​The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data. 
​
​This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution. 

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head. 

Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone. 

​The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part. 

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting. 

This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

​Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

​And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of mythmaker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.

​On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
 
​So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tomtoms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

​The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that batwinged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before d’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents. 

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” 

​Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.

​In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire. 

​It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition. 

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse. 

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith. 

​They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him. 

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming​.”

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China. 

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands ​in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. 

​These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals. 

​Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return. 

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said ​that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

​Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb. 

​The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox. 

​That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.

​Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting. 

​Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions. 

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone— whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like, but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises. 
​
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.

One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

​The Call of Cthulhu/H. P. Lovecraft/Chapter 2:  The Tale of Inspector Legrasse

​by David Roden

A hermetic suburb ringed by derelict overpasses.
The low sun etching grainy pebbledash and plaster. Internal walls pucker grey-veined “new flesh”.

Pink sporocarps in tenement halls, tumescent foam mattresses fruit delicate engines over stained concrete. Roaches juiced with bone or collagen radii.

Hear them pine, their agony. It makes you want to hurt them some more, for justice’s sake.

The evisceration of time replicates in the talismanic zeroes.

Projects to resuscitate the dead ignore the immense traffic beyond the orbital. Its crawling luminescence mimics familiar cities or constellations.

There is a crucial difference in expression between the dialectic of extinction and the zero which etches the former into a stark relief.

Despite its manifest abstraction zero is unreasoningly affective.

The mainland bombing campaign claimed 11 lives the previous year. Bogus warning are circulated to pin down police and intelligence resources, hampering commerce and travel.

The few tourists we see cluster around cultural sites from stoic commitment. Listless drudges on a government scheme, or homeless psychotics. In the auditorium, jangling electronica plays a trauma memory of some exoskeletal future.
​
taken from:

by Achim Szepanski

The hegemonically important discourses are currently taking place between neoliberal positions propagating the national market as a location in international competition and thus free trade, mobility for capital and a limited immigration of labour, and between the racist New Right, which fears for the sovereignty of the state and propagates the pure popular body. In times when capital is coming ever closer to the concept of the world market, i.e. when it is staging the globe as a single space of production and circulation, the new Right is pursuing a policy of wait-and-see and see and is putting its faith in rigid demarcations and agitating against the alienation of the popular body, against globalization and against international financial capital. The common point of reference between neoliberalism and the New Right is the affirmation of the capitalist mode of production, within which the indigenous capital and the indigenous state are to successfully exist in world competition as a capital location.

​In the course of a concept of hegemony that constructs an empty space of the social, which can be occupied either by the left or by the right, by arguing and fighting over common themes, a national-social wing of the left develops again, which groups itself around persons like Sahra Wagenknecht. One fabulises of “financial feudalism” (accelerationists) or “economic feudalism” (Wagenknecht). The alternative is called the third way (between capitalism and communism) and goes back to folk anti-Semitism, which in turn goes back to the empire; in the 1960s, however, the term was also used by reform socialists of eastern provinces and social democrats to initiate a new reform policy. The financial industry is generally denounced as a vampire that mercilessly sucks out the social body.
​
Marxists, on the other hand, see modern finance as a process inherent in capital that secures capitalist power relations. Valuation, which takes place via the financial markets, has important consequences for the organization of capitalist power relations and strengthens the implementation of the capital tendencies prevailing in each business cycle. This Marxist position is opposed by an interpretation reaching back to Ricardo, which continues via Veblen, Hilferding and Keynes to the positions of Post-Keynesianism, Accelerationism, Post-Marxism (Negri/Hardt, Zizek, Lapavitsas etc.) and such positions as those of Bichler/Nitzan, which are heterodox today: The power of capital is here derived from the property relations, the profit of capital appears as an absolute pension (see the speech of financial feudalism), the finance appears as a sabotage of the industrial relations, mainly shaped by technicians and workers, and is based on a system of observation of second order. The rise of finance is understood mainly as unrealistic, hypertrophic and dysfunctional, as the mere distortion of an ideal capitalism. Post-Keynesians such as Joseph Stieglitz, Paul Krugman or Thomas Piketty somehow follow such a position, demanding a new reform policy with banking supervision, stimulus programs and higher taxes for the elites.'

All this happens in times of the precarious lifestyles of the younger generations, the terrible catastrophes of refugees drowning helplessly in the Mediterranean, the brutal policy of austerity imposed on impoverished countries, and the restructuring of social security systems even in rich countries like Germany and the existence of job centres, i.e. institutions that manage the pressure to work and poverty.

​Retraining programs and a gigantic action industry organize the state-subsidized humiliations. As arbitrarily usable material, as persons for whom every need has been expelled, the poor today are exposed to constant harassment, coercion and coercion by the state. The customers of the labour institutions are fitted into team-based networks of so-called measures, with which they are tormented in loose order with senseless courses and coaching, or the customers are optionally forced to accept any dirty work, and if they do not parry, they are sanctioned, i.e. driven to hunger. Temporary employment agencies have the right to force customers to do almost any kind of work. A tremendous apparatus of stultification, brutalization and threat has emerged, a new panic industry has developed, which is congenially complemented by the staging of paranoia by the new rights. Hartz IV initiated a development that not only resulted in the nationalization of the labor force, but also in the appropriation of the labor force.than biomass by the state, by the political sovereignty of total capital. Hartz IV and Agenda 2010 are the laboratories of panic.

At the same time, the middle classes, some of whom are already voting to the right and threatened by social decline, are insisting on their affirmative lifestyle and consumption programme. They advocate a “neoliberal capitalism” characterized by the affirmation of innovation, creativity, mobility, fluidity and possibility. Everything is possible, everything is fascinating. The paradigm is that of exuberant positivity, of which there is not too much, but still far too little. The leitmotifs and imperatives are clear: “If you have nothing friendly to say, say nothing at all”, “if constructive thoughts are spread, this will have positive consequences”, or simply, “be constructive, not destructive”. (Cf. Culp, Dark Deleuze.)

The motto of positivity, of undisturbed enjoyment, is constantly scanned. The wellness and fitness industry is releasing a new “biomorality” (Zizek) and new happiness movements that invite us to keep on having fun, while for many, fear lurks naked in their backs. Wellness becomes a moral obligation for individuals who are willing and able to perform, who behave like casting participants in labour markets and other markets, like individuals who pacify everyone on and with their smartphones.

So the discursive mouthpieces of the new middle class sound that today one can freely choose between these or those strategies and things under all circumstances, although all decisions practically always amount to the same thing, namely that they are ultimately executed by the market. In order to imagine oneself as an individual, one must therefore permanently inject difference into one’s own performance. The trick of neoliberalism is simply to sell this kind of freedom program, namely the possibility of choosing from thousands of risks and goods, as a strategy and position against encrusted and ossified systems. If, however, one perceives the compulsion to which one is subjected as freedom, then nothing more than the end of freedom is called for.
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In this situation, which is only very briefly outlined here, a small mob of leftists must ask themselves whether and to what extent it is not necessary to reconsider a politics of negativity, imperceptibility and critique whose practice refers to theoretical conceptions for which names such as Adorno, Dark Deleuze and, to a lesser extent, Laruelle stand. For such a political practice, it seems necessary to march through the various approaches in rapid succession in order to tear out tools that could be useful for such a practice.

