I wrote about The Invisibles in 2016 in an article that was something of a test-balloon for the style that I’ve more recently adopted in this space. At the time I focused mostly on King Mob and argued for a Hegelian read of the character as a unification of opposites and a movement toward unity.

King Mob is attractive in that manner. King Mob as a character basically exists to depict permutations of a dialectical search for recognition from within the self. The images King Mob presents exist as a nested series of negations. The lynch pin to this series of self-negations comes in a flash-back in Volume 2. This incident relates back to a time when King Mob and Jolly Roger – another Invisibles cell leader – had studied together in a monastery.

Their instructors had trained them:

 6: "Have we yet come even close to a full description of it?
Did we even mention that several hundred years ago it wasn't a chair but a tree? Where is it now, here? Or in memory?"
E:"We cannot even fully describe a chair and yet we say, 'I am.' 'I am...'
Understand there is no, 'I am.'
Nothing, 'is.'"
"Try to describe all that you are"
"Simultaneously discern the logical flaw in what I've just said."
"Now!"
"Feel the White Flame"

This meditation becomes a method of resisting mind-control within the text of the story as it is a lesson in escaping the bounds of self that mind control is posited as manipulating but while this describes a dissolution of self it does so in a specifically unifying way. The identity of the chair is negated in the identity of the tree – the difference is negated in the temporal unity between tree and chair. There is no self because all things unify in the sufficiently idealistic white flame – a generative moment of pure intensity that cannot possess a self because it is all things at once.

King Mob elaborates on this later when he describes reality as being the holographic interaction of two overlapping meta-universes – these he describes in totalizing terms – “healthy,” and, “terminally sick, deranged.” This hologrammatic metaphor is something Morrison sustains for so long that an inattentive reader might actually believe this is what their story was saying. But this is the ultimate unifying metaphor – all that exists does so because the many were subsumed into unity. This collision of the healthy and the deranged meta-universes is the collision of two carefully defined objects in such a manner that they blur into each other and become, in the devastation, one.

But of course King Mob isn’t the protagonist of this story. And the Invisibles, for all it might wink at the idea of being in service of transcendent unity, cannot sustain this illusion. In the end, one of the principal targets of The Invisibles wrath is Thelema. Sir Miles, the primary antagonist of the story, is repeatedly referred to as a highly initiated Thelemite and the idea of the, ‘Satanistic Tory,’ “an existentialist who just wants to feel guilt,” is baked into the climax of the story – with the perverse coronation of the Moon Child. And, if you wanted to propose a totalizing and unifying read of the Invisibles then this deployment of Thelema as the antagonistic ideology proves problematic. Thelema divides history into epochal aeons built around a set of opposing ideological values. These transformations are imbued with a sort of historical determinism that might almost echo Marx albeit absent the materialism that undergirds dialectical materialism. Thelema is almost entirely a species of idealist belief – as above so below – and Crowley’s aeons have a kind of Fichtean dialectical character to them – each aeon arising in response to the problems presented by the one before – and this sort of idealistic grounding makes for a strange basis for the antagonists of the story – should we really read The Invisibles as an internecine dispute among the German Idealists?

And the actual protagonist of The Invisibles laughs straight in the face of this absurd proposition. He laughs and boasts that he’d be a great messiah – would give kids a day off school. Dane McGowan identifies the trap in the unity of the white flame as early as his confrontation with the King of All Tears in the House of Fun. He stays with the Invisibles and constantly acts like a counter-weight to King Mob during dialog scenes. It sometimes becomes easy to forget, with King Mob’s bluster, his tragic relationship with Ragged Robin, and his use as a vessel of authorial insertion, that the story is actually about Dane. He’s the one we meet on page one of the first volume and he’s the one who pronounces, “our sentence is up.” on the last page of the last volume. King Mob’s holographic universes are a fake-out. Robin’s all-now comes closer but is ultimately one final trap. There is something lurking around the edges of the Invisibles story – a thing that is dismissed when Sir Miles asks about it – but it is the central concern of the story. And that thing is the universe attempting to be born and its placenta.

