9.

Explorations



This blog is a three-part book in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The book is a continuation from Hidden Valleys, Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).





Part One: Zone Horizon   (1 - 18)

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

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

       The difficulty of walking toward the Future does not really vary much in relation to the time in which you happen to live. What varies is the degree to which the Future is visible.

    It is perhaps possible – tentatively – to say a little about what it means to walk in this sense. To say a little about the thresholds of contact-with-the-world - and of the body - which are involved in moving in this direction (and eventually in the process some of the extraordinary thinking of the Deleuze of 67/68 will become part of this account).

   Very early in the life of a human individual a “congelation” forms:  the developed form of this congelation is an aggregation of all the organs and faculties – both relatively developed, and nascent – into a co-existence that is severely dominated by sexuality, alimentary appetite, practical/strategic reason (and reason in general), and speech. The eyes, if they are functioning, are also a node of the domination.

    The keep-everything-under-control aspect of practical reason in its congelation form ensures that the congelation is effectively a setting out to die – a setting out to slowly de-intensify in a Stockholm syndrome modality of not putting up a fight against immensely and imponderably powerful surrounding forces.

    On three primary levels a human being is vastly more than this. On the level of the other organs; on the level of the wider, suppressed modalities of the dominant faculties and organs; and – most fundamentally - on the level of lucidity, dreaming, feeling and depth-level intent.

    A symptomatic aspect of the congelation is a turbulent, dysfunctional cycling between different “subjectified” or “reactive” moods. Fear, jealousy, anger, anxiety, self-pity, self-importance, envy, embarrassment, relief-happiness, sexual pleasure, distress, depression, rage, outrage, etc. The tyranny of moods. The sleep of reason that produces monsters is sleep in the form of reason in its fixated, dominatory modality - reason without lucidity.

    But if someone begins to wake the entirety of the self, momentously new horizons begin to appear. The starting point is someone being aware of the direction of Love-and-Freedom: the direction of brightness (as opposed to gravity); the direction of an entranced love for the world; the direction of being in love; the direction of letting go of words and perceiving the surrounding world; the direction of the desire to know what we are at the level of intent; the direction of the impersonal lucidity that is found in poetry, philosophy and art that have the brightness that comes from being expressions of Love-and-Freedom.

   But the starting-point, given this basis, is a heightening of organs that are not part of the domination-system of the congelation, and simultaneously a heightening of those that are. And it is also a process of letting go of internal verbalising in the direction of perception. A concentration, for instance, on breathing and tactile sensation (the two are joined) which is part of a process of learning how to let go of the internal dialogue (hearing could also be the primary starting point, instead of the tactile sense, and will inevitably also be centrally involved). And with this practice existing alongside a waking of sexuality, of practical/strategic reason, of alimentary appetite and of speech (insofar as there is any need for attention to be given to these areas there needs to a greater extent to be a degree of focus on the first three - but primarily, given the wider basis and the waking of the other organs, these developments will take place as a consequence).

   The final element that must then occur is not one that can simply be made to happen. It is a fundamentally required detachment: a detachment both from self-pity, and from the machineries of pity (both personal and social) that impose on people in ways that prevent them from expressing love in their actions, and from reaching the freedom that is lucidity.

   A shock of some kind is required to make this detachment emerge. And if it has emerged  once, an ability can then be acquired whereby – initially with difficulty – it is possible to go carefully toward what produces such shocks in order to bring back the detachment, so that slowly it begins to be more of a permanent presence.

   When this detachment is in full effect the person is beyond the tyranny of moods – they are in a state of sublime “nondifference," in the very specific sense that envisaged failure has the same impact as envisaged success. It is just the thought of a different challenge.

    But overall, in moving toward the recurrent presence of this detachment there are two fundamental positive developments. The first is that the perceptual organ of the skin begins to cross a threshold of attention or focus, along with the (closely related) world of the proprioceptive sensation-field of the muscles and nerves. The second is that lucidity crosses a threshold – lucidity begins to focus itself so that the surrounding worlds of intent and energy now start to be reliably graspable as such.

    This is the escape-path – the “royal road” as Deleuze calls it, toward overcoming the domination of reason, with its system of moods; toward overcoming the congelation (toward waking your true intent, and no longer setting out to die).