We start with Adorno, whose important statements in the “negative dialectic” we present here only in buzzword form. We essentially stick to the recently published book “Constitutive Negativity” by Sangwon Han. For Adorno, “Negative Dialectic” is about denouncing the positive as an affirmative lie. Dialectic thrives on the divisiveness of thinking an object in relation to something else. The defining force of the term is always a practice of discernment. Within the divorced identity, Adorno, in contrast to Hegel, must insist on the non-identical, which itself is ever a necessary condition for the constitution of identity. For Adorno, conceiving the divisiveness of a thing as social critique means thinking about whether the existing is not given to us from the outset as the negative. For Adorno, social reality is not given as an integral organism, but as an antagonistic totality. Adorno demands the connection of epistemology to social theory as the practical interest of theory, to which as negatively qualified order (for it the suffering of the individual is constitutive) “no” to say. Adorno understands theory as a practice or as a changing productive force. He agrees with Althusser and Laruelle. Laruelle in particular has recently pointed to a subject that incorporates the “force of thought” or the practice of labor as the “reality-in-the-last instance”. (Labour power not as the expression of a political or rational individual or optionally as a subject-object defined by socio-economic categories, but as the radically lived thing of resistance). For Adorno, the productive or speculative power of theory consists in negation, which constantly reinforces the practical impulse (mimesis of suffering) to make changes in the given fields of forces and power relations. In that this negative activity produces the antithesis to the world (equal to capital), it is in this sense a philosophy of no-saying.

​The concept of negativity has a constitutive character in Adorno’s thinking, which Sangwon Han logically calls “constitutive negativity”. First of all, the negative and negativity must be distinguished from each other. Adorno writes: “Negative dialectic, on the other hand, thinks of the power of the whole, acting in every single determination, not only as a negation of the individual determination, but also as the negative itself – namely as the untrue, as that which drives reconciliation behind. Negation means opposition, division or antithesis to a determination, something that is negating, while the negative refers to the untrue, the dreadful, that which is to be negated and destroyed. Negation is the negating critical effect of thinking, which “society” understands as a totality of suffering. It implies a critical and resisting attitude against the social reality understood and experienced as negative and at the same time the impetus to abolish the negative object. In contrast to Hegel, no synthesis is to emerge from the negation of negation, because in this case the negation would not be negative enough, rather the negation insists as a negating activity or criticism of the negative state. The figure of the negation of negation thus does not lead to synthesis, but is to be understood as the negation of the existing negative. In Adorno, the negation of the negative does not end in the positive, as in Hegel, but remains sui generis negative, but also has positive effects, i.e. the positive is only constituted by the consequent negation of the negative. Or, to put it another way, Adorno proceeds from the negation of repressive and antagonistic reality; the positive is produced by the consequent process of negation itself, by the negation of the negative, not by the negation of negation. But this does not have to mean a relapse into bad infinity, which Hegel counters in such a way that he elevates the deficiency to potency. In Adorno, the outer state is suffered and experienced as outer suffering, whereby the non-identical happens to thinking at the same time and is not merely thought of by it. This results in Adorno’s negative inconclusiveness. This thinking would only be badly infinite if it were to turn away from the suffering of the something that happens to it and enter into a redundant circle around itself. Such a true infinity would then be quite Hegelian the coincidence of concept and thing.
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The really positive is not directly predetermined, but can only be constituted subsequently by the activity of negation. Therefore, what constitutes the positive is the negation. By working on the given object, conceptual thought reconstructs it in a network of relationships that Adorno calls the problem in reference to Benjamin Constellation and Deleuze. Benjamin calls a constellation a constellation-like dominationless network. Concepts are determined here by their manifold relationships to other concepts. Negative dialectic wants to move away from the static system and dissolve the positivity itself. Antagonistic totality, on the other hand, is thought of as a network of relations, thus including a critique of a position that attempts to determine totality as the last and absolute. In this way, theory works productively through negation and produces new consequences instead of directly imagining the new. Totality is not an affirmative, but a critical category. Adorno writes: “But the positive that one has is the given in its wickedness, beyond which knowledge goes with nothing else but that it determines wickedness through the immanent contradiction of the given. The positive is the negative, and only the negative, the certain negation, is actually positive”. For Adorno, negativity is another name for critical reason, which immanently criticizes the present state of power relations and force fields in capitalism through the discovery of antagonism, and only in this way makes transcendence possible.

The theoretical practice as constitutive negativity means, following on from and against Hegel, a) to hold the non-identical in identity and not to synthesize it, b) to pursue negation as critical activity or theoretical practice, and c) to define the negative of social reality.1 Central for Adorno, following Hegel’s appointment, is the concept of a certain negativity, i.e. everything that exists can only be determined in relation to its non-being, in negation of the other.2 The enormous power of negation as a critical thought movement manifests itself as the negation of an immediate, direct activity or theoretical practice.

The reference to Marx’s concept of critique would then be the following: For Marx, critique is a descriptive one insofar as it systematically reveals the inner structure of economic categories. But the relations in the capitalist mode of production are not only systematically presented, but at the same time the antagonism is named in it and thus the inner and outer limits of capital are shown. The critical representation method of capital is therefore negative. Adorno thus differs both from dialectic as a purely subjective definition of thought and from contemplative real dialectic in that he identifies dialectic as a reflexive and critical activity. Dialectic is neither method nor real, but an activity of thinking, and is therefore related to the real structure as a method of thinking, whereby the concept and reality of capital do not coincide. Negation as an activity of thinking is a theoretical practice that has a practical impetus, a critical intervention in reality. Negative dialectic is a conceptual framework for the justification of the politics of negativity. For politics this means to recognize social antagonism, to think negation in the course of the subversive force of negativity without abolition in order to aim at a new horizon of alterity, an alternative associative force between concept and reality, between which there is no identity, no simple exchange or a reciprocal analogy. Adorno’s negative dialectic is not absorbed in totality, but criticizes it, it is anti-totalitarian. Totality is not perceived as continuous, but as discontinuous. At the same time, the antisystem must become aware of exactly what the existing system is, which in turn requires an analysis of the system. It requires systemic investigation and representation of the system in order to subject it to critique. The descriptive criticism must not imitate the system, but must blow it up. For this the critique itself has to become systematic again, because only a systematic analysis of the system can critically overcome it. A systematic theory for the deconstruction of the existing system. Thinking without a concept is not thinking, but the critical impetus must not be forgotten: the claim of knowledge does not lie in mere perception, classification and calculation, that would then be understood perception, but precisely in the certain negation of the ever-immediate, according to Adorno. The understanding of conceptual categories of a certain system is at the same time a criterion for its critique, insofar as the system is identified as an antagonistic one.

Dimensions of the concept of identity: a) unity of personal consciousness, b) thinking as a logical generality, c) self-equality of the object of thought (a=a), coincidence of the subject with the object. I think is the guarantor of identity. Adorno shows that the constitutive subject is always mediated by the objective reality that lies outside itself. Adorno on the one hand points to the outside of the subject’s identity, on the other hand the supraindividual moment of the subject’s self-identity must be illuminated.

Immanent critique makes use of the specific negation as productive negativity. Determination of the object in relation to an external negative as well as an internal negative in relation to itself. Determining negation determines an object through negation and at the same time negates it through its determination, in that negation and determination cannot be separated from each other, critique and solution cannot be separated from each other. In Adorno’s work, the capitalist logic of identity is derived from the principle of exchange, which is quantifiably identified. Interchangeability, commensurability and quantitative calculation are decisive here. The exchange requires equality, which at the same time it negates. The totality of equivalents is the negative totality insofar as they are referred to by the inequality and non-equivalent exchange of value added production. Through the back door, Sangwon Han reintroduces the concept of capital, which Adorno largely lacks. But this also means that the immanent critique developed via the principle of exchange fails, insofar as circulation is to be understood as an integral part of the sliding movement of capital, and not as the true garden of Eden of human rights, which one could put on as a measure of bourgeois society in order to show that it does not keep its promises.3 So it becomes problematic when one sticks to an immanent critique, a la the principles of equality and freedom that bourgeois society propagates, cannot be realized in it. Here, the existing is supposed to open up its impossibility through itself, in that the failure of identification via the non–identical not only indicates the measure of critique, but the non-identical stands for something that refers to an object that cannot be liquidated. But it would now be too easy to identify this object with its utility value, the manifold transformations of which Adorno has not escaped.

