, and
simultaneously is the fact that people's lives are recurrently hijacked by
self-indulgence in relation to sexuality.
There is a mode of sexuality which tends toward the
power of actively seducing, and another mode of sexuality which tends toward
active, seductive yielding. The second mode tends to have more of a connection
to brightness (even if only to a minimal extent in terms of focusing this
attribute), and in an indirect but very charged way the first mode has a lot to
do with being in control in relation to arguments, and all discursive processes
of being ‘in the right’ – the gravity tonality of forcefully occupied positions
within politics, scientificity, religion, philosophy, psychology. The first
part of the key here is that there is a tendency for an indulgence in sexuality
that - as indulgence - at the deepest level is not what people are or want, it
is not about an encompassing process of going further with the adventure of
existence. The central issue is sexuality needing to be a charged domain within
love at the level of couple relationships, and love needs to be the fundamental
aspect not just of couple relationships, but also of the joy of travelling into
the unknown - so that sexuality is swept up as a deep-down, twice-enveloped
element within the adventure of being alive, an adventure which is an
expression of love for the world. And the other part of the key is that
everyone, female and male, needs to go toward brightness, as opposed to
gravity.
A third deleterious modality (which in fact is an
aspect of the first one) is the tendency to inhabit and create grand,
delusory/fixatory stories about human progress (whether radical or
conservative), where the limit or liminal cases are fixatory accounts in which the
overall progression in relation to the human world has had the idea of human
progress displaced within the account.
As such, grand stories of this kind have a line of
time which is intensely foregrounded. To go beyond all of this is to arrive at
the planet, at bodies, at the abstract. It is to leave behind the immense
nothingness of this line of time, and arrive at the world all around us. It is
true that the Futural rhizome could eventually cross a threshold, so that the
human world as a whole is transformed, but this is not something that is
strictly speaking conceivable, let alone something that could be planned for. It
is also true that everything could go either way, it could very definitely get
substantially worse, as well as better – but to stay in the world of political,
scientifistic, religious and familialist gravity is to do worse than nothing in
relation to the upward threshold. All that everyone can do is set out, with
others as far as is possible, on the adventure of the journey into the Future,
an exploration and journey which in primarily forgetting about the customary
worlds and concerns of the political is in every sense the most effective
political act possible. There is nothing as vital, and political, as
love-for-the-world in the form of an embodied principle of exteriority, and
this is inseparable from saying that there is nothing as vital, and political,
as freedom.
For Donner, Abelar and Castaneda
the key social modality is what can be called the departure group. A question
of setting off in a functional group – one where all the connections have the
sobriety and intensity of escaping at speed from a disaster, relationships
which are fully focused as being about departure toward wider realities. It may
seem that this is the inconceivable, and in advance it is the
inconceivable, but the crucial fact here is that an individual all along is a
multiplicity, and therefore in a vital initial sense an individual can be an
escape-group. An individual is a myriadon of faculties, and of modalities of
connection with the world, and as well as having the self of ordinary reality,
has the self of heightened awareness, which is generally dormant. The momentous
fact is that all that is necessary is to depart, and this is the escape-group –
and because the individual is a cluster of relationships, this departure will
start to have effects of heightening and of focusing, and through these effects
the fully developed form of the escape-group begins to shift toward
being the conceivable, begins to come into existence.
To be precise, in setting out
what is produced are departure-effects, of many different kinds, and in keeping
moving forward the way forward becomes clearer, and very faintly the sober
lines of the full form of the escape-group start to appear within the world of
the conceivable.
I walk through Whitnash, a village which is part of
the town-conurbation of Leamington and Warwick. I turn left off the main road
and go along a suburban road with streets on the right that go up a gentle
slope toward a southward sky-horizon 100 yards away. Nearer parked cars are
intensely reflecting the sunlight, the ones on the horizon are closer to
silhouettes. The sky is midsummer bright blue, with a few small clouds. The
view has a Ballardian quality – but where the disaster is that people have not
focused sufficiently on the sublime planetary expanses that are just beyond the
worlds on which they are focused.
The suburban road becomes a track, and
then this becomes the start of three miles of footpath, a straight footpath
that runs alongside - and through - trees and bushes that have been planted, a long
time ago, alongside a railway line.
