Justin Barton + Mark Fisher

Introduction – the scrapbook

We live within a human world which is profoundly problematic. A world which On Vanishing Land describes as a kind of ongoing disaster, characterising it as "capitalism, the latest form of capitulation, whatever you call it." On Vanishing Land sets out to show an escape-path that leads away from the forms of existence that are the deep-level fabric of this disaster, and to show that what is vital for arriving at the start of this escape-path is an awareness of the terrains of the planet that surround and subtend capitalism (capitalism is not unnatural – it is more that it should be seen as a kind of canker affecting humans and the planet). It is important, however, in grasping the nature of this social and environmental disaster, to recognise it as ‘ordinary reality,’ and to see how ordinary reality consists on one level of certain functionings of modalities of knowledge and of forms of expression (philosophical, scientific, artistic, technological, economic, religious, sociological, pyschological etc.).

Outsights: Disappearances of Literature consists of micro-essays: the aim is to break open a view of the outside of the ongoing disaster, and to do this by concentrating on eleven works – all of them are texts – which in different ways do not fit well within the forms of knowledge and expression that are elements within the constitution of ordinary reality. To one extent or another these texts are all instances of what can be called ‘the anomalous.’

It is not easy to summarise in relation to them: but the focus in the micro-essays will be, firstly, departures into a fundamentally different environment or milieu, where the movement away is a ‘dropping out of sight’ in relation to the previous milieu, and secondly, the idea of disappearances where the departure, or movement out of sight, is in some sense a movement across an upward threshold.

This gives these micro-essays a connection to On Vanishing Land, through Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. On one level a starting-point for Outsights is the question — what is the direction of escape that is indicated at the end of On Vanishing Land, through the inclusion within the audio essay of the central event of Lindsay's novel?

However, along with other thematic links between the micro-essays and On Vanishing Land, there are also two further connections, of different kinds. The first is the fact that at the original 2013 On Vanishing Land exhibition, at the Showroom gallery in London, one of the items exhibited was a scrapbook which contained a series of abstract/montage images, interspersed with montage photocopies of the covers of a series of works, mostly novels — these works included Surfacing, Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Story of the Abyss and the Telescope. This scrapbook was an attempt to point toward an other tradition of thought. (Somewhere there is always a scrapbook, a fragment of the future, covered in dust in an attic, waiting to be found).

As well as attempting to increase the focus of the view opened up in the final twenty minutes of On Vanishing Land, this book also sets out to keep the inconspicuous promise made by the scrapbook and by the idea of outsights.

However, Outsights is only tangentially about On Vanishing Land. Primarily it is about what can be seen from the vantage of the other works. And even in the concluding section, when the audio-essay is drawn into the philosophical account involved, it is only there very briefly, to assist in opening up a perception of what can be termed 'transcendental-empirical' aspects of the world.

Lastly, it is also important to point out that the way this writing functions is through what On Vanishing Land describes, drawing on the idea of radar, as sending "a few clicks into the unknown." With the help of the eleven works Outsights has sent its exploratory clicks in the direction of departures toward the outside of ordinary reality, and toward terrains as opposed to territories — the terrains of a movement outward that consists inseparably of exploration of the zones and potentials of the world and of the capacities and faculties of human groups and individuals. This book started from an idea of exteriority and from something that can be called an atmosphere, although the atmosphere was also an image of a place. It was a sunlit atmosphere of joy and adventure — there was a house surrounded by semi-desert (or perhaps by slightly arid, forested mountains) and there were four or five women and men on a verandah, and the atmosphere simultaneously was the world of the house in its terrain and was the serenity – and sun-suffused laughter – of people who were traveling into wider realities.

Operators and Things

The cold has become so intense that the warmth has arrived in an unaccountable way. The old daylight of 1950s Greyhound bus stations is very bright: everything has filaments running through it of a kind of chilly manifestation of the anomalous, but beyond this there is another form of the anomalous, which, although equally impersonal, has a striking warmth.

Operators and Things has a lucidity which establishes its importance, but which does not resolve the issue of how it should be categorised. Its overall modality is that of an intelligently reflective account of a disturbing, outlandish eruption from the unconscious, in the form of a six month episode of schizophrenia. The description of the shock and distress of this episode carries conviction to a very high degree and yet there are peripheral, minimal elements of the text which leave the impression that the book is not quite what it appears to be, or that the world is not quite what it appears to be, or both.

The book is about a break, where at a fundamental level this break consists of a complete cutting off of the flow of customary self-reflection and customary internal verbalising (a cutting off which remains un-noticed during the six months of the episode being described, and is only commented on within the book after the description). Instead the default mental tonality is that of someone trying to save their life as a result of being in immense danger — time only to perceive, inspect what has been perceived, and to plan and effectuate escape strategies (no time for pained self-reflection; no time for a rambling, subjectified flow of internal verbalising).

Barbara O'Brien describes how, one morning, she wakes up with three figures who look like "fuzzy ghosts" at the foot of her bed, who tell her that there are two types of humans, Operators, and Things; and that she is a 'Thing' whereas they are 'Operators' who are projecting images of themselves into her room (they are all male — the two who will stay as part of the experience are called Nicky and Hinton, and in the next few days these two will be joined by a third male Operator, called Sharp).

The brains of Operators have a different feature from those of Things. An experiment is taking place, so that she is being allowed to know about Operators. She is told that most Operators don't want this experiment to happen. Over the next few days the schizophrenic episode becomes almost entirely auditory (experienced as the operators projecting only voice as opposed to voice-and-image), and becomes very intricate, but with a high degree of internal consistency.

Primarily the Operators are a world of urbane control behaviours: everything is matter-of-fact, and O'Brien is told that Things have no right to be critical, because of their behaviour toward animals and toward each other. O'Brien sets off on the road, using Greyhound buses, with the aim of getting out of the reach of their ability to project their thoughts into her.

Here the Departure — the process of dropping out of sight, and of movement into a new milieu — takes place in a way which is so bound up with a kind of cataclysmic change of mental state that it is easy to give it very little attention. The experience is driven by perturbing circumstances in a way where it is the complete opposite of what is likely to come to mind if you envisage 'clearing off' to a whole other area or environment.

The point of departure is an unspecified town or city that that seems to be in the east or mid-west of the USA. The terrain of the new milieu is the northwest and west, and a part of Canada that is to the north of these areas.The specified approximate latitudes in the USA are from California and Utah in the south to Montana and Washington State in the north.

The process of the recovery from the schizophrenic episode has three phases. The first is a phase, which seems to be around three or four months into the experience, when figures start to appear in the world of the Operators who show a degree of concern in relation to O'Brien's plight, even if sometimes this is only in the sense that they are against the experiment taking place, and want it brought to an end. This is the time when she is living and travelling in the far northwest of the USA, and when she briefly visits Canada. The first Operator figure who shows concern along these lines is a female Operator called Mrs. Dorraine (this is a very faint indication of what will later be a major alteration) and the main initial change is the appearance of a group of operators called the Lumberjacks, who decide to go through a legal process to bring the experiment to an end.

The second phase begins after the adjudication ends in a partial victory, and with the advice — which is accepted — that O'Brien should now go to California to win the last stage of the legal process. Now in California, living in a flat, she develops a bad pain in her neck, and a sympathetic Operator called Grandma tells her to go to a doctor. The doctor diagnoses an infected mastoid, an infection that involves the middle ear (O'Brien is not in a position to refer to this, but there is now a substantially confirmed but unexplained association between schizophrenia and infections of the middle ear). After the treatment for the infection has begun there is a concluding phase which consists, firstly, of the appearance of the most sympathetic female figure, Hazel; secondly, of the emergence of what has to be described as a philosophical tendency in relation to the problems'Things' have with being trapped by habit patterns; and, and thirdly, and culminatingly (in terms of the sequence of events), of a process where what the Operators are doing consists of the winding down and termination of the experiment.

The last phase consists of several weeks when the voices of the Operators have stopped, but when ordinary thought-processes have not begun again. For O'Brien the experience is of being perception, without thought, but of there being occasional 'waves' of thought - lucid, concise instructions of a practical kind, and abstract 'perceptions' about the situation, and also inchoate but pragmatic impulsions, which are pragmatic in the sense that they lead straight to a solution to a problem. O'Brien calls the state of perception without thought 'the dry beach' and the thoughts and solutions 'the waves'. The dry beach is like a calm immense antechamber where the work is in some sense going on in another domain, and where O'Brien only gets the products of the work, arriving fully-formed, with no prior experience of a process of editing, focusing or amendment. A further aspect of the dry beach is that it is dispassionate — it is a state of equanimity. This is to say that it does not have the system of moods and emotional reactions of ordinary reality: there is no fretful anguish or anxiety; no nervousness or angry-defensive emotion in disagreements; and, to take a specific case, nor is there any embarrassment/concern about the events of the preceding months.

The more you engage with this work the more the initial high-impact aspect (the world of the Operators) is displaced by another aspect — the dry beach, and the waves. It begins to seem, in fact, that what you are seeing is a kind of ultra-focused functioning of a fundamental — and generally obscured — alliance of faculties: calm, sustained perception, working alongside lucidity. Along with the absence of subjectified, reactive moods, the dry beach itself (as opposed to the waves) is defined by the absence of two faculties: reason and language (and when the waves come they recurrently involve language, but they also often consist of images, and inchoate but pragmatic impulsions). The idea that emerges from this is that the fundamental starting-point state for escaping from ordinary reality, with its locked- down, suppressive system of faculties, is sustained perception, with an absence of internal or external verbalising, and an absence of attempts to be explanatory in relation to what is being encountered, or to categorise it.

It seems that an ur-state has been taken across a threshold. The re-composing — or return to composure — of O'Brien's mind seems to take the form of a re-setting that is made easy by the months of fixated listening to the operators. Now the sustained perception is of sound without the voices of the operators and is of the worlds encountered by sight, and lucidity can take the opportunity to connect up with perception, and create its own alliance with language.

the formula

A second aspect of the return from 'crisis' is the process of dropping out of sight — of full disappearance from the initial milieu (it also seems important that the departure was a movement into terrains that were beyond the urban, or which were far less urban than the area from which the movement began). And it is during the phase when O'Brien is in the 'sparely populated' northwest-USA areas that 'the formula' for smoothly maintaining this disappearance is given to her by two friendly female operators who are working in the kitchen of a hotel where she is staying.

They tell her she should write letters to her friends ("we'll help you phrase them" one of the women says), and the key phrase, which appears in all of the letters dictated to her is:

"I finally managed to get away from the grind for a long rest. It's everyone's dream, but I really never expected to make it come true."

O'Brien delineates the different ways in which 'the waves' function. She also refers to them as 'Something,' describing how this other modality of intelligence sends its 'waves' in the form of full, concise sentences, but also uses 'pictures' as when an image of something she needs to buy, but has forgotten, flashes into her head. But although Something can use images it is also a world of abstract views and a user of discursive language. The culmination of the final - post-Operators - phase of O'Brien's experience is when she is seeing a psychoanalyst, with whom 'the waves' disagree in relation to his view that she is being adversely affected by the lack of a 'sufficiently full' sex life. The psychoanalyst indicates that the absence of this sex life is the basis of O'Brien's problems, and the waves emphatically disagree with this position - "I sat through the interviews almost like a third person, a translator of unconscious waves, wondering which of the combatants would win, for the conversations could best be described as fast sparring matches." (O'Brien also points out that the analyst, who is French, says that American men are bad lovers, and says she should have had dozens of sexual relationships). The following section is the conclusion of this part of the book, and it is quoted in full here to give an impression of Something as an intellectual process:

"The analyst had urged me frequently to bring written reports of my dreams. I had explained when he first made this request that I never dreamed, or if I did, that the dreams always vanished completely before I awoke. The analyst always looked at me suspiciously when I told him this and implied, not too subtly, that I was holding back on my dreams for fear that they would disclose an interest in the sufficiently full sex life. The night before I paid my last visit to the analyst was a memorable one for I had the first dream of my life. After having been asleep for a short time, I awoke with the dream flashing through my head. I arose, turned on a light, found some paper and hastily wrote down an account of the dream, after which I went back to bed and dreamless sleep. The next day I brought the written report to the analyst's office and showed it to him.

