Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
1.
Taking 1960 as a relatively arbitrary starting-point, it is correct to say that in the years since this date there has been a Change. A direction-of-travel has become more easily visible.
Taking 1960 as a relatively arbitrary starting-point, it is correct to say that in the years since this date there has been a Change. A direction-of-travel has become more easily visible.
*
It is a question, as always, of working with the plane of consistency - the plane of becomings - of the planet and of human beings with their dreamings and outsights, a process which is a pragmatics as much as it is a metaphysics, and where a primary aspect of the pragmatics is a waking of the faculties.
The faculties are faculties of the body, and this explains why perception is the fundamental faculty, the one that it is most important to wake.
The way forward is that of the suppressed modality of the peripheral/divergent. For understanding this modality the worlds of the non-state societies (tribal and nomadic societies) are of central importance (and this in turn entails that anthropology is a crucial discipline, though only when it becomes what can be termed 'practical anthropology').
The suppressed modality of the peripheral/divergent is existence on the definitive terrain - the terrain of consistency, the terrain of nomadism. It starts from perception, followed by dreaming, and then proceeds as the simultaneous waking of these faculties alongside the waking of the faculties of lucidity, choice-making, and feeling, together with the faculty of becomings, which transects all of the others. Because of the importance of dreaming, tales which provide views toward transcendental-empirical aspects of the world are crucial forms of expression.
*
Bright midday sunlight, and to the north, in the direction of the equator, there is a ridge of forested mountains. Several miles to the east there is what seems to be a large lake, visible through a gap in nearby trees.
Ahead you of there is a vegetable garden, and beyond this there is a tangle of wild roses and blackberries, and then there are tall trees, whose leaves are being shaken by a warm summer breeze.
Behind you there is a house which is made of wood, two storeys high, with a balcony: the house is set into the side of a hill, and is surrounded by woodland.
A door is banging in the wind. And there is the sound of a guitar: it is as if someone is remembering a powerful melody, and playing it very slowly.
The wind drops a little, and you feel midsummer sun on your face and on your arms. There are thistle seeds floating slowly across the sky. Five or six birds fly up from the trees, wheel round in an arc to the west, and then disappear in the direction of the mountains.
*
The Change is something that has been placed within the overall world of the human Virtual-Real. Whether or not it will be the beginning of a generalised transformation is in the fullest sense unknown. But the Change is beyond any doubt a path toward wider realities.
*
Fanny and Alexander and A Thousand Plateaus are the inverse of each other. Fanny and Alexander has within it almost no proto-concepts or metaphysical 'figures,'but the ones it includes are fundamental to the film and to an understanding of the world. A Thousand Plateaus creates almost no tales / semi-tales but the ones it creates are very striking, and are in every way central to the book.
The two works are both culminations, and they both find a way of opening up a view of the unknown in the direction of the escape-path. The transcendental-empirical unknown is opened up within Fanny and Alexander by Shakespeare, and primarily by the idea of the worlds of 'practitioners of the anomalous' from the time of Ancient Egypt and of Ancient Judaism. In A Thousand Plateaus it is opened up primarily by Spinoza, but also to a very large extent by an anthropologically-based idea of worlds, in general, of metamorphics, of practitioners of the metaphysics and pragmatics of escape from ordinary, constricted reality ("we sorcerers").
The fundamental domain of philosophy is formations of existence, and the most important of these is a formation of exteriority. Both works look toward these formations of exteriority (A Thousand Plateaus comes very close to naming them). In Fanny and Alexander the anomalous events (the halucinatory rupture created by Isak to rescue the children, the 'ghosts', the apparent action at a distance which resolves the plot-sequence, the movement of the Egyptian mummy) are mainly important because they function to insist toward a suspension of the dogmatic image of the world. What in fact is crucial in opening up the view in the direction of the escape-path is everything else; it is tales, the outsights of tales, delight, acting/drama, dance, groups, semi-groups, lightness, absence of judgemental gravity, joy, the 'outsider' modality (Isak, who saves the family, is in an outsider position, but given his transcendental-empirical tale does not include God, the signs are that he is an outsider in relation to all social formations within ordinary reality). Meanwhile, A Thousand Plateaus labours gigantically on opening up a view of aspects of the world - and in particular the human world - from outside of ordinary reality, succeeding to a great extent in this task, but at the cost of a conceptual intricacy that makes the achievement very inaccessible, and in a way where, although the work looks in the direction of escape-formations - formations of exteriority - it only very minimally brings them into focus. However, this takes place in a way where from the outset the text is straightforwardly conducting toward a suspension of the image of the world, and it as if the outland-doubles of the authors are patiently incursive within the text, creating glimpses, and placing the elements of a scattered diagram of a formation of exteriority across the text. The concepts 'becomings', 'deterritorialisation,' 'nomadism', 'exteriority', and 'line of flight' are all elements of this nearly-assembled diagram.
The concepts in Fanny and Alexander are those of the 'small world' and the 'wider world,' and - inseparably of 'the road' and 'the streams in the forest'. The small world and the road are ordinary reality seen in two separate ways, and the streams in the forest are kept within the world of transcendental-empiricism (they are in some sense an aspect of the sublime, but they are not the divine/the transcendent) by means of the idea of a human source, and the suggestion of some kind of intensive dynamic in the wider world - something positive emanates from out of the sheer arduousness of human journeys and condenses, falling as rain and creating the streams.
The semi-stories in A Thousand Plateaus, are stories of Departure, of Disappearance. The nomad is the person who does not move, in that they have not been drawn by the state into the functionings of interiority. And the person who walks away from the horror of the state and capitalism Departs toward nomadism, and again they do not move. They are within the terrain-worlds of the planet, in a house just out of town, or in a flat in the city. The Departure is a movement away from the intent-formations of the state and capitalism: it is always the fundamentally new - ancient, and always the outlandish state of having departed from ordinary reality. Deleuze in Difference and Repetition says that genuine revolutions always have the atmosphere of a festival, and at a festival it is possible to be aware of a brightness and ethos of freedom which should not be left behind. The revolutionary at last wakes up, and crosses its threshold, becoming the joy and sobriety of a steady, quiet movement along the path of escape.
The specificity of this form of existence - this exploration forwards - is a pragmatics of becoming-active and of waking the faculties, in the form of a joy which is also intrinsically a love for the planet and the whole world. The pragmatics is all-encompassing (it has nothing to do with a 'career'). It intrinsically involves philosophy, it recurrently produces things which are called 'art' and it is part of the spaces of scientific knowledge, but as a pragmatics and metaphysics of escape it is something beyond what is normally understood in connection with the terms 'philosophy', 'artist' and 'science.' And a key part of the tonality and modality of this form of existence is an aspect of warrior focus, involving a struggle to overcome the self (the functionings of the interiority), and an inseparable struggle to extricate from the intent-systems and social machineries of the interestablishment. All of this is glimpsed within A Thousand Plateaus (but it remains the case that they do not bring the parts of the diagram together).
Fanny and Alexander is turned firmly in the direction of the route of escape, but although the right elements are there everything is out of focus. A Thousand Plateaus is partly looking in the wrong direction, in the sense that it is fascinated by the attacks of the nomads on states, and as a result fails to complete the thought that the warrior aspect of the formation of exteriority is the overcoming of the self, and the inseparable extrication-process in relation to the wide-level emplacements of the interestablishment (a fixation on overcoming the interestablishment is the last and most subtle trap of its expression within individuals - the interiority). However, when it is looking in the direction of the escape-path what is fundamental within the book is in effect - and the path is visible.
The lenses click very easily together. And the view sweeps you forward. In A Thousand Plateaus the revolutionary wakes up and becomes what it was all along - metamorphics. Turning in the opposite direction from a fixation on attacking the interestablishment the revolutionary becomes the ultimate journey. It is a journey which is an expression of love for the world, the planet, the human beings with whom you travel, and the whole human world, which is energised by those who are in a state of intensification, of joy. In a profound sense it is a movement of Departure - of travelling further out into the world - where the love involved in travelling-into-the-world leaves only the options of going forward or of collapsing into fear or self-indulgence.
In 1981 The Eagle's Gift is published. This book is straightforwardly a work of metamorphics, and it is the work where the idea of an escape-group is comprehensively delineated, in a setting out of a whole form of existence. It is also a book about an extreme disarray, where in the last third of the book this is in many ways left behind - even though a thread of tragedy, in a very unusual sense, remains all the way to the end. The escape-group that is described has 16 people, but from the outset it is indicated that an escape-group could be larger or could be a substantially smaller unit (later in the sequence of books a group with four individuals will be described); but the details are not as important as the focusing of the idea, and overall what is fundamental is that the core of the pragmatics being provided is effective in creating a formation of exteriority. This known effectiveness is in relation to the individual as escape-unit, and to alliances between individuals where the exteriority modality sweeps everything forward, creating a kind of fugitive formation of exteriority where maps and diagrams produced pervasively do not belong to ordinary reality. The core of pragmatics and metaphysics is what is unwavering: the outsights are immensely valuable, the pragmatics is functional in relation to creating a formation of exteriority, and even if the wider form of exteriority formation - in the form of an escape-group - is over the horizon, the account of it is exceptionally interesting and thought-provoking.