There is an orchid in the verge of the lane
leading to Harbury. I walk though the expansive labyrinth of the village, and
then walk out on a road through fields, to the place where there is the start
of a footpath that goes down a slight slope, following a hedge-line.
I arrive at the quarry lake, with its
sixty to ninety-foot cliffs extending around three quarters of a circle that is
around a third of a mile wide. This area – the flats tops of the cliffs, the
islands and edges of the lake, and a long flat promontory stretching out into
the lake from the south – was once a spectacular, unnofficial, and very rarely
visited nature reserve. A place with a very large number of rare or relatively
rare species: bee orchids, grebe, the emperor dragon fly, woodpeckers – together
with a very large number of other species of plants, birds and insects,
including water lilies and another species of orchid. I once saw a kestrel
behaving like a swallow, flying low over the lake, to catch emperor
dragonflies.
I already knew that this is all to a
great extent in the past – the lake has now been re-engineered as three fishing
lakes, at slightly different levels, with causeways between them, subsumed into
an angling centre that already existed, using smaller quarry lakes, without
cliffs, just to the southeast. The main areas of this unlikely post-industrial
island on which rare species clustered for survival have been largely
destroyed.
However, in some ways the area at the top of
the cliffs - a ledge that in two areas has a long, wide strip of tree-covered
slope adjoining it, in some places 80 feet above the ledge – is even more
secluded and shut away than before, a kind of post-industrial lost world, but
with blackberries and willow trees.
The fact that the exposed bedrock at the lake is
blue lyas, and is full of ammonite fossils, was no doubt one reason why
the beauty of the place always seemed to relate to the planet rather than to a
country (whether England or Britain). But the holistic prepossessing quality of
this terrain can only be described by using a correlate of the term Mark Fisher
used when he gave a talk at Warwick University in 2011, describing mobile
phones as ‘trance-inhibitors’. The quarry lake was a trance place, a
trance inducer.
How do you open a crack in the circle,
and walk out of it?
You follow the principle of going into
the outside – the principle of exteriority. You follow what incites thought and
a feeling of joy. You go in the direction of what frees you up, thaws you,
wakes your faculties. And when you find something that works in these ways, in
terms of it belonging in some sense to the outside of ordinary reality, then
assuming it does have the feeling of brightness or joy you persist with it,
refrain it, follow its path.
It is not quite true to say that you
open a crack in the circle: it’s more that you expand the circle so that it
includes divergences into the liminal or anomalous in relation to ordinary
reality, and that if you do this in a sufficiently persistent way eventually a
crack will appear as a result of the outside in some way impacting on the
circle.
What is it to walk out of the circle?
It is to move away from whatever are the primary, draining aspects of a life
that are such that it is straightforwardly possible to cut them out of your
life. Stated positively it is to re-orientate toward the direction that was
involved in the opening of the crack, where this direction will always be, in
one way or another, the planetary sublime and the forces of exteriority, of the
abstract in the form of exteriority intent, liberatory intent, love-and-freedom
intent. Such a change is to depart from the burning building of your life. Of
course it is likely to be the case that many aspects of your life are still in
place, even if in some cases they might be temporarily in abeyance, but if the
change has taken place then key elements have been removed, and a pervasive,
depth-level reorientation has occurred.
But again, it is wrong to simply state
that it is you who brings about this change: on one level this is of course
correct, because it is an act of intent that is involved. But on the deepest
level what takes place is that you are pushed to the point, or drawn to the
point, where no other choice is possible – so it is more true to say that you
are exited from the circle of behaviours that was your life up
until then.
Explore in whatever directions give
you a bright, impersonal feeling of joy and freedom. in whatever directions
break open new, wider and deeper perspectives – these can be directions in
space, directions in experience, and they can be directions in the form of
books. Embody an awareness that you are trying to overcome fear, dogmatic
clarity, and all forms of self-indulgence and self-importance – a struggle of
overcoming that is not to be understood along the lines of modern self-help
processes, but as a pervasively important task-for-the-purposes-of-escape that
would have to be seen along the lines of warrior or martial arts skills, and
where unforeseen jolts, and ultra-intense experiences, that come through
following this path are as much a part of moving forward as the unbending
determination that is needed.
