31. (1)

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

Explorations: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Explorations: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

  

Through the Forest, the River

Introduction

 1.

  the river

      This book starts from the perception that there is an escape-route within the human world; a path of becoming-active and of waking-the-faculties that leads away from ordinary reality. It also starts from the recognition that there is an intensive differential between cities, on the one hand, and, on the other, the worlds of wilderness, semi-wilderness, scurfland, and countryside terrains, in that the terrains beyond the cities are more intensificatory - more energising, inspiring, heartening, thought-provoking. Furthermore this second starting-point has an extension in the form of the perception that the intensive differential even applies, in general, to the difference between cities and towns, where towns are understood as places with a market-place in the centre, and as places which, firstly have a greater centrality of contact with surrounding rural worlds, and, secondly, have the attribute that it is possible to walk out of them in a relatively short amount of time.

      To start here is to start by concentrating on the planetary actual. But in the opening sections of this book it will become clear that the escape-route leads away from what are called 'the cities,'  and that while this does refer to actual cities, it primarily refers to a set of institutions that together generate and impose ordinary reality, and, most, profoundly, to a collapsed, dominated functioning of the human faculties (one which suppresses the faculties of perception, dreaming, lucidity and choice-making). What this means is that what you are leaving behind in departing along the escape-path is in fact a suppressive formation of intent, a formation which is actual but belongs to the world of the real-abstract, so that its actuality is indeed that of intent - it belongs to the domain of the transcendental-empirical - as oppposed to it being the actuality of the infrastructures of cities. And what it also means is that to set out along the escape-path it is not in any sense enough to go off into a wilderness, or, for instance, to go and live in the countryside. Cities are more than infrastructures, and in leaving them there is an extent to which you separate yourself from their domains of formations of intent; but given that what is in question is escaping from the collapsed modality of the faculties, in leaving the city you are straightforwardly carrying the problematic instance with you, and despite the likelihood of an improvement as a result of the change this improvement on its own will not in any way be decisive.

     By the end of the book the accounts of specific places have to a great extent been transmutated into abstract maps (though it is important to see that abstract here relates directly to depth-level accounts of the world). The primary term for 'the cities' is the interestablishment, and stretching away from the interestablishment is the escape-path. 

     However, it is important to see that the path of waking the faculties in fact intrinsically includes movements into terrains beyond the urban worlds. To start out, it is not enough on its own to leave a city and, for instance, to go and live in a wilderness, and yet movements into worlds beyond the urban are intrinsic to the escape-route (they are a necessary but not a sufficient condition). It is also the case that you are likely to be assisted by leaving a city to live in a town (depending on the town), but what is a fundamental aspect of the path of departure is movements (even if only for weeks, or days) into wilderness, semi-wilderness or countryside terrains.

   As this book continues, the view of the escape-route - a largely obscured direction of transformation - is brought into deeper focus, and views of other associated or counterposed domains are broken open, or, in cases where they were already part of the wider account (as with the interestablishment), are brought progressively to greater clarity.

    One of the crucial outsights in this process is that to embark on the escape-path is to start to live on the definitive terrain, where this consists of the planet, and of individuals who are waking their faculties (and it should be added to this that the faculties are faculties of bodies, a fact which functions to emphasise the faculty of perception, and also functions to place the individuals on the same plane as the planetary body, even if they are tiny in comparison). It can immediately be seen that this opens up the perspective of nomadism, in that the definitive terrain has no connection to nation-state territories - the questions of 'where to go?', 'where to live?', 'where to visit?' become the properly planetary, or 'nomad' questions that they should always have been.

     Two further outsights are these: to follow the escape-route is to put into effect a principle of exteriority (exteriority of the body regarding perception, of the human-world taken as element of the planet, of the urban, of the constricted modality of the faculties, of the nation-state, of the male-dominated world); and, secondly, the path of departure is a suppressed form of the peripheral-divergent - alongside modalities such as 'artist', 'scientist', 'mathematician' etc - which exists as a potential across all forms of society (nation-states, sedentary tribes, nomad tribes etc. - but which is suppressed in all of them, even though it tends to be more visible in societies which do not have one of the forms of the nation-states. 

    Setting out these three outsights makes it clear that Explorations can be accurately characterised as a response to a set of issues from anthropology. The response is philosophical and at the same time is an account of an embodiment of these problems as live zones of highly practical activity (it can be described as a work of philosophy which is also a work of practical anthropology). The issues are these:

The issue of tales or stories, and of all forms of dreaming.

The issue of small human groups, and of the alliances of which these groups are composed.

The issue of becomings.

The issue of the use of drugs.

The issue of the body without organs, and of inorganic beings.

The issue of the role of dance and music in processes of escaping from ordinary reality.

    However, in this context, what is fundamental is seeing what happens when you start out from the concept of the definitive terrain. In doing this everything becomes about faculties and becoming-active, on the one hand, and about the planet, on the other; and the emphasis on the places and worlds and potentials of the planet, together with the emphasis on the waking of the faculties, leaves customary relationships to art, philosophy, technics and nation-states looking as if they have almost no connection with the new reality.