It is important to see the way in which another sequence of works starts at this time. Shabono goes a long way into the space normally occupied by anthropology - in the specific direction of the yanomami people in southern Venezuela - and does this in a way where the escape-route that is metamorphics is minimally but very powerfully indicated. In the next two books there is a movement to full delineation, firstly with a group, or inter-related set of groups, in and near a town in the north Venezuela, and then, in Being-in-Dreaming (1991) with a description of the same escape-group described in The Eagle's Gift. At the same time as this is published Taisha Abelar is writing her book about the same group. The depth-level point here is that the books are exceptional works of metamorphics (none of this is about showing whether or not the group in question existed). 1980 to 82 is the incursion event, because of a consistency and complexity combined with a high degree of success in terms of works being substantially emplaced, but the culmination in fact is in the 1990s, with Being-in-Dreaming as arguably by far the most powerful of all of the works of the different series in question (Donner; Deleuze; Deleuze/Guattari; Castaneda; Bergman).
The struggle involved in the movement along the escape-path involves extrication from the different aspects of the functioning of the interestablishment. In that it is the ultimate journey - the woken form of the revolutionary - it is micropolitical across the oneiric, cognitive and libidinal dimensions of ordinary reality. In Being-in-Dreaming Florinda Donner describes meeting Esperanza, who is a member of the group initially described in 1981:
"'Are you religious by any chance?"
I shook my head [...]
"That's good!" Esperanza exclaimed. "This way you don't have have to struggle against beliefs" she pointed out. "They are very hard to overcome. I was reared a devout Catholic. I nearly died when I had to examine my attitude to religion." She sighed. Her voice, turning wistful, became soft as she added, "But that was nothing compared to the battle I had to wage before I became a bona fide dreamer."
I waited expectantly [...] I could barely disguise my disappointment when she revealed that she had to battle herself.
"In order to be a dreamer, I had to vanquish the self," Experanza explained. Nothing, but nothing is as hard as that. We women are the most wretched prisoners of the self."
It is 1992. Deleuze gets out of his bed realising that he is asleep. The bedroom in which he is standing has windows in every direction: it is a room-sized house. To the south is a hill that might be in an upland area of Provence - a track stretches up the slope through expanses of sun-bleached grass and outcrops of rock. He can hear laughter in the other direction: amongst tall trees he can see three small houses in what seems to be a high valley. The views have a quality of superimposition of film, and he knows the superimposition is from the Future.
*
The human world of capitalism and the nation states is like the Overlook Hotel. It has its endless polished and decorated expanses, and deep within its substance there is something profoundly and pervasively wrong.
But beyond the Overlook Hotel of the human world there is the planet: there are its other species, and its terrains; and here and there are humans living in ways which are not constituted by capitalism and the nation states but which are constituted by nomadism in the form of existence on the terrain that subtends and surrounds the ongoing disaster of the capitalist socius - nomadism in a sense that comes not from anthropology but from metamorphics.
However, this Overlook Hotel is somewhere indeterminately between the hotel in The Shining and Es Toch, in City of Illusions. There is something profoundly and pervasively wrong, but rather than it relating centrally to the echoing or ongoing effectuation of the past within the present it relates to the control functionings of the mind and of social formations.
And here it is important to listen to the worlds of the two novels.
There is a roaring sound, a sound of energy.
There is a distant, intermittent call from an immanent future.
There is the seething, buzzing sound of a nest of wasps.
There is the doubling of speech in the form of mindspeech.
There is music playing on the radio of a car, in the middle of a snowstorm.
There is the silence of the surrounding mountains.
There is the chilling sound of a clock striking the hour.
In City of Illusions everything is about seeing the intent behind statements, and in both City of Illusions and The Shining something that is crucial is an anomalous ability to see where things are going - to have an effective, valid anticipation.
What is recurrently overlooked is the abstract.
Music is in the background, as what calms when under pressure. In the foreground are dreams; processes of seeing into the depths of things, and processes of seeing, again at depth, where things are going.
Love relationships have also been displaced - rather than appearing as fundamental to the way forward, they are shown to include forms which are - or can become - the opposite of the way forward (Estrel, Jack).
*
There is a complex continuum of the abstract. Brightness is on one side (it can be viewed as to the right), and on the other side is gravity. To move along the continuum to the right is for there to be a greater degree of brightness, and to move to the left is for there to be a greater degree of gravity.
Gravity concerns control functionings, which is to say that it concerns impositionism. The affects of impositionism are of many different kinds, but at their most subtle they include righteousness, piety, moral outrage, and the often barely-spoken veridical righteousness of scientific. However, this is a libidinal continuum, and the gravity side is simultaneously the domain of everything in the form of sexual domination and imposition actions emergent from rage.
The opposite side of the continuum is lightness, delight, openness, and a foregrounded awareness of immediacy (bodily and perceptual) which is simultaneously an awareness of the abstract (primarily, of intent). The abstract here is the depth-aspect of singular beings that are immediately being encountered, and is simultaneously an intermeshed horizon or background in the form of the envisaging of worlds of singularities beyond the space of the current encounters. And the abstract is also everything that is termed abstraction (generalising and logico-mathematical contructs) but where these are now a component rather than a foreground aspect, in the sense that they are reason being employed by lucidity.
Everything here concerns exteriority at the level of perceptual immediacy and at the level of the planet (and the cosmos) beyond the human world; everything here concerns a joy which is as sensual as it is intellectual; everything concerns an openness that can also be described as abandon; everything concerns travelling forward into wider and deeper spheres of reality.
With brightness there are three impositionist modalities which have been left behind: the belief in the probity of the political systems of nation states and capitalism; the belief in the adequacy of science in relation to the world of knowledge; the belief in the rectitude of the systems of stories and systems of rules of religion.
In the middle of the continuum are control behaviours in the form of deliberate attractiveness and a simultaneous indication of a willingness for abandon and a high degree of being acted-upon, as opposed to acting. Further along the continuum toward brightness, when attractiveness is inseparable from love, the processes involved to a great extent cease to be directly impositional, but they are constitutively bound up with a subtle but powerful tendency for a reverse impositionism, a diminishment, and making-insecure that is an aspect of this middle-continuum modality of abandon.
It can be seen that this is a libidinal and affective continuum, as much as it is an existential and intellectual continuum.
It can also be seen that it is a gender continuum involving an option that exists, for both men and women, to become-woman, to become-brightness. It is a gender continuum because it does not directly involve the biological, in that men can also go toward brightness in a process of becoming-woman. But it is a gender continuum which, in that it ultimately involves delight, immediacy, lucidity and exteriority, does not involve a becoming-woman that conforms to any customary ideas about the behaviours, roles or appearance of women. A man who in the fullest sense loves a woman, and women overall, is involved in a becoming-woman, and if he somehow arrived at a high degree of brightness he would be likely to give the surface impression all the time of being a man, and would not have lost his love for women.
The relationship of the biological to this continuum has two main aspects, one of which is an indeterminacy, an unknown.
The first aspect is the fact that abandon for those who are biologically female has an additional damaging aspect, in the form of unwanted pregnancy. This is why the absence of the role of traveller-into-the-transcendentally-unknown is not just disastrous in itself: it is disastrous because in its absence there is the enshrined centrality of the couple relationship centred on the reproductive organs, and for a heterosexual woman - in particular one who has woken a little in the direction of abandon - this socially enshrined fixation is exceptionally dangerous.
The second way in which the biological is in question here is the possibility that those who are biologically female have an advantage in travelling toward brightness. Women and men can both travel toward brightness in what is fundamentally the same way; and yet at the same time it may be that biological women have an advantage in relation to this journey, if only in relation to setting out on it. The role of depth-level socialising could ultimately explain everything involved here, but transcendental materialism focuses on bodies: it seems that the corporeality of those who are biologically female makes it easier to embark toward brightness, to become-woman.
*
In relation to works and experiences the property of being 'visionary' can be used with reference to outsights, and to dreamings insofar as they are expressive of outsights.
Those who experience high-intensity but turbulent visionary states will sometimes end up being sedated into torpor by the medical assemblage. Whereas those who experience charged but non-turbulent experiences of this kind are now predominantly domesticated into being 'artists'. To a substantial extent the concept and practice-system of 'art' is now an element of what blocks the effectuation of lucidity.
Music can be taken over by many forces, and it has a way of being visionary which, although it is powerful through being diffuse, is recurrently very poor in terms of building upwards at the visionary, existential level of a transformed understanding of the world. Songs are often where sustained movement takes place, but this is in part because something beyond music is also involved, in the form of the micro-dreaming created by the words.
Staying in the world of works (as opposed to experiences) it is in the writing of philosophy and stories that the struggle is largely played out - the struggle to see the world at the level of the transcendental-empirical; the struggle in which lucidity is trying to wake. As writers start to break themselves free they produce works which are a functioning of a channel which involves a transcendental-empirical understanding of the world, as opposed to 'art'. It is valuable to focus closely on the abstract formations within these virtual-real worlds, and also to listen to their silences and their sounds. Primarily this is a question of terrains and forms of relationship between humans and the world, and between each other. But a point will also arrive where it is important to intensify an awareness of the sounds and the silences of these oneiric terrains.
We are in the Overlook Hotel, and in relation to the the abstract - because dreamings/narratives are fundamental as well as transcendental-empirical philosophy - it is perhaps most accurate to say that it is thought describable as visionary which has been overlooked.