Where King Mob and the other dialectical characters of The Invisibles are correct is that this story is about getting past the barriers of self. But the holographic metaphor which unifies two meta-universes into a transcendent whole acctually miss the mark about what’s happening here. Instead we have to look past the climax of the story, wherein Dane McGowan eats a god and then travels with the Blind Chessman to the AllNow, and into the 2012 coda. Here we see that Invisibles, under Dane’s leadership, have moved away from these unifying dialectical understandings of self toward the Memeplex – a fragmentary and disjointed understanding of being as a series of becomings. Much like Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the Scizo in Anti-Oedipus – the being composed of machines each interrupting the last and each breaking down, being taken out of its series or socketed into some new series in turn – the Memeplex denies a totalizing identity for any given self. If a self dissolves not into the white flame of unity but rather into the writhing and worm-laden flows of the Body Without Organs, and from there into the disjunctive froth of the machinic, of pure affirmative difference, then this rather takes away from the idea of two meta-universes pressing close and forming the illusion of the universe as the holographic boundary between them.

But this brings in the thread of The Invisibles characterized by De Sade and his little utopia of the pornographer, and the references to Wilhelm Reich and Stanislav Grof that are brought along with it. And what do these three very disparate figures share in common?

Sex.

Sade

Of course there is the Marquis de Sade. I want to start by situating the Marquis and sadism within the context of the use of his thought in dialectics. Here, Deleuze becomes handy. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze says:

Sade and Masoch are not merely cases among others; they both have something essential to teach us, the one about masochism and the other about sadism. The second reason why Masoch's fate is unjust is that in clinical terms he is considered complementary to Sade. This may indeed be the reason why people who are interested in Sade show no particular interest in Masoch. It is too readily assumed that the symptoms only have to be transposed and the instincts reversed for Masoch to be turned into Sade, according to the principle of the unity of opposites. The theme of the unity of sadism and masochism and the concept of a sadomasochistic entity have done great harm to Masoch. He has suffered not only from unjust neglect but also from an unfair assumption of complementarity and dialectical unity with Sade. 

Despite sadomasochism being one of the most widely discussed dialectics within sex, Sade and Masoch strain against each other. While each had his lessons, they were not easily situated into a dialectic. The contradictions between their views of reality are intrinsically irreconcilable. Deleuze reads Bataille’s interpretations of Sade to suggest that Sade’s work is, “paradoxical,” that the description of torture can only arise from the victim and that, as such, the victim-subject of Sade’s work is the viewpoint to understanding Sade’s cruel libertines.

For his part, Bataille imagined a revolutionary Sade. In The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade (An Open Letter to My Current Comrades), Bataille attributes a sequence of values to Sade. His argues that Sade is attempting to tell the audience that:

 It is high time that human nature cease being subjected to the autocrat's vile repression and to the morality that authorizes exploitation. Since it is true that one of a man's attributes is the derivation of pleasure from the suffering of others, and that erotic pleasure is not only the negation of an agony that takes place at the same instant, but also a lubricious participation in that agony, it is time to choose between the conduct of cowards afraid of their own joyful excesses, and the conduct of those who judge that any given man need not cower like a hunted animal, but instead can see all the moralistic buffoons as so many dogs.

This cautionary reading of Sade – this idea that Sade is speaking from the position of the victim in order to demonstrate how morality provides the framework for the exploitation of the libertine takes on a very clear representation in the film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom which situates the libertine excesses of Sade’s text during the final days of Italian fascism.

This film treats Sade’s work in much the same way that Bataille does – not as an apologia for the lust of the torturer but rather as a warning and a call to revolution. Sade grabs you by the face and demands you don’t look away from the consequences of the moral system we have normalized within our culture. The libertines of Sade’s books expound at length on their beliefs but, Deleuze says, in contrast to the characters of Masoch’s writing, they teach nothing. There is no instruction for the tortured.

