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)
The Second Sphere of Action
Introduction
A key aspect of this book is to be found in the story The Island, where the protagonist finds three clusters of apparently abandoned buildings, naming them the 'bird buildings, the 'spiral buildings' and the 'river buildings', on the basis of artworks that he finds in them. This relates to the fact that there is a suppressed tradition of thought - of philosophy - in the human world, and to the fact that The Second Sphere of Action explores three expressions of this tradition. There are ways in which the book gives greatest emphasis to one of these expressions - the one that corresponds to the 'bird buildings' - but it will be seen, in the course of this introduction that it is nonetheless the case that the other two also receive a high degree of attention.
Another main focus of the book is the idea that there is a second domain of action, which is to an extent in effect all the time, and which relates to the sphere of choice-making that is experienced when we are not prey to the eco-system of reactive moods (self-importance, fear, resentment, embarrassment, self-righteousness, self-pity, jealousy etc) and when we have arrived in some way at an ability to maintain unbroken perception, without internal verbalising, and without the categorisings and horizons of what are here called the systems of reason-and-revelation, and of ventures-and-lives.
A third focus is the question of dreams in sleep. All of Explorations is about 'dreamings' (a term which has a very wide extension, including fictions, narratives, reveries, and dreams about the future) but it is in The Second Sphere of Action that the dreams we have when asleep are brought fully to the forefront within the overall account of dreamings in this sense.
The only possible starting-point for writing about the suppressed tradition of philosophy (which inseparably is a suppressed tradition of pragmatics) is to give an account of what it delineates in the world, as opposed to starting from its expressions in the form of books. The primary aspect of what is delineated is an escape-route that exists within the world, an escape-path that leads away from ordinary, constricted forms of reality. Within The Second Sphere of Action this escape-route is delineated in two separate ways. Firstly, this takes place through detailing its outsights about the nature of the world, where these, in the context of this introduction, can be indicated by the fact that on one level the escape-path consists of the waking of the faculties, a generalised becoming-active. Secondly, it takes place through an explanation of what it means, in practical terms, to start out along this path of Departure.
But then, of course, it must be asked - what are the three expressions of this philosophy-and-pragmatics which were mentioned at the outset? The first is a double tradition that reached a high-point with Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, but which, in relation to its other aspect, reached a two stage high-point with Virginia Woolf's The Waves, and with a group of writers in the 60s and 70s - Ursula Le Guin, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Joan Lindsay. The second expression is the work of three women and one man: Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner and Carlos Castaneda. The third has, in effect, an unknown authorship, which might be one individual, but could be several: this is a single book from the China of 2400 years ago - Tao Te Ching. These expressions of what can be called metamorphics - the metaphysics and pragmatics of the escape-route - function here in relation to the outsights as additional lenses which break open the view toward the outside of ordinary reality. After its opening section this book 'sets up' the first two of these vantages by showing a parallel development, which, if followed carefully, leads to the perception that A Thousand Plateaus is a path which goes in the same direction as the works of Abelar/Donner/Castaneda, and that eventually joins with the other path - one which goes further, and which is an expression into writings of the escape-route. And an element of the last two sections is a movement to the eastern third of Eurasia, not to indicate some special significance on the part of Tao Te Ching, but, on the contrary, to start a process of creating a new kind of vantage: one that includes Tao Te Ching but extends very substantially beyond it (the terrain of this vantage - insofar as it can be said to have one - is the shamanic worlds of eastern Siberia and the nomad areas of Siberia/Tuva/Mongolia, together with the ancient-and-modern world of China, which gave rise to and preserved Tao Te Ching, and which was the place of origin of a series of disciplines which concern the development of physical fluency, such as Chi Gung).