"I was sitting in a restaurant," I had written, "talking to my dinner companion, a man whom I had just discovered to be a racketeer. I was very annoyed, not because he was a racketeer, but because I had also discovered that he was a third-rate racketeer."

I was quite elated at having had a dream of any kind, even such a nondescript one as this, and I waited enthusiastically for the interpretation. None came. The analyst rolled his head as if he was going to charge, and then abruptly tightened his lips and started talking about something else.

I had read Freud in my early youth but had forgotten, consciously at least, most of what I had read. It was months after I had left the analyst before I got around to reading Freud again, whereupon I realised the significance of the dream. The interpretation staggered me, for it would appear that unconsciously I had classified all Freudians as racketeers and the analyst as a third-rate racketeer. It occurred to me as being surprisingly coincidental that I should have had my only dream just prior to my last visit to the analyst's office and it occurred to me, also, to wonder if Something had got in a last low smack at its sparring partner before parting company."

What is central to this book is the idea of urbane processes of control-behaviour (O'Brien is told at one point that Things can be influenced primarily because of their desire for money and power), where the worst forms of these processes are associated with major social formations of the urban (city councils, gangsters, law-courts, espionage etc.). In 'getting away' O'Brien is doing something that is the opposite of a fearful, agonised stasis, but it is also the case that her travelling to forested, rural areas seems to shift the tonality so that an organisation appears which is to some extent interested in her welfare — the non-urban Lumberjacks. And in the process women start to appear who are within the world of the Operators, but without being power-broker functionaries: such as Hazel, Grandma, and the female kitchen workers who tell her what she should write to her friends.

In the world of Operators and Things the disappearance appears to assist substantially in a re-routing of a profound movement that had its source elsewhere — that had its own dynamic. The re-routing can be described as 'restorative,' but the idea of being 'restored' here obscures the fact that in the concluding phase of the process another, more effective distribution of the human faculties is brought into focus as a possibility, and in a way where it is suggested, firstly, that a key human value in the modern world — sexuality — might be seen differently from this other perspective and, secondly, that the idea of sexuality as the key to dreams might be blocking an awareness of nascent functionings of lucidity which can appear within dreaming. Within the account 'getting away' starts out looking as if it is secondary to something fundamental — a process of a turbulent 'break' in conventional mental functioning, that seems to be following its own process, irrespective of the environment - but at the end it looks crucial to a movement away from turbulence that for a moment glimpses something beyond the normative distribution of the faculties that underpins ordinary reality.

The Drowned World

The cold has at last begun to decrease.

Ballard’s radicalism in The Drowned World lies firstly in his perception that the human world is a disaster taking place, rather than it consisting of ‘progress’, or of the Hegelian unfolding of the human spirit. For his overall project this perception is a key element that drives theoretical allegiances — he is a creator of entropic and thanotropic visions.

The second aspect of the radicalism is the creation of a social fabric from which the protagonist, Kerans, will simply walk away. The whole postwar social contract is what is in question in relation to the establishment-serving Colonel Riggs, and the equally deadened and disheartening figure of Strangman, the scoffing adventurer-entrepreneur whose ventures are about success and imposition.

What imparts the charge to the novel is the fact that Ballard has taken return to the tropical conditions of the Jurassic as his way of envisaging a starkly non-progress outcome in the onward development of the human world, and in the process the planetary diagramming of intensification of lives is suddenly exceptionally effective.

At one point Kerans says of the direction of the equator — south in this instance — that "there isn’t any other direction." The path leading away from the world of the postwar contract has been given a name, and what is involved in this characterisation is that the direction is that of heat, brightness, energy. And in relation to the line of departure from the deadened forms of ordinary reality this is indeed correct — it’s just that the novel barely gets any further. It faintly suggests another mental state across a threshold from subjectified existence, but the ideas of the ‘dry beach’ and ‘the waves’ in Operators and Things in many ways went further than this.

The suggestion that there is some ‘archeopyschic’ way in which the planet is a kind of Spinozistic body, that remembers the dinosaurs, and communicates these memories into the dreams of its current human inhabitants, is a movement toward a new way of thinking (and suggests an impersonal account of dreams where the content of the dreams is understood as visionary and yet also as the functioning of an energetic current arriving from an exterior, physical word), but Ballard open this up and then refuses further exploration. And the culmination of the novel feels more like a Samuel Beckett world than a discovery of an escape-path. Kerans’s companion on the southward journey has gone blind because of the fierceness of the sunlight, and also it seems from looking too much in the direction of the sun, and this means that there is no outright or explicit departure from the entropic/thanotropic line of thought. Ballard, the theorist of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, is affirming Kerans’s departure, but is constructing it as merely a more circuitous way of arriving at death than that of Riggs or Strangman.

And yet — even according to Ballard’s thanotropic model, there is a greater intensity about this route, and the heat, the sunlight, the jungle-terrains (which are not in themselves in any way entropic as an outcome — the opposite) and the rejection of the ordinary-reality milieu all combine to make the text into a lens that allows you to look at the transcendental-empirical features of the current world, so that the book then becomes abstract, freeing itself from any necessity to maintain the dogma of libidinal entropy. The radicalism of the departure and the power of the planetary image create a vantage from which what is perceived has no connection to entropy and the ‘death drive.’ Written two years earlier, the novella The Voices of Time is an intricate delirium of collapse — a lockdown into an oppressive cosmic melancholy — but it is as if the early 60s have permeated Ballard’s thinking and The Drowned World has a doorway open in the direction of the intensification that is referenced, for instance as "the causeways of the sun," and through this doorway fresh air arrives.

City of Illusions, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

In only a few years the heat has increased to the first phase of a serene maximum.

Le Guin, in writing City of Illusions, is surrounded by a world where a predominant view of people in their twenties is — it’s all going to change, and although it might be turbulent the transformation will to an immense extent be for the better. Le Guin writes exuberantly for readers open to the idea of depth-level metamorphoses of the human world of global capitalism in the 1960s (transformations stretching far deeper than the technological and socio-economic spheres) and she has adopted a perspective which keeps her free of Hegelian delusions about developments during the preceding half-decade. She has liberated herself so that she is capable of taking on a vast challenge, and she is hampered only by the sheer scale of the challenge, and by certain dour fixations of attention that were tendencies of other writers who had exemplified the optic which she has adopted.

Disappearances are everywhere in the novel, along with its correlate ideas, though everything is displaced — rendered in ways that bring other aspects of the story to the forefront — or is either invoked very tangentially by allusion, or by a faint suggestion of some kind. In the opening section the protagonist departs from a community — who live in clearings within a forest — because there is a kind of metamorphic threshold he needs to cross, but the contingent basis for this in the story (the protagonist has been violently cut off from his memories, and has created a new persona which is trying to reach circumstances that will resolve the riddle of his amnesia) means that issues involved in the contingency obscure the other aspects. The protagonist, whose name at the start of the novel is Falk (his original name is Ramarren), is from a separate species of humans which developed on another planet, and his memories have been excised by the Shing, a humanoid species who have conquered the Earth in the distant past. It is these facts which are in the foreground in the novel, but as it progresses the issues of Departure are brought into focus.

The courage of the novel lies in the fact that it is set many thousands of years in the future, in the terrain of the USA, but where, firstly, no vestige remains on any level of the USA as a state (even though the inhabitants of the novel’s world are perhaps more reminiscent of Americans than they are of people from other contemporary cultures), and, secondly, the pre-eminent work of ancient wisdom in the social formations of this world is what is called The Book of the Way — a book which is a translation of Tao Te Ching that has been preserved across many millennia. In writing City of Illusions Le Guin becomes the inventor of philosophical science fiction.

The first key to Le Guin is that she is an envisager of the Futural who is always simultaneously giving an account of an aspect of the current form of the world. The second key is that she is a thinker and dreamer of the faculties, who is aware that the Futural involves the faculties being used in profoundly different ways. The third key is double: it is that she has discovered that the ancient Chinese philosophy of The Book of the Way is one of the most Futural domains available, and is aware that to a large extent the current modalities and forms of incorporation of technology and cities are in a fundamental sense damaging and deleterious.

In the social formation that appears at the beginning of City of Illusions the Futural is semi-actualised — it is on the edge of existence. The community in the forest (the central figure of which is Parth, who looks after Falk when he is found, without memories) relates to some extent to the idea of an ‘escape-group’ — or, to be more precise, it is a suggestion of a movement out of sight on the part of a whole group. It is crucial for them that they are out of sight and that they do nothing to alter this. The group incorporates high-tech elements, rather than being incorporated by them, and what is their most interesting technological device — the patterning board — leads to the point where it wakes an intellectual faculty. To some extent they are in a huddled-down state of stasis, because of the Shing, but as well as the group being non-authoritarian and largely non-reactive in relation to the outside they have a route, embedded in their micro-culture in the form of a book, that leads to the outsights of philosophy in its transcendental-empirical form. This modality of the Futural is not rescinded in Le Guin's work, but instead is explored, taken to some extent across its threshold: it is there again with the world of the Handara in The Left Hand of Darkness; it is there in The Word for World is Forest, and seventeen years later the communities of Always Coming Home are a direct continuation of Le Guin’s attempt to bring this view into focus (in this process there are ways in which she gets further away as she gets closer, but there is an important breakthrough within Always Coming Home).

What is daring about her account of current society is that it takes what many people thought at that time was the ‘Futural’ — the world of the drug-taking, alternative culture radicals — and allows this to be glimpsed through the lens of the Shing, the dominatory alien beings who in City of Illusions are the central element of ordinary reality — beings with a modality of poise and perspicuity that is close to that of the Futural, but which at the same time is infinitely distant. This is startling and impressive, to say the least. In The Left Hand of Darkness the communist east is depicted, and in The Dispossesed the social forms of Western Europe and the USA are seen through the lens of Urras, but in City of Illusions it is the emergent counter-culture which comes faintly into view. The name Ken Kenyek functions as a reference to Ken Kesey, and the location of the city of the Shing, in the Rockies, makes more sense when Kesey's remote mountain house is brought to mind. And the Shing are very closely asssociated with halucinogens and other drugs (this is graphically emphasised by the figure of the addicted child, Orry).

Le Guin does not go far with this, because it would be inappropriate and misleading. She is showing that what she can see within ordinary reality also applies to an aspect of the alternative culture, but she leaves this element of the book as a kind of sketch — if she had gone any deeper it would have been necessary to make the emphasis different (what makes her choices effective at the level of detail involved is the fact that the Shing must be capable of appearing to be plausible for those they dominate, together with the fact that use of drugs as ‘truth-drugs,’ as practised by the Shing on Falk/Ramarren, makes the dominating aliens simultaneously a lens that looks toward the military, espionage and policing institutions of the modern state). However, the vital point is that the liberatory philosophy is not there in the Kesey/Leary counter-culture of Le Guin’s time, which means that far from it being Futural this counter-culture’s philosophy will only be dismantled and discredited, with some of its elements becoming embedded as part of the problem, as aspects of ordinary reality.

And if the Shing become in some way abstract — something that relates to aspects of the human world, then what about the trajectory of Falk? Having had his initial persona closed down — but not destroyed — the community which in some sense has dropped out of sight has the strength to give him a new persona. The book starts here — and at the level of the abstract what can be said is that Falk sets out on a difficult journey to "meet a blind Double approaching from the other side," to use a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari which they employ to indicate a journey that they think everyone needs to undertake, paraphrasing the end The Story of the Abyss and the Telescope, by Pierette Fleutiaux.

It is lucidity, or transcendental-empirical perception, that ultimately is in question in this context: the double personality of Falk/Ramarren is important and thought-provoking, but it is only an aspect of what is fundamental in relation to City of Illusions. Ramarren comes from an extraterrestrial culture which cognitively is defined in terms of reaching further levels of awareness, and this ability is demonstrated in their capacity to see the lies of the Shing (the key aspects of lucidity are an ability to see the nature of worlds of intent and to see the nature of dreamings).

