ON VANISHING
LAND
In an era of digital abundance when so many files on
so many USB sticks and so many hard drives are ready
to be downloaded and copied and WeTransferred and
Dropboxed, since 2013, On Vanishing Land’s selfimposed inaccessibility has systematically thwarted the
habitual expectations of availability that organise the
structures of listening under conditions of contemporary
communicative capitalism. Even though its playback
only required an email requesting permission from
Mark and from Justin, its non-existence on YouTube or
Vimeo or Soundcloud or Bandcamp was, and is, enough
to inconvenience the compulsory right to the digital
object that organizes the drives, desires and demands
of dividuality. Constraining the conditions under which
On Vanishing Land could be experienced was not a
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matter of creating an art world demand for a rare or
precious experience. It was a calculated strategy that
was conceived and designed to generate a context of care
around a work whose unidentifiable audio objectivity
borders on and dwells within the oneiric borderlands of
the mix, the aeonic consistency of the audio-essay and
the temporal collapse of the sonic fiction.
The egress that On Vanishing Land engineers requires
specific preconditions that can be characterised as the
construction of a constrained condition for collective
concentrated listening. To assemble an operative portal
to the outside entails the manufacture, the holding and
the sustenance of a specific bloc of space-time. How
difficult, after all, could it be to invite Londoners
to gather at a certain moment for a certain time in a
certain space? Listening to the aesthetic sociality of
listening to an unidentifiable audio object, however, felt
and continues to feel, at odds with and disruptive of
the protocols presupposed by a club, the satisfactions
expected from an exhibition, the norms implied by a gig,
the behaviours required by a party and the conventions
demanded by the cinema screening. Absent these genrespecific prerequisites, the experience of attending a
playback of On Vanishing Land assumes the aspect of
a tournament that plays out within and against oneself.
A sense emerges from within and takes hold of you,
with an urgency that persists to the extent that it remains
unvoiced. A sense of volunteering oneself, proudly, for
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a test and a trial. Of challenging oneself, gladly. Of
aligning oneself, nobly, with a programme. Allying
oneself with a project that is grand and grave. Of
acquitting oneself with glory. Of fighting the good fight.
Facing forward. Opening oneself, ardently, to feelings
of valour that you hardly know what to do with. And
this sense of going to war on the plane of art and
inside the field of aesthetics, persists to the extent that
On Vanishing Land summons active forces that it
orchestrates against reactive forces that it never names
but which are all too audible. What this conflict invokes,
in turn, is not the recollection of sitting on the floor at
The Showroom, back hunched, listening to the Genelec
loud speakers from which Mark’s voice emerges in its
cold-rationalist tonality, rising above the reverberant
haze of John Foxx’s piano, Gazelle Twin’s eldritch
chants and Justin’s aristocratically accentuated accent.
Instead, it summons temporal spirals that drag the worktime matrix of the Gregorian calendar into circular
causalities in which the listening sessions organised
by Mark at Goldsmiths throughout 2015 appear
before the first collective listening to London Under
London at Gasworks in early 2009 and the voice of
Mark can be heard reading Plan for the Assassination
of Princess Anne. He smiles. And this structure of
feeling, inarticulate and inchoate, searching for collective
expression, concentrates itself inside of the collective
listening to On Vanishing Land. Constraining this
structure of feeling in turn produces a mode of recursion
that is not so much a communism of spectatorship as a
JUSTIN BARTON: There’s a whole process of
abstracting out space in order to get to space.
It’s not that amazing things aren’t done in very
subtle ways in film. It’s just that something is
afforded as a possibility by working solely with
sound. The thing about sound is that it obviously
cuts away the visual, but then you have the
opportunity to work with both music and voice,
two whole dimensions of sound. And that gets
you to the space that is beyond visual space. If
you’re thinking that there’s a whole other way of
thinking space, which might be something more
along the lines of what Deleuze and Guattari
are calling the Body without Organs [BwO];
that is, if you’re thinking that what’s really at
stake when talking about an area of Suffolk
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ROBIN MACKAY: In On Vanishing Land [OVL], a piece
you have described as an ‘audio essay’, but also
as ‘sonic fiction’, you’ve chosen consciously to
use sound alone, with no visual accompaniment.
The piece focuses on evoking a particular
area—the Suffolk coastline—and explores the
concept of the ‘eerie’ through involvements
with the literature, film, and music that this
place has inspired, or which are called up by
the conceptual figures of the beach, the eroded
coastline, and other features of that particular
landscape. What links these three things—the
use of sound, the interest in place, and the eerie?
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coastline or London or anywhere, is something
beyond the visual, something that is not just a
world of the visual but is a world of energies,
percepts, dreamings, intent, feeling—if you’re
thinking that that’s what space is in depth—
then sound has a great power to take you to the
BwO. In an early essay, in 1963, Deleuze says
it’s the Ariadne’s thread that leads you out of
the labyrinth—music, sound—that’s what takes
you out. If you think about being, say, in some
wilderness at night, you have the spatiality of
sound around you. You’re in a forest—there’s
the sound of movements, cries, insects, crepitant
sounds. You’re focused on the micro-timbre of
what you’re hearing because you want to know
the intent of what you’re hearing. Because some
of it might actually be dangerous—if you were
in a wilderness, for instance. So you have a
spatiality around you which is fundamental,
utter absolute spatiality, it’s a spatiality which
you experience deeply as a spatiality of intent:
What is the intent of that cry, of that sound—
what is behind that eerie sense of something that
might be following you, something that might
be interested in you, or at least focussed on you?
So obviously sound affords you this opportunity
to go to some extraordinary place—this area
of Suffolk involved in OVL—and to go straight
through, through voice, through music, to try to
get to the other space, the space beyond space.