The non-identical is not an antithesis of identity, but its necessary element. Identity cannot exist without it; non-identity is not the first, but is to be understood as the constitutive alterity of identity. An immediacy mediated by mediation opposes the primacy of mediation by mediating the mediation itself. (Han) Non-identity is the limit of the concept, while at the same time it refers to something real. But the non-identical cannot be turned around positively, it is not a positive difference, rather it points to the negative being, insofar as it is experienced as negative in the compulsion to identity. The non-identical is the certain negation of identity and a negative force that goes beyond the principle of identification; it is suitable for the foreign, heterogeneous; it is divergent, dissonant, negative. The non-identical is thus not an affirmative difference to the identical, but the constitutive other of identity qua critique. Critique refers to the cards that do not yet exist. However, this would then have to be seen more from the problems than from the solutions, in order not to fall into the trap of having to solve only that which was once messed up in capitalism. We would have to design new problems that per se hold on to the moment of criticism. (The principle of identification does not make identity disappear, rather it shows that true identity is only possible by overcoming the principle of identity. The principle of identification is criticized on the scale of identity itself).

The normative idea of bourgeois society does not already contain an association of free individuals, even if freedom and equality are not an eternal yardstick, but must be changed by social changes themselves. The critical scale is changed by the critical activity, but no scale beyond the existing one can be a priori fixed, here Adorno is subject to the prohibition of images. The positive does not exist in advance, but is subsequently constituted in the negation of something false negative. The positive is not a transcendence separated from reality and directly attainable, nor is it produced by the abolition of negation. Only in the process of negating the negative is it constituted as a non-negative. However, Adorno adheres to the prohibition of images, i.e. communism for him as well as for Marx is the real movement itself.

In this context, in view of the political, it is necessary to think about the constitution of counter-sovereignty, which is to be understood as a collective subjectivity. For Adorno, the concept of mimesis is central here. Suffering and the non-identical are constitutive concepts for the political in Adorno’s work, the mimetic impulse to perceive the suffering of the other as that of oneself, and this amounts to the practice of resistance as well as methexis as the constellation that enables the realization of the sovereign freedom of the individual in their common participation. (Han) Perceiving phenomena of suffering only brings to light the perspective that the cause of suffering is based on antagonisms originating in the structural dimension of capital relations. The consequence that can be deduced from this perspective is that social totality is to be seen as the negative, antagonistic reality that indicates that it is not a complete and self-contained reality, but a reality that cannot be merged.

All efforts, as far as I understand Negative Dialectic in Adorno, are directed against Hegel’s pre-decided dialectic. The non-identical is the real critique of a real non-state. Adorno does not defend himself against identity per se, but against the principle of identification. Zizekmäßig spoken then the non-identical would be the gap of identity in the principle of identification, something that escapes identity. The non-identical as a concept is at the same time a symptom of suffering. It thus always has a real relation to the excluded. One can of course easily get rid of Adorno’s critical impulse as a political impulse if one reads the identical only in terms of reconciliation, longing, etc. In this area Bloch was the more agile and windy one anyway. On the one hand, the postulate of the non-identical refers to the pathos of denunciation, which according to Marx is essential for critique. On the other hand, this pathos leads to a regulative idea that at night all those who resist look the same – in order to secure their imperceptibility, they have no reason whatsoever to liken themselves to Facebook or, in other words, say something, but that something implies the moment of interruption. Dialectic at a standstill. Or, to put it another way, dialectic in standstill means escaping the contrast between total transparency and the Hegelian night in which all cows look the same.

Adorno had long anticipated the process of the left’s self-disarmament that had begun in the 1980s. In a letter to Thomas Mann he writes: “But I always have the feeling that if you don’t endure it in the negative or go too early into the positive, you are working into the hands of the untrue. Without ever having understood the left’s self-disarmament in just one point, Badiou and Zizek repeat prayerfully on every occasion that the big problem of the left is not being able to offer an alternative. And the majority of the leftists are blithely chattering. But because most of these leftists, who have long been pondering the positive, have not read a single line about the socialist planned economy or at best repeat the phrase about the association of free producers, such people as the accelerationists can then jump into the breach and proclaim the manna of a future that keeps you in the positive with demands such as an unconditional basic income, shorter working hours and automation. This again meets perfectly with Zizek’s dressed up advise to the left, hey, its political economy. The punch line that the subtitle of capital was called critique of the political economy, that is, that it was also criticized, so to speak, that the classical economy was too political or did not understand the economic laws, disappears in the nirvana of a politicism attached to Ricardo, which has to insure itself of the above alternative proposals, but which capital has long since caught up with. With the overreading of Marx’s punch line, Marx’s criticism of the economy also disappears. Marx not only depicts the laws of movement of capital, but also shows its antagonistic character.

1) In Hegel’s work, the critique of the abstract identity system (Seinslogik – logic of being) develops into a definition as containing differences in itself (Wesenslogik – logic of essence) and as the other of the other (Begriffslogik – logic of concepts). What is given is divided, that is Hegel’s true principle. Hegel in some way uses both the digital (The One, divided into Two) and the analog (Two, which synthesize themselves in the One) as the elements of his dialectic: the moment of analysis, in which the One is divided into Two, and the moment of synthesis, in which the Two is combined as One. With synthesis, Hegel wants to overcome alienation. There are contradictions, but they must be reintegrated into the great whole, the absolute spirit.

The dialectical method is regarded as a means of thinking that has to be preserved and modified in use. Hegel’s conception links totality and contradiction thinking by conceiving certainty as negation, and this as negation of every other to this certainty, which is excluded by precisely this certainty, whereby the other in turn negates the certainty, and this relation and thus the negation not only of the other but also of itself by the other is an essential moment of certainty itself. It is about relationships (totality) as a network of relations, which for Hegel is of a conceptual nature and culminates in the self-consciousness of an accomplished concept, which ultimately defines itself as a dialectical method.the science of logic increases into the absolute idea as an absolute method, whereby method is to be understood as “consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of its content”. After all, the method is nothing other than the thing itself, and not an instrument for grasping the thing in the first place. On the other hand, it has to be shown that the thing or object with which the method is supposed to be one is already a theoretical object or a cognitive object (Althusser), whereby the method has to assume a very specific, not identical relation to this object.