It is worth noting that, when the Invisibles retrieve the tulpa of Sade from the past in the first volume of text, they must bring him through 120 Days of Sodom specifically. As the narration of the bleak story of abjection reaches its climax, Morrison’s Sade says, “The revolution came and I saw the weak become strong and do in their turn what the strong have always done to the weak. I was sickened.” King Mob rolls his eyes and suggests that the only thing they can do is “try to see the funny side.” After all, the libertines of Sade’s stories have nothing to teach in their pages and pages of exposition. They are, for Morrison as for Deleuze and Bataille, a critique of the cruelty of men in power to exploit that power.

As such, Sade makes a fitting character for the ideological wing of a rebel group but still an odd fit for a group with an explicitly dialectical objective of the dissolution of the self into oneness. After all, Sade doesn’t unify cleanly with Sacher-Masoch. His libertines are not fully unifiable with the cold and cruel teachers of Sacher-Masoch. While the libertines blab on and on about their beliefs, they teach nothing, they have no desire to teach anything to their victims. And we, for our part, are given the perspective of the victims within Sade’s work. If we cannot even unify sadism into oneness with masochism, why would we use him to move toward unity?

Furthermore, Morrison does not deploy Sade in this manner. Instead, Morrison, who is openly non-binary now though they were not out at the time, uses Sade to create a third gender in the non.

At the time The Invisibles was written, terms denying a gender binary were in their infancy. The term non-binary, in relation to gender, had been in use for four years in explicitly queer spaces, but it would not achieve widespread understanding until it was popularized by the internet sometime after the publication of The Invisibles. And yet here we are, observing Morrison miraculating, “a new gender; cruel and poised, beautiful and self-contained,” denying one of the most fundamental binaries. However we cannot consider the non a unification of male and female – Thierro says they desire sexlessness, not to be both sexes. The non is, rather, a third term introduced into the interactions of gender. There remain men and women. There are also non. Now Morrison presets Sade as obviously arrogant and willing to take credit for many absurd things. We don’t need to believe Sade is the architect of the non. But when he recruits Thierro at the end of the first volume we get narrative from Thierro’s perspective:

He tells me I have left the houses of the dead and entered the land of the truly living. I am to be no particular age, no particular sex. I am to be fluid, mercurial. He tells me I must slogh my name and my past as a snake sheds its skin. 
He pins a blank white badge to he collar of my jacket. I sit in my seat, nameless, invisible, untouchable, breathing blue smoke. I ask him what I should call him. 
The engine starts up. 
I settle back in the leather seat, becoming weightless and transparent. There is no more time. I close my eyes.
And in y mind I see the sun rise on a new and better world.

While Thierro seems quite happy to have shed their past gender in favour of this brave new future, we see the fingerprints of Sade’s instruction in the narrative. But of course Sade isn’t a teacher. Sade’s works deny the idea of instruction as anything more significant than the powerful talking for themselves. So what are we to make of Morrison’s Sade, teaching strangers against his own inclinations, introducing disruptions into supposedly harmonious systems, creating chaos? Sade creates a utopia of sex and while this utopia does try to decouple reproduction from desire the reality is that Edith’s tour of Sadeland shows very clearly that an outcome of sex, even in Sade’s utopia is children. However mostly what Sade does in his little utopia is play around. And as such Edith’s visit to his compound serves as foreplay to the climax of the story.

And children are the definition of the introduction of a disruptive third term into a dualistic system. One last note before we leave Sade: while in Sadeland, Edith is shown a giant Orgone accumulator. It appears to be having an impact over the weather and she predicts that Sadeland will be nearly at the point of achieving something when time begins to warp around Sadeland.

And this might seem strange. Time and weather being shaped by sex acts. But there are few 20th century psychologists stranger than Wilhelm Reich – and as we depart Sadeland the next step to understanding the anti-dialectical character of The Invisibles is Organon.