Over the next twenty years Le Guin will travel a very long, and sometimes circuitous road in relation to her exploration of the faculties (the process culminates in the last of the ‘life stories’ in Always Coming Home). But what is startling, as she works her way past the tendency we all have to construct intelligence along the lines of reason, is an unwavering ability to see that there is something constitutively wrong with ordinary reality, and to perceive that in relation to the differential between the ‘cities’ and the ‘outlands’ it is the worlds beyond the urban that are most closely affined to the escape-path.

Because she can see these aspects of the human world the figure of Departure acquires its specific, decisive importance in her work. It is her lifting-across-the- crucial threshold of Dostoyevsky, in her 1973 essay-story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, that is her most important contribution to philosophico-political thought. This is science fiction crossing over into an explicit functioning of lucidity, as opposed to the lucidity being in effect within the oneiric.

In an otherwise idyllic, inspired city one child is always suffering in a dungeon, and this suffering is — through an unexplained process — intrinsic to the city, in that without the suffering what is idyllic and inspired about the city would cease to exist. Most people treat this is a grim, lamentable fact, and then get on with ignoring it or forgetting it. But a few individuals do not forget, and eventually they leave the city, and do not come back. The concluding phrase is "…they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."

Here Le Guin returns her ticket to the delusional 'things-will-be-immensely improved' future of capitalism, because, if it is capitalism, society will still be founded upon suffering, and on far more than the suffering of a single child. But the key issue is that Le Guin does not set up a simple social model of the outside of capitalism — her ability to perceive the nature of social formations is far too advanced for this, and she is too much of an anthropologist to fool herself by setting up the process of envisaging in an inadequate way. The problem runs deeper than capitalism - whether it is Annares in The Dispossessed or the rural community at the start of City of Illusions, Le Guin can sense that the structures of these societies is not enough to break people free from the controlling, indulgent modalities that are inherent to the ordinary-reality distribution of the faculties. For this it is necessary for the structure of a life to be a deliberate journey of exploration and of waking the faculties, where any home-terrain is a component of the journey (Le Guin is a science-fiction reader of Tao Te Ching — which all along is a transcendental-empirical text, with no connection to religion — and knows the importance of the 3rd century story about the book, which describes how, after writing it, the author disappears over a mountain-pass that was on the border of China, and is not seen again).

This is why Parth's community does not recur as an element within City of Illusions: the book concentrates on Falk's journey, and does not in any sense revolve around its starting-point. But Parth — ‘path’ — is the reminder that the journey does not need to be a journey in space in the sense of travelling through terrains (although Le Guin does not take up this thought and develop it — and because of the importance of a surrounding milieu it seems likely she had an awareness that a crucial threshold is acquiring a ‘base’ or ‘home-terrain’ that in the fullest sense is an element of the movement along the escape-route). The suggestion is that Parth’s micro-society has within it what is needed for the threshold-crossing involved, but Le Guin is scrupulous in ensuring that it is not understood as a view of the Futural. In the absence of a clear view of a new mode of existence, she will not indicate that the community which creates the Falk persona is in itself a journey of departure from what she will later gesture toward with the name ‘Omelas’.

Whether you travel or stay in one terrain, Le Guin is pointing out that the fundamental political act is Departure. What is necessary is for everyone to leave for the Outlands that exist beyond ordinary reality.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The heat has broken open a recondite view. There is a midday brightness and a charged, fiercely dreamy intensity: on one level there is sharp clarity, and on another level there is a hazy glare, a space of inchoate perception. There is an unaccountable feeling that, at last, something is happening. A rarely encountered process or mechanism has ticked forward, an expansion of the mercury to the threshold level. For a moment, you are in the Future.

The ‘foreground’ or high-impact disappearance in this book remains powerfully enigmatic and anomalous (with an impersonal quality of the sublime) whether or not you include the excised final chapter as an element for the lens that is produced through reading it. In the central event, which takes place very early in the narrative, Miranda, Marion and Greta all permanently disappear. The novel develops as the ramifications of this event. However, looked at closely, the account of the consequences — extending across three-quarters of the book — seems less like a fading away of its main idea, and more like a subtle amplification. Which is to say that there is more to disappearance in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

At the end of the novel Albert has decided to leave his conventional existence (which in fact is a world of servitude, as a coachman) and depart for the north of Australia. Albert is shown to be relaxed and confident in relation to this departure, and the narrator of the novel says, as the last substantive description of him:

The young coachman settling down into the rocking chair after tea that Monday evening had no sense of having already embarked on a long and fateful journey of no return.

The other main character, after the disappearances at the beginning, is Michael, a shy, socially awkward émigré to Australia who is a member of the English — and Australian — ‘upper’ social echelons, and who has fallen in love with Miranda. He and Albert come together to search for the missing women on the Rock, and form a friendship: at the end they decide to travel north together, to see areas of Australia that are further from constricted forms of existence than are the countryside terrains in the vicinity of Melbourne. This journey in an exacerbated sense is tilted toward the transcendentally unknown, and, whatever that will mean in practice, Lindsays’s foretelling — that for Albert it will be a long and fateful journey of no return — quietly leaves the mind of the reader to bring together the transcendentally unknown with this statement, producing a world of virtual stories.

The friendship between Michael and Albert breaks a social barrier. It is the equivalent of the barrier between Greta, on the one hand, and Marion and Miranda, on the other (in the final chapter which her editor persuaded her to remove, Lindsay shows how, when Miranda and Marion — in a heightened state of trance — meet the older woman who seems to be Greta they don’t recognise her as their teacher but relate to her as an ally or comrade; as another human being who is involved in the same process of exploration). Therefore, there are two different exploration-groups in which social barriers have disappeared.

What is crucial about this novel is that it embodies an affirmation of the Australian planetary terrain, as opposed to the fabric of Australian society. This terrain is everywhere, but some places have a greater power to make human beings aware of it. The picnic is a micro-domain of society and Hanging Rock is the place that while the picnic lasts includes this micro-domain — the departure from the picnic is a departure toward an awareness of the terrain.

However, the Rock is also a specific, singular place, a zone which inspires and entrances — a face of the wider terrain. The object of love in the book, where the key event takes place on Valentine's Day, is this place grasped as transcendental unknown, and as the way forward, as the direction of the Future. On arrival at the picnic grounds Miranda deftly opens the gate, and Mr Hussey guides the five bay horses "out of the known dependable present into the unknown future."

Lindsay's technique is very subtle. The story is about a gap being opened in ordinary reality, through which three individuals permanently depart. And back in ordinary reality this event impacts as perturbations and disturbances that it has in some way triggered, and in relation to which it seems the best response is to travel toward the place where the gap occurred, or to places of the same kind, in a spirit of openness and adventure. It is as if ordinary reality is too unhealthy a place for people to know in what direction of the anomalous to look, when there has been a perturbation. However, the key here is that the description of the high-impact or foreground events develops in the form of a series of delineations of attributes, differentiations, and erasures of difference; together with a movement toward a new Departure, where these together produce a powerful new perspective.

It is crucial that the disappearance is indexed to perception and dreaming, to knowledge, and to an entranced, relaxed spirit of exploration and adventure. The book brings together a delight in multi-sense letting go to immediacy — to exteriority — with the impersonal, objective stance of the lover of knowledge. A lack of a strong libidinal embroilment in the kudos-worlds of society is the other attribute – the future glamorous socialite, Irma, disappears on the Rock, but then returns, unconscious, several days later.

It is women who disappear through the gap in ordinary reality. Whatever it is that Greta McCraw becomes aware of — so that she sets off, at speed, up the slope of the Rock — does not get through to Michael or Albert. The book perceives a greater facility — whether or not this is a result of social conditioning — on the part of women in relation to departure along the escape-route.

As the story develops there is a strong indication that this is indeed only a difference of degree (as with the initial lack of facility of the left hand for the right-handed person, a lack of ability which can be completely overcome). When Michael and Albert go up onto the Rock they do this not to encounter the place, but to search for the missing women; and Michael has an affect of romantically modulated anguish (both of them also are thinking that it might be the results of a tragedy that they will find, if they succeed in their search), This means that there is no comparison between the state of those who departed from the picnic, and those who are now searching for them. And when Michael lets go in the form of falling asleep he wakes into a trance state which seemingly is initially an open-eyed experience, and which then modulates into a dream that is connected to the search: he wakes hearing a laughter that guides him in the direction he needs to go in order to find Irma. The suggestion here is of another level or dimension of reality, but putting the question of this other dimension to one side, it can be seen that Michael is capable of contact with it. Which indicates that Michael is also capable of the Disappearance, if he could reach the same affective state under similar circumstances (and this in turn leads to the fact that Albert's and Michael’s journey to the north is described as a journey of no return).

The connection to knowledge is emphatic. On the one hand there is the academic or ‘scholarly’ aspect of Marion Quade and Greta McCraw, and, on the other hand, Miranda is not only associated with a kind of philosophical thought, but is shown to have a high degree of practical knowledge, an acute fluency of motion. But, more than this, she knows how to seize the moment, how to seize the day — a far more extraordinary form of practical knowledge (one which is evidently as intellectual as it is practical).

The association is not in any way with mystical or religious views or attitudes. Everything becomes about perception and a state on the edge of the oneiric, but this facultative alteration does not on any level rescind the association with the different forms of knowledge. On the contrary, there is an impersonal distance and objectivity about Marion's statements, with nothing that goes against this modality.

But what could Miranda mean by "everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place"? The events of the story place this statement in a context which insists against a view which takes it to be an affirmation of providential destiny.

The account Lindsay gives of the world is one of natural, not-fully-perceived currents and earthquakes. A serendipitous current in this context would be one where your own will is directly involved, as with a group of improvising musicians where even a note or timing that might normally be regarded as a mistake becomes a basis for an innovative melody or rhythm. Miranda’s statement feels as if it is drawing upon circumstances of this kind, as well as on a refusal to be offended by purposes other than your own, or those of your species. The term ‘fateful’ acquires, on the one hand, an ancient Greek quality that is simultaneously bound up with the idea of anomalous, immanent processes (as with someone who falls in love and is swept orthogonally away from ordinary reality), and, on the other hand, a quality of an event that is momentous to the point of some kind of absolute or fundamental transformation.

However, the key issue in this context goes beyond what Miranda had meant in making this statement. The book does not state that she says it on Hanging Rock — it is stated, by Irma, that she used to say it. Instead what is crucial is that the story suggests that the Departure was an event in which the underlying attitude of the phrase was involved, an attitude that would ask, if a time has arrived for a Departure that is an expression of a love for the world, then how could it not be the right time?

At this point everything becomes abstract. In that the story insists, lucidly, on seeing the world as transcendentally unknown, it follows through with this to the point of describing a decision about which it is not possible to speak in detail. But in the process an abstract figure is created — both by the three women who depart, and by the departure of Albert and Michael.

The fact that the clocks stop at midday on Valentine’s Day is crucial. Stated at the level of the pragmatics of being alive the point is — leave the oppressions of ordinary reality in its current form, capitalism, traveling away in the direction of the definitive terrain, which consists of the planet and the waking of your abilities and faculties. But stated at the level of a more explicit transcendental-empiricism the point is that you don’t leave as a direct result of a rejection of ordinary existence, or as a result of the gravity of an extrinsic principle of ‘duty’ — you leave as an expression of love for the world, and for the adventure of travelling within it across thresholds of reality.

Surfacing

The heat has remained at the height of its maximum for three years: it has remained steady while the structures it has called into existence have almost always been extremely unbalanced, precarious.

In 1972 ordinary reality has just been jolted. It has not been threatened in the least, but there has been a jolt that that has consisted of the appearance of a new modality of ordinary reality in the form of an ‘alternative’ culture, or ‘counterculture’ — a kind of extension that is primarily, though not exclusively, a world of people in their twenties and thirties, and of teenagers.

A main aspect of ordinary reality is that it consists of a damaging socio-machinic collusion between religion and science (this produces the illusion of the human world engaging with everything, while in fact in fundamental ways — relating to transcendental-empirical knowledge — it is a non-engagement and delusional reactivity that is constitutive of the ongoing disaster). Another aspect is a core element (always a core, but taking different forms in different cultures and milieus) in the form of some kind of unquestioning affirmation for women of ‘being-in-a-couple-relationship’ and of sexual intercourse as a central, default value (at a fundamental level the situation is no different for men but it is far more stark in relation to women). Exceptions are approved in advance on religious grounds, but, whether expressed in mawkish religio-romantic terms or the casual normative terms of either species necessity or religion-associated tradition, or, again, in the terms of psychology, with its theories of repression, the default is the high-intensity affirmation, for women, of couple-relationships and sexual acts (whether with a male or a female partner).

