The trance provoked by internal and geopolitical tensions, the sombre surveillance under dictatorships, the spectre of the omnipresent Big Brother. All of this gravitates around what can be expressed about instability, the uncertainty of what is to come, or indeed, the certainty of violence as a norm, one that endures. As I write now, news proliferates that young people today venerate the memory of the oppressive protagonists of a past they did not live through — yet a past that is not distant, all the extreme violence of that time still being, in a certain sense, very recent. In the Second World War, the world witnessed the tragic reach of supremacist delirium, fed by the mythic forge of nationalisms, in a terrible alliance between political actors bound together by normative violence in pursuit of an ideal, univocal, totalitarian society with no room for diversity. The sombre sonority in Ligeti captures the meaning of that perilous time, of that presence which remains disturbing in the present.
The concept proposed here does not refer to so-called shamanic trance, nor, properly speaking, to the ecstasy afforded by ritualistic practice or by the experience of the journey — whether, for instance, along a personal or even collective trajectory, with distinct intentions, from healing to the pleasure of a rave. This state, attained through the transcendent experience of certain rituals, or indeed through the voluntary ingestion of hallucinogens — to open dimensional pathways, to expand perceptions of cosmic existence, an experience always transformative for sensitive souls — carries, for that very reason, a liberatory and promising potency, directed against the rigid, oppressive normative systems refined by patriarchal culture and the imperialist entertainment industry.
The trance in the Antropocenica may be translated from the infinite vortex of exploring, extracting, producing, consuming. The word presupposes delirium, like a collective fever, in the social convulsion generated by the dystopia wrought upon the world by a hegemonic way of life — one that encompasses, in the present context of widespread pollution and expanded hybrid wars, the new agent-beings animated by artificial intelligences, the perilous horizon of a catabolic capitalism destined to devour all things, sustained by the justifications of mythic and religious imaginaries (neo-Pentecostal theologies of prosperity and dominion). All of this may be considered under the heading of trance: a sensory state that topples or corrodes the reflexive and critical dimension of the spectacular (non)life of contemporary society, in the Debordian sense.
Historically, it refers to scenarios of sweeping crisis, inherent to every era of transition — such as the one lived through today, in prospective scenes upon the arena-stage of a vast theatre of geopolitical tensions. I perceive the trance of scenes of continuous excitement and anguish, driven by the acceleration (speed, in the Virilian sense) of transformative processes — as expressed by the current wars, the so-called disruptive technologies, the erosion of socio-environmental policies, the rising waves of the new fascisms. This sense of the anthropocenic trance represents the existential crisis that defines our time — a time without time, in a place without place — wherein predatory dynamics accelerate the turn of the dynamics of contemporary (non)life, because they introject instantaneity as a condition, afforded by the technological evolution bound to capitalism, with actors who press for innovation with a view to expanding their profits in a context of intense competition amongst capitalists. Today, Raskolnikov's nightmare in the nineteenth century, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment (F. Dostoevsky), may be read as a portent.
To awaken from this terrible dream-image propagated by the drive of a broader ideology — of the hegemonic civilisatory power that encompasses the totality of the Earth — is both possible and urgent. It will involve struggles on several levels. It will involve dreaming other dreams of freedom: against the erosive neoliberality of the world, against fascisms and delusions of superiority.
To that end, the ecstasy of fertile intercourse with other worlds is one of the most potent weapons — a trip afforded by the arts. In his manifesto Eztetyka do Sonho (1971), Glauber Rocha went further: "uma obra de arte revolucionária deveria não só atuar de modo imediatamente político como também promover a especulação filosófica, criando uma estética do eterno movimento humano rumo à sua integração cósmica / a revolutionary work of art should not only act in an immediately political manner but also promote philosophical speculation, creating an aesthetic of the eternal human movement towards its cosmic integration". In this revolutionary potency, as the Bahian filmmaker envisaged, trance may be understood as an opening to destabilise and overcome any oppressive reason, any colonising rationality with its logic of domination structuring the colonial system — still in force, under other garbs (and weapons), of the contemporary hi-tech imperialism. The eroded Earth, lacerated by the concentration of power in the hands of a few, resulting in poverty disseminated among multitudes — who survive amid industrial waste, in the expanding urban peripheries, amid the devastation of wildlife by the extractivist machine — must be liberated.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro