This has recently been experimentally demonstrated. The resultant paradigm not only confirms these views of the Void, but also aspects of all the other perspectives. Chaos rules.
But the concept of the Void has more uses than just cosmological dialogues. The whole of existence can be put into the context of the Void, it is the one universal metaphor. It is the ultimate reality. Many have written of it. It is the Chaosmos of Joyce, Mallarme's mime of the imaginary, the sublime Hymen of Derrida and the uterine, Semiotic Space of Kristeva [Fucking name dropper! ED]. It is the only reality to which all concepts refer, the container of all ideas and the ultimate abyss into which they collapse. As the rhizomatic chaos of Deleuze it connects all things, it is the only unity [Ok, ok we get the picture ED].
But back to the everyday. The human value of this view is the freedom it brings. Without it we are trapped within dogmatic truths, logical prisons, limiting worldviews and exclusionist ideologies. Under it we can no longer create binding, deterministic models of the world. Potential lies within every situation, limited only by our imagination and a vastly reduced set of formal conditionals. The Void is the imaginal space of Castoriadis and his Situationist acolytes. It is the seedbed of revolution.
Since Nietzsche, a current has existed that seeks to free itself from limitation and oppressive structures.
This is has proved not to be easy (certainly not as easy as say, the dreamy optimists of 60's counter culture believed), the extreme experimentation of Foucault and his followers have shown us the barriers that need to be broken through. But the struggle goes on, and not without some personal successes. The bourgeois bastille is beginning to crumble.
Nietzsche came up with the ultimate symbolism for this process, of personal and social liberation, when he writes of a time to leave the safety of 'dry land', get 'on board ship' and voyage out 'into uncharted seas'. He makes good use of the traditional metaphor of the Ocean, as Chaos and the Void, throughout his works. Ultimately his mission is to find 'new land' across this imaginal Ocean, or die in the process, but it was the journey and the Ocean itself, with all its potentials and dangers, which fascinated him most of all. Elsewhere he refers to his lonely strolls in the mountains in the same vein, using this as a 'transcendental' metaphor. But his most influential symbolism arose when he combined these two ideas (perhaps under the influence of the contemporary popularity of Jules Verne) into theimagery of the 'aeronauts of the spirit'.
It was not a great leap of the imagination for 20th century intellectuals influenced by Nietzsche to extend this symbolism into its ultimate form. The journey beyond Earth itself into deep space. Some of the first manifestations of this were amongst the Russian nihilist and anarchist artists of the turn of the century, who saw space (as the region beyond the atmosphere) as a zone of absolute freedom, or even the locale of the sublime. This latter view influenced the Russian anarchist artist Malevich, who wrote of 'breaking the blue boundary of the sky' and a 'swimming in the sea of infinity'. Alas, these ideas often contained elements of a mystical essentialism, and it was only in Dada (partly influenced by the earlier Russians) that the Void really began to be presented in art.
Much later the beatnik idol William Burroughs when commenting on the space race restated the metaphor when he said, ''Space is dream … Why move a PX with all your dreary verbal preconceptions to the moon? To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, priest talk, mother talk, family talk, party talk, country talk. You must learn to exist with no religion, no country … You must learn to see what is in front of you with no preconceptions.'' Around the same time the Scottish wing of the Situationist International, Alexander Trocchi, was also playing with the metaphor and declaring himself an 'astronaut of inner space'. These ideas of Burroughs and Trocchi were to have a lasting effect on contemporary counter culture.
Space is the perfect metaphor for the Void. Reaching it certainly isn't easy, even after we have summoned up the courage to leave the safety of a stable world, a considerable amount gravity has to be overcome before we are free of the Earth's strong attraction. Once in space though we enter the free-fall of zero gravity and begin our liberation from terrestrial limitation. An aspect of the metaphor profitably elaborated on by Timothy Leary, who described it as the hedonic conquest of gravity, the 'turn-on' state, comparable with the Zen buddhist metaphor of enlightenment as a ''Floating …. One foot above the ground''. Mystical speculations aside, it is interesting that Leary's other, more scientific, observation, that 85% of astronauts have entered altered states of consciousness as a result of space travel, may mean that space is more than just a metaphor for the Void, or perhaps rather, that it has incredibly symbolic power [But fucking on hash is cheaper. ED]. And certainly the potential inherent in space exploration has real, material consequences as well as symbolic meaning. As groups like the AAA have pointed out in recent years, with their entertaining presentation of both the abstract and concrete significance of space travel.
Another aspect of the space metaphor is that once in free-fall it is very easy to become captivated by the gravitating effects of nearby planets, particularly the one we recently escaped. Even astronauts can get trapped in orbit, a state that may ultimately lead to a very hard fall back down to Earth. Deep interstellar space alone frees us from these gravitational
dangers (though it is only in the intergalactic regions that we are entirely free of significant influence, but here we also lack stars to guide us. And life without ideals is difficult). The Void of space is as much of an abyss as any Void but dangers here are of an extreme sort, ranging from the annihilation of all matter and form in the absolute Void of a collapsed star, through the destruction inherent in approaching too close to an active one, to the alienation, impatient tedium and apparent pointlessness of a decades long journey between two. The worst danger however is the overreaction of the weak spirited to such extreme conditions, and lack of orientation, in the creation of rigid local structures (prophesized in Sci Fi visions of a technocratic and militaristic 'star fleet'). A process that eventually fixates life and throws it into conflict with all that is outside it.
Fortunately no one can live in the Void forever, and the aim here as in all journey's is to reach other worlds. But the emphasis will be on the plural. Whether we choose to live on a new planet orbiting some distant star, an artificial, private space station in permanent orbit around it, in worlds orbiting other stars or travel nomadically between all of these, our alternatives will be endless.