     An important aspect of Explorations is that it is about - and includes - dreamings of many different kinds, and includes accounts of dreams in sleep, as well as accounts of trance, semi-trance and reverie experiences of different kinds. The concluding sections build lines of thought, and reach outsights, to a substantial extent through taking up dreamings as lenses giving a view toward aspects of the world, and the most important of these sections works across a sequence of dreams in sleep which all focus exclusively or pre-eminently on the planet-beyond-the human-world, and on aspects of the world which are central to the concerns of anthropology, such as small, non-state social formations, and what Deleuze and Guattari call 'becomings.' 

    Referring to this very efficacious, influential world of the virtual-real (dreams are some of the most powerful things we know, in that as well as sometimes being transcendental-empirical outsights, dreams also include dreams about the future, which can transform whole groups of lives) in this context sets up the opportunity to give an account of aspects of existence on the definitive terrain. Three of these can be outlined.

Becomings.

A transformed relationship to technology, where most domains of technology go into the background.

A transformed relationship to dreamings and perception, where these come into the foreground.

      Becomings are trans-faculty processes of 'entering into composition with' - they are processes of 'seeing from the vantage of', learning from, being inspired by; of displacement into envisaging. And the two becomings which are central to this book provide a demonstration that becomings can in no way be understood along the lines of 'acquiring a resemblance to'. A process of envisaging in relation to the planet is evidently not be grasped through a growing resemblance on the part of the body which is the locus of the envisaging. And if a woman or a man is in love with a woman, then this is a becoming with a singular woman, and is a becoming-woman, but it is clear that the concept of resemblance will not connect to what is fundamental about this process.

      Everything in this introduction has been building toward the idea of a new distribution (pattern of use) in relation to technology: a distribution which is at once a falling-into-the-background and a specific new modality. Houses, towns and cities are technological instances; and it is crucial to see that becoming-active and the waking of the faculties together imply a profoundly greater emphasis on action and creativity as opposed to being a passive 'audience-member,' and on experiences which are catalysts, door-openers and initiators of threshold-crossings (some art-forms look very different on the far side of this change of perspective: dance becomes a system of forms of deterritorialisation of the body, and of becomings, and the most fundamental aspect of drama becomes the ability in ordinary-life situations - not in performances - to adopt different personae). Lastly, it has been seen that the sequence of dreams-in-sleep functions as a delineation of a form of existence that has technology very much in the background. Furthermore, in relation to the new modality, if you look at these dreams carefully you discover both that the key technological elements are the house and the improvised/repurposed 'base' in a non-urban terrain, and that even the technological form that is writing is explicitly de-emphasised, in a process that pushes everything back to the faculties, as opposed to their technological products. And a final point in this context is that it is both that the content of the dreams places almost all of technology to one side and that the dreams themselves - as dreams in sleep - are energy-formations at the level of the virtual-real. 

    A first aspect of dreamings is that there is a class or domain of dreamings where they consist of (or primarily consist of) transcendental-empirical perceptions about the nature of the nature of the world, that is, of outsights. A second aspect is that the most fundamental dimension of dreamings is the virtual-real as direct energy-aspect of human bodies: the external substrates of dreamings, in the form of writing and films (etc.), are extremely important, but this importance is both over-emphasised and mis-perceived in the process of books and films being fetishised. A third aspect of dreamings is that, in terms of those which can be called 'tales' they constitute both the trans-cultural undervalued and repressed (as a form which is different from scientific expression, and as the unacceptably anomalous from certain points of view), and constitute the foregrounded, central-to-ordinary-reality elements of the oneirosphere of the human world, in the form, on the one hand, of fictions and dramas, and, on the other hand, of the blocked, suppressive dreamings of the religions (this third aspect sets out a large part of the problem of dreamings as it exists within anthroplogy). A fourth aspect of dreamings is that people live within outer-scale dreamings which in the modern world primarily consist, firstly, of the spaces of historical and scientific time, and secondly, of elements and spaces from the dreamings of religions, where one of the elements is recurrently eschatological time (all of this is likely to be extremely diffuse and unfocused) - and the overall account of this is that people generally live within a 'valley' with very obscure, limited views (we should always ask, whose dream is this this?), whereas it is in fact possible to move to another valley with much clearer views and longer perspectives (length here relates to the Future in the form existence at higher levels of intensity, not only to the recondite spaces of chronological time). The fifth aspect is dreamings in the form of dreams about the future, where dreams in this sense are worlds - and world-creating-elements - which are simultaneously affairs of pragmatics, immanence metaphysics, and micropolitics.

