Newton was wrong. There is no absolute time. An expanding industry, with railways and wage labor, school bells, and liminal spaces. Tick, tock, it never stops. Even quantifiable time is relative. Einstein’s theory of special relativity paints a world that Enlightenment absolutism could never have imagined. Time and space are part of the same entity; the observed time passing for an object depends on the object’s speed relative to the observer. The Euclidean fell like the Titans during the Titanomachy, and on the other side, the Olympian gods took over the flow of time. The Olympiad resides in Minkowski’s space.
Bergson makes an important point that I will align myself with: Duration is not measurable. The distinction between qualitative and quantitative multiplicities is crucial for understanding time. These correspond indirectly to what I will call the inside versus the outside. On the outside, we can measure time. It is on the outside that the curvature of spacetime causes gravity. On the inside are moments, where the present is continuously recreated at the intersection of a future and a past. On the outside, Chronos ticks; on the inside, Aion sighs. The inside is defined by a “here,” and the outside is defined by a “there.”
This distinction replaces res extensa and res cogitans. Everything is a matter of placement. Where am I? Where are you? I am here; you are there. This distinction works by dismantling the Cartesian schism between body and soul. The outside is the place of images. It is the sphere of sensory impressions that revolves around its own inside. I exist here as I am the inside of a sphere of phenomena: desires and intensities. The world and its processes are transactions—an infinite movement of intersections, explosions of desire. We are all a crossing, a knot, in this endless sphere of patterns. The thing-in-itself is precisely here. Not there—unknown and mysterious. You are the light reaching your eyes, traveling through neural pathways. What is it like to be a ray of light? The question is: Where is it? If it is here, it is just as it is. If it is there, who knows?
Being an observer is precisely that: an intersection of information. Everything is a production of desire. Existence tries to recover itself, to constantly recreate itself in recursion. All patterns seek their own death and rebirth in a dance of will to power. The West has constantly been searching for an understanding of the outside, thereby entangling itself in its own concepts and distinctions. We look at the stars, out into space, as far back as possible. We seek answers about how qualia can exist when the starting point has always been there. Inside and outside are the same thing, but different forms of expression. I can see your body, your outside, your lips, and your black-hole eyes. You give them to me with your vibrations, and we engage in a dance. We become each other in the meeting of our eyes. You give me you; I give you me. But your outside can only exist in my inside, and vice versa.
When we look at a nervous system, when we watch where the blood flows in different situations, and try to connect the experience of fear with brain activity, we see the outside of the nervous system on the outside of our own inside. If we were there, precisely there, we too would feel the same fear. This is the distinction. All outsides presuppose an inside, and all insides an outside. All matter presupposes a soul, and all souls presuppose a body. We are all coordinates in Spinoza’s God.
I urge you, make a map. Draw pictures on the inside of your eyes, on the outside of your amygdala. Every discovery and landmark does not escape the brutality of time. We are constantly doomed to relive ourselves as individuals, multiplicities, as gods and existential fractals. What we are, behind all the charades and theater happening out there, is an eternal return. To create a map, you must entrust yourself to this process. All maps change something and are therefore in a constant movement of consumption. Is this not what curiosity entails? I make an image X that represents an event X’, but in the making of X, X’ has changed because it no longer contains X. Everything escapes. Everything is out there—gone yet haunting the present like ghosts. Frustrated, I make a new map Y equivalent to X and X’. But now the same movement arises. It is like trying to focus on mouches volantes. Pure representation is thus a metaphysical impossibility. What language is and ultimately what all semiotics is based on is a process of productive coding. An act of pure magic.
We have lost the magic—the potential-realization of the will as such. But it is still there; we just have different words for it. The fascist’s magic lies in coding, in semantic functions: her body is the desire of men. Everyone knows it: the code resides in the body. If she shows it, it is not self-expression. It is prostitution. The witch, however, is creative in her becoming. She shatters codes. The man-woman function explodes. The beard becomes feminine, the breasts masculine; boundaries open and burst until the binary gender code implodes upon itself. The man’s vagina and the woman’s phallus open pathways for creative self-expression on the smooth surface, the desert, that remains after the codes self-destruct.