Another side to this for me was simply the fact
that this whole space of the so-called audio
essay just seemed very underexplored. There’s a
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MARK FISHER: I think what Justin said reveals
one route out into the eerie, and why the eerie
became a preoccupation. I should say that,
like most of the things we ended up engaging
with in OVL, the eerie wasn’t a conscious
preexisting preoccupation. I mean, I sort of
like the word eerie, and, in so far as I’d thought
about it, which wasn’t a great deal, I’d always
had strong positive associations with the eerie.
But I hadn’t conceptualized it, and I hadn’t
realised the extent to which probably some
of the most powerful things in film, fiction,
music, etc. that had really changed things for
me could be classified as eerie. And I think that
it is possibly easier to get quickly to the eerie
with sound than with image. Because, as Justin
said, there is that acousmatic problem about the
separation of a sound from a source; and when
we started looking into the eerie, one of the first
examples in the dictionary is an ‘eerie cry’, or
whatever; and I think that’s something that
most people can relate to very quickly in the
sense of the eerie: being out in an unfamiliar
space and hearing a sound and not knowing the
intent or the nature of the being, if any, that
caused that sound.
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certain lineage, with people like Glenn Gould,
The Idea of North, and various other things.
But nothing quite like LondonunderLondon—the
project that preceded OVL—had ever existed
before, even though the capacity for people to
make this sort of thing was very widespread,
with sampling technology and so on becoming
ubiquitous on computers. But there’s still this
kind of generic slaving, somehow, where, if
you’ve got sampling software, that means you
make music. And I guess also in the last ten
years or so, music has got increasingly caught
up in repetition. So it seemed that there was this
whole other space to do with the use of sound
and the relation between sound and music
which was wide open, and for which there were
very few precursors. So that’s part of why we
did it, I think.
RM: The combination of the soundscape in the
piece with the spoken voice adds another level
of complexity, of course. And going back to
what Justin was saying about the experience
of being in a place and hearing sounds and
wondering about their intent, it’s very striking
that this is neither an ambient soundscape
nor a field recording—it doesn’t have a direct
indexical relation to the place. OVL is a lot more
complex than that, involving contributions
from a number of musicians as well as your own
JB: I think it’s important to see a place both in
terms of what abuts onto it, which actually is
an expression of something utterly beyond it—
as with Felixstowe container port, for instance;
and also in terms of its dreamings, its virtualreal worlds, its fictions. In this case, the work
of M.R. James, for instance. Also, its semidreaming sonic works, its musical works, like
Eno’s On Land. So a place then very much
becomes an expression of forces beyond it,
maybe in some cases aeonic forces, maybe also
forces within it that are profoundly enigmatic,
like the travellers or Romany people we met
on the way—we don’t have any idea who they
were, really, or to what kind of world they
belong. So it’s important to see whatever kind
of place you’re talking about as connected up
to a whole real-abstract world, but also to see it
in terms of the kinds of dreaming it’s produced.
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reading of the text and excerpts from interviews
with others. So this begs the question of how
this format affects what we mean by place: If
it is to be understood as somehow indexing a
place, then the piece seems to invoke a complex
proposition about what ‘place’ is, and to do so
through a heterogeneous set of (technical and
cultural) memory-devices, rather than simply
being an empirical recording of a place.
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RM: And that’s maybe something that images
would have obstructed, by locking place down
into a depicted physical space. What’s apparent
about using sound is that it allows the discursive
aspect to shift—sometimes subtly, sometimes
abruptly—from one register to another, and
to achieve this very dense layering of different
times, of different works, works which are
sometimes directly connected to the place itself,
inspired by the Suffolk coastline, but sometimes
also connections that seem serendipitous, as
when you talk about The Swimmer or Picnic
at Hanging Rock, correspondences that bring
various works and sensations into a dense
superposition.
JB: Evidently, with film, you can do things
using montage, cutting things in, all sorts of
subtle techniques. But I think there are times
when it can be particularly valuable to employ
a method which gets you to the outside of
whatever ordinary-world zone you’re talking
about, along with the conventions for seeing
it—in this case, it’s capitalism, at the start. And
the danger with images is that they are there
with their buildings, with their trees, with
their rocks, with their concrete things—it’s not
so easy to get through to the outside of all of
that, which is precisely a mode of intent that is
utterly other than capitalism. And the critique-
MF: I think that leads back to the question of
why the focus is on the eerie, rather than the
gothic, or whatever. And why in fact we shifted
things from James. Because there’s that critique
tendency; but there’s also the gothicization
tendency, where affects that belong to the eerie
get captured into a certain kind of gothic or
post-Christian or actually Christian worldview,
as with James. But we felt that the Eno album
On Land was certainly eerie, and that there were
traces—more than traces, strong impressions—
of all kinds of nonhuman forces and sentiences
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freak tendency is to go off in all sorts of negative
comparative directions and just stay locked in
the vicinity of capitalism. It was fundamental
when we managed to get Elizabeth Walling—
Gazelle Twin—as a contributor. Because her
eerily beautiful high-line music, her singing,
produces this very powerful, dispassionate,
disturbingly beautiful effect of a counterpart or
beyond of capitalism. So that, at that stage, it’s
a very real abstract process going on. There’s
a sense of the absolute outside with her voice,
the outside that’s obviously fundamental to
the whole thing, that’s evoked through Picnic
at Hanging Rock at the end, which is obviously
about women escaping. So her voice there
carries a very powerful charge that takes you to
the outside of capitalism.
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in it. Some of those would be threatening to
human beings, but many of them weren’t.
