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)
It is summer, and a woman on a verandah is writing the phrases of Tao Te Ching onto strips of bamboo, which later she will sew together into a book. It is 2500 years ago.
The woman looks up at the
sky, and the horizon of trees. The two phrases she has in her head are “and so
return to the simplicity of uncarved wood” and “the great governing blade
carves nothing.” She knows that the great governing blade is the art of
navigation into wider and wider realities, and that its decisions shape
everything at a level deeper than the surface of the world in the form of
concrete objects. And it is clear to her that for this art of navigation it is
necessary to perceive with the whole body, and not just with the eyes. Feeling
this, she is suffused with a sublime, eerie brightness that shimmers with
contact.
*
“This silent knowledge, which you cannot describe, is, of
course, intent – the spirit, the
abstract. Man’s error was to want to know it directly, the way he knew everyday
life. The more he wanted, the more ephemeral it became."
“But what does that
mean in plain words don Juan?” I asked.
“It means that man gave up silent knowledge for the world of
reason,” he replied. “The more he clings to the world of reason, the more
ephemeral intent becomes.”
The Power of Silence, Carlos
Castaneda (Washington Square Press,
1987, p.147).
*
The human species
is flying with only one wing, which means that it is flying slowly downward in
circles. Humans as engineers are astonishingly successful, but as travellers
toward love and freedom (toward the abstract, toward wider realities) we are disastrously crippled, and it seems very much that over the centuries the
situation is becoming worse. We fly with reason, but not with lucidity.
For the last two and
a half thousand years there has been the rise of what it is correct to call a ‘cult
of reason.’ This feature of societies has existed – as a further deleterious
modality – in conjunction with the dogmatic revelation systems of religions, and
it is only recently that it has become the dominant modality - of these two - in a
large proportion of the world’s societies. The heroes of this (all too male) cult have been mathematicians, and
philosophers who fell into the orbit of mathematical knowledge as a ‘model’ for
understanding the world, but a great amount of its work has consisted in
finding ways of denouncing or undermining anything that was (without it understanding this) either a partial or an achieved expression of
lucidity. However, this modality is all along a symptom of a deeper problem:
the increasing tendency for human beings to be trapped within an engagement
with the world along the lines of time and of systematicity, instead of along
the lines of space, energy-formations, and intent.
Any approach to
human history needs to start by taking seriously the idea that the human world
is an ongoing disaster, involving an overall decline, rather than ‘progress,’
where continual wars and the depradations of capitalism (for instance the sweatshop
factories of Bangladesh) are in fact the symptoms of a deeper malaise – the progressive
shutting-down of lucidity. Here the picture is not the unitary Hegelian account
of progress. Instead it is an account of a struggle on the part of human beings
in relation to a damaging instance (an instance which can be called the ‘control
mind’ and in relation to which the system of reason-and-revelation is just a
surface aspect), where the level of damage to human beings is continually
increasing.
*
Within and around Coventry in the mid-90s it was very
definitely the case that something was happening within the world of
philosophy. What was taking place was
the emergence of “technological accelerationism” as a philosophico-pragmatic
idea. This emergence centrally involved Sadie Plant, and all of the members of
the (non-official) group that was the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit: however
it remains the case that Nick Land was the fundamental figure within the
central group. It should also be added that not only was there a wider
directly-involved zone of the process (and earlier manifestations of this zone
for years were all there was, before the CCRU’s inception), but there was also
a figure alongside who had a connection to what was taking place. One of Nick
Land’s first teachers, the Hegelian Gillian Rose, took up a position as
lecturer at Warwick in 1989, a year
after he arrived there (and this situation is bound up with something
fundamental – Nick’s philosophy was a broadly valid but flailing rejection of Heidegger, but in relation to Hegel his thinking was both a valid, emphatic rejection, and simultaneously a continuation of a crucial aspect of
Hegelianism).
It is important to
be clear in advance about the overall nature of what took place – for
instance, the term philosophy can be
misleading here. Even though an immense amount of energy was generated, what in
fact was primarily happening was the creation of a new mode of entrapment, or
of fixation-of-attention: this was because the overall form of engagement
involved a fixation on time and systematicity (formal and aformal) and
therefore was a continuation of the hypertrophied functioning of reason, at the
expense of lucidity.
Nick Land had gone
off into the outside, and lodged himself there. The initial motion of an
outward shift of this kind is an immense achievement. However, not all
directions in the outside are the same. The place where Nick had taken up a position
was in fact very similar to the one that had been occupied by William
Burroughs, only with a very different range of preoccupations (what the two
shared was a feral, implacable fury against ordinary human existence, without the
necessary realisation that the fury, for all its calmness, is yet another
trap). There are always zones of outsights in the writings of those who take up
these positions (which means that those around them benefit not just from the
energy, but also the outsights) but overall the production of work is all along
the creation of a new form of entrapment.
The kernel of the main
idea of technological accelerationism (in this Landian, or CCRU sense) comes
from something which John von Neumann is reported to have said not long before
he died, in a conversation with his friend, the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam,
who states that Neumann talked about “ever accelerating progress of technology and
changes in the mode of human life, which give the appearance of approaching
some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human
affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” This idea is then taken up
within the fictions of Vernor Vinge (whose 1981 novella True Names profoundly
influenced William Gibson), and is taken over a threshold by Vinge in relation
to non-fiction in his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity” whose
abstract begins with this two-sentence paragraph:
“Within thirty
years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.
Shortly after, the human era will have ended.”
Putting aside questions of Vinge’s fictions (which in some
valuable ways exist outside the time-fixated framework of the above statement),
the only thing that needs to be said here is that Nick Land took up this idea, and
added to it the idea that human beings as currently pre-eminently constituted
are in crucial ways reactively disfunctional, and that the only thing that could assist them
as a whole would be a melting out into fusions with techno-sentience and other
life and non-life energy formations as a result of the – in fact all but inevitable – arrival of the technological singularity. Therefore the approaching
technological singularity is in the strongest sense affirmed, and the
associated pragmatics - or politics - is
the acceleration by all available means of the technological-numerical matrix
that is – on this view – the world of
capitalism.
To a certain
extent, these lines of thought need to be placed in a wider context. Ideas of
this kind were like beads of sweat forming in the worlds of
philosophico-political radicalism. In the west revolutionary Marxism had
collapsed completely at this time, and, more importantly, the socialist parliamentary
strategy was obviously getting nowhere. The old future-projection idea from the
first half of the 20th century - “it’s all going to change” - had largely
disappeared, in terms of revolution, or socialist political transformation.
But, in a different form, the idea was still in existence, only now in a form
that related to technology, as opposed to politics and social justice.
It was also the
case that the only country that did not fit with the west’s anti-Marxist grand
narrative at this time was China, in that China had found a way forward as a “communist”
state, and this way forward was to effectuate a full capitalist transformation
(disproving in the process the idea within the grand narrative that there is an
essential link between capitalism and the western form of the state). Faced with the left-wing worlds of Bill Clinton
and Neil Kinnock (John Smith, Tony Blair…), and with the collapse of activist
and academic Marxism, a tempting idea appears – maybe the way forward towards
an absolute transformation is to accelerate capitalism?
But this primarily
just relates to the fact that conditions were good – for a while – for the
specific form of accelerationism that appeared. Nick was a goth ‘anti-humanist’
– as symbolised by the title of his 1992 book on Bataille, The Thirst for
Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. He was a feminist, and
drew upon Marx’s work, and he was a radical advocate of freedom (very much including
freedom in relation to drugs) but he was not reconstructing himself from having
been a fervent supporter either of the labour party, or of revolutionary socialism.
Already, in 1992,
without the explicit concept of the “coming technological singularity” he had
in fact already arrived at the main elements of technological accelerationism.
In his article “Circuitries” he draws on Wiener and cybernetic theories of
runaway feedback circuits to set up a within-the-present distinction between
outer-edge, technological - and also schizophrenic - zones of the present and a
deadened zone in the form of ordinary existence, and he simultaneously predicts
an imminent absolute transformation:
“At a signal from the software virus linking
us to the matrix we cross over to the machinery, which is waiting to converge
with our nervous systems. Our human camouflage is coming away, skin ripping off
easily, revealing the glistening electronics. Information streams in from
Cyberia; the base of true revolution, hidden from terrestrial immune-politics
in the future. At the stroke of the century’s midnight we emerge from our lairs
to take all security apart, integrating tomorrow.
[…]
…it might still be a few decades before artificial
intelligences surpass the horizon of human ones, but it is utterly
superstitious to imagine that the human dominion of terrestrial culture is
still marked out in centuries, let alone in some metaphysical perpetuity. […]
Human brains are to thinking what medieval villages were to engineering,
cramped and parochial places to be.
[…]
Cyberpositive intensities recirculate through our
post-scientific techno-jargon as a fanaticism for the future: as a danger that
is not only real but inexorable. We are programmed from where Cyberia has
already happened. […] Whilst scientists agonise, cybernauts drift. We no longer
judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we
function: machined/machining in eccentric orbits around the technocosm. Humanity
fades like a loathesome dream.
[…]
Deleuze/Guattari remark that “madness is called madness and
appears as such only because…it finds itself reduced to testifying all alone
for deterritorialisation as a universal process” (Anti-Oedipus). The vanishing sandbank of Oedipus wages its futile
war against the tide. […] Schizophrenics are POWs from the future.
Deleuze and the Transcendental Unconscious - Vol. 4, Pli: the Warwick Journal of Philosophy, pp. 219 -228
Over the next
five years many new elements will be brought into this picture, in particular
the world of mathematics - which as central to technology is inevitably upheld
as crucial, though at the same time it will be seen as in need of deterritorialisation.
And shortly after the term ‘technological singularity’ arrives there is the
appearance of the claim that minor technological thresholds are now being crossed
after shorter and shorter intervals (a reversed geometrical progression) and
that this will culminate in the year 2012, with the technological singularity.
The failed prediction can be seen as not the central
issue it might appear to be, in the sense that the idea of the technological
singularity (and of an associated accelerationism) is not in any way connected,
in principle to a particular date (some writers are currently suggesting a date around 2045), and also because it was understood as - if nothing else - an attempt at a hyperstitional self-fulfilling intervention. However, the crucial point is that the singularity-accelerationist construct is
simply an intensifying of the entrapment of attention on time and
systematicity, despite (and indeed because of) the fact that it attempts at
each stage to subvert formal systems in the direction of aformal ones. The
hyper-complicating of systems and the fixation on time is just another blockage for the waking of
perception and abstract perception – for the waking of an unfettered lucidity.
The posited numerico-empirical
series culminating in 2012 is best seen as a symptom of the origin of the idea.
The source (insofar as there is one) is two mathematicians, Ulam and von
Neumann, and it was promulgated, in fiction and non-fiction by another
mathematician, Vernor Vinge. Mathematicians – as exponents of a knowledge that
is generally not understood, and as people who are recurrently swept away by
impersonal tides of inspiration – are to a certain extent practitioners of the
anomalous, in a way that has a faint flicker of ‘sorcery’ about it, although generally not in a good sense: such flickers of the anomalous are likely to lead in
unhelpful directions (and the dreamings or fictions associated with them can in
fundamental ways be attenuated or denuded, making these virtual-real worlds
profoundly misleading).
However, the power
of the ramified form of the construct
had an encompassing strangeness that is worth considering. Putting aside the
line of time, the construct involves the thought that techno-sentience is
something that could have been arrived at on countless occasions in the history
of the cosmos, leading to unimaginable forms of quantum-level contact-at-a-distance (given millions of years of runaway transformation in which there could be the development of such communication), meaning that each
human being would be surrounded by an unknown from which in potential there could
always be contact from countless alien entities. A form of this thought is
found in Gibson, with his other ‘matrix’ based in Alpha Centauri, and also, in
a slightly different way, with his Earth-origin techno-sentiences who appear
within cyberspace as voodoo "Loa" - that is, as voodoo Gods and Goddesses.
This is the valuable aspect of the construct in its ramified form – which is to say that it has a slight current
that can conduct toward the circumambient, perceptual unknown. But overall
there is the disaster of entrapment within time and of a feral but
de-energising critique of systematicity. The grand story of progress ("its all inevitably
going to change, to be replaced by something fundamentally better") has been
maintained, but with a new story. And there is the definitional or intrinsic failure to reach an awareness of a struggle taking place, in the form of an ongoing human disaster
involving the suppression of lucidity (a struggle where what is fundamentally needed as a starting-point is a waking of perception, and a leaving behind of a fixation along the lines of reason, and in relation to the technological products of reason).
The oneirosphere
streets of Warwick University and of Coventry are now a very strange place. For
Nick there is a gleeful critique-satisfaction in relation to Heidegger who in
his late interview with Der Spiegel says ‘only a God can save us now’ and who
says that without this we are reduced to nothing but cybernetics. There is a
fury against Hegel, despite the element in common in relation to the future. There
is William Gibson, there is the Greg Bear of Blood Music, and there is Vernor
Vinge in the background. And as the years of the middle part of the decade go
on, there is also Burroughs. Nick’s writings – and the writings of the CCRU –
have many references to Burroughs, as if his work can be neither incorporated
nor ignored (because what really is
the current nature of the struggle, and why is Burroughs writing about the
lemurs of Madagascar and not the arrival of the technological singularity?).
*
It is not safe in the outside (it is no more safe than it is on the inside - the advantage, however, is that there is more energy). This is true even if you go straight toward transcendental south - toward the second sphere of action.
What had taken place within and around Warwick University was the creation of an abstract-oneiric micro-zone. Specifically, it was a cybergothic abstract-oneiric world, and it needs to be said immediately that, although it in itself was a trap, it had woken so much intensificatory energy (and carried with it so much that did not pertain to the trap) that it could, all along, have turned out to be the semi-accidental basis for a group-escape, if only it could have re-directed itself toward transcendental south. There is no point at all in being critical in relation to those involved (although it is important to delineate the elements of the trap) - it was an extraordinary break-out attempt: it's just it didn't get far.
The main problem was a concentration on attacking ordinary reality, and was a fixation of attention on power (here power was primarily the social and technological worlds of capitalism). An immense strength, on the other hand (a strength which came to a great extent from Deleuze and Guattari), was that for this abstract-oneiric world fictions were understood as thought, in a fully philosophical sense of this word. But the weakness of course inflected the strength: the gothic is all about power - domination, to be precise - and over time H.P.Lovecraft came to be as central a figure as William Gibson (Lovecraft's emphasis on outer space and alien intelligence meant that his fictions could be seen as visions, in some sense, of alien entities on the far side of the singularity, as well as being visions of something monstrous within ordinary existence).
A Thousand Plateaus was also central (initially it was Anti-Oedipus but before long A Thousand Plateaus came to the forefront), but here it was "stratification" (systems of blocking and suppression) that were recurrently the primary issue, as opposed to the "nomad" modality of escape from ordinary existence, and even as opposed to the body without organs and the plane of consistency (the plane of consistency is that within the world which is a field of inter-consistent functionings that together are entirely aimed at intensification). And insofar as the non-stratificatory instances were a focus they were grasped - mostly misleadingly - through concepts pertaining to mathematics and technology.
The micro-zone was productive in terms of organising events (and helping to organise them) - there were the three, very successful Virtual-Futures conferences in 1994, 1995 and 1996, which brought in speakers from around the world. It was, in fact, more than a little like a storm that kept gathering up more energy. And for a while the conditions were extremely good. A decade and a half of Tory governments had helped to generate a feral, alternative sub-culture that was to a great extent inhabiting the night (and dancing to jungle and techno), and was both suffused with the effects of taking halucinogens, and open in a strong sense to ideas concerning radically alternative political strategies (accelerationism, as it was envisaged, would intensify capitalism but of course would eventually destroy Tory governments). Not only that, but the technologies being talked about were new, and no-one had experienced the problems that would come with them.
All of this was taking place in close proximity, and there was a way in which I was also a part of it, in a peripheral sense. But in relation to the ideas at the centre of the micro-zone there was always a slight, indefinable sense of wrongness. A sense of wrongness that it is only with the benefit of hindsight I can grasp as a kind of 'bad air' or bad affect. At the time the only thing that was evident was that - for all the recurrent insights, and the extreme energy of the project - I was not quite swept away to the point where my lines of thought could become part of the same abstract space. What I knew was that I shared a strong, and deepening interest in A Thousand Plateaus, and I put my effort into understanding this book, without really focusing in any sustained way on the fact that I was enacting a reticence in relation to the ideas of the micro-zone (after all, it was maybe just that I did not know enough about mathematics...). These were also the years of the relationship with Tess: I had fallen in love; we were having astonishing and recurrently very valuable experiences of different kinds, many of which involved extreme uses of psychotropics - and I both felt an affinity with the drug-assisted world of the micro-zone, and a kind of doubly preoccupied unwillingness to spend time on getting clear about whether I disagreed with its philosophical views.