The symbol as such is never empty. It is a place of intensity, with its own DNA strands ready to be manipulated and mutated. Logos is its potential for both repetition and mutation. A sound carries meaning based on its memory. “Teacup” triggers a network of memories—associations traveling on a map where rhizomatic networks glow in existence. The memory of being institutionalized, vomiting during pregnancy or the flu, might make us disgusted by the thought of the tea in the cup. The repetition of the symbol occurs through an orientation of the place it reveals to us: “No, thank you,” in response to the invitation of the tea symbol. Or the opposite: a first meeting with a loved one, a childhood memory of a cozy winter night with a loving family, a refuge from stress’s corrosive effects. Logos is the event of the addressed. Yet the symbol is open to mutations through this logos: the DNA strand of memories holds infinite possibilities for lines of flight in its logos repetition.
The witch appears naked, pulls at her phallus, and refuses to travel through the male-answering-masculinity-male-violence surface. She nurtures her breasts and screams to open the concrete gate to the feminine surface: “A woman!” She turns herself into a logos-machine that, in one place, creates new repetitions of the phallus symbol. She recodes to shatter the stratification of the codes. And like ripples on water, her feminine incarnation spreads. All it took was an incantation for the symbol to vibrate in new ways. It opens up a clitoris-phallus and the penetration of the phallus-vagina through a muffing. The witch’s spells are an opening: she codes to create new surfaces, fostering new movements in opposition to the fascist’s barbed-wire tunnels. She flips the switch and journeys to Blåkulla.
Simulacra are self-referential symbols; seemingly empty. The symbol seals the content; a pure reproduction. The advertisement refers only to a memory of an advertisement, resulting in a stream of stagnation. We live in Disney Land. The witch mutates through logos—not to find a way out of the hyperreal, but to accelerate simulacra production to its ultimate limit: Blåkulla, the conventibus. She sabotages its rigidity because she simply wants to move freely. Détournement is her art of doing just this: using simulacra to twist apart the spectacle. It is a revelation, a reminder of the grotesque. Everywhere are simulacra—the highest layer of maya in postmodern society. The postmodern city extends not just in the material sphere. It stretches in and out of all spheres of places. Geography is urbanized even in what Marxism calls the superstructure of the base. The distinction is no longer clear: what is material, really? Simulacra have left us with an urban environment within ourselves. Psychogeography’s goal is to explore all the strata of the city. The superstructure has become a place; a prison. The witch thus embodies Marcuse’s “The Great Refusal.”
The art of witchcraft is the art of travel: le dérive. The witch is a nomad. Nomadology is her first tool for moving to her sabbath. She takes what she finds: a philosophical concept, a scientific theory, an animal, a house wall, a piece of music, an artwork—whatever is available to her. With these, she journeys through memories or through logos, and she drags herself schizophrenically across all the layers and strata that have been built up like walls along her line. She only needs a springboard. She gets high on the air, or on her flying ointment, and travels through the psychedelic sphere, making her invenire. The sabbath is her carnival; in these places, she finds new ways to create herself. She expresses her will, her power, through movement. She sits in her chair, moves one way to stand up, another to reach the teapot. Tick-tock, leg1 goes, and leg2 mirrors the movement. She performs a tea-becoming movement to reach the realm of the tea god. Flavor is, in itself, a place.
The coffee is dark, low, and earthy, blunt, masculine, brown—a symbolic DNA; a memory. Neighbor to chocolate. The tea is light, high instead of low, sharp like agave, feminine and beige. Neighbor to tobacco. This journey is familiar and simple. We move in ways we’ve learned; repetitions of human vibrations. The witch, however, moves in animal or molecular vibrations. Carnivalesque in her motion, she discovers new rotations and positional changes that take her to new places—places that seemingly always existed, ruins of a forgotten world. Yet she creates memories of new becomings in her journey. She creates a territory, only to deterritorialize; constant movement to stretch out as far as possible. Her entire existence is a blasphemy—her own journey in the divine comedy, where the order between heaven and hell is blown apart.
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.” — Baudelaire
The witch is a flâneur in that she finds herself in multiplicity; she dwells in the borderlands between identities. She is never alone: sensory impressions, the light that penetrates her and transforms as it moves through nerves into sensory images, the molecules that travel in and out of the conatus of cells that have found a pattern through which they can exercise their will to power. She sees that she can define herself in this multiplicity of processes: the duality of “I am not my body,” the egoism of “I am contentless, the Unique, and multiplicity is my property,” the carnival’s “It is a we, never an I,” and how she defines herself depends in turn on the virtual plane. These different states are plateaus that she moves between depending on the consequences she desires. She loves herself, which means she loves the universe. That is why she moves: it is her conatus that makes her stretch out into fractals.