So what we wanted to get to was this positive
sense of the eerie, really—positive, but not
reassuring or comforting. It involves a kind of
evacuation of ordinary subjectivity, and that’s
why there’s this association with dreaming:
there’s a certain kind of dream which is not
a nightmare, it’s not an urgency dream, but
it’s one where you’re at the limits of your
ordinary subjectivity, or beyond those limits;
and that’s the work that Picnic did: this sense
of an abstract space including certain elements
that are repeated in a certain way, an abstract
space that is instantiated in particular physical
spaces, but that isn’t locked to them, meant that
we could put Picnic next to James in a way that
wasn’t just an arbitrary juxtaposition—it was
about what was at stake in Picnic that is blocked
by James: escape, a positive sense of escape into
the unknown. Picnic is extraordinarily powerful
because it maintains that sense of the eerie right
to the very end. What tends to happen with
works that have traces of the eerie, or what can
happen, is that the eerie becomes dissipated at
a certain point, renaturalized. Whereas what
happens with Picnic—in both the novel and the
film, and I would argue even in the extended
version of the novel (there was a chapter in
JB: And the powerful thing that was added to
the film, which is just a last element added to an
incredible, spectacular text by Joan Lindsay, as
Mark has described it, is just the very beginning,
which is in fact Poe: we’re a dream, all that we see
and all that we seem is a dream, a dream within a dream.
The vital thing is that you have to think about
that in terms of what we’re talking about, the
unknown, which is that we’re a dream within
a dream, and it’s very dangerous out there;
there’s one dream beyond the next, and they’re
all very dangerous—this is not at all safe, this
exploration into the eerie.
MF: But the thing is, the dream we’re in is not
very safe either.
JB: Far from being safe, it’s a world of the most
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the novel which was not included in the final
version and which was cut from the film), is that
it maintains this eeriness throughout; that you
go over one threshold into the unknown, but it
doesn’t become a new home; that you’re then
explorers in this unknown and there are then
further thresholds of the unknown which are
infinite; in fact, there’s an inexhaustibility of
the unknown. And I think that’s the peculiar
power of that text, really, that resonated back
into OVL.
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hideous predation.
RM: There’s something here about the eerie not
being correlated in any way with us, is that
right? The eerie doesn’t care about us, it’s not
there ‘for’ us or waiting for us.
JB: The affect of the eerie is precisely the affect
of an attention—or possible attention—that
might be malevolent, might be positive, might
be totally indifferent.
RM: In this feeling out of the non-territory of
the eerie, this refining process of what the eerie
is that goes on throughout the piece, you were
talking about how Picnic was ‘blocked’ by James,
so there’s a dialectic or a movement in-between
these sources. It’s not so much a superposition
of things that share the same intensities, but
more of an evolving dynamic; which makes
me think that what you might mean by ‘audio
essay’ might be a type of thinking that can’t
happen outside of that space. That the thinking
is actually going on through this ‘peri-auditory’
process.
MF: Well, that’s certainly what happened
because, as I said, none of the major positions
that we adopted in this essay existed prior to the
essay. Virtually maybe, but not actually. So that
JB: To what extent were we being written by that
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just reinforces the point. One thing I’d like to
pick up is this thing about dreaming and forces
and feedback and place. Something that Andy
Sharp (English Heretic), who worked with us on
this, is very keen on developing as a practice is
going to places that have already been filmed,
or that already have associations with literary
or filmic works, going there yourself, and your
response adding another layer to it. Rather
than this endless distantiation, this metadistance, it’s more that your own dreamings
become added to all the existing dreamings.
And a part of that is grasping what was at stake
in those dreamings anyway. We conflate for
the purposes of narrative some of the things
that happened. I think when we did the walk
we weren’t even particularly aware of On Land
being on that terrain, even though it’s an album
that had meant a lot to me. But I think it’s just
a more intense form of what happens when
one engages with any form of criticism that’s
worthwhile, really, which is that the piece that
you’re working with becomes more intense and
transformed by your work on it. It’s not that
one is adding stuff on that’s not there—it’s that
the focus can draw elements of it out that were
previously occluded. It’s a kind of attentional
magic.
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landscape, by those dreamings, to what extent
is the process coming into being because we
were there…?
RM: That is perhaps where the fiction element
comes in: the walk happened, it was the germ
of OVL, and yet it seems that what happens in
the piece is that you retro-fictionalise the walk
by imbuing it with all the resources that you
discovered afterwards: ‘So that’s what happened
when we took that walk...’.
MF: Exactly. It’s very important to formulate it
as you did: fictionalization isn’t falsification, it’s
actually discovering what was happening. All
of those things, whether it be James, Picnic, Eno,
are making contact with this abstract space that
is triggered by the actual space, as it were. The
fact that we didn’t know about Eno at the time
didn’t mean that we weren’t responding to some
of the same intensities, the same terrain, on the
abstract as well as physical level, that Eno was
dealing with.
RM: How did the collaboration with the other
participants happen, how did that unfold, and
how aware were they of what was going on,
since it all seems to fit together perfectly?
MF: There were people we knew personally,
JB: Take Pete Wiseman’s music: because he
had, as a musician, exactly the right tendency
to produce mesmeric, serene, visionary, almost
scholarly work with music. And he’s a friend,
and there was plenty of time to actually talk
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who’d probably got a better sense of where it
was going to go, people like Aled Rees, who’d
worked on LUL, and actually was one of the
few people to provide original music for that
piece, because most of that was sampled. But
most of the other musicians I just contacted,
on the basis that I thought that their work was
already in that space somewhat, and then I gave
them a brief, really quite brief—a paragraph or
so—description of what we were trying to do,
the sense of the eerie we were trying to move
towards; sometimes I met with them, and I
showed them a scrapbook-type blog where I put
up some photos, so they could get some sort of
sense of the space. So I think in lots of ways it
was the same sort of thing we were talking about
with the writers—the fact that these artists
were already working in that abstract space
in the sounds that they were producing meant
that it came together fairly easily in terms of a
solid consistency, because the consistency was
coming partly from the nature of sounds but
also from the nature of the abstract space those
sounds have come from and allude to.
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about what we were trying to do, what we
were trying to evoke. And plenty of time for
me to talk about the eerie, so that the positive
side of the eerie could be grasped. There was
a tendency for most of the music—and it was
all perfect, it worked out really well—to go for
a sort of jagged edge, which again and again
was exactly right, but on its own, if we hadn’t
had anything else, it might have had a slight
tendency to overemphasize the gothic side of
the eerie.