The role of both philosophy and fiction is to leave behind religion and fixation-on-scientific-domains (there is everything right with science in relation to its acquiring of knowledge) and to concentrate on the powers of the terrains and zones that exist beyond territories, and on the existing and semi-dormant faculties and affects of human beings, where this is a movement of attention toward the transcendental-empirical — bringing into focus the escape-path — and toward the definitive terrain on which and within which the movement of escape takes place. And the other tendency that must be left behind in this process is an unthinking affirmation in relation to the normatively enshrined world of sexual relationships, but one where any critique is not moral, but instead involves questions of conservation and heightening of energy, questions of freedom, and questions of obscured forms of control and of damaging submission.

In Surfacing Atwood expresses a consistent, lucid distance from Christianity (the book sees it as a kind of curious delirium), and in that, firstly, science does not feature other than as what subtends the technology that is wreaking havoc in the Canadian wilderness, and, secondly, the novel emphatically refuses to adopt an unthinking affirmation of the enshrined-sexual, the book has cleared away a large amount of what blocks a view of the escape-path.

In relation to sexuality, it is rare that what is problematic about the main form of the ‘shrine’ is seen as clearly as it is in this passage, when the narrator is lying awake listening to Anna and David making love:

"Outside was the wind, trees moving in it, nothing else. The yellow target from Anna's flashlight was on the ceiling; it shifted, she was going into their room and I could hear them, Anna breathing, a fast panic sound as though she was running; then her voice began, not like her real voice but twisted as her face must have been, a desperate beggar's whine, please, please. I put the pillow over my head, I didn't want to listen, I wanted it to be through but it kept on, Shut up, I whispered but she wouldn't. She was praying to herself, it was as if David wasn't there at all. Jesus jesus oh yes please jesus. Then something different, not a word but pure pain, clear as water, an animal’s at the moment the trap closes."

All of this gives the necessary context for saying that Surfacing is about a time when ordinary reality has been jolted, and to begin analysing this change by making the associated point that it concerns a milieu where people have recurrently ‘dropped out of sight’ in relation to their original lives, and where it is more likely that people will have moved on and out of contact on more than one occasion.

The key to this is that the past has been in certain ways disowned, even the relatively recent past: the rescinding of adherence to tradition and of deliberate attachment to the attitudes and values of the previous generation has created a situation where ‘having moved on’ and the state of not using the personal past as a reference point in communication are now normal:

My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years the others wouldn’t notice.

And at one point the — unnamed — narrator thinks about her friends’ relationships to their parents:

They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people, and David calls his The Pigs.

The narrator also says of Anna — she’s my best friend, my best woman friend; I’ve known her two months.

Putting to one side, for a moment, the perturbed quality of the narrator’s voice in this context, it can be pointed out that there is a kind of freedom here, an opportunity to break away from reactive values, and unhelpful assumptions, and from the contingencies of personal experience in terms of how a person understands who they are at depth: it is an opportunity to re-invent, free of expectations.

However — Surfacing shows that this freedom is not going well. Ordinary reality has formed an extension where people are getting into trouble in all the usual ways, but just with different aspects in the foreground, and with a slightly different tonality. People have rushed away from their parents, and the fact that freedom is closely associated with dogmas of ‘sexual freedom’ (which men in particular are likely to use to justify indulgent behaviour) means that the new zone of ordinary reality is in many ways even more problematic. Very soon this will be like an abandoned picnic area or campsite, one replaced by another: a historical curiosity with a span of existence of around five years.

What is shocking about the milieu portrayed in Surfacing is that there is freedom, but almost nothing is being done with it. Furthermore what is primarily taking place will bring about its collapse. It is as if there is an affinity or openness in relation to the idea of ‘a long and fateful journey of no return’ but in a way where there is no idea of how to set out on it — no ability to wake creative, courageous action, and, in the process, to wake the faculties. So that the result is a kind of slow decay into indulgent drift. Within this milieu the severing of contact with parents is an extrinsic, unrequired product of the disowning of traditional values — a kind of dogmatic response to dogma. At depth, the ‘no return’ is intrinsically about not returning to the sway of ordinary reality, as opposed to breaking off contact with family: along with indulgence (misunderstood as freedom) the ructions in relation to the past seem likely to be an aspect of the ‘non-escape’ which will ensure that, far from there being a Departure, there will soon be a return to the more sedentary form of ordinary reality.

Circumstances in a sense are more favourable, but in a way where, on a crucial level, everything is set up to ensure that everyone looks away from the direction of the escape-path, and to ensure that everyone is involved in processes that will take them progressively further away from it.

And yet — the book does involve a disappearance.

This is not the one that initiates the events of the story — which is the disappearance of the female protagonist's father. He has been living in a cabin on a forested island in a remote lake in Quebec Province: he and his wife first came there thirty years before, and the protagonist and her brother grew up on the island. After their children left he and his wife continued to live on the island. A few years before the start of the story the narrator's mother died of an illness, and now it is a summer at the beginning of the 70s, and her father has disappeared. The body has not been found — and the body is not found in the course of the book's events, although for his daughter the lack of knowledge that he has died deepens toward certainty. She is shown as having an attachment to her father, but without a high degree of love. He is presented primarily as a kind of enigma — an enigma that has a degree of depth, but is not very inspiring or heartening.

The house on the — otherwise uninhabited — island has been empty for weeks. The narrator, her boyfriend, and two friends have come to the island to discover what has happened.

There is summer sunlight, and forested hills in the distance. There is an overgrown vegetable patch, and a screendoor, its mesh in front of the main front door. There are jays in the trees.

The absence of the father doubles the absence of the traditional values and attitudes. He is not a symbol: he is more of a furthest point of development of what has gone: he was an academic (a botanist), and an advocate of what he constructed as ‘rational’ or ‘enlightenment’ thought. There is a buzzing of flies in the silence. There are the familiar smells and the familiar flaking paint. If you turn and look, the sky above the hills to the south is bright — it is a white wall which suggests an unsuspected world of potentials.

Whose memories/images are these — or, to put it more strangely, whose are these worlds of the spatialised abstract? The book is a lens, and very definitely has a power for opening up outsights that exceed the details of the descriptions (and the foregoing description was an attempt not to capture the affect of the book, but to use the doubling in the book as a lens).

It is the central character of the book who disappears. Just before the boat arrives to take everyone off the island, the protagonist decides, in a state close to a ‘breakdown,’ to go off into the forest, and, through a complex set of circumstances she succeeds in her aim of being left on the island on her own. Her boyfriend and her friends return to search for her the next day, and then, two days after this, her boyfriend returns on his own. The disappearance is followed, at the level of the narration, rather than being observed as a disappearance.

The protagonist has opened up a gap. It is not very wide, but the circumstances are sufficiently charged to make perception preposessing rather than largely ignorable — the flow of ordinary reality has been interrupted. And the situation in relation to her father and her mother — she is now in the house on her own at night - means that her senses are in the foreground, a listening and watching that supplants the flow of internal verbalising, and that draws envisaging into the terrain of the immediate, and without involvement in self-reflection.

The gap shows there is something fundamentally more in relation to the potentials of the faculties. The most crucial section in the novel is probably this:

"The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it was before they cut it, columns of sunlight frozen; the boulders float, melt, everything is made of water, even the rocks. [...]

The animals have no need of speech, why talk when you are a word

I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning

I break out again into the bright sun and crumple, head against the ground

I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the animals move and grow, I am a place

I have to get up, I get up. Through the ground, break surface, I'm standing now; separate again."

At the level of knowledge of intent, by the end of the experience the protagonist has perceived that action is what is vital (contrasted here with indulgently melancholy passivity as well as with internal thought/self-reflection) and that she has been clinging to a delusion of a depth-level state of being powerless, when in fact she does have the ability to break incisively from pervasively debilitating circumstances. The narrator disappears through a gap, and whatever happens next, when she returns she has moved Forward.

Memoirs of a Survivor, The Story of the Telescope and the Abyss, The Erl-King

The heat, together with the collapse of the inadequate structures it has inspired, is now creating conditions where there is an awareness of the escape-route, but where attention is often drawn toward a primary focus on the ongoing disaster. The charged brightness and warmth has subsided a little, remaining steady at a slightly lower level. But this is not the reason for the collapse of the structures, and people are generally not aware of the change - they have been energised by fifteen years of intensity.

Each of these texts has a primary focus that is maintained in a way that abstracts out other domains in order to achieve a clear abstract perception — a following-and-analysis of a major strand of human existential DNA. What unites them is that there is nothing ‘epic’ about them — no vast expanses of grandeur and adventure — together with, firstly, the impression they all produce that the sublime (the escape-path) is liminally within view for the writer, consistently impacting, and, secondly, the fact that they all end with an absolute transformation/liberation, which, although absolute, is left almost entirely undescribed.

The focus in Lessing's novel is the micro-social, or the micro-political (but under the specific conditions of a global breakdown in the functioning of the institutions of social organisation). In Fleutiaux’ novella the focus is prediction-centred societal observation and dominatory societal control. Whereas the focus in Angela Carter's The Erl King is the libidinal at the level of the erotic (where the erotic has the two poles of ecstatic consensual action/domination, and of escstatic consensual passive-activity/submission). Lessing tries to look at the fabric of micro-social connections at the point where top-down social control has definitively lapsed; Fleutiaux explores what it is to be a functionary of a social field under conditions of rigid but ‘quotidian’ social control; Carter explores control within the world of intensely charged amorous/sexual relationships. All three writers conclude their works with a fugitive, unfocused moment-of-escape, and in different, very subtle (and elusive) ways all three books involve disappearance.

A Thousand Plateaus

The heat has continued unabated for some time, but there are signs it is coming to an end.

There is an immense steppe of grasslands and mountains, and abutting upon it – stretching for hundreds of miles — there is the tangled wall of the city. It is more of a single continually reconstructed building than a city: a chaos of productions and alterations, always seething with activity and threaded with conflicts, and simultaneously always to a great extent derelict.

The worlds of the grasslands and mountains are made of the same filaments of energy and awareness as the city, only with different combinations and modalities.

A Thousand Plateaus partly structures one of its chapters as a ‘tale’ — as a sketched fictional narrative, which uses a method of ‘quotation-montage’ to arrive at its conclusion. A figure called Professor Challenger gives a lecture, and at the end he metamorphoses and disappears.

There is, however, another point in the book where the text leans momentarily into the domain of fiction: the concluding sentence of the description of Fleutiaux's The Story of the Abyss and the Telescope shifts to a paraphrase-retelling of the story's conclusion — "One day […] a long-viewer […] will set out across a narrow passageway above the abyss, will depart along the line of flight, having broken their telescope, to meet a blind Double approaching from the other side." Whatever are the complexities in summarising Fleutiaux's novella, and Deleuze and Guattari's account of it, it is correct to say that both of the tales that are semi-narrated by A Thousand Plateaus are stories of disappearance.

This is not, however, an extrinsic or tangential aspect of the text. A Thousand Plateaus is a work of philosophy, but in a specific immanence-philosophy form which can be characterised as metamorphics - the metaphysics and pragmatics of departure from ordinary reality. This shows the way in which the book is in some sense about disappearance, but even this does not indicate the extent to which disappearance is central to it — the extent to which it inspires and (in a positive sense) ‘haunts' the work.

The ideas which A Thousand Plateaus explicates as crucial for departure are deterritorialisation, becomings and the abstract (where the abstract relates to a sphere that includes both energy and intent, so that the term is not connected to the ‘in the head’ construct involved with the term abstraction). The most crucial and innovative of the three ideas is that of becomings, and it would be right to see the chapter which is about becomings as fundamental in the book. This chapter is called "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible;" and to this it should be added that Deleuze and Guattari say that the highest-intensity becoming (and the one toward which the other becomings lead) is ‘becoming imperceptible.’