     In relation to the first aspect it is crucial to see that the opening sections of this book include delineations of a series of outsights. It is on this basis that the transcendental-empirical aspects of dreamings (when they are present) can be understood, and in fact a large part of the dynamic of Through the Forest, the River is the elucidaton of outsights within dreamings. In relation to the second aspect - the direct virtual-real - it can be seen that it is important that a significant aspect of the book concerns dreams in sleep, together with events/processes in the form of the emergence and overall 'dreaming up' of story-worlds, and in the form of trance-experiences and reveries. There is no time to go in detail into the explication of the five aspects across the work, but it is possible to make two additional points. The first is that all available means are used, including the use of dreamings themselves (a relatively large proportion of the book is in the form of stories). The second is that to a great extent the book revolves around the emergence into the mainstream world of a radical new dream about the future - an event which had its primary threshold-crossing in the years from 1980 to 1982.


    All of this has been an account of what it is to exist on the definitive terrain. But the perception which goes widest and deepest - and which includes the recognition of the definitive terrain - is that there is an escape-route leading away from constricted forms of reality. A main aspect of the opening sections of the book is a description of an event which had the form of a finding-the-way-forward after a phase when forward movement had become impeded. And it is worth noticing that the event involved has a connection to a social world of the kind that is most centrally studied by anthropology. These tribal and nomadic worlds (together with the discipline which studies them) are there from the outset, and are of fundamental importance, but in a way where the importance is finally to be understood through an equivalence: practical anthropology = metamorphics = anthropological philosophy = the philosophy of the future = the pragmatics of travelling toward wider realities by means of transcendental materialism and transcendental empiricism.

     What matters most here is the world in which individuals move, in the specific sense of the directions in which it is possible to travel. A crucial stage within this book is the point - about halfway through - where it becomes a delineation of two different directions of the outside. The first is the direction of exteriority - and of exploration - in the full, open-ended sense: it is the direction of love, freedom and wider realities. The second is a recondite 'trap' - a subtle outlier of the modality of control. The indications of this second direction are a fixation on power, whether sexual, social or at the level of destructive physical forces (much of William Burroughs and a significant proportion of Angela Carter relate to the first instance, Mervyn Peake relates to the social instance, and Ballard to the physical-forces instance); and a tendency for there to be a secretion of interiorities, and for planetary, non-urban expanses to not be brought decisively into focus as the material-sublime, or energy-world sublime. This second direction is what is called the adjacency, and it is clear that it relates very closely to a complex thread of semi-visonaries or 'blocked-visionaries' within twentieth century writing. The affect here always has a subtle wrongness: it shifts between the visionary urbane (a feeling which is connected to mis-perceiving the fixation on power as a process of being libidinially realistic), and either a critique-connected, dry humour (which falls short of the love-suffused nature of joy), or an indulgent melancholy (indulgent melancholy is not the same as the affect of the background radiation of sadness, which functions as a jolting call to depart toward wider realities). In contrast the affect of the escape-direction is pre-eminently joy, delight, and a kind of sublime adventurousness or audacity. It includes the moments of the impacting of the background radiation of sadness, but it is fundamentally the affect of love and freedom. In terms of prominent writers of fictions it is the Virginia Woolf of The Waves and the Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream who are good examples here, and in terms of those who are less known Joan Lindsay is a good example (in The Waves the planetary, energy-world sublime is the place by the sea at the start of each chapter; in Lindsay's novel it is Hanging Rock; in A Midsummer Night's Dream it is the forest outside of Athens).

    

   This book has four main lines of development.

Firstly, there is a focus on places. This starts out as an emphasis on an area of Warwickshire, and ends as a focus on the planet as a whole, and, in relation to specific places, it ends with an emphasis on two areas that are very far from Warwickshire, one in Tuva, and one in Patagonia.  

Secondly, and most importantly, it is a delineation of the direction of transformation - the escape-path.

Thirdly it is an account of developments over the last five hundred years, and primarily over the last century, in relation to modalities of expression which indicate and assist toward the escape-path, and in particular modalities that consist preeminently of outsights. The key aspect of this account concerns the full emergence of anthropological philosophy in the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s, and the secondary aspect concerns a line of progression in the music-focused (and dance-focused) counterculture which extends from the middle years of the 1960s to the middle years of the 00s. 

Fourthly it is an impersonal account of personal experiences, which as it moves along the chronological line of the events becomes more and more about aspects of the world (it is important to see that the culmination of the main phase of this account, in Section 14 (45), becomes an exploration-and-analysis that has nothing at all to do with my own experiences).

    
     The last two lines of development are about opening up the view toward the escape-route - toward the Future (that is, toward the future which has been there all along). Everything concerns the definitive terrain, and the historical-cultural line does not consist of an intensification up to the most recent date, but instead consists of a line that always has the future alongside it, and which, in particular (in this context) has an escape-route line departing orthogonally from it around the year 2005.

    With the third line of development there is a culmination in the form of a series of re-assessments that are made from the vantage of the definitive terrain. The transcendental-empirical is fundamental, in opposition to the empirical. And in turn this means that the domain of philosophy and of narratives/fictions is fundamental. Both transcendental-empirical philosophy and the domain of narratives-expressing-outsights go to the centre of everything.  In connection with other forms of expression both acting and dance are raised up to the highest level, but in ways which make them barely recognisable in terms of the customary perspectives on them, and - most crucially in relation to the directly sensorial aspects of art - perception of the spheroambient world becomes in the fullest sense fundamental, going to the very centre, but having alongside it the directly auditory/visual/tactile art-forms. Lastly, exploration-alliances appear alongside love-couple relationships. The fact that they are also fundamental is in the context of the fact that a worthwhile love-couple relationship is always an exploration-alliance, but on the definitive terrain what is key (because this concerns the decisive level of joy, freedom, love-for-the-world) is the exploration-alliance, and these pre-eminently have nothing to do with the conjugal/sexual, but instead are friendship alliances for the purposes of exploration.