Reich

Wilhelm Reich was an early Freudo-Marxian psychoanalyst. He was educated by Sigmund Freud in Vienna, becoming a doctor in 1922, and had a… storied… career which included several affairs with his patients, a search for a material basis for consciousness that provided much of the prefiguring groundwork for the career of Felix Guattari, he became one of the earliest proponents of preventative reproductive health, attempted to bring mental health to the masses, coined the term “sexual revolution,” wrote one of the earliest texts discussing why people would support their own subjugation (The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)), developed a psychiatric practice that involved massaging naked patients, fled the Nazis to the United States, attempted to make weather-control machines, got in trouble with the FDA for advocating miracle boxes, began chasing UFOs, had even more affairs with even more patients, was imprisoned for fraud for continuing to advocate for miracle boxes against FDA orders, and died in prison. The FDA burned many of his books during this period which led to a posthumous history of conspiracy theories, accusations of pseudoscience and Kate Bush music videos.

It should be obvious from this description that Reich was rather pre-occupied with sex. Rather specifically he was preoccupied with orgasm. Orgiastic potency was one of Reich’s earliest ideas. He saw this not only in the vulgar sense of being able to achieve sexual release, but in the more general terms of being able to “achieve full resolution of existing sexual need-tension,” which, considering the Freudian bent of his work, in turn underpinned many elements of sexual health.

However it must be stressed that Reich was very much unlike his near-contemporary Carl Jung in that he was an arch-materialist. It may be that Reich’s materialism that led him to first consider a Marx-Freud synthesis. Regardless, he had become something of a communist, if a strange one, by 1927. Reich continued his work on attempting to find a material cause of consciousness, first looking at phenomena such muscular tension as possible sources. However in 1937 he changed the direction of his enquiry becoming, for the time, one of the leading figures in light microscopy with work on cancer cells leading him to believe he’d identified a substance called a bion which he believed to be a bridge between living and non-living materials. Experimentation with these materials allowed him to provoke the production of tumors in tissue cultures and led to his devising of the idea that he’d discovered…

I mean I don’t know how else to say this.

Reich thought he’d found midi-chlorians. Reich conceived of an energy force which he called orgone and which he believed permeated existence. He believed this to have several material effects, including the facilitation of consciousness, the maintenance of cellular health and even the colour of the Northern Lights. He thought these bions were the receptors that allowed the collection and use of orgone by living systems. In all of this, Reich was attempting to undertake a serious scientific inquiry into fundamental, still unresolved, questions. That he came up with an answer that has the totalizing trappings of pseudoscience – one weird trick that explains everything -shouldn’t be held too strongly against him. (This isn’t an attempt to downplay his obviously compromised ethical compass, but rather to situate that, strange as Reich was, he wasn’t entirely off his rocker.) Reich tied this cosmic energy to the Freudian concept of Libido. A more refined variant of a simmilar attempt to understand consciousness can be found in the work of fellow-Freudian Melanie Klein in her work on partial objects and in Deleuze and Guattari, who devote some considerable effort to a kind critique of Reich and Klein in Anti-Oedipus with the formation of the idea of desiring-production. This concept, unlike Klein’s partial objects but (to a certain extent) like Reich’s bions and orgone had far-reaching metaphysical implications.

Regardless, following his flight from Europe in 1939, as Europe was increasingly a bad place for a left-wing intellectual with strange ideas about sexual liberation at the time, Reich settled in the United States where he devoted the remainder of his career to studying, and theorizing on, orgone. He eventually founded a rural retreat and observatory which he dubbed Orgonon. (This is the place the narrator of Cloudbusting still dreams of.) Derived from his prior experiments with tumors in Oslo, Reich became convinced that orgone would allow for the curing of cancer in patients. He persisted in tying orgone to the moment of orgasm and to libido in general. He furthermore became convinced he’d developed a methodology for creating orgone-rich environments. These took the forms of enclosed boxes called orgone accumulators. And Reich could not shut up about orgone accumulators with all their sexual innuendo fully on display. It didn’t take long for Reich to discover that the United States in the 1940s was as hostile to a sex-obsessed Marxist academic as Europe had been. By 1954 the FDA obtained an injunction prohibiting Reich from transporting orgone accumultors or writings about orgone and orgonomics (the study of orgone) across state lines.