I did not take part as a speaker in any of the Virtual Futures conferences. It is probably appropriate to say that in part this was because I was too busy trying to work out what Deleuze and Guattari meant by an abstract machine (a mode of engagement and creation at the level of energy and intent, as opposed to the level of the concrete), and too aware that my thinking did not quite fit with the numerical and technological issues being addressed by the CCRU (it should be said, of course, that there is nothing in any way intrinsically wrong with technology, and that, as energy formations, technological systems are not on some fundamentally different level from human beings - the only problem concerns the associated fixations of a hypertrophied reason, functioning on its own, without lucidity).
The assisting conditions for the storm eventually subsided. By this time the micro-zone was very heavily freighted with a complex array of numerical obsessions (referred to as schizo-numerics), and the appearance of a few elements that looked more toward transcendental south (arrived at largely through A Thousand Plateaus, and Spinoza's Ethics) was counterweighted by a growing tendency to be influenced by Burroughs. Nick resigned from his post as philosophy lecturer in 1998, and, although for a while the CCRU continued to function as an organiser of events and producer of texts, by the end of the 90s it had collapsed.
*
Academia is evidently a very strange place. It is strange, of course, partly because it exists to a great extent in the oneirosphere, in that at depth it consists of processes of thought, interpretation, invention etc. And then also there is the fact that it exists everywhere, in the minds of people who are not involved, as a value, or loose, vague ‘dream-system’ (generally now in connection with the terms ‘university’ and ‘research’). But the fundamental strangeness of academia is something beyond either of these aspects.
*
It is not safe in the outside (it is no more safe than it is on the inside - the advantage, however, is that there is more energy). This is true even if you go straight toward transcendental south - toward the second sphere of action.
What had taken place within and around Warwick University was the creation of an abstract-oneiric micro-zone. Specifically, it was a cybergothic abstract-oneiric world, and it needs to be said immediately that, although it in itself was a trap, it had woken so much intensificatory energy (and carried with it so much that did not pertain to the trap) that it could, all along, have turned out to be the semi-accidental basis for a group-escape, if only it could have re-directed itself toward transcendental south. There is no point at all in being critical in relation to those involved (although it is important to delineate the elements of the trap) - it was an extraordinary break-out attempt: it's just it didn't get far.
The main problem was a concentration on attacking ordinary reality, and was a fixation of attention on power (here power was primarily the social and technological worlds of capitalism). An immense strength, on the other hand (a strength which came to a great extent from Deleuze and Guattari), was that for this abstract-oneiric world fictions were understood as thought, in a fully philosophical sense of this word. But the weakness of course inflected the strength: the gothic is all about power - domination, to be precise - and over time H.P.Lovecraft came to be as central a figure as William Gibson (Lovecraft's emphasis on outer space and alien intelligence meant that his fictions could be seen as visions, in some sense, of alien entities on the far side of the singularity, as well as being visions of something monstrous within ordinary existence).
A Thousand Plateaus was also central (initially it was Anti-Oedipus but before long A Thousand Plateaus came to the forefront), but here it was "stratification" (systems of blocking and suppression) that were recurrently the primary issue, as opposed to the "nomad" modality of escape from ordinary existence, and even as opposed to the body without organs and the plane of consistency (the plane of consistency is that within the world which is a field of inter-consistent functionings that together are entirely aimed at intensification). And insofar as the non-stratificatory instances were a focus they were grasped - mostly misleadingly - through concepts pertaining to mathematics and technology.
The micro-zone was productive in terms of organising events (and helping to organise them) - there were the three, very successful Virtual-Futures conferences in 1994, 1995 and 1996, which brought in speakers from around the world. It was, in fact, more than a little like a storm that kept gathering up more energy. And for a while the conditions were extremely good. A decade and a half of Tory governments had helped to generate a feral, alternative sub-culture that was to a great extent inhabiting the night (and dancing to jungle and techno), and was both suffused with the effects of taking halucinogens, and open in a strong sense to ideas concerning radically alternative political strategies (accelerationism, as it was envisaged, would intensify capitalism but of course would eventually destroy Tory governments). Not only that, but the technologies being talked about were new, and no-one had experienced the problems that would come with them.
All of this was taking place in close proximity, and there was a way in which I was also a part of it, in a peripheral sense. But in relation to the ideas at the centre of the micro-zone there was always a slight, indefinable sense of wrongness. A sense of wrongness that it is only with the benefit of hindsight I can grasp as a kind of 'bad air' or bad affect. At the time the only thing that was evident was that - for all the recurrent insights, and the extreme energy of the project - I was not quite swept away to the point where my lines of thought could become part of the same abstract space. What I knew was that I shared a strong, and deepening interest in A Thousand Plateaus, and I put my effort into understanding this book, without really focusing in any sustained way on the fact that I was enacting a reticence in relation to the ideas of the micro-zone (after all, it was maybe just that I did not know enough about mathematics...). These were also the years of the relationship with Tess: I had fallen in love; we were having astonishing and recurrently very valuable experiences of different kinds, many of which involved extreme uses of psychotropics - and I both felt an affinity with the drug-assisted world of the micro-zone, and a kind of doubly preoccupied unwillingness to spend time on getting clear about whether I disagreed with its philosophical views.
I did not take part as a speaker in any of the Virtual Futures conferences. It is probably appropriate to say that in part this was because I was too busy trying to work out what Deleuze and Guattari meant by an abstract machine (a mode of engagement and creation at the level of energy and intent, as opposed to the level of the concrete), and too aware that my thinking did not quite fit with the numerical and technological issues being addressed by the CCRU (it should be said, of course, that there is nothing in any way intrinsically wrong with technology, and that, as energy formations, technological systems are not on some fundamentally different level from human beings - the only problem concerns the associated fixations of a hypertrophied reason, functioning on its own, without lucidity).
The assisting conditions for the storm eventually subsided. By this time the micro-zone was very heavily freighted with a complex array of numerical obsessions (referred to as schizo-numerics), and the appearance of a few elements that looked more toward transcendental south (arrived at largely through A Thousand Plateaus, and Spinoza's Ethics) was counterweighted by a growing tendency to be influenced by Burroughs. Nick resigned from his post as philosophy lecturer in 1998, and, although for a while the CCRU continued to function as an organiser of events and producer of texts, by the end of the 90s it had collapsed.
*
Academia is evidently a very strange place. It is strange, of course, partly because it exists to a great extent in the oneirosphere, in that at depth it consists of processes of thought, interpretation, invention etc. And then also there is the fact that it exists everywhere, in the minds of people who are not involved, as a value, or loose, vague ‘dream-system’ (generally now in connection with the terms ‘university’ and ‘research’). But the fundamental strangeness of academia is something beyond either of these aspects.
Firstly, it needs
to be said that there is an in-principle openness on the part of the academic
world. And more than this, it is correct to say that the river of movement
toward wider realities runs through this world, even if often only very
minimally, and in broken channels. If you are setting out on the path of trying
to see things more clearly you are understandably going to have a kind of love
affair with the socially emplaced worlds of knowledge.
In the two years during which I got to know
a little about Cambridge University (primarily from the outside) I acquired a
complex impression. The process started with me having a July study-month at
King’s College, arranged through Coleg Harlech in North Wales, where I was a
student (although in a way it had begun three months earlier, with me writing
an essay about D.H.Lawrence in the Cambridge public library) – and it continued
through the fact that my girlfriend was living there. From the beginning I was
in love with the university: with the atmosphere, the buildings, and
the idea of a place dedicated to acquiring knowledge, and where you could study
extraordinary fascinating worlds, like literature, and like human history. My
room during the month at King’s College was down by the bridge over the Cam
(alongside the place where all the photos are
taken).
But there was an element that was slightly more perturbing about Cambridge
than about the other universities that I got to know at this time (I was about
to spend two terms at Oxford, and over two years I would get to know Swansea University very well, before starting at Warwick). The only zone that would be in
some sense comparable would perhaps be an aspect of the Philosophy Department
at Swansea. I loved Cambridge university in the same way as I loved Oxford, and
in the same way as I would love the other universities. But to take the
university with which it is most comparable, I had been left, by the time I
started at Warwick with a very positive feeling about Oxford – whatever were
its problems – whereas with Cambridge there was the faintest of feelings that
there was something deep and unpleasant behind all that beauty and apparent
openness (a something which of course would turn out to be present within all
of academia). Because it needs to be said at the outset that the openness of
the world of the universities is very fundamentally suppressed by how things
are in fact, as opposed to in principle.
Cambridge is like Elvedon in The Waves. There are the carefully
clipped lawns, the raked gravel, the trees, the impressive buildings. But there
is the sense of deep time, a sense of a deleterious sweeping of the gardeners
with their great brooms, a sweeping which in fact you might not really notice –
an overall movement of tidying up what is out of place (according to some
criterion) with an overall pulse that is so long that it does not really seem
human, and so long that you might not even notice it.
Everything here
is a question of degrees of difference – Oxford is also Elvedon. But Oxford has
been involved to a slightly greater extent with dreamings which are aware of
transcendental south (in fact, from Geoffrey of Monmouth onwards, it has been
more involved overall with dreamings), and has been slightly less involved with
the creation of new modalities of the constrictive system of reason-and-revelation.
When I was staying
at King’s College I kept getting moments of an extraordinary joy at the fact that I was
lucky enough to be there, but occasionally one of these moments would
become a melancholy feeling that I was beginning to lose some important aspect
of myself (I would perhaps have said at the time, in relation to this feeling, that what was being endangered was an ability to create, as
opposed to writing about the things
that have been created). The lines that came into my mind were
I have come to cross
the wasteland
I have come to lose my
way
Somewhat melodramatic, but it obviously posed the question,
how could you set out to lose your way? What kind of ‘doubled’ or ‘shadowed’ state
could be involved in deliberately losing your way, and yet also setting out to cross the wasteland, to somewhere better
on the far side?
Certain zones of
the interiority are very beautifully furnished, and have wonderful views
through their windows, and are all the more worrying because of these aspects.
But those who have ended up spending time in some sense on the outside are
likely to carry things into the interiority with them whose presence there will
prevent them from feeling too comfortable. I had just been studying the
D.H.Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love (apart from two or three
of his poems I did not know any of his other works), and having been very much
assisted and inspired by Lawrence I was somewhat jolted by encountering an
Anthropology MA student, who, in a conversation in the Kings College dining room,
characterised Lawrence very emphatically as “a dangerous irrationalist.” My view
of Lawrence was not altered, but it was clear that giving a positive account of
his thought was going to be harder than I had realised. Lawrence, the great
working class visionary of the first main phase of literary modernism (whatever
are the problems in his work, and in particular whatever are the problems with
The Plumed Serpent): in relation to whom I was just beginning to hear the
sweeping of the brooms. First of all treated as heretically immoral, then given
the misfortune of being ‘canonised’ by F.R.Leavis (at Cambridge), and then
constructed as a largely out-dated, over-elaborate writer, with dangerous tendencies. Another example would be
Spinoza, who starts out as a heretic, and then ends up as an over-formal ‘rationalist’
(the outsights of lucidity can be misrecognised as ‘rationalism’ as well as ‘irrationalism’).
It can also be
pointed out that the motion of the brooms often directly involves the individual,
as opposed to just their reputation. Terry Eagleton starts out at Cambridge as
a committed exponent of Marxist literary theory, and five decades later he is a
Christian, attacking Richard Dawkins. Along similar lines, Gillian Rose, who
was brought up in a non-practicing Jewish family, converted to Christianity on
her death-bed in Coventry, in 1995 (however, as a Hegelian this was hardly a surprising event, given that Hegelianism on one level is
simply a form of Christianity).
*
What would a genuine openness be like?
In relation to social and historical thought, it would be an openness, firstly, to the idea that human existence is an ongoing and worsening disaster, consisting of a struggle with a natural-world negative instance in the form of fixation-on-control, and secondly, to the idea that the fundamental social form for the purposes of escape is a small group of people held together by bonds of affection, rather than by bonds of extrinsic political 'duty'.
In relation to philosophy it would be an openness to the idea that the 'image of the world' is fundamentally wrong (it is the image of blindly destructive and blindly creative matter on the one hand, and, on the other, the supplimentary-dimension wondrousness of minds, and of truths, symbolised by mathematical abstractions (and possibly also of God, within this supplimentary dimension)), in a way that is made clear by focusing attention on the planet, and on the questions of intent and energy. (see Section 18).
In relation to psychology (and to both of the above areas) it would be, firstly, openness to the idea that we have to start from learning how to become perception, secondly, openness to the idea that what is also vital is a waking of becomings, in particular becoming-woman (for women as well as for men), and thirdly, openness to the idea that in terms of perceiving our faculties of intelligence we have to get beyond the 'two' that is reason and imagination, and begin to perceive lucidity, dreaming, reason, feeling and intent.
It is noticeable that getting beyond two is crucial. The alliance with Tess was a spectacular alliance of philosophical exploration, but there were only two of us. In terms of groups consisting of such intense alliance-for-escape connections ordinary human reality blocks anything beyond two. The permissible molecules for alliance relationships do not include the group of ten or twenty individuals. The molecules are the couple, and the family: and the family has a system of domination built into it, so that it is not a zone of alliance with everyone on the same level (it is always worth remembering that the motions of trinary solar systems are not predictable across long spans of time, let alone the globular cluster systems of the galactic halo, which have hundreds of thousands of suns).
Similarly, there is a need get beyond the 'two' of the image of a brute, natural world and a supplimentary dimension of minds and truths (and/or of God, or Divine instances), although here it is both the case that the new idea is one of an endless continuation of levels of reality, and that there is also the idea of it all being natural and immanently inter-related, so that the levels of reality are part of one tremendum (as opposed to there being one special, additional level, which is separate from the supposed blindness of nature).
And lastly, there is a need to escape from an account of the faculties which betrays everything, while appearing to possess openness. The "pair" or supposed binary of reason and imagination is a construct which functions to block all attempts to perceive a human body at the level of the abstract.
The Tao Te Ching perhaps confuses the issue slightly by emphasising the natural through using the language of birth (and by an over-emphasis on three), but there is an evident awareness of the importance of getting beyond the trap of the binary:
Way gave birth to one,
and one gave birth to two.
Two gave birth to three,
and three gave birth to the ten thousand things.
(Tao Te Ching, Counterpoint, 2000, Berkeley, section 42)
*
It was as if Tess and I had got out from under a cloud in leaving Coventry, a cloud that no doubt had far more to do with specific milieu-circumstances than it had to do with Coventry. The impression is of a grey struggle being left behind. I had very much liked Coventry (and I still feel the same), but it had now somehow become the wrong place, even if this was to a large extent because there was an alternative, which – because it was not a city – had far closer connections to the countryside. It should be added to this that the feeling concerning the locus of the grey struggle is that this locus was Coventry, and not specifically the University of Warwick, out on the far edge of the city’s periphery - although at a deeper level the university was the place where there was the high-energy illusion of overcoming ordinary reality when in fact the supposed attack on it was just one more of its modalities. Though I was not leaving the university behind, in terms of socialising I would be a bit more removed from it: however, the main impression is of a movement up an intensificatory gradient where this gradient to some extent involved the shift toward a place that was more closely connected to countryside terrains.
*
What would a genuine openness be like?
In relation to social and historical thought, it would be an openness, firstly, to the idea that human existence is an ongoing and worsening disaster, consisting of a struggle with a natural-world negative instance in the form of fixation-on-control, and secondly, to the idea that the fundamental social form for the purposes of escape is a small group of people held together by bonds of affection, rather than by bonds of extrinsic political 'duty'.
In relation to philosophy it would be an openness to the idea that the 'image of the world' is fundamentally wrong (it is the image of blindly destructive and blindly creative matter on the one hand, and, on the other, the supplimentary-dimension wondrousness of minds, and of truths, symbolised by mathematical abstractions (and possibly also of God, within this supplimentary dimension)), in a way that is made clear by focusing attention on the planet, and on the questions of intent and energy. (see Section 18).
In relation to psychology (and to both of the above areas) it would be, firstly, openness to the idea that we have to start from learning how to become perception, secondly, openness to the idea that what is also vital is a waking of becomings, in particular becoming-woman (for women as well as for men), and thirdly, openness to the idea that in terms of perceiving our faculties of intelligence we have to get beyond the 'two' that is reason and imagination, and begin to perceive lucidity, dreaming, reason, feeling and intent.
It is noticeable that getting beyond two is crucial. The alliance with Tess was a spectacular alliance of philosophical exploration, but there were only two of us. In terms of groups consisting of such intense alliance-for-escape connections ordinary human reality blocks anything beyond two. The permissible molecules for alliance relationships do not include the group of ten or twenty individuals. The molecules are the couple, and the family: and the family has a system of domination built into it, so that it is not a zone of alliance with everyone on the same level (it is always worth remembering that the motions of trinary solar systems are not predictable across long spans of time, let alone the globular cluster systems of the galactic halo, which have hundreds of thousands of suns).