*
This is the start of Mark Fisher's music retrospective for 2006: "Momus argues that 'if music didn't exactly die in 2006, it certainly felt sidelined, jilted, demoted, decentred, dethroned as the exemplary creative activity, the most vibrant subculture." Fisher agrees with this and goes on to say that the rate of change of pop's content 'continues to sclerotically slow.' At this time Leyland Kirby had just finished his album "The Death of Rave," about which Kirby says this:
"The idea for 'The Death of Rave' was conceived in early 2006, after a visit to the Berghain in Berlin. At the time Berghain was about to explode onto the international club scene as a temple. The feeling was in the air that something special was happening. I went and saw a pale shadow of the past. Grim and boring beats endlessly pounding to an audience who felt they were part of an experience but who lacked cohesion and energy. For me personally something had died. Be it a spirit, be it an ideal, be it an adventure in sound. Rave and techno felt dead to me"
2002 - 2006. The fadedown. (fadedown is a term in opposition both to fadeout, which implies a termination, and collapse: the deintensification in 2002 to 2006 was relatively minor in that it involved the - already fairly minimal - alternative culture modalities dropping down to a lower level of functioning, as opposed to the much more pervasive and marked drop down of 1978 to 1982).
2002 - 2006. The fadedown. (fadedown is a term in opposition both to fadeout, which implies a termination, and collapse: the deintensification in 2002 to 2006 was relatively minor in that it involved the - already fairly minimal - alternative culture modalities dropping down to a lower level of functioning, as opposed to the much more pervasive and marked drop down of 1978 to 1982).
However the historically descriptive terms used in this account are not to be taken as directly indicative of the crucial issue.
Ultimately, what is involved, in analysing music, film and alternative culture from 1960 to 2006 is not history, but is the question of what was missing in the attempt to break open a view of the escape-route. The question is a transcendental-empirical issue, concerning the suppressed faculties. None of this primarily involves a grand challenge to accounts of recent history, or to the procedures of historiography. It is a question not of time, but of the spatium of formations of energy and intent. And the starting-point is the faculties.
The primary answer, in relation to 1960 to 2006, is that a focused or fully effectuated lucidity was the faculty that was missing.
Lucidity is the faculty which grasps the nature of intent, dreamings, and affects. And, most crucially, it is lucidity which can see the intent of the modality (form of being) of exteriority. Lucidity is a breaking-open and focusing of transcendental-empirical outsights, and, in perceiving the intent of exteriority, it can see that intrinsic to this intent is an all-encompassing pragmatics (one that to a great extent involves forms of attention or awareness), and, inseparably, an exploratory metaphysical stance in the form of an active bypassing of the dogmatic image of the world.
The secondary but definitive answer is that what is missing is the exteriority-mode-of-existence. It is this which lucidity can see.
Everything here becomes inseparably about transcendental-empirical outsights and a fine-grained and wide-focus pragmatics of the body and the modalities of attention of the body. And inseparably it becomes about about becomings and an impersonal serene delight. With all of these aspects existing within the space and horizon of a primary focus on the terrains beyond urban formations, whether cities, towns or villages.
The question of a pragmatics which is as metaphysical as it is corporeal produces the impression that we are now in a space that does not seem to be that of 'art'. But this of course is the point. Art is a domestication of the functioning of the suppressed faculties, and something which is fundamental to it is an agreement to not mount any sustained, pervasive challenge at the level of knowledge: the faculty which, within this agreement, which therefore must not be fully woken is lucidity.
However, the fundamental inspiration which drives artists is a movement toward the waking of lucidity. It is just that the systems of ordinary reality continually conduct away from outcomes that go in this direction. A lot of biases, fixations and evaluations must be left behind (a partial critique means nothing at the fundamental level). It is not at all easy to depart from the scanning-patterns and emotional systems of the place of reason, so that reason can at last find a place within a more effective distribution of the faculties.
At the level of the alternative, radical domains of music, writing and film the phase from 1960 to 2006 was a long process of leaning into the futural spaces beyond ordinary reality, and of shifting, within the different areas, from one primary means of doing this to another. The first phase collapses after two decades, and then there is a more tonally 'feral' alternative culture phase which re-groups in the form of a much lower-impact alternative-culture domain (lower impact in terms of its global pervasiveness, but recurrently high-intensity for those involved) and then this in turn undergoes a collapse. Everything here concerns tendencies and degrees. It can be said, accurately, that music goes from a greater tendency to be expressive of dreamings to a greater tendency to be a primary element within a production of trance-states, but both aspects were extensively in effect on either side of the shift. And at the fundamental level nothing has changed since 2006: the process continues as before, though with a lower intensity. But no matter how imprecise these delineations may be it is valuable to take up this lens and look through it.
There are two main issues. One is the awareness of the ongoing disaster. And the other is the awareness of the escape-path.
In relation to the escape-path a first issue is that of the anomalous ability or the anomalous device. And the key issue is that across the phase involved the key modalities are either anomalous anticipation or anomalous perception of language, and depth-level perception of intent (perception of the abstract; of what at depth is going on in the world) is a modality which barely appears, in terms of it being figured in the form of an anomalous modality. Speaking across all aspects, this is to say that the idea of knowledge is kept trapped by reason's line of time, and by the idea of communication.
In The Shining and City of Illusions the two anomalous aspects appear (Danny's anticipation of what is going to happen and the prediction device of the patterning board; Danny's hearing of internal speech and 'mindspeech'). But this is just two books from the time. Focusing initially on anticipation, it is important to see that the most powerful pieces of writing involved suggest lucidity by indicating that the anticipatory process is a perceiving of the present, but in the same instant everything is indexed to prediction. This is what happens in The Left Hand of Darkness and also in Pierette Fleutiaux's novella "The Story of the Abyss and the Telescope." And the situation is very similar with the figure in the form of the anomalous perception of language: insofar as all along it is faintly figuring the perception of intent (whether in an immediacy situation or in a process of seeing into the depths of things across multiple experience) you would in fact be very unlikely to notice this figuring. With 'mindspeech' people cannot see intent in the form of the lies of the Shing, which functions to keep the two modalities apart, and in The Shining Stephen King does in fact construct Danny's ability as a capacity to see intent (the intent of amorous/sexual desire, the intent of the boy who is wanting to steal the radio) but the emphasised modality within the writing is nonetheless a hearing of internal speech. Again and again you get close to lucidity (though even immediacy-perception of intent has not broken open the whole range of the faculty), and this in the context of works which in complex ways are ultra-intense expressions of lucidity, functioning nascently but powerfully within dreaming, but again and again the writing veers away toward premonition and mindspeech.
It can now be asked: how is lucidity 'figured'? The answer is that examples are the optical instrument (the telescope, the pair of glasses), a drug, a mirror, a compass.
The compass is an interesting case, in that it opens up a dimension which is very different from prediction, in the form of navigation, and its process of showing transcendental-south opens up the pole of lucidity that is opposite to immediacy, in that to ask the question 'what is the intent of X?' is very different from asking a question from the anomalous compass.
It can be seen that the era had many moments when one of the figures appeared or half-appeared, as with the glasses in They Live. But overall the figures do not go far. However, the fact that this is the case is not surprising. Writers in this outer-edge terrain are dreamers who use language to express their dreamings, and these two faculties loom large (there are very extraordinary figures for dreaming in this era, as with The Lathe of Heaven, and The Electric Ant, though the list is endless) and the faculty of reason (reason in its trapped and dominatory form) is exceptionally hard to escape. Reason in this form structures thought, and its dominance is assisted by the disturbing emotional charge that comes from an awareness, as lucidity starts to be figured, that to follow through with this process is to be a philosopher, and to challenge the adequacy of science and social science in relation to depth-level knowledge.
In relation to the ongoing disaster, the most powerful figuring before the era had been the implicit figuring of Shakespeare, in the form of tragedy (in relation to the second sphere of action it had perhaps been The Waves). From 1960 a massive development occurs, breaking free under the new circumstances where the religious side of the system of reason-and-revelation has been placed in the background. On the one hand these vary by the extent to which they are explicit. The social worlds of Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness are a loose but explicit figuring of the ongoing disaster (Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale is another example), and the Nova criminals in the works of Burroughs are a straightforward figuring. There are then more implicit cases like Es Toch in City of Illusions and the Overlook Hotel, where what is visionary might be scarcely noticed.
There are also variations in terms of mode of writing. Alongside horror (where They Live would appear alongside The Shining) and speculative science fiction, there is the bright surrealism of Yellow Submarine, and the dark surrealism of Brazil, Being John Malkovich, and the novels of Jeff Noon (Jeff Noon goes furthest in this direction).
However, although to have created a lens which gives a view of the ongoing disaster is an achievement at the level of the transcendental-empirical, the process of focusing the lens is a very different issue. It is not only necessary to be able to show the escape-route, but to systemically critique the cognitive, social, inter-personal, affective and libidinal aspects of ordinary reality. Any main element being left out means that the ongoing disaster has not been understood, and this entails not just that the view is unfocused, but that the fundamental level it will not work, in that those who look through the lens will not understand what they are half-seeing. Leaving out an understanding of the libidinal aspect of the world in relation to control-behaviours (and in particular failing to critique the socially entrenched fixation on the 'sacralised' couple relationship, and failing to open up a view of those who travel into the transcendentally unknown) in the fullest sense vitiates the attempt to see ordinary reality. And failing to see the fully pervasive functioning of the modalities of the disaster within the whole sphere of large-scale social formations also undermines everything.
