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)
Warwick University campus is on land given to it, separately, by Warwickshire council and by the city of Coventry, and the border between the city and the county runs on a curve through the middle of it. Part of the land given by Warwickshire is still agricultural land, so that the university is looking out, on its south-western side, toward fields and woods.
This foregrounding
of the relationship of outside and inside has connections to other aspects of
the city of Coventry. Everything here is a little like the setting for a novel where the events take place on an un-assuming border between two apparently ordinary
terrains, but where everything is much stranger than it seems (and as if these
would belong to a further novel, this does not yet refer to the enigmatic,
strikingly beautiful places, or "zones," that are to be found in the countryside to the south).
Coventry
describes itself as “the city in Shakespeare country,” and this in a way is technically
correct, given that in the 19th century a separate county of Coventry
(which was the city and a five to ten mile radius of countryside beyond it) was
dissolved because of administrative problems, placing the city within
Warwickshire. But evidently the characterisation is an inclusion of the outside
of the urban sphere as of central importance for the inside. Moreover, this is
a continuation of a very old tension. Coventry, like York, used to have a medieval
city wall, but unlike York, because it had become a centre of textiles manufacturing at the
time of the civil war (so that the new upper class was strong rather than the
old) it supported Cromwell during the civil war, and afterwards
Charles II had its city wall destroyed, in revenge for it having sided with with the parliamentarians. This
destruction of the wall in turn set up the conditions for the city surrounding
itself, in the 1960s, with the “noose” of an extremely close dual-carriageway
inner ring road, which runs very near to where the wall used to be, a discordant
race-track circuit that places the outside of transit a half-mile radius
from the top of the low hill on which the central part of the city is built. And at the very centre there is a statue of a naked woman on a
horse – Lady Godiva – so that a beyond of the patriarchal and conventional
world (you still don’t ride naked through a city on a horse, especially if you are a woman) is the totemic and spatially dominating point of the city.
And in a very extraordinary spatial sense the
whole city points southwest toward the Warwickshire countryside, and toward Kenilworth
and Warwick (Warwick is the county town, and still has an intact castle, and
Kenilworth, seven miles away, has the royalist prestige of having a castle,
even though as a satellite of the city it was also parliamentarian and the
castle was semi-destroyed – rendered uninhabitable – by Charles II at the same
time as the city wall was removed). As if it was trying to restore its pride, in
the 18th century the city set up a very wide and exceptionally long
ceremonial approach: behaving like the ultimate country-mansion estate,
Coventry created a broad, two-mile long avenue of trees that extends southwest,
toward Kenilworth and Warwick, and which goes initially downward, and then goes
to the top of a hill which is a lot higher than the starting-point (Warwick
University is a mile to the right – to the west – of this hill). As if the city
was beseeching something to arrive, ceremonially, from this
direction, or as if it was emphasising the importance of this route to the
outside. But this in a way is only the platform for the strangeness: a country
estate would have built something like an obelisk on the hill, and a civic equivalent would
have been appropriate – the place could have been called “monument hill”.
Instead, as if the city was equivocal about the outside, it immediately erected
a gibbet there, from which it hung some robbers, leaving their bodies there to become skeletons (the skeletons were
there for many years) and naming the grand terminus of the avenue “Gibbet Hill,”
a name which remains to this day (it is not a suppressed name, it is the common
name for the place, and is used in postal addresses).
Warwick university
is therefore a mile - along the city border - from Gibbet Hill. Gibbet Hill, a
place which has a beautiful view of countryside, in the direction of
Kenilworth, and which has beautiful oak trees, but whose namers were not kind
to this tree-framed perspective on the outside.
