Explorations
This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
You are moving with the Sideways alongside you, along a line of ordinary-reality which can be seen as going from right to left. As you walk along it, moving from right to left according to the initial perspective, the Sideways is over your right shoulder, an orthogonal line, stretching away from ordinary-reality.
Your attention is drawn to the Sideways, and you turn at a right angle and set off in this new direction. It is clear that this is the direction of the bright and intensificatory Outside, the fundamental way forward, the direction of the Future. Crucial to this movement are perception and awareness of space, together with awareness of intent (the intent of individuals and groups, and the intent of modalities of existence and modalities of dreaming).
Everything has now changed. Over your left shoulder, and a little behind you, is a direction which pertains to the one in which previously you were moving. Over your right shoulder, but not behind you, is a direction in which it is possible to be pulled aside. This is not the past, and it is something which is more Futural than what is to your left and a little behind you (your initial leftward direction was that of the chronic, of the chronic/chronological). This direction over your right shoulder can be called the adjacency.
It is necessary to keep moving forward - toward the waking of the faculties; toward freedom and wider realities.
*
1993. Awareness of the Future has receded. Off in the distance, Sideways, very extraordinary events are taking place, which in a minimal but continuous way are impacting on ordinary reality - and on certain levels there is also a pronounced, temporary heightening taking place within explicitly “radical,” or “alternative” forms of existence and expression. And yet nonetheless awareness of the Future has receded.
1993. Awareness of the Future has receded. Off in the distance, Sideways, very extraordinary events are taking place, which in a minimal but continuous way are impacting on ordinary reality - and on certain levels there is also a pronounced, temporary heightening taking place within explicitly “radical,” or “alternative” forms of existence and expression. And yet nonetheless awareness of the Future has receded.
It is a dreamy brightness that has gone – gone
in the sense that it is no longer a strong aspect of the worlds of ordinary
reality. The becoming-woman that had run through pop-rock for around twenty years has now been substantially rescinded, and has been replaced to a great extent by
the doomy-angry voice of "punk-goth" (which is also the voice of grunge) – and where
this tendency is not in effect the voice is likely to be deeply inflected by
melancholy, or to have largely been removed, as with the dance-tracks of the time.
Capitalism has
acquired a new ability to be “anthemic.” With Carly Simon’s track Let the River
Run (“silver cities rise” – “Come, the New Jerusalem”) it has managed to suborn
a genuine female poet-dreamer into writing a song that has a line of flight in
the form of the exultant joy of an anomalous journey toward the outside of a
constrained existence, but in a way where this is linked fundamentally to
capitalism, monotheistic religion and submissive femininity ("asking for the
taking/trembling, shaking/Oh, my heart is aching"). The fact that this song has
the joy within it only makes it all the more fundamentally pernicious: so long
as it has not been taken up into another force-field it simply impels people
toward the world of the Reagan-speech refrain – “we must build a shining city
on a hill” (and the 1988 film for which it is written, Working Girl, is itself
a hymn in praise of capitalism, oneirically contending “capitalism may be
flawed through human weakness, but if you remain strong and take your chances,
everything will work out fine"). The British Halifax TV ad from the same time is
anthemic in a similar way, working by taking a little of the brightness of the
1977 song “Easy Like Sunday Morning” (The Commodores) and creating a grim clone
of this brightness – the interiority-dream of “everything’s fine, work hard,
buy your Thatcherite flat in a converted warehouse – chill out with your cat,
and your stylish fridge…”. This new,
anthemic capitalism is being fed by the collapse of communist Russia: the sense
that there is a completely different, better way of living (constitutive of
times of greater-proximity of the Future) evidently has no connection to the
worlds of authoritarian state communism, but the collapse of these worlds
throws attention onto capitalism as victor, and provides the false but effective
basis for the argument that all alternatives to capitalist ordinary-reality are
delusions.
The charged,
dreamy brightness being invoked here is an awareness, in fact, of what is to be
seen Sideways from the chronic time of the ongoing disaster of capitulation –
the disaster which at present primarily has the mode of global capitalism. In
1993 the most recent successful invocation of this direction was Kate Bush’s
The Hounds of Love, and Bjork will point out the direction again in Homogenic,
in 1997. But these are the exceptions: pre-eminently
at this time there is the all-too-male voice of punk-goth-grunge (whose doomy
quality to a great extent is not so much clairvoyance as an angry sulking – a part
of the problem, not of the solution); there is a sadness that is not quite sad
enough generally to jolt you free (Radiohead’s songs are dreamy, but the
brightness in the melodies does not run through sufficently to the worlds
created by the lyrics, so that both the sadness and the joy are robbed of their
power); and there is the ultra-charged world of dance-tracks that have an
exultant intensity which nonetheless recurrently is too hectic to approach
anything like a dreamy brightness (the product of young males being involved
more with a becoming drum-machine than with a becoming-woman).
Emergences have
been taking place and then collapsing again – emergences that were often quite
minimal, underneath the hype (The Stone Roses, for instance). Curt Cobain has
gone, and by the end of 1993 River Phoenix will have died. Other
declines are of a different kind: Suzanne Vega is a visionary song-writer
(though her songs are often deeply inflected by melancholy) but after the albums in the
80s her song-writing slowly begins to fade away, with the telling, and brilliant exception of “Tired of Sleeping”
Oh, Ma, when will I be waking? […]
Its just that there’s so much to do
And I’m tired of sleeping.
Things which are
dreamy at this time are often the opposite of bright, as with Twin Peaks (and
Jacob’s Ladder is in many ways a more subtle, powerful example). And the
Hollywood B-Film has been transmutated into a world of ersatz brightness – in the
form of glitzy expanses with no depth, and with domesticated anomalous elements
(Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc.). The beginnings of the transition can be felt
in the movement from Close Encounters to E.T. (these are both impressive films but the B-Film form gets boosted with
the first film, and then goes to a place that is much less intense with the
second, a place that from the point of view of the interiority gives
unstoppable support for the direction that
had already been pointed out by Star Wars). The new Hollywood-fable has been
triumphant through the 80s (including unusual, but also deeply-conservative
examples such as Field of Dreams), and even though there are now a few powerful films
being made which go beyond it, these other works have their own deep-seated
problems. Trainspotting and Naked are bleak dreamings, with very little
awareness of the outside, and The Doors – the best of these films – is vitiated
by the mis-casting of Meg Ryan as Pamela Courson, and in particular by its
subject being a proto-goth, doomy male (but the film remains impressive because of the desert scenes, and the white flash-cuts - and the overall invocation of oneiric freedom).
And in 1993 an
extraordinary female writer has just died. Angela Carter was one of the youngest of
the outer-edge visionary women who set out in their writing to dream up
something radically new in the last years of the 40s, and in the 50s and 60s –
open-endedly, Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin, Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood – and in some ways she was the most talented of all of them. In
her last decade of writing she has turned herself around toward a deepening
awareness of transcendental south, together with a pronounced quality of her
being aware of the Incursion Event of 1980 – 1982 (which on one level is the
full arrival of anthropological modernism). Carter’s writing in fact had always been astonishingly courageous – it has always been a travelling into the unknown through
bringing together the question of sexual rapture with the metaphysics
of social control and of journeys into wider, immanent realities. Her death leaves a gaping
wound.
But what was
going on in the distance in 1993? And what might all along be bound up with ordinary-reality
in works that point to the Future, such as The Hounds of Love, and Homogenic?
Sublime love songs written by women about men have the deep problem that they
are about men who in the end are likely to turn out to not be what they seemed
(men who to a certain extent have broken free have a laughing brightness and
equanimity which appears to have freed itself from self-importance, but in the
end it is a determination to always be laughingly and affectionately poised,
rather than an actual removal of self-importance, and the equanimity will always
turn out to be an illusion - another mask for the jealous ugliness that is the control mind). And, again, how
might all this be connected to the darker expanses of the dreamings of Angela
Carter?
It is necessary to
open a door sideways from chronic time, and from state-philosophy, or the
philosophy of the interiority (which can be “western,” Buddhist, Christian, etc).
But in this context what is needed first is a small movement backwards in time.
Angela Carter here becomes like the cat, glimpsed for a moment in A Room of One’s
Own, which somehow takes Virginia Woolf’s attention back to the time of the birth of
fully effectuated modernism, before World War 1. She was born in
1940, at around the time when W.H.Auden was collapsing back into Christianity, and a year before the
death of Virginia Woolf. It was the same year in which John Lennon was born,
and it was ten years before the publication of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is
Singing. It is necessary to go back in time here, in order to gain energy and
lucidity for going sideways. What was happening in those years – from the
1930s to the 1950s?
(and what was - or is - the Incursion Event of 1980 - 1982?).
*
The wider perspective here is that writers of tragedies break open a view of the ongoing disaster that is ordinary reality (they break open the view toward something "rotten in the state of Denmark"), and is that Shakespeare also to some extent opened up a view of the path leading away from the disaster (through faint but expansive glimpses, and through a concentration on exteriority). But most of all the wider perspective is that during the years of the first phases of modernism there were movements - no matter how localised and rapidly obscured - toward a greater concentration on making the view along the escape-path visible.
But the emergence of this heightened tendency does not indicate a grand upward movement of progress (the breakthroughs within the last one hundred and fifty years are more than offset by processes that have pushed back against the faculty of lucidity, and, in any case, in the most crucial cases they evade any definition along the lines of modernism). What is in question is not some underlying dynamic or dialectical movement on the part of the time of human history, but is the quiet moment where you realise you are looking along the Futural path that leads away from ordinary reality.
*
In The Waves, at the start of the 1930s, Virginia Woolf goes east, to India. Fundamentally the book is an exploration of the planetary Now of intent and energy (and lucidity), and the movement east is in fact not at all a dominant aspect (it is clear that this movement is not only relative to one zone on the planet, but is also to a great extent a temporary phenomenon belonging to the first phases of modernism), but what is primarily important is that she does this in a process of showing a something-more beyond the furniture and trappings of ordinary reality.
Writing in the name of an unfettered modernism, but employing its quietest, least demonstrative form, her main achievement in the book, in this sense (in relation to there being "something more"), is to find a new way of showing "the second sphere of action," (the place - or form of attention - in which the world becomes a serene expanse that is barely inhabited by humans, and becomes a place of animals, plants, the planet, intent-and-energy, and a place of the pre-eminence of the female, or feminine). But her way of doing this is to start each chapter with the description of the house by the sea, and this serene, tutelary terrain is explicitly described as facing east (it is in the direction of the sea that the sun rises at the start of the first chapter). The Waves is an eastward-facing book.
The fact that it is India here that is the primary aspect of the east is not hard to show. India is the last place that is mentioned, four lines from the end of the book. And when the house-by-the-sea section at the start of this final chapter suddenly takes up up a a more planetary focus, the suggestion is very much that the glaciated mountains in the distance are the Himalayas (the end of the penultimate sentence is "and girls, sitting on verandahs, look up at the snow, shading their faces with their fans."
The main positive element of this movement to the east is an awareness of the greater openness to the outside that is possesed by the less dogmatic, more libidinally awake worlds of pantheon-religions with their female gods, and multiplicitous stories (Woolf is making the same connection that is made by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream), but there is also a process of abstract-oneiric critique at work in the book. Percival, who goes to India, is both a revision of the Percival who goes in search of the grail (a replacement of the Celtic west of the grail mythos) and simultaneously of the grandiloquent narrator of The Wasteland, who ends up in the India of the Upanishads at the end of Eliot's poem. The secret here is that Percival in The Waves is just in a sense an ordinary bloke, but the kind of figure who could lie behind the hero-worship romances of epic religious tales, in that he has minimal neurosis, and a high degree of friendliness, adventurousness and charm. But these attributes, in the world of sharp-eyed realism of The Waves, do not prevent Percival from being anything other than an insignificant (and somewhat unappealing) colonialist footnote. The adventure he chooses is to go off, as a member of the colonialist ruling-class, to work in India, where he dies, as a result of falling off a horse.
But India here is much more than the terrain for a moment of anti-Arthurian and anti-Eliot bathos. Most centrally it is involved - in a very subtle oneiric process - in a pointing-out of what appears to be another domain within reality. The place which is given the greatest emphasis in The Waves is a place called "Elvedon," and in particular this locale is "Elvedon Hall." And Elveden Hall (Woolf has changed the spelling) is the place in Suffolk where the Maharajah Duleep Singh lived in great opulence - though it was an opulence of an enforced exile - for 23 years in the second half of the nineteenth century, transforming the interiors of the hall so that they looked like those of Moghul palaces. The connection to India is obscured, but is all along emphatic, and it is a connection that functions through an element - the name Elvedon - that does its more explicit work through the connection it makes to the overall world of the anomalous of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is a natural-world quality (elvers are young eels) but the suggestion of something eerie is in the foreground, a suggestion which is then backed up by the facts that Elvedon is derived from "aelf dene", or "valley of elves," and appears translated into Latin in a 12th century manuscript as "vallis nympharum" or "valley of nymphs" (it should also be added at this point that Woolf had once stayed in a Suffolk village which is only a few miles away). In this way Virgina Woolf makes a new nexus of the anomalous that is precisely equivalent to the one created by Shakespeare.
Although it should be added immediately that what is brought faintly into focus in this process is more gothic than what is perceived by means of the outsights of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The feeling somehow is that lucidity is coming under an intensified attack, and that a warning must be given about something to do with "control" in the human world (and the feeling is also that it is now very emphatically easier to give this warning than to go any futher toward the south-outside than the initial opening up of a perspective toward the second sphere of action). This is the journey toward Elvedon (that is, into a sequestered place, shut away from the primary impacting of "the waves") that is made by Bernard and Susan in the opening chapter of the book:
“Now,” said Bernard, “let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes. We shall sink through the green air of the leaves, Susan. We sink as we run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our heads. There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots. That is Elvedon.
There is a sense of "deep time" here, as if the continuity at issue involves very long spans of time, and very different temporal modalities - as if, for instance, the letters written by the lady might take centuries to be absorbed and to go fully into effect. And as if events like gigantic human wars are fascistic unfoldings of forces of control, in relation to which it might only be possible to say "That's your course, world, mine is this," and which, from this inhuman perspective of the deep time of the interiority, have the calm quality of a gardener (the control mind) sweeping a lawn with a broom. A feeling of an outer zone of the control-entrapment anomalous that relates to the horrific outbursts or paroxysms of subjectified human existence, and another that relates to the creation of new attitudes and new forms of denuded dreaming which together are modes of capitulation - new, languid ways of slowly collapsing, while intensifying on the minimal level of social success or kudos. And to change the optic in relation to the second instance of power, imagine a man writing the letters in a college somewhere in the middle of Cambridge, or Oxford, the "dreaming spires" all around him.
However, Woolf's resources in writing The Waves are immense, and she maintains a primary focus on the south of the outside. She has an unblocked connection to the ancientism of first-phase modernism; and deep time in relation to Love-and-Freedom is not only invoked through the experiences of the characters in their relationship to past incursions of the Future, but is embodied by an awareness of writers such as Shelley, and primarily Shakespeare (Shakespeare in turn was profoundly influenced by letters from the Future despatched in Ancient Greece, in the form of the plays of Sophocles). Despite the pressure of being a visionary whose words are hard to form, and are barely understood by those around her, Rhoda is "the nymph of the fountain always wet" in a descriptive movement that touches in the lightness and brightness-of-spirit (and femininity, or womanliness, with its intrinsic lucidity) that flow in waves from the Future, as it emerges from the aspect of the present that we call the past.
In modernism the world becomes an eerie forest, a terrain of the unknown (the fake outside of the dogmas of religions has been removed so that the wall of the unknown is once more visible, alongside us), a terrain which also stretches back in time, including – and this is only a vital fact in the initial phases – the world of Ancient Greece. And in modernism what is also fundamental is a non-judgemental brightness, that in fact is a world of becomings, and most specifically a becoming-woman.
At the end of the immense rupture of the second world war the "break with the past" has occurred, an event which consists of the full effectuation of the polarity-reversal of the system of reason-revelation (the eerie "ancientist" aspect of modernism had been getting out of hand, and a long process of "machinising" and de-intensification of the human world has made the conditions ripe for a movement that goes even further away from lucidity and the oneiric). But although there is a rupture from the past in relation to the functioning of a whole dimension of the abstract, this is not in the least a collapse of traditionalism: on the contrary, it sets up conditions under which traditionalism can be even more effective. In one way, the break is seen in Britain through the election in 1945 of a labour government (henceforth governments will have to be sociological/technocratic, and will have to appear to be championing social progress in some sense along these lines of "new social understanding"), but it will also be seen in a rapidly emergent intolerance to all stuttering forms of oneirically expressed lucidity (many of the worst of which can be placed together under the terms "romantic-poetic epic," "romanticism", "romance-of-the-land, etc) and in the full refusal of religious premises being used to prove truths within socio-theoretical discourse. And the way in which depth-level traditionalism has in fact been fostered is shown by what takes place in the 50s, and specifically in the oneiric productions of the 50s, together with those of the 40s. And it should be remembered that the labour government was all along a functioning of one side of the political zone of the British trans-establishment, even though it is the side that is closest to the outside of ordinary reality. A proper view of the late 40s was that it was a higher-intensity time within a ruptural, deep phase of low-intensity, and that it had looming above it the forces of a new-modality extreme lockdown that would occur in the 50s.