This art of travel opens up a revolutionary becoming. The witch explores the urban world within herself. The spectre of neoliberalism is found everywhere, and she moves, not to flee, but to become ungovernable; defiant. She makes the late-modern worldview into a delusion by finding a new plateau to stand on, only to leave it again. She creates her own delusions from the connections she can find—schizophrenic machines, a body without organs. The algorithm or spell follows: (1) identify a spectre (e.g., nationalism, the human state of nature, the social contract, the pursuit of objectivity, the work ethic, the nature-human distinction); (2) identify the spectre’s memory, its simulacra, and follow the network until you find a simulacrum that is meaningless according to it. This does not negate the paradigm but provides an immanent escape route from it; (3) move there. Familiarize yourself with its memories, find a plateau to stand on. Nationalism ends up in the Shire, and you become a hobbit. The state of nature becomes laziness (and laziness is virtuous!). Or: make a contract with Satan that is better than what Hobbes can offer, or turn your thoughts into objectivity, telepathy-becoming: “You can read my thoughts,” dig a hole and fill it in repeatedly for the sake of work, or speak to the trees, the earth, the wind, the plants—there are small people within them; (4) make a territory of your place, and finally (5) start again from (1), and make a change to the algorithm.
This formula is a form of iconoclasm: the image of a simulacrum framing a worldview is revealed. Beneath the surface of the icon, we see its underside. We become heretics in our movements: a heretic-becoming as we perform iconoclasm. As heretics, we seek ideas that are grotesque, bizarre, contradictory, and nonsensical. Through this movement, aletheia occurs: we remember that all ideas are grotesque, and we turn the higher strata (the pure, sacred, ideal, virtuous) upside down and reduce it to the lower strata (the grotesque). We recall where the state and its ideals excrete waste and what it does with its refuse. The witch’s sabbath, the dance with Satan himself, is equivalent to the carnival. Satan is the personification of the grotesque, of the impure, of sinning; he is the god of deviants. During the carnival, the body is split into two: openness and penetration. Bodies are both open and penetrative; they are machines with holes and points that can be connected. Penises, vaginas, anuses, noses, mouths, fingers—all become openings or ends to create new connections.
The grotesque body strives to become a body without organs: What can be done with these holes and ends? What potentialities exist for pushing the limits of bodies? The openings are gateways to the virtual; the ends are machine ends, flow chains. The grotesque body opens to ingest curses, penetrate eyes with finger-porn, turn nonsense into smooth surfaces to ejaculate upon. The grotesque body is a becoming that seeks a new kind of freedom—a freedom not possible with the human body but attainable through a deterritorialization of the human body into the grotesque body.
Even abstract bodies follow the same grotesqueness, where ideas copulate with one another on equal terms. We elect our Prince des Sots: he receives the staff of the previous fool and stands on his white hill. How magnificent! A hairless ape with fur on its head! He holds his staff, and everyone listens when he speaks. He makes important decisions, for we are not as important and need his competence to know where to defecate. We applaud: our representative! Our ape on the white hill! We take turns being important. Some of us do not have the privilege of being as important as him. It is best to have someone who can tell us what to do, who we can have sex with, what to do with our time and shared property. It is a carnival; it is a grotesque event, our Prince des Sots. But even he has his openings and points; his anus, vaginas, and penises. We are simply playing a grotesque game, and he represents us fools—the President of Foolery. He is the greatest Jester of us all; the Jester of Jesters. He won that contest.
But the carnival always risks being consumed by the processes of the state. It risks becoming reactionary if it is temporary: “Look how sick it would be if you did whatever you wanted all the time. Men sleeping with men, no definition of what a man or woman is, the poor seizing what rightfully belongs to the rich, and authority becoming a joke! Criminals walking free, and everyone drunk and high. Remember who you are; do you really want to sacrifice yourselves like that?” The carnival must be made timeless: permanent revolution. The war machine must be established wherever we find ourselves for the witch’s sabbath to be liberating. Making the everyday grotesque is, in itself, a revolutionary act.
