This week we read Robin Mackay’s essay “A Brief History of Geotrauma”.
I’m having repeat problems with audio recording at the moment — not sure where the problems are coming from (everything was running smoothly before and now it doesn’t want to play ball; I blame this heat wave) but I’ll have these issues figured out soon enough.
So, please be aware that, once again, the desktop audio was not recorded correctly and, unfortunately, most of the discussion was lost. All that has been salvaged is my ramblings, which I’ll cut together into a kind of decontextualised collage (feat. my intro and responses to a couple of questions). There are some jumps here and there but that’s just me cutting out what are now silences and inaudible interruptions. I’ve also included the last sections of our discussion about monster movies and Bob’s obligatory and always helpful signing-off summary.
Below, as ever, is the text used to structure my introduction to the text.
This is quite a straight-forward essay, considering all that we’ve been pouring over in the last few weeks. It covers a lot of distance but hopefully these things that are covered all make sense to people now. It feels less like a cascade of references and perhaps more like a knitting of much of what we’ve read so far.
First, we have Robin sketching out The Invention of Negarestani, half truths and whole lies giving form to this unknown author, extending the reach of the Ccru.
This might just be a pedant’s point to make, but it always surprises me how often Reza is lumped in with the Warwick crowd. Reza was never a member of the Ccru. He was the first post-Ccru avatar, discovering their writings online, after the fact, and building on top. Reza just how a blog, hosted on some obscure German server mostly used for pornography, and found himself entangled in these unfurling personas.
I think Robin clarifies why that’s important here. It’s important that Reza was an outsider who discovered Land and the Ccru not unlike the rest of us did, by following breadcrumbs. Whenever I see someone talk about Reza as part of the Ccru, folding him into that moment in a British university whilst he was, in fact, far away in Iran, I feel like some of the magic has been lost. Reza is the outsider. He’s not like the others and that’s why he matters.
We can put it this way: the Ccru weren’t canon. They were philosophical or literary or cinematic canon in any respect. They were a Thing that emerge from a combining of all this cultural pulp, like a Swamp Thing. But they found a certain amount of fame. Reza was someone who kept their momentum going along a new vector. The Ccru weren’t canon but they became a canon of their own. Reza wasn’t part of Ccru canon but he was successful in inserting himself into that demoralised post-Warwick trajectory, lighting up the blogosphere. And so, says a lot about the forces they are up against when he suddenly loses his outsider status.
But this raises some interesting questions, I think. What is canon? What is legitimate? Should we accept all spiralling extensions simply because they exist? There’s certainly bad Ccru fan-fiction. Reza seems to have a dual understanding of things. He understands the ins and outs of the Ccru and he also understands the ins and outs of his own maligned culture (at least from a Western perspective) and so he plays on both of those things.
So, as much as it is outside, it is grounded. Ccru fan-fiction today seems to miss this grounding. It grounds itself on myth rather than cultivating myth from a hidden grounds… if that makes sense. It is the difference, perhaps, between good postmodernism and bad postmodernism. Reza and the Ccru diagnose, whereas others simply take to enjoying their symptoms.
This difficult relationship to culture and thought is something that I think Robin is articulating in a very interesting way here.
“Trauma belongs to a time beyond personal memory”, he writes, and that is perhaps the key thing to note here. What is being investigated here is something prehistorical — and I mean that in an etymologically literal sense: something pre-writing; pre-narrative. A narrative is something that we build on top. Extending the narrative has its uses but, at a certain point, all we are doing is repressing that which we are trying to describe. This is, arguably, why Deleuze and Guattari and the Ccru and Reza all try to describe and enact simultaneously. It’s a kind of writing in your own blood. It is a kind of traumatic writing, it is triggering. It drives stakes down beneath the text to those things we dress up in philosophy only to forget them.
Robin also draws attention to Hitchcock’s Vertigo here — the scene amongst the redwoods in which Judy is taken over by her alterego Madeliene. “Alterego” is an interesting word in this context. To alter something is to change it but, as a prefix, it takes on a far more structural connotation — a change in the composition of something, as if it is a variant buried in the strata. It is not an extension but a kind of enclosure within the superego.
Amongst the redwoods, Judy’s hysteria scales up this alterego to a geological scale. Madeliene is a variant within the timeline, erupting into the present, like pressurised magma erupting through a fault.
There’s a strong foreshadowing of Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism book here too, which is making me think we should add a chapter from there to the reading list at some point. But, as a side note, I think how that book is very interesting in this regard. Tom isn’t so much just writing on these theories via the Ccru but inserting himself as another avatar. He isn’t relying on myth here but entwines myth with fact seamlessly.
It is telling, I think, that it is not discussed as a post-Ccru text when it is perhaps the best example of one we’ve had since Cyclonopedia. It’s not fan fiction, in that it is knowing non-canonical. It is an outsider writing themselves into the inside by excavating the neglected intellectual strata. It uncovers through abstraction; it explodes as like column of magma onto the surface of thought and then calcifies itself through an impenetrable rhetoric crust.
Why all this extra-textual context is relevant is that this process is also analogous to the geotrauma being discussed. This kind of intellectual speciation and progression, this trespassing between canonical and non-canonical thought, between pop and pulp, authorial and fan-fictional. Calling philosophy “footnotes to Plato”, for example, is grossly accurate, in this sense. Philosophy is the proliferation of fault lines beneath the surface of the text. Footnotes are subterranean junctures, asides, interjections, etc.