In relation to fiction the warning signs in the last years of the 40s are clear. In Lowry's Under the Volcano the central character is drinking himself to death (as is the author) and is killed at the end of the book, and thrown into a ravine. Mervyn Peake has been pulled aside from ordinary reality, but in a direction which is too far away from the south-outside, and too focused on traditionalist social power: he is writing books which are suffused, in a hyper-charged way, with suicide and mental collapse (as if they prefigure his own enigmatic collapse, in the 50s, into a form of dementia that is given medical labels, but is not really understood). And the warning is also there in the fact that the majority of people in a whole trans-atlantic generation are growing up convinced that the atrocities of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were good, sensible actions (this is the strange world of violence in which Angela Carter is growing up). Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road says of America at this time "during the 50s's there was a general lust for conformity all over this country - by no means only in the suburbs, a kind of blind, desperate clinging to conformity at any price."
In Britain by the end of the 50s of Churchill and Macmillan the weight and diversity of conformist oneiric productions and systemic blockings has reached a prodigious level. The grey, new world of modern common sense has arrived, with its avowed, willed disenchantment, and a whole group of writers has burrowed down into the blocked-metaphysics of Christianity in a misguided attempt to cope with the new hegemony of empirical awareness (an attempt whose effects will be profoundly suppressive). The decade starts with T.S.Eliot's Christian play The Cocktail Party winning an award in New York. Graham Greene has been writing a string of Catholic novels. Evelyn Waugh has written the very influential Catholic novel Brideshead Revisited: the Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Auden is now writing talented, but ultimately trite Christian verse, with its emphatic warnings -
When in a carol under the apple trees
The reborn featly dance
There will also, Fortunatus
Be those who refused their chance
(Under Sirius)
- and with its darker, more gothic, admonitory passages, such as this one, from "The Witnesses," where the entities of the title are an external, observing force:
We are afraid in that case you will have a fall.
We have been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain.
Something is going to fall like rain
And it wont be flowers.
When the green field comes off like a lid
revealing what was much better hid
Unpleasant:
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent.
The bolt is sliding in its groove
Outside the window is the black remov-
ers van
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the woman in dark glasses and humpbacked surgeons
And the scissors man.
Meanwhile C.S.Lewis has taken up the "strange tale" (the story with an immanent "other world" alongside ordinary reality) and moved it forward in new directions, but in a movement which simultaneously collapses it into the Christian childrens' tale, making it harder afterwards to work with this form. And lastly, Tolkien re-constructs the romantic story as a realist, anthropology-optic adventure and warfare epic, with supernatural evil intrinsic to it, along Catholic lines, and with women who, firstly, are kept almost entirely out of the story (this taking it below the psychoanalytic radar), and who, insofar as they are present are constructed along neo-traditionalist, Arthurian-feminine lines.
However, at the outset of the 50s there is a work which goes completely against these conformist trends of the times - Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing. Given its tragic ending,this exceptionally lucid and powerful novel could also be characterised, like Under the Volcano, as a warning about the grim, reactionary nature of the time. This would be correct, and it is telling that its author did not write another novel throughout the whole of the 50s. But this novel is also in a radical sense a precursor of what will happen in the 60s. Furthermore, it is a precursor which draws on T.S.Eliot's eastward-focused conclusion to The Wasteland in a way which keeps the poem's eerie-visionary aspect, but rips away its disenchanted-world melancholy and about-to-return to Christianity intimations ("who is the third who walks beside you" etc). The main epigram of the book is this:
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no-one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico, co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
There is a powerful, hyper-realist quality about the tragedy described in this novel which seems to be without precedent. It shows a woman, Mary, caught in a situation consisting of male-dominance familialism and socially instituted racism, and it does this by maintaining a charged, story-heightening focus on small details of place and psychology, and by putting everything within the horizon of a specific terrain in what used to be Rhodesia, a planetary expanse of veld farming country broken by the outcrops of volcanic "kopjes," with a tiny isolated farmhouse at its centre. And its outer-edge achievement, at the novel's end, is to show the woman in uttermost, collapsed extremis (she is about to be killed, and, ensnared in a shocking libidinal trap, she is accepting that this will happen to her), and to show her going beyond it to a state of disturbing, visionary detachment:
"Daylight? Moonlight? Both mingled together, and it would be sunrise in half an hour. She thought, that usually her wakings were grey and struggling, a reluctant upheaval of her body from the bed's refuge. Today she was vastly peaceful and rested.Her mind was clear, and her body comfortable. Cradled in ease she locked her hands behind her head and stared at the darkness that held the familiar walls and furniture. Lazily she created the room in imagination, placing each cupboard and chair; then moved beyond the house, hollowing it out of the night as if her hand cupped it. At last, from a height, she looked down on the building set among the bush - and was filled with a regretful, peaceable tenderness. It seemed as if she were holding that immensely pitiful thing, the farm with its inhabitants, in the hollow of her hand, which curved round it to shut out the gaze of the cruelly critical world."
Mary is blocked by specific difficult circumstances (she has come from the city, and is living in an extremely hot building with an iron roof), and by a humanly endemic suppressive mindset, from grasping the extent to which she is in love with the world around her. And she is also being prevented by her racist white society from a full acknowledgement of the extent to which she is in love with the man, Moses, who is about to kill her, because she has been compelled to treat him angrily, as her racial-inferior servant, rather than as her lover. She cannot bring herself to take a stand and leave at that moment, because her love for Moses is now all she has. And because there is an implacable network of racist white males around her, there is no way she can stay (she is about to be forced to leave in a day's time) and although the situation is perceived acutely by her as hopeless, Mary responds by waking her perception and her ability to conceive the situation at a dispassionate distance. And eventually the visionary level of perception and envisaging lead also to depth-level thought (though her becoming-planet nonetheless does not allow her to reach a solution):
"...a flicker of terror touched her, an intimation of that terror which would later engulf her. She knew it: she felt transparent, clairvoyant, containing all things.
[...]
"She was inside a bubble of fresh light and colour, of brilliant sound and birdsong. All around the trees were filled with shrilling birds, that sounded her own happiness and chorused it to the sky. As light as a blown feather she left the room and went outside to the verandah. It was so beautiful: so beautiful she could hardly bear the wonderful flushed sky, streaked with red, and hazed against the intense blue; the beautiful still trees with their load of singing birds; the vivid starry poinsettias cutting into the air with jagged scarlet.
[...]
But what had she done? And what was it? What had she done? Nothing of her own volition. Step by step, she had come to this, sitting on an old ruined sofa that smelled of dirt, waiting for the night to come that would finish her. And justly - she knew that. But why? Against what had she sinned? The conflict between her judgement on herself, and her feeling of innocence, of having been propelled by something she did not understand, cracked the wholeness of her vision."
Mary does not find a way out, and nor does Moses, who kills her in a state of insane rage, and then shortly afterwards freezes on the spot near the house, waiting, immobile, to be led away toward sentencing and death.
(But a fundamental principle is just becoming visible here, one that will reach a far higher level of visibility over the next 30 years: very extraordinary things happen when women go off into the unknown).
*
In The Waves, at the start of the 1930s, Virginia Woolf goes east, to India. Fundamentally the book is an exploration of the planetary Now of intent and energy (and lucidity), and the movement east is in fact not at all a dominant aspect (it is clear that this movement is not only relative to one zone on the planet, but is also to a great extent a temporary phenomenon belonging to the first phases of modernism), but what is primarily important is that she does this in a process of showing a something-more beyond the furniture and trappings of ordinary reality.
Writing in the name of an unfettered modernism, but employing its quietest, least demonstrative form, her main achievement in the book, in this sense (in relation to there being "something more"), is to find a new way of showing "the second sphere of action," (the place - or form of attention - in which the world becomes a serene expanse that is barely inhabited by humans, and becomes a place of animals, plants, the planet, intent-and-energy, and a place of the pre-eminence of the female, or feminine). But her way of doing this is to start each chapter with the description of the house by the sea, and this serene, tutelary terrain is explicitly described as facing east (it is in the direction of the sea that the sun rises at the start of the first chapter). The Waves is an eastward-facing book.
The fact that it is India here that is the primary aspect of the east is not hard to show. India is the last place that is mentioned, four lines from the end of the book. And when the house-by-the-sea section at the start of this final chapter suddenly takes up up a a more planetary focus, the suggestion is very much that the glaciated mountains in the distance are the Himalayas (the end of the penultimate sentence is "and girls, sitting on verandahs, look up at the snow, shading their faces with their fans."
The main positive element of this movement to the east is an awareness of the greater openness to the outside that is possesed by the less dogmatic, more libidinally awake worlds of pantheon-religions with their female gods, and multiplicitous stories (Woolf is making the same connection that is made by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream), but there is also a process of abstract-oneiric critique at work in the book. Percival, who goes to India, is both a revision of the Percival who goes in search of the grail (a replacement of the Celtic west of the grail mythos) and simultaneously of the grandiloquent narrator of The Wasteland, who ends up in the India of the Upanishads at the end of Eliot's poem. The secret here is that Percival in The Waves is just in a sense an ordinary bloke, but the kind of figure who could lie behind the hero-worship romances of epic religious tales, in that he has minimal neurosis, and a high degree of friendliness, adventurousness and charm. But these attributes, in the world of sharp-eyed realism of The Waves, do not prevent Percival from being anything other than an insignificant (and somewhat unappealing) colonialist footnote. The adventure he chooses is to go off, as a member of the colonialist ruling-class, to work in India, where he dies, as a result of falling off a horse.
But India here is much more than the terrain for a moment of anti-Arthurian and anti-Eliot bathos. Most centrally it is involved - in a very subtle oneiric process - in a pointing-out of what appears to be another domain within reality. The place which is given the greatest emphasis in The Waves is a place called "Elvedon," and in particular this locale is "Elvedon Hall." And Elveden Hall (Woolf has changed the spelling) is the place in Suffolk where the Maharajah Duleep Singh lived in great opulence - though it was an opulence of an enforced exile - for 23 years in the second half of the nineteenth century, transforming the interiors of the hall so that they looked like those of Moghul palaces. The connection to India is obscured, but is all along emphatic, and it is a connection that functions through an element - the name Elvedon - that does its more explicit work through the connection it makes to the overall world of the anomalous of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is a natural-world quality (elvers are young eels) but the suggestion of something eerie is in the foreground, a suggestion which is then backed up by the facts that Elvedon is derived from "aelf dene", or "valley of elves," and appears translated into Latin in a 12th century manuscript as "vallis nympharum" or "valley of nymphs" (it should also be added at this point that Woolf had once stayed in a Suffolk village which is only a few miles away). In this way Virgina Woolf makes a new nexus of the anomalous that is precisely equivalent to the one created by Shakespeare.
Although it should be added immediately that what is brought faintly into focus in this process is more gothic than what is perceived by means of the outsights of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The feeling somehow is that lucidity is coming under an intensified attack, and that a warning must be given about something to do with "control" in the human world (and the feeling is also that it is now very emphatically easier to give this warning than to go any futher toward the south-outside than the initial opening up of a perspective toward the second sphere of action). This is the journey toward Elvedon (that is, into a sequestered place, shut away from the primary impacting of "the waves") that is made by Bernard and Susan in the opening chapter of the book:
“Now,” said Bernard, “let us explore. There is the white house lying among the trees. It lies down there ever so far beneath us. We shall sink like swimmers just touching the ground with the tips of their toes. We shall sink through the green air of the leaves, Susan. We sink as we run. The waves close over us, the beech leaves meet above our heads. There is the stable clock with its gilt hands shining. Those are the flats and heights of the roofs of the great house. There is the stable-boy clattering in the yard in rubber boots. That is Elvedon.
“Now we have
fallen through the tree-tops to the earth. The air no longer rolls its long,
unhappy, purple waves over us. We touch the earth; we tread ground. That is the
close-clipped hedge of the ladies’ garden. There they walk at noon, with
scissors, clipping roses. Now we are in the ringed wood with the wall round it.
This is Elvedon. I have seen signposts at the cross-roads with one arm pointing
“To Elvedon”. No one has been there. The ferns smell very strong, and there are
red funguses growing beneath them. Now we wake the sleeping daws who have never
seen a human form; now we tread on rotten oak apples, red with age and
slippery. There is a ring of wall round this wood; nobody comes here. Listen!
That is the flop of a giant toad in the undergrowth; that is the patter of some
primeval fir-cone falling to rot among the ferns.
‘Put your foot on
this brick. Look over the wall. That is Elvedon. The lady sits between the two
long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms. We are
the first to come here. We are the discoverers of an unknown land. [...]
‘I see the lady
writing. I see the gardeners sweeping,’ said Susan. ‘If we died here, nobody
would bury us.’
Brilliantly disguised beneath the appearance of it being just a childrens' game (but children, again and again, are far more alive and fugitively aware than adults), the domain made visible here is that of the control mind, whatever this element within the human world might be. The fact it is shut away or protected is central ("there is is a ring of wall around this wood"), and its elements are those of control. The hedges and roses are clipped, and the lawns are swept with brooms; there is the clock with its shining, gilt hands; and more profoundly and disturbingly there is the fabric of servitude (it is mostly a place of servants) and there is the inhuman, implicitly dispassionate and violent nature of this world. ('Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We would be nailed like stoats to the stable door."). (The stable, with its clock, suggests both stability, and the domination by will -"taming" - of wild creatures, so that they are transformed into servants). Elvedon is like Bolsover Street in Pinter's No Man's Land: a place whose existence is in some sense clearly indicated, and which at the same time is not easy to reach.
And if you were in any doubt about the strangeness of this domain, Woolf shows Bernard thinking about Elvedon 50 or 60 years later, and makes the point very clearly:
'To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. "That's your course, world," one says, "mine is this." So, "let's explore", I cried, and jumped up and ran downhill with Susan and saw the stable-boy clattering about the yard in great boots. Down below, through the depths of the leaves, the gardeners swept the lawns with great brooms. The lady sat writing. Transfixed, stopped dead, I thought, "I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those brooms. They sweep and they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that lady writing. It is strange that one cannot stop gardeners sweeping nor dislodge a woman. There they have remained all my life. It is as if one had woken in Stonehenge surrounded by a circle of great stones, these enemies, these presences.'
Brilliantly disguised beneath the appearance of it being just a childrens' game (but children, again and again, are far more alive and fugitively aware than adults), the domain made visible here is that of the control mind, whatever this element within the human world might be. The fact it is shut away or protected is central ("there is is a ring of wall around this wood"), and its elements are those of control. The hedges and roses are clipped, and the lawns are swept with brooms; there is the clock with its shining, gilt hands; and more profoundly and disturbingly there is the fabric of servitude (it is mostly a place of servants) and there is the inhuman, implicitly dispassionate and violent nature of this world. ('Do not stir; if the gardeners saw us they would shoot us. We would be nailed like stoats to the stable door."). (The stable, with its clock, suggests both stability, and the domination by will -"taming" - of wild creatures, so that they are transformed into servants). Elvedon is like Bolsover Street in Pinter's No Man's Land: a place whose existence is in some sense clearly indicated, and which at the same time is not easy to reach.
And if you were in any doubt about the strangeness of this domain, Woolf shows Bernard thinking about Elvedon 50 or 60 years later, and makes the point very clearly:
'To let oneself be carried on passively is unthinkable. "That's your course, world," one says, "mine is this." So, "let's explore", I cried, and jumped up and ran downhill with Susan and saw the stable-boy clattering about the yard in great boots. Down below, through the depths of the leaves, the gardeners swept the lawns with great brooms. The lady sat writing. Transfixed, stopped dead, I thought, "I cannot interfere with a single stroke of those brooms. They sweep and they sweep. Nor with the fixity of that lady writing. It is strange that one cannot stop gardeners sweeping nor dislodge a woman. There they have remained all my life. It is as if one had woken in Stonehenge surrounded by a circle of great stones, these enemies, these presences.'
There is a sense of "deep time" here, as if the continuity at issue involves very long spans of time, and very different temporal modalities - as if, for instance, the letters written by the lady might take centuries to be absorbed and to go fully into effect. And as if events like gigantic human wars are fascistic unfoldings of forces of control, in relation to which it might only be possible to say "That's your course, world, mine is this," and which, from this inhuman perspective of the deep time of the interiority, have the calm quality of a gardener (the control mind) sweeping a lawn with a broom. A feeling of an outer zone of the control-entrapment anomalous that relates to the horrific outbursts or paroxysms of subjectified human existence, and another that relates to the creation of new attitudes and new forms of denuded dreaming which together are modes of capitulation - new, languid ways of slowly collapsing, while intensifying on the minimal level of social success or kudos. And to change the optic in relation to the second instance of power, imagine a man writing the letters in a college somewhere in the middle of Cambridge, or Oxford, the "dreaming spires" all around him.