However, the primary dynamic of this book is the widening and deepening of the initial perspectives, together with a process of exploring the horizon-of-the-unknown that is opened up as the 'beyond' of the outsights. Instead of it consisting of interpretations of other maps, the focus is directed toward the terrain. All available means are used: these consist of writing which is in the form of abstractions (as with this introduction), narratives in the form of fictions, and accounts of personal experiences. To take the crucial instance, the idea of the second sphere of action is set out at the very beginning, and then it is delineated, through different approaches. Halfway through the book the reader will find themselves in the middle of a novel, The Corridor (three of the five sections of this book-length tale are included here), and the reason for this transition is that on a primary level The Corridor - without it being in any way a didactic work - is a figuring of the second sphere of action.
The account of experiences at Warwick University is also part of the same process of delineation, And it is important to see the impersonal nature of this account: it concerns a milieu rather than an individual, and it concerns a process by which a principle of exteriority slowly - without a knowledge of what was happening - went into effect through a complex range of encounters and circumstances, so that eventually there was a shift in which individuals started to be aware of new possibilities. The second sphere of action is the horizon of this account - an account which concerns falling into a current which sweeps you a fraction forward (it is only a fraction because we always have a degree of familiarity with the second sphere of action, but it is nonetheless an important fraction).
In relation to dreams in sleep the position that is taken is that certain kinds of dream can be glimpses toward aspects of the world, so that these dreams are to be understood as a modality of perception, but where the term perception includes the seeing of obscured potentials of existence, and the seeing of formations of intent. These dreams have the form of clearings in the forest of urgency-dreams, which make up the vast majority of dreams in sleep, and which are not glimpses at all (these other dreams are concoctions of fear and anxiety, and are not worth any attention). Glimpse-dreams, on the other hand, consist of a rarefied form of perception, and can be characterised, firstly, as explorations (as opposed to urgencies), and secondly, as having an affect of joy, serenity, or impersonal 'poise' (the affect is in opposition to the anxiety of urgency-dreams: ultimately it is always the joy of discovery, even when what is being discovered is an aspect of the world which is not pleasant).
It can be seen that dreams here become philosophical; with the modalities involved they are grasped as perception-of-the-world, as opposed to being personal. This view opens up a pragmatics of giving attention to exploration-dreams or glimpse-dreams (urgency-dreams are not worth giving any consideration: they are tangled composites of subjectified states). And this pragmatics is the domain of the dreamer, in that only the dreamer can answer the initial question 'what was the affect?'. (Another way of posing this question is - did the dream have the impersonal affect of the transcendental-materialist sublime; did it feel like bright sunlight, or fresh air?).
This leads therefore to the question of the faculty of feeling, a faculty which all along is a modality of intelligence (it is inchoate perception). And it is this faculty which is delineated in the final section of the book. The view of dreams which has been at work in the earlier sections makes it necessary to give an account of the faculty of feeling.
A last point concerns the question of it being a 'double tradition' that includes both The Waves and A Thousand Plateaus. It could be said that the 'spiral buildings' are really two separate groups of buildings that abut upon each other, and this would in fact be correct. This issue acquires its importance because the tradition which goes furthest, and reaches the highest level of focus, is that of the recondite area of anthropological philosophy toward which A Thousand Plateaus leads: the path here therefore runs from one set of buildings to another.
The whole of Explorations is primarily about this onward path from A Thousand Plateaus, and from works written solely by Deleuze, such as Difference and Repetition. The second section of The Second Sphere of Action is an account of this movement forward within anthropological philosophy, and it is important to see that that the sections in this volume (and across all three books) about the Warwick philosophy milieu are centrally focused on this onward path, so that the philosophy of the CCRU is a secondary issue (this is because the primary aspect of the supposed way forward, in the form of accelerationism, is founded on a delusion, but it is also because ultimately Explorations is about terrains, not the texts which map them, and it is necessary to include only what helps with the account of the terrain).
But therefore - how it can be a double tradition? And, to make the question more precise, how can it be a double tradition when on one side the texts are pre-eminently conceptual, and on the other side they are pre-eminently narratives? The answer has three aspects. The first reason is that the two sides have influenced each other substantially over many hundreds of years. The second - and far more important - reason is that the works on both sides consist of transcendental-empirical outsights. And the third reason is that there is a zone of indeterminacy between the two.