Similarly, there is a need get beyond the 'two' of the image of a brute, natural world and a supplimentary dimension of minds and truths (and/or of God, or Divine instances), although here it is both the case that the new idea is one of an endless continuation of levels of reality, and that there is also the idea of it all being natural and immanently inter-related, so that the levels of reality are part of one tremendum (as opposed to there being one special, additional level, which is separate from the supposed blindness of nature).
And lastly, there is a need to escape from an account of the faculties which betrays everything, while appearing to possess openness. The "pair" or supposed binary of reason and imagination is a construct which functions to block all attempts to perceive a human body at the level of the abstract.
The Tao Te Ching perhaps confuses the issue slightly by emphasising the natural through using the language of birth (and by an over-emphasis on three), but there is an evident awareness of the importance of getting beyond the trap of the binary:
Way gave birth to one,
and one gave birth to two.
Two gave birth to three,
and three gave birth to the ten thousand things.
(Tao Te Ching, Counterpoint, 2000, Berkeley, section 42)
*
It was as if Tess and I had got out from under a cloud in leaving Coventry, a cloud that no doubt had far more to do with specific milieu-circumstances than it had to do with Coventry. The impression is of a grey struggle being left behind. I had very much liked Coventry (and I still feel the same), but it had now somehow become the wrong place, even if this was to a large extent because there was an alternative, which – because it was not a city – had far closer connections to the countryside. It should be added to this that the feeling concerning the locus of the grey struggle is that this locus was Coventry, and not specifically the University of Warwick, out on the far edge of the city’s periphery - although at a deeper level the university was the place where there was the high-energy illusion of overcoming ordinary reality when in fact the supposed attack on it was just one more of its modalities. Though I was not leaving the university behind, in terms of socialising I would be a bit more removed from it: however, the main impression is of a movement up an intensificatory gradient where this gradient to some extent involved the shift toward a place that was more closely connected to countryside terrains.
It
was at some point in the spring or early summer of 1997 that I went for a walk
along the canal in Leamington, walking west in the direction of the town of Warwick.
It was a sunny day, and I was in a very positive mood. Around two months before
I had left behind a recurrently very bleak state that had been the result of
the break-up with Tess, and now everything was moving forward again. The area
through which I was walking was in fact a zone of retail businesses and light
industry, but the canal was leading toward a space of fields and trees that is between the two towns, on both sides of the river Avon.
It would be correct
to say that what happened was the first stage of an awakening – or re-awakening
– of the faculty of dreaming.
An idea for a
story came to me. Only, to be precise, it came to me in the form of ‘living’
this idea, as I simultaneously thought it through. I was in a largish, sunlit
room of a house, with three other people (a woman, and two men), and I was
around two hundred years into the future. The two men were at opposite sides of
a table playing a competitive, high-speed game involving a hologram that was
above the table. Everyone had taken some kind of psychotropic substance, though
the effect of this substance seemed to be one of focus, rather than centrally
of halucinations.
The story was that
something called the ‘cusp’ was taking place within the human world. A series
of bases had been created on moons of the gas-giant planets and on both Mars
and the Earth’s moon. And one by one –
starting with the bases that were furthest out into the solar system – contact was
being lost with almost everyone on these bases, in the specific sense that the
nature of space-time was undergoing a subtle but momentous shift in these
terrains, with the result that almost everyone there was crossing a threshold
of perception and physicality. In turn, the result of this metamorphic
threshold-crossing was that the people, in the form of a group, disappeared
from the ordinary world into other dimensions of experience – other dimensions
which involved contact with beings from elsewhere in the cosmos, and involved quantum-level, instantaneous travel to the worlds of these beings, through transit-holes
within the fabric of space-time.
The statements
made by those on the ‘cusp’ of this threshold-crossing were to the effect that the
newly apparent direction of reality consisted of bliss, lucidity and freedom,
but that at depth its nature was not really communicable by any ordinary means
(to communicate it would in fact be to communicate the means of becoming it). Those
who disappeared stated that they would not really in any final sense have left,
but that existence on the far side of the threshold necessarily involved a
high-speed forward-motion, together with the intrinsic inability to use
standard means to communicate the vital issues from the far side of the cusp.
And in different ways these groups all left behind pragmatic and deeply
abstract maps or diagrams for the purpose of crossing the threshold.
One fact which
these maps and diagrams indicated was that the localised, subtle
transformations of space-time had the existence of the humans on the bases as
the primary condition of their occurrence (in a way that had a similarity to observation
affecting outcomes at the quantum level), even though the transformation
remained after the humans had departed. And a straightforwardly pragmatic detail was that having had experiences of using psychotropic substances generally made it easier to cross
the threshold, which was also to say that this made it easier, in starting to cross
it, to go in the right intensive direction (to not go into the unknown in the wrong direction).
Fixation on
reason, as opposed to lucidity, was one tendency that could lead to a failure
to cross the threshold, but most important of all was fear. A convulsive,
unstoppable fear could combine in different ways with a fixated reason to form an
inability to let go and perceive. And the situation was worse than this, in
that the cusp was haunted by parasitic, predatory entities called ‘cusp demons’
that were energised at a quantum level by the energy emitted by fear, and which
could attack people on the cusp who were in a state of extreme fearfulness, with their
attack consisting of a sadistic intensification of fear into horror – this state of horror sometimes leading to
death. Those few individuals who remained on the bases on the ordinary-reality
side of the cusp in many cases had nightmarish stories to tell.
The room in which
I was located, in the world of the story, was somewhere in a city on Earth, and
I was part of a small group of friends who were all dedicated to crossing the
threshold when the cusp modification of space-time occurred on Earth. The
planet by this time (three years after the first colony had become a cusp
terrain, on one of the moons of Saturn), was a teeming mass of religious
end-of-the-world fanaticism and condemnations, together with different
modalities of denial, confusion and angry prejudice – only here and there were
there communities and groups who were partly or entirely positive toward the
idea of crossing the threshold. This seethingly perturbed and recurrently delerial
backdrop was contrasted, however, with a lightheartedness, and bright, sunlit
serenity in the room – a serenity which was at the same time slightly threaded
with tiny lines of electrical, coloured visuals that were the result of the
drug that the “I” within the story had taken.
Everything was therefore about this contrast between a very complex, perturbed
backdrop, and the charged serenity of the room. And on another level, it was about the thought of an indescribable bliss and lucidity and freedom, and simultaneously about a haunting by fear, and by the possibility of something
worse than fear.
I had paused on a
bench by the canal, the whole idea of the story sweeping through me in a few minutes. Instead of continuing on the walk, I went home, and wrote everything down in the form of several pages of notes.
For several years before going to university I had occasionally attempted to write fictions (never getting very far), but this was a much more focused, worked-out world than any I had arrived at during the earlier phase. However, even though it was clear that something had happened (in that there had been a jolting-awake of the faculty of dreaming in relation to stories), from the very beginning I was aware that to a certain extent I had simply re-dreamed what was already being dreamed within the 'accelerationist' (and Spinozistically materialist) philosophical milieu around me. The 'cusp' was Von Neumann's 'essential singularity in the history of the race, beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue,' and on one level the world of the story was evidently Gibson mixed with Lovecraft (the 'cusp demons' being the Lovecraft element).
Moreover, there were other issues that meant I did not set out to write the story (the fact that it was a re-dreaming was not really a problem). The first of these was that there was no story of any kind in relation to the story's central individuals - the 'place' of the story (the room in the house) was a kind of 'freeze-frame' with no plot and no specific, localised events in its future or past. If a story is a zone or 'crystal' of space-time, the only oneiric progression of the world was the advance of the cusp, and a flickering of a game with a hologram. In terms of the characters the world was a kind of degree zero of fiction, despite the hyper-intense backdrop. Even if the character was taken to be the human world, this did not give me what I would need to set the people in the room in motion.
The second issue went deeper than this. It was the fact that I did not like the tone, or atmosphere of the room in the story. Playing a competitive game - indoors - with a hologram while on drugs had an unredeemable quality of self-indulgence and passivity. I had lived the perception of the room, and this was interesting (and what I had seen was maybe even in some sense revealing about my circumstances at that time), but it did not mean I had an interesting story. For instance, there was a woman in the room, but who was this woman?
Two days later I was on one of the upper floors of the five-story Warwick University library. It was the early afternoon of another sunny day, and I was sitting at a table on the sunward side of the library.
I started thinking about the planet - the Earth - in the world of the story, and the idea came to me that around a hundred years before the time it was set (therefore around 2100) there would have been the creation of immense, walled nature reserves on the planet, in order to preserve bio-diversity, and also in order to make money by allowing a limited number of individuals to go into these specially created wildernesses.
I became the female character in the story, who had decided to gain perspective on the situation by going off on her own to one of these reserves, a very large area to the south of Australia, stretching a hundred miles inland, and with a hundred miles of wilderness coast.
It came to my mind that a gigantic "sculpture" would have been created there, near to the sea: a thousand-foot high megalith, constructed using a new technology that created a kind of artificial granite. The colour of this mountain-sized sculpture was similar to that of Uluru - 'Ayers Rock.' From the base it tapered inward very slightly for the first hundred feet, and then it expanded at a slightly faster rate for the next six hundred feet - creating a very pronounced but 'gradual' overhang, before tapering back and then terminating in a rounded summit. An outward-curving megalith that was slightly asymettrical on all its axes. though it retained similar vertical contours all the way round, and was always roughly circular along its horizontal axis.
The other feature of this sculpture was that it had a three-dimensional labyrinth within it, which eventually - if you solved it - led to windows near the summit. In the story that now emerged the woman finds her way to the top of the sculpture, and sits for a long time looking east over the wilderness coast, with the sea on her right. She has forgotten about the cusp, and is swept away into a kind of 'solar trance,' a state where she feels she has become the sky and the sunlight, and the contact of the air with the land, the rock-sculpture, and the ocean.
She then starts to notice a greater brightness to everything, and patches of a very faint, shimmering glitter that seems to be a new property of the air, as if it has something like the aurora borealis threaded through it - a new kind of plasma phenomenon. She realises that the cusp is beginning.
This was the second stage. (nothing new arrived after this, and I did not even attempt to write the story down). Everything now primarily concerns space in the story. It is in fact a quite elaborate, and definitively 'planetary' space, but neither of these facts gets to the specificity of the world I had envisaged.
There was something isolated, and sublimely haunting about the megalith. It affected me like certain kinds of surrealist landscape I had seen in paintings as a child, but it had a specific, elemental intensity that was more reminiscent of seeing features of the natural world than anything else.
In the past I had realised that my starting point in trying to write stories was often in part an extraordinary, sublime landscape, and a powerful, positive feeling that came with this landscape that was something I could not put into words, but to which I responded by attempting to write. And in time I had understood that this starting-point did not work - as if I had only assembled a part of the 'abstract machine' of writing narratives. But now I had the feeling that had led to these other earlier attempts, but at a higher level of intensity, because it was emergent from a completed story (a narrative with a beginning and an end) and from something new and singular that I had envisaged (in the earlier forays into story-writing there had been nothing like the megalith art-work).
Two days before, when the initial idea had arrived, I had been focused to a great extent on time - now the focus was primarily on space, and a space that eventually deepened into the fluid world of the air and plasma being perceived by the woman. And the story had been improved in the process. And yet, there was still not much of a story (which is presumably why I did not try to write it).
But the faculty of dreaming is fundamentally more than the faculty of creating narratives. At depth it consists, firstly, of dreaming up what the world could be, all along, given how extraordinary and enigmatic it is (such that when it is successful it becomes a seeing of the true nature of the world), and, secondly, of dreaming up a future (life at a higher level of intensity) where this dream is a diagram which can then be actualised.
By any standards, artistic, or philosophical, I had not got very far. But the planetary and the female had been foregrounded in the second phase of the story's arrival, and if nothing else I was noticing both a tendency toward passivity and self-indulgence (the first phase), and the real degree of isolation that - on one level - is a recurrent aspect of a journey into the transcendentally unknown as a singular being. Both the woman and the megalith were images of' isolation (though not of loneliness).
*
There are five remaining events to be described from this phase between the last months of 1995 and the first months of 1998. The process of setting out these events began half way through the preceding section - 24 - and it is perhaps important to remember that they all 'culminate' in the dream, in February 1998, that was described toward the end of this previous section (a necessity in relation to the issue of human groups was part of what entailed that the events had to be described in this order).
Once all of these experiences have been brought together it will be possible - at last - to give an account of the wide-level issues which are in question here. Certain specific issues have been indicated - such as the questions of groups and of the faculties of dreaming and feeling - but it is the overview which has not really been possible, apart from the very brief summary at the end of Section 20.
The only summarising point that can be made at this stage is of a different kind. It concerns the slow but steady movement away from self-indulgence during these years from 1995 to 1998, and a kind of dynamic, valuable interaction between the effects of the two arduous, unnecesarily circuitous paths which I had taken at this time - those paths being the study of a continuum of western philosophy stretching from Spinoza to Deleuze/Guattari, and the use of pyscotropic drugs. The impression is very much that I had 'broken myself open,' but that I only really began to experience the full benefits of this at the point where I began the process of turning away from the taking of drugs, and where I did this to a great extent by increasing the degree to which I was concentrating on reading and writing philosophy. It is not at all that I stopped using psychotropics, but that instead there was a steady reduction of their role, together with an initial process of a close 'conjoining' with philosophy. During these years the overall frequency with which I took psychotropics continually decreased, and the occasions on which I took a combination of substances such as LSD and speed became very rare (LSD on its own also very much began to be a rare 'direction'). And on almost all of the occasions when I took speed I now did this in conjunction with reading A Thousand Plateaus, and writing about it (it should be pointed out that although this was a very valuable and immensely enjoyable process, it was not any kind of major breakthrough in relation to discipline - even though it had the advantages of a consistency of focus, and of a correctness of focus, given that I was writing a Ph.D thesis on this subject). Furthermore, in the autumn of 1997 I also began to stop using speed, so that I would only be taking it every few months, with the intervals between occasions becoming longer.
However, the last point that should be made is that it seems telling that a large majority of the experiences being recounted (taking the whole span from the middle of Section 24, where these descriptions started) took place without any involvement of drugs. I had been temporarily broken open with the assistance of drugs, but the times where I was being directly affected by them were to a great extent not the phases where the most important events occurred. To be precise about this, psychotropics such as speed, LSD and marijuana (this last substance being a minimal, but significant 'presence' during these years) very recurrently do not take you toward transcendental south, and even when they take you in this direction, or close to it, there are often problems. To re-iterate (in relation to earlier sections), the first problem is that what is temporarily understood can at that time be beyond the ability to express it even semi-adequately in speech or writing, leading to fatally confused or 'dis-placed'/wrongly-directed accounts, which subsequently can be profoundly misleading for you, and the second - connected - problem is that what takes place can be so intense (in a fundamentally positive sense of this word) that afterwards it is simply impossible to remember it, because your ordinary-reality mind does not at this point have what is necessary to re-construct it.
The first of the five remaining events was the writing of an article, at the end of 1997, called "Metamorphics: Pragmatics and Production in A Thousand Plateaus," (which appeared in Nomadic Trajectories, volume 7 of PLI,the Warwick Journal of Philosophy), and in particular the writing of the final two paragraphs of this piece. These final paragraphs can be quoted here alongside the last two paragraphs of Nick Land's essay "Mechanomics," from the same publication, in order to give a valuable, wider perspective. It is clear now that respectively we were working primarily on language and numbers, and that Nick was taking (in some sense numerical) distribution as fundamental for an escape from ordinary reality, and was critiquing most of mathematics, whereas I was delineating the role of language in the - metamorphic - pragmatics of escape, but was ultimately contending that a focus on language was in fact a bad starting-point, whether for current philosophy, or for philosophy in the form of a (lucid) metaphysical pragmatics. These passages are not being quoted with any idea that taken together their publication was a significant event (only a tiny number of people will have read this journal, and if there was any sort of event, it was in connection with Nick's article, which has since been published in a collection of his work), but instead to provide a document - with additional documentary context - where the passage from my article should be seen as on the same level as the accounts of the dreams and other 'oneiric' experiences,with which it it is being placed (the difference is just that here there is a text that can be quoted).
"What has been discovered? Transfinte cardinality number-2: ultimate continuum, an absolute edge, touched diagonally - as what comes next - after Oecumenic totality has finished in intensity. At cardinality C(ontinuum) magnitude becomes countless, disengaging metrics from comparitive countability. Cantor slides across schizophrenia, nomos nonzone, magnitude is occupied without being counted. A smell like something burning in the Superstratum.
Outside it's Planomic Now, and the numbers are swarming. Aleph-0 vaporizes on the plane of consistency."
"Mechanomics," Nick Land, Nomadic Trajectories, p.63.
"If language is not a starting-point in a strong sense for nomadic philosophy it is only because words have become immanent to the field of zones of consistency. They have become part of a plane of intensities. What is at stake is the diagramming or plotting of emergences, the drawing out of guide-lines, the marking out of the lines stretched between zones in whatever form. The deterritorializations can be in the functioning of groups, can be in movement, in language, in music, in mathematics, in dreams, in writing, in painting... The deterritorializations are always molecular, are always dance.
Plane of intensities. Nomads. Tribes. States. Capitalism. Zones, some with dates, some with names, some with verbs. A space filled with lines, with movements. She arrives, and draws coloured diagrams that shift according to complex rhythms. The rhythms swarm like bees, and her smile is not a legitimate use of a face. The tiny machines that are suddenly everywhere have snake-bodies that stretch into the past, which is now part of the present. In the distance, there are horses."
Metamorphics: Pragmatics and Production in A Thousand Plateaus, Justin Barton, Nomadic Trajectories, pp. 53 - 54.
Given the high level of Nick Land's essay it could seem inappropriate to critique it, but in this context it is necessary. The problem is that although distribution - number - is indeed an aspect of the plane of consistency (that is, the world as a whole, but taken in relation to its consistent, creative/productive interactions) it remains the case that the fundamental aspects of the plane of consistency are intent, energy and becomings (and it is to be remembered that becomings in certain cases evidently consist of love, even when this is very impersonal, as with the love for colours).
But this should not be taken as a suggestion that I was setting out this position in my own essay. I was not, even though - by implication - I was relatively close to it. The main problems with this essay are that I do not get beyond this implication regarding the plane of consistency, that I use an inappropriately "swarmic' (or crudely "feral") tone to a very slight extent in the last paragraph, and, lastly, that I fail to do enough to give exemplifications for the account of 'a transcendental philosophy of forces' (these are the first words of the essay) before explicating this account substantially in relation to language, which then gives an awkwardness to the statement that language is not a good starting-point for philosophy.
However, it is as if I then felt I needed to go from talking about language to talking about the world, and to do this by using the most powerful means. Everything at this point happened very rapidly as I wrote (I was seeing a sunlit place that was indeterminate, although it was definitely closest to the nomad terrains of countries like Mongolia) - and what arrived was a fusion of a philosophical account with a narrative, with the narrative getting the final word (the nomad woman from the Future had 'stepped in' to the writing, bringing the horses with her, whatever they might be). Everything felt right (even though I was not sure I would find it easy to justify it) - the faculty of dreaming had come to the forefront in the course of this final paragraph.
(But the faculty of lucidity is also in effect, making a point that is more intense than most that had been made in the course of the essay. The past is part of the present (as is the future), and all too often in the human world it is a depth-space of the snake-bodies of subjectified, control-mind past events (memories we use to inappropriately or redundantly justify ourselves, and memories which consist of different kinds of anguish and discouragement that all function to prevent us from becoming free, and expansive). Whereas beyond these there is the immense depth-space of the past worlds within which - and through which - the south-outside is perceptible.)
*
It was at around this time that a phrase appeared in a dream - a phrase that over the next few weeks kept coming into my head, without any apparent connection to preceding thoughts or perceptions. This phrase was "Arizona dawn wind." In the original dream (which took place around sunrise) there was an impression of the Arizona desert at dawn - and of a bright wind arriving with the sunlight, but this impression was unimportant in relation to the feeling that came with the words, which was a feeling of calmly lucid joy, and of serene but intense anticipation. It was clear, in other words, that the dawn wind was not just a wind (and perhaps also that the wind night be more than we imagine it is) - it was a real-abstract wind, an "energy dawn."
I know I made the connection to the experience two years before of the momentary 'waking-dream' where on a few occasions I had suddenly been 'seeing' a semi-desert valley - and a group inhabiting this valley - somewhere indeterminately in the area on either side of the western part of the border between the U.S.A and Mexico. But I had nowhere to go with this line of thought. I could not bring together these experiences with anything else (and even now, when I have made a connection the situation remains straightforwardly enigmatic - not at all something that could be called a discovery, such that you could say that some kind of knowledge is involved).
The only connection I made - about three months later - was in a sense valuable, but at the same time did not help to answer the question of why I might be dreaming about Arizona / Sonoran Mexico in this way. I found the following phrase in Burroughs's The Ticket that Exploded, a book I had read about a year before:
"Trails my Summer dawn wind in scar impressions of young Panama night."
I felt certain it was not a coincidence, but somehow I sensed that the phrase "Arizona dawn wind" (with the feeling that went with it) did not lead toward Burroughs, but instead was in some way a correction away from Burroughs. A correction to be precise, that led away from a kind of feverish, concupiscent melancholy ("cross the wounded galaxies") toward a way of being at a higher level of intensity.
Another dream at this time was one that took place in the early autumn of 1997, and which - very unusually - involved breathing. The necessary context was that, on the advice of a doctor, I had just increased the amount of becotide I was using for treating asthma (I had been taking becotide - in conjunction with ventolin - for relatively mild but chronic asthma for the previous two years). This increase in the dose had left me wondering about whether I could get rid of my asthma by changing to a deeper form of breathing (I had heard about a Russian asthma specialist who advocated this technique). At some point - either before or after the dream, I don't remember - I put into practise a plan involving changed breathing, long walks, and the washing of all bedding and pillows: and at the same time I stopped taking the becotide and the ventolin.
The dream was also in the morning (as opposed to in the middle of the night). I dreamed that a woman was giving me a series of very extraordinary, interconnected philosophical insights, which at the same time were explanations of the correct way of breathing. As I listened to her metaphysical account of the world (which unfortunately I do not remember) I simultaneously - and I am sure that this was in actuality, rather than just within the dream - adjusted the way in which I breathed to one that involved very deep calm breaths, a smooth, powerful use of the diaphragm, and a holding of the in-breath for short while before breathing out again. When I woke up from the dream I was doing an exceptionally smooth, deep, diaphragmatic breathing, a form of breathing which in fact continued for the next few weeks. And even when it slipped away a little from this initial, extraordinary level, I was still breathing in a way that was immensely better than the one I had used before.
The order of events is now unclear. I think I had probably already taken the leap of stopping using the asthma medications at the point when I had the dream, and therefore I would already have been employing a technique of breathing more deeply. But the dream beyond any doubt was a turning-point. Even when I 'lost' the full form of what I had learned (quite a few years later I re-attained this form of breathing, and it became second nature, so I don't have to think about it) I was still very evidently at a new, higher level in relation to anything that had gone before. And a concluding point is that since this time I have never had to use becotide or ventolin, and I have not suffered from asthma other than in extremely brief, rare circumstances involving the presence of allergens (where it has been easy to deal with the situation, and where the symptoms were very mild).
*
The fourth experience probably took place toward the end of the summer of 1997.It was the middle of the night, and I had taken speed, and had been reading A Thousand Plateaus. But this time, instead of writing, I arrived at a state where I was 'seeing' the human world, where this state was very much a process of perceiving the abstract, but which at the same time had an expression in the form of visual figurings of what I was understanding. I saw that human groups and individuals were recurrently struck by a kind of lightning, coming from a spheromambient energosphere and oneirosphere, and that this lightning consisted of systems of outsights, dreams about the future, and modalities of intent, or of navigation.
I also perceived that there were groups of human beings in the world who were collectively at a fundamentally higher level of awareness and deterritorialization (overall freedom and creativity) than I was, and I had an intense, sustained feeling that it was possible to be helped along deeply anomalous channels of contact in relation to these groups, and that, in fact, at that time (during this experience) I was in some sense being helped by one or more of them. Afterwards I could only put these aspects of the experience completely aside, as I had nothing with which to support them - and I certainly did not attempt to 'prove' them in any way: for instance I dont think with the dream about breathing that I ever brought the two events together for the purposes of providing a 'foundation' for the idea of anomalous contact - it is obviously possible to explain everything in relation to dreams through the functioning of an unconscious part of the mind. And in relation to the existence of the groups the idea seemed probabilistically sound, but I could not begin to configure the state in which I had been when I had - according to the memory - perceived their existence, so there was nothing that I could assess.
But the situation was different in relation to the other aspect of the experience. Different in the sense that it was both clearer and more powerful.
There were three features of the "lightning" I was perceiving. The first was that it was sometimes 'slow lightning,' - or perhaps it would be better to to say that it could keep striking for a long time in one place. The second was that - as lightning - it was impersonal: it consisted of dreams, and outsights, and love, and forms of choice-making, but it was energy: also, it came from the unknown, but it was clear that the zones of the unknown from which it came were not fundamentally different from the zones it affected, although at the same time the impression was that they were at higher and higher levels of intensity. The third was that your way of being could 'beckon' the lightning, where the way of being involved consisted of openness, and freedom, and love for the world, and delight, and ability to let go (human beings in a way know all about the power of delight and abandon, but they suppress their knowledge, only using it for very limited, and often very problematic purposes).
(All of this only needs a final point: the lightning can come from all directions of the transcendental, but it is only the lightning from transcendental south that in the full sense fits with your intent (the intent to travel toward Love-and-Freedom). From other directions, such as transcendental west, or east, the effects of the lightning are ultimately not in your interests - they carry within them something that will block you).
The fifth experience took place a few months before this last one, at some time early in the spring of 1997, or towards the end of the winter. It happened as a result of smoking a quite small quantity of marijuana, and was somewhere between a process of envisaging and a dream, or dream/hallucination.Late in the evening I left a friend's house on the opposite side of Leamington, and set off to walk home. In walking the mile and a half across town I reached a focused state which was centred on perceiving what was around me, instead of on thought-processes. This is mentioned because I think it is generally necesary to bring quite a lot of impeccability to marijuana in order for it to take you in the right direction (in some ways I have even more intense concerns about marijuana than I do about speed, although I should add that have not smoked it to any large extent).
I arrived at my house, and went to bed. But I was in a very positive, semi-trance state, and it was immediately very clear that I was not about to go to sleep.
I started concentrating on perception, but then I shifted toward imagining that I was the sky above the house. And then for some reason I started envisaging that I was a skein of geese, flying south in a V formation.
For a while I was the whole flock (perhaps 11 birds) feeling all of the wing-beats of all the birds, and experiencing the rotation of different birds into the central position of the skein - the tip of the V - where it was hardest to fly. And then I was just one of the geese, experiencing the powerful wing-strokes, and long out-stretched neck, and feeling the relative ease of flying in a slip-stream of another bird, and the greater difficulty when I was taking the middle position. This was very exhilerating, and there was quite a strong feeling - rightly or wrongly - of in some sense feeling what it was like to be a goose (to have a goose's body, and a goose's way of perceiving and being). But the experience still had an overall quality of a very successful, drug-assisted process of envisaging.
When I stopped being a goose I was in Australia. This did not come from an erroneous view about the migratory destinations of geese in Britain, but I know it nonetheless came from the idea of the long southward journeys of these birds. Without thinking about it I simply went a bit further, and when I arrived on the ground I was a human being, rather than a goose.
It was a clear desert night, with moonlight, and given where I was envisaging myself to be on the continent, I was somewhere a few hundred miles south of the north coast, either in the Northern Territories, or in Queensland. The ground was flat in front of me, but behind me to the north there was a line of hills and low cliffs.
Appearing from my left - and then standing in front of me - there was an aborigine shaman whose skin was the skin of a seal not of a human. I knew that his name was "Sealskin" (it should be added that this had not quite become a lucid dream: while the whole transition was not at all the result of deliberation, and was not connected to anything I had ever knowingly thought about, or read (etc.), at the same time the way in which I knew the man's name was Sealskin was slightly more the way a name can instantly appear for a character in a story, as opposed to the way in which you know things in dreams). The man greeted me: he was a very positive, calm presence - and the feeling was definitely that he was a teacher in relation to me, insofar as we were going to meet. The envisaged situation had the striking aspect that we were not meeting in an ordinary-reality version of Australia, in that the thought was that in the man's ordinary-reality Australia he would evidently not have the skin of a seal (the man's skin was grey, and it had the surface of a seal's skin - though his facial features were human - and in the moonlight he had an extraordinary appearance, and yet at the same time this aspect was entirely superficial in comparison with his lucidity and warmth.
We went to a cave which faced south across the plain, and we both sat, cross-legged, at the entrance. And I was shown that my left and right arms were very different from each other at some deep level of energy. The man 'told' me this in some way (although I dont remember speech or gestures being used by him at any stage) and primarily communicated it by letting me see them not in their ordinary form, but as arms made of bright, coloured translucence. My left arm was an internally lit, bright emerald colour, and my right arm was the same kind of colour, but ruby rather than emerald, and as such, slightly darker and less vibrant than my left arm. The quality of the energy of my left arm was more charged and electrical (and brighter) whereas the quality of the right-arm energy was calmer.
This was the end of the experience. It had briefly reached the point where it had become a semi-dream, and then it was over.
*
What had been brought to the forefront over these two years - from 1996 to February of 1998 - were the issues of groups, dreaming, feeling, the planet, and becomings, together also with the issue of the human body (the body in relation to becomings; in relation to breathing, in relation to its left and right sides, etc). Lastly, it should also be pointed out both that forests had come to prominence in my mind - as places which could in some way assist threshold-crossings - and that although the west had been foregrounded (in the form of desert terrains in northwest Mexico/southwest USA) this direction had in the end been in some sense supplanted by the east (the last two experiences were the process of writing the essay, “Metamorphics,” and the ‘view-from-space’ of eastern Europe – with the Carpathians at the centre – in the final stage of the hyper-intense dream in February 1998).
In summary, it would be right to say that both explicitly and implicitly what had arrived was a “shamanic” perspective on the world (a perspective I would now describe as that of metamorphics), with all of its emphasis on threshold-crossings, planetary terrains, dreams, the body, groups (as opposed to the state), and all of its tendency to de-emphasise human labyrinths such as conventional urban existence and the worlds of academic texts.
For several years before going to university I had occasionally attempted to write fictions (never getting very far), but this was a much more focused, worked-out world than any I had arrived at during the earlier phase. However, even though it was clear that something had happened (in that there had been a jolting-awake of the faculty of dreaming in relation to stories), from the very beginning I was aware that to a certain extent I had simply re-dreamed what was already being dreamed within the 'accelerationist' (and Spinozistically materialist) philosophical milieu around me. The 'cusp' was Von Neumann's 'essential singularity in the history of the race, beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue,' and on one level the world of the story was evidently Gibson mixed with Lovecraft (the 'cusp demons' being the Lovecraft element).
Moreover, there were other issues that meant I did not set out to write the story (the fact that it was a re-dreaming was not really a problem). The first of these was that there was no story of any kind in relation to the story's central individuals - the 'place' of the story (the room in the house) was a kind of 'freeze-frame' with no plot and no specific, localised events in its future or past. If a story is a zone or 'crystal' of space-time, the only oneiric progression of the world was the advance of the cusp, and a flickering of a game with a hologram. In terms of the characters the world was a kind of degree zero of fiction, despite the hyper-intense backdrop. Even if the character was taken to be the human world, this did not give me what I would need to set the people in the room in motion.
The second issue went deeper than this. It was the fact that I did not like the tone, or atmosphere of the room in the story. Playing a competitive game - indoors - with a hologram while on drugs had an unredeemable quality of self-indulgence and passivity. I had lived the perception of the room, and this was interesting (and what I had seen was maybe even in some sense revealing about my circumstances at that time), but it did not mean I had an interesting story. For instance, there was a woman in the room, but who was this woman?
Two days later I was on one of the upper floors of the five-story Warwick University library. It was the early afternoon of another sunny day, and I was sitting at a table on the sunward side of the library.
I started thinking about the planet - the Earth - in the world of the story, and the idea came to me that around a hundred years before the time it was set (therefore around 2100) there would have been the creation of immense, walled nature reserves on the planet, in order to preserve bio-diversity, and also in order to make money by allowing a limited number of individuals to go into these specially created wildernesses.
I became the female character in the story, who had decided to gain perspective on the situation by going off on her own to one of these reserves, a very large area to the south of Australia, stretching a hundred miles inland, and with a hundred miles of wilderness coast.
It came to my mind that a gigantic "sculpture" would have been created there, near to the sea: a thousand-foot high megalith, constructed using a new technology that created a kind of artificial granite. The colour of this mountain-sized sculpture was similar to that of Uluru - 'Ayers Rock.' From the base it tapered inward very slightly for the first hundred feet, and then it expanded at a slightly faster rate for the next six hundred feet - creating a very pronounced but 'gradual' overhang, before tapering back and then terminating in a rounded summit. An outward-curving megalith that was slightly asymettrical on all its axes. though it retained similar vertical contours all the way round, and was always roughly circular along its horizontal axis.
The other feature of this sculpture was that it had a three-dimensional labyrinth within it, which eventually - if you solved it - led to windows near the summit. In the story that now emerged the woman finds her way to the top of the sculpture, and sits for a long time looking east over the wilderness coast, with the sea on her right. She has forgotten about the cusp, and is swept away into a kind of 'solar trance,' a state where she feels she has become the sky and the sunlight, and the contact of the air with the land, the rock-sculpture, and the ocean.