However, Woolf's resources in writing The Waves are immense, and she maintains a primary focus on the south of the outside. She has an unblocked connection to the ancientism of first-phase modernism; and deep time in relation to Love-and-Freedom is not only invoked through the experiences of the characters in their relationship to past incursions of the Future, but is embodied by an awareness of writers such as Shelley, and primarily Shakespeare (Shakespeare in turn was profoundly influenced by letters from the Future despatched in Ancient Greece, in the form of the plays of Sophocles). Despite the pressure of being a visionary whose words are hard to form, and are barely understood by those around her, Rhoda is "the nymph of the fountain always wet" in a descriptive movement that touches in the lightness and brightness-of-spirit (and femininity, or womanliness, with its intrinsic lucidity) that flow in waves from the Future, as it emerges from the aspect of the present that we call the past.
In modernism the world becomes an eerie forest, a terrain of the unknown (the fake outside of the dogmas of religions has been removed so that the wall of the unknown is once more visible, alongside us), a terrain which also stretches back in time, including – and this is only a vital fact in the initial phases – the world of Ancient Greece. And in modernism what is also fundamental is a non-judgemental brightness, that in fact is a world of becomings, and most specifically a becoming-woman.
This change – the
movement toward the second sphere of action, and toward women – generates an
answering, suppressive change in the system of revelation-reason, so that
reason becomes the dominant modality (it becomes the system of
reason-revelation, in a change of polarity) with this new suppressive
configuration being also characterisable as blocked-modernism. The new element
here is psychoanalysis (which creates a domesticated, individual-and-familial
unknown), with this element going into place alongside the sociological
(Hegelian/Marxist/socio-technical progress) mode of engagement (for which the
unknown is the chronological future, as opposed to it being the
higher-intensity dimensions of the Now – the intensive Future). Dreamings will
now have a far greater tendency to be those of science fiction, and of the
blocked-perspective of psychoanalysis, but religion will not have been left
behind as an influence (it is still a fundamental part of the system) a fact
that will be very much in evidence during phases of social low-intensity.
At the beginning of the 1930s, the new
suppressive system is going into full effect for the first time, as a major
phase of low-intensity begins to take
hold. The Waves is completed,
undamaged by the change (and a little earlier Orlando has become a woman –
going east to do this…), but by 1932 the first, astonishing phase of full
modernism is emphatically coming to an end. It is under these circumstances
that W.H.Auden begins to write the poems for which he will be known. In 1936 he publishes "Look, stranger":
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be
That through the channels of the ear
May wonder like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
[...]
Far off like floating seeds the ships diverge
On urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
This in a strong sense is an invocation of the point where transcendental attention begins. It is degree zero of transcendental awareness. Taking the "island now" as the world of the energies of space-time, then what is the ocean of the now that lies beyond the island? (there are "seed-like" ships here, with their voluntary errands - a glimpse toward the world of intent - but, taken to this point of the abstract, what dreamings and systems and energy-formations might these ships be?). There is a faint - and not necessarily very helpful - sense of intent given to the light (the leaping light for your delight discovers) but this semi-glimpse has more power as an element that helps conduce toward Blake's Spinozist idea that energy all along is delight. And more widely, the delight is a minimal but effective invocation of brightness, alongside the way in which the entire poem, very quietly suggests the charged serenity of the second sphere of action, the place where the human is not in the foreground - the place beyond the all-too-human domain of ordinary reality (if you look more strangely, with more quietness, beyond the "small field" of ordinary reality, you will see the calm, planetary expanses of energy and intent). And all this is true of the poem while at the same time it conforms to the demands of a work structured by empirical attention. A place or object is described, and an indeterminate individual has a feeling - delight - and is a place into which the percepts enter which become memories; the clouds are physical, and the memories of the clouds move in the mind in the same way, but nothing in the poem directly demands we see the cloud-memories and the clouds as ultimately being formations of the same kind (so that the planet would be seen as like thought or dreaming, and percepts-memories would be seen as more like energy-formations that enter us, and have an existence within us).
But later, around the beginning of 1940, a change is beginning to be noticeable: in ("New Year Letter (January 1, 1940") Auden turns the attention toward the sublime and simultaneously challenging beauty of the North Pennines, and refers to the basalt intrusion of igneous rock that runs across it, using this as a way of thinking about eruptions of oneirically expressed desire into human habituated existence, in a verse-form consisting of jingling rhymes (Along the line of lapse the fire / Of life's impersonal desire / Burst through his [man's] sedentary rock / And as at DUFTON and at KNOCK / Thrust up between his mind and heart / Enormous cones of myth and art). It is a poetic process that remains distant and history-and-theory-focused in relation to both encounters (with the area, and with human beings), and one that now is more vulnerable to a collapse away from transcendental awareness. (very soon Auden will be a poet both of Christianity and of psychoanalysis).
*
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be
That through the channels of the ear
May wonder like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
[...]
Far off like floating seeds the ships diverge
On urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
This in a strong sense is an invocation of the point where transcendental attention begins. It is degree zero of transcendental awareness. Taking the "island now" as the world of the energies of space-time, then what is the ocean of the now that lies beyond the island? (there are "seed-like" ships here, with their voluntary errands - a glimpse toward the world of intent - but, taken to this point of the abstract, what dreamings and systems and energy-formations might these ships be?). There is a faint - and not necessarily very helpful - sense of intent given to the light (the leaping light for your delight discovers) but this semi-glimpse has more power as an element that helps conduce toward Blake's Spinozist idea that energy all along is delight. And more widely, the delight is a minimal but effective invocation of brightness, alongside the way in which the entire poem, very quietly suggests the charged serenity of the second sphere of action, the place where the human is not in the foreground - the place beyond the all-too-human domain of ordinary reality (if you look more strangely, with more quietness, beyond the "small field" of ordinary reality, you will see the calm, planetary expanses of energy and intent). And all this is true of the poem while at the same time it conforms to the demands of a work structured by empirical attention. A place or object is described, and an indeterminate individual has a feeling - delight - and is a place into which the percepts enter which become memories; the clouds are physical, and the memories of the clouds move in the mind in the same way, but nothing in the poem directly demands we see the cloud-memories and the clouds as ultimately being formations of the same kind (so that the planet would be seen as like thought or dreaming, and percepts-memories would be seen as more like energy-formations that enter us, and have an existence within us).
But later, around the beginning of 1940, a change is beginning to be noticeable: in ("New Year Letter (January 1, 1940") Auden turns the attention toward the sublime and simultaneously challenging beauty of the North Pennines, and refers to the basalt intrusion of igneous rock that runs across it, using this as a way of thinking about eruptions of oneirically expressed desire into human habituated existence, in a verse-form consisting of jingling rhymes (Along the line of lapse the fire / Of life's impersonal desire / Burst through his [man's] sedentary rock / And as at DUFTON and at KNOCK / Thrust up between his mind and heart / Enormous cones of myth and art). It is a poetic process that remains distant and history-and-theory-focused in relation to both encounters (with the area, and with human beings), and one that now is more vulnerable to a collapse away from transcendental awareness. (very soon Auden will be a poet both of Christianity and of psychoanalysis).
*
At the end of the immense rupture of the second world war the "break with the past" has occurred, an event which consists of the full effectuation of the polarity-reversal of the system of reason-revelation (the eerie "ancientist" aspect of modernism had been getting out of hand, and a long process of "machinising" and de-intensification of the human world has made the conditions ripe for a movement that goes even further away from lucidity and the oneiric). But although there is a rupture from the past in relation to the functioning of a whole dimension of the abstract, this is not in the least a collapse of traditionalism: on the contrary, it sets up conditions under which traditionalism can be even more effective. In one way, the break is seen in Britain through the election in 1945 of a labour government (henceforth governments will have to be sociological/technocratic, and will have to appear to be championing social progress in some sense along these lines of "new social understanding"), but it will also be seen in a rapidly emergent intolerance to all stuttering forms of oneirically expressed lucidity (many of the worst of which can be placed together under the terms "romantic-poetic epic," "romanticism", "romance-of-the-land, etc) and in the full refusal of religious premises being used to prove truths within socio-theoretical discourse. And the way in which depth-level traditionalism has in fact been fostered is shown by what takes place in the 50s, and specifically in the oneiric productions of the 50s, together with those of the 40s. And it should be remembered that the labour government was all along a functioning of one side of the political zone of the British trans-establishment, even though it is the side that is closest to the outside of ordinary reality. A proper view of the late 40s was that it was a higher-intensity time within a ruptural, deep phase of low-intensity, and that it had looming above it the forces of a new-modality extreme lockdown that would occur in the 50s.
In relation to fiction the warning signs in the last years of the 40s are clear. In Lowry's Under the Volcano the central character is drinking himself to death (as is the author) and is killed at the end of the book, and thrown into a ravine. Mervyn Peake has been pulled aside from ordinary reality, but in a direction which is too far away from the south-outside, and too focused on traditionalist social power: he is writing books which are suffused, in a hyper-charged way, with suicide and mental collapse (as if they prefigure his own enigmatic collapse, in the 50s, into a form of dementia that is given medical labels, but is not really understood). And the warning is also there in the fact that the majority of people in a whole trans-atlantic generation are growing up convinced that the atrocities of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were good, sensible actions (this is the strange world of violence in which Angela Carter is growing up). Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road says of America at this time "during the 50s's there was a general lust for conformity all over this country - by no means only in the suburbs, a kind of blind, desperate clinging to conformity at any price."
In Britain by the end of the 50s of Churchill and Macmillan the weight and diversity of conformist oneiric productions and systemic blockings has reached a prodigious level. The grey, new world of modern common sense has arrived, with its avowed, willed disenchantment, and a whole group of writers has burrowed down into the blocked-metaphysics of Christianity in a misguided attempt to cope with the new hegemony of empirical awareness (an attempt whose effects will be profoundly suppressive). The decade starts with T.S.Eliot's Christian play The Cocktail Party winning an award in New York. Graham Greene has been writing a string of Catholic novels. Evelyn Waugh has written the very influential Catholic novel Brideshead Revisited: the Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Auden is now writing talented, but ultimately trite Christian verse, with its emphatic warnings -
When in a carol under the apple trees
The reborn featly dance
There will also, Fortunatus
Be those who refused their chance
(Under Sirius)
- and with its darker, more gothic, admonitory passages, such as this one, from "The Witnesses," where the entities of the title are an external, observing force:
We are afraid in that case you will have a fall.
We have been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain.
Something is going to fall like rain
And it wont be flowers.
When the green field comes off like a lid
revealing what was much better hid
Unpleasant:
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come up and are standing round
In deadly crescent.
The bolt is sliding in its groove
Outside the window is the black remov-
ers van
And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the woman in dark glasses and humpbacked surgeons
And the scissors man.
Meanwhile C.S.Lewis has taken up the "strange tale" (the story with an immanent "other world" alongside ordinary reality) and moved it forward in new directions, but in a movement which simultaneously collapses it into the Christian childrens' tale, making it harder afterwards to work with this form. And lastly, Tolkien re-constructs the romantic story as a realist, anthropology-optic adventure and warfare epic, with supernatural evil intrinsic to it, along Catholic lines, and with women who, firstly, are kept almost entirely out of the story (this taking it below the psychoanalytic radar), and who, insofar as they are present are constructed along neo-traditionalist, Arthurian-feminine lines.
However, at the outset of the 50s there is a work which goes completely against these conformist trends of the times - Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing. Given its tragic ending,this exceptionally lucid and powerful novel could also be characterised, like Under the Volcano, as a warning about the grim, reactionary nature of the time. This would be correct, and it is telling that its author did not write another novel throughout the whole of the 50s. But this novel is also in a radical sense a precursor of what will happen in the 60s. Furthermore, it is a precursor which draws on T.S.Eliot's eastward-focused conclusion to The Wasteland in a way which keeps the poem's eerie-visionary aspect, but rips away its disenchanted-world melancholy and about-to-return to Christianity intimations ("who is the third who walks beside you" etc). The main epigram of the book is this:
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no-one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico, co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
There is a powerful, hyper-realist quality about the tragedy described in this novel which seems to be without precedent. It shows a woman, Mary, caught in a situation consisting of male-dominance familialism and socially instituted racism, and it does this by maintaining a charged, story-heightening focus on small details of place and psychology, and by putting everything within the horizon of a specific terrain in what used to be Rhodesia, a planetary expanse of veld farming country broken by the outcrops of volcanic "kopjes," with a tiny isolated farmhouse at its centre. And its outer-edge achievement, at the novel's end, is to show the woman in uttermost, collapsed extremis (she is about to be killed, and, ensnared in a shocking libidinal trap, she is accepting that this will happen to her), and to show her going beyond it to a state of disturbing, visionary detachment:
"Daylight? Moonlight? Both mingled together, and it would be sunrise in half an hour. She thought, that usually her wakings were grey and struggling, a reluctant upheaval of her body from the bed's refuge. Today she was vastly peaceful and rested.Her mind was clear, and her body comfortable. Cradled in ease she locked her hands behind her head and stared at the darkness that held the familiar walls and furniture. Lazily she created the room in imagination, placing each cupboard and chair; then moved beyond the house, hollowing it out of the night as if her hand cupped it. At last, from a height, she looked down on the building set among the bush - and was filled with a regretful, peaceable tenderness. It seemed as if she were holding that immensely pitiful thing, the farm with its inhabitants, in the hollow of her hand, which curved round it to shut out the gaze of the cruelly critical world."
Mary is blocked by specific difficult circumstances (she has come from the city, and is living in an extremely hot building with an iron roof), and by a humanly endemic suppressive mindset, from grasping the extent to which she is in love with the world around her. And she is also being prevented by her racist white society from a full acknowledgement of the extent to which she is in love with the man, Moses, who is about to kill her, because she has been compelled to treat him angrily, as her racial-inferior servant, rather than as her lover. She cannot bring herself to take a stand and leave at that moment, because her love for Moses is now all she has. And because there is an implacable network of racist white males around her, there is no way she can stay (she is about to be forced to leave in a day's time) and although the situation is perceived acutely by her as hopeless, Mary responds by waking her perception and her ability to conceive the situation at a dispassionate distance. And eventually the visionary level of perception and envisaging lead also to depth-level thought (though her becoming-planet nonetheless does not allow her to reach a solution):
"...a flicker of terror touched her, an intimation of that terror which would later engulf her. She knew it: she felt transparent, clairvoyant, containing all things.
[...]
"She was inside a bubble of fresh light and colour, of brilliant sound and birdsong. All around the trees were filled with shrilling birds, that sounded her own happiness and chorused it to the sky. As light as a blown feather she left the room and went outside to the verandah. It was so beautiful: so beautiful she could hardly bear the wonderful flushed sky, streaked with red, and hazed against the intense blue; the beautiful still trees with their load of singing birds; the vivid starry poinsettias cutting into the air with jagged scarlet.
[...]
But what had she done? And what was it? What had she done? Nothing of her own volition. Step by step, she had come to this, sitting on an old ruined sofa that smelled of dirt, waiting for the night to come that would finish her. And justly - she knew that. But why? Against what had she sinned? The conflict between her judgement on herself, and her feeling of innocence, of having been propelled by something she did not understand, cracked the wholeness of her vision."
Mary does not find a way out, and nor does Moses, who kills her in a state of insane rage, and then shortly afterwards freezes on the spot near the house, waiting, immobile, to be led away toward sentencing and death.
(But a fundamental principle is just becoming visible here, one that will reach a far higher level of visibility over the next 30 years: very extraordinary things happen when women go off into the unknown).
*
There were many
complexities and exceptions in relation to the social force-field of capitulation
in the western world of the 1950s, and not just because of events like the successful
production in 1956 of Look Back in Anger,
in which Jimmy Porter rages against the Sunday morning church bells. An
important example of an addition or “complication” is Paul Eluard’s return to
communism, and his poetic eulogising of Stalin in 1950. Capitulation comes in many
forms, including superficially “ruptural” ones, and it is only the relationship
to current or emergent state-power zones within the interiority that is
definitive of it – as opposed to determinations of “right” and “left”. And in
relation to Britain a large intellectual strand was present at the start of the
decade that was in agreement with Eluard.
It is also valuable
to think about the nomination by an Irish literary group in 1950 of Lord
Dunsany for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Dunsany’s first three novels in
different ways are all extremely impressive achievements, but his way of
writing – with its poetic-prose, and its countryside-focused and non-religious
opening up of the “numinous” (or of the transcendental in directions other than
that of the gothic) is one of the modes of fiction that has been emphatically
blocked by the break with the past. His description of the end of the Golden
Age in The Charwoman’s Shadow seems
prescient (one of the two protagonists leaves at the end of the story in a
journey from Spain across Europe, taking all anomalous or “magical” beings with
him as he goes, and then walks hundreds of miles across Eurasia to a country
called “The Land of the Moon’s Rising”). In the new oneiric climate Dunsany has no
chance at all of winning the Nobel prize, but he is also confronted with the
spectacle of H.P.Lovecraft producing work which is profoundly influenced by
him, but which progressively comes to be focused on transcendental north. The
gothic fits in the deepest sense with forces of control – the forces of the
trans-establishment – because it functions as “warnings to the curious.” These
are warnings to never stray too far away from the worlds of reason and
revelation (for these worlds lucidity is the unperceived, the unwoken faculty),
and it can be seen therefore that the gothic does not just fit with the system
of reason-revelation, but is a major component of it.