And names are
evidently strange here. In hidden-away places beyond the border things recurrently shimmer with the eerily sublime or the numinous, but on and within
the border this shimmering becomes very hard to see when looking through the
lens of names, given the gothic Alice-in-Wonderland affect they produce. “Warwick”
as the name for the university is a “contradictory” name which denies the
existence of the city in which it is located (it is technically partly in
Warwickshire but it is on the edge of Coventry, and partly located within it,
and it is very definitely not in Warwick). Then there is Gibbet Hill, and
alongside this there is “Peeping Tom” who is killed for being a voyeur, the figure alongside Lady Godiva in the story that is iconic for the city. And at the centre of it all the named is the place which
The Specials called a “ghost town” (and which Phillip Larkin subtly damns with
the non-praise of “nothing, like something, can happen anywhere”), and the name itself is proverbially a term of opprobrium through the phrase “being sent to Coventry.”
In dreaming up
the impression given by this name there is an irresistible tendency to think of
the worlds of the past – the old Forest of Arden (Coventry was built in this
forest) for instance 3000 years ago when the white horse of Uffington was made
to the south, and when maybe the human world of the time had a shamanic relationship
with the animal with which Lady Godiva is associated. And (ignoring
etymological disputes, which leave everything open) what was the coven – or group
with some kind of covenant, or firm set of principles – that is suggested by
the name? And what was the tree, for these women and men on the edge of our perception; and indeed, at the time of the founding of the city, was anyone perhaps hung from this tree?
*
It is 1993. At
this time an attempt at an escape toward the outside is taking place within the
philosophy department of Warwick University. It has been gathering intensity
over the previous two or three years, and
very soon will manifest itself as the “Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit,” a small group of writers/theorists whose work briefly had a degree of success on
the peripheries of the philosophical and artistic domains. The central figure
of this development is a young Deleuzian called Nick Land, who is a tutor in
the department.
To look at this
development is indeed to go through the mirror – but the only problem is that
in going through the mirror you can go in many directions. A primary aspect of
what took place was an approach to Deleuze that was damaged by blocked,
suppressive elements from both Kant and Hegel, which were taken up into a
reaction against Heidegger, a recurrently theological philosopher who needs primarily to be
ignored, rather than reacting against him (in a late interview Heidegger characterises cybernetics as a disaster awaiting human knowledge, saying “only a god can save
us now”). The Kantianism lay in a fixation on discovering conditions of
possibility (ordinary, conditioning aspects of circumstances that are easy to
see, but are “too close” for attention, normally, to look at them - judgements
for Kant, numbers and machinic circuits for Nick Land), as opposed to concentrating on the unknown intent/energy/libido aspects of the surrounding world in a focusing of perception and abstract perception. And the Hegelianism lay in a fixation on the “film” of the human
world, and an “interpretosis” determination to find emergences in this world
which would – according to the fixation – turn out to be the beginning of the
end for the constrictive forces of global human society (Marxism degraded into complex, techno-messianic delusions). However, another
aspect of the emergence (an emergence which increasingly involved other
theorists) was a genuinely Deleuzian – and Spinozistic – engagement with the
world, which had its highpoint around 1998, with the brief development of the
ideas of “sorcery of confinement” and “sorcery of flight”, which here can valuably
be translated as metamorphics of confinement (where for the acting forces the threshold is that of the heightening of
the control-mind, and for the acted-upon it is directly – rather than
insidiously – a form of collapse) and as metamorphics of escape from the
interiority.
Freighted with
semi-focused anomalous concepts (drawn from Deleuze, Norbert Wiener, Spinoza,
George Bataille, etc) and with a primary concentration on numbers and
technology – conceived increasingly as in some sense the fundamental aspects of
the outside, the abstract – this philosophical micro-movement was set up to
make waves, and inspire those looking for a way out from the interiority (it
was a kind of techno Kantian-Marxist radicalism and anti-piety materialism). It
was also set up to not survive long within Warwick philosophy department, or
indeed, to survive long as a group-emergence. However in its initial phase of emergence the combination of accelerationism and what can be called “schizo-numeric cyber-materialism” (this is not supposed to name a coherent
perspective – it might be debilitating to attempt to focus this lens) was able to have real success, even within the
world of the academic institution. In 1993, 15 out of 60 Ph.D philosophy
research grants from the British Academy were awarded to Warwick postgraduates,
and the work of Nick Land was a main reason for this very high level of
allocation to a single department.