    At a much earlier age (on average, at least) there can be an entirely different process where what is brought to bear on the congelation is not Love-and-Freedom, but is an obtuse anger that heads passively down into the ground of the congelation in order, darkly, to intensify control (“Everything becomes violence on this passive ground. Everything becomes attack on this digestive ground.” – Difference and Repetition) This is the emergence of the stupefied state of the psychopath or "tyrant" (the control-fixated, generally imperturbably-cold authoritarian), who overcomes the imposition machineries of pity (and the acute/anguished forms of self-pity, as opposed to its chronic form) but in a process which is intrinsically the emergence of a self-importance machine of control. This stupor does not overcome the congelation, it merely engorges it, while stripping down (though not in any way overcoming) the tyranny of moods. The self-pity of “how dare they do this to me?” focuses itself into a tight beam of self-importance, so that the system of the tyranny is now appetitive pleasure, control-pleasure, sadistic pleasure and anger.

    (The other disaster that can occur is a hypertrophying of reason. This state may remove the pervasive reason-tyranny aspect of congelation-functioning that is obsessive self-reflection, but it does not in the least overcome the congelation, nor of course the fixation on reason (and it does not overcome the tyranny of moods, it just lessens its impact). At the limit here the stupour takes the form of a fundamental engorging of reason and a fearful, implacable determination to avoid anything that goes in the direction of lucidity (which evidently is not perceived as such). This is a very productive stupour (a state which is exemplified by figures such as Kant). There are the productions of reason, and there is stupour in relation to lucidity and the entirety of the self. A one-way bridge has been crossed into a victory of the congelation (a victory which in fact will be productive not just of formations of reason, with their tendency to provoke fixation on this bandwidth, but of subtle confusions brought about by reason attempting to work in zones with which it is unable to engage)).

     But when what goes into effect is a fascinated love for the world (the planet, women, men, animals, bodies in all of their aspects, dreamings, the energy dimensions of the cosmos) and an intention to see beyond metaphysical dogmas, then the situation from the very beginning is in every sense different. It is fundamentally in opposition to that which applies with those who respond to the dark insistences of the world by throwing themselves angrily, in a capitulatory collapse, into the darkness of the ground (the ground here simply refers to the need for sources of energy which is a fundamental aspect of the constitutive process of formation and ongoing maintenance of a human being, a process which can be transmutated). Deleuze describes how the emergent faculty of detachment – when inspired by love and a will toward abstract perception – leads to lucidity: it becomes the path of escape – “At this point the intensive factors of individuation take themselves as objects in such a manner as to constitute the highest element of a transcendent sensibility, the sentiendum; and from faculty to faculty the ground is borne within thought – still as the unthought within thinking, but this unthought has become the necessary empirical form in which […] thought at last thinks the cogitandum; in other words, the transcendent element which can only be grasped by thought." (Difference and Repetition - see p.153, Athlone, 1994 - translation very slightly different).

    Which is to say that the senses are woken to the point where they at last allow through the worlds which can only, in turn, be grasped by an emergent lucidity. 

(and lucidity can see the south-outside - the Future).

  Note:

    2005.  The rave generation and the radicals of the following generation went off together into the world of the internet and of social media, and almost no-one survived. The first few years are like watching a horror film, as the subsumption brutally takes place. Initially there is couch-surfing, anti-capitalism, freegans, and many other kinds of internet-focused or internet-organised radicalism, and then a combination of corporatisation and reactive/reactionary uses of social media destroys almost everything. A few months before he died, Mark Fisher changed from a smartphone to an old-type phone that could only be used for texts and calls, saying that this was to avoid seeing the deluge of messages coming through via emails, and he told me he had been left with the impression that if the black rectangle of the smartphone was in some sense 'alien' - as with the rectangular monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey - then it would be right to think in terms of the alien alterity as predatory or parasitic, the functioning of what was wrong within the world of capitalism. 

     The path toward the Future is there alongside us all along, and when you get a view of it you need to avoid the distraction of the latest developments within the chronic/chronological, and set out toward the planet, bodies, faculties, intent, and, most specifically, exteriority intent. And if you start out, don't focus too much on critique (this is be fixated on the wrong direction), and don't stop, whether distances turn out to deceptive, or some things turn out to be difficult to bring into focus, or if fewer people came with you than you expected. As Mark wrote, in 2005, "You come to be in a mortifying structure, that precedes you. You only have a lifetime to escape."

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