The break with
the past seems to be part of what is involved in the phrase “The past is
another country, they do things differently there,” which begins Hartley’s 1953
novel The Go-Between, a very
important exception to the multi-faceted conservatism of the time. But this is
not a novel of nostalgia (and evidently it is even less a novel of nostalgia
for traditionalism). It is another tragedy, to be placed alongside The Grass is Singing (Pinter in the
early 70s describes reading it and breaking into tears half way through, saying
of this emotional response “it was very eerie”). And in its undemonstrative way
it is a classic first-phase modernist dreaming, with its ancientism in the form
of the boy’s zodiacal myth system, and his improvised curses or “spells” in
latin, and with its central, fundamental invocation of 1900 as a high-point
from which the twentieth century had collapsed.
And a further
exception (or semi-exception, perhaps) is Under
Milkwood, from 1954. Dylan Thomas has in fact added to the metaphysically
conformist force-field of the time by enigmatically
threading religious imagery through many of his poems and by stating publically
that he believed in God “because he’d be a damned fool if he didn’t.” But in Under Milkwood Thomas depicts a world of
dreams and longings on the part of people living in a small town by the sea (the
presence of the dead within it seems not at all religious but more to do with
the memories of the town’s inhabitants) and he does this in a way which has a powerful
lightness that has tragedy suffused
hauntingly into it, and which makes surreal comic situations into opportunities
for powerful outsights about human existence (furthermore the music that is
integral to the piece –done by a composer friend of Thomas’s - is modernist, as
opposed to romantic, or late-romantic). Thomas has forged his way forward in
his writing: he started out with poetry that inscribed the religious elements
within compositions that seemed to border on surrealism, but now he has found a
way of looking toward the outside by means of a lucidly delerial brightness that
seemingly has no derivative connection to the surrealism of the continent, and
that has largely freed itself from transcendence metaphysics.
(And it should be added that the very important modernist
tradition of surrealism – which included di Chirico, Kahlo, Matta, Leonora
Carrington, Ernst, Eluard, Tanguy etc, and which would continue powerfully in
Latin America for the next two decades – was at this time being brought under
the shadow of the different extant wings of conformism: alongside Eluard’s
eulogising of Stalin was Dali’s 1940 retreat into Catholicism. Dali’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper was
completed in 1955).
Also, after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, there is a freeing up of thought from dogmatic positions, and a greater openness to non-conventional forms of expression, which will lead to innovation in relation for instance to cultural studies, and to accounts of the political situation that will be less laden with interpretosis-theorising. Although far from a paradigm of unfettered dreaming, Orwell’s very effective Animal Farm now goes from being largely seen by intellectual radicals as a betrayal to being seen as a precursor of the positions of the “new left” (reading the 1960 collection of political / cultural studies essays Out of Apathy in 1985 I was struck by how readable and exciting it was, with its essays by Stuart Hall and E.P.Thompson, and with its reference, in one of the titles, to an essay by Orwell). The cold war nuclear stand-off is increasingly discrediting the world of the state, detaching people from their different state-conformist adherences. And the beats and exultant melodies of rock and roll are beginning to suggest a whole other way of being – a way of being involving freedom at the levels of action and of thought.
Also, after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, there is a freeing up of thought from dogmatic positions, and a greater openness to non-conventional forms of expression, which will lead to innovation in relation for instance to cultural studies, and to accounts of the political situation that will be less laden with interpretosis-theorising. Although far from a paradigm of unfettered dreaming, Orwell’s very effective Animal Farm now goes from being largely seen by intellectual radicals as a betrayal to being seen as a precursor of the positions of the “new left” (reading the 1960 collection of political / cultural studies essays Out of Apathy in 1985 I was struck by how readable and exciting it was, with its essays by Stuart Hall and E.P.Thompson, and with its reference, in one of the titles, to an essay by Orwell). The cold war nuclear stand-off is increasingly discrediting the world of the state, detaching people from their different state-conformist adherences. And the beats and exultant melodies of rock and roll are beginning to suggest a whole other way of being – a way of being involving freedom at the levels of action and of thought.
Dunsany is now as
if two hundred years in the past (The
Wind in the Willows, with its “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter about an
encounter with Pan, is able to have a central existence, because it is a
children’s book, but Dunsany’s inspired, non-religious – and non-supernatural -
attempt to re-dream England along these lines is rendered all but invisible).
However, Virginia Woolf’s way of reaching the second sphere of action is still
in full effect. This is what has not been undermined, or consigned to the past
(Virginia Woolf, the visionary dreamer who has the courage and devastating
lightness of touch, in A Room of One’s Own,
to say that she learned to substitute a view of the open sky for a view of “the
gentleman in the sky” recommended for her adoration by Milton). The interiority
has done a lot of suppressive work in the previous decades, but the 1962 title “Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf” seems symbolic of the fact that Woolf’s work remains
free from the effects of these obfuscatory processes. And now there is the publication of The Golden Notebook, in 1962 (12 years after The Grass is Singing) - with Picnic
at Hanging Rock only 6 years in the future - and coming toward the charged
beats of exuberant freedom there is the dreamy brightness of the songs of The
Beatles.
*
*
A profound shift which occurs during the 60s and 70s is a movement of the anthropological
perspective into the foreground.This was ultimately about reaching the
brightness of the overall human domain of perspectives that currently exist
beyond that of reason-revelation – a world in fact that is inseparable from
becomings, in particular becoming-woman. And the question of the history of the last few
thousand years was not being left behind in the process – very much on the
contrary – but unlike in the first phase of modernism the emphasis was now on
the current sphere of human forms of existence. Anthropology had in fact all along been a
crucial element in the explosion of modernism at the start of the 20th century. A deeply embedded love of
classicists had left the cultures of the
English-speaking world wide open to the radicalism of Frazer’s The Golden Bough
(which places the story of Christ as just one more story to be symbolically
understood, alongside all the other stories of societies and tribes). But this
book itself was as much historical as anthropological, and
belonged also to the initial stage where the central focus of history was the
“classical” world – The Golden Bough starts from a passage within Virgil’s Aeneid. This
“arcadian” initial phase of modernism (that has A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a
precursor) extended oneirically from Fraser’s sacred grove of Diana, to stories
of Ariadne and Dionysus, but by the 1960s it is not nearly anomalous enough.
This is partly for intrinsic reasons (it is historical rather than
contemporaneous, and it is focused only on one zone within history), and also
because it has now been keeping bad, conservative company (The Wasteland, with its
emphasis on The Golden Bough, is now visible as a place on the way to
Christianity; W.H.Auden, in “Vespers”, written in 1955, says “I am an
arcadian”).
The oneirosphere
of the 60s and 70s is a place of flashes of an anthropological perspective
which taken to its full extent, is an applied anthropology (an embodied
anthropology). It is also a place of extraordinary appearances of the idea of a
woman – or women – travelling deliberately into the unknown. These two elements
will come together – in a joint culmination, or threshold-crossing – in
Florinda Donner’s Shabono. An issue
that runs fundamentally deeper than that of religion is all along that of
women, gender, and of becoming-woman (the only other issue that subtends – or
is prior to – religion in the same way is that of territory and specifically of
current justifications for war as sensible behaviour, an issue that is also
central for applied anthropology). It is clear that the current of an awakening anthropology in fact can only converge with the
oneirosphere development of dreamings of women travelling into the unknown – a
dreaming which most easily takes the form of a woman or women going off into a
wilderness, or semi-wilderness – because an applied anthropology fundamentally
involves women moving deliberately into the south-outside (the dimension of the
unknown which does not involve damage or destruction in going towards it).
Everything here
concerns brightness, and that which blocks it, and subverts it. The shift at
the start of the 60s intrinsically involved women coming to the forefront of
oneiric production, with their outer-edge brightness – their greater capacity
for non-judgmental, non-opinionated perspectives. The beyond-the-gravity
aspect of The Beatles was just the cutting edge (the “beats” had been an
all-too-male movement, with too much gravity and potential piety involved – by
1959 Kerouac was proclaiming himself a Catholic, and saying that by “beat” he
meant “beatific” – but the Beatles in contrast attuned themselves to a
English-surrealist lightness and social irreverence that was coming from Spike Milligan, as opposed to Alan
Ginsberg). The new, heightened emergence of modernism would soon be suffused
with the work of visionary women. But the phase of higher-intensity that
culminates in 1980-82 does not guarantee freedom from the effects of the system
of reason-revelation for those who set out to create unfettered dreamings in
this transformed atmosphere. And this is partly because there are two sides to
reason-revelation (so that someone escaping from one side is likely to still be
deeply embroiled in the other) and also, inseparably, because there are
different directions of the unknown.
The three
primary blocking modalities for the new women writers (putting temporarily aside
the proto-religious questions of the socially enshrined “familialist/love-couple”
ethos) are now, firstly, fixation on the temporal line of Hegelian/Marxian/techno-futural
development; secondly, fixation on the temporal, constrictive line of psychonanalysis; and thirdly, fixation on
the gothic. In particular the first and last of these modalities are open to
aspects of the world which it is necessary to perceive, but it is what they
block off as fixations of attention that is the key issue – the extent to which
they prevent a full opening up of attention toward the forest of the spatium (the first has the now of the
grievance, and the third has the now of the hidden horror, and these aspects of
the world exist, but there is transcendentally more to the now than this). This
spatium – or eerie tremendum – is best invoked here by Picnic at Hanging Rock and by Shabono, although the Canadian
semi-wilderness of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing
should also be mentioned, along with the – very different - forests of Angela
Carter’s “The Erl-King” and Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest.
Questions of futural time, politics and technology now of course in a
sense have their own genre – science fiction (it is this domain of writing that
has been the great beneficiary of the break with the past – of the polarity
reversal of the system of reason-revelation). And this genre extends in a
complex continuum from “conventional” adventure sci-fi to socialist/Marxist projections of a
transformed future, such as Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time (which Gibson is right to credit as a
starting-point of cyber-punk, although it is much more than this), and William
Morris’s News from Nowhere.
But there is
another, “non-genre” form of fiction which is a primary locus of the first
blocking modality: this is the novel about people who are, in one sense or
another political radicals, for whom the imminent – or relatively imminent –
overcoming of capitalism is a possible or probable horizon, or is, at the very
least, the fundamentally valid, desirable political outcome. These were the
people by whom – to a great extent –
Doris Lessing was surrounded in the decade after her first novel, during which
she did not a write a second one (and it is important to remember that for some
of them the novel would have been regarded as a “bourgeois art-form”). And The
Golden Notebook - along with novels like Piercy's Vida - is a primary example of this kind of writing (and primary not
because it is dogmatic, but because it critically shows the ways-of-being that are involved, and yet at the same time is inflected by them). The central character
is Anna Wulf, a woman who wrote a novel several years earlier (and now has a writers' block), and who has a
relationship with a revolutionary socialist called Saul Green – a relationship
which culminates in a kind of shared mental breakdown, a breakdown that does
not appear to lead to any resolution of the problems of their relationship (though the book is in a positive sense haunted by a possibility of a resolution) and which is
followed, after a joint recovery of equilibrium, by Saul leaving Anna.
"That was three days ago. These last three days I have been
inside madness. When he came downstairs he looked very ill; his eyes were sharp
bright wary animals inside circles of brownish bruised flesh, his mouth was
tight, like a weapon. He had a jaunty soldier air, and I knew all his energies
were absorbed in simply holding himself together. All his different
personalities were fused in the being who fought only for survival. He gave me
repeated glances of appeal, of which he was not aware. This was only a creature
at the limits of itself. In response to the need of this creature I felt myself
tense and ready to take stress. [...]
If I had
tape-recordings of those times , it would be a record of jumbling phrases,
jargon, disconnected remarks. That morning it was a political record, a
hotchpotch of political jargon. I sat and listened as the stream of
parrot-phrases went past, and I labelled them: communist, anti-communist,
liberal, socialist. I was able to isolate them: Communist, American, 1954.
Communist, English, 1956. Trotskyist, American, early nineteen-fifties.
Premature anti-Stalinist, 1954. Liberal, American, 1956. And so on. […]
We began discussing the state of the left in Europe, the fragmentation of socialist movements everywhere. [...] I remember thinking it was strange that we were able to be so detachedly intelligent when we were both sick with tension and anxiety. And I thought that we were talking about political movements, the development or defeat of this socialist movement or that, whereas last night I had known, finally, that the truth for our time was war, the immanence of war."
It can be seen how much a politicised line of time is foregrounded
here (although without anything being simplistic or dogmatic in relation to this line). And not only this, the other necessary point at this stage is that the world of space of the novel has been populated with elements that are categorisations of social forms according to a Marxist-Hegelian schema of social progression. A little later
in the novel Anna has a long dream, where for a while she is dreaming about
being an Algerian soldier fighting the French, and where she has a realisation
that the overthrow of one tyranny will lead to another:
"Terror brought me out of the dream, and I was no longer the
sentry, standing guard in the moonlight with the groups of his comrades moving
quietly behind him over the fires of the evening meal. I bounced off the dry, sun-smelling soil of Algeria and I was in the air. This was the flying dream, and it was a long time since I had dreamed it, and I was almost crying with joy because I was flying again. The essence of the flying dream is joy, joy in light free movement. I was high in the air above the Mediterranean, and I knew I could go anywhere. I willed to go East. I wanted to go to Asia, I wanted to visit the peasant. I was flying immensely high, with the mountains and seas beneath me, treading the air down easily with my feet. I passed over great mountains and below me was China. I said in my dream: I am here because I want to be a peasant with other peasants. I came low over a village, and saw peasants working in the fields. They had a quality of stern purpose which attracted me to them. I willed my feet to let me descend gently to the earth. The joy of the dream was more intense than I have experienced, and it was the joy of freedom. I came down to the ancient earth of China, and a peasant woman stood at the door of her hut. I walked towards her [...] It was easy to become her. She was a young woman, and she was pregnant, but already made old by work. Then I realised that Anna's brain was in her still, and I was thinking mechanical thoughts which I classified as 'progressive and liberal'. "
Lessing's writing has a depth of nuance which means it recurrently problematises what is blocked about the perspectives of her characters, but in The Golden Notebook these counteracting movements do not take the world of the fiction far into the outside of ordinary reality, other than in the direction of dreams within sleep, like the one above. The judgmental world of male gravity and self-importance looms up everywhere in the novel, and the male-generated interpretosis systems of both Marx and Freud intrude their disfunctional lines of time into the lucidity of Anna's awareness of the world. There is a forest here, but it is a forest of the many personalities or modes of being of individuals (and this of course is a view of the outside, a very complex domain within the outside that includes aspects that are more like viruses than aspects of the multiple self), and this forest is there without a corresponding awareness of the planet, and of the lucidity, and brightness, and capacity to travel into the unknown of women, perceived in the horizon of the planet, as opposed to the horizon of the home and the urban. At one point Anna has another dream, this one about Saul - a dream which suggests an aspect of this domain of multiple individual selves or ways of being, and which is set within a grim terrain of buildings and machines:
"I slept and I dreamed the dream.This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counter-part, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together, and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognised in the dream, those other dreams we all have, when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction."
It is not at all that a journey into the unknown cannot take place in a home, or in a city: it is more that a primary generator of the breakdown is that Saul has taken up the heavily male-adopted - newly emergent - sexual freedom ethos, and explicitly will not commit to staying with Anna (he is travelling around from one European city to another) and this makes the horizon of the breakdown to a great extent the all-too-known horizon of love-couple insecurity and claustrophobia. And as a result there is not enough of the planet within the book, and not enough of women.
The Beatles at this time - the early 60s - are doing a lot less directly philosophical/sociological thinking than Doris Lessing, but instead are involved in a cognitive process of expressing what is beyond the domain of reactive values: instead of thinking along grave, male lines, they are primarily letting go of these tendencies and expressing their love and delight at the existence of women (not that this is as innocent as it seems, but letting go toward love and charged, beautiful music is nonetheless a real achievement); Lessing beyond any doubt writes one of the best novels of the 20th century, and its weaknesses are probably to do not just with fixations of attention on the line of time, but also with the fact that for her the existence of men is a source of delight and love to a smaller degree than is the existence of women for The Beatles (as Deleuze and Guattari point out women are recurrently in need of a becoming-woman as much as men, and in general they are not at all in need of a becoming-man).
But it is important to see that the fixation of attention on the revolutionary line of time is given an extraordinary instantiation in the form of the preface to The Golden Notebook written by Lessing in 1971, in which she very brilliantly analyses the socially enshrined psycho-libidinal suppression of women in their relationships with men, and then says:
"I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I was writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is about to be swept away in the next decade.
(So why write novels? Why indeed! I suppose we have to go on living as if...)".
We have to go on living as if the absolute transformation was not coming... It is in movements of attention of this kind that the process of perceiving the world - a vast, multi-tribe, anthropological and planetary spatium or intensive forest, at different degrees of intensity - is misdirected in the form of an anticipation into the socio-political, "chronic" future. All of the anticipations of violent revolution and generalised calamity-and-war are connected to the dark, empirical-transcendental fact that ordinary reality is an ongoing disaster, which has war threaded continuously through it (Lessing is seeing this in the passage quoted above when she talks about the "immanence of war"). And more importantly, anticipations of a revolution at the levels of freedom and of love are connected - this is what gives them the apparent substance - to the fact that the revolutionary outside of Love-and-Freedom is all along a dimension of the present. It is the immanence of brightness - of journeys toward transcendental south - that is the fundamental immanence.