Reich disregarded this injunction, and was charged and convicted for contempt in 1956 to a two-year prison sentence. While he was imprisoned, the FDA destroyed as much of his writing on orgonomics as they could get their hands on. He died of heart failure shortly before he would have been eligible for parole.

In the Invisibles, Sade is a perfect figure for foreplay before sex. Our opposites come together, come so closely together their boundaries blur, and then all kinds of scandalous things occur. With contradictory, cruel, revolutionary, cynical Sade we can represent the whole possible breadth of such liberating scandal and also situate the critique of it.

Reich then comes after – he comes, again not to put too fine a point on it – at the moment of orgasm. The awkward and spasmodic life of Reich is not text in the Invisibles. He’s only present in the extent of the regard Sade serves him in Sadeland, and in how Edith hints he is the path forward from Sade. It’s a brief moment – a few pages, a side adventure in the last volume before the fun of god-eating and knight-hanging gets underway – but it forms a bridge between the foreplay of Sade and the resolution of the story. The invocation of Reich just before the climax of the story drives home what is being done when the Invisibles kidnap Sir Miles and then subject him to a torture which is textually juxtaposed against an Invisible initiation ceremony (the Jack Flint initiation) that is structurally almost identical. By juxtaposing Sir Miles facing ego-death while dosed on Key-23 to Jack Flint also experiencing ego-death while dosed on, yes, Key-23 administered by the exact same people the text is all but shouting at us that what Sir Miles is undergoing isn’t torture. It isn’t revenge. It certainly isn’t an interrogation. What they’re doing is an initiation. In the kidnap of Sir Miles, the Invisibles are taking a parcel of thought, of energy, and they are firing it into the body of the opposite. This moment certainly seems dialectical when taken alone but it isn’t the final resolution. Rather it is the fulcrum between coming together and coming apart again. This isn’t a collapse into unity, it’s the piston-movement of a sex act.

In the end, this is what the principal text of The Invisibles is. I mean King Mob, acting as authorial insert, gives this away in the final pages when he says the story is, “a thriller, it’s a romance, it’s a tragedy, it’s a porno, it’s neo-modernist kitchen sink science fiction that you catch, like a cold.” It’s a porno. It’s right there – the Invisibles describes a highly abstracted metaphysical sex act. If the two meta-universes have collided it isn’t in the manner of the titanic and the iceberg but in the manner of lovers coupling. And if you are going to introduce such a clear metaphor for sex into a narrative about the fundamental nature of reality can you really be surprised to find a Freudian waving back at you from the subtext?

But ultimately Reich is insufficient. “He denounced, in the final resignation of Freudianism, a fear of life, a resurgence of the ascetic ideal, a cultural broth of bad consciousness. Better to depart in search of the Orgone, he said to himself, in search of the vital and cosmic element of desire,” Deleuze and Guattari say of him (emphasis mine). Morrison, too, is seeking a cosmic element of desire in the Invisibles but while Reich can get us to the orgasm, he can’t get us to the finish line, he can’t get us away from a dialectical collapse into oneness. For that we need to turn to an even stranger figure of psychoanalysis in Stanislav Grof.

Grof

To get to Grof, and how he plays a role in the Invisibles we should first situate where Grof is in comparison to other figures we’ve discussed. Stanislav Grof is a leading figure in the field known as transpersonal psychology, a branch of psychology interested in movement away from self both in forms of healthy ego-transcendence via mystical experience and in forms of unhealthy breaks from the ego via mental illness. Transpersonal psychology largely focused on the idea that consciousness was not something that operated only in a specific state. Focusing on subjects including the use of drugs, meditation, shamanic activities, mystical practices and near-death experiences, transpersonal psychologists sought to map a psyche that was broader and more complex than the self.