In this book the point about outsights is made in the opening sections, in particular through a comparison between Shakespeare and Spinoza in section 3. And the concluding section shows the way in which there has been an influence between the two sides (and for the purposes of this introduction, if Shakespeare is taken as an example, the influence of his works can be seen to a very large extent within philosophy from the eighteenth century onwards). In turn, the zone of indeterminacy is substantially explored, but through an embodiment of what is found in the liminal zone.
There are features of drama/dramatisation/acting that give this domain a very high degree of importance, but in a sense which in fact is only in one of its aspects about stageplays, films etc. A first aspect is taking on a different persona - which can be done very quietly through producing a new construct out of your interests, loves and fascinations, so that different elements are brought to the foreground, and which can also be done in the virtual-real, in a process which does not need to be the beginning of the creation of a work. But a further aspect is dramatisation in the form of a domain of several personae without there being a play, and takes the form of dramatisation in the form of conceptual personae, as with Hume's dialogue, or Deleuze and Guattari's Professor Challenger. These are the two aspects of the zone of indeterminacy.
It can be seen that The Waves could be put on stage, exactly as it is. There is not any straightforward clash between the characters, but it is like a play (with philosophical dialogues, in contrast, there can be a clash of opinions, but they are in other ways far less like a play). The Waves finds a new way forward. With the mid-twentieth century break with the past, poetry was pushed into the background (to be replaced - or substantially displaced - by song lyrics), and drama undergoes an explosion into film and television that is spectacular to a very high degree, and yet which largely consists of expressions of the system of ventures-and-lives (as with dreams in sleeps most of these dreamings are products of different aspects of subjectification); at the same time stageplays are also pushed into the background, although not as resoundingly as with poetry. Woolf's achievement is to create a new form of prose-poetry and a new form of dramatisation, where these two forms together are very effective for pointing toward the second sphere of action.
In this book, conceptual personae are to some extent in effect, but the figures involved (Ffion, Cass, Steven, Miranda) do not clash with each other as with Hume's dialogue, but instead are closer to the figures in the The Waves, while also, as with figures such as Miranda, having a degree of similarity, in formal terms, to a figure such as Professor Challenger. (it is important to see that the movement onward from A Thousand Plateaus is to a domain of anthropological philosophy which functions to a substantial extent through dialogue: only, unlike with Plato, this is dialogue as lucidity and as a pragmatics of escaping from the interiority).
What is involved in the statements of the personae in this volume concerns many different aspects of the world. However, a key point is that a primary aspect of The Corridor (and one that only partially involves the novel's characters) is that it is delineation of the second sphere of action. The question of the faculties slowly grows in importance through the book, but there is a line of continuity from The Corridor to the end of the last section, which shows how a view toward the second sphere of action is opened up by The Waves.
The Second Sphere of Action
1.
It can be asked - what are the modalities or features of the intent-world of human beings which relate most crucially to the domain of dreamings? (dreamings here are dreams about the future; stories; dreams in sleep; the blocked dreamings of religions; sexual fantasies; myths; and processes of dreaming up what has been taking place over the millennia in the world). This question concerns the transcendental-empirical terrain of the faculty: it puts aside the issue of the empirical aspects of dreams, and asks about that which wakes dreaming - that which is at a higher level of reality and that moves the faculty in the direction of wakefulness, in the direction of it becoming fully focused.
However, because dreaming involves outsights about the nature of the world - the question can be rephrased: in terms of understanding the nature of the world around us, and of our lives within it, what, at the level of the transcendental-empirical, are the most vital, jolting aspects of the world?