However, a concentration of attention on this futural and technical/political line of time has another danger. When Ursula Le Guin starts to write, creating dreamings set far in the future which break open untouched, immensely valuable expanses for the new modernism, she does not do this in any straightforward sense as a radical or revolutionary socialist, and still less does she write as a utopian. Her radicalism is that of a fundamentally anthropological perspective, together with the fact that she has gone east to access the philosophical resources of the Tao Te Ching (the book plays an explicit major role in City of Illusion as well as being threaded though other works; and she describes herself as "a non-consistent Taoist, and a consistent non-Christian"). But the problem about the futural/technological modality is that in its depth-aspect it sets up - and conducts toward - processes of thinking about control and instrumentality, but does not open thought in the direction of becomings, or of embodiment - embodiment in a sense that involves not just the embodiment of knowledge through the functioning of the faculty of lucidity, but also involves the specific brightness of women.This is why the extraordinary achievement of The Left Hand of Darkness is inflected by the curious aspect that in creating a planet of hermaphrodites Le Guin has effectively populated it with males who all are capable of either of the two roles within reproduction (the choice of the pronoun "he" to describe them could have been influenced by many things, but in the end it is clear that it functions in consonance with a very predominant maleness on the part of those who it designates). And although certain subtleties are possible within a concentration on control, these are the subtleties of domination, not the subtleties of brightness (of being in love, of lucidity, of ability to be perception, of non-judgmental laughter - all of which exist within Le Guin's work, but not, insofar as this mode of blocking is in effect, in a way that sufficiently allows a lucid view of the feminine). It is in this way that along with reproduction and nurturing another element that can be added to the view of female sexuality is the question of submission/domination: in City of Illusion the main female character, Estrel (who betrays the male protagonist to an alien dominatory race who have enslaved human beings) is described negatively as fundamentally submissive in her sexual behaviour, which means that in functioning as a spy for the aliens, and seducing the protagonist, she is controlling by her willingness to be submissive.
The problem is that the specific canon of reason (there is far more to reason than this) involved in the system of reason-revelation is very much a male-generated affair. And this means that if the technological-futural modality is in effect it can be hard to adopt female perspectives in their depth-aspect. And a primary indicator of the problem with Le Guin's work is that during her first 12 years of writing (during which she wrote the main books for which she is known), all but one of her protagonists is a man. She says about this, talking about a time in 1977 "I gradually realised that my writing was telling me that I could not ignore the feminine. [...] But I could not write about women."
In 1972 Le Guin writes The Word for World is Forest, in which there is a community of forest-dwelling human beings (Athsheans) who have a dimension of their existence that is called the "dream-time." (they are on another planet, and are considered as alien - because of physical differences - by violent colonists who have come from Earth). The forest here is a very extraordinary place, in that because the "dreaming" awareness that corresponds to the dream-time can occur while people are awake the forest for those in this state is both the ordinary world and another one, with its own, different consistency (the other world is the "body without organs."). But the protagonist here is male, and there are no major female characters at all - so no woman walks into the unknown of this forest. And because the protagonist is an Athshean, there is a sense in which no-one does this (especially given that this protagonist is preoccupied with an idea that has hitherto not existed in the Athshean world: that there could be circumstances where it is necessary to fight a war). The overcoding within subsequent Taoism (as opposed to the philosophy of the Tao Te Ching) of "yin yang" across "know the male / yet keep to the female" has no doubt not been helpful here, in that keeping to the male looks like less of an issue if you see what you are doing as "yin" attempting to add the complementary "yang" perspective. But the overall feeling here is that within a powerful fictional world there is a missed opportunity to describe a journey into the transcendentally unknown, and a missed opportunity to take up the perspective of the female in relation to a dimension of the anomalous (the Athsheans do not have female practitioners in relation to the "dream-time," in the same way as - somewhat bizarrely - the inhabitants of Earthsea do not have sorceresses, as well as sorcerers).
*
We have arrived for a second time at the year 1972 (Doris Lessing's preface to The Golden Notebook was written in June of this year). It is now four years since Joan Lindsay dreamed up the journey of four women into the unknown of a forested expanse of mountain-wilderness called Hanging Rock (a dreaming that had an explicitly "anthropological" connection in its initial form, in that the excised concluding chapter - excised because it was rejected by the publishers - showed the women crossing to another dimension, where time flows differently, a "dreamtime"). It is a year since Carole King brought out Tapestry, in one of whose songs are the words
Way over yonder is a place that I know
Where I can see shelter from hunger and cold
And the sweet-tastin' good life is so easily found
Way over yonder, that's where I'm bound
(this song, if you include all of the words, hovers as a whole just alongside being religious, but it is an aspect of the brightness of this time that it stays alongside it - holding open a faint view toward the Future - rather than collapsing into the gravity of piety and dogma). 1972 was the year of publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Thompson says of a high tide of non-traditionalism in the San Francisco area in 1966 - 1968:
"you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that what we were doing was right, that we were winning... [...] And that I think was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didnt need that. Our energy would simply prevail."
And 1972 is also the year in which Margaret Atwood publishes Surfacing, a novel which in subtle ways is profoundly moving, and which both takes a woman to the point where she is on her own in a semi-wilderness, and has a faint but pivotal connection to the worlds of the indigenous peoples of Canada (making it an expression on the intensifying current of anthropological modernism).
This novel is moving because it shows how there has been a profound social change - a rupture has occured in the form of a substantial increase in freedom, and in the form of a break from many aspects of traditionalism - while at the same time showing that the alternative culture is constructing itself as a new system of conformism and suppressive behaviour. And also because the female protagonist has an encounter with an outside of the human social/urban world (a forested island on a remote lake) but is for most of the book in a state of hyper-intelligent flat-affect - as a result of many different disturbing events over the previous few years - which means that the eventual increased breakthrough into her of this world takes the form of an aspect of a breakdown. (A breakdown that in fact has more to do with the buried traumas of her past than with her encounter with a spheroambient, planetary outside).
The exceptionally, unsentimental, non-glorifying quality of the writing (which contrasts with a kind of posturing idealising of the counter-culture in Hunter S.Thompson) blasts open a sense of place and time in a remarkable way - and at the centre of the time is the fact of the Rupture (to give the necessary context, the protagonist is setting out with friends on her journey because a few weeks previously her father went missing from his house on the island, and has not been found):
"I like them, I trust them, I can't think of anyone else I like better, but right now I wish they weren't here. Though they're necessary. David's and Anna's car was the only way I could make it [...] They're doing me a favour, which they disguised by saying it would be fun, they like to travel. But my reason for being here embarrasses them, they dont understand it. They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father , Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs."
And a little later there is this passage about her friend's boyfriend, David, which suggests a wider tendency of disowning - and perhaps of concentration on the current situation for other reasons - that has made people's past's to a great extent into voids:
"He spent four years in New York and became political; he was studying something, it was during the sixties, I'm not sure when. My friends' pasts are vague to me, and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn't notice."
The vagueness of the pasts of the individuals in the group (together with a lack of long-term familiarity as a result of a normalised state of flux - "Anna is my best friend. I have known her for two months"), suggests it is possible for the unnamed protagonist to pass off a flat-affect version of herself as normal, because they don't really know her, and they don't have any coordinates about her past that would cause them to expect something from her.
There is nothing at all "good in itself" about the domain of different features of this social shift (and certainly there is nothing good about the indulgent, still-sexist system of alternative-culture behaviour that is now solidifying itself), but there is something about the combination of relative freedom from traditionalism and from having a known past that seems potentially very attractive: surely, for instance, it could only be a valuable exercise - or creative challenge - to move for a while from one place to another, creating an entirely different persona for each new place, with each new persona necessarily having a different past?
But the past of the protagonist-narrator is not pre-eminently one of freedom: instead it is a world of perturbing memories, and of painful events that are in fact not over, but are just starting-points of ongoing circumstances (she is estranged from a child from a marriage that ended, as well having the traumatic memory of an abortion when she was a teenager; and her father has gone missing, and for most of the novel has not been found).
The blocking-modality of psychoanalysis is in fact in effect here, even if in a liminal way (and the overall structure is very much capable of being a generator for this modality). Instead of the pre-eminently futural line of social and technological progression, here there is the pre-eminently backwards line of past traumatic events, which are needing to be "worked through," or brought to the surface. It can be seen that this is not psychoanalysis in any sense that relates intrinsically to specific theories: it is broader and vaguer than that (in a very crude form it is the stuff of the "backstories" of countless Hollywood films that have no connection at all to Freudian or Lacanian theories, etc): the only connections to the theory-systems are buried trauma and a very strong tendency for this to be familial. The nameless narrator of Surfacing is freighted with four or five traumas, all of which are familial. And evidently it is not that this is at all unlikely: it is more that there is a thin-ness, or lack of depth, to some of the traumatic nexuses (as with what seems to be casualness, rather than courage or integrity in dismissing the existence of the estranged child - an attitude which is never deepened in the later experiences), and to some of the aspects of the resolution, in the course of, and after the breakdown. At the end of the novel she has a sudden realisation that she loves her boyfriend Joe (who seems generally to be a sullen mess, who resents his girlfriend's achievements), and given it is being shown that she has fought her way to an enhanced awareness through a quite extreme slipping-sideways or "breakthrough-derangement" it seems more likely that she would feel both a real affection, and an increased awareness of the problematic nature of their relationship. Marge Piercy asks how, in choosing to live with a man who opts to be a loser "does she stop being a loser?" The suggestion is that the book is here passing off a failure of her judgement as an expression of a state of lucidity on the part of the protagonist. As if, in a way that partially lacks depth, she has been loaded up with trauma, and then in a similar way, has been freed from it.
And yet - the book's evocative power to give you a place and a social time (and also a small specific terrain with a personal or childhood depth-world, so that it is like a charged stack of space-time) is exceptional, and intensifies across multiple readings, with individual paragraphs recurrently feeling like very striking poems. It is just that, simultaneously, there is an insistent feeling that a multiple freighting of the protagonist with trauma has somehow been functioning, in the writing, as a way of fending off the power of the "haecceity" (the here-and-now) of this planetary expanse that is the house by the lake, and the forested island. Joan Lindsay has Miranda and Marion leave for Hanging Rock with an extreme lightness, and a bright, intense capacity for abandon - and a letting go toward the haecceity of the place creates a metamorphosis of their awareness. The protagonist in Surfacing is much older, and there has been more time for emotional scars, but nonetheless she seems to have been reactively pressed into the gravity of disturbing past events. The result is the haunting, edge-of-the-sublime affect whereby the outside is always plaintively present - as if calling, or lapping like water - within the world of the novel, but at the same time is held at a distance: the place by the lake has almost no doorways to the outside in the form of spheroambient intent and energy, but instead it is a dense space of doorways to the past.
*
It is also in 1972 that Angela Carter writes The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which is surely one of the most impressive, intelligent, and lucidly imaginative novels ever written. In this novel Carter very emphatically goes east, to China, but as part of a double movement that also takes her to South/Central America (this is the location of most of the events – a location which remains indeterminate in relation to any country or more specific area). However, this book, along with her story “The Erl-King” (written around 5 years later), needs to appear here as primarily an exemplification of the third blocking-modality – fixation on the gothic (or, properly speaking, fixation on zones of the outside that are substantially distant from transcendental south).
*
The female aspect of the human world is brightness (although there is male brightness, as well). There are even reasons for believing that the female is all along the par excellence form of lucidity, love, and the ability to let go. But also, the feminine has a smaller tendency than the masculine to get involved in the unthinking posturings of metaphysical, political and scientific opinionatedness, with their associated (and potentially war-inducing) judgmental gravity. And this is inseparable from a willingness to be “disregarded” in relation to the kudos-world of grand opinions about things; to not be concerned about taking “positions” in order to have “standing” - a willingness to be seen as “small” in relation to the kudos-world so that you can slip in anywhere unregarded, and perhaps as a result learn to think at a new level. All of this makes it apparent that the feminine is an aspect of the Future.
In relation to the key issue of lucidity, it can be seen why in Florinda Donner’s book Being-in-Dreaming (1992) there is a description of men, in relation to knowledge, as being like closed cones which come to a point at the top, in that they attempt to use reason to reach upward, and of women as being like cones which are open, and the other way up; which are open in the direction of the abstract. Donner describes her encounter with a woman called Esperanza, who makes the above comparison, and who then says,
"Men are close to the concrete, [...] and aim at the abstract. Women are close to the abstract, and yet try to indulge themselves with the concrete."
Esperanza is careful to point out that the attempt at indulgence with the concrete is a behaviour that is instilled by a male-generated view of women, and to point out that women also have a very high level of ability with reason, it is just that they also have a specific, extraordinary facility with the abstract (the abstract can here be exemplified as the world of intent, love, freedom, feeling, awareness, dreams and wider realities). Women have a "different track" or different path profoundly emplaced within them, and men in fact have to transcend themselves as males (as this term is generally understood) in order to get to this "different track."
The idea here is that in general women end up either relinquishing any tendency to move in a sustained, deliberate way in this different direction, so that they only ever fleetingly and fugitively go towards it, always returning, or they go toward the male-generated modality of knowledge, becoming "converts" to the reason-fixation of men, a fixation which can only see part of the zone of engagement of reason, and cannot see the worlds grasped by lucidity at all (in the context of the 1980s it would be appropriate to think of Margaret Thatcher at this point).
The world (or zone of human social milieus) from which Being-in-Dreaming has arrived is the world which is very much in the background in 1993. It is in the background, but it is still in effect, leaning in from time to time with something new, and always ambiently in effect through people reading the already-emplaced works - even though it is the case that overall, to different degrees, the dreamy brightness of the earlier phase is now in abeyance in the societies of what is called "the west." Within the outer-edge zones of success fostered within the establishment it is perhaps Bjork's album Debut that is most turned toward the Future - Bjork has found the elfen feminine (something tangentially connected to the gothic) and gone off with it in a more southward direction, learning how to dream and think through this way of being (it is a good step in the right direction). In itself this way of being will initiate more of an ability to dream than those expressed by most of the hectically ecstatic dance tracks of the time.
And the question of dreaming - of the lucidly visionary - is evidently fundamental in this context. To take the overarching instance, women in western societies over the last two centuries have in fact arrived at the point where "writer of fiction" is a role that is standardly available to them. And the imposed, suppressive option between fugitive lucidity and collapse-into-reason perhaps to some extent has a higher than normal chance of being transcended by those who take up this role.
*
In relation to the abstract, there are three views - or outsights - that can be drawn from this journey from 1900 to 1993/2002.
The first is that in reaching an awareness of the abstract an awareness of the feminine and of becoming-woman are invaluable.
The second is that the dispassionate - or impersonal - modality of being (that lucid state of love and integrity which is not swayed by the pre-fabricated moods of the control-tendency of the human mind) is equally invaluable for focusing an awareness of the abstract.
The third is that a lucidly visionary piece of writing is a lens for seeing zones of the abstract, irrespective of whether it is a work of philosophy, a novel, a story, the words of a song, a poem, a documentary account, a play, or the script of a film.
Note 2
Note 3.
* * *
However, a concentration of attention on this futural and technical/political line of time has another danger. When Ursula Le Guin starts to write, creating dreamings set far in the future which break open untouched, immensely valuable expanses for the new modernism, she does not do this in any straightforward sense as a radical or revolutionary socialist, and still less does she write as a utopian. Her radicalism is that of a fundamentally anthropological perspective, together with the fact that she has gone east to access the philosophical resources of the Tao Te Ching (the book plays an explicit major role in City of Illusion as well as being threaded though other works; and she describes herself as "a non-consistent Taoist, and a consistent non-Christian"). But the problem about the futural/technological modality is that in its depth-aspect it sets up - and conducts toward - processes of thinking about control and instrumentality, but does not open thought in the direction of becomings, or of embodiment - embodiment in a sense that involves not just the embodiment of knowledge through the functioning of the faculty of lucidity, but also involves the specific brightness of women.This is why the extraordinary achievement of The Left Hand of Darkness is inflected by the curious aspect that in creating a planet of hermaphrodites Le Guin has effectively populated it with males who all are capable of either of the two roles within reproduction (the choice of the pronoun "he" to describe them could have been influenced by many things, but in the end it is clear that it functions in consonance with a very predominant maleness on the part of those who it designates). And although certain subtleties are possible within a concentration on control, these are the subtleties of domination, not the subtleties of brightness (of being in love, of lucidity, of ability to be perception, of non-judgmental laughter - all of which exist within Le Guin's work, but not, insofar as this mode of blocking is in effect, in a way that sufficiently allows a lucid view of the feminine). It is in this way that along with reproduction and nurturing another element that can be added to the view of female sexuality is the question of submission/domination: in City of Illusion the main female character, Estrel (who betrays the male protagonist to an alien dominatory race who have enslaved human beings) is described negatively as fundamentally submissive in her sexual behaviour, which means that in functioning as a spy for the aliens, and seducing the protagonist, she is controlling by her willingness to be submissive.