This development
was also very affected by the gothic (a key indicator – when it is an obsession
- of not being turned in the right direction). The collapse after 1982 – when
the Future receded – both involved a turn toward technology and a turn toward
the gothic. “Landianism” was heavily pervaded by the work of H.P. Lovecraft
(Lovecraft’s work in many ways is to be regarded as a kind of showy, gothic
collapse from the level reached in the first novels of Dunsany). And it was
equally influenced by the work of William Gibson whose cybergothic Neuromancer
novels (written between 1984 and 1988) had the feature of embodying a
concentration on both technology and gothic. But the facts that these novels
are extremely impressive and that Gibson declines as a writer as he becomes
less cybergothic – less focused on the outside – should not obscure the perception that both Lovecraft and Gibson are lamentable in relation to a focused
attention on the liberatory domain of energy and intent/libido that
pre-eminently concerns the planet, the abstract and women (notice how there are almost no women in Lovecraft’s writings,
and the all-too-male aspects of the central female figure of Neuromancer, Molly
Millions; and notice the lack of any sustained engagement with the planet and
its other animals – the planet beyond the included threadwork of its human
social domains – in both of these groups of stories). In making the
oneiric-visionary central – and associating this with the energetic world –
these stories have a real strength, but this strength is continuously
undermined by an unfocused concentration
on gothic and obscurely gothic zones of the outside (obscurely gothic zones are
limited areas of the outside which are energy sources for debilitating
keeping-everything-control tendencies within the human world, areas such as
number, time grasped as linear, and formal systematic fields).
In a direction that was not the gothic, there was an escape-route within this abstract space, an escape route which led toward transcendental south.
Everything concerned substantive philosophy, in that it was about forms of existence, and was also fundamentally about social worlds, the planet, and the body.
There is transcendental south, and then in another direction there is fixated critique. A differential trait of fixated critique is a modality, at one degree or another, of being inflected by the gothic (at a depth level this inseparable from the nihil that is intrinsic to fixated critique. Fixated critique is not just a fixation on critique it is a fixation of reason in relation to specific directions.In the same direction there are the two primary forms of philosophical piety - which can be characterised as Hegelianism and Heideggerianism, but these did not form part of the abstract space of the radical Warwick mileu (other than domains that were being critiqued).
There are two forms of fixated critique, one of which is anomalous in that the virulence of its antipathy to ordinary reality at crucial points continuously and explicitly discards issues of valid accounts, and deploys all available writing modalities in the process of critique and attack. This modality was the one which was primarily in effect within the Warwick milieu, so that the space consisted of three attractors: an other modality of being and understanding (consisting of travelling toward transcendental south); the modality of virulent critique which can be indicated by the name Nick Land, but also by the name William Burroughs, and a modality which through most of the main phase of the activity of the milieu was only minimally in effect - the modality of a fully fixated critique in the form of a gothic-inflected, stripped-down descendant of Kantianism.
Mark Fisher's trajectory was one of falling toward the Landian attractor, and then setting out on the difficult walk toward the doorway toward transcendental-south - toward what can be called the place of exteriority.
This abstract space is exceptionally complex, as is the extension of abstract space that has just been indicated. Piety-philosophy and gothic-inflected philosophy are in fact both expressions of the system of reason and revelation, and at the on-the-edge-of-escape wing of Hegelian-inflected philosophy are modalities which are forms of gravity but which have a scanning pattern that to some extent includes transcendental south.
There are critique modalities which have a piety/gravity involved: the critique can either be in the name of something that is being lost or in the name of something which is yet to come (where these tensions are in fact of the very nature of the system of reason and revelation).
There are different versions of an account of a human disaster here, and different accounts of technology. In relation to the disaster it can be the (ultimately non-disaster) of the ructions of dialectical upward movements (Hegelianism), or it can be the rise of technology and technics (Heidegger), or it can be a disaster of 'stratified' or 'coded' human existence that will be overcome by an acceleration of technology (Land).