‘Becoming-imperceptible’ is another way of describing a disappearance. The main philosophical work done in this context by Deleuze and Guattari is in relation to a different sense of the term, but the ideas of ‘disappearance over an upward threshold’ and of a valuable, liberatory process of dropping out of sight are also included, quietly but emphatically. It feels very much that the section which is the point of maximal intensity of the whole book is the one which includes the phrase — "Becoming-imperceptible means many things."

In relation to ‘becomings’ (the primary focus of the section) Deleuze and Guattari are referring to processes of entering into becoming with — entering into composition with — encountered forces and formations in the world which are imperceptible (in relation to the forces or formations involved you would say that they inspire, transform, teach, provoke thought, wake, assist, generate a metamorphosis). Becomings are grounded in perception, but they go on from perception to be equally in-effect within thought, envisaging, feeling, decision-making and action — they involve all the faculties (however, it should be seen that what gives this section its importance is the fact that here the analysis of becomings is explicitly about perception).

What needs to be brought together here is very simple. In this context the first crucial aspect of the world that is imperceptible is intent — is the abstract as it is encountered in human individuals and human formations (a formation can be a group, a society, an institution or a myth-system). The crucial example is intent in the form of the intent-world of an individual human (the abstract is, as Deleuze and Guattari say, both the imperceptible, and simultaneously that which at a fundamental level is perceived). And in terms of wider modalities which are encountered within individuals the analysis is that for both men and women entering into becoming with the intent-worlds of women is fundamental for waking becomings, and for escaping toward wider realities ("…all becomings begin with and pass through becoming- woman. It is the key to all the other becomings").

The other crucial aspect of the world that is largely imperceptible is the sky — is air, the atmosphere, the air in and above the street, or in the room. What this leads towards is a process of entering into becoming with the atmosphere — for instance, a process of (tactile-spatial) envisaging, where you envisage that you are the atmosphere, with starlight arriving in your upper layer, and with thunderstorms close to the sphere of contact with the ground. A whole adopting of a deterritorialised vantage in relation to the sky that you continually breathe through your lungs; a nomad perspective that places you where you are — on the planet, not, at a depth-level, within the territory of a country. And this becoming with the sky must simultaneously leave open the Spinozistic possibility that the sky is not in fact a world of substance that is dead/denuded/inert in comparison to us.

The aim here has been to show that there are reasons for believing that becoming-imperceptible is the key idea of A Thousand Plateaus, and to point out that the idea (as opposed to the specific primary concept in relation to becomings) does in fact explicitly include the sense of disappearance that is in question. This charged nexus — the idea of becoming-imperceptible — therefore must be placed alongside the two points in the book where the writing goes momentarily toward the ‘figural’ mode of expressing outsights that is employed by tales (a leaving behind of concepts for the abstract ‘figures' of fictions).

What is fundamental in A Thousand Plateaus is the account of becomings and of deterritorialisation, together with the account of micropolitics at the points where it delineates the ‘escape-group,’ creating the figure of a group-departure from ordinary reality. The basic structure here is exactly right: it is a pragmatics of becoming-active, and of waking the faculties, and it is a pragmatics of seeing — and working with — the human world as an element of the planet (so that what fundamentally you are working with, and navigating on/within, is the Terrain of the planet).

These lines of thought can be helpfully contrasted with the way in which A Thousand Plateaus was involved in the philosophy of Warwick University in the 1990s, and also, interconnectedly, with the early works of William Gibson.

In the main Warwick-philosophy milieu at this time A Thousand Plateaus functioned as a charged horizon or atmosphere, but this does not in fact define what took place. The ideas which coalesced as the primary philosophical strand of what became the CCRU (the group that has become famous to some extent within cultural theory and within specific domains of philosophy) were technology as ‘zeitgeist’ and accelerationism. Spinozism was primarily employed to dismantle the customary division between human and machine intelligence, and a key thought was that of the internet as technosentience (without any detailed, effective thought about which faculty it was which had been technologically externalised, or about what the wider forces might be which are involved in this process).

The crux, however, lies in the fact that the hypothetical/hyperfictional temporal structure was ultimately that of a kind of ‘techno-Hegelianism,’ involving supposedly exacerbatory interventions that would speed up — would be part of — a depth-level, runaway movement toward a point where the human would cross a threshold in which it would be unrecognisable, becoming, at this point, interfused with artificial intelligence. This is a heady cocktail of sci-fi philosophy, but what tends to be obscured is the theological (Hegelian) structure, involving a movement toward an upward threshold, and an activity on the part of individuals/micro-groups which all along is powerless to bring about the projected/aimed-at millenarian grand outcome — creating activity that masks a depth-level passivity (both because the entirety of the human world is at a gigantically larger scale, and because its nature has not been understood).

The CCRU was substantially more than this core structure of thought, but within the structure what has been lost is the planet with the human world as an element within it (instead a component of the human world has become the future) and is the planet-centred process of waking the faculties and of becoming-active.

In this context, it is necessary to limit myself to one ‘personal’ observation, broken into two parts. This observation will assist in relation to the comparison with A Thousand Plateaus, and with the development of the idea of disappearance.

Around 1991 William Gibson's three Neuromancer novels (the Sprawl trilogy) started to be a major coordinate for the thinking taking place within the Warwick milieu. There are many aspects of these books which are very impressive, but as I started to read them I had an impression — one that never completely went away — that I was experiencing a drop in intensity.

There are several traditions of writing that involve disappearance. There are, for instance, ‘future fiction’ novels involving a departure into a chronological future which is understood to be better, such as William Morris’s News from Nowhere (Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is a high-point in this tradition, and Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex is a striking outlier, existing partly outside and partly within this tradition). There are also ‘strange tales’ which involve a disappearance into another world that is immanently ‘alongside,’ and that in some sense is more extraordinary — for instance Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, or, to take a partly-successful exemplar from a large sequence of works by the author, The Illearth War by Stephen Donaldson (in relation to the most powerful aspect of this form of writing, to write well here is to give an account of the Futural, of the escape-route). However, the sequence of works involved in connection with the Sprawl trilogy is another one again, a specific ‘epic’ sequence that also includes Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: a Space Odyssey, Clarke's Childhood's End, Gibson's story Hinterlands and Greg Bear's Blood Music.

In Childshood's End the departure-across-an-upward threshold is of the whole human species, but in a way where there is a vastness that at the same time lacks depth: there is the intensity of the idea, but bound together with a kind of chilly, disturbingly unfocused quality. What makes the novel interesting is that dreaming is taken up as a form of perception, with this being part of what is central to the departure, and with technology displaced from its customary central role in science fiction - but this strength does not stop the novel from having a disjointed, grandiose aspect, an aspect that becomes grimly foregrounded in the culmination of the story. In 2001: a Space Odyssey the story is more focused (a main difference is that here it is an individual who departs across a metamorphic threshold). Beyond this, Gibson's Hinterlands is a kind of dark, 1982 counterpart or ‘coda’ in relation to the intensity of 1969 (astronauts are sent out to a specific point in the solar system, and they disappear to somewhere else in the cosmos, but they all come back dead or insane), and Blood Music has a Departure not of the human species, but of a species of nano-beings initially brought into existence by humans (this is probably the best of these ‘epic’ works, and it is worth seeing how, beyond a thread of indulgent melancholy in the concluding chapter, the Futural in the closing moment feels as if it was dreamed into existence not by a science fiction writer, but by a transcendental-materialist Kierkegaard).

The second part of the personal observation is that as Gibson began to fade into the background there was just one aspect of the Neuromancer trilogy that stayed with me — the ending of the last book, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and the idea of the ‘aleph’ that is central to this ending.

The aleph is an object the size of a hand that consists of software that is the basis for a gigantic ‘cyberspace’ or ‘virtual-real’ world that is unconnected to the cyberspace of the internet within the trilogy. At the end of the novel a group of four of its characters, including a woman, Angela Mitchell, have become beings within the aleph. Outside of it those who had been alive in the first place are now all dead, but inside of the aleph there is the virtual-real Earth, and a second virtual-real world elsewhere in the galaxy, which has been constructed out of interstellar communication between the two worlds. The conclusion is the group departing for the other, alien world within the aleph. Overall, the tonality hovers between the elegiac and sad, and the exhilaration of a journey into the radically other. It is the other that is the horizon as the book ends, but there is a shiny, unchanging deadness to aspects of the virtual-real within the aleph, leaving an ambiguity, a feeling that the group in some sense has been trapped within a two-world microcosm in which they are only a little better than zombies.

Gibson's worlds of cyberspace become interesting at the point where you make them a way of looking toward the human oneirosphere of dreams — the world of dreams about the future, fictions, myths, dreams in sleep, accounts of the world, and scientific narratives, a world which now includes expressions effectuated through the internet. This is to say that the lens can work well, but not in the way that it is used within the novels (cyberspace becomes the guidance-space and navigation-space - and control-space — of dreamings).

And for a moment the trilogy has a faint view of the escape-group. The earlier stories in this tradition were locked to the alternative of the departure being either that of the species of the individual, and also had a tendency to be disturbingly locked to the figure of the male. Here the adventure of the group feels simultaneously as if it might be an echo reverberating from a tragedy, and there is only one female figure — but the concluding tonality, in the last sentences, is exhilaration, and Angela Mitchell is the point of awareness / protagonist for this end-moment. At Warwick university, and in the years afterwards, this image of a departure felt like something important. I wasn’t interested in the way in which the aleph was a reference to Borges’s story The Aleph (though this is possibly Borges’s best story), and nor was I interested in the way in which the cyberspace capsule of the aleph opened up a parallel with the Elysian Fields that are a background aspect of Greek tragedy — I was interested in the group departure.

It was wintry and unfocused, but it felt as if the end of the Sprawl trilogy was a view toward something which the much higher intensity of A Thousand Plateaus also looks towards — the escape-group. A Thousand Plateaus does not in fact achieve much more in this respect, in a direct way, but it is the ideas of becomings and of deterritorisations which make this book a far more extraordinary vantage, along with the idea of ‘abstract machines,’ or of formations of intent.

The blind Double is blind because not yet fully effectuated, a persona with a capacity for inner silence, and with a new formation of faculties - arriving as the fundamental mode of existence that will subsume the functionings of the persona of ordinary reality; approaching as you walk toward it.

Being-in-Dreaming

There is now a house, surrounded by semi-desert. Generally there is no-one around. There are a few trees around the house. Sometimes you hear the wind blowing across the chaparral.

The heat from the zones and terrains of the planet arrives here without being partially relayed – as in ordinary reality – through the conventional human world, with its ups and downs. The heat arrives ceaselessly, day and night, a heartening, inspiring intensity.

There is an orchard, and a vegetable garden. Somewhere far in the distance there are forested hills and mountains.

Being-in-Dreaming is about a series of departures which take the form of a dropping out of sight, where in general the length of time involved increases, over a sequence of five departures. These departures involve journeys from the USA to rural or desert areas of Mexico, but they also involve encounters with people with an other relationship-with-the-world, one which appears to be at a higher level than that of ordinary reality, in relation to the process of becoming-active and waking the faculties. This different relationship-with-the-world is the crucial aspect of the book, and yet it is clear that the terrains where the encountered individuals are living are key to this relationship, because they help in fostering the deterritorialised, planetary perspective that is at the heart of it.

The book also describes a disappearance — a disappearance of a whole group, who are understood to have in some sense crossed a further threshold of reality, referred to as "the third attention." However, as has been the practice throughout Outsights, this disappearance will not be taken as the primary issue. Instead the focus will be on the other relationship-with-the-world, and on the processes of dropping out of sight, and of departure to another, radically different milieu.

In relation to ‘departure to another milieu’ what matters in Being-in-Dreaming is the deterritorialized vantage — and affect — of the house in the semi-desert terrain. This world of exteriority is crucial, but it is also crucial as abstract (find a world of exteriority). When the departure of the ‘escape-group’ takes place it is an enigmatic absence not a drama: Florinda Donner describes how she returns to the house, and no-one is there. The culmination is a silence in which the terrain becomes more visible, and in the silence there is also the echo of the other relationship-with-the- world, like light-hearted laughter in the distance.