    The fourth line of development culminates in an analysis of the transcendental in relation to the planetary, and in relation to the outsights of certain kinds of high-point experience. Simultaneously it culminates in three different views which are broken open. The first of these concerns two kinds of place which can be found: the place which is ideal as a place to live, when existing on the definitive terrain, and the zone - the place in a wilderness or scurfland area where it is valuable to pause for a while (a place for waking perception). The second is a view from an instructive composite-terrain consisting in part of the nomadic and shamanic worlds of Mongolia, Tuva and the Baikal region, together with China perceived in connection with an ancient emergence of transcendental-empirical philosophy, and with the emergence of body-focused disciplines such as Chi Gung and Tai Chi. The third is a view toward the escape-route where certain aspects of the world come insistently into the foreground: these include exploration-alliances; forest terrains; women - in particular - as explorers of the transcendentally unknown; the sky as insufficiently-perceived aspect of the planet; becomings; places/terrains as crucial in waking the faculties.

   What is foregrounded on the definitive terrain is the planet. The nation states have fallen decisively into the background, and more than this, they have become deeply and disturbing problematic - a ruinous domain seen from a distance by the nomadism that is a journey toward freedom.

    To describe this situation another way, the nation states and capitalism (into which the nation states have been subsumed) are on fundamental levels an extremely destructive and damaging form of weather. There are the terrains of the planet, and then there the forces within the human world which are continually destroying species and wild terrains, and which are suppressing and attenuating the lives of human beings. 

    The planet beyond the human world has an immense capacity to energise and inspire.The planet is heartening, although it is an unknown - an unknown toward which openness must be maintained by suspending the dogmatic image of the world / of matter. Back in the direction of the human world there is the buried subtending world of the human, with all its inspiring aspects, and its affection for the planet, and then across the top of this there is the interestablishment with its modalities which can give the impression of being points of control over the ongoing disaster but which in fact are parts of the problem, not of the solution.

     This is where thought begins: this nomad vantage provides the most vital aspects of the matrix of thought. It is a question of envisaging from this vantage: of entering-into-becoming by seeing, feeling and dreaming from this planetary perspective, where the human world is just an element within the planet. And the principle of exteriority - together, interconnectedly, with all issues of waking the faculties and becoming active - provides the other aspects of the matrix. The principle of exteriority, in fact, starts from the planet, and many of its aspects lead directly to it (for instance, while we live on planet Earth, to concentrate through perception on the spheroambient world is preminently to concentrate attention on the planet; and, again, to focus on non-state societies, such as nomad social formations, is to go closer to the issues of planetary terrains).

     Here the questions of the inner worlds of human beings are reclaimed for exteriority. The virtual-real is, to say the least, a fundamental dimension of human existence, To take the example of dreams in sleep: the vast majority of dreams in sleep are expressions of the system of reactive, subjectified moods, and are barely worth any thought at all; whereas a very small proportion of dreams in sleep, detectable in part through feelings such as joy (it can be seen that it is important to develop the faculty of feeling), consist of outsights into the nature of the world - the world at the level of the transcendental-empirical. And again, it is outsights which are the crucial aspect of processes of dreaming up stories (dreamings). Furthermore, effective dreams about the future (which are some of the most powerful forces we know) not only relate to exteriority, but as they are effectuated they transform it.

    In relation to feeling - a further aspect of the virtual-real - everything becomes a question of intent, and there is not only the exteriority intrinsic to intent, but there is also both an exteriority beyond the brain, and, in practice, an immense domain of individual, group and social intent. Love is on one level a feeling, but it is also a world - or dance - of interaction and becomings, in relation to which it is correct to say that the intent that is love is that of the whole world of the body, and not just of the body's brain (in the same way as the spheroambience of perception pertains to the whole body). And, in practice, the process of detecting feeling and intent (on the part of a woken faculty of feeling) becomes a process of perceiving intent in social, socio-cultural and socio-oneiric worlds - a process of perceiving active, joyful affects, on the one hand, and, on the other, of perceiving reactive, deleterious affects. A question of seeing the joy of the principle of exteriority in effect within writers of philosophy and of fiction, and of seeing the dark damaging intent of gravity in effect within the worlds of religions - a whole discernment of the forces of thought, and of the forces of the oneirosphere. In starting out from the virtual-real you soon discover that exteriority is everywhere.