In a sense, there is no word for the other side
of the eerie, this dispassionate positive side of
the eerie is precisely what’s been edited out of
the world. And Pete’s music was fundamental,
because it caught this emphasis on the eerie
positive side. It had that positive mesmeric
quality. Because I think it’s really important
to get this right, it’s fundamental to see that
with M.R. James, the problem is that you have
something which is an expression of the birth
of Gothic horror in the modern world. And the
modern world loves gothic, it loves horror, but
it absolutely has a shutdown on the opposite
dimension of the eerie, because that’s the way
out. Basically, gothic horror just in the end
plays into Christian—or Judaic or Islamic—
entrapment metaphysics, with its violence of
transcendent maleness. Because in the end it just
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frightens the hell out of people, points out that
horrific things happen if you open yourself up
in the direction of the unknown, and people are
likely, in the end, having just frolicked around
as critique-freaks in the zone of the gothic, to go
precisely nowhere, and to have played into the
hands of people who say, yes, there’s something
out there other than the material world, and be
afraid, be very afraid—if you genuinely open
yourself up to the unknown, you’re going to go
to hell to be roasted by M.R. James’s demons.
Which means it’s the last great attempt to defend
Christianity—M.R. James was a Christian, he
read his stories out at Christmas! In Cambridge,
a bastion of traditional Christian values…. So
that incredible attempt by the religious system
to defend itself by scaring people, which in
fact goes on all the way through the twentieth
century and is still going on as strong as ever,
and which is gothic horror, has got to be fended
off. Because the opposite direction is what’s
been edited out. It’s really important to see that.
Unless you get to the thought of an intent towards
absolute
deterritorialization—dispassionate
movement towards absolute intensification,
absolute freedom—you haven’t seen what’s at
stake in all of this. And the gothic keeps you
staring in completely the wrong direction, keeps
you staring in the direction of the old Christian
myth system.
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MF: James is pretty clear about that: A Warning to
the Curious! This is what happens to the curious....
But what was also blocked in James was his own
libidinal attachment to these things, clearly.
This is what is repressed in the gothic. Curiosity
is a pool of the unknown.
RM: So he’s warning himself?
MF: Yeah, curiosity is bad, if you go to any outside,
it must be coded as evil. Following on from
what Justin said about Pete, I think it’s also true
about Elizabeth. There’s an eerie dimension to
Elizabeth’s work, and there’s something really
eerie about this in retrospect. Even at the time.
I was saying to Justin, we really need some
other kind of thing here, some kind of female
voice—and almost precisely what I had in mind
was Elizabeth’s work, what it would sound like.
Then I was sent the John Foxx and the Maths
album that featured Gazelle Twin, Elizabeth,
on a couple of tracks, and I thought, this is
exactly the sort of thing we need. And luckily, I
texted John Foxx’s manager saying, who is this
Gazelle Twin, this is fantastic; and he said, oh,
I manage her, if you want to involve her with
any projects, let me know—so I said, I want to
involve her in one right now! But the timescale
of that—and this is what I mean about its being
eerie—it was really late on, it was in November,
Because it’s not just a certain ambivalence
about certain other pieces, which could be
seen as dark gothic; but once they’re the other
elements of the sunlit numinous eerie, then they
can be heard in a different way, not as being
about gothic terror, but as being about a certain
kind of terror that is to do with being awestruck,
or losing one’s ordinary self. And neither of us
can now imagine the piece, what it would have
really been like, if Elizabeth hadn’t arrived
from Aion at exactly the right time!
JB: It’s only once you have that sunlit, numinous,
dispassionate sort of intensity floating across
the top that the other things do their work in
a really effective way. There are elements of all
the other tracks that go in this direction, but
it’s only once you have Pete Wiseman, and yes,
most specifically, Gazelle Twin, across the top
of it all that everything really breaks free.
RM: So it’s really a matter of (re)constructing the
intensity of that first walk, encountering the
right pieces to be able to reconstruct it and to
bring it into existence. And as you say in the
piece, these moments are moments we don’t
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and the show was starting in January. And she
provided three pieces which really did tip things
over.
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really ‘experience’—we just have these gaps,
half-memories.
JB: It was a really amazing walk, and a lot
happened. It’s important, when you think about
the haecceity of a sunlit, solar-trance day, that
what you’re thinking about is the terrain, but
also the planet. And the sun is not anything to
do with Suffolk, it’s that which is connected up
to the whole planet. To get through to the full
intensity of the haecceity of a preternaturally
hot day in April in Suffolk, to get you to Suffolk,
you really need to get to the whole planet, to
get to that haecceity of the connection between
the sun and the planet on that day—that’s what
gets you to Suffolk. You get there not just by
talking about the sun, but also by bringing in the
whole planet—through bringing in Australia,
through bringing in Picnic, through getting that
planetary perspective. Because it’s not at all
about the provincial, about the little place—
Suffolk is not that at all. It’s about getting to the
place by getting to the whole planet.
RM: Two things that come out of this: The question
of intensity, the question of the relation between
‘an intensity’—a sensation, an atmosphere of a
place that seems to happen all at once and to
be inexpressible; and the notion of exploration
of the abstract space that’s implicated in that
What I’m trying to get at is the relation between
this kind of pure moment of perception and
this process of explication which unpacks
1
David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation,
Consciousness and Creativity (Michael Joseph, 2007).