This revolutionary potential is something Deleuze and Guattari have already pointed out through the schizophrenic. They also show how the schizophrenic can tend toward paranoid fascism in their body without organs. But it should be clarified that the grotesque body uses the body without organs as a horizon—a horizon for finding new connections and intensities. The grotesque body is comedic in nature: it produces laughter-machines in fractals, connected into clusters that create new clusters, connected ad infinitum. The grotesque body, therefore, is a laughter generator. Arthur in Todd Phillips’ Joker demonstrates how he expanded the grotesque body. The content of the higher strata of the social sphere implodes upon itself, step by step, as the Joker becomes the grotesque body—the carnival opened through a pistol-shot-rich-kid penetration.
Who, then, is the witch? If the carnival is always an “Aha, that’s me. I was a ‘we,’ after all,” what is it that travels? The witch is, in fact, a byproduct of the place she finds herself in. Deleuze and Guattari showed that the subject is, in fact, a residue—a pure waste product—of the production of desiring machines. The production happens everywhere, and everywhere the subject is indirectly produced. The there is desiring machines, machines that create an environment—a place. The subject experiences the place, but in fact, the experience of the place is a byproduct of its desiring production. The subject is, therefore, part of the environment; the there creates the here, vice versa. They are engaged in a dialogue that (re-)create reality in an infinite loop. To travel is to create new connections and disconnections, new flows and registrations, new consumption. It is the environment that changes; geography is what moves, not the subject. Our flâneur is the subject of a self-referential desiring machine that creates a strange loop, as Douglas Hofstadter demonstrates—a constant spiral that always leads back to itself; a Nietzschean subject.
With that said, whatever exactly “that” is, let us tell you a story.
In a place far, far away, long ago, they searched for the thing-in-itself. Noumenon was always there, always lost. For some reason, they are still searching for it. The quest for God himself. But God was always over there. Image after image is spat out, and they cut into God to find God. They search and search, concluding that it is impossible. It cannot be found. After all, they have looked everywhere. Image after image, created as a result of their own desire to find this God. God laughs at the whole affair, perhaps because the knives tickle its skin, its organs, and its innards. But God is precisely there—not as an image, but as pure immanent hereness. As a boundary, a limit to what is possible. A limit always ready to be shattered.
Similarly, they look at themselves and see themselves in the mirror they built. They know exactly where they are—they are precisely there. They also look at the hands they hold in front of them. They are exactly there. “Oh, how wonderful,” they say. “Now I know what is up and down. I am here, and that is there. Now I know how to orient myself in this mess.” And they do know, for they have made an image showing precisely what they need to know—what is what, who is who, and how is how, and what knowing is to know. And so begins their journey. “Now everyone, since we have cut enough and know what is what, let us also find out who is who and how is how!” Enthusiastically, they fornicate with matter, for she is, after all, “over there,” unlike their holy “here.” Image after image shows how they act, so they know what is what, who is who, and how is how. And they also say to you with lustful eyes: “Let us look at you. Let us see all your movements so I can paint an image, so I know who you are.” One, two, three, and so we were caught as well. They are trapped in an obsession. We are trapped in theirs. The obsession with images. The neurosis of dominance. Yet they eat, just like us. And just like we are there, so are they there. We were always a ‘we,’ but the difference between us is one we all affirm. We never see a “here,” only a becoming-there, never a being-here. It is only a game to pretend we are not of the same substance. The game affirms difference, and everywhere we divide, cut, to continue Creation. But we cannot stop wondering: What if they had found God after all? Then maybe they would just throw it away, so we could laugh together instead of playing mommy-daddy-child, or cops and robbers. Damn fascists.
We are just like Bruno and the Church. They burn us at the stake for what we are: witches and heretics. And we scream affirmatively, embracing what we are: “Yes! We are witches, we are heretics! For everywhere we see Creation, and we dance with it in ways that are indescribable, impossible, heretical to their very core.”
If these seekers of noumenon are defined by their method of conducting science with dominance through their algorithm—[cut into the earth, create an object, look at the object, create an image of the object, exploit production, repeat]—then from the world of experience arises a metaphysics that divides the sea. X becomes Y and Z: I see the tree, I divide it into categories—trunk, root, crown, branches, leaves, cellulose, lignin, carbon consumption, oxygen production, photosynthesis, not bushes, not grass, not animals, Aristotelian negation; thing-becoming. In this machine composition, two strata emerge: res cogitans and res extensa. Res cogitans exerts its power over res extensa, consuming its own division. Even the human body falls to the same fate: [cut it from the earth, make it an object, look at the body, create an image of the body, exploit the body, repeat].