The two different forms of fixated critique have a different relationship to reason: one (the descendant of Kantianism) is fundamentally reason; the second one uses reason but is a hybrid outlier that, although an outlier is still ultimately part of the system of reason and revelation. This second modality of fixated critique is far more open to the anomalous, and its works have a tendency to be threaded with thought-provoking elements and outsights: however the overall modality is that of a highly productive form of entrapment.
Although there is something relatively dull about the refinement-of-Kantianism attractor this does not make it the least dangerous and damaging: the views of those who are locked fully onto the place of reason are particularly dangerous for those who who are setting out in the direction of the place of exeriority.
Within the main (non-outlier) extent of reason and revelation the new developments often have very interesting aspects insofar as they take a stand against primary dimensions of ordinary reality. These are figures who are very different from writers such as Kojeve and Fukuyama. However, what is interesting and valuable is inseparable from what makes them profoundly deleterious and insidious. In the first modality of piety Heidegger and Tolkien are alongside each other in their reaction against the technologies of modernity, and - far more interestingly - in the radically de-dogmatised spaces of the second, Hegelian/Marxist form of piety you find E.P.Thompson and Pete Seeger alongside each other in the same way - on the edge of freedom but still fundamentally trapped by a focus which is primarily in the wrong direction.
*
There is nothing in itself wrong with technology - the issue is how it is being used by the interestablishment. Beyond technology, what is fundamentally important are the worlds of exteriority. The world of the beyond-the-human terrains of the planet; the world of perception, the world of dreamings, the world of the body.
*
It will be seen from the opening sections of this book that in 1993 I was working on a problem of space which can be indicated, firstly, by the Spinozistic idea that the planet as a whole is not on a lower level from human beings in relation to the attributes of its substance. However, secondly, it can also be indicated by the following line of thought: if you imagine you are in a post-industrial area of derelict factories and trees, and envisage you walk to the top of a hill on a misty morning in summer, and that you get to the top as the mist clears, and you then get a wide view of hills, and buildings and woodlands and blue sky - then is the beauty of the spheroambient encounter with space, through sight and touch, here fundamentally different from the beauty of music, or have we just been trained in some way to feel that it is different? (because with music we experience it as an expression of feeling on the part of the human spirit, whereas with the space described we experience the consistent micro-dance of multiple formations - sunlight, the solid terrain, the fluidities of the sky - as mere, brute matter).
A second problem I was working on (or moving toward) was the issue of suppressed faculties of intelligence, in particular the faculty of dreaming (the Warwick milieu fostered this because it was saturated with cybergothic and science fiction narratives such as Neuromancer, Bladerunner and Blood Music). However, the centrality of dreaming here tends to disguise the importance of this direction, in that studying the faculty of dreaming leads to the faculty of lucidity - and because the faculty of lucidity is a perception of the transcendental-empirical the process is an escape from the blocked perceptions of customary philosophy (what Deleuze calls 'state philosophy'). It can be pointed out that, using 'dreamer' as a term that points simultaneously to lucidity, there have been two dreamers' revolutions in the last two hundred years, one of which started around the middle of the 19th century, with the other starting around 1960 (this second was one was short, but was profoundly more successful, with A Thousand Plateaus as a key work in terms of its high-impact aspect).
The fact that I could be working on these problems within a milieu which directly supported this work shows the suspension of the dogmatic image of the world which had taken place. But to travel into the real abstract is a subtle process. Nick Land encountered the basis of the idea of accelerationism in Gibson and Vinge: his 'human security system' is the Turing cops of Neuromancer, but this idea, together with support provided by Anti-Oedipus, led to a view which does not see that acceleration of technology is the very nature of the current modality of the interestablishment, entailing that his advocacy of acceleration is nothing but a functioning of the machineries of entrapment of ordinary reality. (which is to say that, in this direction, the situation is fundamentally more gothic than he realised).