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intensity. The process of ‘unfolding’ what is
implicated within intensity is told brilliantly by
David Lynch in his peculiar book on creativity
and transcendental meditation, when he
recounts how touching the roof of a car heated
by the sun in the parking lot of the studio
‘caused’ the appearance of “the Red Room […]
the backwards thing […] and then some of the
dialogue”: “The Idea tells you to build this Red
Room. So you think about it. Wait a minute,
you say, the walls are red, but they’re not hard
walls. Then you think some more […] they’re
curtains. And they’re not opaque, they’re
translucent. Then you put these curtains there,
but the floor […] it needs something […]”). The
‘Idea’ is the experienced intensive state, in pure
memory, that must be pursued (“when you veer
off, you know it […] this isn’t like the idea said
it was”), and reconstructed (“The idea is the
whole thing—if you stay true to the idea, it tells
you everything you need to know […] You try
some things and you make mistakes, and you
rearrange, add other stuff, and then it feels the
way the idea felt.”)1
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the abstract space implicated in it. Because
what’s important, I think, in OVL, is that you
don’t just yield to the notion that there’s an
inexpressible intensity that one can only try—
and fail—to evoke. It’s a very controlled, patient
reconstruction (or retroconstruction).
JB: It’s incredibly precise, what’s at stake here.
But I think it’s important to think for a moment
both about lucidity and about what stories are,
what tales are—in the context of abstraction
and intensities. Beyond reason, which is the
lower form of intelligence, there’s lucidity, which
is the higher form of intelligence. And lucidity,
most recurrently, and perhaps most effectively,
expresses itself in the form of stories, in the
form of tales, in the form of deeply, profoundly
abstract tales. In fact, if a tale is genuinely the
product of lucidity, it is more abstract than the
products of reason. Because a tale, a magical
tale, an anomalous tale, Lindsay’s Picnic,
Shakespeare’s Tempest, Fleutiaux’s The Story of
the Telescope and the Abyss, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,
Ballard’s The Drowned World, Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves, it’s a world which consists precisely
of real abstraction—it’s a dense, very carefully
bound together world of intensities, or lines of
intent, abstract clusters, abstract modes.
So in fact, another myth of the modern world
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is that reason is the place of abstraction, and 97
that stories are just some strange supplement
which just boosts it in some way by having a
narrative involved, or the story gets boosted
by the abstraction. In fact, the myth is that
reason is the place of maximal abstraction.
Maximal abstraction is found in stories,
genuine anomalous tales, and in all expressions
of lucidity. So, when you’re constructing a
narrative, whether it’s a narrative of a walk
or a narrative in a more obvious sense, what’s
happening as it unfolds in you and through
you, as it appears beneath your fingers as you’re
doing it, is a whole series of lineaments of intent:
a whole series of real abstract modes, forces,
get woven, bound together in a virtual-real
construct, a crystal of space-time, something
which is an abstract world of passwords, which
is a password overall, in terms of breaking open
whole new aspects of the world. It’s a world of
outsights—it shows you the outside, and it guides
you to the outside.
MF: I think that highlights the difference
between this and the way we ordinarily think
about fictions, as just something people make
up. Your example from Lynch is the entailments
of the dreaming real. Nietzsche has these great
lines about creativity, when there’s something
coming through you, and you have to follow it—
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98
we’ve all had these experiences, and we’ve all
felt the lack of them at a certain point: you can
make the figure of the Golem, but it won’t move
for you; we’ve all felt there are other moments
when you’re rushing after this set of things that
just have to be that way. And I guess the power
of entering into these kinds of fictional vortices
is to lucidly find ways of doing this, so that it’s
not just a kind of romantic happenstance. That
there’s a practice one can follow that can reliably
generate these kinds of intensities, actually.
RM: There’s an extraordinary level of lucidity
that’s reached that goes beyond the creator’s
mind in the type of situation you were describing
with Elizabeth, where you’re encountering
things that are exactly what you need for what
you’re constructing—somehow this kind of
lucidity breeds or attracts coincidences. So what
you’re talking about here would be a kind of
coincidence-engineering….
MF: Yes, because it’s important that that doesn’t
‘just happen’ to you; that there are ways of
getting out there, and that it’s not just a question
of inspiration, although it can sometimes feel
like that. I guess there is a question about the
role of landscape—or terrain, I think we both
prefer that word—in literature in general. Also
thinking about it in terms of music, where a lot
JB: Exactly, because in a way the pragmatics can
be described by the process of, in an exploratory
way, trying to find a way of building a plane of
consistency, finding a way of building something
in which lucidity is to go into effect. And here
what was vital was that we took the walk.
We took the walk as a starting point, which
meant that we were being led by terrain, by a
trajectory through terrain. By something that
was primarily about the terrain: it was deeply
impersonal. But that of course involved Eno,
M.R. James…. So in a sense there’s the seed
crystal: a whole process of thinking about the
terrain, which obviously has this whole thing
about fending off invasions, about fending off
the sea. That’s the starting point; the terrain;
and then also, out of M.R. James in 1900, Eno
somewhere in the late 70s or early 80s—from
that, you ended up with a story about the history
of modernism, which was fundamental in the
sense that it’s an essay, it’s about that area of
Suffolk, but it’s also about a whole series of things
that emerge from thinking about eighty years of
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of the music that’s most powerfully affected me
is closely associated with terrain. And obviously
that relationship is much more abstract than
what we’re doing, but clearly, terrain is a
potentiator in that way, that can be fed back
into.
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100 modernism. So there was a way that was found
of building an impersonal, de-subjectifying
plane that followed lines of the terrain and
lines of the unknown at the level of strange
movements within modernism. It’s not at all that
you can’t be assisted by concepts, but we were
never working within some superimposition or
prefabrication of concepts. mf: The extent to
which it wasn’t prefabricated I think even we
forget. Because we now reconstruct it: we did
the walk, then we did the piece. But we did
the walk not because we were planning to do a
piece based on the walk. We did the walk really
as research for a whole other project which in
a way has come out in Justin’s fictional work.
So there’s a real sense in which the piece made
itself happen rather than us deciding.
MF: The extent to which it wasn’t prefabricated
I think even we forget. Because we now
reconstruct it: we did the walk, then we did
the piece. But we did the walk not because we
were planning to do a piece based on the walk.