The problem is that the specific canon of reason (there is far more to reason than this) involved in the system of reason-revelation is very much a male-generated affair. And this means that if the technological-futural modality is in effect it can be hard to adopt female perspectives in their depth-aspect. And a primary indicator of the problem with Le Guin's work is that during her first 12 years of writing (during which she wrote the main books for which she is known), all but one of her protagonists is a man. She says about this, talking about a time in 1977 "I gradually realised that my writing was telling me that I could not ignore the feminine. [...] But I could not write about women."
In 1972 Le Guin writes The Word for World is Forest, in which there is a community of forest-dwelling human beings (Athsheans) who have a dimension of their existence that is called the "dream-time." (they are on another planet, and are considered as alien - because of physical differences - by violent colonists who have come from Earth). The forest here is a very extraordinary place, in that because the "dreaming" awareness that corresponds to the dream-time can occur while people are awake the forest for those in this state is both the ordinary world and another one, with its own, different consistency (the other world is the "body without organs."). But the protagonist here is male, and there are no major female characters at all - so no woman walks into the unknown of this forest. And because the protagonist is an Athshean, there is a sense in which no-one does this (especially given that this protagonist is preoccupied with an idea that has hitherto not existed in the Athshean world: that there could be circumstances where it is necessary to fight a war). The overcoding within subsequent Taoism (as opposed to the philosophy of the Tao Te Ching) of "yin yang" across "know the male / yet keep to the female" has no doubt not been helpful here, in that keeping to the male looks like less of an issue if you see what you are doing as "yin" attempting to add the complementary "yang" perspective. But the overall feeling here is that within a powerful fictional world there is a missed opportunity to describe a journey into the transcendentally unknown, and a missed opportunity to take up the perspective of the female in relation to a dimension of the anomalous (the Athsheans do not have female practitioners in relation to the "dream-time," in the same way as - somewhat bizarrely - the inhabitants of Earthsea do not have sorceresses, as well as sorcerers).
*
We have arrived for a second time at the year 1972 (Doris Lessing's preface to The Golden Notebook was written in June of this year). It is now four years since Joan Lindsay dreamed up the journey of four women into the unknown of a forested expanse of mountain-wilderness called Hanging Rock (a dreaming that had an explicitly "anthropological" connection in its initial form, in that the excised concluding chapter - excised because it was rejected by the publishers - showed the women crossing to another dimension, where time flows differently, a "dreamtime"). It is a year since Carole King brought out Tapestry, in one of whose songs are the words
Way over yonder is a place that I know
Where I can see shelter from hunger and cold
And the sweet-tastin' good life is so easily found
Way over yonder, that's where I'm bound
(this song, if you include all of the words, hovers as a whole just alongside being religious, but it is an aspect of the brightness of this time that it stays alongside it - holding open a faint view toward the Future - rather than collapsing into the gravity of piety and dogma). 1972 was the year of publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which Thompson says of a high tide of non-traditionalism in the San Francisco area in 1966 - 1968:
"you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that what we were doing was right, that we were winning... [...] And that I think was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didnt need that. Our energy would simply prevail."
And 1972 is also the year in which Margaret Atwood publishes Surfacing, a novel which in subtle ways is profoundly moving, and which both takes a woman to the point where she is on her own in a semi-wilderness, and has a faint but pivotal connection to the worlds of the indigenous peoples of Canada (making it an expression on the intensifying current of anthropological modernism).
This novel is moving because it shows how there has been a profound social change - a rupture has occured in the form of a substantial increase in freedom, and in the form of a break from many aspects of traditionalism - while at the same time showing that the alternative culture is constructing itself as a new system of conformism and suppressive behaviour. And also because the female protagonist has an encounter with an outside of the human social/urban world (a forested island on a remote lake) but is for most of the book in a state of hyper-intelligent flat-affect - as a result of many different disturbing events over the previous few years - which means that the eventual increased breakthrough into her of this world takes the form of an aspect of a breakdown. (A breakdown that in fact has more to do with the buried traumas of her past than with her encounter with a spheroambient, planetary outside).
The exceptionally, unsentimental, non-glorifying quality of the writing (which contrasts with a kind of posturing idealising of the counter-culture in Hunter S.Thompson) blasts open a sense of place and time in a remarkable way - and at the centre of the time is the fact of the Rupture (to give the necessary context, the protagonist is setting out with friends on her journey because a few weeks previously her father went missing from his house on the island, and has not been found):
"I like them, I trust them, I can't think of anyone else I like better, but right now I wish they weren't here. Though they're necessary. David's and Anna's car was the only way I could make it [...] They're doing me a favour, which they disguised by saying it would be fun, they like to travel. But my reason for being here embarrasses them, they dont understand it. They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father , Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs."
And a little later there is this passage about her friend's boyfriend, David, which suggests a wider tendency of disowning - and perhaps of concentration on the current situation for other reasons - that has made people's past's to a great extent into voids:
"He spent four years in New York and became political; he was studying something, it was during the sixties, I'm not sure when. My friends' pasts are vague to me, and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn't notice."
The vagueness of the pasts of the individuals in the group (together with a lack of long-term familiarity as a result of a normalised state of flux - "Anna is my best friend. I have known her for two months"), suggests it is possible for the unnamed protagonist to pass off a flat-affect version of herself as normal, because they don't really know her, and they don't have any coordinates about her past that would cause them to expect something from her.
There is nothing at all "good in itself" about the domain of different features of this social shift (and certainly there is nothing good about the indulgent, still-sexist system of alternative-culture behaviour that is now solidifying itself), but there is something about the combination of relative freedom from traditionalism and from having a known past that seems potentially very attractive: surely, for instance, it could only be a valuable exercise - or creative challenge - to move for a while from one place to another, creating an entirely different persona for each new place, with each new persona necessarily having a different past?
But the past of the protagonist-narrator is not pre-eminently one of freedom: instead it is a world of perturbing memories, and of painful events that are in fact not over, but are just starting-points of ongoing circumstances (she is estranged from a child from a marriage that ended, as well having the traumatic memory of an abortion when she was a teenager; and her father has gone missing, and for most of the novel has not been found).
The blocking-modality of psychoanalysis is in fact in effect here, even if in a liminal way (and the overall structure is very much capable of being a generator for this modality). Instead of the pre-eminently futural line of social and technological progression, here there is the pre-eminently backwards line of past traumatic events, which are needing to be "worked through," or brought to the surface. It can be seen that this is not psychoanalysis in any sense that relates intrinsically to specific theories: it is broader and vaguer than that (in a very crude form it is the stuff of the "backstories" of countless Hollywood films that have no connection at all to Freudian or Lacanian theories, etc): the only connections to the theory-systems are buried trauma and a very strong tendency for this to be familial. The nameless narrator of Surfacing is freighted with four or five traumas, all of which are familial. And evidently it is not that this is at all unlikely: it is more that there is a thin-ness, or lack of depth, to some of the traumatic nexuses (as with what seems to be casualness, rather than courage or integrity in dismissing the existence of the estranged child - an attitude which is never deepened in the later experiences), and to some of the aspects of the resolution, in the course of, and after the breakdown. At the end of the novel she has a sudden realisation that she loves her boyfriend Joe (who seems generally to be a sullen mess, who resents his girlfriend's achievements), and given it is being shown that she has fought her way to an enhanced awareness through a quite extreme slipping-sideways or "breakthrough-derangement" it seems more likely that she would feel both a real affection, and an increased awareness of the problematic nature of their relationship. Marge Piercy asks how, in choosing to live with a man who opts to be a loser "does she stop being a loser?" The suggestion is that the book is here passing off a failure of her judgement as an expression of a state of lucidity on the part of the protagonist. As if, in a way that partially lacks depth, she has been loaded up with trauma, and then in a similar way, has been freed from it.
And yet - the book's evocative power to give you a place and a social time (and also a small specific terrain with a personal or childhood depth-world, so that it is like a charged stack of space-time) is exceptional, and intensifies across multiple readings, with individual paragraphs recurrently feeling like very striking poems. It is just that, simultaneously, there is an insistent feeling that a multiple freighting of the protagonist with trauma has somehow been functioning, in the writing, as a way of fending off the power of the "haecceity" (the here-and-now) of this planetary expanse that is the house by the lake, and the forested island. Joan Lindsay has Miranda and Marion leave for Hanging Rock with an extreme lightness, and a bright, intense capacity for abandon - and a letting go toward the haecceity of the place creates a metamorphosis of their awareness. The protagonist in Surfacing is much older, and there has been more time for emotional scars, but nonetheless she seems to have been reactively pressed into the gravity of disturbing past events. The result is the haunting, edge-of-the-sublime affect whereby the outside is always plaintively present - as if calling, or lapping like water - within the world of the novel, but at the same time is held at a distance: the place by the lake has almost no doorways to the outside in the form of spheroambient intent and energy, but instead it is a dense space of doorways to the past.
*
It is also in 1972 that Angela Carter writes The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which is surely one of the most impressive, intelligent, and lucidly imaginative novels ever written. In this novel Carter very emphatically goes east, to China, but as part of a double movement that also takes her to South/Central America (this is the location of most of the events – a location which remains indeterminate in relation to any country or more specific area). However, this book, along with her story “The Erl-King” (written around 5 years later), needs to appear here as primarily an exemplification of the third blocking-modality – fixation on the gothic (or, properly speaking, fixation on zones of the outside that are substantially distant from transcendental south).
It is not that the book is not valid as a warning (it has a
complete validity in this sense, although first you have to be able to focus
the lens it provides). Again it is not that the book cannot discern the
direction of the south-outside, referring, as it does, in lucid ways to what it
calls “the death-defying double-somersault of love” (“Love is the synthesis of
dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented”). Instead
the problem is that almost all of the book's attention is directed towards
control, dominatory power, and to erotic sexuality that is not at all connected
to the state of being “in love”, or is only faintly or implicitly connected to
it. The story, showing an extraordinary anthropological breadth of
understanding, shows tribal systems of domination (most spectacularly in
relation to the religious system of a tribe of centaurs) and shows two
pervasively impacting modes of social control, one of which is described as “Confucian,”
and the other of which is characterised
as an entrapment brought about through a deranged freeing-up of the imaginative and perceptual systems (specifically through a meeting of “yin” and “yang”
that is a generation of what is called “radiant energy” or “eroto-energy" -
“…I knew from my own experience that, once liberated, those
desires it seemed to me he cheapened as he talked of them were far greater than
their liberator and could shine more brightly than a thousand suns and yet I
did not think he knew what desire was. At the end of the corridor was a pair of
sliding doors with Chinese characters painted on them.
‘My wife’s work,’ said Hoffman. ‘She is the poet of the
family. In rough translation our motto reads; "there is intercommunication of seed
between male and female and all things are produced.” It is exceedingly apt.'
I was totally unprepared for what I found inside those
doors.
The electricity of desire lit everything with chill,
bewitching fire and the entire structure was roofed and walled with seamless
looking-glass.”
In writing about love Carter knows about transcendental
south, but not in a way that understands the fundamental, and intensively aysmetrical need for becoming-woman.
Instead, her focus is caught within a labyrinth of overcodings of questions of
yin and yang (and of mirrors and symetries instead of becomings) that was what
supplanted and suppressed the outsights of the Tao Te Ching), and although the writing marks
the tension of this struggle, she cannot bring into focus the world of becomings
– and of becoming-woman – in relation to love. Albertina says this in the book's final pages:
“The state of love is like the South in Hui Shih’s paradox: “The
South has at once a limit and no limit.” Lu Teming made the following
commentary on this paradox: “He spoke about the South but he was only taking it
as an example. There is the mirror and the image, but there is also the image
of the image; two mirrors reflect each other and images may be multiplied
without end.” Ours is a supreme encounter, Desiderio. We are two such
disseminating mirrors.”
The book
emphatically marks a change that has just taken place at this time: the
emergence of the area from Mexico to tropical South America as a profound,
quietly pervasive focus – or point of reference - on the planet for assistance
with movements toward the Future, but it draws most heavily on work from the
east in trying to find a way out of its labyrinth, but without reaching the
heart of what is to be found in this zone. The unknown - perhaps female - source of the Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu is an attribution, not a name - it means Old One) knows
about becoming-woman, and also knows both that brightness is at a higher level
than “radiant energy” and that the language of desire is best kept for
criticisms of self-indulgence, and for what prevents the state of sustained,
unalloyed seeing of the world that in The Infernal Desire Machines is called “persistence of vision.”
In “The Erl-King”
Carter shows the deeply gothic aspect that fundamentally exists, all along,
within human sexuality (and that to a great extent is definitive of it in its
hyper-erotic modes where being-in-love is not in any primary sens in the foreground). In this story a girl goes on her own into a wood.
The first words are “The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon…”
and then a little later there is this phrase “The two notes of the song of a
bird rose on the air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made
into a sound.” And there is really nothing like this stupendous, sustained
focusing of lucidity (unbroken across nine pages) on a journey by a girl into
the unknown, not in the direction of Love-and-Freedom, but in the direction of
wild, hyper-sensual sexuality, and of - fortunately only partial - submission to dominatory power:
“Now, when I go
for walks, sometimes in the mornings when the frost has put its shiny thumbprint on the
undergrowth or sometimes, though less frequently, yet more enticingly, in the
evenings when the cold darkness settles down, I always go to the Erl-King and
he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his
huge hands.
He is the tender butcher
who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off
come all my clothes.
When he combs his
hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle
and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he can stand as still as a
tree, when he wants the doves to flutter softly, crooning as they come, down
upon his shoulders, those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding
rings round their necks. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to
call the birds out of the air – all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he
will keep in cages.
The wind stirs the
dark wood; it blows through the bushes. A little of the cold air that blows
over graveyards always goes with him, it crisps the hairs on the back of my
neck but I am not afraid of him; only afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo with
which he seizes me. Afraid of falling down.
Falling as a bid
would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief
and knotted the ends together so they could not get out. Then the moving
currents of the air would no longer sustain them and all the birds would fall
at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for him, and I know it is only
because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further. The earth with its
fragile fleece of last summer’s dying leaves and grasses supports me only out
of complicity with him, because his flesh is of the same substance as those leaves that are already turning into earth.
He could thrust me
into the seed-bed of next year’s generation and I would have to wait until he
whistled me up from my darkness before I could come back again.
[…]
He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin, of mauve,
pearlised satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so
lucid and encompassing it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead
leaves as if into the stream I have become.
[…]
The candle flutters and goes out. His touch both consoles
and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on this
roaring mattress while the lovely moony night slides through the window to
dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in.
Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him
to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of
water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for
drowning
There is nothing wrong with lucidity being turned in this
direction. In one sense there is everything right with it, in that the libidinal danger is being seen. However, it needs to carry
with it a fundamental tendency to go back toward transcendental-south, and to
maintain attention predominantly in this direction. Which in part is to say
that it needs to carry its own libidinal antedote – otherwise the allure of the sensuality (which exists everywhere within the fabric of ordinary life, as well as within the story) will overcome the lucidity of the libidinal critique. And if Angela
Carter’s work is brought into view across the span from her first fiction to "The Erl-King" it will be found that these tendencies are not at all in effect.
And what is striking is that Angela Carter herself – to some extent at least - comes
to recognise that something has been out of kilter:
“You know, sometimes when I read my back pages, I’m quite
appalled by the violence of my imagination.”
This was written
after Nights at the Circus, and
before her last novel Wise Children,
which has a very different tonality from the rest of her work. What becomes clear is that Angela Carter,
like Mervyn Peake and William Burroughs, had for a long time been in a state
where she had been pulled substantially into the outside, but not in the
direction of the Future. A bit like with Barbara O’Brien’s year-long schizophrenic encounter
with “the operators” (but without taking it all to be straightforwardly the reality
around her) she has spent many years “away with the fairies” – specifically the
serene, anomalous forces that are all about a lucid fixation on control, or on
instances of power that are not at all pre-eminently connected to
love.
*
And then – moving forward
from The Erl-King – it is 1980-1982. And suddenly there is a work about a woman
who goes off into the unknown, but not in the direction of control. In Florinda
Donner’s Shabono the new foregrounded zone from Mexico to
tropical South America acquires a momentous, specific point of reference in the form of
an account of a particular kind of non-state social formation – that of the Yanomami indians in the rainforests of what westerners call Venezuela. Here there is a
sublime beauty on the part of the writing, a sustained lucidity and brightness
that moves across a whole range of different aspects of this form of society,
paying very close attention to the role of the female in Yanomami sorcery or “metamorphics” practices (in a quiet, inconspicuous
way, this is in fact the main issue of the whole book). And Shabono very definitely has the attribute of “dreamy
brightness,” though in a sense where “dreamy”
has gone to the more lucid of its two poles. Instead of the book being
dream-like in the surrealist sense of “one anomalous thing after another” (with a faint - or disparate and
perhaps disturbing - underlying consistency) this quality is in the form of the
sustained, inspired – often blissful - focus across a consistent but
extraordinary terrain that is found in lucid dreams. It is not at all that the
Yanomami Indians are focused intrinsically toward transcendental south, or that
they are described as such in this book: it is that they provide a point of reference where
there is both a valuable critique which is transposable to western societies,
and where there are certain, key elements of greater attunement to the south of the outside,
which together - presented lucidly - open up a view toward the Future.
