This blog is three books in the process of being written, in the form of initial drafts of the sections, posted in the intended order, a project for which the overall name is Explorations. The three books are a continuation from Hidden Valleys: Haunted by the Future (Zero Books - 2015), and also from On Vanishing Land, an audio-essay made by myself and Mark Fisher (released by Hyperdub/Flatlines on 26th July, 2019 - https://hyperdub.net).
Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
The supreme enigma - the supreme unknown-which-is-knowable - is the composite of the planet and of our dreamings about the planet.
1.
2. A primacy of the faculty of perception – that is, of sustained attention in relation to the spheroambient world that arrives continually into the world of a perceiving being; and, inseparably from this, a primary focus on the body, and on energy.
3. An effectuated functioning of the faculties which form the outside of the dominant forms of connection with the world, where these other faculties are perception, dreaming, lucidity, intent and feeling, together with the faculty of becomings, which transects the other five.
4. A primary focus on a specific modality of existence that can be called brightness (where this is in opposition to gravity).
5. A primary focus on non-state societies, in particular nomadic social formations: this being a focus which concerns not so much the entire fabric of empirical details of these societies, but which instead takes the form of giving attention to these societies insofar as they involve a higher degree of knowledge in connection with the escape-path which leads away from ordinary reality, and which consists of processes of waking the faculties, and of becoming-active.
6. In relation to modalities of expression, a primary focus on the world to be delineated or dreamed, as opposed to a focus on concepts and forms of writing (new concepts and new forms of writing will emerge, but precisely through the conceptual/linguistic issues involved in creating them being secondary).
7. A centrality of attention in relation to the transcendental-empirical, as opposed to the empirical (see Section 19). Knowledge of the escape-path is an example of knowledge of a transcendental-empirical aspect of the world. This attention on the transcendental-empirical is a focus on intent, energy, dreamings and affects (so that in this respect it intrinsically involves the faculty of lucidity), and it also fundamentally needs to include sustained processes of explanatory envisaging - or generation of hypotheses - on the part of the faculty of dreaming.
8. A centrality of attention in relation to groups, and all micropolitical issues, as opposed to the domain of state politics, whether this is that of individual nation states, or of blocs/alliances of nation states.
Between 1995 and 1998 something that can correctly be termed an affect appeared in my life. It had already been there, in a diffuse way, but during this time it became focused to the point where it was noticeable.
A preparatory point is that an affect in the sense in question is here being defined as a specific kind of feeling, or range of feelings, together with a specific kind of dreaming/envisaging, where the affect can appear in dreaming and waking states, as well as states of semi-trance. This, properly speaking, is an oneiric affect.
These are the features of the affect:
Wilderness, semi-wilderness and scurfland terrains, with a bright serene atmosphere.
A group which has crossed, or is about to cross, an upward threshold of existence.
Individuals – seen on their own - who have crossed, or have the ability to cross, an upward threshold of existence.
An impersonal feeling of joy.
In terms of a specific expression, the affect does not of course need to have both a group and an individual, so that the core of the affect is –
Terrains with the bright serene atmosphere; an upward threshold of existence; the impersonal feeling of joy.
This 'planetary' affect can appear in dreams in sleep; in the combination of an actual experience and thoughts/envisaging that occur at the same time; in plans and dreams for the future; in the dreaming up of stories; in semi-trance or ‘reverie’ experiences of different kinds.
In the dream experiences (in which the affect was at its clearest) the upward threshold-crossing was something ‘quotidian’ and yet simultaneously was sublime – sublime to the utmost extent when envisaged directly. It was not referenced to anything ‘mysterious’ along the lines of known anomalous cultural forms (eg. 'shamanism'), but instead was a quotidian fact, though momentous in the extreme. In the culminating dream this was expressed by the final process of reaching the threshold being seen as like tuning a radio to a frequency (for these dream experiences see Sections 24 and 25).
The affect arrived in the form of around fifteen experiences that took place between the autumn of 1995 and February of 1998. However, the core of the affect was in the four dreams in sleep which took place across this phase of around 30 months.
There is more that could be added about the ways in which it went into effect, but it would be correct to state that this planetary affect was a new powerful flow of a current that had already been moving me, but which now moved me forward at a faster speed. This was at the level of the places I decided to visit, and at the level of the dreaming up and writing of stories (there is no doubt that these two can together constitute a fundamental level).
The planetary affect can be seen in effect across the millennia, although its focused expressions would appear to be extremely rare (no doubt because the current involved is not connected either to the nation state or to religion). At the time in question I had been encountering it, in a diffuse form, through reading A Thousand Plateaus.
A final point is that a distinction can be made between the affect, and its specific modalities of expression. The affect remains the planetary affect across the different modalities (though at a sufficient level of development it becomes straightforwardly what can be called the affect of brightness, while retaining everything from its initial form), but the modalities are different forms of dreaming. This distinction can be explicated by pointing out that in the years after 1998 I was being influenced by the modality of the affect which had appeared, but, having by this time found other forms, it was only in 2006 that I started on a process of deliberately developing this form of dreaming (The Corridor is the main result of this process in relation to stories, and Hidden Valleys was the point where I started to explore the form of dreaming through philosophy, in distinction from the creation of the oneiric-abstract worlds of dreamings).
At a certain point it becomes very clear that the current involved exists in the human world; multiplicitous, yes, but singular: an actual current, as opposed to many processes incorrectly brought together under one concept.
However, it remains the case that the indications are that – simultaneously - it is fundamentally exterior to the human world, if only through something that could be provisionally described as a kind of energy source, and source of inspiration.
The first point here is that it is profoundly connected to the planet. This connection is both at the level of the environmental circumstances where the force is more likely to go into effect, and at the level of the content/outsights of the oneiric productions (the dreamings) of the force / the affect.
There is no doubt that the current exists within the human world, and there is also no doubt that it is a current in the form of a principle of exteriority. The impression here is of a thread of the anomalous: an impersonal, sublime energy-flow which runs through (and is the best part of) an embattled, partly-awake being that is at a fundamentally higher level, in relation to which you are a component element, but where you are simultaneously an element which is separate, free-floating. You follow the affect, you begin to embody the principle of exteriority - the current sweeps you away.
*
The phase of my life from 1995 to 1998 has been described three times in Explorations (it can be added that Zone Horizon is largely about precursor events, and this book - Through the Forest, the River, has given an account of how a 'penumbral' direction began to come into focus at this time, alongside the brightness of the direction in which the current was moving). In Section 25 (The Second Sphere of Action) it was described in terms of a semi-focused philosophico-pragmatic set of outsights and guidelines that I arrived at during this time; in Section 37 it was described in a way which concentrated on travelling and the writing of stories; and in Section 49 the account on one level was centred on three persistences; with a set of philosophical/anthropological works; with writing stories; with travelling to out-of-the-way places. Also, in Section 49 a conduction is described which it is pointed out only began with the University of Warwick philosophy milieu.
The later phase of this conduction was the appearance of the planetary affect. There is no contradiction here with what has gone before; but on its own the the description of persistences is in danger of suggesting a subject acting meritoriously upon inert, intransigent materials, and the key here is that the arrival of the affect in question was the appearance of a dream, a longing and a feeling, where it did not seem in any way that I had created what had arrived - it seemed instead that something had come from outside and drawn me forward into a more wakened state (and it is not that this is an additional, unmentioned persistence - the affect was fundamentally involved in all three of the persistences).
The conduction from 1995 onwards ended in a slowing down, as I failed to orientate my life for travelling in this way. And then there was a jolt (Section 34), the response to which led to new inspirations - and overall a new, multi-element conduction - which allowed a development that had been taking place through the whole process to reach the point where I wrote a story, The Corridor, which was on a scale - in terms of length of narrative - which meant I had very little time for any other form of writing. And at a further level it has been the same process since the trip to Tuva, and the last phase of writing the novel-length story: however, the break has been the shift to setting out a philosophical account of the threshold within the dream aspect of the affect - a threshold which, by 2011, I knew was not just an element within fictional stories. The same process that led me to writing fiction changed its predominant mode again in terms of its expression in a form of writing.
Note
At the fundamental level the conditions of possibility of thought are the world (and in particular the planet, with its profoundly inspiring, heartening, thought-generative impacting or arrival into our lives, in the form of our ongoing encounter with it) alongside the aspects of the transcendental-empirical (brightness / the escape-path / the second sphere of action / the ongoing disaster), and together with the faculties, in particular perception, lucidity, dreaming, becomings and intent, but also reason and language. Everything here concerns exteriority, and the transcendentally unknown which is knowable is right in front of us - all we need is to wake our faculties. The idea of the unknown which is unknowable is just a damaging distraction. The grey vapour of Kantianism disappears in the sunlight.
In assessing a human instance (a group, or an individual, or a cognitive system, or an institution, or a religion or a nation state) it is necessary to grasp it at the level of intent and of feeling, and at the level of its dreamings, in particular its dreamings about the future. As a result eventually seeing will occur - the functioning of lucidity, a process in which a figural, sharp-edged perception of what is being produced by the instance will emerge, and in which, at the deepest level, there will be a grasping of it in relation to the differential field of brightness and gravity.
Dreaming must also be woken by exploratory creations of accounts-of-the-world and tales/stories, and by exploratory considerations of stories which produce a feeling of serene, impersonal joy.
It needs to be noticed that it is exceptionally suspicious that dreamings within ordinary reality are either discounted as mere entertainment or, in the form of religions, are structures around which people build their lives.
What is fundamental here is that dreamings recurrently contain outsights about the nature of the world. Dreams in sleep may not often contain these outsights to any great extent, and this is because the faculty of dreaming has not been woken. Most dreams in sleep are a kind of detritus, and most stories are the products of the systems of ventures and lives, of reason and revelation, and of subjectified affects (the majority of dreams in sleep reveal primarily the grim blocking-structures of subjectification). The conditions of possibility of thought in dreaming are the same as the conditions of possibility of thought overall: everything involves exteriority, encounters. The vapour of Freudianism also disappears.
What must now be delineated is the need to avoid a ‘supplementary dimension’ in thinking about the planet, and also in thinking about the human beings who exist on it The aim here is to set everything out as aspects or attributes of one zone, but to do this in an open-ended way. However, despite the process being open-ended what is not involved is the idea of a supplementary dimension – the exploratory axiom of exteriority is that the planet is not at a lower level through lacking a crucial dimension, and not just because the human world is an aspect of it.