The first of these last two points can be made again by pointing out that the problem is not elsewhere at the level of the socio-political, but is immanent to all of us, and is as much intellectual/cognitive as it is libidinal. And the second point, concerning the social sphere, can be deepened by reference to the fact that if it is not seen that the problem is within all of us then any reference to a 'good' existing mode of top-level social formation will prevent the systemic analysis from functioning at the vital level. This is why Ekumen and ansible (despite the account of the creation of the ansible) are deadly for Le Guin's Hainish mythos. The Ekumen aligns with the United Nations, and the ansible is the product of science, and it is possible for people to think in this way: "there is a validatable steerage function in its early stages, and we have a scientific establishment which, like the United Nations, has some good people, and I am one of the good people, and the good people are slowly prevailing - so that there is just a slow Hegelian process of improvement" ("dialectics work in mysterious ways - at depth there is no disaster")".
A further version of this problem is where a bright, surrealist modality radically evades the gravity of moralising, but where everything remains nebulous. The depth-level power of Yellow Submarine is the songs, in which The Beatles have fully embodied a first-stage ability to speak outlandish in both micro-dreamings and in music, in relation to the affective tonality of the escape-path, which can be described as brightness. The film is an achievement, but it does not show the problem is immanent to everyone or make a social critique pervasive and this makes it an achievement which, although it had an impact at the time, was destined to be almost entirely forgotten.
Outlandish is the language which people continually start to learn, and which is continually forgotten. That is the nature of ordinary reality.
A primary way in which the escape-route has been shown has been through the ways in which it has been embodied. But it has also been made visible, minimally but very powerfully, in works such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. In an only slightly different form (and in some ways more effectively) it has also been evinced in films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Princess Mononoke. All of this is to say that the main way in which this view has been broken open has been through a movement from an urban to a non-urban terrain, and simultaneously - in most cases - through a Disappearance in the form of a movement across an upward threshold-crossing.
However, beyond this, it has been made visible through the additional-but-immanent worlds of strange tales, and through all visionary or transcendental accounts of the development of suppressed faculties, and - perhaps most of all - through indications of the trans-facultative faculty of becomings or accounts in the form of a lens for seeing this faculty by means of a single aspect. The Way of Wryd is exemplary in this respect in relation to becoming-woman, and The Maxx in its graphic novel form is another good example. Becoming-animal is a recurrent element, but this lens tends to be very badly focused. The figure of the shape-shifter points to becomings in a way which in many ways is better from the semi-indicative aspect of telepathy in pointing toward the perception of intent, but generally the difference between the two is not that great. It is the lucidity of many aspects of the context in Wild Seed which makes the protagonist's shape-changing more interesting.
However, although aspects of what needs to be seen are visible, and the point of Departure is occasionally perceived, overall the escape-route is fundamentally not seen, and (inseparably) nor is the faculty of lucidity.
The ordinary reality of the human world is the Overlook Hotel, a place of gravity and of control, a place within which wars of all kinds are continually produced. It is necessary to leave ordinary reality and travel within the Zone that is the planet, moving always in the direction of brightness, exteriority (in all its forms) and the waking of the faculties. Perception is the most important faculty of all (because it is the key to a deepened encounter and becoming with the planet), and after perception dreaming is the best starting-point among the suppressed faculties, because it brings about a displacement of scanning patterns in relation to the biases of the trapped form of reason, but to cross the crucial threshold, and reach the Place of Exteriority, it is necessary to concentrate on intent and all forms of the abstract, in order to wake lucidity.
1. Becoming-brightness
Delight is a key explorer-traveller attribute, a warrior attribute, where the conflict is that of overcoming the self, and of departing from the interestablishment. A primary and delight-suffused focus on immediacy and on singularities (with the vital singularity being the planet) is fundamental: this attribute is a capacity for a serene, joyfully hyper-charged abandon.
2. A becoming-active, involving a pragmatics of conservation, heightening, and releasing of the energy of the body.
3. A concentration of attention along the lines of exteriority, in particular perceptual exteriority, the exterior domains beyond the urban, and the faculties which are kept in a suppressed, exteriorised state within ordinary reality.
4. The embodied realisation that state wars are produced by the interestablishment, which means that ultimately the response to them is to depart from the interestablishment.
the horizon
5. Firstly, an openness in relation to immanence: the idea that in some way everything at depth is thought, actively explored in relation to the planet and in relation to the human body; generations of male proponents of ordinary-reality knowledge need to be by-passed, so that we stop thinking along mere-matter (non-thought) lines in relation to the planet, and in relation to the organs of the body. An openness to the idea of impersonally effective group alliances which are not constituted by the control modalities of ordinary reality.
Within science there is a suppression-system of reason. Within music there is an intermeshed domain of suppression-systems of religion, of implicitly religious faux-humanism, of nationalism, and of soul-and-romance. In music a main part of what is captured in this second domain is the line of flight of love on the part of love songs: a love song as such is a movement of freedom and of joy - it is a deterritorialisation - but it is always a question of what forces, at any particular moment, are taking hold of the song.
In music 1960 to 2006 is a process in which the assemblage of dance and music mounts a sustained attempt to break free from ordinary reality, starting with a primary modality of the micro-dreamings of songs, and ending with a primary emphasis on the events and charged beats of rave dance tracks. At the end of this process both pop-rock and festivals have been substantially institutionalised - given their own places and prizes - and illegal and legally 'liminal' dance events have to a large extent subsided. And because this is ordinary reality that is involved the new situation seems so natural that it is hard to perceive that anything ever happened.
But of course very little had happened. Songs and bodies of work in the form of songs can be catalysts for a movement forward - door-openers or 'components of passage' - but they tend not to provide much in terms of a pragmatics and a metaphysics of escape, so that the gain is often limited and temporary. And although micropolitical revolutions - the emergence of escape-alliances and escape-groups - do indeed have the atmosphere of a festival, unfortunately the deterritorialising power of festivals does not in itself include what is needed for the focusing of a movement of escape.
The Golden Notebook. The Drowned World. The love-song trajectory of The Beatles rises to the point where it faintly indicates a female transcendental-empirical alterity - and a brightness expressing itself through another distribution of the faculties - in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Picnic at Hanging Rock. The Left Hand of Darkness. Horses. Fanny and Alexander. Falling out of Cars. The whole phase can be delineated in this way - though Jeff Noon's use of the term 'lucidity' is a potentially misleading, barely-focused indicator at the end rather than a grand culmination of a movement forward.
But then you have to ask two questions: the first is - what happens if you include philosophy in its customary 'western' form? That is, what happens if you include works which are recognised as in this philosophical tradition?
Here it seems there is only A Thousand Plateaus, together with other works by its authors - in particular Deleuze - which overall are at a lower level of intensity.
And the second question is: what happens if you include works of anthropological philosophy (in a line of metaphysics and pragmatics which includes A Thousand Plateaus) without reference to what is officially recognised as philosophy?
And then everything changes: something has happened. There has been an emplacement within ordinary reality of the work of outlanders whose work is not only an expression and an explicit delineation of the faculty of lucidity, but has the same relation - of being expression and delineation - to the mode of existence that can be called exteriority.
When I started working on londonunderlondon with Mark Fisher we hadn't noticed that the fadedown was taking place, because it is always possible to set out toward the Future (and at the level of thought about this kind of development we were focused on the more substantial deintensification in the phase from 78 to 82). And when I started working on The Corridor, and shortly afterwards the text of On Vanishing Land, if I had been asked about rave I would have emphatically agreed with Leyland Kirby that it had died, but this view did not affect the way in which I was focused on the line of its continuation in the semi-separate world of dance festivals, and had no connection at all with the orthogonal view toward the Future, toward existence at a higher level on intensity.
The crucial point, is that, as the process started, and as the fadedown was taking place around us, Mark Fisher and myself were benefiting both from A Thousand Plateaus, and from the emplacement which had occurred. The attempt to read A Thousand Plateaus at Warwick University had largely failed, but now it had resumed and was succeeding, and we were beginning to focus the outsights of the works of Castaneda, Donner and Abelar. And in a quiet impersonal way the atmosphere, in a flat in Bromley with a view of trees on a southward horizon, was the atmosphere of a festival.
*
These are the key aspects, or 'abstract cores'.
There is a form of existence which consists of an exploration of the world - a travelling into the unknown in the direction of wider realities - and this form of existence can be called metamorphics.
To be an explorer into the transcendental-empirical is the sublime in the fullest sense, and this radically displaces the value of the couple-relationship-centred-on-the-sexual-organs.
Perception and the planet-beyond-the-human-world are vital starting-points for waking this form of existence, along with a process of becoming-active in the form of a conserving and freeing up of energy.
The explorer-traveller alliance, the semi-group (a loose nexus of alliances) and the group are the formations of metamorphics at the level of relationships between individuals.
Our primary faculties are perception, lucidity, feeling, dreaming, reason, speech, and navigation, together with the trans-facultative faculty of becomings. We need to start with perception and dreaming, and wake lucidity, which can also be called seeing.
The first aspect of the horizon is the escape-group, the group whose form of existence is a travelling into wider realities. Here there is something visible on the horizon, but it is likely to be substantially out of focus.