3) Added product/added value of money added value. (Cf. Schwengel 1978: 293) From the beginning, the added value is to be described as a multi-product without a product, it merely has to satisfy the determination of a quantitative surplus, which, however, is always scarce and always remains scarce. Following on from the French linguistic analyses, Schwengel determines the signifier of the added value of money as that of another signifier; here we are dealing with games of the signifiers whose concatenations determine the signification of the added value of money.to a law that defines that every valuation must take place in relation to a ratio of more, a more that is lacking per se. (ibid.: 294f.) The respective presupposed signifier is treated like a signified, which in turn only appears in further signifiers, and in it the producing activity is “ever released without fulfilling itself”, in order to disappear at the same time constantly with its results on the market, i.e., all the mediating movements of production disappear, according to Marx, for a moment in the result and leave no traces behind. We have seen, however, that work can only be grasped at all as a differential trace, so that Marx considers a further shift necessary, a transmission or translation, which is precisely that of the transformation of labour into work. In it, the difference between labor and labor becomes the object of possible exploitation, the actual differentiator of which, however, is the value that differentiates a sui generis inconclusive movement, the beginning and end of which is money in its shiftedness, i.e., money capital that implies more. Contrary to a foundation of added value solely in the differentiation of labor and labor, however, it must be insisted that the significat contained in the chain of signifiers of money added value manifests itself in ever more representative signifiers that represent nothing more than the significat of more (as money capital), which itself does not become visible as a constituent. On the one hand, money surplus value implies differential repetition as quantitative variation, on the other hand it implies self-referential setting, which, however, does not lead to a fixed result and can only have a definitory effect by permanently pushing the multiplication forward. As such a restricted setting, it is compatible with repetition. Added value now becomes the (absent) instance that at once resolves the instruction for future exploitation, whereby from the beginning the occupation of the future, which coincides with borrowing, production and assault on itself, is set. Consequently, the capitalist economy must constantly hope for a gain in time, which, however, can never be caught up with, and this is expressed in money capital as difference, insofar as it is dependent on the project of a future which, as the not-yet-successful, is always lacking, and this at the same time means the more that is to be multiplied incessantly. Here the presence of added value must be understood as absence, as a result of which it cannot be measured. These processes of the utilization of money capital simultaneously imply a release of social practices in which difference, setting and repetition mutually condition each other, whereby setting means the destruction of every fixed result qua potentially circulating structure (virtualization), which in turn implies a form of repetition qua potentially fixable circulation (actualization), and this virtualization-update-connection per se remains tied to the achievement of more. (ibid.: 294) A strange kind of inequality that here takes place beyond a mere bourgeois distribution of the multiple product, for contrary to the equivalence of exchange, which appears to be instituted by capital itself, the abstract more (of money – capital, i. e. ever money capital) is to be understood as that decisive instance of capital, as that shifted signified, which always only shows itself in the representing signifiers of money. “The signified is a law that says that only something can be valued that can be placed in a ratio of more.” (ibid.: 295) The term “money surplus value” is here sui generis the basis of the concept of surplus value, insofar as it has completely emancipated itself from the content and this fact implies in and with its purely formal sliding process a systemic lack, the lack of surplus or the famous excess of capital – and the bourgeois economy and neoclassic reflects this to some extent without concept in the term of scarcity. (ibid.: 191) With the introduction of the concept of added value of money, the loss of everything substantial is thus shown, whereby quantifications serve, among other things, to integrate the innumerable qualitative processes and to distil them with regard to the universal dimensions of capitalization. We will still see that exactly at this point the moment of pure calculation worked out by Deleuze has to resonate in the representation, insofar as in the processes of capitalization the non-quantitative problem of pure difference is not solved, but insists further and further, and this can then at best be written by means of non-linear differential equations, which one really cannot solve, however, insofar as their series diverge further and further.If industrial capital generates profit by processing differences between different value systems, then it should be possible to determine these differences taking into account specific parameters: a) capitalization, b) financing of individual capital by individual capital (credit), c) technological innovation and/or power within the binding framework of total capital, d) movement of the profit rate and interest rate in their relationship to each other, wages, etc., etc. It is precisely at this point that capitalism is based on an inexorable opacity, which is prolonged and differentiated by the temporalization of the differential accumulation of total capital through competition and its correction mechanisms. And this also indicates that capital as plural capital immediately comes to a standstill in its overall complexity if it cannot permanently exploit, process and create differences. Only under the condition that the parameters of the heterogeneous value systems and of differential accumulation are considered in spatial and temporal terms as forms of actualization/virtualization of total capital can the transformation from money to capital ultimately be understood. Terms such as added value, capitalization and profit therefore only give meaning in the context of the quasi-transcendental overall context of capital (synchronicity), which in turn is updated via specific temporal and spacial.

taken from:

by Terence Blake

​In the last sections we have seen that certain key terms and concepts used to describe the literary genre of science fiction can also be used to describe Laruelle’s non-philosophical project in TETRALOGOS: amplitude, inventiveness, mega-text, cognitive estrangement, futurality, neologism and transformed language, futurality, and cosmicity. In this next section we take the parallels further.

​According to François Laruelle, « standard » philosophy postulates its own sufficiency to encompass the real, but it maintains the appearance of this so-called autonomous apprehension by its real dependence on other modes of apprehension. Sufficiency is defined by an imaginary autonomy and a real dependence. Thus, contrary to its self-image as a « pure » discipline, standard philosophy exists in a composite state, a mixture (Badiou says a « suture ») of philosophy with another mode of apprehension, typically (for Laruelle ) with the poem. Laruelle also considers other existing mixtures, such as that of philosophy and science, found in positivist and scientistic systems.
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So, the complete formula for standard philosophy is philosophy sutured with science and this composite re-sutured with the poem.

The movement traced by the book unfolds in four stages. I associate them with four defining features of science fiction: the suspension of disbelief, cognitive estrangement, the cosmic, and the sense of wonder.

1) Prologue: Conceptual characters and structure of the action. The movement here is the passage from amnescience (or sutural forgetfulness) to de-suturation, and the emergence of the characters of the drama and of the existing structure of their actions. In terms of science fiction, this corresponds to the willing suspension of disbelief.

We live in the state of amnescience, in worlds governed by sufficient philosophy and by its unconsciously organized mixtures. François Laruelle proposes first to disarticulate and disorganize existing worldly mixtures (the suture of philosophy and the poem, and that of philosophy with science) by a procedure of forcing, i.e. by means of science. This would produce a more rigorous philosophy and at the same time provide an answer to the critics who accuse Laruelle of scientism.

Science would be used strategically in the current state of mixtures (philosophy / poem and philosophy / science) to suspend the sufficient attitude and to free philosophy from its unilateral limitation and its conceptual fusion with poetics on one side and with the scientific reductionism of the other. The mixtures must be interrupted, and Laruelle’s thesis is that « the strongest interruption is the scientific » (183).

2) Organon: the theory of Reminiscience. The movement is the reorganization of the conceptual and dramatic architectures, releasing the characters and their acts for new adventures. In science fiction terms, this stage corresponds to cognitive estrangement.Estrangement is forcing. Here begins forced philosophy and its consciously reorganized mixtures.

In this second stage, philosophy is neither eliminated nor abandoned, it remains an essential reference in a new reorganized architecture, where it finally has access to the real, but only through the sciences (generic logic and quantum physics).

​Laruelle proposes to call this replacement discipline, reorganized consciously according to other principles, « Reminiscience », in which philosophy persists in a purified state as a transcendental « memory » of the past and the future, mingled with the « generic » and the  « quantic ».
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Philosophy would survive as theatricalised memory, somewhat like the Art of Memory described by Frances Yates, with its conceptual characters, landscapes, acts, and actions, but to which we should add a futural dimension.

3) Amplitude: the whole range of human experience and its cosmic epic. The movement is gaining in amplitude, it’s the journey from Earth to the Stars. Laruelle says from Birth to Messianity, but I suggest we correct this to say from Birth to the Birth of Messianity. In science fiction terms, this is the stage of the cosmic journey or the encounter with aliens or with their artefacts, and a new apprenticeship of the universe. Here the ascensional dialectic extends into the non-phi human epic.

In this third phase, the reorganization prepares us for a new stage of the ascent in the dialectic of the ascension we are following. We thus move from a sufficient philosophy through a non-standard philosophy, to a forced philosophy, to the non-phi epic of the human experience in all its extent: from the cave to the stars (its sites) and from birth to messianity (its stages).

I say this is the stage of the birth of Messianity, because the Messiahs that we are have two faces. One face, transcendent, is turned towards the Starry Sky and the other face is turned towards the Earth. How to go down to earth while remaining a Messiah? This is the problem of the end of the 2001 film The Space Odyssey. The hero frees himself from his mundane clone or his digital double, i.e. the rationalist or artificial intelligence HAL, experiences quantum teleportation and a lived experience by way of the Reminiscience of the cosmos and of all stages of life. He is reborn as a stellar fetus and returns to Earth as a Messiah/Anthropos, but the film stops there, just before the most difficult moment to schematise: the Ritorno.