However, looking toward transcendental-south, there was, all along, a doorway to the Future.
*
In the context of
the year 1993 the question of the gothic leads to Angela Carter, although this
is partly to describe 1993 in relation to an absence. Angela Carter is perhaps
the greatest oneiro-theorist of the gothic, and she had died in 1992, aged
only 51. As Deleuze says, artists are “the tightrope walkers of the spirit,”
although with this phrase the risk is that all that will be grasped is the
problem for artists of speaking from a semi-focused lucidity in a human milieu
which will attempt to attack their views as irrational: there is also in fact the
question of the negative effects on the will of spending too long (even if the
artist is not fixated) looking in the direction of the gothic.
Taking the gothic
tale to a new level of lucidity in relation to the libidinal, in The Erl-King
(1977) Carter shows how women are trapped and crushed by the main forms of
sexuality, and how men who are taken over by the role of sexual control (a role in opposition to that of sexual yielding) are prevented from ever really growing up into who they
are.
The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. […]
The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody comes. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in the woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. […]
The two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist in the thickets, mimicking the tufts of old man's beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes; heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or enchanted fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by one, the ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled back into the earth. The trees threaded a cat's cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that I felt I was in a house of nets and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known it then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me.
Erl-King will do you grievous harm.
Piercingly, now, there came again the call of the bird, as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird left alive. That call, with all the melancholy of the failing year in it, went directly to my heart.
The girl in the story discovers that “the price of flesh is love,” and discovers that the immensely charismatic (and in some ways metaphysically adept and courageous) insouciance of the Erl-King is in fact the total immaturity of the control-mind in its male and most destructive form, an immaturity which ceaselessly functions to turn women into insecure, sexually befogged victims of maleness, caught, transmutated into singing birds, in the libidinal cages constructed for them. The Erl-King is the fully developed form of the so-called “male” modality (this role evidently can be occupied by a woman just as much as by a man). Angela Carter had an intense awareness of Shakespeare’s systems of outsights, and perhaps in particular drew on elements from Hamlet, as in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus. And the deepest truth being pointed out by Hamlet is of course that in the human world the male has largely been murdered or massively suppressed, and to a great extent supplanted by something else (the male is the male form of the lucidity of brightness – absence of “gravity” – and of free, focused intent), and the female is very much still alive, but is unknowingly existing in close proximity to the murderer, the control-mind.
The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was sufficient to itself; perfect transparency must be impenetrable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light coming down from sulphur-yellow interstices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nicotine-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. […]
The woods enclose. You step between the first trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its original privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody comes. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in the woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. […]
The two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist in the thickets, mimicking the tufts of old man's beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes; heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or enchanted fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by one, the ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled back into the earth. The trees threaded a cat's cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that I felt I was in a house of nets and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known it then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me.
Erl-King will do you grievous harm.
Piercingly, now, there came again the call of the bird, as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird left alive. That call, with all the melancholy of the failing year in it, went directly to my heart.
The girl in the story discovers that “the price of flesh is love,” and discovers that the immensely charismatic (and in some ways metaphysically adept and courageous) insouciance of the Erl-King is in fact the total immaturity of the control-mind in its male and most destructive form, an immaturity which ceaselessly functions to turn women into insecure, sexually befogged victims of maleness, caught, transmutated into singing birds, in the libidinal cages constructed for them. The Erl-King is the fully developed form of the so-called “male” modality (this role evidently can be occupied by a woman just as much as by a man). Angela Carter had an intense awareness of Shakespeare’s systems of outsights, and perhaps in particular drew on elements from Hamlet, as in her 1984 novel Nights at the Circus. And the deepest truth being pointed out by Hamlet is of course that in the human world the male has largely been murdered or massively suppressed, and to a great extent supplanted by something else (the male is the male form of the lucidity of brightness – absence of “gravity” – and of free, focused intent), and the female is very much still alive, but is unknowingly existing in close proximity to the murderer, the control-mind.