The result creates a beautiful machinery, though disconnected from its machine-ecology, and it enacts violence upon bodies. The image is placed among images: the doctor sees your body’s behavior, searches through their images, and you become a malfunctioning machine. Perhaps you cannot walk; you cannot move. Or perhaps you move too quickly; you run far too fast in every direction. A bipolar-becoming, you make yourself free, even though your speeds and oscillations create waves that are not always to your advantage—the price of freedom. Your body is analyzed, you are placed there: “Everything in Its Right Place.” Symptom-seeking finds an image that replaces your face. In this way, you know where your rightful place is.
In this process of creating a world of res cogitans and res extensa, a creative process arises. Apollo holds tightly to his love: the reproduction of the same. Oh, great Apollo, spare us from your sickly arrows and make us well. This creative process (Apollo) creates a world where everything has its place. Social strata manifest as institutionalization and the organization of the image of “health/unhealth.” The hospital and social services act as liver-kidneys; the hospital as a sickness-organ, death-organ, and madness-organ. Social services act as the purifier of flow; minorities are either excreted or regulated, formed, and made to pass as majority. Together, they attempt a reproduction of the same; a homogenization process. A creation of the healthy-sick and, in doing so, the creation of good-evil. You must fall into your place, for those who deviate and dance with Dionysus fall outside the sacred order granted by the Holy Spirit of rationality.
Empatheia, Oh Beautiful Goddess!
Let your wisdom wash me free from Apollo’s arrows and blinding sunlight. A line of flight reveals itself in your beauty. Empathy makes it possible for my neurons to dive beneath the surface, to see without hierarchy. You transform res cogitans into res extensa and vice versa. Look at the pine tree—its trunk, its branches, its cones, and needles. What is it like over there? What happens over there? Darkness, but the sun is present—not as a sun but as a sign. It tickles in that direction. I walk there at my own pace. And it tickles in a way that makes me stretch into points. That is where I want to go! Over there, where it tickles. A tree-becoming reshapes me. My neurons move in such a way that they create their own tree: me. Look what you’ve done, Empatheia! You made me into a pine tree! Together with the tree, I am reminded of the tree’s own nature—its own memories and its own becoming-there. I walk to where the tree is. I am inspired to move there by pure empathy. In the sun’s rays, Aletheia reveals who I am: creator and creation as one.
And I say to Apollo’s children: “I am a tree! Can you understand how beautiful that is? I found myself there, in a pine tree!” And I laugh a cosmic laugh; what a trick, what a wonderful twist in this endless process of becoming. And Apollo’s children look at me with astonished faces: “A pine tree?” And I reply enthusiastically: “Yes! A pine tree!” They write something in their papers and prescribe medication. They see channels, information flows: everything must go right. “Sick,” they write on my forehead and send me onward.
I and you have an important function in these becomings: that of a marker: “here” and “there.” You are the other, I am the subject. I and it share a similar function: it as res extensa, I as res cogitans. The duality between these has the same function as a knife: Cut into the universe until you find what you want. But when boundaries waver, something magical occurs: I become you; we become each other. In Hades, there is only a “we”; beneath the surface, there is only a “we.” Machine A produces an I-it relationship. Machine B produces an I-you relationship. Machine AB produces a dance: AB: (A(B is sick and X(follow protocols))B(A believes B is sick and Y(invite to dance)).
In AB, A wants to maintain the duality of a subject performing an objectivist operation on B, but B wants to maintain a different duality. B depends on A because it is together that they create whatever it is they want to create. If A cuts into reality as I-it, then B cannot help but invite to a dance; to a dialogue. The dialogue is a place. The place of reciprocity and exchanges between two equal parties. This place is a shared machine production, where the place consists of the shared reality between I am here and you are there. The dialogue can, in turn, lead to a “we,” where this distinction no longer serves a function: I am you.