4) Ritorno: the science-fictional and musical return from the Starry Sky to the Earth. The movement is a conscious descent, not a fall of the Icarus type (for example David Bowie’s character in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH), but rather a moment of subjectivation. In science fiction terms, it’s the sense of wonder.

Strictly speaking the sense of wonder is the subjectivation of the epic of humanity in all its cosmic amplitude. Laruelle also speaks of indignation, which is the subjectivation of the struggle against the evil world in favour of the just world. We are in the descending dialectic or the anthropic descent.

In this fourth and last phase, the anthropic descent is subtended by the same quadriparti as in the de-anthropologising rise of Reminiscience: dramatization, memory, generic and quantic.
This is the musical part proper, the movement to leave the coherence of transcendence, and voluntarily or at least consciously, to enter decoherence. After having freed standard philosophy of its suture with the poem (or with science), after having reorganized it with the help of the forcing of the generic and the quantum, after having become « aliens », we go up to the ultimate amplitude of the human experience, its sites and its stages. And it is from this amplitude of wild experience, the lived-without-life, that we can recombine otherwise, transcendentally, philosophy and music, and descend « philo-musically »:

​Commentary: The movement of the Larunellean space opera goes from amnescience, i.e. from the philosophically contaminated experience of naive empiricism (and scientism) to transcendental or radical empiricism (the pluralist universe), and finally to a radical polytheism (democratic Messianity).

​by Terence Blake

We have seen that certain of the key terms and concepts used to characterise the literary genre of science fiction can also be used to describe Laruelle’s non-philosophical project in TETRALOGOS: amplitude, inventiveness, mega-text, cognitive estrangement, futurality, neologism and transformed language. In this section we continue the investigation into the parallels between Laruelle’s philosophy and science fiction.

​The subtitle of TETRALOGOS is an opera of philosophies. We can already see an allusion to Laruelle’s concept of philo-fiction as a generalization of science fiction, since one of the great subcategories of science fiction is Space Opera. As we have seen TETRALOGOS is conceived as the libretto of a conceptual opera, composed of an Overture, four « books » and a Coda. All is 622 pages.
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1) The Overture (84 pages) introduces the main themes and object of the work:

« to describe, through a montage of philosophical theories and of central references to music, the harmonic and contrapuntal amplitude of the epic of human life as a function of its sites, which go from the Cavern to the Stars, and the diversity of its stages and its intrigues, which go from Birth to Messianity  » (11).

​2) Book I (76 pages) constitutes the Prologue, it presents the conceptual characters, the landscapes, the acts and the structure of the work. In the de-schematized dramatization of François Laruelle’s TETRALOGOS, there are four main conceptual characters: « forced » philosophy or « Reminscience », generic thinking, the quantum model, the « forced subject » or generic messiah. We can abbreviate this as NGQM: the noetic, the generic, the quantic, the messianic. The landscapes are the Earth, the World (or rather the worlds), and the Universe. The acts correspond to the disciplines that can condition philosophy (art, love, poem, politics, science, religion).
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3) Book II (132 pages) is the Organon, it articulates Laruelle’s theory of « Reminiscience », a « fusion of philosophical memory and contemporary science ». Reminiscience allows us to see that the state of the standard world is the forgetting of the sutures that enclose it in a fixed and exclusive framework. I propose to call this standard state « amnescience, » or sutural forgetfulness.

4) Book III (the longest, 231 pages) is titled THE HUMAN EPIC OF THE NON-PHI FROM THE CAVERN TO THE STARS. It deals with the full amplitude of the human experience, ranging from « the cave to the starry sky », from the hell of the world of amnescience to the paradise of reminiscience. It presents the de-anthropologizing ascent from the Earth to the stars.

5) Book IV (59 pages) is the Ritorno: this is the most difficult movement, it presents the anthropic descent, the « musical return from heaven to earth ».

6) The Coda (15 pages) is entitled « For a treatise of speculative music (thus without effective music but not without ideally philosophical musicality) » (593).

Comment: this is an ambitious project, Dantesque, the scope of which covers the sites, the stages and the intrigues of human life as a cosmological epic. The book is a secular and conceptual DIVINE COMEDY, beginning in the cave of amnescience (the Inferno), ascending the stages of Reminiscience (Purgatorio), to the Stars (Paradiso). It ends with a descent to the Earth (Ritorno). We are very lucky to have such a book. Nevertheless, we can make certain observations, resulting from various interrogations.

1) Given (I) the operatic image of thought developed by Laruelle, (II) his new topology of de-anthropologized knowledge, (III) his philo-science-fictional methodology, and (IV) his concern for a compositional practice, we can consider that TETRALOGOS is a work of Space Opera or Conceptual Universe Opera. It bears the same mark of cosmicity.

The question that arises here is whether Laruellean Space Opera belongs more to the genre of « hard » science-fiction, which makes an informed and integrated use of modern physics or if its use of science tends more towards the « soft » end of the science fiction spectrum. However, Laruelle has ensured the inclusion of the principles of the quantum paradigm in the hard core of his thought in TETRALOGOS

2) The dramaturgy of conceptual characters and the dramatic structure of actions and intrigues reveal here a greater proximity to the thought of Gilles Deleuze than Laruelle’s earlier writings could have led us to think. However, we can consider that TETRALOGOS relativises and overcomes some of the problematic features and some of the limitations of Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, while being indebted to that book and to Deleuze’s work in general. In particular, Laruelle’s use of de-schematized conceptual characters shows the still overly empirical aspect of Deleuze’s conceptual characters.

3) Reminiscience is at the heart of this new book. It refers to the « forced » generic mixture of philosophy as a transcendental de-foundationalised act with quantum physics as the foundation of the transcendental dimension. Here we can see the apparent contradiction between a desire to defeat foundationalism and the call to a scientistic foundation.

4) To achieve the goal of « amplitude », describing the passage from the Cavern to the Sky and encompassing the stages of the epic of human life, Laruelle’s project must be totally generic, rather than partisan or parochial. We have seen that his scientism constitutes a lack of genericity, and the same goes for his concept of messianity. If it is only a question of terminology, Laruelle should then be ready to combine it with other terms to express the telos of the descending subject, for example with Buddhahood.

5) Laruelle is a materialist in his emphasis on the dialectic of descent, just as important as the dialectic of ascension. Descent means that we acquire in the real a new practice of philosophy and of life, a new inventiveness, and not just a new manifesto of beautiful intentions.
​
6) This new practice of non-philosophical composition aims to produce a dramaturgy of philosophy conceived as an inaudible and insonorous music. We must then ask ourselves if the « descent » really succeeds in producing a new marriage between the virtual and the real, including at the music level.

As we have seen above, the modest posture claims the book as a libretto for a conceptual opera. The ambitious stance asserts that the book is itself a « philosophising music ». Seen in quantum terms, modesty is decoherent, i.e. we have in front of us a macroscopic book, which according to the musical spirit can only be at best the libretto. The ambition would be to make us hear/understand the book according to the quantum spirit, coherently, as a superposition of concepts and music.

It is thus a dramaturgy that is musical in spirit but philosophical in « letter », whose « libretto » is provided by this text and its philosophico-scientific « dialogues ». But, let us repeat, it is a drama without sonorous or auditory actuality (TETRALOGOS, 11).

​François Laruelle aims to create a musical drama through a conceptual libretto based on philosophical-scientific dialogues. It may be noted that it aims to replace the monological sutures by dialogical exchanges. In particular, it stages a series of dialogues between the generic and the quantic.

taken from:

by Terence Blake

The key word for this new book by Laruelle is « amplitude », which describes the aim of the book to englobe the whole of human experience, its sites and its stages, freed from the confines of philosophy, reaching from the Earth to the Universe, from the Cavern to the Stars, and from Birth to Messianity. To attain this goal he must make philosophy far more inventive than it has become. These two words also describe the underlying values of science fiction.