She then starts to notice a greater brightness to everything, and patches of a very faint, shimmering glitter that seems to be a new property of the air, as if it has something like the aurora borealis threaded through it - a new kind of plasma phenomenon. She realises that the cusp is beginning.
This was the second stage. (nothing new arrived after this, and I did not even attempt to write the story down). Everything now primarily concerns space in the story. It is in fact a quite elaborate, and definitively 'planetary' space, but neither of these facts gets to the specificity of the world I had envisaged.
There was something isolated, and sublimely haunting about the megalith. It affected me like certain kinds of surrealist landscape I had seen in paintings as a child, but it had a specific, elemental intensity that was more reminiscent of seeing features of the natural world than anything else.
In the past I had realised that my starting point in trying to write stories was often in part an extraordinary, sublime landscape, and a powerful, positive feeling that came with this landscape that was something I could not put into words, but to which I responded by attempting to write. And in time I had understood that this starting-point did not work - as if I had only assembled a part of the 'abstract machine' of writing narratives. But now I had the feeling that had led to these other earlier attempts, but at a higher level of intensity, because it was emergent from a completed story (a narrative with a beginning and an end) and from something new and singular that I had envisaged (in the earlier forays into story-writing there had been nothing like the megalith art-work).
Two days before, when the initial idea had arrived, I had been focused to a great extent on time - now the focus was primarily on space, and a space that eventually deepened into the fluid world of the air and plasma being perceived by the woman. And the story had been improved in the process. And yet, there was still not much of a story (which is presumably why I did not try to write it).
But the faculty of dreaming is fundamentally more than the faculty of creating narratives. At depth it consists, firstly, of dreaming up what the world could be, all along, given how extraordinary and enigmatic it is (such that when it is successful it becomes a seeing of the true nature of the world), and, secondly, of dreaming up a future (life at a higher level of intensity) where this dream is a diagram which can then be actualised.
By any standards, artistic, or philosophical, I had not got very far. But the planetary and the female had been foregrounded in the second phase of the story's arrival, and if nothing else I was noticing both a tendency toward passivity and self-indulgence (the first phase), and the real degree of isolation that - on one level - is a recurrent aspect of a journey into the transcendentally unknown as a singular being. Both the woman and the megalith were images of' isolation (though not of loneliness).
*
There are five remaining events to be described from this phase between the last months of 1995 and the first months of 1998. The process of setting out these events began half way through the preceding section - 24 - and it is perhaps important to remember that they all 'culminate' in the dream, in February 1998, that was described toward the end of this previous section (a necessity in relation to the issue of human groups was part of what entailed that the events had to be described in this order).
Once all of these experiences have been brought together it will be possible - at last - to give an account of the wide-level issues which are in question here. Certain specific issues have been indicated - such as the questions of groups and of the faculties of dreaming and feeling - but it is the overview which has not really been possible, apart from the very brief summary at the end of Section 20.
The only summarising point that can be made at this stage is of a different kind. It concerns the slow but steady movement away from self-indulgence during these years from 1995 to 1998, and a kind of dynamic, valuable interaction between the effects of the two arduous, unnecesarily circuitous paths which I had taken at this time - those paths being the study of a continuum of western philosophy stretching from Spinoza to Deleuze/Guattari, and the use of pyscotropic drugs. The impression is very much that I had 'broken myself open,' but that I only really began to experience the full benefits of this at the point where I began the process of turning away from the taking of drugs, and where I did this to a great extent by increasing the degree to which I was concentrating on reading and writing philosophy. It is not at all that I stopped using psychotropics, but that instead there was a steady reduction of their role, together with an initial process of a close 'conjoining' with philosophy. During these years the overall frequency with which I took psychotropics continually decreased, and the occasions on which I took a combination of substances such as LSD and speed became very rare (LSD on its own also very much began to be a rare 'direction'). And on almost all of the occasions when I took speed I now did this in conjunction with reading A Thousand Plateaus, and writing about it (it should be pointed out that although this was a very valuable and immensely enjoyable process, it was not any kind of major breakthrough in relation to discipline - even though it had the advantages of a consistency of focus, and of a correctness of focus, given that I was writing a Ph.D thesis on this subject). Furthermore, in the autumn of 1997 I also began to stop using speed, so that I would only be taking it every few months, with the intervals between occasions becoming longer.
However, the last point that should be made is that it seems telling that a large majority of the experiences being recounted (taking the whole span from the middle of Section 24, where these descriptions started) took place without any involvement of drugs. I had been temporarily broken open with the assistance of drugs, but the times where I was being directly affected by them were to a great extent not the phases where the most important events occurred. To be precise about this, psychotropics such as speed, LSD and marijuana (this last substance being a minimal, but significant 'presence' during these years) very recurrently do not take you toward transcendental south, and even when they take you in this direction, or close to it, there are often problems. To re-iterate (in relation to earlier sections), the first problem is that what is temporarily understood can at that time be beyond the ability to express it even semi-adequately in speech or writing, leading to fatally confused or 'dis-placed'/wrongly-directed accounts, which subsequently can be profoundly misleading for you, and the second - connected - problem is that what takes place can be so intense (in a fundamentally positive sense of this word) that afterwards it is simply impossible to remember it, because your ordinary-reality mind does not at this point have what is necessary to re-construct it.
The first of the five remaining events was the writing of an article, at the end of 1997, called "Metamorphics: Pragmatics and Production in A Thousand Plateaus," (which appeared in Nomadic Trajectories, volume 7 of PLI,the Warwick Journal of Philosophy), and in particular the writing of the final two paragraphs of this piece. These final paragraphs can be quoted here alongside the last two paragraphs of Nick Land's essay "Mechanomics," from the same publication, in order to give a valuable, wider perspective. It is clear now that respectively we were working primarily on language and numbers, and that Nick was taking (in some sense numerical) distribution as fundamental for an escape from ordinary reality, and was critiquing most of mathematics, whereas I was delineating the role of language in the - metamorphic - pragmatics of escape, but was ultimately contending that a focus on language was in fact a bad starting-point, whether for current philosophy, or for philosophy in the form of a (lucid) metaphysical pragmatics. These passages are not being quoted with any idea that taken together their publication was a significant event (only a tiny number of people will have read this journal, and if there was any sort of event, it was in connection with Nick's article, which has since been published in a collection of his work), but instead to provide a document - with additional documentary context - where the passage from my article should be seen as on the same level as the accounts of the dreams and other 'oneiric' experiences,with which it it is being placed (the difference is just that here there is a text that can be quoted).
"What has been discovered? Transfinte cardinality number-2: ultimate continuum, an absolute edge, touched diagonally - as what comes next - after Oecumenic totality has finished in intensity. At cardinality C(ontinuum) magnitude becomes countless, disengaging metrics from comparitive countability. Cantor slides across schizophrenia, nomos nonzone, magnitude is occupied without being counted. A smell like something burning in the Superstratum.
Outside it's Planomic Now, and the numbers are swarming. Aleph-0 vaporizes on the plane of consistency."
"Mechanomics," Nick Land, Nomadic Trajectories, p.63.
"If language is not a starting-point in a strong sense for nomadic philosophy it is only because words have become immanent to the field of zones of consistency. They have become part of a plane of intensities. What is at stake is the diagramming or plotting of emergences, the drawing out of guide-lines, the marking out of the lines stretched between zones in whatever form. The deterritorializations can be in the functioning of groups, can be in movement, in language, in music, in mathematics, in dreams, in writing, in painting... The deterritorializations are always molecular, are always dance.
Plane of intensities. Nomads. Tribes. States. Capitalism. Zones, some with dates, some with names, some with verbs. A space filled with lines, with movements. She arrives, and draws coloured diagrams that shift according to complex rhythms. The rhythms swarm like bees, and her smile is not a legitimate use of a face. The tiny machines that are suddenly everywhere have snake-bodies that stretch into the past, which is now part of the present. In the distance, there are horses."
Metamorphics: Pragmatics and Production in A Thousand Plateaus, Justin Barton, Nomadic Trajectories, pp. 53 - 54.
Given the high level of Nick Land's essay it could seem inappropriate to critique it, but in this context it is necessary. The problem is that although distribution - number - is indeed an aspect of the plane of consistency (that is, the world as a whole, but taken in relation to its consistent, creative/productive interactions) it remains the case that the fundamental aspects of the plane of consistency are intent, energy and becomings (and it is to be remembered that becomings in certain cases evidently consist of love, even when this is very impersonal, as with the love for colours).
But this should not be taken as a suggestion that I was setting out this position in my own essay. I was not, even though - by implication - I was relatively close to it. The main problems with this essay are that I do not get beyond this implication regarding the plane of consistency, that I use an inappropriately "swarmic' (or crudely "feral") tone to a very slight extent in the last paragraph, and, lastly, that I fail to do enough to give exemplifications for the account of 'a transcendental philosophy of forces' (these are the first words of the essay) before explicating this account substantially in relation to language, which then gives an awkwardness to the statement that language is not a good starting-point for philosophy.
However, it is as if I then felt I needed to go from talking about language to talking about the world, and to do this by using the most powerful means. Everything at this point happened very rapidly as I wrote (I was seeing a sunlit place that was indeterminate, although it was definitely closest to the nomad terrains of countries like Mongolia) - and what arrived was a fusion of a philosophical account with a narrative, with the narrative getting the final word (the nomad woman from the Future had 'stepped in' to the writing, bringing the horses with her, whatever they might be). Everything felt right (even though I was not sure I would find it easy to justify it) - the faculty of dreaming had come to the forefront in the course of this final paragraph.
(But the faculty of lucidity is also in effect, making a point that is more intense than most that had been made in the course of the essay. The past is part of the present (as is the future), and all too often in the human world it is a depth-space of the snake-bodies of subjectified, control-mind past events (memories we use to inappropriately or redundantly justify ourselves, and memories which consist of different kinds of anguish and discouragement that all function to prevent us from becoming free, and expansive). Whereas beyond these there is the immense depth-space of the past worlds within which - and through which - the south-outside is perceptible.)
*
It was at around this time that a phrase appeared in a dream - a phrase that over the next few weeks kept coming into my head, without any apparent connection to preceding thoughts or perceptions. This phrase was "Arizona dawn wind." In the original dream (which took place around sunrise) there was an impression of the Arizona desert at dawn - and of a bright wind arriving with the sunlight, but this impression was unimportant in relation to the feeling that came with the words, which was a feeling of calmly lucid joy, and of serene but intense anticipation. It was clear, in other words, that the dawn wind was not just a wind (and perhaps also that the wind night be more than we imagine it is) - it was a real-abstract wind, an "energy dawn."
I know I made the connection to the experience two years before of the momentary 'waking-dream' where on a few occasions I had suddenly been 'seeing' a semi-desert valley - and a group inhabiting this valley - somewhere indeterminately in the area on either side of the western part of the border between the U.S.A and Mexico. But I had nowhere to go with this line of thought. I could not bring together these experiences with anything else (and even now, when I have made a connection the situation remains straightforwardly enigmatic - not at all something that could be called a discovery, such that you could say that some kind of knowledge is involved).
The only connection I made - about three months later - was in a sense valuable, but at the same time did not help to answer the question of why I might be dreaming about Arizona / Sonoran Mexico in this way. I found the following phrase in Burroughs's The Ticket that Exploded, a book I had read about a year before:
"Trails my Summer dawn wind in scar impressions of young Panama night."
I felt certain it was not a coincidence, but somehow I sensed that the phrase "Arizona dawn wind" (with the feeling that went with it) did not lead toward Burroughs, but instead was in some way a correction away from Burroughs. A correction to be precise, that led away from a kind of feverish, concupiscent melancholy ("cross the wounded galaxies") toward a way of being at a higher level of intensity.
Another dream at this time was one that took place in the early autumn of 1997, and which - very unusually - involved breathing. The necessary context was that, on the advice of a doctor, I had just increased the amount of becotide I was using for treating asthma (I had been taking becotide - in conjunction with ventolin - for relatively mild but chronic asthma for the previous two years). This increase in the dose had left me wondering about whether I could get rid of my asthma by changing to a deeper form of breathing (I had heard about a Russian asthma specialist who advocated this technique). At some point - either before or after the dream, I don't remember - I put into practise a plan involving changed breathing, long walks, and the washing of all bedding and pillows: and at the same time I stopped taking the becotide and the ventolin.
The dream was also in the morning (as opposed to in the middle of the night). I dreamed that a woman was giving me a series of very extraordinary, interconnected philosophical insights, which at the same time were explanations of the correct way of breathing. As I listened to her metaphysical account of the world (which unfortunately I do not remember) I simultaneously - and I am sure that this was in actuality, rather than just within the dream - adjusted the way in which I breathed to one that involved very deep calm breaths, a smooth, powerful use of the diaphragm, and a holding of the in-breath for short while before breathing out again. When I woke up from the dream I was doing an exceptionally smooth, deep, diaphragmatic breathing, a form of breathing which in fact continued for the next few weeks. And even when it slipped away a little from this initial, extraordinary level, I was still breathing in a way that was immensely better than the one I had used before.
The order of events is now unclear. I think I had probably already taken the leap of stopping using the asthma medications at the point when I had the dream, and therefore I would already have been employing a technique of breathing more deeply. But the dream beyond any doubt was a turning-point. Even when I 'lost' the full form of what I had learned (quite a few years later I re-attained this form of breathing, and it became second nature, so I don't have to think about it) I was still very evidently at a new, higher level in relation to anything that had gone before. And a concluding point is that since this time I have never had to use becotide or ventolin, and I have not suffered from asthma other than in extremely brief, rare circumstances involving the presence of allergens (where it has been easy to deal with the situation, and where the symptoms were very mild).
*
The fourth experience probably took place toward the end of the summer of 1997.It was the middle of the night, and I had taken speed, and had been reading A Thousand Plateaus. But this time, instead of writing, I arrived at a state where I was 'seeing' the human world, where this state was very much a process of perceiving the abstract, but which at the same time had an expression in the form of visual figurings of what I was understanding. I saw that human groups and individuals were recurrently struck by a kind of lightning, coming from a spheromambient energosphere and oneirosphere, and that this lightning consisted of systems of outsights, dreams about the future, and modalities of intent, or of navigation.
I also perceived that there were groups of human beings in the world who were collectively at a fundamentally higher level of awareness and deterritorialization (overall freedom and creativity) than I was, and I had an intense, sustained feeling that it was possible to be helped along deeply anomalous channels of contact in relation to these groups, and that, in fact, at that time (during this experience) I was in some sense being helped by one or more of them. Afterwards I could only put these aspects of the experience completely aside, as I had nothing with which to support them - and I certainly did not attempt to 'prove' them in any way: for instance I dont think with the dream about breathing that I ever brought the two events together for the purposes of providing a 'foundation' for the idea of anomalous contact - it is obviously possible to explain everything in relation to dreams through the functioning of an unconscious part of the mind. And in relation to the existence of the groups the idea seemed probabilistically sound, but I could not begin to configure the state in which I had been when I had - according to the memory - perceived their existence, so there was nothing that I could assess.
But the situation was different in relation to the other aspect of the experience. Different in the sense that it was both clearer and more powerful.
There were three features of the "lightning" I was perceiving. The first was that it was sometimes 'slow lightning,' - or perhaps it would be better to to say that it could keep striking for a long time in one place. The second was that - as lightning - it was impersonal: it consisted of dreams, and outsights, and love, and forms of choice-making, but it was energy: also, it came from the unknown, but it was clear that the zones of the unknown from which it came were not fundamentally different from the zones it affected, although at the same time the impression was that they were at higher and higher levels of intensity. The third was that your way of being could 'beckon' the lightning, where the way of being involved consisted of openness, and freedom, and love for the world, and delight, and ability to let go (human beings in a way know all about the power of delight and abandon, but they suppress their knowledge, only using it for very limited, and often very problematic purposes).
(All of this only needs a final point: the lightning can come from all directions of the transcendental, but it is only the lightning from transcendental south that in the full sense fits with your intent (the intent to travel toward Love-and-Freedom). From other directions, such as transcendental west, or east, the effects of the lightning are ultimately not in your interests - they carry within them something that will block you).
The fifth experience took place a few months before this last one, at some time early in the spring of 1997, or towards the end of the winter. It happened as a result of smoking a quite small quantity of marijuana, and was somewhere between a process of envisaging and a dream, or dream/hallucination.Late in the evening I left a friend's house on the opposite side of Leamington, and set off to walk home. In walking the mile and a half across town I reached a focused state which was centred on perceiving what was around me, instead of on thought-processes. This is mentioned because I think it is generally necesary to bring quite a lot of impeccability to marijuana in order for it to take you in the right direction (in some ways I have even more intense concerns about marijuana than I do about speed, although I should add that have not smoked it to any large extent).