The we-relation signifies a lived monism but also a lived pluralism. The prophet calls out: “I am all of this!” The we-relation is a here; it is here that I exist, resolving the conflict of being lost. It is another place: the plane of molecules. Instead of the exhaustion in a negation of finding “myself,” where time is out of joint, where I flee from myself and always find myself far away (lost), the we-relation is a place where intensities take their full space. It is not a being-at-hand; it is a becoming in itself, where no relation transcends the place anymore. Here is Hades, and those of us who find it know the way: Move downward.
Unlike Apollo, here is Dionysus. In the underworld—in the we-relation—knowledge is no longer in an I-it relation. The intellect has no name here, and neither the rationalist nor the classical empiricist can ground their knowledge here. As Bergson demonstrated, the rationalist falters when attempting to encompass the absolute under a single perspective—we resist because we are far too many. Similarly, the empiricist fails as they try to divide the world, filling it with images—we resist because we are more than just images. Bergson’s intuitive method is, in fact, a katabasis. I descend below the surface, and there I find myself. And I am a we.
The we-relation is, in one sense, a relation to myself but not in the monologistic nature of the I-it relation. Instead, it radicalizes the I-you relation. Unlike an anabasis (ascent), a katabasis (descent) is potentially traumatizing. Here, everything differentiates itself; here, we die, we are born, and the universe’s intensities burn completely organlessly. The opposite—ascending—is instead a place of pure liberation, a full transcendental enlightenment. Those who find this place see that time is out of joint and laugh at the process. But in Hades, desire burns. Desire is the productive force behind the infinite dance. In heaven, we laugh because we see that everything is just a game; but in the underworld, we play until the blood flows. When we find ourselves here, everything appears as nothing other than an endless carnival, where I am you.
Bakhtin’s carnival opens the door to dialogue, to a we-becoming, to the expansion and unveiling of a single event into creation itself.
Both directions of movement (upward and downward) are processes of knowledge. I dream of Bruno’s dream—a science that dances with phenomena; a phenomenon-becoming. A search for the intrinsic properties of matter. Katabasis is a molecular-becoming: instead of finding Truth through dissection—Aristotelian negation, empirical quantification, and mirror-creations—the molecular reality involves a together-becoming; the carnival. The molecular’s actions can certainly inspire the molar reality, but truly being together means the I-it relationship ceases. Begin in an I-you relationship. Hold a dialogue with H₂O: What does water say to you? What does water do to you? Travel along your networks, along the map of neurons, through your subconscious, and reveal what you find. You discover a water-relation; you travel along the water, feel its tastes, and find its movements. Go deeper. Where is the water? What is it like to be there? Heat-cold response, pure movements of hydrogen-oxygen vibrations, dancing in a carnival: “We are going home!” Down into the ocean. Salt solutions. What is it like to be a water molecule? What is it like to be a river? What is it like to be a sea? A glacier? A cloud? We are already there: we breathe, drink, and travel in a human-water-machine. Find a fixed point, a strata; find a line of flight and travel along the path of a water-becoming, and you will find movements and potentialities in the H₂O concept that a chemist can only make an image of. Your egalitarian underground journey to the carnival. There, you find God, whom we killed. And in the process, you see that everything is ensouled; the gods breathe down your neck.
Everything is intra-relational. Your worldview is full of fascists and imperialists—break it apart. You are not an agent in a cold world of res extensa. You are an intersection of relations. Relations between spirits and gods. The wind blows against your face and makes you angry. It flirts with you and invites you to dance. Fall into it. Seek something more beautiful. Something greater. New playgrounds lie behind Cartesian sterilization. An architectural project lingers in all of us.
Liminal spaces are a longing for something beyond the toxic everyday. Spaces that are so familiar yet lack the brown noise of capital. The Backrooms play an important role for us postmodern humans in how they capture and organize the desires we have to escape. No-clip out of it. The concept encompasses a line of flight that takes us to a labyrinth of yellowish corridors emptied of content. The fear it invokes is not of the kind where X intrudes on Y. Rather, it is the same terror embodied in Hellraiser: a fear of how far our consciousness can stretch if it glitches out of itself. It offers no magic, no gods, no spirits. It offers the tranquility of a desert. The creatures inhabiting this environment can be nothing other than the shadow figures lurking behind corners during sleep paralysis. They are your own shadows. Traces of where you have been before. The entities residing in The Backrooms are the ghosts of capital, our own desires, our attempts to flee from meaninglessness while being doomed to return to its logic.