Firstly, it is necessary to think about the aspect of the human world – and therefore of the planet – which can be termed the oneirosphere. And in this context the term will be used for all dreamings, and for all accounts of the world. Most specifically it will be used for the sphere of stories, dreams in sleep, fictions, scientific narratives, religious narratives, memories, anticipations, daydreams, reveries, semi-trance experiences, sexual fantasies, myths, and historical accounts.
The oneirosphere therefore is brought into focus as a spherical domain that is alongside, or co-emplaced with, the atmosphere, and also with the sphere of the tectonic plates of the Earth’s surface. This is a good emblem of immanence (despite it being over-focused on human beings), but it is nonetheless only a starting-point.
Holding the idea of the oneirosphere in mind, it is possible to step back for a moment, and ask ‘what do people dream?’ The key to answering this question is the system of reason and revelation and the system of ventures and lives.
Both of these systems function to give a sense of vastness (there is all of this, and yet there is also all of this). But in both cases this is a deception: all along, in fact, there is an immense shutting down of potentials involved.
The revelation side of the first system is the domain of the captured, destroyed forms of the functioning of lucidity, and, in particular, of the full awareness of the planet as the unknown, the enigmatic, and as in some sense the ‘sublime’. Everything is collapsed into interiorities, damaging transcendence moralities, and delusions about the ‘material world’ and about human lives. The second system is a world of grand or romantic missions, where these are bound together with aspects of the first system. Respectively, the two domains have close links, in terms of their acute (as opposed to chronic) manifestations in the form of paranoia and mania. However, the reason side of the first system is equally pathological, because of its de-intensificatory fixations (fixations at the expense of the other faculties). In relation to acute disturbances the reason aspect of the system takes the form not of mania, but of manic depression, but where the emphasis must be placed on depression (the mania side produces emphatic but misguided anticipations, for instance, but it at least has a general openness, that could at any point assist in waking lucidity and dreaming). Here everything is futurally indexical and structurally indexical, but without the understanding of intent – the transcendental-empirical knowledge – that makes a depth-level understanding possible. The result is a profound vulnerability to depression.
The nature of the ‘sides’ of each of the two systems is that they are not expected to be in close overt communication with each other within an individual: on the contrary the expectation is that in general they won’t have this communication. There is also the accepted possibility that you could only engage with one, but always with the background idea that there is something two-dimensional about you if you only develop on one side. If a geologist is religious they are not expected to build a bridge between the two domains, but if they are a geologist who has no interest in religion the functioning of the system is to suggest there is a lack of depth on the part of the individual.
If the system of reason and revelation supposedly answers the question ‘what is the nature of the world? / “what is really going on?” then the system of ventures and lives answers the question “what are the potentials of a human life?” Here, again, there are two sides which are expected to connect only very rarely. Career and relationship. Public life and private life (the apparent vastness – there is all this, and then there is also this).
Here the world of relationships is understood as something that is not easy to talk about – as something which in some way includes a thread of the sublime – and yet this world turns out to have been codified in advance, so that it primarily involves couple relationships centred, at the beginning at least, to a great extent on sexuality, and with a default assumption about reproduction/adoption (it also has a side-exit option in the form of religious asceticism: the appearance is that nothing has been left out, including the menage a trois etc). But although this world of relationships is seen as something extremely 'special' it is kept fundamentally apart from career.
There is a kind of creepy, sinister domestication of the sublime here: systemically/machinically there is a piety supported by myriad songs, stories and films (but very much unsupported by a world of domestic violence and unhappiness, and of serial relationships) and simultaneously there is the cynicism of the absolute default in relation to mixing across the divide (don’t be sentimental, this is your career not your private life). What is missing here is the idea of relationships as love-alliances that are part of a process of waking the faculties, and of travelling toward wider realities.
Dreams about the future are always endlessly beyond the dreams fostered and selected for by the two systems, but overall, in relation to these systems the dreams are of kinds like these: dreams about a love relationship that is yet to happen; dreams about a current relationship or family; career dreams about success, discoveries, achievements, 'hero' victories etc; religious dreams about developments in the course of a life; religious anticipations concerning life after death.
But having given an account of dreams about the future, it is necessary to place this in the context of the planet. How does the planet appear within these dreams and anticipations?
The planet as victim of capitalism
The planet as mere blind matter
The planet as force of random destruction
The planet as part of what will be destroyed on the day of judgement
The planet as gift of a benevolent divine entity.
It is clear that all the time the planet, when focused upon with any intensity, is an object of wonder. But this is precisely what does not belong to the systems - instead it is what is captured by them. The moment any thinking takes place within the systems the planet shifts toward being the functioning of 'forces of nature,' the victim of capitalism, and, recurrently, the world which has been gifted to us by a transcendent force beyond nature.
It is true that the planet is the victim of capitalism, but it is a question of shifting to seeing the human world as within the planet, and of re-thinking the part of the planet that is not the human world. These are the contrasting perspectives:
the planet as in some sense an (embattled) Spinozistic zone, where the substance of the planet does not have a smaller number of attributes than the substance of human beings.
the planet as the unknown; as definitively the sublime; as world of intensificatory alliances; as world of predatory forces
The planet as place of semi-wild, scurfland and wilderness terrains which are likely, if encountered with sufficient openness, to have a profound intensificatory impact, in relation to the waking of the faculties, and the process of becoming-active.
The planet as where, at depth, you are, as opposed to being in a ‘state’, a ‘country’.
In a positive sense of the term everything now starts to be’ haunted’ by immanence. If the planet is a world which you love, and which heartens, inspires and energises you when you travel in semi-wild and wild terrains (so that you arrive at outsights - at transcendental-empirical knowledge) then what exactly is this relationship? It is possible to take the example of a man who says about a woman - ‘I’m in love with her, and she endlessly inspires me, but this is just a material energetic current that happens to wake by own intellectual faculties, rather than her teaching me in any way.’ We would regard this man as very disturbingly deluded and prejudiced. This comparison does not prove anything, but it is important to see that this is how we are in relation to the planet.
It can be seen that although the human oneirosphere and the atmosphere/geosphere don’t lead, when considered together, to any pattern of simple correspondences in terms of dreams about the future, the planet does become the key to a typology of these dreams, and in a way which introduces the idea of immanence. It will also be noticed that on one level the typology concerns maladies (depression, paranoia, mania) which also breaks open immanence, but at the level of the pragmatics of the body.
The questions here concern perception and action, and they also concern sexuality.
Sexual fantasies are part of the oneirosphere. What are these affects? It is important to see that they recurrently involve different modalities of a kind of domination and unhealthy submission (a libidinal/ecstatic impositionism), but it is also important to see that they confound levels – they resist codification as parts of the putative supplementary dimension of the mind (because of their relationship to the sex drive of the body), and yet as dreams they do not belong to the domain of the organs. It can be pointed out as well, that recurrently they are also part of the domain of dreams about the future.
However, what is crucial here is the libidinal investment of perception, and the waking of the faculties as a result of a generalised becoming-active. Here there is a domain of joys (sensory, physical, intellectual, and oneiric-abstract) that has an evident connection to the heightening or intensification of the body in terms of its abilities, level of fitness or health, and ways of conserving energy. In relation to the human body – as opposed to the body that is the planet – the pragmatics of immanence suddenly acquires an unquestionable traction: in terms of learning to wake the body through becoming-active and through conservation of energy, and in terms of learning the skill of unbroken perception.
The idea arrives at this point of other stories – stories of escape which inspire to a high degree, in the sense that they inspire the totality of yourself.
However, a last point is this, in the process of holding open the idea of the oneirosphere. The wild and semi-wild and countryside terrains have a greater intensity – a greater power to wake the faculties – than the cities and urban terrains. This shows up at the level of the creation of worlds of outsights, and also in relation to religion which continually captures both love for the planet and lucidity and re-codes them with the delusion-system (establishment education systems also benefit, though to a great extent simply by heartening impact). The point here is that the ‘near’ edge of the periphery (the countryside, areas around small towns, areas alongside mountains or deserts) is a very heavily ‘contested’ or sought-after zone. There is of course no straightforward correspondence between people and terrains, but a tendency can very definitely be discerned. The power of the periphery… Many kinds of foundations are created and maintained on the periphery, and their material conditions are exceptionally disparate, but despite the chiaroscuro of different circumstances, the same tendency is always to some extent involved. Speaking generally, but taking examples from Britain: university towns (St Andrews, Oxford, Cambridge), the Eden Project, the Minack Theatre, ‘intentional communities’ such as the Findhorn foundation, artist communities, the theatre at Stratford on Avon, monasteries, convents – all of these rub shoulders as inhabitants of the periphery.
The far edge of the periphery is where it is much harder to live. The point here is not to establish a major correspondence in terms of emergences of worlds of outsights, or of delusional captures, but is instead to point to the two zones – the two areas of the periphery – as fundamentally important in relation to navigation (even if, as a limit case, the navigation only involves the terrains of your oneiric worlds).
4.
5.
What is seen through the planetary affect is the second sphere of action, and the escape-path. While it here that we live, the planet - in its exteriority - is in the fullest sense the domain of the second sphere of action, and the upward threshold-crossing is the departure, along the escape-path, from the ordinary, deadened reality of the interestablishment (in its latest macrological form – capitalism). And there is a whole liberatory pragmatics that slowly comes into focus, through experience, and through transcendental-empirical writings. This is the pragmatics of brightness, of Love-and-Freedom – a pragmatics which is also a micropolitics of nomadism.
At this point, in relation to navigation on (and perception of) the planet, it needs to be seen that the interestablishment is an element that is located multiplicitously and macrologically on the planet, so that navigation involves working within - and moving out beyond – the ruinous aspects of the human venture. But, at the level of perception the dedication to perceiving intent can now be turned upon a domain where it can obviously bring this area into focus, to some extent at least. The aim here is to work around, and depart from, an element within the human world - and therefore, in some sense, of the terrain of the planet - which is not intensificatory in its effect. In the second sphere of action the interestablishment as any kind of main focus, but when it is given attention it is seen as located or lodged within the planet - in a way where it is understood as an energy formation which is deleterious or de-intensificatory in relation to human beings.
The interestablishment is also the interiority: it is the expression at the macrological level of the interestablishment – the interiority – within individual human beings.
As well as being defined as the modality of interiority, it can also be characterised as the modality of control.
