<<TRANSMATHOME

Note 6. Territory and Flight from Territory

At the level of the social or of territory, what is the difference between panic and fear? The difference is that panic can involve a movement to a different territory, or the beginnings of the creation of a new one, whereas fear in this sense intrinsically involves the shoring up of territories and the deepening of territorial routines. There are far better ways of embarking on a line of intensification than flight in its ‘headlong’ form, but it remains the case that the impersonal rush of panic can sometimes lead to an escape, whereas the cycling round of background and acute fear only involves the re-enforcement of the trap. Fear in this sense involves an entering into composition with the afraid, a concentration on territorial rhythms and suppressions, and only a very limited connection with zones that might on occasion be held up as ‘sources’ of fear. As Burroughs says, what is needed is ‘a disintoxication from fear and inner control’[3] (he also says that  ‘all monopolistic and hierarchical systems are basically rooted in anxiety’[4]). This gnawing background fear takes many forms and has many aspects, which cycle round in an always singular way: fear of failure, fear of exclusion,  fear of people from other races and cultures, fear of diseases, fear of being fat, fear of drugs, fear of enemies of society, fear of punishment by the state. At the level of actions this shifting fear expresses itself in people becoming more and more embedded as elements within assemblages of power, and in them becoming more and more constricted and ‘routinised’ or territorialised: in short it expresses itself in the form of the adoption of a permanent defensive or convalescent mode. In contrast, although panic can be the forerunner of a collapse, it can also under certain circumstances be a process which cuts away a whole field of territorial functionings, and leaves a person or group displaced (even if they are in the same place) and surrounded by the potentials of a new terrain.

It can be seen that the subtlety of fear is that the problem is always addressed in terms of external or surrounding forces, and is solved along the lines of a retreat into territories,  when in fact the danger lies in the fear itself, and the field of territories has fear as an inherent or endemic aspect. The full horror of fear is therefore that the danger to the body involved is secreted in a place where it would never be suspected – the enemy is within the body, rather than external to it.

It is not a question of recommending panic (this would be an absurdity), but of pointing out that for headlong flight to take place is not in itself a bad thing. Panic is a non-subjective state  which cuts habituated chains of acting, verbalising, and imagining, and in which unsuspected capacities can surface, and as such panic is absolutely distinct from the neuroses, paranoias, and depressions of socially embedded fear. It can rightly be said of panic that it takes people beyond themselves, but the self from which they are taken is not their own – it is the aquired and ‘parasitic’ self of fear, and of fixation on the centres and regularities of the territorial and the dominatory.

The question of panic is only being emphasised as part of a process of separating panic from  fear. There are many modes of non-subjectified global affectivity that are in effect at points of rupture or breakthrough -  joy, intent engagement,  shock, astonishment, fury. And beyond initial points of rupture there  are spaces of intensification of engagement for which the ‘spasmodic’ or ‘ecstatic’ language of intense emotions becomes inappropriate, despite the heightening of intensity. Beyond headlong flight and fugitive forms of joy, there is the intensive voyaging of free flight, where the process is no longer  definable as escape in that it is beyond the spasmodic aspect of points of rupture.

<<Back to CONTENTS | APPENDIX/CONTINUATIONS Note 7 Maps, Dangers, Freedoms>>