Firstly, there is the second sphere of action. A sphere which is much calmer and quieter than the first one, and where the planet comes fundamentally into the foreground. In this sphere the damaging - reality-blocking - insistences of internal language recede, fade away. Inner silence is a primary aspect, and joy is a primary tonality. Within this sphere the sky, wildernesses, and all countryside and scurfland terrains are the central focus, along with animals, and plants, and processes of waking the faculties. And spread through the human world, what is visible - as if seen from a distance - is a grey fog or webwork of the control-modalities and reactivity that are a constitutive aspect of ordinary, deadened reality. In the second sphere of action becomings come to the forefront, and in particular becoming-woman; and, alongside this, an entering-into-composition in the form of an envisaging which sees all aspects of the human world - including thought - as a domain within a planetary Zone where in terms of the attributes of substance there is no difference between humans and the planet. There can be a kind of click. The planet is in the forefront, and the nation states are very far in the background, their infrastructure looking like dereliction. In front of you is a sunlit expanse of sky and land; there is a distant but powerful awareness that the customary forms of thought are suffused with problematic aspects. There is the sound of the wind, birdsong.
Secondly, there is a body without organs across or around the planet, comprising the human world, and the worlds of the planet's other animal beings, and with an unknown full extent beyond, which is experienced - beyond precise knowledge - as including in the fullest sense the whole planet. This body without organs variously consists of intent, feeling, love, lucidity, anticipations, customary forms of thought, accounts of the world, memories, and domination-modalities (etc) and it very clearly includes, within the human world, an oneirosphere of dreamings. Within this oneirosphere are the religions, which are blocking modalities, in that, in insisting on one delusional, damaged story, and in rejecting the outside in favour of the interiority, they function to prevent the waking of the faculty of dreaming, along with the waking of the faculties of lucidity and intent. Also within this oneirosphere are "hero" tales and "romance" tales, which in the vast majority of cases are pre-eminently conducive toward forms of entrapment within ordinary reality.
Firstly, there is the second sphere of action. A sphere which is much calmer and quieter than the first one, and where the planet comes fundamentally into the foreground. In this sphere the damaging - reality-blocking - insistences of internal language recede, fade away. Inner silence is a primary aspect, and joy is a primary tonality. Within this sphere the sky, wildernesses, and all countryside and scurfland terrains are the central focus, along with animals, and plants, and processes of waking the faculties. And spread through the human world, what is visible - as if seen from a distance - is a grey fog or webwork of the control-modalities and reactivity that are a constitutive aspect of ordinary, deadened reality. In the second sphere of action becomings come to the forefront, and in particular becoming-woman; and, alongside this, an entering-into-composition in the form of an envisaging which sees all aspects of the human world - including thought - as a domain within a planetary Zone where in terms of the attributes of substance there is no difference between humans and the planet. There can be a kind of click. The planet is in the forefront, and the nation states are very far in the background, their infrastructure looking like dereliction. In front of you is a sunlit expanse of sky and land; there is a distant but powerful awareness that the customary forms of thought are suffused with problematic aspects. There is the sound of the wind, birdsong.
Secondly, there is a body without organs across or around the planet, comprising the human world, and the worlds of the planet's other animal beings, and with an unknown full extent beyond, which is experienced - beyond precise knowledge - as including in the fullest sense the whole planet. This body without organs variously consists of intent, feeling, love, lucidity, anticipations, customary forms of thought, accounts of the world, memories, and domination-modalities (etc) and it very clearly includes, within the human world, an oneirosphere of dreamings. Within this oneirosphere are the religions, which are blocking modalities, in that, in insisting on one delusional, damaged story, and in rejecting the outside in favour of the interiority, they function to prevent the waking of the faculty of dreaming, along with the waking of the faculties of lucidity and intent. Also within this oneirosphere are "hero" tales and "romance" tales, which in the vast majority of cases are pre-eminently conducive toward forms of entrapment within ordinary reality.
Thirdly, at the fundamental level human beings are explorers of the transcendentally unknown, who, as a result of deleterious circumstances, have largely been trapped, going round and round in circles, like objects caught in an eddy, in a backwater of a river. Human individuals are all beings who are going to die, and they have a single chance to move forward from this entrapment.
Fourthly, in the human world there is an ongoing disaster taking place, an ongoing disaster in relation to which it is necessary to simply walk away, where this walk is an ultimate task - done intrinsically in the name of love and freedom - that is evidently what is deeply needed for yourself, for those around you, for the whole embattled human world, and for the entire planet, with its species on the edge of extinction.
