Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
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.
* * *