There are in fact three primary component systems:
The system of reason and revelation
The system of ventures and lives
The system of subjectified (reactive) affects.
The key affects here are self-importance, fear, envy, resentment, rage, outrage, self-pity, jealousy, indulgent melancholy, self-interested adulation, self-interested submission, self-important triumph, possessiveness, and embarrassment. However, the system is also profoundly bound up with sexuality, so that some aspects of sexuality are expressions of the functioning of this system.
Fear and self-importance are the two most crucial affects in the system, and ultimately it is self-importance that requires a primary emphasis.
It can be seen that self-importance comes in many forms: personal self-importance, national self-importance, religious self-importance, modern ‘tribal’ self-importance, as with gangs and football teams, and species self-importance (“we are special, the other creatures of the planet are on a lower level in comparison with us”). But it is also important to see that both rage and self-pity can be affectively analysed as disguised self-importance (“how can they be doing this to me…”).
In its only apparently benign form, in relation to stories (films, novels etc) the system of subjectified affects has an extremely close relationship in the modern world to the system of ventures and lives.
There are:
Stories about success in relation to warfare, espionage, careers, science, crime etc.
Stories about success in relation to romance.
Daydreaming (probably most often done more by younger individuals) is a creativity with these stories, as opposed to a passivity. And almost everyone is drawn toward practicing the creativity, at one level or another, of sexual fantasies. The different kinds of success are recurrently mixed into one story.
Again, there is the structure of affect as kind of feeling and kind of dreaming-production.
There is a specificity about the planetary affect. It is a joy: the feeling is of the sublime, and if there is sadness involved, this is not an indulgent sadness.
However, the point here is not to suggest that people can break free from self-importance by starting to dream up stories involving this planetary affect.
The point is to make people aware of the escape-path, and of the interestablishment - of the systems of the de-intensificatory modality that is clamped upon the human species.
To get beyond it, all of the aspects of the principle of exteriority are needed, and in particular a hard-edged, dedicated process of intensifying the body, saving energy, and waking the faculties – a process in which perception must have most initial emphasis (along with action in relation to becoming-active), with dreaming and lucidity as the next faculties in terms of importance at this stage. However, this is inseparable from a deterritorialisation toward a focus on the planet, as opposed to the human world being the centre of attention, with the planet in the background.
*
The interiority consists of the systems which have been delineated, and, overall can be characterised as a modality of reactivity, or of deleterious control-behaviours. The expression of the interiority at the macrological level is the world of nation-states, corporations etc. and, at the widest level, is capitalism. This multiplicitous world of the interestablishment has different modes of action but is part of the same domain at the level of forms of intent. The key thing about it is that it is ruinous, or inherently dysfunctional in that it is not a domain of functionings that is guiding the human world forward.
Because of the local modalities of the interestablishment, the fact that democracy is emphatically the best system is not what it seems, because in practice states use democracy to underwrite or justify all kinds of impositionism and disguised authoritarianism. But more than this, the issue is that nation states exist within the overarching current form of the interestablishment - capitalism.
*
The human world is everyone: it is individuals in the ways in which they are not affected by the interiority. It is like a sphere with plasma lines extending from it, travelling outwards. These lines of escape are what energises the sphere to the greatest extent, and are what gives it a chance of one day crossing a threshold away from the malady of control.
The reason why it is important to give support to environmentalism is that once a threat becomes a danger at this level of intensity there is a substantially greater chance of a movement within the human world having an impact. Under these galvanising circumstances substantial changes can take place, and the global institutions of capitalism could end up producing the impression that they are, in a general sense, what they emphatically are not – an effective steerage function leading human beings to better forms of existence. This will be a fundamentally important shift, though the challenge will be to avoid being fooled by the illusion. The change will be a modulation of capitalism, and the generalised process of deadening and dampening of lives will not have come to an end, and will probably in some ways have deepened (a process of saving the planet – but for capitalism).
In fact, what is fundamentally needed, is for human beings to set out along the escape path. From a certain angle the green philosophy being explicated here can be seen as complementary to environmentalism, and there is an element of truth in this: but it is not that a bit of green philosophy is needed with the environmentalism, it is primarily that environmentalism is a stance of explorer-travellers setting out to escape from ordinary, deadened reality. This is not something that can be known about, or planned, but at a certain point the futural lines could interconnect and work back into ordinary reality, suffusing it and transforming it. Build the rhizome in the Future – it is only from the Future that the interestablishment of capitalism could be overcome.
*
There is a pervasive presupposition within accounts of capitalism, which is that it has a deep-level rectitude. This can also be expressed as the presupposition that at the most fundamental level it is a process of working out a problem, where this process has rectitude, or probity. The first manifestation of this presupposition is in conventional discourses which assume that capitalism ultimately does not have affinity for states which do not have rectitude. In fact this idea is entirely refuted by the existence of highly successful states employing violent impositionism (whether against other states or their own population) and sophisticated, covert authoritarianism in relation to their populace. The second form is that of dialectical accounts, where the assumption is that there is an underlying upward movement, where within the present time there are precursors of the synthesis that will eventually be the end of capitalism, with diverse figures such as Lenin and Fredric Jameson being in the position where they will eventually turn out to have been on the right, or futural side of history. The problem here is that despite Che Guavara having immense integrity in comparison with that against which he struggled, the construction of heroes does not alter the fact that what is taking place is the ongoing and worsening depradations of capitalism, and that processes of taking over control of a state, whether successful or not, do not change the course of the disaster.
The third form of the presupposition is the idea that major change can be brought about through appeal to those who are viewed as in a steering role in relation to capitalism. Here the first problem is that those steering it are pre-eminently its functionaries and window-dressers (nobody is driving capitalism – it has people who impersonate drivers). And the second problem is that, in relation to the overall social modality, to speak ‘toward’ this modality - with the thought of genuine top-down liberatory decisions being made – is, in a crucial sense, like someone going up to a dictator and explaining that the country is full of violent functionaries of the despotism whose activities must be stopped. Only at this widest level there are no dictators, there is just an absence of ways in which capitalism can be altered toward socialism, which in the end has more impact than the systems of spurious justifications of the functionings of economic forces. The world stopped listening to accounts of the suffering of workers (and of people in post-industrial rust-belt areas), not because they were untrue, but because no-one had a solution.The overall summary here is that when the problem is too large and disturbing people assume that it cannot in any sense be the problem, and insist on seeing the domain involved as something with a deep-level rectitude. The fact that no-one has a solution to capitalism means that everywhere there is the implacable assumption either that it was never a problem, or that it is busy working out its own solution.
Environmentalism therefore is in a position where it must appeal to everyone, and not be fooled by the steerage functions giving the impression that they are leading the response. Only by a generalised waking of what does not pertain to the interestablishment can the steerage functions be wrenched a little from their first-level tendency, and toward a modality which saves the global socius (the ongoing disaster in its current form) by drawing back from a full environmental catastrophe.
The interestablishment is not in any sense a unified controlling modality: it is a conglomerate of effects or expressions of control-modalities. The fact that it has a directionality - the destruction of species and the environment, and the facultative suppression of human lives - does not make it a controlling instance. It is a tangled, definitively internally divided domain of effects of control functionings. It is at war within itself, and simultaneously resonates across itself, and in turn it is affected by the endless micro-worlds of movements (even if only fugitive, or partial) that relate to the existence of the escape-path. The suppressive systems exist embedded at the widest levels, within knowledge-institutions, language, social traditions and modalities of artistic production, but this systematicity does not in any way represent a governing force, as there is no unification at the level of projects, and all the systems exist alongside what is fundamentally beyond them - those formations of intent which are liberatory and which are part of the space of the transcendental-empirical. The malady is endemic, but its systemic effects are anything but a controlling instance. We are not sufficiently anthropological about our own societies, and when we are anthropological we look for structures and fail to see the pervasiveness of feuds, ruptures, divisions, vendettas, wars, angry decades-long refusals to communicate, etc. The effects are in personal relationships, families, institutions, nation-states and groupings of nation-states: an endless production of wars (there is always war in the ecumenon). Within capitalism there is a split between trading/monetary domains and nation states, and on the first side conflict is to an extent held-down or institutionalised as competition, but because the nation states are like rats caught in a trap, there are continual outbreaks of warfare along current major fracture-lines, and because corporations are lodged - even if this is often in an extremely deterritorialised way - within the nation states, large-scale alliances of states draw the corporations into the processes of their conflicts (the states are all underneath the canopy of capitalism, in the sense that they have been surpassed by it, but individual corporations are at a lower level than a large-scale grouping of nation-states).
It is best to see the control mind - the interestablishment - as corporeal, but with systemic, affectively powerful expressions within the macrological worlds of the social field, and to understand everything in terms of overall effects - but without presuming to have an etiological account, or any kind of definitive account of communication/transmission. It is something seen at the level of the transcendental-empirical, and the knowledge can be employed in the form of a pragmatics of becoming-active, and of waking the faculties.
It is possible to set out a domain of enquiry, knowledge, cognition and dreamings, with science envisaged as being on the left, followed by both customary academic philosophy and literature/fiction, together also with other forms of art, and then a middle zone of maximal holistic integration - a zone which can be called transcendental materialism or metamorphics - followed in turn by politics, and by religion.
In front of this domain, but involving only the two sides - so that here they join in the middle - is a domain of reactivity. The system of reason-and-revelation (with its dogmatic images) is connected up with the system of ventures-and-lives, and with the system of subjectified affects. In the case of the first of these the sub-system of time and formal/near formal organisation is now - in the modern world - in the foreground, and revelation is more in the background. And it is important to see that the system of subjectified affects and the system of ventures-and-lives (in combination with reason-and-revelation) insist toward not just the 'missions' of a fundamental, underlying self-importance (a first aspect of the 'me'), but also insist toward a libidinalised identification with a nation state, and toward auxiliary identifications with blocs of nation states, ethnic and religious groupings, and international identifications as with 'scientist' etc.
The three main forms here are the structure of time and systematicity, the structure of good side in a conflict and evil side in a conflict, and the structure of interiority.
In relation to philosophy the idea of a constitutive human-world development in an upward direction (where the development or progression can be the human spirit/human material endeavour, God's will, geist etc.) is endemic within the human world, even if the idea in some ways is under more pressure now than previously.