We did the walk really as research for a whole
other project which in a way has come out in
Justin’s fictional work. So there’s a real sense in
which the piece made itself happen rather than
us deciding.
JB: Yes, when I said we took the walk as a
MF: About lucidity and the essay form: I think
what the concept of lucidity gives you is also
the idea that talking about what’s happening,
analysing what’s happening, doesn’t subtract
from the intensity of what’s occurring. Which
goes once again against this romantic idea that
one is swept away by these forces of unthought,
as it were—to affirm that actually there’s a
relation between the unthought, the outside,
and the capacity to reflect upon it. There’s a
disintensifying mode of reflection, but there’s
an intensifying mode of reflection. And I think
that’s what can be provided by this essay form
over and above a fiction: because you can have
fictional elements, but you can also talk about
how those fictional elements are working. And
rather than that being some kind of debunking
of a magic trick, it is a demystification of the
production of lucidity, you could say.
RM: Could you clarify the argument with
modernism that seems to run through OVL?
JB: It’s not an argument with modernism,
it’s more standing up for a free unfettered
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starting point, I meant that after the walk had 101
taken place—and this was in fact Mark’s idea—
we took the walk as a structure to work with in
order to create something….
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102 modernism that’s been there all along and
which is still in effect. The point that was made
earlier on about the difference between Joan
Lindsay (but this would also apply to Virginia
Woolf) and M.R. James is that Lindsay gets
you through to the free, unfettered modernism
which is still fundamentally what’s at stake, what
everybody’s trying to escape to. It’s important
to see that there was always a danger of things
collapsing down into something which was
unbelievably clever, but which, in the end, did
not take you through in fundamental ways to
the outside, to the eerie, to the unknown—there
is nothing at all eerie about James Joyce’s Ulysses.
It is that difference that’s vital. It’s sensing how
modernism was brought up by a stepfather
called Freud rather than by its real father, who
was called Nietzsche, or perhaps Lewis Carroll.
It’s a question of seeing, in fact, that a few
people broke through to sustained lucidity, and
it’s a tumultuous thing to do this and then to
climb up to the ramparts of modernism and say
the things that can be said if this has happened.
People who do that are liable sometimes to find
things very difficult. Nietzsche did it, Virginia
Woolf did it. Or rather, to reach lucidity is a
very extraordinary thing, and to reach lucidity
is particularly difficult if it’s not really backed up
by lucidity explicitly in the form of philosophy.
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Deleuze, I think, actually does reach precisely 103
that, but he’s so backed up with philosophy
that he is not one of the ‘tightrope walkers of
the spirit’. So basically it’s this that’s at stake, it’s
getting out from behind the shadow of Freud
and James Joyce to reach Joan Lindsay and
Virginia Woolf and Nietzsche.
RM: Isn’t it also connected, Mark, with what
you’ve talked about as a ‘pulp modernism’?
Which is very far away from the austerity of
what we think about as being involved in project
of literary modernism?
MF: Yeah, I think so, because pulp or popular
modernism is an alternative to postmodernism.
A lot of the democratization of modernism is
what’s been classified as postmodernism—but I
think that, in so far as that’s positive, it’s better
thought of as a pulp or popular modernism
which in a way retrospectively vindicates
modernism: the fact that Virginia Woolf is
available in Penguin, widely disseminated,
changes it from being something that’s just for
the bourgeoisie. And yeah, and of course, lots
of elements of what we’re working with were
already popular modernist—a lot of the things
we worked with in LUL—Quatermass and the Pit,
the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Sapphire and
Steel. And also, something we haven’t talked
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104 about yet, which would be a whole other hour’s
conversation, which is probably the intense peak
of intense cryptic modernism, Alan Garner.
JB: Absolutely, Alan Garner, but also Sapphire and
Steel, which was the very first thing at the start
of LUL. There couldn’t be a better example of
unfettered modernism. So yes, it’s desperately
important to think of people like Joan Lindsay,
who’s probably not thought about in the same
space as people like Virginia Woolf, and to think
of Sapphire and Steel, and also the extraordinary
figures in the world of music—if you’re talking
about modernism, it’s important to see that
1962 was the explosion of pop modernism, and
it’s so fundamental to keep in mind people like
Kate Bush and Patti Smith, in this discussion.
RM: What are your thoughts on OVL’s uneasy
relation to the contemporary art establishment
which, I guess, would see itself as faithfully
following through the logic of modernism?
Precisely because of the kind of narrative
elements you’re bringing in, and because
of its intensity and its affect, OVL sits very
uncomfortably in the space where it was
presented.
MF: Yes, it doesn’t fit in at all, and certainly if
either of us are described as ‘artists’, we both
JB: There’s a certain element of ‘pet of the
bourgeoisie’ in the term ‘artist’ which is really
disturbing!
MF: Particularly now, I think. But there’s also the
other side—that you tend to think of an artist
as someone who can do things I can’t do—so I
can’t be one! But it’s more that it’s really purely
arbitrary and accidental that this ended up in
an art assemblage. We had produced it off our
own bat, with all kinds of other resources that
we were fortunate to have. We produced LUL
for Resonance FM, and a natural home for what
we’re doing in all sorts of ways would be radio,
not the art world at all. But it just so happens
that a series of contingencies led to it being
played in an art institution. And that brought
out certain things that wouldn’t have come
out if it had been a radio piece: the fact of the
ritualistic dimension of going to a space, sitting
down, and listening to something that demands
your attention for forty-five minutes, and won’t
work unless you’re absorbed in it. I think that
not only formed a contrast with a kind of affectlite feel of lots of things in contemporary art,
but also the wider world now, where attention
is constantly besieged, obstructed, etc. So from
our point of view there was a definite benefit in
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feel very uneasy for all sorts of reasons.
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106 its having been installed in that way. But there’s
no necessary relationship to the art world, I
don’t think.