     It can be seen that there is a further equivalence: metamorphics = green philosophy. And in thinking about the escape-path of existence on the definitive terrain (with its principle of exteriority) it is important to see that this path is also like a river which sweeps you away. This river exists within the human world, and pertains fundamentally to what is beyond the world, and the human world is an element of the planet. The exact nature of the relationship between the river and the planet is not clear, but it is as important to let go of the dogmatic image of the planet/matter as it is to let go of the dogmatic image of the body (with its un-Spinozistic dogma that what pertains to intelligence can only pertain to the brain). And what is fundamental is that within the forest, there is the river - the river of love and lucidity and wider realities.

 2.

  of place and time

                                                                                                                                                                                                    

                                                

    Philosophy breaks open views toward the escape-path - toward the Future. In doing this, its relationship to space - and to places - consists of a delineation of modalities: for instance the modalities of wilderness and semi-wilderness terrains, and of urban terrains. But also, modalities such as towns, and, as has been seen, such as human faculties (human forms of expression, such as writing, make up another group of modalities). The relationship to time primarily concerns the time of metamorphosis, of the transformation that is a movement along the path of escape; but it also concerns the time of historiography in relation to 'chronic' time. And here, in being the beyond of Hegelianism, the patterns of an ongoing disaster are delineated (developments that are not that of a dialectical unfolding), and, as part of this process certain shifts within the modalities that block an awareness of the escape-path can be discerned.

    However, movements within writing along the line of chronic time are here preeminently about a concentration on events that allow for an opening up of a view toward the Future. Which is to say that these events make it possible to show modalities of space - of the world of forces and of intent - which are brought into effect in following the path of escape from ordinary reality. 

   

    Explorations as a whole is centred on two sequences of events. Firstly, a series of events, starting around 1993, which involved a radical milieu connected to the philosophy department at Warwick University. Secondly, a sequence of events that began in 2003, where at the outset these substantially involve the milieus of counterculture, dance and music.

    In relation to the first sequence the modalities explored include the town (as opposed to the city), and the zone - the place in a countryside, scurfland or wilderness terrain where it is possible to stay for a while and gain perspective on circumstances. And a chronic time development in question here is an early 90s high-point of expressions of disaffection within the mainstream, where this included the disaffection of anger and melancholy criticism, and also the re-affection, or heightened-affection of an awareness of the outside of ordinary reality.

    One modality explored in relation to the second sequence is the counterculture 'festival' in a specific sense that includes the world of what has been called the 'rave' alternative culture; another is the place which would give maximally advantageous circumstances as a base - a place to live. And beyond these, what is explored (as with the first sequence) are the modalities of the non-urban, the modality of groups, the modality of exploration-alliances, and the modality of the faculties and becomings of a human individual. Also, in this second case, there is an exploration of a chronic time development which, looked at in relation to a very positive aspect, involves a small-scale intense high-point of the re-affected electronic music emergence that began in the late 1980s, and, looked at in another way, involves the de-intensificatory shift that Leyland Kirby has called 'the death of rave'.

    The non-Hegelian philosopher who can perceive the human world at the level of the transcendental-empirical can see processes of intensification and deintensification where these are not 'redeemed' by some delusional dialectical upward movement that subtends them, and can see that in a profound sense there is a worsening disaster taking place on the planet where this runs deeper than the destruction of the environment and the ravages of capitalism. The changes in the ordinary-reality systems-of-suppression in fundamental ways make the situation worse, and open up a way forward only if the direction of metamorphosis - of the Future - is perceived. The mid-twentieth-century polarity reversal of the system of reason-and-revelation - in which reason became fully dominant - makes the system more pernicious because it maintains the reactivity of religion as a kind of enshrined element in relation to which it supposedly makes no sense to argue, and because the foregrounding of the specific models of reason employed by this system makes it harder to make contact with lucidity. The associated shift in the system of ventures-and-lives to an axiom of equality of women is where the immense opportunity is opened up, but to grasp this opportunity it is necessary to see the time of metamorphosis: otherwise the deadening down of ventures as constructed by reason and religion - together with the subtleties of ideas of 'romance' and of the altered-but-ongoing imposition of fixation on sexual coupling, as opposed to full exploration-alliances - will lead to a new, diverse but deadened-down world of modes of conformity.

      In my fiction-writing between 2003 and 2015, which I did in connection with collaborations between myself and Mark Fisher, there was always a way in which, to some extent at least, i was starting out from the idea of groups of people who had a significant degree of attunement to the milieus of raves and of counterculture electronic dance music festivals. This can be seen in terms of a genetic trait, rather than in terms of a decisive overall characterisation, but it remains the case that it is important for understanding the oneiric-abstract worlds involved. It is very much present in the concluding, 'when space breaks open' section of londonunderlondon, and in one way or another it is always in effect in what follows. In 2008 I encountered the milieu of small-scale electronic dance music festivals in an extraordinary area of the northwest of Argentinian Patagonia (an area centred on a town called El Bolson) and this fused with my relatively recent experience of the ultra-inspired 2005 and 2006 Glade festivals to produce an awareness of an ongoing alternative-festival modality (one that might be any combination of psy-trance, drum and bass, techno, house, etc, and would have no connection to the commercialised modality of EDM megafestivals) and it was this awareness that to an important extent was in effect as I dreamed up the milieus of the characters in The Corridor. 