Fifthly, there is a current of impersonal intent - of brightness - that runs through the human world. It is a current of Love-and-Freedom, and it can also be seen as like a cairn-path across a very high range of mountains. Very little is known about this path, other than the fact that it is a functional, fundamental option (fundamental in that travelling it is a waking of who you are). It is the Futural path, the escape-path.
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The form-of-being of the escape-path is a centrality of focus on the planet (grasped in its exteriority so that in particular the focus includes the sun and the stars) and on becoming-active and waking the faculties. What is primary in relation to the faculties is perception, and what is primary in relation to becoming-active is the body: so the focus can be condensed in its expression to the planet-in-its-exteriority; the body; perception. In starting to move forward the tonality that appears is joy. What is fundamental to the intent of this form-of-being is a brightness in the form of an undogmatic encounter with the world, and a love or affection that has the quality of delight, dance. Brightness can be very quiet in its expression (though once it has been noticed it will be all the more powerful because it is quiet). It can also be partial, an aspect primarily of only one domain of an individual or group's activity. And, again, it can be in effect in ways where it is an encounter with tragedy - and here it will impact as a wave of sadness that jolts and propels along the escape-path. When it is permeative instead of partial brightness is Love-and-Freedom; a new distribution of the faculties; a more-developed form of exploration and action.
How can the jolting sadness of the depth-level perception of the tragic be brightness? It is brightness because it is lucidity - because there is always a brightness, a modality of joy, that is inseparable from the functioning of lucidity, so that the term 'sadness' here has a visionary aspect that separates it from subjectified states of distress. Secondly, this depth-level perception of something human beings are struggling against does not have the deleterious heaviness of moralising - you are caught up, in a jungle, in a life-and-death struggle with a predator, but lucidity does not view the predator with moral repugnance (and as well as being inappropriate, this would also be counter-productive).
In the second sphere of action decision-making concerns exploration, becoming-active, the waking of the faculties. But a woken faculty of lucidity entails that in the second sphere of action what is seen within the human world is intent - where the fundamental differential is between brightness and gravity (gravity is dogmatic righteousness, the control-modalities, the reactive affects of subjectification) and where intent is seen not only in individuals but in the 'dreamings' of social formations, accounts of the world, religions, stories. institutions, philosophies and myth-systems. And at the widest level what is seen is the ongoing disaster and the Futural path. On all of these levels what is seen is perceived with the eyes of the transcendental-empirical. Properly speaking, therefore, the second sphere of action is only reached once there has been a departure along the escape-path. However, it is recurrently glimpsed from within ordinary reality.
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A question of starting from space. (philosophy has very predominantly been trapped by the delusory profundities of time).
We need to start from the planet in its exteriority (the planet in itself, but also in its relationship to the sun and the other stars), the planet as world of co-emplaced and interfused zones, and the planet as transcendentally unknown. And we need to start from the faculties, affects, intent-worlds and dreamings of the micro-zones of human individuals and small human groups (we also need to hold in mind that the world of these micro-zones is a world that is an aspect of the planet). In particular, dreamings consisting of outsights are crucial here, and dreamings as a whole are fundamental, with the nature of the the planet within the oneiric-real world of a human being as a key indexical (as well as sometimes consisting of outsights, dreamings can be delusional, or can consist of suppressive edits). Dreamings here very fundamentally includes dreams about the future, as well as accounts of the past.
It is necessary to start from the planet and dreamings.