But alongside this is the world of standard cosmology, which at the least functions as a further zone of time-line fixation: the question here is not primarily about whether current standard cosmology is correct, although this is also an issue. There has always been a subtle or not so subtle connection between standard cosmology and religion (from advocacy by the vatican to Hawking writing about knowing the mind of God), but the main issue here is not geneaology or whether Big Bang cosmology is about to be a failed paradigm. Bjorn Ekeberg, in Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe, shows how its foundation as a theory is far more dubious than is generally realised, but, again, the point ultimately concerns time-line and systematicity fixation, not the veridical status of the theory. In general people do not have an awareness of the form of the Milky Way Galaxy with its sphere of approximatey 125 orbiting globular clusters, and still less do they tend have any knowledge of very large-scale features of the cosmos such as the Pegasus-Pisces filament, etc. Given the disaster taking place on the planet, and in the human world, it is worth thinking about the expense of megaprojects like the Large Hadron Collider and the James Webb Space Telescope, and to reconstruct them as having a religious, and a socio-religious function. And it is vital to see that the general separation from an ability to question the views, is the same as used to be the case for centuries in relation to the priesthood, who, even if someone could read, would claim that only they had the ability to interpret. We are left with an event about which nothing can be said (in the beginning was the Big Bang) and a subsequent line: there is the connection with religion, and then there is a line which is both relatively uninteresting, because of the general form of the presentation, with its concentration on regularity - sameness everywhere -, and because most people do not have the knowledge of astrophysics which would allow them to understand the details.
In the background sphere of engagement with the political domain it is clear that the current social world consists both of capitalism and of the nation states, together with the conglomerations of nation states. There is both the world of the depradations of capitalism, and a world of libidinalised attachments to nation states and to alliances of nation states. The nation states are like creatures caught in a trap, and this systemic issue can be re-expressed by saying that capitalism and the nation states are like the Overlook Hotel: at the level of their deep-seated antagonisms and economic vested interests they continually produce the monstrous (and the fact that as a general principle democratic states are preferable by far does not stop them from being intrinsically part of the structure).
In the domain of reactivity religion is alongside politics, and politics and religion meet with the other side, in the form of academic philosophy/art/literature, and science. In the second part of the domain there is much less of the excluding structure of identification, although, for instance, the modern 'hagiography' of, say, scientists, can vary in its emphasis from one country to another (but the reason side of the system of reason-and-revelation is no less pernicious as a result of this difference). In politics, and - interelatedly - in religion there are 'sides,' in that the structure of reactivity here works in this way. Here religion, politics and fantasy stories all meet in a structurality that is evidenced everywhere: there is the good side, and there is the monstrous side - there is Aragorn and Sauron; there is the enlightened Democratic west and the communist tyrannies; the enlightened societies of communism and the crypto-fascist capitalists, etc. All of this would seem like reactive, superficial hero-tales if wasn't for the fact that it is the very stuff of reality within the Overlook.
Within religion there are many examples of fixatory lines of time, but here everything is constructed through revelation, and the events of the line of time are subordinated to the structure of Good and Evil, with, in some cases, the line including a futural extension culminating in a Day of Judgement.
However, the most important form of reactivity is that of the other-worldly 'internal', a modality that is spread across religion, politics and philosophy. Here there is the supplementary dimension of 'soul' or 'spirit' and there is also the different modality of the subject - endowed with an awareness of other subjects - who constitutes the unknown of the world, as with Kantianism and Buddhism. The supplimentary dimension is populated in all sorts of different ways: with the moral law, with the protension and retension of time, with righteousness understood as understanding, expressing and abiding by the 'spiritual' or 'right,' but the key here is that it is always constituted in a way which fits with the forms of the dogmatic image of the world, such that there is a fundamental separation between spirit/mind/soul/subject, and the world of matter, of bodies. As Deleuze and Guattari say, it is necessary always to work at n-1 dimensions: to cut away the supplementary dimension, and reach a lucid perception of a human individual which grasps the individual's connections at the level of the faculties, of perception in particular, of libido, of love, of becomings.
In the second sphere of action the nation states are very far in the background. But not only this - insofar as they are expressions of the interestablishment (and they are expressions in this way to a very great extent) they are ruinous: they are intricate, and extremely dangerous zones of dereliction. And it is is also very clear that we are not in a planetary court of adjudication. The states exist trapped within capitalism, and on every level the international steerage institutions, run by the nation states, are not what they seem (and this is a transcendental-empirical issue, the states and capitalism are expressions of the globally pervasive interstablishment, which means that, while this is the case, reform of the ‘court’ does not exist as a possibility). It is a question of dedicatedly affirming the process of preventing environmental catastrophe, but the best – desperately required - outcome is a shift that would save the planet from being the basis for the ever-deepening, more subtle depradations of capitalism.
It is important not to be fixated on – trapped within – the dead futural time of continual thoughts along the lines of ‘if somehow, by thirty years from now, we can have changed X”. We need to affirm socialist and environmental outcomes. But most of all we need to live within the Futural horizon of the escape-group. This journey is an expression of love for the planet, and after a while it is clear that in every way the escape-path is the only way forward. You are in love with crossing the planetary thresholds of the unknown, and this is the way to the Future. And what the planet fundamentally needs is for human beings to escape.
A nexus of affects and attributes comes into focus. The encompassing term for all of the aspects is the intent-modality of brightness, in its initial, and across-a-threshold forms. And a fundamental aspect of what is involved is joy in relation to immediacy – the singular worlds of encountered perceptual domains. But this is inseparable from an ability to see the intent of encountered individuals, and in turn it is inseparable from seeing the overall world of intent that is grasped through transcendental-empirical perception (the abilities cover the range from perceptual immediacy, to the ability to grasp the world at the level of the abstract). Furthermore, in terms of attributes what is involved is openness, kindness, unbending intent, and courage. The delight and playfulness of this way of being have a laughing irony as a reserved ability that can be used incisively when required, and have a ‘sweetness’ or ‘charm’ that can be used to prevent and defuse conflict, but perhaps the most vital characteristics are the following: a relative lack of self-importance, in particular in relation to opinions concerning the nature of the world, and an ability, when it is obviously a question of love and of freedom – to take leaps, to be prepared to depart to another space, to let everything go in the name of the sublime (including letting go of an opportunity to justify your actions against accusations).
To a great extent these abilities (in a somewhat curtailed form) tend to be used in the human world to maintain families and constitute couple relationships. But in the context of the escape-path the horizon becomes planetary and becomes that of wider realities – the worlds perceived at the level of the transcendental-empirical. It can be seen that there is another figure of Knowledge here – a figure different from either the scientist or the humanist scholar. Everything starts from the senses, from immediacy, from joy and playfulness and openness, and from a navigation that is aware of intent – of the abstract. Normally held in abeyance, it can reach the full form of itself simply by shifting the focus of the awareness-of-intent to the planet and the whole human world. The arrival in this other place of being has walked reason across the bridge to the point where it acquires a widened range of application, but where it has become a lower-level counterpart of lucidity. You can of course be a practicing scientist to any extent that is required on the far side of this bridge, but on the near side you are simply in the place of reason.
There are those who look at the world through the eyes of reason, and therefore cannot see it. And there are those who see immediacy with the eyes of lucidity, but who have somehow been blocked from turning their eyes toward the world. And when this second group of people start trying to think, they are are almost always given nothing but the customary models of reason, which propel them backward from their starting point. It is necessary to move from seeing individuals with the eyes of lucidity to seeing the zones and modalities of the world in this way - with eyes which see intent - and to start at this point to see the world of the transcendental-empirical: the body without organs, the ongoing disaster, the definitive terrain, the escape-path.
The explorer-traveller (but again and again the explorer-traveller does not move) is the person who can see intent – who can see the abstract – and who can see where to navigate towards, and with whom to form alliances, in order to shift an immediate milieu further toward Love-and-Freedom. The terrains beyond the human world hearten, and wake the faculties, very much in particular if they are encountered with unbroken perception. Everything is about exteriority: seeing intent entails seeing the ongoing human disaster, and seeing the escape-path. And it becomes possible to see the ways in which liberatory affects go into effect within individuals, in particular the planetary affect. Although the depth-level of the circumstances cannot be easily discerned, it becomes very clear that human beings are as if under siege from a world of subjectified affects, a world which is very much within them, in the form of the interiority. Most dreams are nonsense, made up of fear shiftingly expressing itself as ‘urgencies’ (as opposed to serene explorations). And most cultural productions simply feed, recurrently in a very disguised way, the force-fields of subjectification, of reactivity. However, the siege is occasionally broken (and at the level of feeling it is continually being broken, but what is taking place is too diffuse for us to notice) and after a while it becomes possible to find the liberatory current in effect within your life which leads Outwards, toward existence on the definitive terrain. Follow the affect.
It can be seen that if most dreams are just 'chickenshit productions of the human mind' (products of fear), and a very few are transcendental-empirical glimpses toward the Outside (with no connection to the world of the 'familial'), then psychoanalysis has no connection to the liberatory pragmatics (and metaphysics) that is being delineated. And it can also be seen that, for all the importance of a large number of Marxism's perceptions, this pragmatics-and-metaphysics is not connected to the ideas of the take-over or transformation of the state that are found within Marxism (though see the conclusions of sections 47 and 48).
Evidently this gives Explorations a close connection with A Thousand Plateaus in that in this work Deleuze and Guattari take on the gigantic task of addressing the questions of freedom at work within the main systems of philosophical pragmatics that have emerged since the middle of the 19th century, questions which are as anthropological as they are philosophical, and which require an engagement with what has been taking place in the human world during the last fifty thousand years.
In terms of this less recondite area of philosophy (which in particular consists of the work of Deleuze, together with his work with Guattari) the main lines of connection can be explicated.
It is necessary to leave behind the dogmatic image of the world (section 18) and see the worlds of forces encountered by your senses - in general this will be preeminently the forces of the planet - as the transcendentally unknown, so that the planet is always seen by default along Spinozistic lines, for the want of a better term. It can be seen that this departure from the dogmatic image of the world is also a departure from the dogmatic image of thought, as delineated in Difference and Repetition.
The zone of content that correspond's to writing's zone of expression is the world of forms of existence and terrains (where these terrains can be profoundly abstract, through being, in part, terrains of intent). The problems of philosophy (and also of story-writing at the level of the transcendental-empirical) concern forms of existence and terrains, and only secondarily involve the 'concept domain', in the form, most crucially, of the re-application and creation of concepts. But the primary issue is that the force of departure-deterritorialisation for the two nominal 'sides' (existence/terrains and writing) is the metaphysics and the pragmatics of the escape-path.