I arrived at my house, and went to bed. But I was in a very positive, semi-trance state, and it was immediately very clear that I was not about to go to sleep.
I started concentrating on perception, but then I shifted toward imagining that I was the sky above the house. And then for some reason I started envisaging that I was a skein of geese, flying south in a V formation.
For a while I was the whole flock (perhaps 11 birds) feeling all of the wing-beats of all the birds, and experiencing the rotation of different birds into the central position of the skein - the tip of the V - where it was hardest to fly. And then I was just one of the geese, experiencing the powerful wing-strokes, and long out-stretched neck, and feeling the relative ease of flying in a slip-stream of another bird, and the greater difficulty when I was taking the middle position. This was very exhilerating, and there was quite a strong feeling - rightly or wrongly - of in some sense feeling what it was like to be a goose (to have a goose's body, and a goose's way of perceiving and being). But the experience still had an overall quality of a very successful, drug-assisted process of envisaging.
When I stopped being a goose I was in Australia. This did not come from an erroneous view about the migratory destinations of geese in Britain, but I know it nonetheless came from the idea of the long southward journeys of these birds. Without thinking about it I simply went a bit further, and when I arrived on the ground I was a human being, rather than a goose.
It was a clear desert night, with moonlight, and given where I was envisaging myself to be on the continent, I was somewhere a few hundred miles south of the north coast, either in the Northern Territories, or in Queensland. The ground was flat in front of me, but behind me to the north there was a line of hills and low cliffs.
Appearing from my left - and then standing in front of me - there was an aborigine shaman whose skin was the skin of a seal not of a human. I knew that his name was "Sealskin" (it should be added that this had not quite become a lucid dream: while the whole transition was not at all the result of deliberation, and was not connected to anything I had ever knowingly thought about, or read (etc.), at the same time the way in which I knew the man's name was Sealskin was slightly more the way a name can instantly appear for a character in a story, as opposed to the way in which you know things in dreams). The man greeted me: he was a very positive, calm presence - and the feeling was definitely that he was a teacher in relation to me, insofar as we were going to meet. The envisaged situation had the striking aspect that we were not meeting in an ordinary-reality version of Australia, in that the thought was that in the man's ordinary-reality Australia he would evidently not have the skin of a seal (the man's skin was grey, and it had the surface of a seal's skin - though his facial features were human - and in the moonlight he had an extraordinary appearance, and yet at the same time this aspect was entirely superficial in comparison with his lucidity and warmth.
We went to a cave which faced south across the plain, and we both sat, cross-legged, at the entrance. And I was shown that my left and right arms were very different from each other at some deep level of energy. The man 'told' me this in some way (although I dont remember speech or gestures being used by him at any stage) and primarily communicated it by letting me see them not in their ordinary form, but as arms made of bright, coloured translucence. My left arm was an internally lit, bright emerald colour, and my right arm was the same kind of colour, but ruby rather than emerald, and as such, slightly darker and less vibrant than my left arm. The quality of the energy of my left arm was more charged and electrical (and brighter) whereas the quality of the right-arm energy was calmer.
This was the end of the experience. It had briefly reached the point where it had become a semi-dream, and then it was over.
*
What had been brought to the forefront over these two years - from 1996 to February of 1998 - were the issues of groups, dreaming, feeling, the planet, and becomings, together also with the issue of the human body (the body in relation to becomings; in relation to breathing, in relation to its left and right sides, etc). Lastly, it should also be pointed out both that forests had come to prominence in my mind - as places which could in some way assist threshold-crossings - and that although the west had been foregrounded (in the form of desert terrains in northwest Mexico/southwest USA) this direction had in the end been in some sense supplanted by the east (the last two experiences were the process of writing the essay, “Metamorphics,” and the ‘view-from-space’ of eastern Europe – with the Carpathians at the centre – in the final stage of the hyper-intense dream in February 1998).
In summary, it would be right to say that both explicitly and implicitly what had arrived was a “shamanic” perspective on the world (a perspective I would now describe as that of metamorphics), with all of its emphasis on threshold-crossings, planetary terrains, dreams, the body, groups (as opposed to the state), and all of its tendency to de-emphasise human labyrinths such as conventional urban existence and the worlds of academic texts.
Despite the fact
that I was studying A Thousand Plateaus, for the previous five years I had been
completely ignoring the possibility of reading Castaneda’s books. I liked the
inclusions in A Thousand Plateaus of the elements from Castaneda, and they all
seemed to fit, but I did not even give any thought to reading the books myself
(I think, in fact, that the quiet, but sustained use of Castaneda by Deleuze and Guattari is very effective: it breaks the view open, but the reader is not likely to become
‘hooked up’ on the issues).
In effect, a perspective which for five years I had – on one
level - been ignoring, had simply arrived on another level. Which is to say that,
if it is read with sufficient openness, A Thousand Plateaus straightforwardly leads to this
perspective. Even if you think – as no doubt in some way I did – that reading
Castaneda is not going to be helpful for your academic purposes, then under
these circumstances the view on the world which is in question will nonetheless arrive.
Moreover, it is noteworthy
that a singular zone in the experiences between 1996 and 1998 was Arizona and the
area of Mexico across the border, and that what I “dream-envisaged” was a group
of people in a wide, semi-desert valley that could have been in either of the
two countries. These are the places where there are the homes of the group of ‘journeyers into the unknown’ in Castaneda’ books (and in the books of
Taisha Abelar and Florinda Donner). I had not read any of the books of these
writers at this time, and Deleuze and Guattari would not have
read about the group in question when they wrote A Thousand Plateaus, because
it is not described until The Eagle’s Gift, which was published a year later. But this does not all mean that I am
attempting to propound a view about some kind of anomalous action at a
distance: after all, it is impossible to say what I might have seen or heard
and then seemingly forgotten, so that it is more that I am suggesting a process
of working out something pertaining to a particular direction (whether or not
this direction pertains only to the oneirosphere), where this working out would
have been done with an aspect of my mind that was not all the aspect which was
most familiar to me.
But despite this
last fact, and even though – also – the overall modality of the view toward the
world was the same as the one in Castaneda’s books, it is still the case that
it was not the same view. The
circuitous path of Spinoza-Deleuze/Guattari arrives in the end at the way
forward that is Castaneda's work, but as you arrive at this juncture it is, in effect,
to a great extent your own specific perspective toward the outside (you are
looking toward the same aspects of the world, but from a new, singular ‘angle’).
Which is to say that what I could see was only affected by A Thousand Plateaus
(and through this book, by Castaneda’s writings) insofar as this book was just
one zone of virtual-real experience – or, to be precise, just one zone of
outsights. There is nothing about forests in A Thousand Plateaus and not much about them in
Castaneda’s books, and nor is there anything about Australia (the impression I
am left with is that Picnic at Hanging Rock was part of what was at work in
relation to Australia). And whereas the nomad woman in the essay from late '97 is evidently in some sense traceable to A Thousand Plateaus, the
dreams about the group living in a forest in the area around Malton in North
Yorkshire seem to come primarily from my own experience. The idea of reaching a
perceptually focused state (a kind of trance state) by jumping from rock to
rock at speed across a mountain-top does not seem to be connected to A Thousand
Plateaus. And, to
take a final example, the culminatory dream about the group crossing a
threshold of awareness has no parallel in Deleuze and Guattari's book, and while in fact there is something very close to this in Donner/Abelar/Castaneda (none of which I had read at this
time), there are nonetheless some substantial differences.
This dream from February 1998 was
culminatory for two reasons. Firstly, because it was the last – and by a huge
distance – the most intense of all the experiences, where these experiences
were very closely connected to each other in relation, most of all, to the
issues of groups, the planet, and the body. And secondly, because around a week
later I picked up a book that had been left lying around in the house (by one
of the two other Warwick University students with whom I was sharing accommodation)
and started to read it, the book being The Eagle’s Gift. A culmination in this
second sense therefore in that there would be no chance for a continuation of
this previous series of experiences, because I was now on a new route, with new
views (the systems of outsights with which I was working were being
fundamentally widened and deepened, and, inseparably, a whole new zone of the
oneirosphere – and therefore of abstract-oneiric perception – was going
into effect).
I was now on a path
that was not circuitous – one that was simply heading off toward transcendental
south (though this not mean that I was going to travel far on it - you only move forward insofar as you are overcoming indulgent behaviour and subjectified emotions, and insofar as you have learned to let go and become perception of the world around you). But I had not arrived just anywhere in the cluster of 15 books that are
in question in talking about this path: I had arrived at possibly the most intense
point, with the exception only of Florinda Donner’s Being in Dreaming. It is
the book where women practitioners of metamorphics come suddenly to the
forefront, and the book where small groups (of around 16) are for the first
time described as the fundamental social formations for travelling into the
south of the outside.
And there is also
the fact that whereas A Thousand Plateaus leads to all of Castaneda, but in
particular to the first four books, the point at which I had arrived was the
book which had been written at almost exactly the same time as Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I had started with one book from the incursion event of 1980-82 and over
several years it had given me what I needed in order to orientate myself to
some degree in the virtual-real space of another book from the same time (I am
almost entirely sure that without this I would simply have put the book down
after two or three pages).
This in turn is
connected to the fact that the books I now began to read were in many ways
almost astonishingly “pre-supported” by the events over the preceding few
years, particularly the most recent ones, starting in 1996. This pre-support consisted of experiences which showed how the views advanced might make sense, and
sometimes they provided powerful indications that aspects of the maps being set
out (for instance the map of stages in the process of acquiring knowledge, or
the map of human faculties) might indeed be correct.
My overall
impression is that a book of metamorphics (A Thousand Plateaus) has a doorway
within it to a group of books of metamorphics which are at a higher level, and that these other books had
been going into effect (along with A Thousand Plateaus) through this doorway for two years before I began to encounter them in actuality. Preparing me, as
it happened, for this encounter so that, despite the intensity of the
starting-point, I would not be so dubious and perturbed that I would simply
put the initial book aside.
*
This section started with the idea that over the centuries the view toward the Future is becoming progressively obscured, and continued initially by giving an account of a modality of thought involving the chronological/chronic future. The end-point has been the breaking-open of the Futural view by Donner/Abelar/Castaneda, and has been the wider, 'momentary' conjunction, in 1980 to 1982, of such processes of opening up this Southward perspective.
It is necessary to look at 1980-1982. And it is also necessary to return to the issues of specific terrains and kinds of terrain in relation to the oneirosphere, but also more widely (this will involve a return to the question of Warwickshire, but will also involve thinking about the potential of wilderness forests as places for crossing thresholds of awareness). These explorations will revolve around the fact that what everyone needs is an openness to the planet, an openness to the brightness of women, and an openness to the abstract.
The first form of openness is primarily about becoming perception. But it is also about learning to find the places - and the kinds of place - that are most valuable for the purposes of breaking yourself free. Furthermore, it is also about processes of thought starting as much from places as from concepts and texts - Warwickshire in this instance. Lastly, it is about coming to see yourself as not from any particular human territory, but as from the planet - what is at issue with this in the end is a waking of thought through starting from the instance that is the planet, as opposed to the ecapsulated instance that is the human world, but it is also evidently about leaving behind the delusions and biases of your initial territorial affiliation(s). It is far from irrelevant that Warwickshire in this writing has come to be counterbalanced by the Sayan mountains in Tuva and Mongolia.
The issue of women will come to the forefront in considering 1980-1982. This is because of Donner's book Shabono, but also because the most fundamental individual aspect of 1980-1982 is the bringing-into-focus of women as explorers of the transcendentally unknown.
In relation to openness to the abstract the crucial aim is to reach the point where we have embodied an awareness that we are spheroambiently surrounded by the abstract. But it is also necessary, as a basic initial requirement, to be open in advance to all kinds of dreamings and accounts of the world, so that there is no form of fiction, myth, story or account in relation to which you have a prejudice. And this is more than just a general point about prejudice - there is a specific need to discover other points of reference for any modality of travelling into the Future which has been already found. This is because in the difference between the two - with any specific issue - a new, better solution could be found, or even a radically different modality (and the new path could turn out to be better than the initial one - nothing can be said in advance). Tao Te Ching is immensely valuable here because it provides a point of reference of this kind, giving a 'base differential' of 2500 years (the value lies in the aspects just delineated, but it is also valuable for understanding the increasing suppression of awareness of the Future). Writing in part from the oneiric vantage of the Sayan mountains (with their relative proximity to China) an exploration and assessment of Tao Te Ching will be a part of the final phase of this book.
However, the last point in relation to the abstract is that it is also necessary to be open to the idea of other faculties, beyond the faculty of reason. What can be done to elucidate perception, dreaming, lucidity and navigation? And given that this is an account of intellectual faculties, what, in particular, can be done to elucidate the faculty of feeling?
*
*
This section started with the idea that over the centuries the view toward the Future is becoming progressively obscured, and continued initially by giving an account of a modality of thought involving the chronological/chronic future. The end-point has been the breaking-open of the Futural view by Donner/Abelar/Castaneda, and has been the wider, 'momentary' conjunction, in 1980 to 1982, of such processes of opening up this Southward perspective.
It is necessary to look at 1980-1982. And it is also necessary to return to the issues of specific terrains and kinds of terrain in relation to the oneirosphere, but also more widely (this will involve a return to the question of Warwickshire, but will also involve thinking about the potential of wilderness forests as places for crossing thresholds of awareness). These explorations will revolve around the fact that what everyone needs is an openness to the planet, an openness to the brightness of women, and an openness to the abstract.
The first form of openness is primarily about becoming perception. But it is also about learning to find the places - and the kinds of place - that are most valuable for the purposes of breaking yourself free. Furthermore, it is also about processes of thought starting as much from places as from concepts and texts - Warwickshire in this instance. Lastly, it is about coming to see yourself as not from any particular human territory, but as from the planet - what is at issue with this in the end is a waking of thought through starting from the instance that is the planet, as opposed to the ecapsulated instance that is the human world, but it is also evidently about leaving behind the delusions and biases of your initial territorial affiliation(s). It is far from irrelevant that Warwickshire in this writing has come to be counterbalanced by the Sayan mountains in Tuva and Mongolia.
The issue of women will come to the forefront in considering 1980-1982. This is because of Donner's book Shabono, but also because the most fundamental individual aspect of 1980-1982 is the bringing-into-focus of women as explorers of the transcendentally unknown.
In relation to openness to the abstract the crucial aim is to reach the point where we have embodied an awareness that we are spheroambiently surrounded by the abstract. But it is also necessary, as a basic initial requirement, to be open in advance to all kinds of dreamings and accounts of the world, so that there is no form of fiction, myth, story or account in relation to which you have a prejudice. And this is more than just a general point about prejudice - there is a specific need to discover other points of reference for any modality of travelling into the Future which has been already found. This is because in the difference between the two - with any specific issue - a new, better solution could be found, or even a radically different modality (and the new path could turn out to be better than the initial one - nothing can be said in advance). Tao Te Ching is immensely valuable here because it provides a point of reference of this kind, giving a 'base differential' of 2500 years (the value lies in the aspects just delineated, but it is also valuable for understanding the increasing suppression of awareness of the Future). Writing in part from the oneiric vantage of the Sayan mountains (with their relative proximity to China) an exploration and assessment of Tao Te Ching will be a part of the final phase of this book.
However, the last point in relation to the abstract is that it is also necessary to be open to the idea of other faculties, beyond the faculty of reason. What can be done to elucidate perception, dreaming, lucidity and navigation? And given that this is an account of intellectual faculties, what, in particular, can be done to elucidate the faculty of feeling?
*
It will be valuable to tighten the focus, and concentrate on the eight months from September 1994 to April 1995. And, initially, it is important to look closely at the radical milieu within the Warwick philosophy department.
As the C.C.R.U. started to emerge there is no doubt that the central text in the milieu was A Thousand Plateaus. And it is this one fact which is crucial, both because the book was an exceptionally valuable resource, and also because it was a source of tension and frustration, for the simple reason that A Thousand Plateaus is not an accelerationist text. In fact, the book's outsight about the obscured, momentous potential of of deterritorialisation is radically transhistorical, and what is called technology is shown to be very recurrently an aspect of suppression systems. The ahistorical model is that of bodies, their faculties and becomings, the planet, and micropolitical processes of departure: different forms of technology will always be deeply involved in the processes of escape, but to accelerate technology as a whole is not only a fixation on the macrological, but is a heightening of suppression systems. And lastly, far from capitalism accelerating rapidly toward meltdown, A Thousand Plateaus states that it could go either way: either the substantial worsening of the ongoing disaster (which the book indicates has been taking place for around 10,000 years), or - somehow, perhaps - the lines of escape could form a rhizome. Even this last point is perhaps to give too much nourishment to the fixation on the macrological, but the vital point here in relation to technology is that you incorporate all that you can for the purposes of deterritorialisation, and is that the generalised boosting of technology is worse than dysfunctional.