JB: It’s strange what’s called the art world, where
do you draw the line? Because if you think of
some particularly good electronic dance music
festival which happens to have a tent which is
playing anomalous, weird things through the
night, it always seemed to me that, for OVL to
be played at 4AM to people out of their heads,
but in a very dispassionate focussed sober way,
was the utterly perfect way for it to be heard,
or just for people to be listening to it in the
same circumstances in their front rooms. But
of course that’s not at all what people have in
mind when they talk about the art world: the
art world isn’t at all people out of their heads at
4AM.
MF: I think there’s almost a deliberate removal
of affect in many pieces of contemporary art
now: what makes it art is that you don’t feel
anything in relation to it. We’re encouraged
to feel that we’re Neanderthals if we still think
that art should create feelings and affects, that
it should have aesthetic texture, content, etc—
that’s not sophisticated. Lots of tendencies in
the contemporary art world are exactly against
those things. But I’m happy to be Neanderthal
JB: But I think in a way the art world likes its
products, it makes its money out of its products,
and it produces an attitude whereby all they
actually encounter is this world of products.
And the eerie is always about hearing something
which is an expression beyond that world. You
should get that strange feeling of ‘what forces
has that emerged out of?’ Listening to Raime,
one of the contributors, doing their music, at
the gallery, one of the things that took place
there, I was very struck by their music and I
felt like I was hearing it as coming from some
place of dereliction, from a strange world of
forces, dark but bright, semi-collapsed, semichaotic, a place arriving because of some black,
energetic way of seeing the cosmos. It’s always
a question of the world that’s giving expression,
of the whole world out of which the artwork has
emerged. The art world doesn’t in itself conduct
you toward hearing the eerie cries of forces
beyond the product, the forces that have found
expression within it.
Finally, it’s important to focus on the unknown:
you said, Robin, isn’t it always a question of
reaching the eerie in any place, in any room,
not just in some particularly conducive zone like
the strange Suffolk coastline area? And I think
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if that’s the case, to be honest.
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108 that’s right—it’s always about being aware of the
unknown around you. And finally, having got
to the spatium that reveals itself through sound
as a world of intent, you need, at last, on your
own, with the light on, in the ordinary world,
to see the visual as also a world of strange cries
emerging from who knows what, all around you.
All of the people around you and all the space
around you is a strange world of cries coming
from an utterly unknown dark space beyond. So
that, in the end, you get to the world of intent,
the world of strange cries, in your front room,
in the street… and maybe if you have or are
encountering enough sheer intensity, in some
art studio space! If you’re lucky!
RM: This brings us to the submerged theme that
runs through the whole piece: that of glimpsing
the eerie outside of capitalism in the container
port at Felixstowe—the idea that there’s this
screened-off zone where we can see behind
the banal glamour of the world, this assemblyline distribution hub which would allow us
somehow to peep over the fence of the world
we’re in. One of the interviews that you include,
in excerpts, in OVL, is Dan Fox talking about
the eerie experience of actually being physically
in that world, of being on a container ship.
So, the relation between Felixstowe being a real
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place where this stuff really happens—as against 109
the idea that Capitalism generates a global,
virtual nonspace in which we’re all sitting around
using wifi in airports which could be anywhere,
which is such a widespread idea—against this,
OVL shows us that in a sense what’s ‘beyond’—
at least, what’s beyond this consensual dream
of contemporary nomadism—is not something
weird, disembodied and immaterial, but the
moving around of massive amounts of physical
stuff.
JB: The physical ganglions of capitalism the size
of several cathedrals...!
MF: We really wanted to present the whole
interview with Dan Fox as a separate piece
because he goes into this in quite a lot of depth.
The interview with Dan is itself a kind of tale,
about a six-week voyage he took just because
he wanted to, and has not really discussed with
anyone else or done any work on the basis of.
Certainly, it was exactly talking about that
dumb materiality of capitalism, and the contrast
between the sheer frenzy of communication for
us, and the weird monastic nature of life for
people who make that possible. They only get
news once or twice a week on those ships! So
there’s this absolute flip where what allows this
so-called immaterial communication is this
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110 supermaterial floating monastery.
JB: The sort of thing that makes this possible—
this frenetic world of blocked dumbed-down
high-speed activity—is this slowness taking
place on the ocean.
MF: And a certain sort of silence as well, which is
not just audio silence. We often describe the docks
as silent. Actually one of the first times we went
to Felixstowe we got off the train in the evening
and we went straight down to Landguard Point
and could see the docks there. And yes, you’re
taken to the back end of capitalism, that’s the
thing. What it often reminds me of when I visit
the docks is the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
the 1978 remake, when you see the kind of slow
impersonal work of the pods, just building their
propagation systems. And the silence is not a
physical silence—it’s actually quite noisy. It’s a
silence to do with a lack of the sight of human
beings. We found out subsequently that you’re
not allowed to walk around there because it’s
too dangerous. So the impression you get when
you look at it is of machinery performing its
work without the agency of human beings. And
in some sense that tells you what really is going
on, you know? What really is going on: that it
had got away with something. And the thing it had
got away with, in a lot of ways, was us.
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RM: This leads to the question of what role site 111
or place or terrain can play in some kind of
resistance. And it seemed to me that the piece
presented a very different perspective on that
question than contemporary art, which often
presents site as a locus of resistance by trying to
reconstruct it as something wholesome, rescuing
site from the anonymity of globalization,
burrowing into its quirky histories and representing them—the artist parachuted in
to champion the vital specificity of a place,
who then becomes explicitly or otherwise a
prosthesis of the heritage industry…. Because of
this very different notion of what this place is,
as we’ve discussed, you’re not rescuing it and representing a physical site, but championing an
abstract-real site that is accessible in different
ways.