What is vital here is the waking of the faculties (in particular perception, dreaming, lucidity, feeling, and decision-making), and is the application of the principle of exteriority, in particular in relation to the outside of the body encountered by perception, the outside of urban terrains, and the outside of the dysfunctionally dominant faculties that constitute ordinary reality. And what is perhaps most crucial of all is the waking of the across-all-faculties capacity of becomings, in particular the envisaging, thought, feeling and decision-making that constitute an entering-into-becoming with the planet.
*
The body is the intra-immediacy. It is a space of affects; of dreams about the future; of virtual-real worlds in general; of outsights; of other processes of thought; of percepts; of becomings.
Brightness is the fundamental affect: it is delight in relation to of the worlds of the planet and in relation to the sun, the stars - all of the immediacy-cosmos and all of the cosmos encountered with technological assistance - ; it is delight in seeing intent - the abstract - and in seeing energy-formations of all kinds; it is delight in perceiving that life as what at depth it is - becoming-active - consists of crossing upward thresholds of awareness and existence. And when it is the depth-level aspect of an effectuated intensificatory pragmatics that has woken lucidity, then what has emerged is the intent-modality of brightness.
There are reasons to believe that women have always been the supreme exponents of brightness. And it is very clear that state politics and religion, with their gravity, have always consisted to a very large extent of processes which capture brightness, and destroy it, other than in its most deadened, controllable forms (brightness has to reach its true form, reaching both the planet and the wide-level worlds of the abstract, and leaving behind an absolute default concerning relationships centred on the reproductive organs).
Here, there is no longer the dead, passivity-time of ordinary reality. Instead there is the Futural horizon of travelling further out into the World. The future has become the future of the definitive journey. The space is the sublime worlds of the planet and of the world around it, and the definitive journey heartens and energises - waking the faculties - and transmits energy to those who encounter the explorer/traveller. At the fullest and most innovative levels of lucidity the values of socialism and environmentalism must be embodied and affirmed, but to stay within the dead, depressive time of ordinary reality is the collapse of politics which is constitutive of the ongoing disaster. The ultimate political act is micropolitical - it is to depart toward the World, toward love, freedom and wider realities.
In its more focused form of the planetary affect is turned outward toward the sky - toward the atmosphere and the worlds beyond. The planet cannot be dreamed without the sun and the stars, and the intent-modality of brightness is fundamental within the dreaming which is an element of this affect. And it is also clear that the dream in February 1998 is in fact on the far side of a continuum between the less and more focused forms of the oneiric affect: it is an explicit expression of the intent-modality of brightness in that the joy of the affect suffuses it, and in that it concerns the planet in relation to its exteriority. This is the beginning of the answer to the question - what is the form of dreaming that is part of this more focused form of the planetary affect? A more substantial answer to this question is that a modality of this form of dreaming is the story The Corridor (sections 16, 26, 27, 28, and 43).
The body as intra-immediacy - as world of perceptions, affects, outsights - is a space that needs to be woken; that must be heightened, through processes of intensification and of conservation of energy. It is a body-shaped haptic eye, and a space of virtual-real journeys.
Perception becomes about focusing attention toward the planetary unknown, so that the unknown is here understood as what is all around you at all times, in relation to your sensory contact. (Religion and science between them put into effect a domestication of the unknown, so that, for religion, the fundamental unknown is not the material world of the planet and of the bodies that are human beings, and for science it is a domain of dead, sub-intelligence empirical processes, or is the associated futural unknown of prediction). Dreaming becomes about exploratory envisaging, and creation of new circumstances and formations of existence, in ways which both - while it is here that we live - have the planet and its exteriority as in the fullest sense central. Lucidity perceives intent, dreaming, sources of inspiration and energy (and the becomings these involve) and it does this in ways which always sees the human world as a domain existing within the planet, and in ways which discern that the animals of the planet are worlds of intent alongside us, so that we at last stop thinking that we are looking down on them from a supplementary dimension (this self-importance needs to be dissolved). Decision-making chooses directions in the modality of the nomadism of intensity, where the immediate horizon and the planetary horizon are preeminent, and where its actions are the functioning of the principle of exteriority - very much including planetary exteriority at the level of the virtual-real and at the level of perception. Reason assists in whatever ways are possible in terms of systemic (prediction-yielding) and formal processes. Feeling reaches outwards into the World, looking for the way forward in the immensity of the horizon.
It can be seen that everything becomes primarily about space, about the abstract in the form of intent, and about affects, where these consist of both dreaming and feeling. Time has become the horizon of a singular nomadism, a singular process of travelling further out into the World.
And the way of thinking about feeling has been transformed. It seems that human beings need to understand affects. They are dreamings which in their most intense form can conduct toward (and can consist of) the outsights and guidelines of a liberatory pragmatics and metaphysics, and inseparably they have the aspect which runs deeper than the oneiric. The general view of feeling is that nothing could be more personal and 'interior.' But beyond the grim turbulences of subjectified emotions there is the faculty of feeling, and this consists of inchoate but effective perception: in terms of the overall abstract nature and boundaries of what it distinguishes feeling is a world of encounters with exteriority which is the basis for fundamental processes of navigation.
When I found my way to Harbury Lake I had arrived at a terrain that was about as rich in rare species as any I was likely to find in Warwickshire. This is a primary aspect of the planetary affect that arrived with me through the initial and subsequent visits. But the place was more than this: it was secluded, inconspicuous (hidden in plain sight through being an unregarded post-industrial lake with low cliffs), and had the impressive quality of looking like dull scurfland from a distance, but of turning out to be intricately fascinating - in relation to its plants, animals, insects and rocks - when you looked more closely. Holistically, it was a singular terrain that caused me to experience the planetary affect.
And of all the experiences between 1995 and 1998 it was the one which was easily open to something that could be called verification. When I returned in 1998 I experienced the affect at a higher level of intensity. I returned again the next summer, and the one after. The third visit - in 1999 - was when the idea of "Ktarizon: Deep Water" came to me, while looking at some rocks below the surface of the lake, and it was during a visit the summer afterwards (by this time I was living in London) that this idea focused itself into the full story. And the issue is not the value, or otherwise, of the story, but instead concerns a repetition where it did not feel likely at the time that anything new would emerge, but where something new did emerge. The impression is of a refrain where the bass arrives after the first two repetitions.
This refrain did not belong to ordinary reality (it didn't have any form of kudos, and was not a ritual, in that it was open-ended in terms of how long it would last), and as such it is right to say that it was both deterritorialised and deterritorialising. It can be pointed out as well that it increasingly developed a form in the domain of the virtual-real.
An aspect of this book, Explorations, is that it has been about three refrains of this kind. The sequence of visits to Harbury Lake; the journeys in wilderness or semi-wilderness terrains; the writing of a series of stories about escape-groups which began around 1997.
The primary question concerns the pragmatics and metaphysics of travelling along the escape-path. You cannot create maps unless you know the terrain.
A secondary question concerns the zone of expression alongside the zone consisting of forms of existence and terrains (ultimately this zone of expression is philosophy, fiction, drama, music, painting, games etc). This question is, how do you create works (maps/diagrams/catalysts) that have evaded the systems of reason-and-revelation and of venture-and-lives so that they function as a force of deterritorialisation?
The other experiences from 1995 to 1998 were also open to verification, in this unusual sense of the term. It would have been possible to return to Greece, but instead - without giving any thought to the underlying process - I followed the affect by starting to do long walks in mountain terrains (the Carpathians, the Pyrenees, the Asturias). And with the dreams in sleep the process had to be primarily one of exploration and development (taking the dreaming across a threshold) in that you cannot get back to the affect by an ordinary, non-trance process of remembering (although if you are in a relatively heightened state - a state of joy - its possible for the affect to arrive to some extent through remembering). And here I eventually followed the affect by writing stories which in different ways had an aspect - concerning escape-groups - which had started from the dreams in sleep. These two processes of verification - of exploring the affect - were therefore the other two refrains, alongside the refrain of visits to Harbury Lake.
All three of the refrains stretch back to the phase from 1995 to 1998, and all three of them must be understood in terms of the planetary affect. On a first level the reason for talking about refrains is to point toward the pragmatics of another modality of navigation, and of another - deterritorialised - modality of space-time, but it is vital for attention to not be trapped again by reason's line of time (transcendentalising a straight line is the death of thought). On the primary level the aim is to point towards the way in which the refrains were expressions of the affects: ultimately they were expressions of the world of intent - the world of the abstract - that is brightness. And the dreaming intrinsic to brightness concerns the planet in relation to its exteriority, and concerns the joy of crossing upward thresholds of existence (we are taken back therefore to something which is not a line but is an ongoing metamorphosis, and most crucially to joy, to the planet, to the cosmos).
Many thousands of years in the future a group of people are living in the ruins of a city that was destroyed hundreds of years previously. It is understood by these people that there had been something constrictive and deadening about the social forces which had been the primary driving force in effect within the world of this city. Everything is overgrown with trees and small plants, but there are highly sophisticated technological components and devices everywhere, some of which are still functioning. The view of the people in this planetary terrain is that the technology on one level pertains to a kind of blight from a higher dimension, one which they are themselves trying to overcome, with only partial success; but that with each technological element the only question is whether it can be taken up and made a part of an intensification of existence, a waking of lives.
With technology we are always in this situation. The futural city of the story is the terrain of nomadism.
There are two crucial views. The first is that with every device, system and technological modality it is a question of whether it can assist with waking the faculties and becoming-active, and to what extent it is needed in creating the basis for the existence of the escape-group. The second is the perception that the issue of technological systems is not new, but extends all the way to writing and to the systemic crafting of air which we describe as speech.
It is possible to reach the point where you experience a kind of click. The sudden perception that what is fundamentally needed is inner silence.
Who is this corporeal sphere of perception encountering the sphere of the planet? It is clear that its valuable dreamings consist of outsights, and therefore pertain to exteriority, like perception. There are also strong indications that the arrival of these valuable dreamings - and the affects of which they form a part - is an emergence that in a profound sense is driven from without, as opposed to being the creation of an 'oneiric body'.
It is also clear that the faculty of lucidity involves the emergence of concepts which are a further basis of outsights (in relation to the term basis, there is a kind of parallel here in the glass that provides the basis for a modality of seeing when looking through a lens).