As such, they do draw back to many of the same origins as Guattari and Reich – principally via Freud and Bataille. On the topic of Bataille’s relationship to the development of transpersonal studies, Harry Hunt says, “part of the importance of Bataille today may be in his extreme and pointed articulation of these genuine ambiguities that remain largely implicit within a ‘human sciences’ transpersonalism or a contemporary ‘science of consciousness.'” Grof came out of a Freudian education before pivoting toward an interest in birth and death experiences. In 1974 he joined the Esalen Institute – known largely for the participation of Aldous Huxley, Abraham Masow, and for the formation of Gestalt Practice. Much of this led to attempts to incorporate Buddhism into western psychotherapy and ontology, though these efforts have been criticized within Buddhist circles.

Grof is unique among the subjects brought to bear by Morrison within the Invisibles of being alive in 2021, and his current work remains concentrated on psychic exploration facilitated by breathing practices and the use of entheogenic agents. However most of Morrison’s interest has to do with Grof’s concept of perinatal matrices. Grof believes that physical, chemical or emotional trauma at various points in the development of a fetus between the moment of conception and that of birth lead to various patterns of psychological manifestation that leave a mark despite being repressed. (Note the essentially Freudian notions of symbolic exchange and repression. We still haven’t escaped Freud here.) These matrices are referred to by a system of numbering thus: Basic Perinatal Matrix I (BPM I) associates with trauma experienced in-utero prior to the beginning of labour. BPM II corresponds to trauma that occurs between the onset of labour and entry to the birth canal. BPM III corresponds to trauma that occurs during movement through the birth canal and BPM IV corresponds to the trauma of the moment of delivery.

We can see, in some of Grof’s detailing of BPM I experiences a movement toward Melanie Klein’s idea of partial objects – albeit one that extrapolates from this concept in a significantly more mystical manner to the biomes of Reich or the desiring-production of Deleuze and Guattari. Nobody could make the mistake of calling Grof a materialist. Grof is cited repeatedly and explicitly within the concluding volume of The Invisibles, his presence in the text is far more substantial than that of Reich, but there’s a specific page I’d like to focus on:

This page comes not from the climax of the story (which properly belongs to Reich with his Bions and his UFO hunting) but from the denouement. “‘The King-of-All-Tears withdraws in a rain of colored cubes,’ goes the story — the ‘Archons’ are clearly BPM 3 Grof condensations — inevitable signs that universal larval development is proceeding towards self-awareness and birth.” In this fiction, the King-of-All-Tears is one of five Archons of the Outer Church, the most active one at that as it is the one who tempts Dane at the House of Fun and who attempts to disrupt Ragged Robin’s time travel experiment. Renn Butler, a disciple of Grof, says abut the BPM 3 matrix that it, “is based around the dynamic stage of labor, with the corresponding activation of powerful biological energies. The cervix is now open and the infant is slowly forced down the birth canal by uterine contractions that range between between fifty and one hundred pounds of force, a struggle for delivery that pits the mother and fetus in a synergistic effort to end the often excruciating suffering inflicted on each other.” From the perspective of the structural view of what this story is trying to do in this moment it is thus clear that the sex-act metaphor of the climax has been followed by a time-jump of some significant gestational period and has thus led to the moment of birth. There is additional metaphorical material to be mined from Morrison’s invocation of Grof – returning to Butler, “The transpersonal side of the experience includes sequences of temptation, sacrifice, purgatory, and Judgment. Individuals also confront or identify with deities such as Shiva, Kali, or Hercules performing his Labors, or with dying-reviving figures such as Persephone, Christ, Osiris, or Dionysus. The experiences in this matrix culminate in a type of intense driving arousal that transcends pain and pleasure, which Grof referred to as volcanic or Dionysian type of ecstasy.”

