Our fourth session on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia. This week, we read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and “The Z Crowd” chapter from Cyclonopedia.
Below are notes written to structure my introduction to the session.
This chapter begins with a view of the universe that resonates with Fisher’s ‘Flatline Constructs’, where he wonders “what if everything were as ‘dead’ as the machines.” Life is an exception to the rule. The universe is defined more by unlife than life as we know it. But unlife is not an emptiness. It is a base, a flatline, upon which human life becomes a glorious excess. We know this, unconsciously perhaps. Why else are we so fascinated by zombies — the dead who suffer from an overabundance of life.
We have this dark Spinozism here again, what Ed Berger recently called a Lacanian-Spinozism of the seething void. God-or-Nature is a monstrous expanse of unlife.
There’s also this strange Deleuzian affirmationism going on here. When death is presupposed and survival is distinct from “evading death”, we have a kind of attempt to make oneself worthy of the process.
What’s telling about this, though, is that Lovecraft, despite his white supremacy, writes in his own demise. As Reza points out, via Houllebecq’s book, Lovecraft always makes his “heroes” like him — or, rather, who he wishes he was: white, affluent professors of institutions. This is a habit that Lovecraft picks up from M.R. James, the Cambridge don and English ghost story writer whose most famous stories involve people just like him — highly respected professors at the most prestigous universities — heading out to the Suffolk coast and uncovering curses that ruin them.
It’s an odd tendency, really, when you think about it. M.R. James, for instance, has a famous story called “A Warning to the Curious”, in which this radical Outside Reza talks about is unalive and well. If you want to head for the Outside, do so at your own peril. It’s a sort of dark forest theory of the paranormal. We read abour professors who are victims of their own inquiring nature; who, in the pursuit of knowledge, make themselves known to horrifying forces that they cannot afford.
But Lovecraft takes this a step further when he populates his Outside with grotesque racialised subjects, as if adding insult to injury that these “uncivilised” peoples are better prepared for the outside than the educated bourgeoisie. We see this when Legrasse, the detective in The Call of Cthulhu, comes across the weird rave in the woods. And the downfall of each character in the story is occasioned by their brushing up against a different kind of institution, be it the police or the university or whatever.
But this is precisely the message of Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy. Making yourself worthy of the process doesn’t mean a monastic discipline and study of phenomena and noumena. As soon as you institutionalise — that is, make institutional — the process of philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom as an unending becoming, you will inevitably end up further institutionalised — that is, in the looney bin.
That’s sort of the message here with Reza’s text too and the Aryans. The sense of radical openness pursued by those on the Iran plateau is doomed to failure once this openness is imposed upon them by the institution of empire. The pre-Aryan necromancers and sorcerors are better prepared for the task that the Aryans want to master because they don’t make it into that sort of a practice.
This is, in a way, a form of anti-praxis, and it is as applicable to weird fiction’s strange view of death as it is to U/Acc view of capital. Any attempt to weather the storm through innately conservative institutions is a paradox and a fallacy. This is where “praxis” differs from “a practice”. Praxis is an “accepted practice or custom”, according to one dictionary, and what is acceptance if not institutionalisation.
This is what Reza is gesturing towards when he unearths the fallacy of “survival”. Survival is, by definition, a conservative rather than emancipatory process. It doesn’t hope for the new but the persistence of the same. As a result, the Aryans, in doggedly pursuing their own survival, doom themselves — and this is as true of Reza’s Iranians as it is contemporary neo-Nazis — because they forget how to make themselves worthy of the things that happen to them, they forget how to be opened by, instead finding themselves open to all manner of irrational responses to the uncontrollable proliferation of unlife.
The irony, of course, is that these futile attempts at purity only allow demons in more effectively, but the difference is that this process is mistaken in thinking it is wise. Reza’s is like an appeal to a Bataillean sovereignty in this sense. True sovereignty comes from the offering of sacrifice — not sacrifice in and of itself but, in putting one’s hand on the block, you find yourself far more in control of your own fate. In affirming the threat to your life, you find yourself more in control of it than you would if you tried your damnedest to fight for your own survival.
I wrote a post on this the other day. It’s what we see in the Black Lives Matter movement. In identifying with the deceased, through chants of “I Can’t Breathe”, or in affirming your own helplessness before a higher power, as in “Hands up, don’t shoot”, the movement has found itself channelling even more collective power.
This is the germ Reza speaks to, I think. What do germs do? Their primary function is to proliferate. Germs are crowds. They are collective embodiments of unlife that infect and poke holes in the mistaken wholeness of institutions.
This is oddly why Lovecraft’s stories are useful in their racism. Despite himself, he shines a light on this great power of a subjugated class, which affirms its own existence and channels something other and abjectly unknown, whereas Lovecraft and his “heroes” are impotent in thinking they somehow know better.