The second and fundamental aspect of the horizon is immanence. Energy on the part of the human body is understood as feeling (the depth-dimension of the abstract), and in relation to a bodily pragmatics of energy, feeling-as-energy is taken up in relation to, firstly, the holistic - proprioception-and-emotion - feeling of the body, and secondly in relation to the body's capacity to act, dream, think and create. This way of thinking about energy - that energy is feeling, the depth-dimension of the abstract - is applied to the rest of the physical world: the perspective or exploratory idea is that it is energy in the same sense that is the depth-level nature of everything from suns to rocks, and from chemicals to lightning - and, centrally, the idea of immanence involves a fundamentally different view of the substance of the planet as a whole, and of the body beyond the brain (the idea of energy here is grounded in everything we know about energy: this idea of energy-as-feeling is the fundamental guiding-idea or pragmatic-idea - an idea which conducts toward the waking of the faculties, toward the Future). But the fact that this way of thinking is likely to be seen as only exploratory does not mean there is nothing fully visible in relation to immanence: the human world and the worlds of the other animals are interconnected bodies without organs with a depth-dimension of feeling, and these therefore are a zone of immanence.
What has been called 'art' appears here as an aspect of processes of metamorphics, which is to say that art is more than we thought it was.
For women a primary aspect of sex with men is that it befogs them: it is deleterious to their confidence and to their awareness of intent.
Men need to go through a process of becoming-woman to the point where it is no longer accurate to say that they are males.
If the path of metamorphics - of becomings - is followed, sustained love relationships between women and men become possible. Love relationships are more than we thought they were, but their existence in this more sublime form is made possible through them being an element within metamorphics. For women as well as men the capacity for a love relationship of this kind is dependent upon becoming-woman - becoming-brightness.
Futural or explorer-traveller love relationships of this kind also become possible between those of the same sex, dependent in the same way, for both individuals, on becoming-woman.
Self-indulgence is particularly entrenched, sacralised and insidiously disguised within the social construction of heterosexual relationships, but in all of these forms of relationship it is self-indulgence which must be left behind in the direction of a brightness which can be characterised as serene abandon or serene delight.
Becoming-woman has an apparently accompanying modality which is not a counterpart but is an included element: this modality has a main focus at the level of the corporeal and consists of the trace of what has previously - and misleadingly - been called masculinity: it is what-has-been-called-masculinity insofar as it exists within metamorphics. This most centrally is a becoming-brisk, a becoming dynamic-fluidity, a becoming ready-to-corporeally-act.
An explorer-traveller is a warrior against the self, and a warrior ready on all levels for the dangers of the journey, but fundamentally they are an exponent of becoming-delight, of serene abandon.
*
A further issue concerns a difference between the ability to be a dreamer, and the ability to be a creator and shaper of circumstances. This distinction appears within the works of Castaneda, Donner and Abelar as the distinction between 'dreamers' and 'stalkers,' where stalkers are also defined as makers of 'controlled folly' - inventors and shapers of circumstances within the domains of ordinary reality. The books state that everyone has both abilities, but, as with left hand and right hand, individuals start out as fundamentally better with one ability than with the other - so that people are divided into dreamers and exponents of valuable circumstances. Neither of these abilities is indexed to success within ordinary reality with its domination by a constricted form of reason, but the crucial point in this context is that the books state that women are dreamers par excellence, and are stalkers par excellence (so that they are always the outer-edge exponents and teachers with both abilities) but that males, although they have a lower ability with their initial, specialist modality (in the end everyone learns both, as with becoming ambidextrous), start out with a little more skill with their secondary ability.
It is certainly true that women, when finally given a chance, are exceptional dreamers, and no-one would doubt the ability of women to be spontaneous, inventive organisers in the roles to which they have been primarily conducted during the millennia of human existence in which it has been insisted that women look after the hearth, the home, the shabono, the raising of children etc. (the immense kudos machines of scientificity, religion, business and art are all set up to obscure these achievements - everything has been set up so that women raise men who then receive prizes for achievements which are often far less important than the female achievement behind their success).
It is necessary to be very suspicious about what is given ultra-high kudos within the world of ordinary reality. If men have been trading on a greater ability to be a jack-of-all-trades with the two abilities, and if dreaming and creating-controlled-folly connect to some extent to space, on the one hand, and to time, on the other, then have certain domains been created which profoundly favour men, even though ultimately - with both abilities effectuated - this favouring would be erased? Given the chance women went immediately to the centre of the production of dreamings. But should we give some thought to why it is that women for the part are not currently competing at the highest level in chess, and why it is that, although female songwriters/dreamers are everywhere, there are very few female classical composers?
The waking of the faculties is in a profound sense a feminist issue (men have created an exceptionally dubious kudos machine). But it is vital also to think this: although it is true that songs, sounds, refrains and musical compositions can be powerful door-openers, what is the extent to which chess and classical compositions are components of passage for travelling toward wider realities?
*
We have reached the point of seeing a domain of understanding and pragmatics which has science and engineering as a counterpart (and which is also bound up with - and to an extent inseparable from - the domain of other arts forms, and music in particular, as with the instance of songs). To this it should be added that the analyses of some social and psychological disciplines - very much including writings that belong to the domains of Marxism - recurrently in some sense pertain to the domain of anthropological philosophy, and therefore to metamorphics. The domain of lucid Marxist and socialist perceptions (with their pychological/social aspects such as the outsight that religion is directly comparable to opium, and is deleterious in its effects in the same way) are very much part of the domain of anthopological philosophy: the problem concerns a dialectical-predictive embroilment in different forms of revolutionary and state politics, whereas the escape-route fundamentally consists of micropolitical departures. The ongoing disaster does indeed currently consist on one level of capitalism - corporations, capitalist/superwealth modalities of all kinds, the greed and destruction embedded in deterritorialised finance capital - but it is necessary to see that the interiority (the modality which consists of the functionings of the control mind) is in each one of us; that is, it is necessary to see the disaster at the level of the transcendental-empirical. And to take micropolitics to the level of a formula, it is necessary to put on your own oxygen mask, rather than thinking you can put one on the whole human world.
What moves you forward, on the path of escape, is love for the world. The direction in which you are moving is the direction of Love-and-Freedom, the direction of wider realities. It is delight to move forward, and it is the joy of deepened understanding, and of increasing freedom from blocks on thought and the functioning of the faculties: but at the most fundamental level it consists of love for the world, for the friends/allies-in-the-escape who are alongside you on the journey, and, in general, for those - close, or distant and unknown - who benefit from the energy and outsights created in the escape. It is the yes of love for the world that drives everything, and - inseparably - from the perspective of wishing to assist in the plight of humans, with there being nothing available that is remotely like the beginnings of a plan for a destruction of the entirety of the interiority, there is no way forward other than the escape-route. It is necessary to forget gravity and become brightness. We are beings who are going to die, and we must find a way of expressing our love - for the world, and for individuals around us - where the journey of at last discovering what is possible consists, as such, of the taking up of pragmatic issues where there is purchase on them: such as the process of freeing oneself from the interiority.
At more than one point in Castaneda's writings there is a specific, fundamentally political story. Its most developed form concerns the Toltec civilization: it states that this civilization was taken over by dominatory, suppressive forces at a high level of sophistication, but that these forces were destroyed by practitioners who had reached the 'third attention' - so that a baleful social formation was dissolved, its cities left to be covered in forests.
To be an individual where the interiority is uninterruptedly in effect is to be at the level of the first attention. For those of us who are struggling to bring about sustained interruptions of the interiority, even the second attention is a horizon whose features are not easy to grasp. Therefore, accounts concerning the third attention relate to what is beyond the horizon: we cannot assess the stories, and it has to added that the problem of overcoming capitalism is an even more vast problem than that of overcoming a specific civilisation. Such tales have a brightness, but there is nothing specific to be said. It is clear that the only way forward is to become delight and an implacable adventurousness and courage - is to travel toward Love-and-Freedom.
2.
The horizon has been transformed, metamorphosed. The horizon in this sense is the unknown - the transcendentally unknown. Since Kant this horizon has been constructed according to two, disparate, 'dead' possibilities: the world beyond our perceptions and constructions either consists of inert, mindless matter, or the world of matter/energy does not exist. The fact that Berkeley's idealism really only appears within academic philosophy does not change anything. The further possibility is that we are being arrogant in not applying our knowledge of space to the entirety of the world of spaces beyond our body. This possibility is that every energy formation is a zone of feeling, and that very pervasively these energy formations and zones of feeling are in some sense also worlds of awareness and intent.
This is the first aspect of the fending-off of the outside within this domain of the system of reason and revelation. The second is the idea of the subject and object - and inseparably of the idea of a domain of conditions of possibility of understanding, which introduces an instance - the subject - which always carries with it a suggestion, through methodological difference, of ontological difference, the suggestion that the subject is not an energy formation (and in any case energy - matter - may not exist, for this delusion structure).
A human individual is an encounter-world, a myriadon of encounterings - a zone-cluster of faculties where circumstances and concomitant explorations cause one faculty to go into effect and then another, but where very recurrently there are different faculties in effect (and perception is always to some extent in effect).
The transcendental-empirical terrain is all around us - consisting of intent, dreamings, affects, faculties, and energy formations. The second fending-off on the part of the system of reason and revelation in this context is the pair or combinant of options - there is a God or gods; and / or human beings, by virtue of their minds, occupy a plane or dimension that is fundamentally separate from matter. The fact that this second position is explicitly acknowledged as not proven within Kantianism is irrelevant - the image, the belief, is everywhere. All of this is a control fantasy.
This dogmatic image of the world is of course inseparable from the dogmatic image of thought. The world arrives in human beings, according to this fantasy, and then is constituted, recognised or 'grasped' by the concepts, the categories, the system of the conditions of possibility (however this is imagined in each case). Furthermore at the crucial level the thinking is all being done by ultra-trained, highly talented experts - physicists, philosophers, theologians - so that no-one could believe they could contribute to this cutting edge of the grasping of the world without an immense process of academic/scientific training.