     To use a phrase from Leyland Kirby it was the 'energy and cohesion' of these festivals which had struck me, and it was this impression which allowed me to be unaffected by another impression at this time which was that rave had emphatically come to an end. This did not matter, given that much of what was most important about it was running in a new channel, no matter how small this channel might be, and, in any case, I was not in any way starting from an enshrining of the elements of rave or of post-rave festivals, and, in particular, nor was I following the line of time in a way where what I was writing was to be constructed as a prediction of where things were going. I was drawing a little on the freedom-ethos and forms of expression - and joy - of the milieus in question, but then I was dreaming the overall starting-point forward along the line of metamorphosis, along the Futural line of intensification. The fact that back in Chronos there had been a decisive collapse in the sub-culture of 'rave' was in the fullest sense irrelevant.

     What was informing this 'dreaming forward' was not just a relatively extrinsic domain of subject matter, but was also a double process of deterritorialisation. From the summer of 2005 to the autumn of 2008 my life was 'relocated' in that I did a large amount of travelling and lived without permanent accommodation (working in the centre of London, and, for more than half of this time, sleeping in a tent in different areas of woodland on the periphery of the city), and at the same time I shifted modalities at the level of the abstract, and went from predominantly writing philosophy to predominantly writing fiction. The nature of a dreaming forward of this kind is that the movement along the line of metamorphosis at the level of 'mythos' is not going to take place without corresponding movements at the level of 'ethos' (this other domain of movements does not in any sense require the nomadism of movements in space, but this is one form that they can take).

      A further point about the Futural line of transformation - in distinction from chronos - concerns the difference between its expressions ('works') and its processes of production. This can be illustrated by the fact that the events at Warwick University in the early and mid nineties were the result not only of a chronos surge of disaffection, but also - in fact, most definitively - were the result of the impacting of a work from 1980, in the form of A Thousand Plateaus, a work which preeminently is a view toward the Future. This leads to the fact that there is a further sequence of events on which Explorations is centred (although it is more true to say that it is centred on their ongoing effects), where these events are the publication of works between 1968 and 1998, principally by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar and Carlos Castaneda (this sequence had a striking, multi-tradition high-point in 1980 to 1982, but it reached its phase of highest intensity in the 1990s). The movement forward and dreaming-forward that has been in question, commencing in 2005, had the domains of freedom of the dance-and-music counterculture as part of its starting-point, but a further main aspect of its starting-point was the outsights broken open in the works of the writers who have just been named. In other words it was not just a departure from the chronic line of ordinary reality, but was a departure that was starting out from a domain of movements - in the virtual-real - which already belonged to the aeonic, the Futural.

     The western world's deintensification around 1980 led over the next few years, not to a full return of intensity, but to a regrouping in the form of an alternative, edge-of-ordinary reality platform which continued for around twenty five years, expressing itself in electronic dance music as a complex domain that included drum and bass, techno and psy-trance (drum and bass had the greatest potential for propelling people forwards, but in general techno and psytrance probably were able to generate more of the energy and cohesion - in a group of people dancing - that Leyland Kirby references as key for understanding rave). Similar, associated developments occurred in other domains, with, for instance, a kind of 'bright', allusive, understated radicalism building itself up in film, TV, writing and pop-rock (understated here refers to semi-comedy, as with the work of Kauffmann up until Eternal Sunshine, to 'young adult' writing as with Philip Pullman's trilogy, and to the quiet visionary intensity of works like Bjork's Homogenic). The de-intensification in the middle years of the 00s was a pervasive tendency for there to be a collapse in the zones of the radical platform. It is too close an event to talk about in detail, but the one point that should be made is that there had not been a dialectical movement from the late 60s to the mid 00s, something that can be seen well in music in that it had been largely struck dumb - in relation to the power of lyrics to break open outsights - and had primarily developed in connection with the deterritorialisation of dance, and with rave-venue improvisation, in a kind of continuation-strategy that eventually fell apart.

     In writing about his piece "The Death of Rave," from 2006, Kirby is explicit and emphatic in saying that the intent involved in the work is not nostalgia. In a similar way, in working together, in 2006, on the piece Disappearance [Section 42], which involves a group which departs along the Futural line-of-transformation in the early 1970s, Mark Fisher and I were in no way affected by nostalgia, but had simply taken the early 70s as a slightly better-than-average place to beak open the view toward the Future (it was this view that was important, not the particular zone of chronic time). In making On Vanishing Land - the piece we made after finding we did not have the resources to produce/dramatise Disappearance as an audio work - we in fact expressed this point in its clearest form, by pointing out at the end that the envisaged group of people from around 3000 years ago might have known more about the journey into the Future than people know now. And in the companion work, The Corridor, it is important to see that I located the work exactly in its time of writing, in the late 00s, as if I had a background awareness that the great danger of the time was being haunted by melancholy (Burial's 2006 invocation of the power of - and the collapse of - drum and bass, is a momentous call to travel to the Future, but if you don't manage to hear this call it becomes capable of being caught up in the dispiriting force of charged but passive sadness). The year 2005 exists within the work as a year of Departure, not as a time of collapse: I wasn't thinking about this as I was writing, but a time when intensity is fading down is not just as good a time as any other to set out toward the Future - it is the best time.