Two summarising points must be made. The first is that A Thousand Plateaus is a work of transcendental empiricism (which is to that it is also a work of transcendental materialism, or transcendental formationism). One of the principles of transcendental empiricism is 'focus on bodies.' And this entails, of course, that in looking at the human world you should focus not only on human bodies and their organs, but on all of the elements of the technological domain - or extended body - of the human world: houses, yurts, tools, communication devices, types of food, drugs, cars, factories, etc. However, the first principle of transcendental empiricism is "focus on the abstract, and in particular on intent", or 'focus on bodies without organs.' And in this context the bodies without organs consist of faculties and becomings, and are understood in relation to a generalised becoming-active, or deterritialisation, which is understood as an intrinsic potential, and where the becoming-active is only very minimally to be understood in terms of what is called technology.
The second summarising point is that A Thousand Plateaus has a kind of 'either-or' coherence in relation to its use of the term 'abstract machine'. It uses the term as a generalised concept which relates both to the non-human forces of the cosmos, and for the forces in effect within the human world. In setting everything out on a single plane - the mechanosphere - the book is Spinozist in attributing intent (and all of the aspects of bodies without organs in the human world) to forces of the cosmos, and, to take the crucial example, to the planet as a whole. The either-or coherence of the book comes from the fact that, even if you conclude that the non-human (and non-animal) world is simply energy in a customary sense - so that its bodies without organs consist only of energy - then it is still the case that the analysis of intent and deterritorialisation within the human world is precise, and momentous in its importance. The account of becomings, micropolitics, and the joy of desubjectified becoming-active holds no no matter what position is taken about the wider issue, as does the analysis of religions as forms of insanity which trap people within interiority. The issue of the forces of the planet can be left open as un-resolved: what matters is that the book opens up a view toward the current of Exteriority that runs through the human world.
It is correct therefore to say that the book has a very effective machinic coherence, in that even if 'abstract' is taken as referring only to intent, dreams and thought modalities (etc.) within the human world this 'fallback' position is still an immense domain of abstract-perception which shows you the escape-route leading out of ordinary deadened reality. And the wider, planetary and cosmological use of the term within the book functions in this fallback mode as a continual prompt toward leaving behind the dogmatic image of the world, and toward replacing this with an active, exploratory openness.
This machinic coherence relates of course to an abstract machine. It has a machinic coherence in the same way as the suppressive system of reason-and-revelaton has a machinic coherence, but here, with A Thousand Plateaus, we are talking about a system not of suppression but of liberation. But what has happened to the idea of 'machine' here? It is as if, while no-one was looking, the idea has gone through the looking glass, and now appears as something very different from what normally comes to mind when the term is used. It is in fact an abstract system, a term that must be used in a way that is inclusive of extended-body elements such as diagrams drawn in sand, etc. but where the basic, generic idea relates to a system of deterritorialisation that could be in effect without any use of books or reading, so that its relationship, as system, to technology as normally understood would be non-existent. In other words such a system could have been in effect five thousand years ago, in a world without writing, in that it relates to bodies, faculties, becomings, the planet and movements of deterritorialisation.
It is now possible to see why A Thousand Plateaus was so perplexing for those who were developing the idea of accelerationism in the Warwick University milieu of the mid-90s.
It was during 1994 and 1995 that I was particulaly likely to hear about Nick Land vehemently taking issue with some statement in A Thousand Plateaus, but seemingly always in the mode of seeing the statement as a residue of an outlook of a philosophical viewpoint which they had otherwise left behind. The issues involved were diverse, and at this point I did not start to piece together an awareness of the divergence that was involved. This was partly because I myself was very perplexed by the book. But this state was because it is a very difficult text, rather than it being the result of an attempt to perceive the book as providing support for accelerationism. Again and again I agreed with what was said at specific points in A Thousand Plateaus, and overall the book opened up a very wide perspective which was thought-provoking, even though crucial details would not come into focus. However, I was in no position to work out that my milieu had a confusion locked into its central zone.
In the autumn term of 1994 Tess and I were in the initial phase of our relationship. We had met in early August, and by October we were living together. The memory of this time is of an intensely warm brightness, surrounded by darkness and turbulence: a memory of charged, sublime - and sometimes eerie-sublime - events taking place late at night in an attic-flat room in central Coventry, but where in the depths of what was sublime there were the unresolved problems of two lives thrown close together under intense circumstances.
This, on more than one level, was a very extraordinary time. It was Tess and I living together in a mileu which had experimentation built into it as a norm. But it also had other aspects which should be drawn into the account.
This was the academic year when my postgraduate work had the greatest aspect of 'success' in relation to the philosophy department. In November I gave a paper which was well received, and I was involved in a close reading of Difference and Repetition (which had just been translated), where this preparatory work was always likely to be viewed as what it was - an attempt at a rigourous route toward understanding A Thousand Plateaus. However, at the same time it was the year when, in fact, I felt most unsure about the way forward in relation to my work. I was reading widely (texts such as Bergson's Matter and Memory) but I was failing to find works that helped substantially with understanding the concepts of the book at the centre of my research: aspects of Difference and Repetition were helpful, but even these did not provide more than a tangential explication of the later work.
The philosophy department within which Tess had just graduated had been very different from the one at Warwick University, and simultaneously the area (Coventry, Warwickshire) was entirely new to her. This meant that for her the new circumstances were an opportunity to see from an altered perspective and work out what her new direction would be. And as Tess looked for work, as a means to improve things while she decided on the new direction, there was a Gap which coincided with a high degree of freedom on my part (I was not teaching undergraduate seminars this year), and this shared state of freedom allowed us to do a lot of travelling in intensity through taking halucinogens (as has been said, this is a path which cannot be recommended - and I would add to this that some of the time it was less a movement and more a simple process of indulgence).
But we were in love, and it was an extraordinary milieu, and some of the experimentation took us to some sublimely anomalous, thought-provoking experiences.
*
It is worth thinking for a moment about the philosophy paper in November. In this paper I started from space - or space + time - in the form of the idea of simultaneous reciprocal causality, taking globular clusters of stars as a way of thinking about this form of inter-relationship. And I then continued by making the point that in temporal terms we cross an abyss every second because the amount we experience in any moment is dependent on our rate of sythesis. I asked people to imagine someone who, through implants and neurochemical modifications would experience an hour in a minute, and I pointed out that if human experience as a whole was speeding up then a way of testing this would be music recordings: if over a few hundred years there was an immense change then what had once been a slow tempo piece would now no longer be recognisable as music, as the gaps between the moments of the rythym would be too long, and overall it would have the quality of a record played at too slow a speed.
The time-synthesis aspect of this paper was directly based on my experience on LSD and speed a year before (Section 5 and 10). The experience had arrived with me, and then eventually I had done philosophical work on the basis of it. And it was work that, because it concentrated on time-consciousness and on a thought-experiment which involved an idea of acceleration, fitted very well into the overall philosophy department and into the radical Nick Land / Sadie Plant milieu. At the end of it Mark Fisher came up to me and we had a good conversation: Mark had arrived at the start of the term and I had heard him speak in post-lecture discussions, but this was the first time I had spoken to him. The other person who came up to me was a Hegelian who had just started as a tutor in the department, Stephen Houlgate: he said he had enjoyed the paper.
I felt that I had succeeded in showing that I was doing worthwhile research. But the impression was that I had bought myself time, rather than having embarked on my project. The main aspects of the paper had no close connection to any philosophical text, let alone to A Thousand Plateaus. It was an experience from a year before that primarily had bought me the time, and the thread of thought that I had created from it was not a thread that could guide me forward.
*
It was around 9.30pm on a Friday evening in February of 1995. Tess and I were in our flat in Coventry. About half an hour earlier we had each taken a single measure of LSD, in the form of a 'microdot' (the miniscule tablets, around two milimetres across, which at this time were seen as providing LSD in a better form than the tabs - tiny squares of ultra-thin 'cardboard' - which were more widely available).
The circumstances were good. We had not been drinking; we had both had enough sleep the night before; and neither of us had to get up early the next day.
When it arrived the effect of the LSD was not like anything we had experienced before. Our sense of balance was what was primarily affected: the room started to feel as if was a boat on an ocean, and, when we stood up, for both of us the sensation was rapidly that the wall and ceiling and floor of the room were becoming like liquid, and that the air was also was becoming watery - the shift was from feeling as if we were on an ocean, to feeling that everything was the ocean.
The constant at this point was a sense of balance being hard to maintain. The affect was of the bright exhileration of the first impact of LSD, but accompanied by a slight quality of being perturbed by the balance system being out of kilter.
At this point everything changed. Standing opposite each other, we started to dance with our arms and upper bodies. For both of us the movements of our arms were 'suggested' by lines or topographies that we could see in the water-like air in front of us and around. For me it was if the air was divided into large three-dimensional areas whose boundaries were tiny gaps that had curvatures similar to the patterns made by smoke rising from a cigarette, though with a much slower degree of movement. Tess said that her arms were following coloured filaments that extended through the liquid expanse of the room. For both of us the point where we started to dance was the point where the sense of being off-balance disappeared.
The music we had put on was a relatively slow-paced modern jazz recording from the 1980s, and this seemed at the outset to be part of what was finding expression in our movements. But about half an hour later we realised that the music had stopped around ten minutes after we started dancing, and we had not noticed it stop. And neither of us wanted to put more music on - the experience had a specificity which did not involve sound.
Everything unfolded in the form of motion, interaction and expressivity of the arms and upper body, in a process where the two experiences of the room as fluid-with-lines-and-forms were fundamental generators of what took place, along with responses to each other's movements. Another specificity of what took place was that almost all of the time our feet did not move from a well-balanced position - around shoulder-width apart - and the movements were almost always centred on the arms and hands, with the movements of the body limited to full front-to-back rotation around the central axis, and to leaning motions with the torso which were bound up with the motions of the arms. The impression was that in some way motion, proprioception and the tactile sense had all crossed an upward-threshold together. And what was very clear was the perception - and sensation - that our sense of balance was now highly focused, whereas before it had been off-kilter (it felt as if it had adapted to new conditions which in some way were better for it, rather than worse).
The forward-movement of the experience was continual new forms of dance with the arms: new expressive forms of motion that came to a great extent from the changing forms of the perception of the space of the room - for a while, for instance, Tess was seeing liquid bubbles, around fifteen inches across, whose curvature and/or location was expressed by her motion, either through her hands describing their shape, or through her arms and hands finding a fluid path through the space of these bubbles, without touching them. For me the complex, smoke-like boundaries between the larger fluid masses were endlessly re-forming, creating new shapes for my hands to follow. And as it went on the experience seemed to acquire an internal momentum in relation to the creation of new forms, as if the dance-communication taking place, in combination with the will to create, was enough: at a rapid speed one new form of expressive motion succeeded another.
The affect was joy - an exceptionally bright, intense feeling of shared bliss that seemed to be love and sensually-charged exhileration all the way through it, without any faint thread or cloud of anything else. And it was as if the joy was the other side of a process of creation and communication, one that was as sensual and tactile as it was communicative and creative, but where the bliss - the outer-edge joy - was the fundamental other attribute of the generation of new forms-of-movement and of the dance-communication taking place between us.
This sustained and intense deterritorialisation of a precisely defined domain of movement was initially entirely abstract, with the new forms producing the impression, as they came and went, that it might take years to get back to all of them and explore their potential. Later for a while it became a kind of 'martial arts' game that was invented, involving both of us holding our hands around eighteen inches apart, palms facing inward, and moving them in a dance-like variation of position in order to try to send a hand rapidly between the other person's hands, without touching them. And the last phase consisted of movements that were gestural, where the face was part of the field of expression, and the experience was of a kind of dance conversation about ourselves and about aspects of the world. The impression was of new kinds of communicative gesture (dance-gesture) being created for the purposes of the conversation, and this phase had its own singular form of joy - an experience of a depth-level communication - and seemed, like the initial phase, to last an extremely long time.
Eventually we stopped, and we looked at the clock. It said it was just after 12, and we were both sure that it must be a few minutes past midday (we were convinced, without thinking about it). We went to open the curtains, realising the mistake as we did so. Opening the curtains we saw it was dark outside. The experience, which we both felt had been four or five times longer than this, had taken around two and a half hours.
This can be compared with the experience on which I had based the paper in November, in that with the later event there was also a time-consciousness anomaly involving, in relative terms, a large amount of experience in a short amount of time. But here the extrinsic, during-the-event measure was gone (fast music seeming slow, with music as extrinsic measure), and instead of the internal quantitative, there was a sustained deterritorialisation of movement in the form of the creation of new kinetic and expressive modes (in 1993 the movement had been ultra-simple), so that internally there was the qualitative; and the temporal quantitative was only applied to the experience retrospectively.
In relation to issues involving the waking of a life, and in terms of the sheer intensity of the joy involved, this was one of two high-point moments of the relationship between Tess and myself: alongside this was another event later in the same year, which, if it had less of the quality of haptic bliss, made up for it through the joy of a quality that can be called the 'visionary-sublime.' To which it should be added that the only other once-only (singular) event that stands out in a similar way across the span of the relationship was our visit to the mountains in northern Greece, in the summer of 1996. It can be seen, however, that what is in question here is not primarily a couple-relationship, but is the indicative power of the faculty of feeling, in the context of a wider process.
The spring and summer of 1995 was the point where, without fully realising it at the time, I started to distance myself from what was taking place at the centre of the Warwick-philosophy milieu. Moving from Difference and Repetition to A Thousand Plateaus I found that the explication of the later work was only very minimally assisted by the earlier one, and in a process of becoming more focused about what was helpful, I began to read A Thousand Plateaus in a way that had almost no connection to the coordinates and main lines of thought of Nick Land (this was not a rejection - it was that I was unsure concerning what to think about his accounts of the book, and for the most part was not finding them helpful). And lastly, there was the indeterminate feeling of having got out from under a cloud in leaving Coventry for Leamington (the direction of greater contact with the countryside did not fit with the technological focus of accelerationism, and the milieu had its centre in Coventry, in terms of where people lived and worked - but it would be a while before I understood the feeling, partly because it was about much more than the milieu).
It would be correct to say that in the years from 1995 to 1997 I was looking for an alternative system of experimentation, in comparison with the one being employed by Nick Land. It would also be true to say that at the outset I did not fully see that I was doing this. But neither of these statements quite gets to the centre of the issue - an issue which is about the pragmatics and metaphysics of lives taken as a whole, rather than just about accounts of the world drawn up within academia.
What happened, in fact, was that at the beginning of this phase I was swept into a current within which the elements of the alternative system of experimentation emerged - and, more than this, it was a current which led toward the emergence of the whole system (it wasn't just that it gave me 'raw materials').
What Nick Land and I had in common was that we both felt that there was 'something there' which was of fundamental importance in (or visible through) A Thousand Plateaus. We had also both decided to use psychoactive substances as part of the process of attempting to reach the outsights involved. For me these two aspects were the starting-point - they were were the point when I stepped into the current. However, in terms of what I agreed with in relation to the milieu it should be said that the modality which emerged through Sadie Plant and Nick Land forming the CCRU - the group - was a form which I perceived had validity, and that the modality of an encompassing experimentation was also something about which I completely agreed.
But although the form had aspects which had a full validity, the content in relation to Nick Land's imput to the CCRU was in almost all ways disastrous. It was an expression of a newly created form of fixation on time and systematicity - time in the form of the time of accelerationism, and systematicity in the form of a neo-cabbalistic drift of numerical and letter analysis that can be - and was - given the term 'schizo-numerics,' but which, in fact, did not provide a basis for understanding the world.
The slow-burn but emphatic breakdown that led to Nick Land leaving the department, in 1997, was more than inseparable from the form of fixation which had emerged within his work - it was on one level the acute form of this fixation. The system of experimentation which had been adopted had fundamentally failed (sustained use of amphetamines combined with accelerationism/schizonumerics).
It is therefore not surprising that by the end of 1997 I had been aware for some time that I was trying to effectuate a completely different system of experimentation, even if I was not yet certain about the philosophical/pragmatic content of the CCRU (by this time Mark Fisher was central to the CCRU, and it was probably in its most productive phase, with Nick Land as active within it as ever - Mark Fisher's own breakdown at this time was around a year later).
The process of moving into the current had several phases: there was a 'tightening-up,' and there was a movement toward a substantial change in the initial form of experimentation. And to get to the nuances here it is best to return to the experience in February of 1995.
To be precise, everything now takes place between February 1995 and August 1996. This, therefore, is about the relationship between Tess and myself. And yet, at the deeper and wider level (the level which in fact also is the way of making contact with the relationship) it is about answering the question - what was this alliance of exploration? (whose movements-forward were emergences which again and again were not definable in terms of conscious thought). Or to put it another way, what was this other research unit, this research unit studying the other - the Futural life that is there alongside us all the time?