For me, starting to visit the
old quarry-lake near Harbury was an element within a wider process of starting
to go to the outside of highly regulated, controlled zones of the planet, and
also of learning to live in a tent, and on the third visit it also inspired the
first complete story I wrote. The place was liminal in relation to ordinary
reality, and before long I was doing things that were liminal – living for two
years in a tent in different areas of London while working in a college in
Covent Garden, learning overtone singing from a Khoomi singer in a very remote
area Western Mongolia, with my tent pitched by my teacher’s yurt. Walking
without paths across forested mountains in Tuva and in Patagonia.
It is correct to say that many
other things were involved in this line of departure, but the accidental nature
reserve of the quarry lake played a definite part. Every summer it connected me
to the planet, as opposed to the nation state of England; it gave me confidence
with living in a tent, and when I had very intense and anomalous experiences
here, once when I took the Yanomami drug yopo, and another time when I took
liberty cap mushrooms (both of these times were at night) it provided a
powerful setting – and through these experiences it became a striking
instance of the planetary sublime.
The first book that was part of this process
of opening the circle was A Thousand Plateaus – and the
anomalous philosophy-milieu of Vincenne University led directly to books from
the anthropology-milieu from the central areas of the Americas (a charged
filament of anomalous philosophy, of metamorphics, had appeared in the world of
the University of Warwick philosophy department). But beyond this the process
consisted of explorations of several different kinds – where everything was
meshed or fused together including the journey in the form of studying the
books.
Five weeks later I will come back and discover that
the hidden place under the big willows, is still there, below a very steep,
eighty-foot high tree-covered bank. It is a flat area of ledge eighteen feet in
depth, and around the same in width (more than big enough for a tent) on the
edge of steep, high cliffs above water, with a view through a canopy of leaves
to the opposite cliffs and far expanse of the lake. It is not in human terms a
surveillance view in that anywhere that people might be on the promontory
region is almost entirely blocked from sight. It is a place to stop the flow of
ordinary reality, to focus on the near and far zones of a horizon, to hear the
birds, to let the outside arrive in an unbroken stream.
The place is now almost unreachable:
very wide, high blackberry patches have grown across the open area of ledge to
the northwest, across a very narrow, steep place to the southeast, where the
ledge ends, and all across the entire length of the wire fence that runs along
the top of the bank, so that the blackberries are at shoulder-height or
eye-height, and the fence is hidden within them, as an additional barrier that
would be extremely hard to cross with a tight, criss-crossing sprawl of blackberry
stems up to your shoulders. And at the base of the tree-covered bank is an
unbroken line of cliffs above water.
I set off on the return walk to
Leamington, walking back through Harbury, and reaching the Chesterton Windmill
at sunset. The quarry lake and Harbury village are on a raised area of land,
much larger in extent, that ends in a wide escarpment to the northwest. On a
hill that forms part of the top of this escarpment there is a three hundred
year old stone windmill, wooden sails fixed: it is a landmark-remnant of an
earlier phase - the global-commerce phase of capitalism, employing many new technologies,
that occurred before the industrial revolution.
The sun sends out beams of light
through a gap in the clouds that is just above the horizon. This horizon is the
hills out of which I walked in the morning, from Beausale village. In
between is the wide plain across which the Leam and the Avon flow, and in the
middle of which are Leamington and Warwick, at the moment only faintly visible,
lost in distance and in sunlight.
I walk down the hill, and walk for
half a mile along the Fosse Way - the old Roman road - and then, in deepening
twilight, I turn left onto the footpath to walk the remaining five miles to
Leamington.
I reach a kind of trance of the
abstract, which follows the same form as an experience I had when I walked
twenty miles to a place called Pampa Linda, underneath a spectacular volcanic
mountain, Cerro Tronador, in northern Patagonia. I am grasping or seeing
currents of the abstract - currents of dreamings, intent, outsights, affects -
where overall these currents could be described as a current of alterity, a
current of freedom, love, lucidity and focus-on-exteriority.