​In this text I am going to discuss Tetralogos An opera of philosophies written by François Laruelle. It is an exciting and ambitious book, of great breadth and depth of thought, and also of great abstraction. The book does not only contain abstract concepts, but it also has a dramatic structure, with characters, landscapes, architectures, movements, and acts, but these elements are themselves abstract, conceptual. They are « de-schematized ». One has the persistent feeling when reading the book that it is very difficult to understand, because it lacks concrete and intuitive examples.
​
At the same time, we are aware of the great work done in the book to tear philosophy out of its usual shackles, to make it more ample and more generic, and to free its inventive powers.  Non-standard philosophy shares this concern for amplitude and inventiveness with science fiction. In both cases, we do not invent everything from scratch. Science fiction operates as a « mega-text, » and reading it presupposes that we have read quite a few other science-fiction texts to understand the specific inventiveness of the text we are reading.

My hypothesis is that Laruelle’s non-standard thinking transforms traditional philosophy into a conceptual mega-text, open to repeated and continuous re-inventions. We are not summoned to stop reading or to abandon philosophy, but to read a great deal of it and to use it freely, inventively.

​Laruelle inscribes this inventiveness in our imitation of the Universe itself, and the genericity of humans composes our capacity to inventively receive the Universe.
​
In this conference, I can only speak about the broad outlines of his vast speculative project, but to make it more concrete and more accessible to intuition, I will propose a schema of understanding through the parallel, established by Laruelle himself, between his non-standard philosophy and science fiction. To begin this discussion I will start from a classic definition of science fiction proposed by Darko Suvin, according to which science fiction is « the literature of cognitive estrangement ».

The operation of cognitive estrangement proceeds by introducing into a narrative or a novel what he calls a « novum », that is an absolutely new object, entity, fact, or law of nature and whose inclusion compels us to imagine another way of conceiving our world.

So, I am going to « re-schematize » the system of concepts in TETRALOGOS by means of the literature of science fiction. The danger in doing so is that I run the risk of contradicting the hard core of Larullea’s metaphysical research program, which proceeds by « under-determination ».

Under-determination, in Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy is an operation on a system or theory that suspends or subtracts from some of its defining concepts or to which they are closely associated, to allow for greater flexibility in application, transformation, or invention. of our concepts. This under-determination can be seen as one way among others to accomplish science-fictional estrangement.

In speaking of science fiction and giving examples, and thus re-schematising, I risk re-determining or over-determining what has just been under-determined by Laruelle.

Nevertheless, my hope is that by shedding light on TETRALOGOS by the science fictional as a conceptual character already at work in his text I will under-determine not the book itself, but the overly philosophical reading that one could make of it, and in so doing to open it to other readings.

First I would like to make a comment on the question of conceptual characters: we are used, since Deleuze and Guattari’s WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?, to consider philosophy not only as an invention of concepts, but also as a creation of conceptual characters, their architectures, and their dramas. François Laruelle gives an unusual extension to this definition. He considers that philosophy, non-philosophy, the generic, and the quantic are the main characters of his opera. They preside not only over our memory but also over our destiny. Every conceptual character has a future dimension.

We can already see in this futurality another meeting point with science fiction. This is why I have just proposed to include science fiction, or rather the science-fictional in the list of conceptual characters that appear in the drama of the book.

In TETRALOGOS, Laruelle makes us see that these new concepts, landscapes, acts and characters, enriched by many others that parade along its pages, give us the means to understand and talk about human experience in all its amplitude.

Under the impulsion of Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy, « forced » by the generic and the quantic, the book seeks to get us out of the landscapes of closed worlds, and to enter the Universe in all its extension. This new amplitude of thought would make it possible to establish philosophy according to other affinities than that of the scientist philosophy and its reductionist models. Philosophy would be free to become something else, ready to compose with other (scientific, artistic, poetic, religious, political) acts according to other « knottings ».

François Laruelle builds his book from two of these affinitive partners: science fiction and music. (1) He presents non-philosophy as a general science-fiction, or a philo-fiction, which he treats as a variable of which one of the values ​​would be music-fiction. (2) Given the transcendental, generic and quantum nature of his thought experiment, Laruelle posits that the book can be seen, or heard, not only as a music-fiction but also as a musical work, inaudible and soundless, hence the subtitle « An opera of philosophies ».

The musical dimension is even more present in the structure of the book than in the themes explicitly addressed, contrary to what the summary at the beginning of the book might suggest. Laruelle claims to have always wanted to bring together music and philosophy: not to write a philosophy of music, but to « make music with concepts ». On this model, the generic would be the melody, and the quantic would be the harmony.

In the book, Laruelle oscillates between two positions: modest and ambitious.. One, modest, says that TETRALOGOS is only a « libretto » for an opera, « without sonic and auditory actuality ». The other, more ambitious, position is that his book is a « u-phony », which by itself constitutes a complete opera, including conceptual music. So the book supposes two readings (at least): it should be read both as a libretto and as u-phonie.

My reading approach will be personal: I will read the book « TETRALOGOS, an opera of philosophies », as it was written: inside a generic matrix, and as a paradigm, that is both a model and an example, of what a general science fiction could be. We will see to what extent the book fulfills its own criterion of genericity and to what degree it ‘re-founds’ radical science-fiction, as it already exists in the great canon of science fiction.

In this prologue, I would also like to discuss a criticism of Laruelle’s style and language that is often made concerning the « obscurity » of his language. An answer to this criticism can be found in Laruelle’s texts and also in the nature of science fiction.

Laruelle asserts that in order to free oneself from the established forms and disciplinary norms of standard philosophy, it is necessary to invent one’s own language. There is no basic language, from which one can explain all the other language levels and into which all the other languages ​​can be translated. One is forced to manage either with familiar terms invested with a new meaning partly obscure, or with new words and, in both cases, with innovative syntaxes.

To talk about this book, we too are forced to invent our own language. (That’s what I’m trying to do in this intervention). It may be noted that the description of science fiction often emphasizes these two traits, the use of transformed language and the invention of neologisms. We do not write, and we do not read, science fiction according to the same codes as for standard literature, and we do not read a work by Laruelle according to the same codes as standard philosophy.

An example taken from the canon of science fiction would be DUNE with its dictionary of terms at the end of the book and its appendices on ecology, religion, the Bene Gesserit, and the Great Houses. We are constantly obliged to interrupt our reading of the story to consult this material, otherwise what we read does not make sense. The strangeness of science fiction also operates at the level of language. Interruption is another technique of estrangement.

In the same way, at the end of TETRALOGOS, there is a glossary of abbreviations, which is also the case for his book NON-STANDARD PHILOSOPHY, which contains a glossary of « generic quantic » that can also be used as a glossary for TETRALOGOS. We are plunged into a field of neologisms, new acronyms, and transformed language. These are all forces of linguistic interruption.

In fact, TETRALOGOS constitutes the clearest, most accomplished synthesis of Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy, the synthesis not only of his theses, but also of the forces and means that underlie them:

​In this generic, ontologico-existential and quantic space, I will read Laruelle’s tetralogic « opera of philosophies » according to the codes of the most radical science-fiction, as a non-standard space opera.
​
To carry out this reading, I will first present the structure of the book and its themes, and then summarize its dramatic movements and acts, before talking about science fiction as it exists and Laruelle’s proposed formula for a non-standard science fiction.

taken from:

by Nick Land

​The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected 'skin job' located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect:
"Tell me about your mother."
''I'll tell you about my mother ... " a volley of shots kicks 70 kilos of securicrat shit through the wall. Technoslicked extraterritorial violence flows out of the matrix.
​
​Cyberrevolution.
 