Of course Grof was hardly the first person to speak of Dionysus in such ecstatic terms and as you can draw a thread back through time from Grof to Bataille, so too do you eventually encounter Nietzsche who framed the Dionysian such in the Birth of Tragedy:

...all this, as also the unconditional will of Christianity to recognise only moral values, has always appeared to me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a "will to perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most fatal disease, of profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion, impoverishment of life,—for before the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that is, unconditional morality) life must constantly and inevitably be the loser, because life is something essentially unmoral,—indeed, oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting No, life must finally be regarded as unworthy of desire, as in itself unworthy. Morality itself what?—may not morality be a "will to disown life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning of the end? And, consequently, the danger of dangers?... It was against morality, therefore, that my instinct, as an intercessory-instinct for life, turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental counter—dogma and counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely anti-Christian. What should I call it? As a philologist and man of words I baptised it, not without some liberty—for who could be sure of the proper name of the Antichrist?—with the name of a Greek god: I called it Dionysian.

Dionysus – an Antichrist, an intercessory-instinct for life. And it would seem as if we’ve reached another dialectical impasse in establishing the King-of-All-Tears as an antichrist to the Christ-figure of Dane Mcgowan. Except that Dane rejects such notions. People variously try to frame Dane as Christ, as Maitreya, as an avatar of the Aeon of Horus, and he rejects every label. Dane, getting well beyond the idea of such singular identities, tells an old mate who he comforts at the end of the world, “Remember it’s all just a mirror we made to see ourselves in. And when the archons come and it all turns inside out with scary miracles. It’s only all the things you left outside when you were building your little house called, ‘me,’ ey.”

Dane does want to collapse the boundaries of self – but look at the tense shift: it’s a mirror WE made. It’s the things YOU left. The monsters come from the singular – the magic mirror, which we’ve previously examined as being a representation of the Body Without Organs comes from US. From the many.

Minkowski space and the eternal

Hermann Minkowski was an instructor of Albert Einstein and the person responsible for the General Relativity conception of four-dimensional space-time. His work posits a perception of time that allows every moment to have always already happened. The work of Einstein and Minkowski overturned the “Presentist” view of time – that past and future don’t exist but instead an ever-moving moment of now – and instead posited time more as a direction or a dimension with a relationship to other dimensions such that it is only really useful to measure relationships between objects. We exist not as individuals moving through a river of time but as the worm-trail of change across the surface of some impossible substrate. In typical fashion, The Invisibles characterizes this substrate as being a cosmic crystal however the specifics of the substrate are less significant than the consequences: that every act has always already happened in full – that the universe is ultimately an object in which our subjective experience of change is one of positionality alone.

This is certainly something we see textually when Dane goes behind the walls of the world with the Blind Chessman and sees his own worm-trail through life. The same visual motif occurs during the denouement when Ragged Robin returns from her journey through time now transformed into an avatar of the AllNow. Within our universe, that holographic projection of two meta-universes, time is a block. There is no need to worry about causality beyond the loop of narrative causality that winds through The Invisibles because everything that ever has or will happen exists simultaneously within the substrate of being.

Before I inferred that Ragged Robin got closer to the truth than King Mob – with all his transpersonal dialectics. Robin’s block time contains all of difference inscribed upon its surface. It is an ever-complexifying topography of difference. But it is, despite this, still reducible to a single thing in the form of the Infinite. And so we make a final turn, now to Sartre.

The infinity of being

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues for a very specific understanding of what being is – specifically he denies the idea of an essence beneath the appearances of being. Instead Sartre posits that being exists of an infinite series of appearances each of which is representative of the object. The object is the infinite totality of those appearances.

Returning to the White Flame Meditation, Mr. Six says, ” Have we yet come even close to a full description of it? Did we even mention that several hundred years ago it wasn’t a chair but a tree?” This infinite series of appearances – the tree, the chair, the shattered ruins of the chair after Elfayed destroys it with a hammer, these are all appearances of being – where Sartre differs from Six and Elfayed is in saying that there is no white flame behind all of them. There is nothing. “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm,” Sartre says. And Sartre’s conception of being becomes thus worm-like – an ever expanding sequence of appearances stretching off into past and future alike. From this Sartre first collapses every binary – every possible approach to the dialectic – down to just this: the binary of the finite and the infinite.