       What is it to 'dream forward'? In relation to the specific dreaming-forward in question, a valuable point that can be made at this stage is to some extent peripheral (a question of initially seeing from a distance). This is that in the course of the process I both became aware of the importance of sound/music in threshold-crossings leading away from ordinary reality, and simultaneously began to be aware of a subtle displacement of music, in relation to dreamings, and in relation to the worlds of outsights of both philosophy and fiction. But also, and primarily (leaving behind the domain of forms of expression) in relation to the wilderness and scurfland terrains of the planet.

     In the concluding sections of Through the Forest, the River - and of Explorations - it is pointed out that the specific form of the escape-path that has been delineated can be characterised in terms of three 'persistences' at the level of intent (and therefore at all levels of action). A persistence in relation to the wild and semi-wild terrains of the planet (both at the level of the actual and the level of the virtual-real); a persistence at the level of writing fictions and other forms of narrative, as a counterpart to writing philosophy; and a persistence in relation to a conjoined reading of Deleuze, Guattari, Castaneda, Donner and Abelar.

    It can be seen that narratives - and therefore dreamings - are very much at the centre of this, in that they appear in relation to all three persistences (the persistence in relation to the terrains of the planet can take the form of narratives, in that it involves the virtual-real as well as the actual). But at this point it is important to take narratives as dreamings, and to take up the question of dreamings as a whole. At the end of the first part of this introduction it will have been seen that dreamings had become central in a large number of ways: dreams about the future; the exploratory envisaging of what is taking place in the world; dreams in sleep; the oneirosphere of human dreamings; dreamings that contain outsights but that are called 'fictions.'

      The opening sections of Through the Forest, the River are focused to a large extent on the faculty of dreaming. And partly through following this line of thought the book sends down lines of exploration into the past, and toward places that have not been involved in the previous books of Explorations. However, there is another focus alongside these questions: what starts to be delineated is a profound association between developments in relation to the faculty of dreaming and journeys into scurfland and wilderness places. And the association that is detailed shows the second instance coming before the first. But it needs to be seen that already the planetary is a primary focus in that the whole book is starting from questions of places/terrains. The book starts from the places that can be indicated by the names Leamington, the University of Warwick, Coventry, and Warwickshire, and then moves outward, following the lines of questions involving modalities of terrains, toward two other places - Tannu Tuva, and the northwest of Argentinian Patagonia. In the process there is a movement in which the places themselves become views toward the transcendental-empirical - in particular they become lenses that give a view of the escape-path (though it should be seen that it is spaces that have this power). However, the question of the pragmatics of places - of finding zones and places to live - comes to the forefront, as does the issue of the planet as a whole. 

    

   *

    It is a sunny day with clear, dry air, and I have just walked up the switchbacks of the narrow road that goes across a saddle of land, between mountains, and then drops down to Lago Epuyen. It is early March, in 2008. I have done this walk once before, two months earlier. In around two weeks I will be back at work in London, after an unpaid three month break. 

    I turn round, looking north. To the right is Piltriqitron, the tall, outlier mountain, with its intricate, rocky summit, and steep, forested slopes. To the left is the main cordillera of the Andes, extending out of sight to the north, with forests on the lower slopes, and small patches of glaciation on the south-facing areas of the summits.

   In between is the valley, around ten miles wide and thirty miles long, slowly rising as it goes north. But the valley itself has large areas of tree-covered hills, often with crags and low cliffs. 

    And the view has no main central point: the valley slowly becomes the hills and distant mountains of the horizon, and there is no single feature in the centre to rival Piltriquitron, or the Andean mountains on the left. What is at the centre is the valley, and although it has many areas of fields, what is mostly visible from this vantage is trees - trees that extend into the mountains to left and right (although the mountains have in fact been heavily logged by the timber industry). Here and there human habitations can be seen in the areas that are within two or three miles of where I am standing. Ten miles away, to the north, the town of El Bolson is largely hidden by hills, with only a few buildings visible amongst an expanse of trees.

                                  

         *                                                        

     

    

1.




  What would a philosophy of the Future be like? A substantive philosophy of wider realities and of faculties, of lucidity and freedom; a philosophy of metamorphosis, in which everything relates to encounters within a horizon of the transcendentally unknown - what form would such a philosophy take?