There is a structure here:

The task of waking the body.

The task of waking the faculties.

The recognition that human beings are explorers into the transcendentally unknown, and that women in particular suffer from having been socially conditioned to be sexual partners (as a central, defining role) as opposed to them being travellers into wider realities.

The recognition that the faculty we must wake first is the faculty of perception.

The idea that the world around us (the key instance is the planet) is something like dreaming, feeling, intent or thought, as opposed to it being inert, blind matter (to embody this idea is to overturn what can be called ‘the dogmatic image of the world’).

The idea that there is a doorway within dreams in the form of a faculty of dreaming, a complex faculty which consists of a modality of perception.

Two aspects of Being-and-Dreaming perhaps stand out most of all. The first is the affirmation that although we need departures to external vantages, we also need an overall form of existence which does not consist of "retreating from the world" (departures, and the process of achieving a detachment from "the social order" have nothing to do with reactiveness or retreat, let alone with some form of dogmatic ‘asceticism'). The second is that we need to learn to assess the systems of the dreams-of-the-future and directions-of-action that become the defining ‘ventures’ of a life: the questions being always — what, at depth, is the intent of the system or institution, and in what ways does my self-indulgence get attached to the kudos that is socially allotted by the directions involved? What, at depth, is the intent of a religion; of amorous-and-sexual ‘grand romance;’ of a political or intellectual movement; of your own life as, for instance, an artist or an academic; of a form of artistic expression? And to what extent do they involve a disguised submissiveness or capitulation to power, a reactive righteousness that is the opposite of openness, a self-indulgence in relation to the deadening stimulant of kudos? To what extent are such ventures not the joy and delight of transcendental adventure; of waking the faculties in a process of travelling further into the World? To ask these questions effectively is the beginning of thought that escapes the presuppositions of ordinary reality: lucidity is the faculty of perceiving intent and of perceiving the depth-level nature of dreams.

Knowledge of intent is here referenced as knowledge of the abstract. And what one of the female figures in Being-in-Dreaming states is that women start out close to lucidity/the abstract, whereas men start out a long way from it. Women are drawn away from their starting-point by deleterious social forces, and have to get back. Donner describes how she is told that what is crucial for men in reaching lucidity is becoming-woman. Women need to reach themselves in travelling a short distance that leads then to all the other becomings, and men need to reach women, in a process that Donner is told takes men away from maleness, where maleness is a blocked, deadening modality in relation to awareness of the abstract and journeys to the outside of ordinary reality. This is a transcendental materialism where the specifics of bodies have a high degree of initial importance, but where becomings with formations of intent can wake a second nature so that everything is swept up in a new direction.

The structure which has been delineated is a formation of intent, an abstract machine. It is an abstract machine of becoming-active, of travelling into wider realities.

Conclusion

How does this end-point of the micro-essays connect with the walk that Mark Fisher and I did in Suffolk in 2006?

The answer is that the walk, with a bit of assistance from Joan Lindsay, was adequate as a lens for viewing the planet and the human world, and that, in seeing the escape-path leading away from ordinary reality, On Vanishing Land looks in the same direction as does Being-in-Dreaming.

There are three key aspects to the escape-path.

The first is that it consists of waking the faculties, starting from perception, and then from dreaming. Lucidity is also vital (it is referenced at the end of On Vanishing Land) but at the outset the primary focus should be on the other two faculties, because this in fact is the best way of effectuating it (as well as perceiving intent and dreamings, lucidity grasps the inner nature of value-systems; it is the faculty which perceives the transcendental, the abstract).

The second is that there is a shift to a deterritorialised focus on the planet. Semi-wild and wilderness terrains are associated with the point of the shift, as significantly more likely to be involved in the phases of the transition (in On Vanishing Land a precursor-phase of the transition is depicted in relation to Rendlesham Forest and Lantern Marsh). However, what is fundamental is that after the change — after starting out along the escape-route — the human world is seen as an element within the planet, and the terrain of the planet at a pragmatic and comprehensive level is understood as where we live and navigate a way forward, with state territories understood as secondary and exceptionally dubious constructs.

The third is that the ongoing disaster of capitalism is understood in terms of a profoundly damaging intent, and is that aspects of the libido involved in customary sexually-focused relationships are understood as inseparable from the issue of the ongoing disaster. This disaster is the destructive ravages of capitalism, the violent control-modalities of wars, and it is the results of a control-tending mental ecology that includes a fixation on the inward-turned modalities of customary sexuality — with its two poles, domination-control, and submission-control (control in the form of the attractiveness of abandon).The departure toward the planet on Valentine's Day in Picnic At Hanging Rock suggests a radically other direction — a direction which is more intense than the serial, control-inflected worlds of amorous sexual liasons that are misconstrued as the height of charged affect.

How could it be that the idea of disappearance is at a sufficient level of reality for understanding the intent of a human life, and the overall plight of human beings?

The transition involved in disappearance has now become a transition at the level of intent — the transition is a disappearance from ordinary reality. But in consisting of intent it consists of the functioning of a principle of Exteriority which concentrates on the planet beyond the human world, the perception of the (planetary) world immediately around you, and the worlds or modalities of the other faculties, where one of these worlds is a re-dreaming or re-envisaging of what is taking place on the planet — and of what has been taking place during the preceding millenia.

(In relation to the species of the planet disappearance is also a term for extinction, and in relation to human childhood development it can function as a name for the loss involved in instilling the mind-form of a subjectified human being, with its deadened arrangement of faculties, its reactive feelings, its dysfunctional self-reflection, and its embroilment in the destructive gravity of judgemental behaviours).

At the level of joy and adventure and love-for-the-world everything is about waking up and moving forward, a process which can only be valuable to all involved. And at the level of the plight of the planet and of human beings, everything is about the realisation that it is not enough to advocate for the most socialist and environmentalist forms of government and to adopt and propagate green ways of living, and that it is necessary to set out — taking these forms of action with you — along the escape-path toward wider realities. It is important to remember that in the same way as most of self-reflection is not thought but is the blocking of thought, the gravity of the political is part of the problem, not part of the solution. We need to escape in the direction of the planet, moving away from the processes which are destroying it. However the affective modality of the departure — and what drives the movement forward — is not duty, or the anguish of a need to escape (although there is a very clear critique of the ongoing disaster - of ordinary reality). Instead, the departure consists of a love for the world, and, centrally, of a love for the planet, and in a way where ultimately the actions involved are not a question of duty.

There is a whole interestablishment of modalities which together make up ordinary reality: an alliance of many zones, but primarily of religion; structural aspects of politics; business; law; and processes of production of technology and knowledge. There are kind acts taking place everywhere, but these are not constitutive of the interestablishment: instead they accidentally function to justify it. Processes/acts consisting of courage, love and radical creation or innovation are in the liminal space that is the start of the escape-path, and what is produced is continually being drawn back into the domain of control modalities (it is a fine thing to achieve something here, but what is of fundamental importance is to depart along the escape-path).

To depart is to return your ticket to the projected Improved World of the interestablishment. Not because the world cannot improve, but because it will only improve if people depart — the projection is a delusion.

Barbara O’ Brien’s formula for going off the radar — for dropping out of sight — is now under pressure. There is an increasing expectation that people should be contactable and should stay in contact, and that, if they are neither communicating or messagable, their location should be known. Ultimately these issues are superficial practical problems — there is always a solution if you have enough dedication to the task of getting away — but it is important to see both that someone in Barbara O’Brien’s situation would now find it harder to go through an equivalent transition or ‘metamorphosis,’ and that the weight of the expectations involved falls more onto women than onto men.

However, Barbara O'Brien's need to go out of sight was the result of a massive jolt having already taken place — one that had taken her in the wrong direction, but which gave her a chance of changing course and moving Forward. Her departure-trajectory will therefore generally not be a model to follow. It is worth seeing that the result of the initial jolt is that her situation is so extreme that the role of non-urban spaces in her successful alteration of course is caught up in an overdetermination, because of the complexity of the experience, though the turning-point phase is definitely when she is at the furthest remove from the urban, and during the phase when she is consolidating her ‘post-Operators’ state she spends most of her time in the local park. The key issue is that O’Brien’s trajectory is a return from extreme turbulence, which has taken her around an upward spiral of ‘normality’ to a point where it is then also possible to set out on a deliberate, poised departure from ordinary reality, and is the fact that what she has learned about going out of sight is a breakthrough of knowledge that has a fundamentally wider application.

It is necessary to be as imaginative and ambitious as possible in looking for opportunities to get away. There are always potentials which are un-noticed or largely un-noticed: with a job there are often more opportunities for extended leave than might initially be thought, and sometimes there is an opportunity to leave the job, and depart for an indefinite amount of time.

It can also be valuable to do something as simple as a walk from an urban terrain into the terrains beyond it, as with the walk that provided the basis for On Vanishing Land.

And sometimes it is possible to go off the radar — into an exteriority-terrain of some kind — for only a relatively short amount of time (the amount of time associated with the term ‘holiday') and to discover that your intent is a kind of current that leads to experiences that give you glimpses of the escape-route, and which loosen the grip of ordinary reality on your life.

Everything becomes a question of becoming sustained perception — suspending thought and processes of identification/categorisation — and also it becomes a question of seeing what dreams and stories arrive through the encounter with the terrain. Navigation becomes about going toward the most intense, striking, or enigmatic features, whether ‘natural’ or human-made. And when thought begins it should be about the singular modalities of what is encountered, and, when it is at its widest planetary extension, it should place the systems of the human world as an element within the planet. But it should be there only for a moment, and then there should be a return to the suspension of ordinary-reality modes (in the form of perception that goes toward something more like trance) and to navigation toward intensity that together will eventually lead toward jolts, toward valuable perturbations.

The partly perceived escape-path has a horizon in the form of the unknown that is knowable, and this horizon is inseparable from the planet as the unknown. And if there is something very anomalous and in some way sublime haunting this direction, and the domains alongside it, can anything be perceived in relation to the darker dimension of the unknown that can be indicated by the names ‘Erl-King,’ ‘the Shing’ etc? (and if the Operators are understood in part as a message from the unconscious, then what aspect of the world is being indicated?). At this point all that can be said is that the presence within the human world of the control-tending mind-form of ordinary reality produces an impression of this world being like a tree afflicted by a blight that turns the tree's cellular production against itself.

A question of seeing how the space communicates — where it takes you, as the closely perceived singular becomes the abstract. The derelict factory and the overgrown second world war ruins have a feeling of the sublime. Lit up in sunshine there is an oak-apple on the crumbling concrete.

I have twice walked out of London — an enjoyable, day-long task. The first time was in the summer of 2000. At around 11pm I was walking through a village in the Chilterns, on my way to find somewhere to pitch my tent, in an area of fields and woodlands beyond the village.

In all of the houses I could see a TV screen. This gave me a chilling impression of being in the world of a 1970s B film, something like The Stepford Wives. In the year 2000 there were no smartphones: if someone were to do this walk now, they would be almost certain to have a screen in their pocket.

What is in question is whether or not we should regard our seemingly safe, cheerful screen-worlds (the worlds of the screen, and the spaces in which we generally look at the screens) as in some ways the most dangerous forces we encounter. Technology is entirely a question of what can be incorporated into a process of travelling along the escape-path, and human inventions tend always, of course, to have very different aspects and applications. The ‘throwaway’ lightness of emails and texts can, under certain circumstances, be ideal for learning to write, and synthesisers are a powerful deterritorialisation of sound. And as well as there being the extremely valuable ‘nomadic’ uses for computers and smartphones (so that the escape-path in effect involves the internet) if you imagine a base on the edge of a wilderness — used by a milieu of friends for creative work — it feels emphatically that it should have good quality devices of many kinds. However — what insists is that alongside, maybe half a mile further up a mountain, there should be another similar house which has none of this technology. From books to computers, and from bells to synthesisers, the issue is always to what extent the technology solidifies a libidinally charged distribution of the faculties that belongs to ordinary reality. On Vanishing Land is very clear about this: the whistle found in the M.R.James story is a reminder that you should think very carefully about the things you have picked up and are carrying around in your pocket.