But this is problematic. “If the series of appearances were finite, that would mean that the first appearances do not have the possibility of reappearing. which is absurd, or that they can be all given at once, which is still more absurd,” Sartre says. If the universe of The Invisibles is to be seen as having a unitary being then it is, in fact, constituted of an infinite series of all its own appearances. All these figures, Jack Frost and King Mob, Ragged Robin and Mr. Six, the Marquis De Sade and Edith are rescued from unification in a white flame by dint of each being part of that infinite sequence. Each becomes the site of a little pool of nothingness at the heart of being. Each achieves at least being-in-itself in the process of being an appearance of the universe that you can point to and say, “there is a thing.”

Sartre attacks the Kantian basis of Hegel’s idealism, by arguing for the visceral being of the appearance, “If the essence of the appearance is an ‘appearing’ which is no longer opposed to any being, there arises a legitimate problem concerning the being of this appearing.” There’s no need for noumen lurking behind. This led to Deleuze praising Sartre above all others in “He Was My Teacher,” and championing him as taking the first tenuous steps toward a philosophy affirming difference. The nothingness curled in the heart of Sartean being lies just the other side of the membrane of the Body Without Organs.

And here we finally can begin to talk about how Morrison, too, despite their protestations to the contrary does the same.

We have discussed at some length how The Invisibles uses the metaphor of the sex-act to demonstrate the true-movements of the meta-universes at its core. With the Marquis de Sade we see the coupling. All sorts of scandalous things transpire, many of which are cruel and shocking. Others are hauntingly beautiful. This reaches its crescendo in an act of coitus that initiates the aeon-dominated idealist monster Sir Miles into the truth of freedom and that climaxes in a grail full of tears and the promise of resurrection. There is a disjunction in time and we see the results of this: the arising of the Memeplex, the dissolution of self not into Grof’s transpersonal unity but rather into the disjunction of the machinic. The birth of the universe.

A birth is ultimately a process where one thing becomes two things. There is a mother. There is an organ growing within her – it starts off merely a few cells but over time it begins to change. By the time it reaches the stages of Grof’s Perinatal Matrices, it has begun to divide and then there are two beings. A child cannot be dialectically reduced back to their parents. Take away everything that was the father and everything that was the mother and you will still have something, some unique element of being, remaining and that being multiplies to infinity. Every being becomes a universe in itself.

In No Exit, Garcin remarks that, “Hell is other people.” Sartre, however, was the ultimate champion of freedom. He recognized the infinite potential of a person to be and to be different than they were before. In the Memeplex we see a conception of that freedom. We see echoes of this in King Mob’s dialectical quest for self-recognition and in Lord Fanny’s careful and magic-infused play of gender and identity. And by reminding us that we construct an Other from those things we choose are not US, Dane sees this freedom too. In the last page of The Invisibles, Dane recounts one last lesson from Elfayed (who is one of the two instructors of the White Flame Meditation), “‘We made gods and jailers because we felt small and ashamed and alone,’ he said. ‘We let them try us and judge us and, like sheep to slaughter, we allowed ourselves to be… sentenced. ‘See! Now! Our sentence is up.”

This is the central renunciation of the dialectic. Ultimately there is a ‘us’ a multitude who can no longer be made to endure hell in other people. The universes multiply and the new, the self-aware new arises in a multitudinous “us” away from unity and toward an affirmative difference, toward some great and unknowable future which isn’t a block of predestination. The fixity of Minkowski space-time end at the edge of the universe being born and whatever exists beyond that is something new, something different. The multitudinous many froths out of potential wherever the one is. Each appearance of a being has a being-in-itself in turn, each being is an infinite series of appearances. We can try to dialectically collapse the many into the one all day but ultimately the recursive infinity of difference wins through. If the Invisibles ended in oneness it would be bleak. The final victory of the Outer Church that hates difference, that wants a universe unchanging forever. This is not the ending we achieve. Instead it is far stranger – a recognition of the infinite in every being hiding behind the semblance of idealist unity – but what else but strangeness should we expect for the conclusion of this strange book?