Whereas in fact thought transmutates and creates concepts, and is an encounter with the transcendental-empirical terrain which requires a fundamental openness and courage - and at the crucial level (the level of outsights) it is fundamentally open to everyone, not just to those who have undergone an academic training (in fact an academic training is likely in many cases to be a disadvantage). Poets again and again reach outsights precisely through not drawing on systems of concepts, but through generating their own terms - but poetry has its own blocking modalities, its own constraints.
A poet who is also a visionary dramatist creates substantial problems for the system of ordinary reality because their 'art' is doing too much at the level of transcendental-empirical perception - and a lot of work has to be done to mis-construct the nature of their work. But the fundamental problem for ordinary reality is the work of those who leave the emperor's library and set out on a line of Departure which produces a system of outsights that is also a pragmatics - those whose work is a metamorphics.
It is easy to only hear the word 'unknown'. But the transcendental-empirical terrain also consists of zones and formations which are straightforwardly the unknown which is knowable, they are the already-half-known which is knowable. It consists of intent, affects, faculties, dreamings, lives, the ongoing disaster in the human world, the departures that take place within lives and milieus, the blocked dreaming that is ordinary reality, the liberatory dreaming of a system of outsights that encompasses ordinary reality in seeing that it is a reactive formation amongst other formations, a malaise. The horizon is the unknown in the initial sense, and within the intermediate terrain of the transcendental-empirical, there is the escape-path.
The extent to which the horizon is the unknown which is knowable is not something that can be known in advance. It is a question of going into the outlands. The language of the outlands is different each time it appears, because new concepts and ways of speaking always emerge in any sustained process of breaking open outsights. A question of learning to explore the world - of learning to explore at the level of the transcendental-empirical, which is also the level of its energy formations in the customary sense, a question of learning to speak the always-new language of the outlands.
Ordinary reality - the central, reactive current that is almost the entirety of what we call human history - comes into focus as a disturbing, disfunctional hypertrophy, so that its relation to the planet is like that of a parasite-induced outgrowth on a tree (humans are killing each other, and constricting each others' lives, and are destroying the planet). The planet is around you, suffused by sunlight and starlight. The transcendental-empirical is around you, all the way to, and including, the horizon. Set out along the escape-path.
3.
The Zone is the planet - the planet-in-its-exteriority. The Zone is the transcendental-empirical terrain in which we exist. It is the transcendental-empirical terrain of all the faculties, but under certain circumstances there can be a valuable clicking-into-place in focusing on the fact that it is the transcendental-empirical terrain of dreaming.
The planetary white void is all around you, above you, beneath you. The oneirosphere within the human world is spread all around the planet. Intent is visible in human formations, human individuals, human interactions, in animals, in human dreamings. Affect is visible, and the directions from which affect arrives. Beyond this there is the unknown, the white void.
Dreamings have four key forms, the first of which is disastrous. Blocked, deleterious dreamings, open but unfocused dreamings, open dreamings that are threaded with outsights, open dreamings that are threaded with outsights and include a pragmatics of Departure from ordinary, deadened reality.
What are key features of this last form of dreaming?
A concentration of attention on the planet - a concentration which is simultaneously a displacement of attention from human technology and human modalities of organisation.
A concentration on a modality of existence that can be called brightness, which consists of a centrality of attention on perceptual immediacy and on intent; of an adventurous, courageous delight in exploration; and of a displacement away from the gravity of ideas of good and evil, from the gravity of personal and species self importance, and from the gravity of the conceptual.
A concentration on the abstract, as opposed to abstraction.
The abstract is an aspect of the corporeal: in describing the abstract everything always concerns either the encounter-modalities (as with faculties) or the intra-space (as with the oneiric real) of the corporeal. And ultimately the descriptions always relate to both of these dimensions of the corporeal.
The abstract is therefore entirely different from abstraction, despite the fact that abstraction, properly analysed, is a micro-element within it. To describe the abstract is to produce abstraction, but the source is the abstract.
When the corporeal is thought about across time, and in relation to all its affects, modalities and aims it becomes apparent that terms such as existence and form of existence are appropriate, but everything still concerns the corporeal.
The primary domains of the abstract are: the overall modalities and the sub-modalities of intent, the faculties (including perception, and the faculty of feeling or of affects), and the oneiric-real.
The faculty of lucidity is fundamental because it is the perception of the abstract - it is the initial or primary faculty of outsights.
The faculty of dreaming is even more fundamental because in also breaking open outsights it has a far higher degree of effectiveness in relation to making-perceptible and delineating transformational, liberatory modalities of intent.
Dreamings here are therefore coming to the foreground both in relation to the faculty of dreaming and in relation to the dimension of the abstract that is the oneiric-real.
And in looking at the dreamings of the last 4000 years it can be seen both that they predominantly are blocked, and that there is the need for new liberatory dreamings.
In being planetary, liberatory dreamings have no connection with the dreamings of nation states. And in stepping sideways from technology and human macrological systems of organisation they have only indirect or tangential connections with the dreamings of science, and of the customary domains of knowledge and the conceptual.
They also avoid all tendencies to be structured along the lines of the emergence-dynamic of the love-couple, with its often deeply-occulted ur-gravity, or along the lines of the trajectory of established high-kudos success or victory, whether this success is in discovery/exploration/invention, or is in defeating an enemy, or is in relation to any other ordinary-reality domain of enterprise.
And in focusing toward the human as the unknown, when these dreamings look toward death they either straightforwardly indicate that we are finite beings who will die, or indicate that if a threshold-crossing is possible - one that involves staying alive for longer in some way, but with a transformed energy-substrate - this threshold-crossing is only possible through a sustained, pervasively disciplined process of intensification, of waking the body and its faculties.
A concluding point is that on the transcendental-empirical terrain the emergence of new dreamings recurrently has a profoundly enigmatic aspect.
*
The three essays are Inside the Whale (1940), by George Orwell, Outside the Whale (1960) by E.P.Thompson, and Nomad Thought (1973) by Gilles Deleuze.
What these essays share, firstly, is the overall view of capitalism that comes from Marx, but with a rejection of the idea of dialectics - which is to say that they see capitalism as the latest form of an ongoing disaster, but not as an intrinsically upward-tending 'working-out' of a problem.
The second point is that the authors of the essays share a tendency to see literature (including fiction and poetry) in political and philosophical terms.
Ordinary reality is as libidinal as it is cognitive and language-embedded, and is as corporeal, habitual, and perceptual as it is oneiric, presuppositional and affective. It has extremely powerful, disparate expressions at the level of macrological formations (nation states, religions, corporations etc), and at the individual level it is the system from which everyone has to escape.
In Nomad Thought Deleuze can see the beginning of the escape-path, and his focus has become anthropological, in the sense that he has realised that departure is on a crucial level a question of being planetary, as opposed to being caught up within a dreaming of a nation state, and in the sense that the historical domain of nomadism has come to the forefront of his domain of thought.
Off to the side of his work a breakthrough is taking place: the emergence of an expression of the Sayan modality of thought which has what can be termed an anthropological form of dreaming. And for the rest of the decade Deleuze and Guattari will together write a work which is aware of this emergence, and which sets out to bring into focus the line of departure in question, with only partial success. A Thousand Plateaus is part of a singular anthropological shift or outward inflection, of which the novels of Ursula Le Guin from this time are also a part: the two sides of the Arkadian modality leaning out in the direction of the escape-path.
What becomes a little more visible at this time is what appears as a threshold-crossing, although in reality it is a series of micro threshold-crossings which will be reached and crossed in different ways by each individual. And the key is that each individual has to set out along this path (so that the key to the depth-level domain of the political is in all of our hands) and has to continue along it with an absolute dedication to encountering the world, becoming active, waking the faculties, and leaving behind control-fixated modalities of intent.
What is fundamental to Inside the Whale is that Orwell sees fiction and poetry as having a vitally important political or socio-depictive aspect: he sees works of literature as expressions of an ethos, a way of seeing and interacting with the socio-political world. It is just that, in settling on an 'acquiessent' (this is his word) recognition of the ongoing disaster as the only way forward for literature, he is trapped in a still-Hegelian mindset that thinks that because you can't transmutate capitalism there is no outside of the whale.
The key to Nomad Thought is that Deleuze is beginning to look in an anthropological direction, and is beginning to do this in a way where what is central for understanding the beyond of the ongoing disaster is a threshold crossing to what he is calling nomadism, where nomadism only secondarily involves movements across terrains, or the potential for such movements. What this entails is that although the piece is about Nietzsche, he is starting to move away from Nietzsche.
There is no doubt that Deleuze is right to recognise the importance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This text not only has the first and second of the three features of full dreamings outlined earlier in this section, it in certain fundamental ways has the third feature as well. Moreover, it not only has the lucidity involved in it being an expression of outsights - the knowledge toward which poetry tends - it also has a pragmatics running through it, even if this is sometimes opaque (or implicit), and is somewhat limited in its scope. Furthermore the book is expressive of the planetary sublime - the planet and the cosmos around it appear here as compellingly and definitively inspiring and fascinating, and also as unknown in a transcendental-empirical sense, in that they are threaded with anomalous, enigmatic elements.
However, although the book comes close to being straightforwardly an expression of the Sayan modality of thought it falls short by including - centrally - a new kind of gravity of the concept, one which is clinical/psychological rather than moral, and which involves a kind of mind-trap, or misguided modality of description and cognition, that is to a large extent the result of a residual but still in this context decisive tendency to be fixated on the faculty of reason and specifically its line of time.