Lucidity can see the escape-path; it can see the centrality of inner silence, of alliances of escape-comradeship, of awareness of the abstract (in particular, intent and dreamings), of becomings, of having the courage to take up the adventure of existence, of delight, or brightness. Looking back in the other direction it can see the interestablishment - the subjectification modalities (control modalities) that extend grimly across religion and politics in tonalities that range from righteousness to melancholy. It is necessary to have the ability to perceive this other direction, but primarily it is necessary to be looking toward the planet as a whole and toward the second sphere of action (which is the definitive terrain at a higher level of focus).
In the second sphere of action in looking toward the planet you are also looking toward the human world as an element within it: because this is how we view the worlds of the other species, and because this is the domain in which we place the known forms of disease and parasitism. In any appeal to the human world everything flips to the other 'side' because you are appealing to what is not the interiority, and to the aspect of human beings in the form of the capacity for a deliberate waking of the faculties (and you are therefore appealing to everyone).But the default view concerns the now of the formation within the planet. Here there is a view toward the interestablishment (which is the known, but on another level the unknown), and there is also the view toward the human intent-world as a whole: a being which is moving with great difficulty, hypertrophied in relation to one set of faculties and atrophied in relation to another - this is also the known and the unknown, but to glimpse it for a moment affects us in a very different way. It is the sphere and the escape-lines extending from it (it is necessary to become part of one of the escape-lines), an intent-world moving forward within a very extraordinary, recondite struggle.
We generally don't realise the extent to which we sacralise technology. We casually sacralise new developments in technology as cutting edges of the 'zeitgeist,' not focusing, as we do this, on the horrific devastation being created by these cutting edges. And we sacralise the forms of technology which are often not perceived as such, as in the case of books: in this instance we sacralise and do not pay attention to the fact that while, on one level, the most ceremoniously sacralised books can be superficially heartening, on the fundamental level these books conduct toward a closing down of lives.
There is a glow that comes from the world of creators of systems of care and education; from the world of craftswomen and craftsmen; from the world of engineers and discoverers of medicines and inventors. This glow comes from the struggling intent-world of the human world grasped as a whole. But the problem is that this world is flying with one wing which is fully developed and another wing which is badly damaged. And yet you can still feel the joy of the flight.
In the second sphere of action technology is viewed as pertaining to the planet, placing the silicon chip alongside the quartz crystal, and keeping the book on the plane of the tree, and the canal on the plane of the river. And because of the ways in which technology is profoundly inflected by the interestablishment (the functioning of control-modalities) everything you pick up must be considered with great care, the way you might look at a pile of old clothing during a time of bubonic plague. All of the indications are that there is a further level on which technology is more than it appears to be - but in a somewhat dark sense of the word 'more'. Nomadism is incorporative and improvisatory in relation to technology, but you should think very carefully about what you have picked up and are carrying around in your pocket.
*
With all of the dream experiences of the phase from 1995 to 1998 there was always a marked exterior vantage at some point, a seeing from above or from a distance. They always involved an oneiric perception of a terrain, or planetary milieu, at the same time as they involved a perception or awareness of a group of people. And relatedly, in terms of the more normal modalities of dreams, they did not tend to go in close to the point of there being focused experiences of events or interactions (the dream in 1998 was an exception - but here everything was at the level of knowledge-of-what-was-happening and feeling, and the visual was transformed from any ordinary modality of seeing, describable only by a term such as 'haptic'). A further point is that in the 'momentary' dream, in the form of a sudden oneiric event, where I was seeing the valley in Arizona or the northwest of Mexico, the awareness of the group who lived in this valley having information-technology knowledge was there within the dream, but in a way which seemed to be not at all at the forefront, in that everything was in the affect of joy and comradeship that concerned a movement across a threshold to a wider level of reality.
In the dreams about the group living in a forest I went in closer, but without seeing or taking part in any interactions, and in these dreams the technology was the house, with nothing else involved at all (and these dreams did not in any way feel as if they were 'set' in the past). These dreams arrived in the mid to late nineties, and they were dislodged in me, so that they started to go into full effect, in 2006, but only after the idea had arrived of a forested, derelict parallel world. The main trajectory of Explorations ends at this point (Section 49).
And then in 2008 I had the dream where I started in mid-air above a forest in what felt like southern Siberia, and then arrived at the derelict military base. Here there were interactions, and everything concerned becomings and affects: there was no technology other than derelict buildings being used seemingly for shelter, and as well as there being a 'warning' about the dangers of indulgent sexuality affecting my interactions with women, there was also a warning of this kind in relation to indulgence and fixation in connection with writing and speech. The overall picture about technology could not have been more clear - there is a fixation which must be overcome, and there is no reason at all to think that modern technology is the most important part of the problem.
It is an easy step from Siberia to Tarkovsky. When I arrived in Leamington I arrived in the Zone, only the Zone involves reaching the Outside, and the 'room' you are looking for is a place or set of circumstances which takes you toward the Outside, or assists you with travelling Forward within it. Insofar as it can be said that I found the place within the Zone, Harbury Lake was the place - a singular terrain which was eventually 'replaced' by a set of circumstances. It would also be correct to say that for the previous few years in Coventry I had been on the edge of the Zone. However, although it starts in Coventry, and moves to Leamington, it can be seen that on the crucial level Explorations has continually returned to Harbury Lake.
Much later, when I was writing The Corridor I was repeatedly struck by the intensity of the affect that was involved in the process of dreaming up the story - of 'inhabiting' it or living it in the virtual-real, and of thinking about it. And as it continued this experience became heightened, rather than it fading through me being 'accustomed' to the affect of the tale. There had always been a kind of haunting joy - a serene, slightly eerie feeling of the sublime - but at the point when I started writing about and thinking about the Elsewhere I was particularly struck by the enigmatic feeling of beauty that came to me through dreaming up the events of the story, and through thinking about the 'wall of white light,' and the worlds beyond it.
It is worth holding in mind that earlier, in arriving in Leamington, I had been putting a distance between myself and the place where the idea of accelerationism was being primarily developed, especially given that at the same time I had been shifting toward a close engagement with A Thousand Plateaus in relation to its Spinozism. This involved perceiving bodies - very much including the planet - in ways that had broken free of what I would now call the dogmatic image of the world, and a process of coming to understand the bodies of human beings in terms of formations of intent, where the different aspects of these processes had no direct focus on technology.
The Corridor is a dreaming, but it is also an exploration of an anomalous account of the world - a transcendental-materialist or Deleuzo-Guattarian hypothesis. My attention in writing it, caught up in the intense affects involved, was only peripherally on broad questions of technology, if at all, and because the technology aspects of the story appeared without me thinking about them - to some extent like the incidents in dreams - they are particularly worth thinking about in this context.
In The Corridor everything starts with a threshold-crossing that involves two forms of technology (a type of recording and a modified wall of a room) combined with unbroken perception. But it goes from this to next-level threshold-crossings which either involve sustained perception or a process of envisaging - in both cases without technology being involved.
It is also worth pointing out that in the parallel emergence world what in relative terms is foregrounded is the diagrammatic (the scrapbook) and the world of visual arrays in the form of computer art and paintings, but that the world of these forms is to some extent associated with sophisticated but damaging directions. The same is true of the visual in relation to clothing (these two aspects are brought together in the form of the clothing worn by Tamsin and the familiast in Section 3).
However, what is also quietly emphasised is the form of technology that is the house. And it should be pointed out that emails are crucial in 'buying time' within the second world that has been discovered.
The house as basis for a movement of escape is different from the physical house. In The Corridor this has been refined down, and becomes more sparse as the intensity grows. The emphasis on sound production (if sound shadows are music they are in a liminal space in relation to sound) almost entirely disappears after the first threshold-crossing; a modality of internet communication is crucial but in a background way; and both visual arrays and writing are given an emphasis at the point of arrival in the second world, but then go into the background. Everything goes toward the faculty of perception and the faculty of dreaming. There is no question of a comparison between modalities of 'art' - instead the primary movement is toward perception and toward the spaces encountered by the sense of sight and the spheroambient space of the worlds encountered by the senses as a whole.
What is in question here is perception and envisaging - where envisaging relates intrinsically to the faculty of dreaming, but relates most fundamentally to becomings. The point in A Thousand Plateaus where everything starts to be centred on a comparison between music and painting - in Of the Refrain - is to a significant extent a point of collapse. The previous section had been moving toward a pragmatics and metaphysics of becomings, for groups and individuals. And it is this question of forms of existence that is in every sense crucial - forms of group and individual existence understood in relation to terrains, faculties, becomings and deterritorialisation.
The potential for places pertaining to a group to be networked across large distances and for the sharing of information are now limitless. However, what is fundamental is a becoming-active, and a waking of the faculties. The tonality has changed with the arrival of the 'modern' world, giving everything an impression of the substantantially new - and yet, at the deepest level the situation is the same as it was, for instance, in China three thousand years ago.
An effective (rather than blocked) trans-facultative philosophy is in an elucidation of worlds of intent, modalities of dreaming, groupings of faculties and zones of affects, and it is an elucidation of the aspects and powers of worlds of energy-formations. And the fact that an effective trans-facultative philosophy can perceive a greater power of the beyond-the-human terrains of the planet to wake the faculties entails that philosophy in its unconstricted form is green philosophy. But it is green philosophy not primarily in the sense of understanding the planet as the place within which human destruction of eco-systems is taking place (though it is vital that the ongoing human disaster is visible), but in the sense of perceiving what is fundamental in escaping from the deadly trap of ordinary reality - the trap which is devastating the planet.
The worlds of intent, dreaming, faculties and affects all pertain to bodies and multiplicities of bodies: they are the dimensions of the abstract which pertain to this domain of bodies and corporeal systems. Philosophy therefore elucidates substantive aspects of the world, but at the level of the transcendental-empirical: it conducts toward transcendental-empirical knowledge.
The system of reason-and-revelation blocks tales and narratives through the delusion of ultimate stories (religions) and through constructing them as entertainment and minimally important supplements (reason). But it is far more important that this system blocks philosophy with an analysis construct that intrinsically is the view that substantive knowledge (as opposed to what it advances in the form of conceptual, epistemological and evaluative accounts) is not part of the domain of philosophy.
