14.

Explorations



This blog is a three-part book 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 book is 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).


Part One: Zone Horizon  (1 - 18)

Part Two: The Second Sphere of Action   (19 - 30)

Part Three: Through the Forest, the River  (31 - 50) 

    

 Between 1993 and 1998 there was a cluster of 'lines of connection with the world' which in some sense could be said to be helping me. Although in many ways there was a calm surface to my Warwick University milieu, below this surface there was a turbulence being created by a departure from ordinary reality setting out in the wrong direction (one where you could not travel far, and which was fraught with confusions, and damaging fixations of attention). And the impression I have is that, without me realising it, certain lines of connection were assisting me in moving toward a separate endeavour. The most obvious line was my work on the books of Deleuze/Guattari and Delueze, and another one was a slowly intensifying connection with terrains exterior to the urban worlds of human beings. A further modality was at a level of intensity which entailed that it ran deeper than what could be characterised in terms of persistence. This was the line of connection with women - with the female aspect of human existence.

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    It seems right to say that in the autumn of 1993 I was 'going toward' a love relationship. Several months earlier a five-year relationship had come to an end. I was in a very charged, adventurous milieu, and I had reached a point where there was a chance of me being confident in relation to seeing and creating opportunities, as opposed to being dazzled and nervous - a point at which I was arriving quite late. My unusual background would have affected me: I had not been at school after the age of eight, and it was not until I was 17 or 18 that I had any kind of real 'peer group'. I was displaced - slightly out of phase. (With a more conventional background I would probably have reached this threshold much earlier, and by the age of 31 I could easily have been the father of two or three children).

Tess and I met in August in 1994. There was a sustained joy at the start of our relationship - a feeling of being swept away. Tess was a philosophy graduate who had a spirit of adventure at the highest, most instinctive level of intensity. During the next two and a half years our love-relationship was inseparably a wide-ranging process of experiential and intellectual experimentation. It was exploration in intensity across a range of different worlds of experience.

    

    August, 1996. I am with Tess in a small town in northern Greece: there is a view of forest growing on a lower slope of a mountain. Everything is an intense, sunlit Now in the form of a mountainous terrain (I am not thinking at all about the mythological – oneiro-abstract – dimension of Greece) – and I am swept away each time I look at the forest. In a dreamy, quietly charged way I long for us to go there. 

     Four days before we had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go away on holiday. We had almost no money (we had just bought a tent in Thessaloniki) and recurrently everything felt strikingly idyllic. And - as well - I had glimpsed a direction.

    But what are love-relationships? What are intense love-relationships in the form in which they almost always occur?

    They are a reciprocal state of being “in love,” and they are blissful, ultra-intense sexuality (but the sexuality, for all its wild intensity, is enveloped by the being-in-love). They are delight in each other’s company, and therefore they are worlds of becomings. And lastly (and this is how they manifest themselves – rather than being an intrinsic aspect), they very recurrently have a metaphysics of the relationship being “special,” such that there is a belief that the bliss and the love will not fade away.

   This is to understand them in relation to their first phase. Taken over a span of years, as opposed to weeks, what characterises these relationships is an eventual fading of sexuality, and a continuation of love, although in a diminished form (with the fading of sexuality there is recurrently a fading of delight in each other’s company, a fading of reciprocal becomings, an increase in insecurity, and a general return to reason-modalities, as opposed to the modalities of lucidity). 

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    Why is it that women and men are shut off from an awareness of the option of being a traveller into the unknown? This seems a particularly important question for women, because, whether or not they are lesbian, bisexual or heterosexual, in terms of ultra-intense two-person relationships the field of options does not extend beyond relationships which have the reproductive organs as central (so that a final element of millennia of oppression seems still to be in place, but in a way where this element is so effectively disguised as the nature of reality that it is almost always invisible).

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   The experience of seeing the forest in Greece can be placed alongside instances of another kind of longing: the moments from earlier in my life when I had a reverie about being in a love-relationship, and was transfixed by a feeling of joy. These earlier experiences were the faculty of feeling making me aware of a direction that would turn out to be even more sublime than had been shown by the glimpse, and which, as well as consisting of love, would be profoundly an experience in relation to bodies.

    It is becoming clear that it is necessary here to consider the question of the human body. For academia the body is, broadly speaking, an extrinsic element, and the private life of the academic is the wider sphere of the extrinsic. Whether a thinker goes out dancing, has love relationships, or goes walking in mountains, is viewed as primarily irrelevant (the connections are reduced to platitudes about the need to be healthy, and to occasional references to the fact that many thinkers have recommended walking as a valuable assistance for intellectual work). But this, in fact, is an ignoring of the fundamental issue.

     In the work of Castaneda (and Florinda Donner, and Taisha Abelar) a completely different perspective is found. Castaneda says  “All of the faculties, accomplishments and possibilities of shamanism are in the human body itself”.  In relation to accounts of the acquisition of knowledge this statement is an indication of the fundamental difference between metamorphics and the “western” view on this subject.

    But it is vital not to go too fast here, both to avoid allowing presuppositions about the body to control (and suppress) our abstract-perception, and because, as we have seen, metamorphics also exists within western philosophy. The vital issue here is the idea of “faculties.” As Deleuze says, “the doctrine of the faculties is an entirely necessary component of the system of philosophy” (Difference and Repetition, chapter 3).

      Three faculties can initially be outlined, to explicate this way of thinking (and to get away from the usual perspective on the human body):

The faculty of lucidity (the faculty of seeing the abstract, in particular intent and dreamings).

The faculty of dreaming (the faculty of experiencing and creating unfettered, liberatory virtual-real worlds, which simultaneously are lenses for perceiving the abstract).

The faculty of feeling (the faculty of inchoate perception of directions).

     To a great extent this book is a process of delineating – and of giving expression to – these faculties, and others. The body (or rather the entirety that is an individual human being – the entirety from which the body is normally subtracted) is a world of forms or modalities of encounter, or of faculties. And terrains must be thought of not just as parts of an energy-formation, but as places which in some cases can hearten and inspire in powerful ways. A zone of the abstract is an element of an energy-formation, and so is a terrain, but rather than just attributing its energy aspect, with a terrain we can grasp it in terms of the affects it produces.

     During the years in question my life was moving toward a substantial falling away from what is called success (in relation to my academic career this appears as a contingency, in that it seems very likely that a little more discipline or a slight difference in the Warwick Philosophy department could easily have changed this), but it remains true that, despite my life being a mess, I was moving toward a kind of opening, or doorway. But this did not only relate to the abstract - to formations of intent.  It is relatively easy to talk about the ways in which the doorway toward which I was being drawn in 1993 to 1998 consisted of a first stage in relation to outsights about the world, about pragmatic systems of waking a life and of waking the faculties, and about forms of exploration and modalities of 'dreaming' (where in 1998 I would still be very far from bringing all this into focus). And yet it was also the case that this doorway had a complex and irreducible aspect at the level of terrains. 

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