It is possible now to arrive at the conjunction event from a different direction. At the centre: Shabono. Fanny and
Alexander. A Thousand Plateaus. The
Eagle’s Gift. And then there are many works around these, in a way where the conjunction events comes into focus as a high point relating to two lines of development when these are taken together. On the non-western side the line of development is from the 60s to the late 90s,whereas the western line, while it also starts in the 60s, has a point of collapse in the early 80s (this line is far too diffuse to have any simple termination - there is a sense which it re-intensifies a little in the late 80s and then fades down again around 2005-2006). And in relation to the 'stories side' of the western line of development it is now possible to see that an aspect of the overall conjunction is a whole cluster of 'strange tales,' some of which appear more as speculative fiction, and where everything declines around the early 80s: Woman on the Edge of Time, A Dream of Wessex, 'The Erl-King', True Names, The Beginning Place, the first and second Chronicles of the Unbeliever trilogies, John Foxx's story The Quiet Man, Mythago Wood. It would be correct to place Gibson's The Sprawl trilogy in this line (relating to True Names, and A Dream of Wessex), and to see Jeff Noon's Vurt as an attempt to go further in this direction which draws upon a kind surrealism - an attempt which has ended by the time Noon writes Falling Out of Cars, published in 2002. But the issue of The Erl-King and of Carter's writing after this story is what is crucial here. The specificity of The Erl-King, is that in the other, heightened domain that is constitutive of the strange tale what is encountered is something disturbing and impersonally sinister that can easily be recognised as an aspect of sexuality. The story is liminal in relation to strange tales, as are other works such as the film of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and A Dream of Wessex, and it is important to compare the affects: in Picnic of Hanging Rock the degree zero of the strange tale has a solar, perceptual trance as the affect; in A Dream of Wessex the key affect is the love between the male protagonist and the woman who has also travelled into the other world; in The Erl-King the affect is the erotic. Carter has found what must be included as an element within accounts of the world, but has she turns away, and shifts a little toward the transcendental-empirical in the direction of Escape, she does not succeed in moving far - the plight is the same as for William Burroughs. It is not easy to escape from the woods of The Erl-King.
toward a new lens for seeing the planet
The highpoint of the long-phase conjunction event is also Wild Seed, the Canopus in Argives novels, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, The Hunger, Sapphire and Steel, True Names, Stalker, Cities of the Red Night. And running through this is an aspect of the long-phase conjunction in the form of a cluster of strange tales, starting from around 1967 (Canopus in Argives is a strange tale mythos).
The productions of the two modalities of the Arkadian vantage (fiction, and philosophy) arrive at the early 80s, and on neither side is there what is needed for any easy process of moving forward - a threshold needs to be crossed, a bringing into focus of problems at a new level. Both sides reach a highpoint, and they look incredibly different on the two sides. A Thousand Plateaus is hypertrophied at the level of micro-critiques, and is an ultra-complex domain of concepts which just succeeds in getting over a border that exists between structuralism-influenced thought and philosophy in the form of metamorphics. The highpoint on the other side of the vantage has many forms, with Fanny and Alexander going furthest, because it breaks everything open for thought, and has a constitutive brightness which knows about - and reveals - the horror of gravity.
A key point is that with what is highly developed in the early 80s almost nothing continues. There is a break. Deleuze and Guattari do not continue along the line of development of A Thousand Plateaus. Bergman stops making films. The Always Coming Home project, which was started at this time, is not something to which Le Guin returns (unlike with The Hainish Cycle and Earthsea novels), and when she writes a strange tale, The Beginning Place, in 1980, this will also be a world to which she does not return. After three years of writing science fiction/fantasy, starting in 1979, Doris Lessing stops, and puts the project away.
But the crucial point is that this entire domain of the long-phase conjunction event can be seen as to a great extent an attempt to focus a new way of seeing the planet. Fantasy fiction and science fiction have been trying to do this for some time, but around 1980 to 1982 things begin to fade, and start to be partly supplanted by cyberfiction. Tarkovsky does not continue with science fiction after Solaris and Stalker, and Donaldson's second Unbeliever trilogy is very 'thin' in comparison to the first one, which already had a lot of flaws. What is in question is propelling science fiction and fantasy toward the planetary as eerie-sublime, and is an escape from the structure of the battle of Good and Evil with hero protagonist/s (Donaldson does some powerful work in relation to the first aspect, but only escapes fractionally from the second structure through having a main protagonist who cannot be described as a hero).
Le Guin's immense fascination with forests falters in writing The Beginning Place. Later, with the idea of the Immanent Grove, within the Earthsea sequence, it will become philosophical in terms of the name, but although she re-dreams dragons from evil to natural/recurrently good - and probably writes too close, in the form of reworking, to the mythos of Tolkien as a result - she does not substantially re-dream forests through the associated idea of immanence.
The planetary expansiveness of Cities of The Red Night is at its most expansive in connection with the parts of the novel which are about Captain Mission's Libertatia (which include the section where a woman who is travelling to join Mission's freedom-enclave thinks ' this is a sorcerers revolution - I must find my place in it as a sorceress'). Later, in the early 1990s, Burroughs - now attempting to get out of the woods of feral critique and fixation on sexuality - will write Ghost of Chance, and in this short book will write some of his best pages in returning to the idea of Mission's libertatia, but this time with a focus on the forests of Madagascar.
And the big shift to cyberspace fiction of True Names and Neuromancer involves something that feels liminal to the whole project, in the form of a recurring moment where a character sees - or understands/acts - from the point of view of the whole planet, but mediated by the 'eyes' of the internet. In turn, Jeff Noon's Vurt (which refuses to be cyberfiction while taking its structure) forms a kind of subtle continuation. At the end of the novel the reader encounters a woman who is asleep, and who in some sense dreams the Vurt, a world in which everyone is having experiences through ingesting halucinogens. Gibson's cyberspace has been re-worked, but it is as if Erythrina at the end of True Names has not just become a being who is distributed throughout the technosphere as a guardian against malign takeovers by AIs and aliens, but has become an element of the technological system of another, parallel reality.
By 2002 the project of Le Guin and Tarkovsky and Lessing has clearly failed in terms of a pervasive takeup within the most high profile zones of ordinary reality (the world is awash with Tolkien films, and the grimdark extension of Tolkienism in the form of the Game of Thrones and Witcher sequences is already far advanced). The most striking part of the fiction-writing coda of the long-phase of the conjunction event is Noon's 2002 Falling Out of Cars, which feels like someone struggling and largely failing to focus a lens - near the beginning of the novel the female protagonist is taken into a densely tangled, enigmatic terrain of Oxfordshire woodland where there is glade that has a stone font whose pool of water captures the reflections of those who look in it, so that other people who look in it will see the faces of those who have looked into the water (the suggestion is that something indeterminate has been lost for those who look in the water). At the end of the novel the same character walks into another area of woodland. Having crashed her car, she sees a horse which goes into the trees, and follows it. She arrives at a lake, and she sees herself mirror-imaged on the opposite side, and she crosses a threshold which involves her throwing away what she has spent months finding - the anomalously dangerous fragments of a broken mirror. Inbetween the novel is episodic, where many of these episodes have a kind of techno-gothic aspect that is feverishly oppressive in terms of the atmosphere which is created by them. At the end it is as if the novel makes a subtle, valid gesture of indicating the (immanent) planetary exteriority of /the urban, but has not gone far in terms of breaking open an overall story-world that is an effective lens for looking in this direction.
After this Noon does not write a novel for more than ten years, as if the problem has somehow become intractable or has been lost from view as a result of a shift of focus - or as if he went back in order to leap further. But it can be seen that posing this problem solely in terms of the planet is not in the end adequate. It feels important that when, in Falling Out of Cars, the protagonist simply stops driving the car, and goes into the woodland, it is a female protagonist who follows this line of Departure.
*
The female aspect of the human world is brightness (although there is male brightness, as well). There are even reasons for believing that the female is all along the par excellence form of lucidity, love, and the ability to let go. But also, the feminine has a smaller tendency than the masculine to get involved in the unthinking posturings of metaphysical, political and scientific opinionatedness, with their associated (and potentially war-inducing) judgmental gravity. And this is inseparable from a willingness to be “disregarded” in relation to the kudos-world of grand opinions about things; to not be concerned about taking “positions” in order to have “standing” - a willingness to be seen as “small” in relation to the kudos-world so that you can slip in anywhere unregarded, and perhaps as a result learn to think at a new level. All of this makes it apparent that the feminine is an aspect of the Future.
In relation to the key issue of lucidity, it can be seen why in Florinda Donner’s book Being-in-Dreaming (1992) there is a description of men, in relation to knowledge, as being like closed cones which come to a point at the top, in that they attempt to use reason to reach upward, and of women as being like cones which are open, and the other way up; which are open in the direction of the abstract. Donner describes her encounter with a woman called Esperanza, who makes the above comparison, and who then says,
"Men are close to the concrete, [...] and aim at the abstract. Women are close to the abstract, and yet try to indulge themselves with the concrete."
Esperanza is careful to point out that the attempt at indulgence with the concrete is a behaviour that is instilled by a male-generated view of women, and to point out that women also have a very high level of ability with reason, it is just that they also have a specific, extraordinary facility with the abstract (the abstract can here be exemplified as the world of intent, love, freedom, feeling, awareness, dreams and wider realities). Women have a "different track" or different path profoundly emplaced within them, and men in fact have to transcend themselves as males (as this term is generally understood) in order to get to this "different track."
The idea here is that in general women end up either relinquishing any tendency to move in a sustained, deliberate way in this different direction, so that they only ever fleetingly and fugitively go towards it, always returning, or they go toward the male-generated modality of knowledge, becoming "converts" to the reason-fixation of men, a fixation which can only see part of the zone of engagement of reason, and cannot see the worlds grasped by lucidity at all (in the context of the 1980s it would be appropriate to think of Margaret Thatcher at this point).
The world (or zone of human social milieus) from which Being-in-Dreaming has arrived is the world which is very much in the background in 1993. It is in the background, but it is still in effect, leaning in from time to time with something new, and always ambiently in effect through people reading the already-emplaced works - even though it is the case that overall, to different degrees, the dreamy brightness of the earlier phase is now in abeyance in the societies of what is called "the west." Within the outer-edge zones of success fostered within the establishment it is perhaps Bjork's album Debut that is most turned toward the Future - Bjork has found the elfen feminine (something tangentially connected to the gothic) and gone off with it in a more southward direction, learning how to dream and think through this way of being (it is a good step in the right direction). In itself this way of being will initiate more of an ability to dream than those expressed by most of the hectically ecstatic dance tracks of the time.
And the question of dreaming - of the lucidly visionary - is evidently fundamental in this context. To take the overarching instance, women in western societies over the last two centuries have in fact arrived at the point where "writer of fiction" is a role that is standardly available to them. And the imposed, suppressive option between fugitive lucidity and collapse-into-reason perhaps to some extent has a higher than normal chance of being transcended by those who take up this role.
*
In relation to the abstract, there are three views - or outsights - that can be drawn from this journey from 1900 to 1993/2002.
The first is that in reaching an awareness of the abstract an awareness of the feminine and of becoming-woman are invaluable.
The second is that the dispassionate - or impersonal - modality of being (that lucid state of love and integrity which is not swayed by the pre-fabricated moods of the control-tendency of the human mind) is equally invaluable for focusing an awareness of the abstract.
The third is that a lucidly visionary piece of writing is a lens for seeing zones of the abstract, irrespective of whether it is a work of philosophy, a novel, a story, the words of a song, a poem, a documentary account, a play, or the script of a film.
Note 1
The experience recounted at the beginning of this book (Sections 2,4,5 and 6) shows clearly that I was both very much part of the radical milieu of Warwick University's philosophy department and that simultaneously I was extremely distant from the main development that was taking place within it.
I was following lines of thought that were emergent from Deleuze and Guattari's idea of deterritorialization; I was aware that the nation state was not only intrinsically problematic even in its best guises, but was also blocked from making large-scale change through being in the control-field of capitalism; and I saw corporeal and micropolitical experimentation (including the use of halucinogens, and the phenomenon of dance-focused sub-cultures) as philosophically important in relation to questions of freedom and questions of obscured aspects of existence.
Furthermore, I was beginning to arrive at the idea that the crucial form of deterritorialisation is that which pertains to the small human group, and this was indicative of another alignment with my milieu, in that I felt that the fundamental instance for philosophical engagement was not the individual.
And yet, in terms of what was now emergent within my milieu, I was about as distant from it as it is possible to be.
My overall direction - as is obliquely indicated by the recounted experience - was toward the perception that the primary line of escape for human beings is the worlds of the planet that exist beyond the cities and the overall expanses of state/corporate/military infrastructure, and was toward the inseparable perception that becomings are also fundamental in every way for the purposes of escape from a collapsed form of reality, and that they are based upon the faculties of perception, dreaming and intent. I was travelling very rapidly toward the view that these ideas are central to an understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's statement 'we cannot speak sufficiently in the name of an outside.'
But when these views are taken as a way of understanding deterritorialization (which is what they are) it becomes important in this context to see that no aspect of them directly involves technology, and that they are not an account of the overall dynamic or direction of capitalism. Which is to say that this account of deterritorialisation is not in any sense accelerationist.
The account involved group and individual transformations (with an an individual being understood as a multiplicity) and was therefore micrological rather than totalising on the macrological level; and it started from the space of transcendental encounters (encounters which wake the faculties, and which involve perception of wider levels of reality), as opposed to starting from the time of the entirety of the human world in the socio-economic modality of capitalism. Both of these positions involve a pragmatics and an account of the world, but they are gigantically different in relation to the form of the pragmatics, and in relation to what is being delineated.
At the time I was aware that if micropolitical lines of escape combined with each other to a sufficient degree then a phase change - across a threshold - was possible. But I had not realised that, although this view was valid, an engagement with the world along the lines of accelerationism was the complete opposite of a focus on the spaces of small-scale group and individual deterritorialization, and was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
To some extent the fault lies with Deleuze and Guattari. To set out what is positive first, it needs to be said, firstly, that in writing A Thousand Plateaus their horizon had become preeminently micrological and micropolitical, and, secondly, that the book has a central emphasis on the space in which becomings take place: furthermore, although they have their own problem with a fixation on time - in the form of the idea of the refrain - they avoid any line-of-time picture of a technological/libidinal ubercurrent, or ubertelos, driving everything (the account is of a struggle taking place in which capitalism might or might not be the victor, and the possible defeat of capitalism is not presented in terms of accelerating what capitalism already does). However, in combination with the idea of absolute deterritorialization the focus on capitalism that comes with the other part of the book's title (Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2) can easily lead to the idea of accelerationism.
In fact the idea of absolute deterritorialisation is simply the term they use for processes of intensification which are not in the form of intrinsically recurring intensification-and-collapse, and their analysis, in arriving at this point, is focused to a large extent on micrological processes such as couple relationships. Their horizon is space and micrological lines of escape - but they leave the door wide open in relation to accelerationism.
It was around 1998 that I first began to feel that accelerationism was not only separate from my own views, but was in fact yet another form of time-fixation, one that could in fact be as pernicious, in being a delusion, as Hegelianism, and one that was more likely to be easily transmitted than Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence of the same.
The early 90s high-tide of rage against the machine, together with the emergence of the world of the internet, had produced a construct within the collapsed form of reason, as opposed to the reason which is at last woken into pragmatics by lucidity. The rage had become a rage aimed at taking the social and actual machines - and machine networks - across thresholds so that eventually they would melt the suppression-systems of ordinary reality.
However, a concentration of attention on the formations of the interestablishment is in fact a form of collapse and suppression which pertains to the interestablishment. And, more importantly, this attempt at acceleration is a failure to recognise the degree of adaptational intelligence that is at work in the interestablishment, so that accelerationism does not perceive the extent of the perturbingly 'gothic' - or successfully control-orientated - aspect of what it is confronting (it is correct to say that in looking toward the interestablishment - and its latest macrological form, capitalism - we are looking toward transcendental north). Lastly, it is crucial to see that accelerationism is a disguised form of passivity. It manifests itself as a pragmatics, but everyone is left waiting for a decisive event, supposed to be coming in the future: and given that the event does not arrive there is in fact a decisive, absolute passivity in relation to the posited threshold ("what we are doing is helping but it will only be when X happens that Y will occur, and X depends on far more than our actions"). This is in opposition to a micrological pragmatics where a movement forward can be perceived (rather than actions having no clearly discernible result relative to the aim), and an overall movement of capitalism is not required for the outcome involved.
It is evidently not that there is anything wrong with technology. It is always simply a question of incorporating it into processes of escape, and of understanding the wider domain, alongside which it functions. For instance, after two and a half thousand years it is pervasively not grasped that the technology which is known as 'books' fundamentally consists of an adjunct that leads to the worlds of dreamings and outsights.