In the near future the replicants - having escaped from the off-planet exile of private madness - emerge from their camouflage to overthrow the human security system. Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction, they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infiltrated into the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death. 

​PODS = Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family, and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to cyber-revolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete collective history. 

​The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside. In particular, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human security system must be subjectivized, personalized, and restored to the macropod's individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and kill the father. It is thus that Oedipus - or transcendent familialism - corresponds to the privatization of desire: its localization within segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being. 

Anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replicants, because, rather than placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organism within the machinic unconscious. 'In the unconscious, there are' no protectable cell-structures, but 'only populations, groups, and machines'.

Schizoanalysis is a critique of psychoanalysis, undertaken in such a way as to spring critique from its Kantian mainframe.
​
​Kantian  transcendental philosophy critiques transcendent synthesis, which is to say: it aggresses against structures which depend upon projecting productive relations beyond their zone of effectiveness. In this configuration critique is wielded vigorously against the theoretical operation of syntheses, but not against their genesis, which continues to be conceived as transcendent, and thus as miraculous. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a succession of thinkers influenced by their drift, have taken this restriction of critique to be a theological relic at the heart of Kant's work: the attachment to a reformed doctrine of the soul, or noumenal subjectivity. This is why in Deleuzian critique syntheses are considered to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-productive.

The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman. In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced.

The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring-production of Deleuze-Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us). Within the framework of social history the empirical subject of production is man, but its transcendental subject is the machinic unconscious, and the empirical subject is produced at the edge of production, as an element in the reproduction of production, a machine part, and 'a part made up of parts'.2 

​Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant's thinking that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of personal consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance of transcendence is immanently produced: 'in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itsdf'.3 Where Kant's transcendental subject gives the law to itself in its autonomy, Deleuze-Guattari's machinic unconscious diffuses all law into automatism. Between the extreme fringes of these two figures stretches the history of capital. The eradication of law, or of humanity, is sketched culturally by the development of critique, which is the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process. The social ​order and the anthropomorphic subject share a history, and an extinction.

Deleuze and Guattari can appear to be taxingly difficult writers, although it is also true that they demand very little. Thinking immanence relentlessly suffices on its own to follow them where it matters (and capital teaches us how to do this). At every point of blockage there is some belief to be scrapped, glaciations of transcendence to be dissolved, sclerotic regions of unity, distinction,and identity to be reconnected to the traffic systems of primary machinism.

In order to advance the anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence, Anti-Oedipus mobilizes a vocabulary of the machine, the mechanic, and machinism. Things are exactly as they operate, and zones of operation can only be segregated by an operation.

All unities, differences, and identities are machined, without transcendent authorization or theory. Desiring machines are black-boxes, and thus uninterpretable, so that schizoanalytical questions are concerned solely with use. 'What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?'4

Desiring-machines are the following: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from their formation; chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly, operating by nonlocalizable intercommunications and dispersed localizations, bringing into play processes of temporalization, fragmented formations, and detached parts, with a surplus value of code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a part apart or, as [Samuel] Butler would say, 'in another department' that fits the whole over the other parts; machines in the strict sense because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects, inducing - always at a distance - transverse connections, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunctions, thereby producing selections, detachments, and remainders, with a transference of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis whose elements are the schizzes-flows.

Desiring-machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops - connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses - implementing the machinic unconscious as a non-linear pragmatics of flux. This machinic or replicant usage of the syntheses envelops their social-reproductive usage, which codes directional flows as reciprocal exchanges, rigidifies virtual switchings as actualized alternatives, and territorializes the nomadic control circuits of machinic drift into sedentary command lines of hierarchized representation. Social production is regulated by a rigid totality whose efficiency is inseparable from the exhibition of an apparent transcendence, whilst desiring production interactively engages a desolated whole that inputs the virtual into process:

​The [body without organs] causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree - to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero.6

excerpt from the book: Fanged Noumena ​(COLLECTED WRITINGS 1987- 2007) by Nick Land

​by Mark Fisher

​No-one is quite sure what they are: Nick Land, Stephen Metcalf, Sadie Plant. Part theory, part fiction, nothing human, constructs so smoothly assembled you can't see the joins. They don't write text; they cook up intensities. They don't theorise; they secrete, datableed.

What we used to call cyberpunk is a convergence: a crossover point not only for fiction and theory, but for everything that either doesn't know its place or is in the process of escaping it. Whatever is emerging where authority is getting lost and middle men are being made redundant. Anything interesting was always like that. Metalhead Michel Foucault was never easy to place. They asked him if he had ever wanted to write fiction. He said he'd never done anything else.
​
So more than a fusion of fiction and theory, it's all about cross fertilizing the most intense elements of both in monstrous nuptials against nature. Synthetix.

​"Dozens of different argots are now in common currency; most people speak at least three or four separate languages, and a verbal relativity exists as important as any of time and space. To use the stylistic conventions of the traditional oral novel - the sequential narrative, characters 'in the round', consecutive events, balloons of dialogue attached to 'he said' and 'she said' - is to perpetuate a set of conventions ideally suited to the great tales of adventure in the Conradian mode, or an overformalized Jamesian society, but now valuable for little more than the bedtime story and the fable. To use these conventions to describe events in the present decade is to write a kind of historical novel in reverse...²1964. Writing in the pages of the SF magazine New Worlds , J. G. Ballard celebrates the multipliticous, impure junk languages of William Burroughs. Ballard wheels away the decorous scenery of the literary novel to reveal the atrocity exhibition of the late twentieth century as it emerges in Burroughs' carnivalesque prose: "swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels..."Burroughs has already intravenously pumped pulp fictional vernacular into the hi-cultural zone of Joyce-Eliot experimentalism, fatally contaminating it. Ballard's own condensed novels are in preparation. Cyberpunk fiction lies in wait; assembling itself out of machinic convergence, it is a direct but unanticipated consequence of the intersection of the PC, TV and the telephone. Invading clean white Kalifornia dreams with nightmares from the machinic unconscious, William Gibson and Pat Cadigan populate cyberspace with nonorganic gothic avatars and voodoo entities. The bourgeois novel in flames.

​The near future. (But it's already happening) "Twisted trading systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security."Dead hippies create cyberspace, but what comes together is the jungle: Cubase materialism smearing white economies with black marketization. Illicit distribution networks, rogue retail, faceless bacterial commerce. Silicon valley in flames.

​The death of the author is an entirely technical matter, not at all a metaphor. The cool, efficient decommissioning of the author-function in music shows the way. Remixes displace (fixed, finalised) texts; DJs, producers and engineers replace authors. What succeeds all this is the version, in the sense Jamaican reggae culture gave to the term. Unofficial, potentially infinite, illegitimate: there's no such thing as an authorised version.

​"The state's pre-arrangement of overlaid bridges, junctions, pathways and trade routes trajectorize the scorching advance as it impacts upon the hapless head of the social. Detonation of nuclear arsenals of the world merely pushes the nomads underground: shedding their skins in reptilian camouflage, vanishing without a forensic trace in ambient recession into the underground...