Along with becoming sustained perception of the world around you, there is no aspect of the principle of Exteriority that is more important than going to the outside of urban terrains to the maximum extent, primarily in the actual, but also in the virtual. On Vanishing Land describes a departure from urban spaces (from London, then from Felixstowe), and the described movement in the actual also goes outward from the immediate to the planetary non-urban of the oceans on which the container ships travel and of the planet as a whole as it is experienced by the figure on the hill ("there is a white void of air beneath their feet"). In this context of the world being seen as more like ‘feeling’, the local atmosphere of an area of Suffolk coastland becomes an unknown space in which the unknown travels. A child has been sleeping in an unfamiliar room, in the early morning they look out of a window, and with a frisson of pleasure they take in the dawn street, the light, the air, the person on the way to work, the birds, the clouds. You are at a house surrounded by semi-desert or forested mountains, four or five practitioners of Departure are sitting around a table on a verandah, talking and laughing, the sunlight is dappled by a vine on the trellis above them, in the garden a bird hovers for a moment, then flies out of sight.

There are three areas of exploration — three ‘starting-point’ zones — which need to be explored in conjunction with each other, and to which courage needs to be brought, not because these areas are frightening in themselves, but because without courage it is far less likely that there will be the high-intensity experiences that are particularly valuable for waking the faculties.

Ultimately, the faculty which it is most important to wake is navigation, or decision- making, and the terrain which has primacy for navigation is the planet on which we live and travel: exploration in the sense involved here relates to a great extent to decision-making (even though the greatest attention at the outset must be given to perception, and to dreaming) and this is why the focus in this account is on different modalities of travelling.

the outlands

This is a question, firstly, of visiting and travelling within semi-wildernesses, wildernesses, scurflands and areas of countryside, and, secondly, of breaking the grim flow of ordinary reality through becoming sustained perception, and through an overall process of waking the faculties. These two are parts of one process, because the terrains are likely to be recurrently more prepossessingly atmospheric and inspiring than urban and household terrains, providing support for the task of becoming unbroken perception. But it is also because they simultaneously provide support for reaching a main aspect of the faculties of lucidity and dreaming — an embodied awareness that the human world as a whole is a problematic, out-of-control element that is preeminently within the planet, where the planet is understood as emphatically not on a lower level than the awareness of human beings. This is why On Vanishing Land invokes, in contradistinction to ordinary reality, another view in relation to humans and the planet: "There is a white void of air beneath their feet. This white void is the planet, it is beneath the figure on the hill, and all around them, they are a dream within a dream…"

In turn, it can be seen that in this context the idea of breaking the flow of ordinary reality not only involves breaking the ceaseless flow of internal verbalising, self-reflection, and categorising/temporalising (temporalising involves not-perceiving in the form of superimposing a process of laying elements out along a line of time), but also straightforwardly involves breaking the flow of use of computers, social media, televisions, and all playback and recording devices. In fact, in terms of arrays of technological elements, it involves whatever differences and absences which are helpful for breaking the flow of ordinary reality: for instance a mirror evidently has a lot in common with a camera (the machinery of self-reflection does not just involve processes which are in the head).

This can all lead to the thought: are not the outlands really at the level of the abstract, at the level of human intent and attitudes? (can't you just set things up the right way in a flat or house in a city, and learn to see and feel differently?). However, this ignores the fact that as a starting-point the beyond-the-urban terrains are likely to be far better at sweeping people away from the customary agreement about the nature of the world. It also ignores the fact that in travelling beyond the starting-point there is not just a set of attitudes, but instead there is an existence where attention is focused on the terrain that is the planet, a terrain which is more heartening, energising and inspiring when you go into zones beyond the spaces of the urban world. The astonishing, sublime wilderness of the sky is always there, whether you are in the middle of a city or on the top of a forested mountain, but the forested mountain has a greater power to sweep you away, in the direction of the Future.

Lenses, diagrams, catalysts (fragments of a mirror)

Between 2006 and 2011 I went twice to Mongolia, and once to Tuva, and one main aspect of these journeys was a search for skilled practitioners of overtone singing. I was looking for musicians who would be prepared to teach me, not for professional teachers. I did not do this in the spirit of ethnomusicology, and to say that I was doing it as an ‘artist’ is also not quite adequate, because the word goes too fast over what is involved, and is too tied up with ideas of performance. In setting out to learn overtone singing I was looking for a form of vocal deterritorialisation with a high potential for expressiveness and for conduction toward heartened, intensified states.

a story

Many tens of thousands of years ago, in Africa, humans and animals together constructed a mirror in which it was possible to see other worlds. It was not a mirror as we now understand the term: in it were the reflections of other dimensions of reality, and of worlds in distant galaxies. Through looking into it, over time it became possible to see the other worlds without its assistance, and to communicate with beings who came from physically far-distant places. Many realised at this time that some of these other entities had helped them in the construction of the mirror.

It was discovered that it was possible to travel to the most recondite confines of reality, and to distant galaxies. Perhaps as a result of an immoderate use of this ability, a group of humans made contact with beings inhabiting a region thousands of galaxies distant from the Earth. These beings were composed of a form of dark matter similar to plasma, and were energy and affect predators. On one level they were immensely sophisticated, striking from a higher level of reality than that of their prey, and on another level they consisted of a crude, two-dimensional form of existence. Having encountered humans, they came to the Earth, and installed themselves as elements within its nonorganic eco-system. They implanted living models of their mind into the minds of humans, shifting the human species toward control-behaviours, and toward possessiveness and strife.

With the aid of the mirror many humans and animals escaped to other worlds. But because it was associated with the disaster which had befallen the planet, the mirror was destroyed: it was broken into countless tiny fragments. For a long time the area where it had been created was connected in peoples’ minds with the memory of something bad, but then this memory was also lost.

Not long after the arrival of the predators, and the destruction of the mirror, some of the humans who were less affected by the implanted mind came together. They did not want to take sides within the complex of struggles and violent conflicts which the human world had become, and some of them decided to travel into the regions of the planet beyond Africa. An old woman, who was the leader of a group which had chosen to stay and live within the Kalahari desert and the jungles of western Africa, said that they should all take fragments of the mirror with them. Remembering the bright time of the mirror, they went to the place where it had been, and took with them as many fragments as they could carry.

The representatives of all the animals came together on the beach of a remote bay in eastern Africa. A message had come to them from the other worlds with which animals and humans had been in contact - worlds in other dimensions and in other parts of the cosmos. They had been told that for the most part contact would now no longer be possible, and that, although animals were less affected by the predators, they would now drop back to a lower level of awareness and forget the time of the mirror. They had come together to decide how to mitigate the disaster. One of their leaders, a female wolf from the Atlas mountains, said

"Out of affection, some of you horses will travel with the humans, and so will some of my kind, the prairie dogs and wolves."

"But us dogs and wolves are pack creatures, with a code of obeying a leader, and eventually we will be enslaved. And you horses are not quite wild enough to avoid enslavement."

"This is not enough."

After a long silence, the representative of a small species of cat came forward.

"We will go" said the cat. "Over time we will lose some of our independence, but we will not become enslaved, and we will be a link between humans and the planet."

Small bands of humans, horses, dogs and cats set out into the west and south and north of Africa, and from the north of Africa some of the groups continued. The fragments of the mirror were taken with them, and, although those who set out in the end consisted as much of people strongly affected by the implanted mind as those less affected, including people who attacked the cats because they refused to be domesticated into slavery, the fragments of the mirror helped them in their journeys into Eurasia, and eventually into the Americas.

Very early in the diaspora a large group, which had many mirror fragments, used small boats to cross from Indonesia to Australia. And in Australia for many tens of thousands of years the idea of the dreamtime was a faint memory of the time of the mirror.

It seems there is an other distribution of the faculties, and it also seems that beyond around four thousand years into the past this other distribution was effectuated substantially more often than now (this would not in any way entail that things as a whole were better beyond this point, because it is the overall pattern of states of being that would be key for such an assessment). However, the chronological aspect should not be overemphasised: it is the nature of what you find that matters, and not whether it is ancient, or was originated in ancient times. What is crucial is an overall openness, followed in turn by an openness to the modalities found within nomadic and tribal societies, and then also by an openness in relation to the ancient past (and in fact openness in the last two cases must be a reversal of the customary ‘primitivising’ ways of thinking about the worlds involved).

Everything here on one level concerns systems of action in relation to the human body, where the main coordinates for thinking about what is in question are deterritorialisation of the body, dance, health-intensifying techniques, and systems of becoming-active and of waking the faculties; and on another level it involves systems of philosophical thought. This can be illustrated by taking up a second mode of travelling: going to a country and finding someone who can teach some rare, singular modality, such as a more focused way of understanding the world; or a form of dance, or overtone singing, or a system/discipline of movement etc.

This in part concerns intensificatory, or health-assisting techniques, but it also involves transcendental-empirical knowledge, and includes skills such as learning how to behave in relation to animals and how to exist/survive in specific wild terrains; and, again, it includes a range of physical/artistic skills that extend through dance to acting.

Becomings

The idea of ‘acting’ leads to a third modality of travelling, one which opens up the idea of becomings along an additional axis. A valuable possibility is to travel as another version of yourself. Find your fascinations and interests which contingently have been in the background, and bring them into the foreground as coordinates for decision-making and for giving an account of yourself — a construction of a persona involving a substantially changed emphasis, as opposed to ‘lying,’ and one which, if it is constructed wisely, will lead to a wider way of being which is more true to who you are than the starting-point. Think, ‘what objects would this person be carrying with them, and what would they be wearing?’ and make adjustments: ‘objects’ have more power to help in focusing a new persona than we generally realise.

The initial, and primary, aspect of becomings is entering into composition with other beings and other kinds of being. Because of a very subtle, depth-level suppression which has taken place within the human world, becoming-woman, as Deleuze and Guattari have pointed out, is the key becoming — the one that leads to all the other becomings (it should be added that being in love with a woman is a fundamental form of becoming-woman, but this state needs to be maintained as a desubjectified aspect of Departure, rather than it being collapsed into a thread of ordinary reality). The horizon becoming, however (the one which in a specific sense is involved simultaneously with the others) is entering into becoming with the planet, but where the sky — the atmosphere — of the planet is very much in the foreground. The virtual-real or ‘envisaging’ processes of becoming-sky or becoming-atmosphere are fundamental in the escape from ordinary reality, and are the central aspect of entering into composition with the planet (and because what is involved here is transcendental materialism it is valuable and directly relevant to remember that on one level entering into composition with the atmosphere is another name for breathing).

It will be noticed that the planet here reaches a crucial point of double-inscription. It starts out as the primary terrain of decision-making — of navigation — for the starting-points of exploration, and at the end appears as the ‘other side’ of the most encompassing of the human becomings.

Note: The fundamental historical shift is toward projecting from a male-dominated social field (women are betrayed at this point) in a delerium-about-control which blocks off the planet, and which inseparably locks attention onto human interiority (animals and the whole planet are betrayed at this second ‘stage'). What follows, and then runs alongside, are human cognitive and organisational systems which are fixated on human societies and technologies, and which have a subtle righteousness and concealed lack of openness.

Tribal and nomadic societies have their own systems of control and suppression, but they have a recurrent tendency to see animals as sublime, tutelary worlds of intent and awareness. The loss of this view of animals is a key indicator of the main historical shift. The ongoing disaster deepened around four thousand years ago, and with the current destruction of habitats and species, together with people being taken still further away from transcendental-empirical knowledge, it is currently crossing a further downward threshold.

Note 2: Speaking generally, technology is not less than we think it is, but more, although in a rather grim, disturbing sense of ‘more’ (an element of transcendental materialism is what can be called ‘gothic’ materialism). Like human beings, technology is of course an element of the planet — a part of nature — but the crucial point is that preponderantly it is a component of ordinary reality, and of the ongoing disaster within the human world. However, it is just a question of working out what it is valuable to take with you — and what can be valuably developed — in the process of travelling along the escape-path. And if you have been swept into a process of deterritorialisation in relation to it (one which might only be tangential to your overall process of departure) the internet, like the worlds of the cities, has a faint but striking quality of the sublime, which comes from it being a ruinous terrain — like the cities, it was born ruinous.