Although it is possible to see the sense of the overall view from the outset, each individual must prove transcendental-empirical knowledge for themselves, and, if they wish to do this, must find a way of expressing this knowledge in relation to the new areas that will always arise through experiences, new developments and discussions. This is why it is correct to say that philosophy conducts toward transcendental-empirical knowledge, and it is why the blocking on the part of the system of reason and revelation is possible. Metamorphics is both a pragmatics and a metaphysics, but its existence remains perennially obscured.
However, the situation is more complex than this. Philosophy can point out that there is a dogmatic image of the world in relation to matter, and in particular to the zones of the planet beyond the human world and the worlds of the other life-forms. But at the outset the new way of giving attention to the planet - having gone beyond the dogmatic image - does not in itself yield knowledge. What is necessary at this point is the focusing of all of the faculties in relation to the planet, and, most importantly, the faculty of dreaming. It is necessary to explore new hypotheses in a sustained way. This is the pragmatics of dreaming, and it is an explicit adjunct to transcendental-empirical metaphysics - it is an exploratory metaphysics. It is in this sense that The Corridor and the other stories in Explorations are philosophical.
For this modality of dreaming the crucial questions here are these. What could be happening for this to be taking place on the planet? And, if the planet is viewed along 'Spinozist' lines - as a space of intent, feeling, dreaming and thought that is also occupied by independent 'formations of intent' (to use intent as the overall term for the substantive or material abstract) - then what are the elements that might explain both the sublime aspect of the human world (the escape-path) and the ongoing disaster?
It can be seen that in a quite recondite way we are blocked by the dogmatic image of the world from access to the means of oneiric exploration.
However, there are two further ways in which we are potentially blocked in relation to dreamings. The first lies in the fact the most high-impact and high-profile forms of imaginative fiction are now film and television creations whose basis in production, direction and effects/transmission technology is so gigantic that this modality of fiction can make it easy to forget that the act of dreaming is available to everyone, and that beyond even the script there was the act of dreaming up the world in the virtual-real (no matter how tightly related this was to a process of writing). The second is the fact that the system of ventures and lives profoundly forecloses the process of dreaming.
In relation to the second point, the scope of the foreclosure is indicated by the absence of the escape-group, of nomadism in intensity, and of the explorer-traveller - the traveller into wider realities, into the unknown. The system of ventures and lives is a system of kudos - a world of heroes of invention, romance, politics and war; a world of heroes of faith and intellectual 'enlightenment.' The pragmatics and metaphysics of becoming-active and of waking the faculties, with its becomings and affects, is intrinsically absent from the system of ventures and lives. A sublime joy is involved in this pragmatics and metaphysics, but it has nothing to do with religion: religion is what happens when the affect of brightness is collapsed down into the modalities of control, and it is only religion which is to be found within the ventures-and-lives system.
It can be seen that dreaming here is not primarily about producing philosophy or art. It is about travelling along the escape path. The exploratory dreaming outlined above is about bringing the world into greater focus, and to let go and dream - to dream with sustained openness - is always inseparable from processes of discovering obscured potentials of human lives. There is in fact a continuum that stretches from the dreaming we try to understand with the term 'fiction' and dreaming in the form of dreams about the future. And it is at the point where we arrive at dreams about the future that it is possible to see the extent of the area suppressed by the system of ventures and lives, and to see that dreaming is fundamentally about the creation of forms of existence, rather than it being centrally definable in terms of 'art' and of 'interiority.' There is nothing more powerful than dreams. Through dreams the actual is forged in the heat of the virtual-real.
The Zone, in the modified 'Tarkovsky' sense, is what has here been called the Initial - the liminal space on the edge of the Futural outside, on the edge of the escape-path. And it can appear in front of you in endless combinations of terrains and circumstances. Ultimately the Zone is a name for the planet, but what always remains is the centrality of places and modalities of action which conduct toward breakthrough and forward-movements along the path of escape (together with the fact that the other directions do not disappear - for instance the direction of the Deep Hotel, or the direction of what Tarkovsky calls the meat grinder).
The places and modalities shift, are augmented, and sometimes go through changes so that they are primarily in the virtual-real as opposed to the actual. And, conversely, what started out as in the virtual-real can shift to being primarily in the actual. The movement forward can at times have a slow, everyday quality on one level, and yet this is just the surface of a river. Something that is recurrent, is that when a new idea emerges there is the feeling 'surely that isn't possible?' But often there is only the unfolding of events that are just a little to one side of convention-bound behaviour: for a few years you visit a place every year; you start to spend weeks every summer walking in mountain-forest wildernesses; you write stories about groups who are escaping from ordinary reality. This leads on to points where the distance from the customary is more striking, in relation to exploring potentials: you live for a while in a tent in different areas of the peripheral woodlands of a city, while working at a college in the city centre. You write a work of philosophy which embeds an impersonally personal narrative as a component of the philosophy, and which includes a novel. A quiet process of following the affect, where the depth-level 'plane of consistency' involves the beyond-the-human terrains of the planet.
Any emergence of a focused modality of the planetary affect is inseparable from the emergence of philosophical maps and diagrams which relate to terrains and formations of the abstract, and to singularities, immediacy and exteriority. These two domains can have a substantial degree of independence from each other, but you will not be swept forward by the affect unless this other domain has at least reached an initial level of actualisation. This is because the idea of a fundamental threshold - the idea that is part of the dreaming which is a component of the affect - has no intensity unless it has been given some philosophical support.
Strictly speaking the appearance of the more fully developed form of the planetary affect is the point where the nexus of attributes and abilities outlined earlier becomes effectuated to the point where it is deliberate in its functioning. And what emerges at this stage is profoundly transfacultative: it is a system of outsights that is inseparable from a modality of intent expressing itself partly as as pragmatics of travelling into wider realities, where the whole is also a sublime drive and form of travelling and exploration, and can be correctly described as a modality of joy, of delight. Described along the initial lines the fully developed affect is a component, and the whole form of existence can be termed a meta-affect. The meta-affect of brightness therefore becomes another name for metamorphics.
But, it can be asked at this point, what were the maps and diagrams in effect at the point of the appearance, in the mid-90s, of the modality of the planetary affect? Evidently they were the perspectives that I derived from a lineage within philosophy that can be delineated by saying that it is the lineage from which A Thousand Plateaus emerges, insofar as the circumstances leading to this book can be described in this way. And this was sufficient to give intensity to the planetary affect.
And then, in the years that followed, I discovered two other domains of philosophy, one modern, and one ancient, leaving an overall domain of philosophical accounts that consisted of a line (the lineage) and two contrasted points.
Through reading these accounts, and through a long experiential process, the view which at length came into focus was this:
A human individual has the faculties of perception, dreaming, lucidity, speaking, feeling, reason and intent (or decision-making).
There is a body without organs which extends around the planet, at the very least in the form of the human world and the worlds of the other animals.
The human world has an oneirosphere that consists of worlds of the abstract. There is also a verosphere - a domain of accounts of aspects of the world - and this verosphere is very deeply inter-connected with the oneirosphere.
Spread across the human world there is a suppressive system of control-modalities in the form of the interestablishment, where the modalities involved can be described as the interiority in relation to their functioning within individuals.
The beyond-the-human zones of the planet, together with the energy-formations of the solar system (fundamentally the sun) and of the galaxy, together have a maximal, unequalled capacity to wake the faculties and inspire affects.
One of the control modalities - the system of reason and revelation - includes the dogmatic image of the world, which, as it is a dogma, must be rescinded, so that it is replaced by a pragmatics of openness.
There is an escape-path which consists of becoming-active and of waking the faculties, together with the bringing-to-focus of transcendental-empirical knowledge and the embodiment of a principle of exteriority which has sustained perception and exploration (actual and virtual) of beyond-the-human-terrains as its most crucial aspects. This escape-path is a route that leads away from the interestablishment.
Beyond the liminal space of the Initial there is existence on the definitive terrain, an existence which eventually focuses itself as existence in the second sphere of action. (These can be described as alternative forms of attention and action, with the latter as the fully developed form, but they are also systems of becomings and of the arrival of affects and outsights, so that the second sphere of action is a more effective way of describing something which is a system or nexus of connections in the form of becomings, affects and outsights, rather than just a modality of attention and a set of associated responses).
Brightness is joy, and most specifically it is a delight and undogmatic openness in relation to the world, and definitively in relation to the worlds of immediacy encountered through perception (an openness that then easily becomes lucidity if focused at wide levels on worlds of intent). Whatever is the reason for this, women tend to have a greater facility for arriving at brightness, but then tend to be turned away from the escape-route by the insistences of those embroiled - including themselves - in the gravity and spurious grand-answers (whether romantic, religious, political or socio-scientific) of the control modalities.
Travelling along the escape-path also consists of becomings, and the most fundamental are entering into becoming with the planet, and entering into becoming with women.
There is no question of relating these views-toward-the-outside to the philosophical accounts that have been mentioned. Explorations has not been primarily focused on texts, but instead the primary issue has been the planet and our relationship to it (understanding the planet of course in relation to its domain of exteriority). It has been about the terrain, not about maps.
Keeping terrains - space, spaces, places - in the foreground has been a fundamental principle of the writing, so as to avoid any tendency for the constricted viewpoints of the interestablishment to be brought into effect in the process of reading. This has taken place through accounts of terrains, but it has also taken place through altered approaches and perspectives: for instance, dreamings have been understood in terms of the oneirosphere, a term which has no connection to personal interiority, and which places this domain into the same conceptual space as the atmosphere, making the question of dreams spatial and planetary.
One of the reasons why texts have still been involved to a large extent is because of the account of the faculty of dreaming. Placed on a historical line (but without an idea of a lineage) Explorations has been about Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf, and it has been about Joan Lindsay, Patti Smith, Angela Carter, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing...
(Shakespeare finds a way of pointing emphatically toward the ongoing disaster; Le Guin writes about the ongoing disaster in substantial detail (as with the social worlds of The Left Hand of Darkness, and as with Urras - in particular - in The Dispossessed). All of the fiction-writers mentioned find ways of indicating the existence of the escape-path. In The Waves Virginia Woolf finds a way of pointing emphatically toward the second sphere of action.)
To study philosophy is to study concept-based transcendental-empirical texts, along with texts which function along these lines but in the modality of fiction. These concept-based texts are always written in new ways, and are never easy to explicate: but the point of course is to explore the world, and to write about the world, if you are going to write, rather than to write about texts. The only point to be made here is that it was a momentous development when, in the 1980s and 1990s, works of transcendental-empirical philosophy were published which had been written by women. It was a moment at such a high level of intensity that it was almost entirely invisible within ordinary reality, but the works have been emplaced within the human world, and over time they will become more visible (while simultaneously being misunderstood and misrecognised).