MF: Whose is the gaze for which that
representation is made, that’s part of the
problem there. It’s presumptuous, this annoys
me and I often say this at art events, when
you hear them bleating on about community,
whilst they’re all there, myself included, as
transnational cosmopolitans. And you’ve got
to affirm that: if we wanted to live in a local
community, we’d have done it; we don’t! So it’s
almost like we want the other to live in these
local communities for us, while we travel round
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112 the world talking about communities. I think
there are very dubious political consequences
to that position. But another thing is to move
beyond resistance, really. There are a lot of
problems with resistance, one of which is it just
traps you within the optic of the thing you’re
trying to get away from. This thing about going
sideways into the outside, or of seeing capitalism
as just one of these forces of capture—obviously
a major force of capture that has occurred—
but seeing it from the perspective of the outside
rather than from the inside that it projects and
wants to trap us into. I still think in that sense
we’re DeleuzoGuattarian fundamentalists, in so
far as we believe that the form of late capitalism
is the creation of interior neurotic subjectivity,
which has never been more widely disseminated
than in the age of reality TV, really—that you
can’t resist it, can’t find an outside which is
beyond it.
RM: Indeed you don’t try to reclaim this area
of coastline aesthetically so as to rescue it from
the clutches of capitalism; you present it as a
figurative and actual battleground, a liminal
space, or even as the evidence of a battle that’s
already taken place and perhaps been lost: the
tendency of contemporary culture would be to
block out even the memory of that battle, or to
‘manage’ it away.
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MF: There’s a very intense location at Landguard 113
Point where you’ll see these different times, these
traces of different struggles: Landguard Fort,
which, like a lot of the military architecture on
that coast, was only ever employed virtually, it
was never actually used to actually defend the
coast from invaders. Then on both sides of the
peninsula you see the erosion of the coast by
the sea; and then you look over and it’s a pure
cybergothic juxtaposition, you see the container
port. And I think the port is a certain kind of
non-place, but not the kind of non-place that
Augé talked about: we see that kind of nonplace, we experience going into retail parks, etc.
But—and Justin’s phrase ‘unvisited vastness’
captured this—this was a different kind of nonplace. Because those container ports have more
in common with each other than they do with
the immediate space in which they happen to
be built.
RM: And they’re not built to be experienced—
they’re not for us.
JB: It’s interesting thinking about the fact that
ruins are places which do not have a function.
They’re not places that have been designed
for you to be, they’ve been stripped of their
function. Which is something I’d put alongside
what’s being said about the southward container
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114 port part of the walk.
There are several other things that need to
come up: one of them would be the question of
what might be a component of an assemblage
that would be a counterpart of this strange
ganglion of the container port: a counterpart
within the world of the nomadisms that are
really at stake here, nomadisms in intensity,
collective nomadisms of all kinds—I don’t just
mean the travellers, the Romany people we met
toward the end. And then there is the question
of resistance as movement toward the outside.
Now, the last, most deadly trap of the inside is
to get you to resist against it. If you resist it in this
way you’ve fallen for its last, most effective trap.
So the fundamental thing of course is just to
leave in the direction of the outside. And in the
course of this conversation it’s also important
not to lock too tightly onto the container port.
I think that in terms of terrain, in terms of
landscape, it’s important to see that there are
some terrains which have a particular power to
take you out towards the unknown. The good
thing about ruins is that they’ve been stripped
away from all of the normal functional things
that you connect them with, and they become
atmospheric. A child encountering ruins just
immediately dreams up a whole world of stories,
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runs off into the zone and dreams up stories. 115
They have that power. The vital thing in the
end, of course, is that, instead of starting from
the area around Felixstowe and Woodbridge
and invoking the cosy community singularity
of the place, what’s really at stake is the idea
that, although it’s true that again and again you
find places which are beyond the periphery,
which are far more intrinsically intense than
the centre—that is intrinsically true, the
centre is the place where there’s far too much
gravity—although this is true, and you’ll find
real nomadism elements there, none of that is
really the key issue. What’s really at stake is that
it’s a zone which has its own particular power,
which is a power to take you out of ordinary
reality towards the forces of the planet; so it
has a power of deterritorialization which is
fundamentally about reaching the global, but in
the sense of the BwO. So you find a place that
has that greater power of displacement, away
from the plane of constricting organization
with its nerve ganglions of Capitalism, towards
the plane of consistency, the BwO.
And I think a last thing would be: What would
you put alongside Felixstowe container port?
What would be a component of the nomadic
world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
Just to invoke one element which I think is quite
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116 valuable, instead of talking about the container
ships and the container ports of capitalism, I
think what might be quite valuable, especially as
we’re so much in the space of the sonic, would be
to take the music reproduction device, from the
record player of the time of Virginia Woolf to
the jukebox that Eno heard playing rock all the
time in Woodbridge, because Woodbridge was
surrounded by airfields with American airmen,
and there were cafés where he was blown away by
rock coming from America; all the way through
to the radios and ghetto-blasters and iPods on
which people have listened to things and got out
of their heads at four’o’clock in the morning. It’s
valuable to think for a moment about the radio,
but to strip the radio away from the sober world
of the radio that plays documentaries or audio
essays and to think it precisely as a component
of deterritorialization. The skill of the nomads
is to be imperceptible. But another skill of the
nomads is to use sound in a de-subjectified way:
who knows what songs get sung in the nomad
communities, just in that sense that a skill of
the nomads is definitely sound, from Django
Reinhardt to the nomad overtone singing of
Mongolia. Evidently a lot of what is carried by
sound-production technology is very blocked—
locked down and subjectifying—but there are
also components for escape, worlds of outsights
and dreamings, and worlds of sonic forces that
MF: That’s historically true, that the development
of the radio is actually very tied up with ships.
Exactly the development of record players, the
whole music industry is very much tied up with
shipping, shipping forced the development of
wireless.
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conduct toward trance, toward the beyond of 117
the self. And I think therefore that it’s important
to hold the radio-and-music-player in mind
as a deterritorialized, plane-of-consistency
counterpart to the container ship.