    This philosophy would set out to see the world in a way which is unaffected by the 'dogmatic image' - that is, the trinary image of blind, endlessly destructive matter; minds; and eternal instances, whether just in the form of mathematical and logical truths, or in the form of these, together with souls and divine entities (see Section 18). The world would be seen as what it is – that is, as infinitely mysterious and enigmatic, and not in a way where the cosmos beyond human beings is missing a fundamental dimension. The knowledge which each of us have of space, in the form of the space of our own body would be used as fundamental: there is no reason – other than fear expressed as dogmatism – to see the planetary space around us as different from the space of our body, and therefore it would be a crucial exploratory principle for this philosophy that the space of the planet - and of the cosmos - is a space of the virtual-real, in the same way as is the space of the human body. At the deepest level this would always be a world without an image – an eerie-sublime spheroambient expanse of the unknown, in which, nonetheless, the transcendentally unknown is continually becoming the known.

    The world of human beings would be perceived as having two primary aspects. Firstly the current of Love-and-Freedom that runs through it – the current of lucidity, delight, openness (freedom from dogmatism), affirmation, and intent to travel into wider realities. Secondly, an oneirophere consisting of ways of perceiving the world, and including within it the blocked, supressive dreamings of the religions. Along with works which are straightforwardly expressions of lucidity (works which in some cases have a centrality of narrative accounts, and in other cases consist of abstractions with almost no narrative), the issue concerning this oneirosphere would be the also-immensely-valuable presence of works that will have been categorised as ‘fantasy’ or ‘poetry.’ In detail, the real issue here is that, even when these works on certain levels involve a high degree of distortion, they do not attempt to pin everything down, either along the lines of a religion, or along the lines of the ‘scientific’ form of the dogmatic image of the world. 

    In relation to an individual human being – taken as a world, and as a world of relationships or becomings - there would also be no image. But here there would be the map of the faculties which can be discerned:

     The faculty of lucidity (where the issue is waking an ability to perceive intent, dreamings, affects, and zones of the world as initiators of affects).

     The faculty of movement (where the initial issue is waking the muscles and zones of the body in the form of releasing them toward their degrees of freedom).

    The faculty of perception (where the initial issue is learning how to stop thinking).

    The faculty of dreaming (where the initial issue is learning how to envisage what is really going on in the world, and how to envisage new, positively transformed circumstances).

    The faculty of feeling (where the initial issue is learning how to overcome de-intensificatory affects such as fear and self-importance, but where the primary issue is learning how to listen to intense, enigmatic feelings).

     The faculty of intent (where the initial issue is learning how to be part of a movement that goes further out into reality).

       In relation to micropolitics everything here on one level revolves around the fact that the task is to become part of a group which escapes from ordinary reality. On another level it revolves around the fact that Love-and-Freedom – or intent – is openness, and is not the desire to pin everything down, a deleterious, de-intensificatory desire which is as libidinal and possession-obsessed as it is religio-metaphysical, and pseudo-scientific. The second issue relates to the need, for both men and women, to develop something that can be called ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘brightness’ – a higher degree of delight, love, lucidity, and overall absence of judgemental gravity.

   

      A final micropolitical point is that it will be perceptible that what everyone needs – in order for there to be a movement away from state warfare and the other forms of violence of the human world – is for people to set out toward wider realities, because of the energy and lucidity that is transmitted by those whose lives have become to a greater extent an expression of Love-and-Freedom.

        *

    It can be seen that this, twice over, is what people always assume – from a distance – is the nature of philosophy. They assume that it will help people overcome what is wrong with them - for instance, fear, and self-importance - and they assume that it is a love of insights about the world and human existence. It is necessary to move toward a genuine philosophy – a philosophy which is open to all expressions of lucidity, and to all pragmatic and oneiric accounts that assist with movements of escape from the deadly trap of ordinary reality.

    The aspect of the body without organs which can be easily made available for thought is the oneirosphere of the human world - the sphere of dreams about the future, stories, accounts of the world etc. And in accessing the modes of engagement-with-the-world that are found within the oneirosphere the process is inevitably one which engages with formations of intent, in that it involves both what is generated by the modes and their dreams about the future. What therefore comes into view as the way of taking up the idea of the oneirosphere is the figure of the group or individual as nexus of forms of encounter, of forms of connection. A space or body of definitively real and simultaneously abstract modalities of connection, where these modalities are socially embedded/institutionalised, and socially modulated: science, mathematics, philosophy, personal life, politics (where this is recurrently very nationally focused), religion, art, psychoanalysis. 

 

      And here the questions are: to what extent does this involve brightness, as opposed to gravity? To what extent does this pervasively involve the waking of the faculties, an overall becoming-active, and deterritorialisation from suppressive (often disguised) spheres and modalities of control? To what extent does this see the planet as the fundamentally unknown, as the primary zone of the tremendum that we encounter? To what extent does this involve a delusory sense of having an adequate way of responding to the ongoing disaster in the human world?

    This way of thinking is necessarily philosophical in that it is transcendental-empirical (tremeral) through engaging with the world at the level of intent, of the abstract, and in that philosophy is one of the modes-of-connection that it delineates. The world is the tremendum, and it can also be described as the connexus. Futural philosophy is tremeral philosophy, nexal philosophy - which is also to say that it is metamorphics, the pragmatics and metaphysics of Departure.

 

    

 

 

                               

                               

                                                                                                       

                                                             * * *