The idea that causes Zarathustra to go into shock, and which is a kind of 'monster' which he fights, is the idea of eternal recurrence of the same, so that the cosmos with this view is a repetition-engine. This idea is kind of 'bad trip' figment that Nietzsche should have left behind (see Section 40, for something similar) at all levels, whether thought of in terms of it being affirmed, or not affirmed. Instead Nietzsche makes an affirmed version of the idea central to the book, bringing back in the process a focus on reason's line of time, and on a kind of dead or deadened option in terms of the planet in its exteriority being the unknown. He therefore, in naming gravity, falls victim to it at the final, crucial point, and generates a kind of clinical, and only supposedly post-clinical, gravity which is then dressed up anthemically - with all the weight of anthems - as being an affirmation of the idea involved.
Deleuze, in turn, wastes a lot of time trying, unsuccessfuly, to impose a new reading, where this superimposed account, in any case, does not have the importance Deleuze ascribes to it, and in fact overall seems to have some of the clinical, deleterious aspects of the position he is trying to supplant.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is therefore a footbridge to the Sayan modality (as well as being a fixation-affected semi-fusion of the two sides of the Arkadian modality) but it is a footbridge which near the end is in a damaged state which makes it very hard to cross.
Hinterlands, the correct setting up of the problem of human beings and their relationship to the world around them (subtract established oneiric, conceptual and technologial/societal systems)
The knowledge toward which poetry tends. There is another, more profound and more encompassing form of knowledge.
Intent within the human world is knowable. It is also knowable that the planetary sublime exists, as always potentially valuable affect.
The sphere of the transcendentally unknown should be constructed as the expanses of the natural world that surround, subtend, and of course include human beings, and this sphere is decisive, in particular when we open up toward it (and to not open to it is to live a life dominated by the control modalities, which must be seen themselves as a recurrently decisive instance of the unknown but knowable). Human beings are creatures with control delusions, and out there, power hovers.
More encompassing dreamings, which reveal intent, and reveal blocked, delusional dreamings, and which reveal the planetary and beyond-the-planetary sublime, which jolts and wakes and inspires, while also breaking open the awareness of these expanses, and their included formations, as the transcendentally unknown.
The exploratory probes within dreamings, where these probes have the form of an anomalous instance that in some sense at least have a straightforward correlate or referent (Prospero with his staff and book relate to the knowledge toward which poetry tends), and the central function of these probes as anomalous elements which break open the awareness of the unknown, as element which is necessary for the full jolt of the planetary sublime. (although such an element does not at all need to be fictional, it can be the anomalous with full validity).
A more encompassing dreaming in the form of an art-mythos (Shakespeare as example).
A more encompassing dreaming in form of a system of outsights, and a pragmatics. A more profound and more encompassing seeing of the world - a fully effectuated dreaming, a metamorphics. The knowledge toward which poetry tends.
Something that is momentous about Shakespeare's work is that insofar as it has any affinity such that it would be a paratext, its affinity is with the oneiric world of Ancient Greece and Rome, but because the religious worlds involved have gone, it is free of any danger of being taken up to support dogmatic positions. In this way it to a great extent it creates what is now called 'art' in that it takes it over a threshold of freedom, and of degree of establishment as a modality.
But at the depth-level what is important here is - firstly - that central to his oneiric worlds are hinterlands which have anomalous, enigmatic elements or beings within them. The works break open the planetary sublime - a view of the planet which while seeing it as heartening and inspiring intrinsically also sees it as the transcendentally unknown.
Secondly, through his tragedies Shakespeare breaks open an extremely powerful but partially opaque view toward the ongoing disaster. This is because the ongoing disaster is in the fullest sense rooted in the system of control-modalities that is constitutive of individuals within ordinary reality: tragedy here becomes the key to politics, and the unpalatable truth is that the starting-point for everyone is an extremely difficult struggle at the level of their own self. Tragedy has a high degree of impact, but it remains inchoate. It is necessary to see that while Lear and Edmond are very different, their existence is on the spectrum of control, and to see that what people are doing is controlling circumstances so that they appear to have crossed a threshold to the beyond of reactivity, a threshold to which in reality they have never come close. The outsight is there, and impacts, but it is necessary to look through the lens in a courageous, impersonal way (that has left behind self-importance) and to see a disaster that is as political as it is individual - to look impersonally through the lens and see the ongoing disaster.
Shakespeare's work consists of predominantly open dreamings, threaded with outsights. It is a key example of the third form of dreaming. But because the delineatory account of the world is minimal or implicit, and because there is no sustained, developed pragmatics of Departure, the work remains a development within the oneiric wing of the Arcadian modality of thought.
Shakespeare's hinterlands, with their forests and wild flowers, had a substantial impact on the poetry of the romantics, and his anomalous elements (and also his hinterlands) have had an impact on fantasy writing. Within the zone of highest-level film ('filmic literature'), his anomalous elements have also had an impact on Fanny and Alexander (Shakespeare's ghosts, the figure of Prospero).
Isak is in some ways an improvement on Prospero, but in fact there has been almost no forward movement anywhere, and both the romantic poetry and the fantasy novels for the most part fall very far short of Shakespeare. Ultimately, even Fanny and Alexander is a re-effectuation which as a whole does not go further, partly because it depends on reference to Shakespeare for its power, making it a partial paratext, rather than a full departure.The knowledge towards which poetry tends is elsewhere. Wherever else it is, in terms of its effectuation in books this knowledge emerged two and a half thousand years ago in China, and started to emerge fifteen years before Fanny and Alexander, in the milieu of anthropology, not in the milieu of art.
A metamorphics - and its fully effectuated dreaming - is an instance of the Sayan modaility of existence and thought. Its emergence and the phases of its embodiment in Departures are not the result of a process of development in the art domain of the - blocked and divided - Arkadian modality, or of a process of development in its philosophical/scientific domain (even if it carries many traces of the milieu within which it appeared). There will be conjunctions that are more than conjunctions between the Sayan and the Arkadian modailities, But this is because what is fundamental are the problems, and although problems are set up differently there is enough in common for wider circumstances to be involved in the different forms of the problems going into effect at the same time.
Within the domain or 'wing' of the Arkadian modality that consists of dreamings the chains or emergences have no inbuilt tendency to be upward processes of development. Most of what has happened since Shakespeare has been a decline. The Waves is an exception, but apart from its power and brilliance - its level in relation to outsights - The Waves has very little in common with Shakespeare. Which conducts toward the second point which is that chains here concern similar spaces of problems, and similar elements and modalities, but generally with no simple, clear line of causality.
The last point is that on the side of the Sayan modality the emergences are not developments building on the domain of Arkadian dreamings or on the domain of Arkadian philosophy/science/anthropology etc. The attractor space of the Sayan modality is a very different domain. The emergences might have traces of the milieu of anthropology but this is because of the Sayan knowledge to which certain tribal and nomadic societies are slightly closer, and they might quote poetry but this is because of the knowledge toward which poetry tends - again, Sayan knowledge.
The limit case here is Donner's Shabono. It is not written as part of a process of building upon forest books such as The Beginning Place, or the initial Mythago Wood story (Robert Holdstock) or The Word for World is Forest. And although it can be said that it carries the trace of works such as The Circle of Fires, it is more that books such as Lizot's are struggling on the edge of a threshold which Donner's book has crossed from the same direction.
In starting to write about forests there are two initial points that must be made.
The first is that forests here are hinterlands, alongside other hinterland terrains such as deserts, and ultimately as hinterlands they are central here to a way of re-focusing attention on the planet so that a direction of travel becomes compellingly visible - so that the planetary sublime becomes visible - and so that the human world comes into focus not as supervenient on everything but as shivering within an all-directions domain of often perturbing, looming forces.
The second point is that dreamings of the fourth type do not need to include narratives. Dreamings in the primary sense are accounts of the world. The secondary sense of dreaming is the one that will seem more obviously connected to the term 'dream', and this other modality of dreamings consists of narratives. Tao Te Ching is a dreaming - an account of the world - and it shows the direction-of-travel, and shows that the human world is shivering within something like a an immense forest, but does this without any use of narrative. Narrative worlds are immensely powerful, and there is no doubt that if a way is found of using them, they in crucial ways are better in relation to breaking open outsights, but this does not mean that they are necessary. The key in Tao Te Ching is the focus on planetary exteriority, and exteriority in all senses, and the displacement of focus away from technology, cities, and all human systems of laws, ritual, and concepts, including moral concepts. The focus is on valleys, rivers, skies (not on cities, laws, and systems); and exteriority is planetary and is also the exteriority of departures - 'just do what you do, and then leave'.
There are several reasons, therefore, why a focus on forests in stories (tales belonging to the Arkadian modality) is ultimately not the central issue here, but for a whole series of other reasons it remains the case that it is valuable to follow this line of thought.
Forests in fact can be seen as a main dimension of the 'repressed'. This seems to be both because we have destroyed most of them, and also because they have a tendency to be dangerous; but most of all it is perhaps because if you focus toward the transcendental-empirical - toward the Zone that is the planet - through the lens of forests you are both seeing toward the planetary sublime and toward a world which is predatory to the maximum (inevitably there are also questions about what forests and trees are in relation the putative body without organs of these formations). This is not to say that forests in themselves are predatory to the maximum, but is to say that they are a lens that helps you see the world around you as both sublime and anomalously dangerous: to a great extent the human world is shivering within a clearing of an immense forest.