The Backrooms are equivalent to Nietzsche’s abyss. Nietzsche teaches us to stare into the abyss, to affirm the terror—not to overcome it, but to be transformed by it. The Backrooms offer you something new. An activity that elevates your being to ante omnia—before everything. Like Sisyphus turning his punishment into his own, the boulder becomes his and the cliff his kingdom. The Backrooms are a place waiting to be territorialized. Be brave. Go further. Go deeper. Fortes fortuna iuvat.
To no-clip is not just an escape; it is a gesture, a movement through and beyond. It is a line of flight in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense: a rupture from the networks of code and control, but one that carries the risk of being recaptured. Capitalism is the master of deterritorialization: it tears down hierarchies, boundaries, and orders to create movement and flow. But it reterritorializes just as quickly: the liminal spaces, the yellowish corridors of The Backrooms, are recoded by capital—into memes, trends, commodities. A line of flight, therefore, must not just be a way out but also a way into something new. The greatest threat to our freedom, our identities, and our becoming is capitalism’s insatiable hunger.
What does it mean to no-clip into a room where relationships, rather than hierarchies, reign? A room where dancing with the wind cannot be capitalized?
Tony Fry’s concept of ontological design is a syncretization of our intra-subjective we-becoming. We are shaped by the spaces we move through, by the artifacts and systems we create. To no-clip is, in this light, not just a physical movement but an ontological gesture—a redesign of what it means to be. The Backrooms are a possibility, a prototype for thinking and feeling beyond capitalism’s ecosystems. But this requires us to see design as a process that shapes us as much as we shape it. What does a world look like where we design for relationships instead of separations? For flow instead of control?
We moved from animism’s intra-relational world to polytheism’s divine warfare, with our own personal gods. We then united behind a church, a god—a single relationship. The efforts of atheism and secularism to separate us were a welcome destruction of the power relations we had entangled ourselves in. Cuius regio, eius religio: the deconstruction of our worldview, however, was replaced with a spectacle. A new ruler, a new religion—of commodity fetishism and simulacra. We remain trapped, like flies to a lightbulb. And every relationship we seek is reterritorialized into the relational and separation forms of apparatuses of control.
If the line of flight is a rupture from the existing network of control and desire, Tony Fry’s concept of ontological design offers a deeper possibility. It is not just about escaping the system but about redesigning the world so that new relationships, non-capitalist interactions, and other ways of being can emerge. Such a redesign shapes us as much as we shape it. Whether it involves mapping The Backrooms, talking to the wind and rain, befriending the moon and stars, comforting the memories in the walls of your apartment, singing a lullaby to your phone, or holding a funeral for your broken guitar, there are ways to design a new matrix of relationships. A matrix that does not exist in the Cartesian apparatus of separation and sterilization or the empty shopping malls of capital trying to sell your own identity back to you.
The true fear that The Backrooms evoke is not the monsters inhabiting the endless corridors and empty rooms. It is not the eeriness of being beyond, inside something that exists in the uncanny valley of familiarity and foreignness. It is the realization that there is always a risk with lines of flight. They always threaten to bring us back to the beginning—to the same systems of control from which we tried to escape. But that is also where their strength lies. In every return, there is the possibility to start over, to redraw the map. To no-clip once more. And again. And perhaps, in the end, leave the brown noise of capital behind forever. Toward a new ontology. A more beautiful archaeology, opposing the ruins of neo-capitalist realism.
Every map we create changes something. It is an act of creation, a ritual, and a spell. The witch does not flee the simulacra to seek authenticity or originality. Instead, she mutates the simulacra, accelerating its production to its ultimate limits, to unleash new possibilities. This is not a return to the “real” but a radical reimagination of the hyperreal. The witch does not mourn the loss of magic; she creates new magic within the ruins. She bends the codes and shifts the patterns of what is possible. Her incantations are lines of flight—not escapism, but liberation through transformation. To create a map therefore, is to engage in a dance with the unknown, to draw lines where there were none; to chart new territories of thought, experience, and being as such. The witch does not seek certainty or stability; she seeks movement, transformation, and creation. In the end, the witch’s journey is a journey of affirmation; a celebration of life. She moves, not as a passive observer but as an active participant, shaping and being shaped by the flux of her own becomings. Her maps are not fixed or final. They are alive, evolving, and endlessly becoming. They are a testament to the boundless creativity of the world and the infinite possibilities of being.