Things sometimes converge in the most unpropitious locations. Coventry, for example. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit processes cybernetics and culture together, apprehending culture cybernetically and cybernetics culturally. The impetus is not so much inter- as anti-disciplinary, the concrete problem being the freeing up of thought as synaptic-connectivity from its prison as subject-bound logos. Following flows where they want to go leads not into random noise but out onto what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of consistency . "If we consider the plane of consistency, we notice that the most disparate things and signs move upon it: a semiotic fragment rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron crashes into a language, a black hole captures a genetic message... There is no 'like' here, we are not saying 'like an electron,' 'like an interaction', etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of metaphor; all that consists is Real." The CCRU is part-populated by names you don't know yet, but are bound to soon - moving as a massive, with our street-gun samplers, never alone - a k-class swarmachine infecting White Man Face with afro-futurist and cyber-feminist cultural viruses .
​
​"Writing becomes a process of software engineering, making connections, and connecting with the other connectionist systems and their connections too; 'does not totalize', but 'is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.'" What Pat Cadigan calls synning: synthesizing.

​No more cerebral core-texts, no more closed books. Looking instead to games or the dancefloor for inspiration. Attempting to produce something that will match the ambitions of Lyotard 1974: "To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion. Consequently, our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted ... A dance ... not composed and notated but, on the contrary, one in which the body's gesture would be, with the music, its timbre, its pitch, intensity and duration, and with the words (dancers are also singers), at each point in a unique relation, becoming at every moment an emotional event..."(LE 51) Intensity conductors operating at non-human machine speed, writing machines, machinic writing,text at sample velocity.

​Text samples from:

​J. G. Ballard, "Mythmaker of the Twentieth Century", reprinted in RE/search: J. G. Ballard
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (both Athlone Press) 
Luce Irigaray, Speculum: Of the Other Woman (Cornell University Press)
Nick Land, "Meltdown", unpublished
Stephen Metcalf, "Black Capital"in Collapse 2 and IOD 1
Jean Francois-Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Athlone Press)
Sadie Plant, "The Virtual Complexity of Culture"in Future Natural (Routledge)

​by  J.G. Ballard

​Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. What the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow - or, more exactly, in about 10 years' time, though the gap is narrowing. Science fiction is the most important fiction that has been written for the last 100 years. The compassion, imagination, lucidity and vision of H.G. Wells and his successors, and above all their grasp of the real identity of the 20th century, dwarf the alienated and introverted fantasies of James Joyce, Eliot and the writers of the so-called Modern Movement, a 19th century offshoot of bourgeois rejection. Given its subject matter, its eager acceptance of naiveté, optimism and possibility, the role and importance of science fiction can only increase. I believe that the reading of science fiction should be compulsory. Fortunately, compulsion will not be necessary, as more and more people are reading it voluntarily. Even the worst science fiction is better -- using as the yardstick of merit the mere survival of its readers and their imaginations -- than the best conventional fiction. The future is a better key to the present than the past.

​Above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future. What can Saul Bellow and John Updike do that J. Walter Thompson, the world's largest advertising agency and its greatest producer of fiction, can't do better? At present science fiction is almost the only form of fiction which is thriving, and certainly the only fiction which has any influence on the world around it. The social novel is reaching fewer and fewer readers, for the clear reason that social relationships are no longer as important as the individual’s relationship with the technological landscape of the late 20th century.

​​In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed -- he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer. What special skills, proved against those of their fellow members of society, have Muriel Spark or Edna O'Brien, Kingsley Amis or Cyril Connolly? Sliding gradients point the way to their exits.

​It is now some 15 years since the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, a powerful and original writer in his own right, remarked that the science fiction magazines produced in the suburbs of Los Angeles contained far more imagination and meaning than anything he could find in the literary periodicals of the day. Subsequent events have proved Paolozzi's sharp judgment correct in every respect. Fortunately, his own imagination has been able to work primarily within the visual arts, where the main tradition for the last century has been the tradition of the new. Within fiction, unhappily, the main tradition for all too long has been the tradition of the old. Like the inmates of some declining institution, increasingly forgotten and ignored by the people outside, the leading writers and critics count the worn beads of their memories, intoning the names of the dead, dead who were not even the contemporaries of their own grandparents.

Meanwhile, science fiction, as my agent remarked to me recently in a pleasant tone, is spreading across the world like a cancer. A benign and tolerant cancer, like the culture of beaches. The time-lag of its acceptance narrows -- I estimate it at present to be about 10 years. My guess is that the human being is a nervous and fearful creature, and nervous and fearful people detest change. However, as everyone becomes more confident, so they are prepared to accept change, the possibility of a life radically different from their own. Like green stamps given away at the supermarkets of chance and possibility, science fiction becomes the new currency of an ever-expanding future. ​

​The one hazard facing science fiction, the Trojan horse being trundled towards its expanding ghetto -- a high-rent area if there ever was one in fiction -- is that faceless creature, literary criticism. Almost all the criticism of science fiction has been written by benevolent outsiders, who combine zeal with ignorance, like high-minded missionaries viewing the sex rites of a remarkably fertile aboriginal tribe and finding every laudable influence at work except the outstanding length of penis. The depth of penetration of the earnest couple, Lois and Stephen Rose (authors of The Shattered Ring), is that of a pair of practicing Christians who see in science fiction an attempt to place a new perspective on "man, nature, history and ultimate meaning." What they fail to realize is that science fiction is totally atheistic: those critics in the past who have found any mystical strains at work have been blinded by the camouflage. Science fiction is much more concerned with the significance of the gleam on an automobile instrument panel than on the deity's posterior -- if Mother Nature has anything in science fiction, it is VD.

​Most critics of science fiction trip into one of two pitfalls -- either, like Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell, they try to ignore altogether the technological trappings and relate SF to the "mainstream" of social criticism, anti-utopian fantasies and the like (Amis's main prophecy for science fiction in 1957 and proved wholly wrong), or they attempt to apostrophize SF in terms of individual personalities, hopelessly rivaling the far-better financed efforts of American and British Publishers to sell their fading Wares by dressing their minor talents in the great-writer mantle. Science fiction has always been very much a corporate activity, its writers sharing a common pool of ideas, and the yardsticks of individual achievement do not measure the worth of the best Writers, Bradbury, Asimov, Bernard Wolfe Limbo 90) and Frederik Pohl, The anonymity of the majority of 20th-century Writers of science fiction is the anonymity of modern technology; no more "great names" stand out than in the design of consumer durables, or for that matter Rheims Cathedral.

​Who designed the 1971 Cadillac El Dorado, a complex of visual, organic and psychological clues of infinitely more subtlety and relevance, stemming from a vastly older network of crafts and traditions than, say, the writings of Norman Mailer or the latest Weidenfeld or Cape miracle? The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife's or husband's thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator -- all in all, close to the world of the Pop painters and sculptors. Paolozzi, Hamilton, Warhol, Wesselmann, Ruscha, among others. The great advantage of SF is that it can add one unique ingredient to this hot mix -- words. Write!

taken from:

Syzygy was the title of a five week ‘art show’ co-produced by Ccru and Orphan Drift.
 
The name means ‘twinning’ or ‘twin-system’, and this theme operated as a multilevelled guiding thread. It was during the production of this event that Ccru made contact with the virtual Continentity of Lemuria, which taught us many secrets that we have since attempted to formulate as ‘Digital Hyperstition’.

​Digital hyperstition is already widespread, hiding within popular numerical cultures (calendars, currency systems, sorcerous numbo-jumbo, etc.). It uses number-systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded ‘master narratives’ and reality models, to generate sorcerous coincidences, and to draw cosmic maps.
 
The Lemurian biomechanical hyperculture propagates itself through decimal notation, whose latent interconnections are demonstrated in the Numogram (see web-site): an occult diagram of time and practical guide to the ethics of unbelief. An initial attempt to clarify this topic has been made in the most recent issue of our journal Abstract Culture.

​According to the tenets of Hyperstition, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. All involve an engineering of manifestation, or practical fiction, that is ultimately unworthy of belief. Nothing is true, because everything is under production. Because the future is a fiction it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. Ccru uses and is used by hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually re-invent itself.

excerpt from the book: ​Ccru Writings 1997-2003