At the widest level of all the faculty of perception is as important or even more important than the faculty of dreaming, but in relation to this line of thought - that of starting from space as opposed to time - the question of perception comes with a 'warning.' We are perceivers, and it is necessary to reach the spheroambience of unbroken multi-sense perception, and then drive this process inwards to the point where proprioception is taken up as part of the question of what it is for something to be a space (even if proprioception only relates to one kind of space - the space that is a human/animal body). However, the risk with perception is it becoming tied back again to time, when perception
is taken up in relation to memory. Dreamings that consist of outsights are transcendental-empirical perception, as with seeing the sphere of the oneiric-real. Or with seeing the escape-path. It is in thinking about the escape-path through the ideas of faculties, energy-formations, intent-formations and the oneiric-real that you leave behind the blocking modality. The escape-path is evidently metamorphosis and diagrams that come from metamorphosis, but metamorphosis is far stranger than duree (let alone the line of chronos/chronic time), and it is only when the focus on space has reached the point where it can see the Futural that it has left behind the trap of time that is a constitutive aspect of ordinary-reality's blocked, suppressive modality of reason.
Faculties, becomings, affects, alliances, modalities of encounter/engagement/creation/modification. Taking a human individual (and by extension a human group) as what it is, a nexus, the faculties, becomings and affects are in the fullest sense lines which, while being real, are lines without contour.
A key point that arises from understanding the planet in relation to this philosophical account of space is that the nation states are territorialising and suppressive instances which fade into a kind of profound irrelevance (this does not mean that we should try to replace them with transnational governance, which, while the transestablishment is in effect within individuals, would only make things far worse - it means that we should focus elsewhere). We are on the planet, and within the planet's atmosphere: this is the locus of the movement Forward, the horizon which is constitutive of the escape-path. The second point that arises in relation to individual human beings is firstly that the mode of existence that is predominantly absent as people think about the potentials of a human life is that of the existential explorer, the existential traveller; and secondly is that the sublime in human existence and human relationships is primarily understood in terms of special relationships defined in terms of the sexual organs, and, for the most part separately, in terms of the delusions of religion. Knowledge and exploration are assigned to science, and the ur-sublime joy of journeys across upward-thresholds of reality is nowhere part of what is perceived.
There are two main modalities or dimensions of territorialisation, one macrological, one micrological. Within the second domain the space of directions is laid out according to the system of ventures and lives, in relation to which a key, very charged element is the familial / the modality of the love-relationship, or amorous-relationship. However, the elements or pre-constructed routes of the micrological in another way need to be grasped as inseparable from institutions that are aspects of the macrological formations. The hypertrophied modalities, formations, systems and emplacements of the control-inflected expanses of the human world involve many different institutions, and recurrently many co-existing separate formations pertaining to an institution. The 'places' and 'roles' are there in many different ways, and sometimes we in some way belong to them whether we like it or not, and in some cases we can decide, or can decide which formations to have a connection with, within the domain of an institution (and the institutions range from very formal to very non-formal). The roles are there, imposed, or laid out in front of us as possibilities: citizen, customer, patient, student, object of research, member of a religious 'flock', partner or wife/husband, researcher/inventor, functionary of an organisation, artist, skilled craftswoman or craftsman, audience member, appreciator of art, analysand.
There are endless valuable elements within the formations when taken up at the widest level, in terms of what they are, but insofar as they are expressions of the interestablisment these formations are worlds of gravity, or are zones which hold attention away from the escape-route. There is a kind of grey, heavy feeling of kudos that emanates from them: a gravity-world of standing and prestige which is exceptionally dangerous in that such self-importance when punctured can be deadly in its reactive response. Certain sub-zones within this overall domain of systems and extended-body elements of human lives, bound up with personal attractiveness, and in some sense expressive or evocative of delight, do not at all have the grey feeling of gravity and of prestige, but because these attractiveness-domains are bound up with the amorous, or love-couple modality of the venture-and-lives system their overall functioning - as opposed to specific instances - is to a very great extent systemically just to one side of what can be called brightness.
All along, beyond all this, is the adventure of waking the faculties, of becomings, of deterritorialisation, of comradeship-alliances for the purposes of travelling along the escape-path, of dreaming the Future into existence.
It is necessary to return to the optic which sees the planet, and individuals - but now it is necessary to concentrate on the microzones of individuals.
Within the corporeal microzones are the validity-worlds of the oneiric-real, and the outsights or transcendental-empirical perceptions.
Beyond the microzones are the system worlds, communication worlds, technology worlds of the domains of the human socius.
The ongoing disaster intrinsically involves a fetishing of external information/communication systems and of texts, together with a fetishing of formal and formalised information and problem-solving systems. It also involves a fetishing, on a local, varying basis, of suppressive, delusory grand narratives - religious, political, religio-political. Lastly (and inseparably), it involves a fixation on, and fetishing of, the micrological form-of-travel that is the familial. Within this world the domains of scientific/academic/journalistic and of artistic discourse are fundamental, alongside the domain of religious and religio-political discourse. The mercantile world is a domain of immense silences at the level of its mega-infrastructure and of immense loudness at the level of its promotion of products: its institutional utterances are not, as a modality, fetishised in the same way (although advertisements are celebrated and given prizes) but the advertisements continually promote - below the level of what is officially being promoted - the structure of ordinary reality, and fetishing here functions at the level of the products not at the level of the domain's discourse (and mercantile trajectories of success - as entrepeneur, as founder, as inventor, as CEO - are a main strand within the system of ventures and lives).
(if you stare for a long time at the civic architecture, military bases, cathedrals and container ports eventually the discourse and the discursive silence will produce an awareness of the greyness and the gravity of the capitalist socius, a domain which ultimately is libidinal, in that it is a multiform but intermeshed domain of intent).
Beyond this immense multiform expanse of systems and formations of the socius there is the thin, fundamental thread of valid dreamings, lucid diagrams, oneiric catalysts, outsights, effective dreams about a future of crossing transcendental-empirical thresholds, of escaping from the gravity of socius modalities.
Human beings have been profoundly alienated from the means of oneiric and cognitive production.
When people think about what are here being called dreamings they are likely to think about novels, films, plays - established stories of all kinds. The areas which are less likely to be taken up are dreams in sleep, processes of dreaming up stories, and dreams about the future.
And when people think about accounts of the world and knowledge they are likely to think about what is embedded in scientific, academic, and skill-domain formations and institutions, and are unlikely to be thinking about knowledge of intent - of the abstract as it is found in human individuals and social formations - or of the singular knowledge involved in the small-scale and large-scale navigation at the level of a life of an individual; and still less are they likely to think about the wide-scale or encompassing transcendental-empirical knowledge of outsights about the nature of the world.
Concentrating for a moment on dreamings, everything is set up in advance in a way that conducts toward passivity - 'how could I be a storyteller? But in reality in pushing toward the heart of dreamings it is not even the spoken tale that is at the centre of the paradigm, despite the immense importance of the tale as transmission, as commonality. At the centre is the oneiric-real - dreams about the future, dreams in sleep involving outsights and transcendental-empirical problems, the arrival and reverie-elaboration, or trance-elaboration of story-worlds consisting of diagrams, outsights, catalysts for an intensified life (but most of all, dreams about the future involving the waking of a life, the breaking open of a life in the direction of love and freedom).
Outsights and outsights-embedded-within-dreamings are perceptions at the level of the transcendental-empirical. And what is perceived is the planet, the beings who exist on it, and the spheroambient world within which the planet exists: and most fundamentally what is perceived, firstly, are zones and modalities that initiate brightness-as-affect, and, secondly, brightness in the definitive form of overall intent on the part of individuals (in opposition to gravity, with its grim world of Judgement and reactivity), where this consists of love and freedom, and where this can also be defined as becoming-active and as the waking of the faculties, in particular the faculties of lucidity, dreaming, feeling, perception and navigation. There has been a change, and there are texts now embedded within the human world which consist together of a system of outsights and diagrams which is far beyond what was previously available. And yet ultimately it is not a question of books but of experience, a question of creating once more the always new, singular modality that consists of a way of travelling into the Future.
There are the grey, hypertrophied emplacements of the ongoing disaster within the human world, like a mist in a system of valleys seen from forested mountains on a sunny morning. There is the thread of dreamings and outsights that guides you forward - a thread so thin it is barely visible and that on a different level is as wide as the world.
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