*
The ways in which I fitted with my milieu were fundamental in terms of what took place: I was always very glad to have the intellectual company of those who shared the views that were outlined in the opening paragraphs of this note. It was only in a 'background' way that, by around 1996, I began to be aware of a high degree of difference (everything was kept in the background because my impression was that the two sets of views were just different perspectives on one domain of philosophical encounter). And at this time I had shifted toward focusing closely on A Thousand Plateaus, in a way where I generally only went to the university to teach: so my contact with my milieu was less at the time when the CCRU was at its maximum level of impact within the department.
And it was not that I immediately started to concentrate on the issue of the non-urban / non-industrial expanses of the planet (this began to happen several years later) and nor was it that the moment when I read Duncton Wood indicates anything about what I read in the months and years after this. It was as if over several weeks I reconnected with my past reading, but then after the recounted experience I put it all to one side again. Over the next year I worked a lot on problems connected with space and with simultaneous reciprocal causality (the key example here was that of globular clusters of stars), and I also did a lot of thinking about the synthesis of time. The specific time-going-slowly experience was drawn upon (without being described) in a paper I gave in the department in the autumn of 1995, a paper which was about reciprocal causality and time (this paper led to the first conversation I had with Mark Fisher, who had just arrived in the department). During this year I also started a close reading of Difference and Repetition.
It was later (in the autumn and winter of 1995) that the questions of the planet and of becomings began to insist (along with the question of the faculty of dreaming). This was a process that involved visionary (oneiric) lucidity being encountered through aspects of A Thousand Plateaus, but also through works such as The Waves.
The experience recounted at the beginning of this book (Sections 2,4,5 and 6) shows clearly that I was both very much part of the radical milieu of Warwick University's philosophy department and that simultaneously I was extremely distant from the main development that was taking place within it.
I was following lines of thought that were emergent from Deleuze and Guattari's idea of deterritorialization; I was aware that the nation state was not only intrinsically problematic even in its best guises, but was also blocked from making large-scale change through being in the control-field of capitalism; and I saw corporeal and micropolitical experimentation (including the use of halucinogens, and the phenomenon of dance-focused sub-cultures) as philosophically important in relation to questions of freedom and questions of obscured aspects of existence.
Furthermore, I was beginning to arrive at the idea that the crucial form of deterritorialisation is that which pertains to the small human group, and this was indicative of another alignment with my milieu, in that I felt that the fundamental instance for philosophical engagement was not the individual.
And yet, in terms of what was now emergent within my milieu, I was about as distant from it as it is possible to be.
My overall direction - as is obliquely indicated by the recounted experience - was toward the perception that the primary line of escape for human beings is the worlds of the planet that exist beyond the cities and the overall expanses of state/corporate/military infrastructure, and was toward the inseparable perception that becomings are also fundamental in every way for the purposes of escape from a collapsed form of reality, and that they are based upon the faculties of perception, dreaming and intent. I was travelling very rapidly toward the view that these ideas are central to an understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's statement 'we cannot speak sufficiently in the name of an outside.'
But when these views are taken as a way of understanding deterritorialization (which is what they are) it becomes important in this context to see that no aspect of them directly involves technology, and that they are not an account of the overall dynamic or direction of capitalism. Which is to say that this account of deterritorialisation is not in any sense accelerationist.
The account involved group and individual transformations (with an an individual being understood as a multiplicity) and was therefore micrological rather than totalising on the macrological level; and it started from the space of transcendental encounters (encounters which wake the faculties, and which involve perception of wider levels of reality), as opposed to starting from the time of the entirety of the human world in the socio-economic modality of capitalism. Both of these positions involve a pragmatics and an account of the world, but they are gigantically different in relation to the form of the pragmatics, and in relation to what is being delineated.
At the time I was aware that if micropolitical lines of escape combined with each other to a sufficient degree then a phase change - across a threshold - was possible. But I had not realised that, although this view was valid, an engagement with the world along the lines of accelerationism was the complete opposite of a focus on the spaces of small-scale group and individual deterritorialization, and was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
To some extent the fault lies with Deleuze and Guattari. To set out what is positive first, it needs to be said, firstly, that in writing A Thousand Plateaus their horizon had become preeminently micrological and micropolitical, and, secondly, that the book has a central emphasis on the space in which becomings take place: furthermore, although they have their own problem with a fixation on time - in the form of the idea of the refrain - they avoid any line-of-time picture of a technological/libidinal ubercurrent, or ubertelos, driving everything (the account is of a struggle taking place in which capitalism might or might not be the victor, and the possible defeat of capitalism is not presented in terms of accelerating what capitalism already does). However, in combination with the idea of absolute deterritorialization the focus on capitalism that comes with the other part of the book's title (Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2) can easily lead to the idea of accelerationism.
In fact the idea of absolute deterritorialisation is simply the term they use for processes of intensification which are not in the form of intrinsically recurring intensification-and-collapse, and their analysis, in arriving at this point, is focused to a large extent on micrological processes such as couple relationships. Their horizon is space and micrological lines of escape - but they leave the door wide open in relation to accelerationism.
It was around 1998 that I first began to feel that accelerationism was not only separate from my own views, but was in fact yet another form of time-fixation, one that could in fact be as pernicious, in being a delusion, as Hegelianism, and one that was more likely to be easily transmitted than Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence of the same.
The early 90s high-tide of rage against the machine, together with the emergence of the world of the internet, had produced a construct within the collapsed form of reason, as opposed to the reason which is at last woken into pragmatics by lucidity. The rage had become a rage aimed at taking the social and actual machines - and machine networks - across thresholds so that eventually they would melt the suppression-systems of ordinary reality.
However, a concentration of attention on the formations of the interestablishment is in fact a form of collapse and suppression which pertains to the interestablishment. And, more importantly, this attempt at acceleration is a failure to recognise the degree of adaptational intelligence that is at work in the interestablishment, so that accelerationism does not perceive the extent of the perturbingly 'gothic' - or successfully control-orientated - aspect of what it is confronting (it is correct to say that in looking toward the interestablishment - and its latest macrological form, capitalism - we are looking toward transcendental north). Lastly, it is crucial to see that accelerationism is a disguised form of passivity. It manifests itself as a pragmatics, but everyone is left waiting for a decisive event, supposed to be coming in the future: and given that the event does not arrive there is in fact a decisive, absolute passivity in relation to the posited threshold ("what we are doing is helping but it will only be when X happens that Y will occur, and X depends on far more than our actions"). This is in opposition to a micrological pragmatics where a movement forward can be perceived (rather than actions having no clearly discernible result relative to the aim), and an overall movement of capitalism is not required for the outcome involved.
It is evidently not that there is anything wrong with technology. It is always simply a question of incorporating it into processes of escape, and of understanding the wider domain, alongside which it functions. For instance, after two and a half thousand years it is pervasively not grasped that the technology which is known as 'books' fundamentally consists of an adjunct that leads to the worlds of dreamings and outsights.
Questions about technology tend to obscure the main issue, which is that there is a fundamental difference between the interestablishment (and it is important to remember that everyone has their own instance of the interestablishment) and the world of micrological escape-formations that depart from it. If deterritorialization is put into practice in relation to micro-worlds of becomings, and in relation to the waking of the faculties (in a process involving technology in whatever ways are valuable), then it is possible to depart in the direction of the Future.
*
There are many ways in which there can be a fixation on libidinal domains of impositionism and destruction. Mervyn Peake's was one of the strangest: his attention was trapped by the structures and actions of ritualised social/traditional processes (and also by suicide in the form of jumping from a height). The composite of sexuality and social forces of control is the domain of fixation for Angela Carter and William Burroughs. For Nick Land the zone of fixation is the composite of the technological/libidinal forces of capitalism and state forces of reactive regulation (where it is not realised that the outside of the current form of capitalism is not a future toward which capitalism is moving, but is the co-existing Future that has always been the outside of the disaster of ordinary reality - the disaster which has capitalism as its latest form). With Angela Carter her best writing involves an attempt to escape the fixation, and this makes her accounts of sexuality substantially more lucid than those of Burroughs. And with Mervyn Peake the trajectory becomes that of a recondite, enigmatic form of collapse: not a partly-successful struggle to escape, but a stumbling into deeper terrains of the form of fixation involved, so that new forms of fixation went into effect.
*
The ways in which I fitted with my milieu were fundamental in terms of what took place: I was always very glad to have the intellectual company of those who shared the views that were outlined in the opening paragraphs of this note. It was only in a 'background' way that, by around 1996, I began to be aware of a high degree of difference (everything was kept in the background because my impression was that the two sets of views were just different perspectives on one domain of philosophical encounter). And at this time I had shifted toward focusing closely on A Thousand Plateaus, in a way where I generally only went to the university to teach: so my contact with my milieu was less at the time when the CCRU was at its maximum level of impact within the department.
And it was not that I immediately started to concentrate on the issue of the non-urban / non-industrial expanses of the planet (this began to happen several years later) and nor was it that the moment when I read Duncton Wood indicates anything about what I read in the months and years after this. It was as if over several weeks I reconnected with my past reading, but then after the recounted experience I put it all to one side again. Over the next year I worked a lot on problems connected with space and with simultaneous reciprocal causality (the key example here was that of globular clusters of stars), and I also did a lot of thinking about the synthesis of time. The specific time-going-slowly experience was drawn upon (without being described) in a paper I gave in the department in the autumn of 1995, a paper which was about reciprocal causality and time (this paper led to the first conversation I had with Mark Fisher, who had just arrived in the department). During this year I also started a close reading of Difference and Repetition.
It was later (in the autumn and winter of 1995) that the questions of the planet and of becomings began to insist (along with the question of the faculty of dreaming). This was a process that involved visionary (oneiric) lucidity being encountered through aspects of A Thousand Plateaus, but also through works such as The Waves.
Note 2
There are two lines, of very different kinds.
In relation to the last century one line is emergent within central zones of the Americas. Beyond this - beyond an immense gap in terms of both time and terrain - this line only has a close connection to the philosophy of ancient China. But what is involved in the connection appears to be the effect of looking in the same direction, as opposed to it being a connection in the form of influence, of a tradition.
The other line is double - it is split between art and philosophy/anthropology/theory - and it is gigantically diffuse, in that it is spread everywhere around the planet. The two forms of this line can to a limited extent be indicated by the names Sophocles and Socrates.
The emergence of the anthropological (the Beyond of the nation state) in the twentieth century was at the level of thought, but it was also at the level of embodied elements such as the beats of rock music. And at the level of the two lines it goes into effect twice: once as a very sustained emergence of metamorphics, and a second time - within the 'western line' - in a double process whose twentieth century culmination, on the one hand, was a cluster of works starting with the The Waves and to a great extent reaching an end-point with the works from the 60s, 70s and 80s (with Picnic at Hanging Rock, City of Illusions, Wild Seed, Fanny and Alexander, Always Coming Home), and, on the other other hand, was A Thousand Plateaus, a work that can be described as an effective - but hard to focus - work of escape-from-academia metamorphics.
Academic anthropology is not a third term in the form of an element within which the lines exist. Rock music did not appear in the 50s through musicians studying anthropology, and metamorphics is not in an academic tradition, but instead is pre-eminently tangential to the anthropology of universities despite the importance of Bateson for Deleuze and Guattari. The element within which the lines exist, and within which there was an emergence of the Beyond of the nation state, is the world of social forms/creations and the world of the planet in its solar and stellar exteriority.
Note 3.
It is necessary to envisage the planet (including its atmosphere) and to see the human world as a spherical filament-work that is spread, a bit like a mist, around the surface of the planet. And looking at it in this way, from very high above the planet’s geological surface, it is necessary, firstly, to see this sphere as including dreams, feelings, desires, thought, perception, outsights about the nature of the world, memories and anticipations, in a way where all of this, taken as a whole, can be described as an oneirosphere, or as a sphere of perception, feeling and intent; and, secondly, to see the dimension or attribute of the oneirosphere as in some unknown way pertaining simultaneously to the planet around the human world, perhaps in a way where to a high degree it is inchoate, unfocused (so that humans would be the point where an attempt at focusing is taking place). This is the refusal to assume that the knowledge each of us possesses of what it is to be a bodily space is a knowledge of something so special that it cannot be applied to the bodily space of the planet. This setting out of everything within a sphere-of-the-unknown can be viewed as heuristic, but it can also be characterised as seeing the planet as unknown in a full sense, not in a trivial one. And it also leads to a new way of thinking about the faculties of human beings.
The second thing that is needed, as part of the same process, is to hold all of the knowledge of the oneirosphere in mind (our dreams about the future, our stories, our myths, our accounts of the world) but to remove the customary idea of the heroic human knower – the grand human intellectual ‘subject’ – and simply see the human world as a domain of oneiric, libidinal and cognitive forces which are impacting on the planet, and which are internally impacting within the formations of this world. This second element is the posing of the problem ‘what is going on?’ - what on earth is going on? This question concerns what is wrong on the planet, and also concerns the existence of an escape-path – of what can be called a Futural path.
It is clear that a disaster is taking place on the planet, a disaster consisting of the crushing of lives, and of destruction and species and environments. And it is also clear that the current form of this disaster concerns the composite of capitalism and the nation states. However, it is necessary to perceive this situation at the level of the transcendental-empirical: and at this level what can be seen is that what is constitutive of the disaster is a formation of the human faculties which is dominated by reason, and which has the faculty of intent (choice-making) trapped on the territorialising polarity of holding everything together, and building an interiority/territory, as opposed to the polarity of openness, letting go, and of venturing into the outside. Further aspects of this formation of the faculties is a faculty of dreaming which is blocked through institutionalised myth-systems, and systems of practice, so that its outsights are blocked or suppressed; a faculty of lucidity which is generally only in effect in very limited circumstances involving immediacy, and a faculty of perception which is locked away from being recognised as a fundamental starting-point.
It is correct therefore to say that what is needed is a waking of the faculties of perception, dreaming, and lucidity (where lucidity is the ability to see intent within individuals and social formations); a shifting of intent so that it always defaults to the polarity of openness and of venturing outside, and a displacement of reason so that lucidity and intent have the central role within the functioning of the faculties.
An immediate advantage of this way of thinking, is that in placing intent at the centre there is a movement toward an awareness of the depth-dimension of humans that consists in part of loves, forms of affection and the modalities of inspiration that can be called ‘becomings’.
But although this is all relatively easy to set out as a direction-of-travel, it needs to be remembered that the depth-dimension consists not only of affection and its becomings but also of emotions in general, libido, reactivities (such as resentment and self-righteous anger) and all the other potential acute crises of feeling, such as outbreaks of fear and agonies of depression. To start to wake the faculties is indeed to move forward along the Futural path, but it also is to become aware that all along you have been in a terrain like the zone in Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of Roadside Picnic, a terrain in which, if you take a wrong turn, you can end up in the meatgrinder – and where not everyone survives the meatgrinder.
Note 4
In transcendental-empirical writing a fundamentally important element is the combinant of the planetary sublime and the anomalous/enigmatic.
A second fundamentally important element is the idea of a threshold-crossing which involves a waking of faculties (starting from the faculties of dreaming and perception) and a transition to what can accurately be described as a nomadism.
Most of all, what I had in common with the radical Warwick University philosophy milieu of 1993-1998 was that as well as working by means of philosophical texts I was searching for outsights - transcendental-empirical perceptions - within the domain of fictions and music/songs. Its just that what I ended up discovering as fundamentally valuable was not Gibson and Lovecraft - to give an incomplete list, it was The Waves, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Horses, The Tempest, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Stalker, Solaris...
What are the reality-blocking addictions? These are some of the most fundamental:
Control-addiction
Kudos-addiction
Critique-addiction
Interpretation-addiction (interpretosis)
Addiction to customary modalities of thought
The most fundamental of these is control-addiction, which in effect encompasses all the others. Accelerationism makes no sense on any level because it aims at intensifying a hypertrophy (the technical and socio-economic machineries and systems of capitalism) in a situation where everything is sliding continuously on pervasive, ultra-endemic control-addiction (micrological and macrological). And worse than it not making sense, it is in fact an expression of control-addiction, in that it is a delusion about what can be controlled.
Critique-addiction has chronic and acute forms, and the reactivity of throwing any nihilist account possible at ordinary reality is a disaster in that its 'virulent-nihilism' aspects include blocks on seeing the escape-path of nomadisms.
Interpretosis is pervasive in Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and religion - and one recurrent strand of religious interpretosis is the modality of signs-that-the-end-of-the-world-is-coming. But 'the end of the world' is inseparable from the end of the world as it exists before the Singularity, and the form of interpretosis is the same in these cases ("these are the signs that the Singularity will occur in 2012").
What is striking about 1993 to 1998 was that a nomadism was in full effect, but because everyone was concentrating on the macrological, not on group-escapes, this was not to any significant extent brought into focus. And overall there were too many blocking-modalities in effect - so that the direction of departure was fundamentally wrong, in the sense that almost no departure could take place, and that everything would soon definitively break into fragments.
What was needed was a horizon in the form of the planet as unknown-which-is-knowable; what was needed was the outsights of abstract perception together with a quiet, focused pragmatics of waking the faculties, becoming-active, and of concentration on all forms of exteriority. A nomadism emergent from metamorphics - an effectuation of the Sayan modality of existence.
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