(The male in the control-mind sense is the world of having an inventory and being in the right, where this is also a process of keeping everything under control in the form of a physical, practical, intellectual and libidinal territory. 'Laughter' is here used as a way 'putting down' what deviates from the system of the inventory. The brightness of the female (the female, and of the male-female) is awareness of the abstract (intent in particular), and it is the adventure of existence, delight, openness to the exteriority of a system, openness to the unknown, a process of travelling across upward thresholds of reality. It is a courageous love that takes leaps, a dance and improvisation in the form of a waking of the faculties, a bright laughter which breaks open a view of the Outside.
The modality to which biological males are very recurrently ushered (whether or not this ushering 'takes') is one which has a high level of focus on the inventory system of being in the right; and the modality toward which biological females are very recurrently ushered (again whether or not the ushering succeeds) is one which has a higher level focus on the singularities of bodies within the sphere of immediacy (the control mind functions on both sides of the gender 'divide' but on the 'female' side it involves a keeping under control and territorialising which has less to with being 'in the right' through inventory systems). All that is needed for brightness to take flight - to cross its key threshold - is for awareness of intent to go across the horizon of immediacy toward dreams, value-systems, social-formations, religions, and ideas. But if awareness of intent stays at the level of bodies in the sphere of immediacy, then in the world of the control mind this corporeal focus on the part of those on the edge of crossing the threshold from first-level brightness has the overwhelmingly powerful tendency for the focus on the adventure of existence to be supplanted by a focus on the adventure of amorous relationships: and here what is waiting is Erl-King, and as Angela Carter says, Erl-King will do you grievous harm).
However (and moving now toward a return to 1993), in Nights
at the Circus Carter primarily leaves behind the gothic, transmutating magical
realism in the direction of metamorphics (magical realism was born under
immensely pressured circumstances in the Russia of the late 20s and 30s, with
Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and its tendency to re-enforce some set of
compromised values – as a basis for a coded attack on another set of values –
needs to be overcome, if the mode is to be used as a means of escape from the
interiority). It is valuable to read this book alongside Florinda Donner’s The
Witch's Dream (1985), a book which is about a visit to a small town in
Venezuela, and which has two female figures (an older woman, and a younger one)
who form an instructive parallel pairing to Lizzie and Fevvers in Nights at the
Circus. Both books are very fundamentally about love and sexuality (and, in
different ways, about journeys into the unknown). They also are both very
fundamentally are about destructive power in its socially instantiated forms (what
Marquez called “la violencia” – the social violence which he said he found a
way of writing about in the form of magical realism).
In 1993 Donner has just published her third book,
Being-in-Dreaming (1992), a book, which like the other two, is an expression of
a focused philosophical lucidity, and which, at a new, more encompassing level
of engagement is a pragmatics and metaphysics for the purposes of escape. Also
in 1992, another female, anthropologist writer of metamorphics appears: Taisha Abelar publishes
The Sorcerers’ Crossing: A Woman’s Journey, a book whose lucidity is in every
sense alongside that of Being-in-Dreaming (and it should be pointed out that the idea of the abstract - as a term for the energy-intent outside of ordinary, deadened reality - is fundamental in both of these books, and in different ways is given a subtle, powerful emphasis).
Both of these
writers will then disappear, five years later in 1998 (along with a third
woman, Carol Tiggs), such that they apparently have not been seen in any
documented way since that year. This is a “disappearance from view,” though it is a disappearance about
which nothing is here being claimed,
not even that they have fully dropped out of sight – it may be that
opportunities to document their appearances are not being taken up. Nonetheless, whatever the details, it is a striking event
which makes the disappearance of the women in Picnic at Hanging Rock seem more than
ever like a possible moment of extraordinary “seeing” on the part of Joan Lindsay, back in 1967.