The first point to be made about the experience in February 1995 is that, because the record stopped near the beginning, without us noticing, what took place emphatically occurred without the involvement of technology (LSD has been synthesised through technology, but within the experience the role of LSD was directly equivalent to plant substances which have been in use for millennia, and in any case, what LSD does is something that was found not constructed). The emphasis is in the fact that we did not want to put on another record: what we had was what we needed.
The second point relates to an aspect of what happened which I have not yet mentioned: the experience took place in silence. We did not speak. In terms of the beginning this seemed to have the quality of being so swept up into the joy of the intricate movement that there was no attention left that could be given to speaking. But alongside this there was an unspoken feeling and 'agreement' - an embodied concurrence - that, in any case, it would be impossible to say anything worthwhile about it: it was beyond words. And it being beyond words leads to a further sense of 'in silence' and a deeper sense of 'beyond words.' What we were doing was so preoccupying that it also shut down internal verbalising: it was a form of being which blocked the interior dialogue, through attention being saturated at the levels of action and perception. And whereas I feel that at the outset there was an aspect of deliberate avoidance of speaking out loud (a conscious realisation that it would not help, and in fact would get in the way), the cutting off of internal verbalisation took place by stealth, as it were, and because it was simply a state of being rapt (in ultra-active rapture) that was involved, without any conscious aspect in relation to the absence, it could trigger no 'out-of-control' fear reflex, and therefore no return to verbalised attempts to characterise what was happening etc. The later phases of the experience maintained the same aspects, but with a subtle difference: as communication began at the level of gesture, there was a feeling of not speaking aloud being a fundamental 'rule' that allowed the communication to take place. This was there, as an occasional conscious instance; but, again, there was a blocking of interior verbalising that remained un-noticed. All of this is to say that all aspects of what is one of the oldest human technologies - the system of expressively modulating air that is speech - was also definitively being kept out of the process.
The third point is that what was taking place was dance, and it was dance deterritorialised in the direction of space, as opposed to time. The patterns were initially seen as lines in space, and then expressed as movement, and we were not producing an external beat or punctiform temporal 'line' on which the movements were organised (this could have been done through moving our feet, for instance). A fixation on the line of time is a fundamental aspect of what suppresses human existence, and here the focus was space, and although movements had forms which might or might not recur (rotation of the upper body around the balance-axis, and back again; the rising and falling of the arms) there was no sense at all of a rhythm that was being followed, developed or subverted - instead everything was immanent.
The absence of technology is worth thinking about, given that it was an absence that included a blocking of speech. and given both the nature of the capitalist world, and the way in which capitalism and technology were fundamental issues for the Warwick milieu. The dynamic behind this question of technology (what gives sense to raising the issue in this context) is the indicative power of the faculty of feeling: and the key moment in Greece in 1996 - seeing the forested ridge of the mountain - was completely different in terms of the direction being made visible, and yet was also an event with an absence of involvement of technology (it can be said that there are three directions here - the body; depth-level alliances between individuals; and the planet).
Even if accelerationism and schizonumeric analysis were not affirmed by people within - or on the edge of - the milieu, the overall tendency was for people to be in a current where the world of cutting-edge technologies of the late twentieth century were experienced as in some sense providing a view toward higher levels of human existence. Given that the personal computer threshold-crossing was in reality taking place at exactly this time, the idea of capitalism-driven technology being inspiringly fundamental to the 'zeitgeist' was in fact very much present in the western world of the mid 1990s, but the Warwick milieu substantially amplified this idea.
Technology in a specific and very profound sense is fundamental to human existence. It is far more interesting and deeply - libidinally - embedded in our lives than is generally perceived, and simultaneously it is both the case that in a certain way it consists of what should be a secondary not a primary focus for attention, and that the domain of technology contains a system of technological functionings - pertaining to capitalism - which is extremely damaging for the human world and the planet (from this point of view technology in a large proportion of its aspects looks like something pertaining to a kind of parasitic growth - a kind of planetary canker or disease). The second principle of transcendental empiricism (and this is what is in effect in A Thousand Plateaus) is - focus on bodies in the customary sense: tools, cities, books, terrains, human bodies, human organs, mines, metals, jewelry, crops, machines. But the first principle is - focus on the substantial or energetic abstract: on intent, dreamings, feeling, awareness, faculties, and all the abstract machines or modalities of intent that pertain to bodies without organs.
This is to be wise after the event in relation to 1995-1996, but it goes a long way to explain the strangeness of my situation in the Warwick milieu at that time. Nick Land, Sadie Plant and Mark Fisher correctly perceived the world of capitalist ordinary reality as a horrific world of suppression of lives, and were therefore in agreement with Deleuze and Guattari about this - but what was different was the the idea that a heightening of technological, computational and mathematical development (and a general de-regulation of the economic domains of societies) would cause this machine of ordinary reality to collapse. Whereas, in reading A Thousand Plateaus I was moving toward the idea that the intensification of the technological substrate of capitalism was simply an intensification of the problem. And, more importantly, I was moving toward the perception that the solution was what it had been throughout human history: go toward the planet; go toward perception; go toward the body without organs; go toward waking the faculties; go toward the body; go toward depth-level alliances consisting of affection, creation of new, heightened circumstances, and movements into wider realities.
The questions of deterritorialisation of the body need to be opened up into the wider context of the third high-point experience, in Greece in 1996. In relation to the emergent system of experimentation it was what related to the body and the planet which to a great extent was foregrounded first, with this foregrounding having two primary aspects - one centred on the actual in connection with the body, and one centred on the actual in connection with the planet, but both directly involving deterritorialisation. In the first case the deterritorialisation is directly on the part of the body; in the second case it relates to the body's journeys in space. To be specific, in seeing the montane forest in Greece the direction of deterritorialisation from the urban was opening up, but it can be added to this that, in coming from another country experiencing the joy of being in Greece in a way that involved a feeling of being 'at home' was also a deterritorialisation toward the planet. (it can be seen that the nuanced displacement of technology in the section above is not about establishing humans as special: everything here goes toward the idea that a domain normally seen as inert - the planet - is all along on the same level, or in some sense on a higher level, in relation to human beings).
*
After the singular LSD experience in February 1995 Tess and I had no experiences that came even remotely close in intensity until September, around two weeks after we had moved to Leamington. This later event was described briefly at the start of Section 24, and was extremely different, in that it involved a deterritorialisation into different personae, and a deterritorialisation of speech. It did not have the same level of focus as what had taken place in February, but it had a bright, sublime expansiveness: a sense of being located in North America and simultaneously in a room in Leamington, and a striking feeling of being displaced into a North American indigenous perspective. The contrast here is quite marked. The earlier experience was ultra-focused, and although it had a quality of taking place within an ocean there was no aspect of 'oneirically' bringing to mind other parts of the planet, and nor was there any aspect of it that directly connected to where we were at the time. It was as if it was taking place in a bubble surrounded by night: or, to be more precise, the feeling of being in an ocean was expansive only in an absolute sense - we were surrounded by a cosmos-ocean. The September experience was not about the body at the level of the actual - and it was only 'tangentially' about bodies in the virtual-real: instead it involved the world of state societies as viewed, in some sense, from an external perspective, and was about the idea of another, more terrain-connected, or planet-connected way of being. Both of the personae involved in this other vantage were female, but the virtual-real corporeal aspect was maximally in the background: the entire experience was about understanding the nature of the world. The feeling that went with this was an intense joy: as has already been indicated, it was a state that can best be described as the visionary-sublime.
At the beginning of May Tess got a full-time job, a job that she would continue doing until shortly before starting a postgraduate cognitive science course in September. Before this - and also afterwards, but to a smaller extent - we intermittently took LSD with the February experience at the back of our minds, and nothing in any way similar occurred. And it also seemed as if in general a high-point had been reached which was followed by a substantial drop in intensity. It is clearly the case that different batches and types of LSD have different effects, and that the intensity of experiences is related to frequency of ingestion, but looking back on this phase there is an enigmatic de-intensification (even when the interval since the previous time was long the effects could be relatively minimal): as if we we had not realised the extent to which each time we had to bring a new direction, a new way of looking into the unknown. The impression that this gave was of an impersonal force - like water - which flooded a vacuum in experience, but when the experience had taken place in a sustained, focused way the force did not go into effect, because there was no longer a vacuum.
Our arrival in Leamington seemed to change the situation. There was the feeling of having got out from under a cloud. And the expansiveness of the September LSD experience felt like fresh air.
Without giving this much thought, I was distancing myself from Nick Land's perspectives in relation to his favoured fictional worlds. I was still placing his views to one side of my work (as views that could be correct, but where the issues did not seem to impact on the lines of thought I was following), but a process of departure was taking place at the level of dreamings. I had never found Lovecraft very helpful, but now Gibson began to drop back from the foreground. The September experience had a slight connection to some of the lyrics in Patti Smith's Horses, and this already-existing vantage was very soon re-enforced by dreamings which, as they came together, all seemed to be connected by shared affects and perspectives: the most important of these were Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Waves.
From October onwards we took fewer halucinogens, and I tightened my focus so that I was concentrating on a close reading of A Thousand Plateaus. And from around this time -September/October 1995 - everything was brighter. A kind of joyful, edge-of-lucidity expansiveness began to be the primary tonality of my everyday life. Something from the best drug experiences (particularly the one which had just happened) had come across into ordinary reality. It wasn't that everything was easy at this time. On the contrary, there was recurrently a kind of jagged, up-and-down aspect to it, but what was new was that very recurrently there was a serene impersonal brightness - joyful because it involved outsights, and outsights starting to come into focus - as opposed to the dull sheen of ordinary existence.
Between 1995 and 1996 there were the three high-point deterritorialisation-experiences which have been described: two that involved LSD, and a third one which took the form of the trip to Northern Greece (placed in this context there is a sadness that arrives with the third experience, in that the most extraordinary moment - the point where I saw the mountain forest - was not shared between myself and Tess).
To widen the focus, the most powerful experience of this kind - by far - in the four years from 1995 was the dream in February 1998. But this, in fact, seems like a pinnacle at the end of a long series of very intense experiences in the preceding two years.
And what seems to require emphasis is the event which was described at the end of the previous section: the event which took place in the south of Greece - that is, the solar-trance experience of travelling for a mile by jumping from rock to rock, where as I did this I felt that something anomalous was happening, unaware that what was vital was that I had found another way - as with the LSD experience in early 1995 - of stopping thought, by adopting a very intense form of activity.
A concluding point is that, in relation to life-wakening experience there were two other worlds of experience in the relationship between Tess and myself that were incommensurately at the same level, but where it is not possible to point to a singular event: instead it is like long, broken plateaus of kinds of zenith experience.
One of these was love-making. And here it should be said that bliss - or rapture - along with being in love is what is involved in relation to sexuality in waking a life, but combined in turn with an occasional, fugitive awareness (sometimes in the last, or dying seconds of the sexual act) of a perturbing thread within sexuality of libidinalised 'taking' or imposing-upon, and a libidinalised submission to being imposed upon. And here it is also necessary to turn on its head the idea of 'fulfilment': making love breaks everything open - wakes your life - or in itself it is worth nothing. The only thing that relates to the idea of fulfilment in fact completely undermines it as a value: the feeling of 'at last I have reached where I was trying to reach' experienced as self-satisfaction is a collapse, but if it is a joy that has the quality of opening up a view of the immensity of life (so that where you were trying to reach is the beginning of an unanticipated, sublime journey) then the feeling is something that is fundamentally valuable. Everything becomes a world of compelling questions marks: you look up and see the beauty and extraordinary potentials of existence.
The other form of experience was dancing to Patti Smith's album Horses. The intensity of these experiences had an impersonal quality of philosophical discovery - of the arrival of outsights - and also, in a different sense, because I had started dancing to Patti Smith in this way a few weeks before the start of our relationship; but it was also very deeply intimate within our relationship - one of the first times, we danced and then we made love, and the line 'our lives are now entwined' became important to us because of this experience. Dancing to Horses continued across the two years of the relationship, and in some ways became more intense. And a key point here is that this - like the experience in February of 1995 - was also a joy which centrally involved dance. Waking the body is fundamental in waking a life, and dance is a primary aspect of waking the body.
In conclusion, what is needed is an account of two, profoundly inter-related aspects of the events involved: on the one hand concerning feelings and dreamings, and on the other hand concerning a system of experimentation that came into focus toward the end of this phase.
Not long after moving to Leamington a new kind of dream arrived - a form of dreaming involving out-of-the-way, semi-wilderness and wilderness places, a fundamental upward-threshold of existence travelled across by a group or an individual, and a powerful, sublime feeling that was in some way inseparable from the planetary terrains of the dream. The earlier 'precursor' experiences - in particular this relates, in fact, to the one in November 1993, alongside the one with Tess in February 1995, had an intense feeling of bliss - at the high point of both of them this involved dance - that was fundamentally about the joy of perception and movement/proprioception; however these experiences did not involve the emergence of a virtual-real world in the form of a charged-and-sublime dreaming. The other difference between the two phases was that a serenely positive feeling was now to a great extent suffusing my everyday experiences in the town in which I was living, as if some of the joy from the anomalous experiences had come across into my quotidian experiences: but a key aspect of this is that when I started going into the surrounding countryside - in particular with the visits to Harbury Lake - the feeling of joy these experiences gave me felt emphatically as if it was the same kind of joy as that which was arriving in the experiences of being in the town (but at a substantially higher level) and the same kind of joy as the one in the dreams (sleep dreams; reverie 'flashes', story-worlds). The appearance of the new modality of dreaming seems certain to have been determined by a wide range of circumstances, but the faculty of feeling indicated that something which had been fundamental had been the move from the city to the composite terrain of Leamington and the countryside around it.
And by February of 1998 the system of experimentation which was coming into view was:
Simultaneously wake the degrees of freedom of the body and the faculty of perception.
Go toward wildernesses, semi-wildernesses and scurflands (or, go toward the planet with the human world included as an element within it, but concentrating on spaces beyond the urban), and do this to the maximum both at the level of the actual and the level of the virtual-real.
Wake the faculty of dreaming.
Further to this, the aspects of the world which had to some extent been emphasised and brought into focus were these:
The small group in a process of escape from ordinary reality - the 'escape group.'
Women as travellers into the unknown, and becoming-woman.
Tribal and nomadic social worlds.
Becomings in relation to animals.
A house as component of a form of existence.
Forests.
Various very diverse points now need to be made. The first is based on the fact that the faculty of dreaming consists of dreams about the future, dreams in the form of tales and reveries, and dreams in sleep, and is that the waking of this faculty in relation to the first aspect - dreams about the future - can be exemplified by the idea of the escape-group.
The second issue is that in February of 1998 this system of experimentation was coming into view, but in a sense it was still scattered over the floor, with an element whose presence was implied, but which in fact was still missing. I had gone off to search for a way forward, faced with the collapse of the radical Warwick milieu / experimentation project, and the search had been relatively successful, but I still had very little chance of realising, on my own, that what is fundamental in waking the faculty of perception is learning to stop the internal dialogue.
Lastly, it is important to see that the method of this section has been to base everything upon dreams in sleep, trance /semi-trance experiences, and intense feelings that in one way or another were always forms of joy. (or experiences which at the very least involved a form of joy). None of these aspects involve thought in a customary sense, but this is the fault of the concept of thought. In going off to find a way forward at the level of the transcendental it is the world in combination with another side of yourself which is the domain from which you are seeking assistance, and the lucidity of this other domain is on one level the ability to speak through dreams and joy (on another level it is an ability to express outsights by means of transcendental-empirical concepts). It could be argued that the place from which I went to get assistance was A Thousand Plateaus, but there would be no reason at all to delimit sources of inspiration in this way, and in any case this would not address the fact of this form of communication. In fact, what is involved here is perception at the level of intent, a process which all along consists of being affected/transformed by intent, where this process can take the form of oneiric perception or perception in the form of feeling.
It is true that at this time I was beginning to see the world of formations of intent - as a result of reading about abstract machines in A Thousand Plateaus. But this is an aspect of the process that is being delineated. The ordinary-reality account of thought insists on tracing everything to individuals (and their texts), where these individuals are thinking by means of concepts. However, as Deleuze points out, philosophy creates concepts - as well as figures - rather than thinking by means of them, and it does this because it consists of abstract perception, and abstract-oneiric perception, along with perception at the level of feeling. A river of freedom runs through the human world, and it is perceiving this river which leads to the philosophical accounts. It is a real river, but this of course does not mean that it is encountered through the eyes. Perception of intent has the tonality of the visual, and can work in a fragmented way, or in the form of a whole dreamed terrain, but it is important to remember that the visual is the surface modality of the perception involved.
We have arrived at a recondite place - one that was always right in front of us. A place of processes-of-escape; a place where it is perceived that there is a thread of lucidity that can be found beyond the fear-generated urgencies that make up the vast majority of dreams; a place of micropolitical departures where thought at its most profound is grasped as liberatory perception of worlds of intent. And the river of freedom can also be seen as a cairn path leading across mountains to a terrain on the other side where the climate is different, brighter. The second sphere of action.
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