In Shakespeare there are the forests and there is the view of the threshold-crossing. He keeps the two largely separate (Prospero's island is not described in terms of forests, despite Ariel having been trapped there within a 'cloven pine'), and the play with a forest which is threaded with the anomalous is a comedy. But anything beyond this would have been too much.
For a long time after this nothing more happens, but around 1850 things begin to change. Writings about forests begin to appear (The Wood Beyond the World, Phantastes) and so do tales which include a view - no matter how faint - toward the threshold crossing. Dunsany is probably the writer who gets furthest, but despite there being important elements within The Charwoman's Shadow and The King of Elflands Daughter these books do not succeed in moving forward from the point reached by Shakespeare.
And then Tolkien makes a complex, reactionary intervention - a collapse. Here the forests are darkened and carefully desensualised; they exist within a world of Good and Evil which is ultimately ruled over by God and his angels; and there is no threshold-crossing.
Ursula Le Guin is not directly affected by this reactive development, although it is possible she is drawn toward an opening, in terms of readership, that Tolkien largely created. She returns again and again to forests which are threaded with the anomalous, or which have an anomalous aspect, but it is as if something is wrong, and the project keeps slipping through her fingers. City of Illusions, The Word for World is Forest, The Pathways of Desire, The Eye of the Heron and The Beginning Place are all forest books, but there are ways in which the edgy, gritty, sublime and also anomalously disturbing quality that would be involved in a way forward is most in effect in City of Illusions (despite the writing being in some ways not at the level of her later work). Her equivalent of Prospero is Ged, but, unlike the way she writes in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven, the Earthsea books are written in a young adult mode, and when in The Other Wind (written around the year 2000) an anomalous forest appears in the form of 'the immanent grove,' the use of the term immanent is on one level extremely powerful - and connects up effectively with a key moment in the initial book - but there is another level on which the somewhat mild and two-dimensional presentation of the forest (which in some sense is all forests) means that it feels like a long-ago predetermined indication of a book she did not write in 1967.
The Pathways of Desire, The Eye of the Heron, and The Beginning Place are written between 1977 and 1980, around this time John Foxx was writing The Quiet Man, with its overgrown, forested London, and Robert Holdcroft was writing the first version of Mythago Wood, a story which, like Pathways of Desire, takes an exteriority and reveals it is produced by human beings, and which populates the non-exteriority in ways that have a thin, minimal quality. And in 1982 there is Fanny and Alexander, a partial reeffectuation of the Shakespeare abstract machine. At the point where he tells the story to the children Uncle Isak feels like an improvement on Prospero, and this is a new work rather than being derivative, but because the threshold-crossing is here brought into an association with religion, and because it depends too much on reference to Hamlet, the film despite all its brilliance is to an extent a paratext of Shakespeare, and is a slight decline from Shakespeare's major works.
But if you read the four books by Le Guin books written in the years from 77 to 85 (the three that have been mentioned, together with Always Coming Home) there is a quality of her trying very hard to reach something, in a process that involves her increasingly drawing on her anthropological knowledge.
And of course the crucial point in this context is nothing at all to do with a need to write better fictions about forests or hinterlands (and still less is it about the need to go beyond the point reached by Shakespeare). It is about the need for writing which is an expression of the Sayan modality of thought - writing which, while it might involve a narrative, fundamentally consists of outsights and of a pragmatics of departure.
There is a depth-level sense in which it is correct to say that Shakespeare is a primary inventor of fantasy literature, and because he tied this emergence to the outsights of tragedies, and his oneiric worlds include and recurrently point toward hinterlands, his work remains a very high point of development of the 'art' side of the Arkadian modality of thought. His work has the three features of the fourth type of dreaming that were outlined above (although it needs to be pointed out that this is relatively common in poetry) and although there are elements of it which belong to or are affined with ordinary reality it is correct to say that to a great extent it faces in the direction of the escape-path. However, what is missing is the wider domain of outsights, and the pragmatics.
However, in the last four decades of the 20th century there is a Change, an emergence which will always have the potential to make art and customary philosophy things of which you would say 'this is only the beginning'. This is the emergence of narratives of the anomalous that are expressive of the planetary sublime and are settings for a wide domain of outsights and a closely connected pragmatics.
The concentration on the art side of the Arkadian modality has been the result of the focus on dreamings in the initial sense of the term that relates in this context to narratives. But in the fullest sense of the term there is always a dreaming. A Thousand Plateaus is a dreaming - an account of the world. But for several reasons it is not an instance of the fourth kind of dreaming. This is partly because it does not have a fully developed pragmatics, but also because it embodies a continual turning-back toward systems of concepts (rather than a displacement away from them), despite the fact that it breaks open the view toward the abstract, in opposition to abstraction. The book also tries to see the nomadism of those who depart along the escape-path in terms of something like revolutionary communism, and in taking up instances of nomad wars against states it has a very damaged lens in relation to the most fundamental outsight.
However, the book is a very highly developed instance of the philosophy side of the Arkadian modality, and it will always be seen as a part of a body of work (Deleuze's philosophical output) which is embedded within western philosophy. And in this context the key is that through its many direct and positive references to works that are part of the Change, it opens up a connection to the Sayan modality of thought.
A path therefore toward a path. The inside of the leviathan of ordinary reality is almost nothing, and the outside is almost everything. Instead of the acquiesence or quiescence advocated by Orwell what is needed is unbending intent. Save yourself from ordinary reality before you start trying to save others, in a process where what is fundamental is a journeying out into the world in a joyful, courageous process of exploration, where your journey will lead indirectly or directly toward moments and influxes of assistance, and where it can never be known what a wider, rhizomatic domain of these journeys of departure might produce in terms of the forcing back or even overcoming of ordinary reality.
The Zone is the planet-in-its-exteriority (that is, including sunlight, starlight, the magnetosphere, the moon). It is the planetary enervolon. A domain of the unknown which is knowable.
The enervolon includes the human oneirosphere, which to a large extent consists of dreamings that are profoundly reactive, profoundly self-important at the level of species self-importance. Many of these dreamings can accurately be described as delusions, because they project - transcendentalise - figures from the human world onto the planetary enervolon and onto the entirety of the cosmos. Other dreamings - the dreamings of scientificity, which is inseparable from, though not the same as science - function to instill and perpetuate the idea of humans as superveniently working from an eternal plane of knowledge, which is the species-self-importance idea of human beings as the pinnacle of existence, where this pinnacle region is envisaged as across-a-threshold in that it is, according to the delusion, separate from energy-formations. Together these reactive, delusional dreamings are central in the process of the destruction and diminishment of the eco-systems of the planet, and of the crushing and attenuation of human lives.
Properly speaking, the second sphere of action is the name for the state where you become aware of the Zone, the planetary enervolon. Its arrival is the point where you see that the human world is shivering on the terrain of the unknown, and when you look around you and see the planet and the sunlight and starlight as the profoundly unknown and sublime world that it is. The click at this point is the shift to an awareness of an intense silence, but at a deeper level it is the opening up of a channel of abstract perception of intent, energy-formations, affects, faculties, journeys of metamorphosis, dreamings.
The emergence in the last four decades of the 20th century is of a modality of Sayan thought which has close connections to the domain of anthropology - although ultimately its outsights and its pragmatics are its own, as opposed to them having been sourced from anthropology -, where this modality primarily takes the form of anthropological narratives. The issue of the appearance at this time of an expanded form of the anthropological imaginary within the two sides of the Arkadian modality relates necessarily to different kinds of writing, but is not separate from the emergence of the new form of the Sayan modality: it is a rippling effect from what is taking place Elsewhere, as well as being a response to circumstances that are affecting the worlds of both modalities. "Nomad Thought," A Thousand Plateaus, The Word for World is Forest, Always Coming Home.
In the world of the Sayan emergence what in fact is fundamental is the overall dreaming - account - in the form of the outsights, and the dreaming in the form of the narrative is secondary. And the key, as always with this modality, is the leaving behind of the established concepts of ordinary reality, and the creation of the valid description by new combinations of terms, by newly created concepts, by new uses of words, and by new figural terms and constructs. The knowledge toward which poetry tends, and toward which anomalous, partly-lucid narratives tend, is the knowledge that is found within the expressions of the new emergence of the Sayan modality.
What is needed is an active openness in relation to the depth-level nature of the World that surrounds us and includes us (exploratory, hypothesis-ideas of anomalous energy-formations, and the idea of radical or absolute immanence, are both modalities of active openness of this kind) and an active openness in relation to the Future (the escape-group is an example here, as is the idea of existence on the far side of a fundamental threshold, and so is the idea - one which has immediate, straightforward validity - of the creative / intellectual alliance).
But although the active openness of such dreamings is a crucial aspect of them - an active openness which opens up an awareness of the planetary sublime, and of the very wide potentials of human beings as tremeral explorers - what is most vital of all are the outsights that are fully within the narrative worlds, and the outsights and systems of pragmatic guidelines and of principles of exteriority on the part of philosophical (and micropolitical) accounts of the world that are either embedded through them, or in the case of Explorations, interpellated through them and placed around them. These accounts of the world are also and intrinsically dreamings, but in a different sense - a sense which is explained by the term account, is related pre-eminently at the level of knowledge to the faculty of lucidity, and, because outsights and an effective liberatory/intensificatory pragmatics are what are involved, is defined - in differentiation from valuable, awareness-opening, exploratory constructs - in terms of validity.
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