These books and events need to be held in mind at this point
to offset the effects of writing more generally about 1993. To refrain this
point, as ever 1993 was the cosmos Now of the planet. But in the human world very
extreme state/religious wars were brewing up again as a consequence of the
first gulf war, and artistic-philosophical lines-of-escape were collapsing very
rapidly, and recurrently were either carrying elements that were keeping them
from developing (for instance MDMA was a very damaging drug for the alternative cultures of electronic dance music)
or were setting off in the wrong direction. The determinination to escape was a little heightened at this
time, but it was being continually undermined (that is, a little more so than
in phases of high intensity) by damaging circumstances. However, if you just
maintained your will to look outward toward it, the Future, as always, was
clearly visible.
*
*
The feeling that an intensification was taking place came partly from a heightening of dance, and therefore to a great extent was well-founded. It was just that the change was not going
to go very far. I had no awareness of this at the time (and in fact had only a minimal,
largely unconsidered sense that something was happening) but there was an
emergence underway of not one electronic dance-music milieu, but a whole inter-related system of
these milieus. The weakness of the
development was that even though it had a fundamental relation to the outside
(in the fullest sense, and also in the sense of out in the countryside, or
outside of institutional spaces, in a disused warehouse or factory) it did not
have much ability in relation to the abstract-oneiric – it did not have much ability
to see Love-and-Freedom, and to produce songs and outsights which would have placed
themselves deep within the wider culture.
The shift in
relation to dance did however have a border-zone of change which was at a
higher level of intensity, and beyond this, in the wider intensification, there
were associated movements in writing and film that also had a sustained
abstract-oneiric focus, which, to different degrees, was turned toward the
south-outside. In 1993 Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird were just beginning to
produce their first tracks, and at the same time, up in Manchester, Jeff Noon
published Vurt. Over in Japan Miyazaki was starting to work on Princess
Mononoke. Creative escapes overall had largely been collapsing very fast and
had generally been quite mediocre “breakaways” (The Stone Roses, The Happy
Mondays), and not being mediocre was no guarantee of safety (in late 1993 Kurt
Cobain only had a few months left to live, and Gibson’s publishing of Virtual
Light in this year signalled a movement back toward a domain of socio-futural assessments that pertains, all along, to a zone of the interiority).The new
developments were in general going to continue a bit longer, and were going to be
at a higher level when primarily taking the groups of “Madchester”as a
yardstick, as opposed to the songs of Nirvana, or the Neuromancer trilogy.
In 1993 the basis
of a new phase of war had been created, with the direct intervention by a
Christian country in the Islamic middle east.
The movement toward the main downward threshold-crossing was already under way.
In June the USA had fired 23 cruise missiles into Baghdad (the target was the
headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service) in a violation of international
law that was in retaliation for an attempt by Iraq to assassinate George Bush.
And in February Osama bin Laden had made a first attempt to blow up the World
Trade Centre (the issue being American intervention in Islamic issues, and
particularly the stationing of American troops in Saudia Arabia, which was
perceived as an extreme religious violation). The first gulf war had been the start of a
process of creating an exceptionally reactive and destructive enemy, an
equivalent to the Treaty of Versailles (wars and fascistic forces – which
always exist on both sides – should be understood in terms of the war-producing
“structures” of the ecumenon, not ultimately in terms of the actions
of individual states).
But maintaining a
focus on the widest and deepest issues, in 1993 the ambient effect of the war
was that it had created the first elements of a new conservatism. It can be
seen that a war which is widely held to be unjustified turns people’s attention
toward the outside of the world of the ecumenon, with its warring
states, and its control-metaphysics, as was the case with the Vietnam War
during the phase of greater proximity of the Future, between 1962 and 1982.
Conversely, a justified war is a generator of extreme traditionalism. The 1950s
were an era of an exceptionally disturbing conservatism: to take one main symbol of
the change, along with W.H.Auden’s capitulation to Catholicism and T.S.Eliot’s
Anglicanism, there was now the appearance of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with its re-assertion of the control-mind
metaphysics of evil and fallen angels, its bringing back of medieval,
aristocratic values, its racism, and its re-imposition of a model of religious
(feminine-spirititual) “grace” onto women, so that the ideal for women is not the physicality of the quest, but is that of being a chivalric inspiration for the male (Arwen stays at home and sews a banner for Aragorn…). Warwickshire,
once again, was involved in a shift in the oneirosphere, but this time, as with
Thomas Malory in the 1400s, it was a profoundly reactive shift – Tolkien finds a way
of returning to the reactionary oneiric expanses which Shakespeare leaves behind.