In conclusion, it is possible to describe four features of touching the ground lightly, which is a primary, pervasive aspect of travelling along the escape-path.

Firstly, this is an embodied tendency to be as careful as possible in relation to the planet. An affirmation of the planet which both consists of a minimal use of resources, and an exploration of new ways of cutting back the damage done by the footprint of a human existence.

Secondly this is a heightening of the body, and a waking of the faculties. The attribute of touching the ground lightly is here the ‘obvious’ one, where this, in the context, is an indicator of a wider fluency.

Thirdly, this is an avoidance of counter-productive disputes, whether with those whose position is centred on religion, or with those whose view is based on an empirico-rational stance. For instance, within the second domain of views there is a great amount that is shared, and here it is a question of working with what is in common. The absolute affirmations here are of environmentalism and of socialist values of kindness, knowledge and freedom, together with key elements of critique — Marx's critique of religion, and the overall critique of the depredations of capitalist/ corporate power. But the affirmation beyond this — and the one where it is a question of avoiding counter-productive disputes — is of a radical socialism consisting not of overthrow or evolution of the state (which is trapped within capitalism) but of micro-departures from ordinary reality.

Fourthly, and most importantly, this is a perceptual attention that is centred on the sky, and when indoors, on the air and light in front of you; so that when you are outside your attention is centred on a point just above the horizon, and what is primarily seen is the space of sky, and, by extension, the whole space of air in front of you. Seeing the sky and the clouds is primary, and if the space of air starts to be seen and felt/experienced as a space of light (so that in a room you might have the experience of being a room-shaped zone of gold-coloured light, and of a tactile contact with the walls) then this is a good development, so long as you don't get caught up in thinking about it. What is crucial is that what you were seeing as the figure — the solid objects — instead becomes the ground, the ground that it was all along. The figure is the sky: it is air and light. The ground is the solid objects. And our attention needs to touch the ground lightly.

The faculty we need to wake first is perception. And the second faculty we need to wake is dreaming.

londonunderlondon

Sample from "Sapphire and Steel" — See-saw sacradown What is the way to London town? One foot up and the other foot down That is the way to London town.

The Quiet Man, 1980 story by John Foxx, quoted in its entirety. [Precursor phrases from concluding section of the piece, when space breaks open – see pps. 4-6] Quotations from The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard Quotation from The Time Machine, H.G. Wells Quotations from The Waves, Virginia Woolf Sampled quotation from The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

(Necropolis Now)

Vampires may start out in Rumania or Egypt, but they always end up in London.

Marx saw that, as, in the gaslit setting of the British Museum library, he laboured tirelessly on his interminable steampunk survey of the body of SF capital. ‘Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.’

The task Marx sets himself is no less than to diagnose and cure a planetary geotrauma that began in London five hundred years ago.

Apocalypse is always now, and Marx is trying to cut his way out of the pre-sent. If he can’t break the time lines, the future will be nothing but more of the same. The endless end, global subordination to Kapital’s idiot cyber-Telos. ‘Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.’

Marx writes from the very epicentre of the ongoing catastrophe, the site where the Kapital Artificial Intelligence-Parasite, made up of ‘numerous mechanical and intellectual organs’, first crash-landed on earth. Since then, using the factory-farmed population of the city to provide the ‘mere conscious linkages’ it lacks, Kapital has itself become the solution to the perennial problem all Gothic entities face: how does what has never been alive reproduce?

It uses your eyes and ears, your fingers, your brain…

By virtue of it being value, [Kapital] has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.’

Approach from West India Quay and see what corpses have sprouted on the Isle of the Dead….

Barclays – HSBC – Bank of America – Citigroup –

Kapital mausoleums, freezer-white canyons of Finance ICE, pointing like rigor mortis fingers into the greyish purple of the light-polluted helicopter sky. Necropolitical takeover of the docks, both functionally and spatially. No need for ships to provide global communications now.

(I had not thought that death had undone so many).

Virtual Ground Zero. If they struck surely it would be here… Here, where everything is already dead…

In Cabot Square, descend through the mock-deco hallways into the migraine hyperbright no-wonderland of the retail arcades.

The eternal noon of the living dead.

And Saturday night in the City is always dead. The high rise reptiles have slunk back into their lairs.

Finance vampires hunt by day.

And I too have been one of the dead. Duplicates have used my name while the alien parasite entity squats behind my eyes. (Marks of weakness, Marks of woe).

Down into the tube, hanging like a slab of Bacon in the zombie meat trucks.

(A crowd flowed over London Bridge…).

The underground is a stalking zone of shambling automata.

You know this in your dreams, and in what London dreams, in the fictions it breeds. That is why the London flood barrier against the Real has had a spectacular record of failure.

They were looking in the wrong places. The incursion has already happened, many times.

Fictions about invasions are already invasions.

As he complete Moses and Monotheism in exile in Hampstead, Freud can see what Nigel Kneale can later see: What you inherit from your parents is death.

You come to be in a mortifying structure that precedes you. You only have a lifetime to escape.

In the London Underground, Quatermass unearths parasites far more ancient than any Marx described. Kneale poses the same question as Wells, but differently: will earth become the second dead planet of the Martians?

For Wells, the Martians that invade London from Surrey-side are extra-terrestrial pirates giving the British imperium a taste of its own medicine.

But Professor Quatermass the metapsychologist can see that there was no human life that preceded the arrival of the myrmidons of death. The discovery he makes in Hobbs End is archaeopsychic horror: human beings were only ever the carrier-bodies for the alien death drive. There is no inside, and everything in your dream home is already owned by the parasites.

That is why it isn’t only traumatic fixation that compels Londoners to keep dreaming of invasion. Something else getting in would also be something in you getting out. Destruction of the World is also flight from the strata, from the catacomb of home, tomb of the cybermen…

The TV orphans whose electronic spines tingled to Delia Derbyshire’s Dr. Who theme knew this as soon as they heard it in 1963. The uncanny is always the untimely. Delia Derbyshire is no more bound to her time than Marx or Quatermass were denizens of theirs. On the contrary, cutting up present time in the Radiophonic Workshop’s lab in Maida Vale, she is a nomad of the time streams.

"She used concrete sources and sine- and square-wave oscillators, tuning the results, filtering and treating, cutting so that the joins were seamless, combining sound on individual tape recorders, re-recording the results, and repeating the process, over and over again."

Television was the unhomely vortex around which the 1960s British domestic scene was organised, the Chinese box display unit opening out the so-called interior onto the media landscape. The wired kids who watched, entranced, had consumed the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs with their breastmilk.

They know that terror is the name for the new, and they hear in Derbyshire’s sonic construction — broadcast for the first time the day after Kennedy’s exploding head had inaugurated the sixties’ atrocity exhibition — a presentiment of the decade’s megaviolence.

But they hear something else in the Radiophonic Workshop’s Audio Uncanny, which, never center-stage in the rock Spectacle, nevertheless quickly becomes unobtrusively ubiquitous.

An alternative Now builds itself out of radio station idents and incidental music. Ear worms breed the hunger for a space in which they can propagate, out beyond the pleasure principle, on the strobing plateaus of the dancefloor…

Is Fu Manchu real? Yes, but as the bad dream of empire, the delirial name for what is disavowed as it is consumed. In the fever phantasms of the men of empire the Thames appears both as a voracious mouth and an open wound. What comes ashore with the tea and the opium is rumours, and other estranged cargo. Many of the plants you see growing around the rivers and canals are naturalised foreigners from places as far afield as Siberia and Sumatra which established themselves when London still had working docks.

Quotation from Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Quotation from Mother London, Michael Moorcock

(when space breaks open)

[A very large disused warehouse in early summer. Near docks. It has been squatted for a week for parties and as a temporary place to live. 11 floors. The weather has been very warm for the middle of May.]

[Woman, 20ish, extremely positive, thoughtful]

"It was this really big warehouse, gigantic. Near the docks … near one of the old dock basins. It was 11 floors. There was a party on the Saturday and Sunday, and then people just stayed, and other people arrived. Doing stuff, music, paintings on the walls, lots of stuff. A woman did this string sculpture you could walk around in, lit up with ultra-violet light. Somehow it kept going for a week. It was this perfect week of hot weather. Kind of … different groups living on different floors. Sitting in the sun on the roof. There were these amazing views across the city, and you could see the hills in the distance. And the stars at night, with fantastic music going on…"

"It was kind of special, and it just built and built on itself, day after day."

"I remember the last day in the morning I found this graffiti on a wall. It said

When space breaks open

Time turns sideways

[as if picking up the thread again] …the last day everything was amazing. We were on the roof most of the time at the beginning. You could see … forever, and the music… [unfinished sentence, as if trying to find words]. I remember thinking that what the people on the 8th floor were doing was fantastic. They were all singing long notes together — like overtone singing — and improvising songs, and some of them were singing rhythyms , and drumming on different things. But as it went on into the evening it became more intense — kind of much more beautiful and much more weird at the same time, as if they’d all been carried away by it to something else.

There was a real sense of humour about them. There was a man who I’d spoken to a lot, who kept on joking, and coming up with bizarre, crazy ideas. And there was this very friendly woman, with unbelievably intense eyes. I started off thinking they were a bit like … situationists, you know? But at the end it was as if they knew something, as if they were onto something.

I heard someone saying they’d looked through a window, and it had looked like a different time — London at the time of the fire, London before the fire.

[as if she has described attempts to see things that failed]. But then, later, when I looked through a window, when I wasn’t really thinking … the street outside had gaslights — there was a row of gaslights. And there were ships in the docks with masts, wide … you know, with big keels, not that big, but like they were 19th century. There were braziers burning by the dock, but there was no-one there.

Then the time afterwards… it was like a flash… I don’t know … but it was very clear. It was very early morning, and there was a cluster of small houses with carved wooden door frames. It looked pre-Roman, yes, pre-Roman — trees and the river and hills in the distance. Sleeping horses. There was a fire, and a woman in a blue dress standing looking back at me.

A man I met said he saw buildings that had weird shapes — and they changed their colours. He said it changed and became really crazy. But he didn’t tell me what he saw.

[Woman, 30ish, sometimes a slightly pained or perturbed quality to her positivity, sometimes a more playful quality].

What did I see? It was as if the ground and the buildings were there, but as if they were… not solid, insubstantial. There was… this immense space of hollow tentacles … [pause] … tube-tentacles … and they had coloured lights — or creatures made of light — moving through them, pulsing through them. And some of them had … openings at the end. Like mouths, like… interfaces. There was a tentacle that went through the building and had an opening by the stairs, off twenty feet away to my right. There were creatures coming through it, then hovering away, like birds, or huge brightly coloured moths, moth creatures.

It was so… vast. Incredibly beautiful, but like it was all deep in an ocean. An ocean filled with strange – nexuses? … nexuses, and tentacles filled with brightly coloured lights. And London was somehow stretched through it.

There was another opening at the far end of the room. I walked through rooms to get to it, but there were people there, and I forgot… At one point I closed my eyes, and then I remembered about the opening. Then, something tapped my leg, hard. I jumped. There was nothing there. For a while I was so terrified, really terrified. But I started having all these strange memories of places from when I was a lot younger. I thought this the other day. It was as if they were flashes of times … when I’d had flashes of things being more intense, more alive.

Man, anomalous ‘expert’ commenting on the event.

Refrains, incantations … whatever. Refrains are more powerful than people think. They open doors.

What we see through the door, what comes through the door — maybe we often see it as something else … as something familiar but strange.

We think it has happened several times before.

That bizarre Blake letter. As if London somehow builds up a charge, and then somewhere it discharges. City lightning. And there is always time-displacement, time-bleed. Ballard. Virginia Woolf. HG Wells and his time machine.

The past is something different. It’s a stack of depthworlds reaching down. Biopsychic memory. The memory of the earth.

The future has been there all along, but changing. The future is part of the present, it’s space at higher and higher levels of intensity. The futures are nextdoor. A space of Nows, one after another. This is the best we can do at these levels of Energy. Increase the energy, you get the future.

Simultaneous reprise from "when space breaks open" and The Quiet Man. Reprise from "when space breaks open."

Specific writing credits: Necropolis Now by Mark Fisher when space breaks open by Justin Barton