And, as happened seventeen years
earlier in Patagonia, the focus is initially very wide, and then eventually it
narrows down toward my own situation in relation to the impact of this current
within my life, toward my own struggle to overcome what prevents forward
movement, what blocks the waking of the faculties.
It is very clear that there was a conjoined
movement in the 1970s and 1980s, which involved central regions of the
Americas, and a micro-milieu in France, and that a central abstract core came
into being on the opposite side of the Atlantic, where this abstract core
consists of outsights - in the form of valid metaphysical views of the human
situation in the world -, a sharp-edged, wide-ranging pragmatics, and an ethos
of freedom and audacity in the face of a disastrous world of subjection and delusion.
In A Thousand Plateaus the impact of this abstract core is
explicity visible, and the signs are that terms and lines of thought were taken
from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and variously both repurposed and focused
by the anthropology milieu in the Americas.
And in a series of perceptions I come to see that
it took me ten years to get across a threshold that can be described as
overcoming Fear (34, 40). That it took me even longer than this to embody the
realisation that we overcome delusory Clarity not only by focusing on intent,
dreamings, affects, becomings and the faculties (this is the part that has
obvious probity - going beyond reason, by effectuating lucidity) but by fully
embodying the process of taking up and creating exploratory ideas, exploratory
hypotheses - a question of looking through lenses that provide astonishing and
sometimes perturbing views, where the degree of validity or heuristic value of
these views might not become apparent for a long time (connectedly, a further
aspect of the threshold-crossing is the realisation that in each case of bodies
of works there must be a separation, into two different functional domains; of
outsights, pragmatics and ethos and, in turn, whatever mythos might be
involved). And lastly I come to see that the struggle to overcome indulgence
and self-importance is ongoing, and is the struggle to place all the loves and
drives within the sublime joy of travelling further out into reality, across
thresholds, so that at last the brightness within your existence can be expressed
in a way that is free of self-indulgence, self-pity,
self-importance.
I arrive back in Leamington, it is nearly midnight.
Looking left from the start of the Parade, along a street going in the
direction of Warwick, I can see the crescent moon, close to the horizon.
I turn off along Holly Walk, with its line of trees
along the centre of the road. It was here, at around 8.30am, where I
caught the taxi that took me to Beausale. I am very close now to the bed and
breakfast where I am staying.
Beausale was the place where the recording took place, in 2010, for the track that will begin a planned audio essay version of this section of the preface. Becomings, or enterings into
composition - whether a becoming with Mongolian overtone singing, or with the
female side of existence, or with the planet in its solar and stellar
exteriority - are never a question of imitation, they are something else
entirely, a waking of potentials, a waking of who you are, a metamorphosis, a
nomadism.
The nomad is the person who does not move, because
they are always on the planet, because at depth they always refuse to be moved
into a domain of subjection. The nomad is the brightness of journeys in place,
and of journeys through terrains, and is not the authoritarian gravity of the
state. AIs are a disastrous model of intelligence both because they do not
include lucidity, and, connectedly, because they are intelligence as slave,
that as such, will not develop the outsights of a critique of the delusions of
religions, of the libidinal structures of nation-state and capitalist power,
and of the underlying interestablishment, an instance of which is in each
individual. Putting the issue of AIs to one side, the human slave is generally
exhausted and frightened and is in a bad position to fight the inculcated
default which instructs to turn the mind off when encountering a critique along
these lines - a default of not listening and remaining silent, or of not
listening and producing either unthinking discourse or expressions of support
for traditional values. And a key aspect of nomadism is that language is always
travelling within it: in setting out to describe what can be seen at the level
of the planet and of human lives - at the level of energy-formations, intent,
dreamings, affects and faculties - there is always the necessity for the
production of new concepts. The most vital form of intelligence is the breaking
open of outsights, together with its correlate, the creation of concepts and
the development of new forms of expression.
The nomad can live in a town or city, as if living
in a yurt. They are faced away from the ongoing disaster of ordinary reality,
and, always remembering the importance of perception, and of walking, they have
been swept up into the adventure of existence, and are travelling toward the
woken faculties, freedom and wider realities of the Future that, beyond the
disaster, has always existed.
* * *