In 1993 the
reactive elements had been put in place, although their effects were to some
extent held in abeyance by the slightly increased activity of radical,
alternative sub-cultures. The time was a phase of conflicting currents, a time
when the wind of human-world circumstances had not set strongly in any
direction.
However, this is
all to give too much emphasis to chronic time, the time of the ongoing human
disaster. The fundamental issue, as always, is the Future (which has been there
all along). It can be noted at this point that having once achieved a
deliberate, focused view of the direction of Love-and-Freedom it is in the
deepest sense impossible to take part (either directly, or through an
affirmation) in the wars of the states, and not because of a perceived duty,
but because it is clear at this point that what is most vitally needed in the human world is for people to set out
toward the south-outside, and that any reversion to involvement in state war
would be a movement into insanity (which is to say that the actions are
expressions of love, and of a lucid perception both of the south-outside, and of the
horror of the interiority).
Any form of
affirmation of state wars by a metaphysical system is an indictment of it. But
the position which here speaks is not definable simply as that of pacifism. The
warrior ethos of movements of escape from the interiority sees that struggle is
involved, but where this struggle is an overcoming, by each individual, of
their own manifestation of the control mind (and separately, in a “martial
arts” way, in relation to immediate impacting violence, fighting for defensive purposes cannot entirely be ruled out –
although this would have nothing to do with any affirmation of state
warfare).
*
The mountain-pass
toward which the Southward route leads involves the development of a full
ability to stop internal verbalising, and simply perceive, for as long as is
necessary, without interruption from the scurrying of thought (which in this
context is always non-thought). It also involves an overcoming of all emotions
of self-importance, resentment, jealousy, neurotic fear, rage, outrage – the
tyranny of moods. If you want to keep moving forward you have to learn to perceive, using strategies to overcome the "internal dialogue," the compulsive non-thinking thought of the control mind. And to overcome the system of reactive moods you have to conserve and heighten energy in a process that will increase joy to the point where this system of grim "passions" begins to be disabled (it is not that I have got very far on this path: it is clear that the main bulk of the mountain-pass is still in front of me).
But it is important to avoid a slippage toward a focus on critique, in the same way as it is important to avoid a focus on chronic time, and on philosophy in a conventional sense. The above critiques are valid (in relation to the system - whatever it is - of the control mind, and in relation to its social expression in the form of the interiority or trans-establishment, with its suppressive metaphysical formations). It is also true that in 1993 an emergence was taking place in Warwick University's philosophy department, an emergence which to a great extent would collapse 6 years later. And equally - the fact that in 1993 I was embarking on years of studying A Thousand Plateaus was
central in every way to my having set out toward the south-outside. But this
does not mean that the direction in question should slip toward being seen as
nothing but an ability to effectively picture the world from a detached place of
contemplation, an ability envisaged as existing separately from the details of a person’s life. It was indeed the case
that in moving Southward, away from ordinary reality, I was taking steps toward the abstract (and in particular toward
the Space of intent and energy, as opposed to the systematicities and sequences viewed by an abstract-perception fixated on the line of time of ordinary reality), but this process intrinsically involves energy, in that it consists of very libidinally-charged becomings between different formations-of-energy/formations-of-intent. And simultaneously with moving toward the abstract, I was being swept toward women (toward being "in love," and toward learning how to stay in the de-subjectified state of becoming that these two words describe) and I was being swept toward the planet, in a process that would soon begin to move to mountain-forest terrains beyond Britain, but which would start with me being drawn outward into the countryside of Warwickshire.
* * *