This other historical line (again, not a lineage) is Lao Tzu, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari, Castaneda, Donner, Abelar.
The reversal of the polarity of the system of reason and revelation has in many ways intensified the ongoing disaster within the human world, because of the deadening processes of codification on the part of reason, and the overall greater tendency for lucidity to be suppressed. However it is a gigantic improvement that it is now straightforwardly possible for women to publish concept-based transcendental-empirical texts.
Feeling is inchoate perception, so that following the planetary affect is already a process of coming to understand the world in relation to the faculty of feeling, and the idea of the fundamental threshold-crossing includes the idea of a transformation of philosophical understanding, meaning that manifestations of the planetary affect are lenses which look toward the worlds which exist beyond the surface of things. Following the affect led eventually to the process of writing The Corridor, a process in which the planetary affect reached its fully developed form, the affect of brightness. And having worked for many years on creating this form of lens, I then shifted toward creating a lens which was preeminently conceptual, rather than preeminently oneiric. It can be seen therefore that it has been a single process, which is why The Corridor and the other stories are included within Explorations.
The question of places has on one level become the process of delineating the current that runs through the world - the river which runs through the forest. The combination of Harlech and Coleg Harlech has been a valuable instance of this shift to the wider perspective (Section 36).
Coleg Harlech was a foundation of the periphery. It was a remarkable achievement and gift, created in the 1920s, and it was too intellectually and courageously modernist a foundation to have a high chance of surviving for long. It was a socialist-tradition college in the sense that it was created initially to help working class people get to university, but as more providers appeared in the cities - from which its students largely came - the funding providers were less and less open to helping the college follow a distinctive strategy it had developed (the course was two years in length, and the college was residential). It was theoretically possible for it to continue, but no matter how pragmatic and open-minded the executive may have been its tradition was not well-suited for a time of conservatism and of educational standardisation.
The hall of residence has been derelict now for several years - an eleven story block with many smashed windows, and plants growing around the base.
At the time I was there what I felt was that Harlech and Coleg Harlech together were overwhelmingly beautiful, My feeling then was that the place was poetry embodied. As if the combination was what poems were about, and was more sublime than the poems,
I was there studying Shakespeare alongside books by Marx-influenced historians, and was being taught by literature tutors with an intense love of the subject, and by history tutors who were scrupulously undogmatic in terms of theoretical accounts that were left-wing in tendency. Studying Shakespeare was a compelling experience, and so was studying the 19th century Russian novelists alongside Russian history, and an intense aspect was the emergence of an awareness of the era of the Spanish Civil War, where this arrived through studying history, but simultaneously through studying Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano) and WHAuden.
Though I also have the impression that the most powerful point of all was in the second summer term when I read The Waves (not on the syllabus), and kept thinking - this is the best expressive prose or prose-poetry I have ever read (I didn't know what to say about it, or how to take it forward as a form of dreaming, but I was overwhelmed by it).
The founders of Coleg Harlech would probably have felt that I had received their gift. But such a gift is a very extraordinary thing. What I had received was an inchoate but sublime view along the escape-path. In a sense not much had happened - it is noticeable that I largely forgot about The Waves until around ten years later. But nonetheless I had been moved forward a little, within a shallow, slow area of the current.
Families are also foundations. But it can be seen that in the sections where my experiences in New Zealand are described (Sections 33 and 35) some of the most important parts of the account concern the terrain - the Port Hills, the horses, the Southern Alps forming the westward horizon (and it should be added to this that the place was a fundamental aspect of the experience of being at Coleg Harlech - of the Coleg Harlech 'gift').
When I was a child, at the age of 8, I experienced a striking feeling of joy when travelling on UK motorways at night - this was during a small number of journeys when I was back for three months from New Zealand in the spring of 1971. The feeling was connected in particular to a stretch of the M1 which had lights on motorway lamp-posts on the central reservation, and to service stations - in particular Leicester Forest East, a service station where the restaurant was on a 'bridge' over the motorway. The feeling to some extent returned on journeys that took place when I returned from New Zealand, aged 15. The feeling was about transit, and about the lights, and about the whole system of the motorways, from vending machines that provided food when restaurants were shut, to the cat's eyes on the edges of the tarmac, and to the signs which, if you had a map or the appropriate knowledge, were a machine for endless journeys. But most of all it was about the journey and the lights: the motorways at night were threads of organisation running brightly through the unknown. There was a feeling of the sublime that must be placed alongside the experience at the Dragon Hotel described at the start of Section 35. Afterwards, the feeling remained intense, but was always elusive: if I concentrated on any part of it, the feeling would disappear - and no stories ever suggested themselves from it. Aged 16 I attempted to write a song that expressed it, around the words 'shiny nights'. and when I was in my early twenties I tried to write a poem, which included the phrase 'transit's anthem' but I knew that both of these attempts were failures. It was a feeling which did not become an affect.
There is a glow that comes from the human world's technologies and constructions when these are perceived in relation to travelling within the unknown, and in particular when lights at night are involved, in that these make what would be invisible visible. In itself the technology of motorways (even envisaged with only electric vehicles) is inseparable from the fact that the human world is flying with a disturbingly hypertrophied wing in relation to its engineer aspect. But the glow comes from the terrain and the light, more than from the technology: it comes from the entirety of the journey including the terrain within which it is an exploration.
And if you go now to journeys along the escape-path the glow of the sublime becomes far more intense. Here the technology, insofar as it is in effect at all, to some extent consists of books (there are very few of these books), and everything is fundamentally about the world of the terrain and the worlds of the travellers: with the abstract in relation to intent and energy and affects as the central focus of attention. The glow in the first instance comes from the wider world, the journey, and from a mode of technical knowledge within the world of the human. The glow in the second instance comes from the light of the sun and the stars, from the planet, from the movement forward along the escape-path, and from a knowledge that instead of only being indicative of it, is a knowledge of the sublime - a knowledge of the river that runs through the forest. The series of experiences that are the basis of the second part of this section formed the point where I started to be deliberately aware of this other glow - a glow which is always intrinsically a feeling and an awareness of a modality of intent, and which is such a serenely powerful form of joy that it can sometimes be seen as like a wall of white light.
Here there is another form of navigation.
*
affect
The planetary affect is straightforwardly an affect in the sense that the worlds of the planet and the surrounding stars which are central to its oneiric aspect have been encountered in experience. There is an initial sense in which it leaves open the question of the source of the dreamings - the oneiric worlds - but through all the forms of the affect there is a direct line of connection in terms of feeling and experientially-based content, and it is vital to see that in the fullest sense it is pragmatically effective. It can be explored philosophically at the level of the upward threshold-crossing, and this can be in ways across a spectrum from 'what, for transcendental empiricism, would be the next level of reality?' to 'what would it be to be fully, pragmatically aware of the nature of capitalism and the plight of the planet?'. It can also be explored through creation of new virtual-real worlds, taking the form of attempts to upen up outsights. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, it can be explored by going into semi-wildernesses, post-industrial scurflands, mountain forests, or any other kind of beyond-the-urban terrain - and seeing where these places take you.
And the concluding point on the 'genetic' level is that the core domain of the dreaming is expressive of an aspect of the composite of the planet and the included-within-the-planet human world in the sense that it is an outsight - it is a view of the escape-path.The affect is therefore both empirical and transcendental-empirical. On a first level it is an affect in that it simply arrives, and on a second level - the level of transcendental-empirical perception - the joy and thought-generating intensity will only continue if there is the determination to deepen and widen what can be seen, in a process of focusing and reaching outsights. And here again, at this second level, it is an affect, in the same way as the overall world in front of you is not the result of a deliberate process when you choose to open your eyes.
The planetary affect is the sky-and-planet affect, the serendacity affect, the escape-path affect, a more developed, oneiric form of the affect of brightness.
However, it is important to see that the planetary affect does not exclude the night: brightness here relates in part to a sublime-serene joy - an impersonal delight - and the oneiric worlds of the affect are worlds of the planet, but also are the worlds of the stars and of the gaps between the stars. Darkness, caves, night, starlight, all of these are therefore not in any way in opposition to the affect - they are as much a part of its virtual-real worlds as daylight terrains.
energy, intent, the abstract
Both energy and the abstract relate to everything. Intent relates straightforwardly to the domains of the human world and the worlds of the other animals, but it is left fundamentally open that it might relate to everything, and in particular that in some sense - perhaps very strange and hard to grasp - it might relate to the planet as a whole. And it is also fundamental that intent is understood as pertaining to the body, so that it is grasped as an attribute of an energy formation.
To think about the abstract in this way involves a perception of immediate immanence, and an openness in relation to the extension of intent across energy formations. But this openness does not preclude effectiveness. The pragmatics of grasping and focusing intent, and of conserving and heightening energy, are in no way impacted upon by the lack of knowledge at the level of the openness.
the river
The river is the principle of exteriority and it is the affect of brightness: it is the current that carries you forward. The river is metamorphics. It produces cairn-paths across the mountains, and at the deepest level it is the finding of the way forward and is also the creation and repair of the paths. The metaphysics is fundamentally also about transformational action, both at the level of the actual and of the virtual-real: the affect of brightness is a way toward outsights and toward the solving of transcendental-empirical problems, and the principle of exteriority is nothing if it is not a pragmatics.
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Go to the top of the hill, and turn right when you get to the field with the 17th century windmill in the middle. Walk past the windmill, and stand on the edge of the hill looking south.
It is a fine thing to create something like Coleg Harlech - and it is a fine thing to raise a child so that they have a degree of awareness of the escape-path. But what is fundamental - for the good of everyone, and on every level - is to set out on the journey.
You know which direction is south, and you could walk forward, over hedge-lines and through areas of woodland. And you can also take tracks and roads and footpaths. To move forward along the escape-path is like this, but instead of it involving an awareness of the direction of the equator, it involves an awareness of the direction of wider realities. It is a warm summer evening, and soon it will be a starlit night, followed by the early sunrise of midsummer. You are surrounded by the charged darkness of the transcendentally unknown but knowable, but in one direction there is a joy which recurrently becomes views which have an unmistakable brightness, whether they are of daylight terrains or terrains at night. Follow the affect of brightness - it will lead you to the Future.
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