This week we read the preface to Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet as a way to ground last week’s discussion around dust. The importance of this chapter, I think, lies in Thacker’s concision when exploring the articulated scales of cognition now complicating philosophy in the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, another week plagued by recording issues. OBS Studio is being the most unstable and inconsistent programme for me. I need to look into some other options. As such, I’ve had to trim this week’s recording down to just my introduction. You can hear the shaky audio there but this was so much worse for everyone else coming through in the discussion. Apologies about that, but hopefully this still works as an introduction to this text.
Below are my introductory notes, as usual. These were unfinished before we started chatting and I just decided to wing it from there on out.
These notes are followed by links to a few things that were discussed over the course of this session.
Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet is a pretty fascinating book — not only for the blackened nature of its subject matter but how, despite this, it managed to break through into the pop cultural sphere. (Something discussed at length in an episode of Radiolab based on the book).
In many ways, what Thacker manages to pioneer, at a time when most were still just dreaming about it, is a kind of pulp philosophy. The Ccru had attempted it and Deleuze and Guattari somewhat prefigured it but I don’t think it was until Thacker wrote this book that the occulted nature of pessimistic and nihilistic philosophies actually found the market that weird fiction had done.
I think the preface to this book should get most of the credit for that. I’m quite keen to re-read Thacker’s Zer0 trilogy but I often found its eclecticism quite disorientating. He can be hard to follow, I think, as he jumps from reference to reference. But this preface is a masterpiece in concision, laying the foundation not just for his own project but summarising what it was that had preoccupied the blogosphere for much of the previous decade: “the horror of philosophy.”
Not “a philosophy of horror”, as he takes care to emphasise, but “the horror of philosophy: the isolation of those moments in which philosophy reveals its own limitations and constraits, moments in which thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own possibility — the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language.”
This is, I think, what we were introduced to last week in Cyclonopedia. Reza has now introduced the concept of “dust” and its enigmatic relationship to the slime dynamics of oil. I think how Thacker introduces the various scales at stake here goes someway towards clarifying the relationships between Reza’s various vectors and entities. He writes, for instance, that “one of the greatest challenges that philosophy faces today lies in comprehending the world in which we live as both a human and non-human world — and of comprehending this politically.” He continues:
“On the one hand, we are increasingly more and more aware of the world in which we live as a non-human world, a world outside, one that is manifest is the effects of global climate change, natural disasters, the energy crisis, the progressive extinction of species world-wide. On the other hand, all these effects are linked, directly and indirectly, to our living in and living as part of this non-human world. Hence contradiction is built into this challenge — we cannot help but to think of the world as a human world, by virtue of the fact that it is we human beings that think it.”
The present popularity of a term like the “anthropocene” neglects such contradictions, I find, and it is perhaps a term like “cyclonopedia” which better describes our new relationship to ourselves and how capacity to know the human and non-human world. As such, Thacker’s trilogy would have very much suited the name “cyclonopedia” as well, if it hadn’t already been taken. This is because neither text functions quite like an “encyclopedia”. Though it shares the same etymological roots, the word “encyclopedia” describes an innocuous attempt to provide a kind of “general” education. It is a text that attempts to *encircle* all knowledge.
A cyclonopedia, on the other hand, demonstrates how a text can encircle itself, going round and round and round, emphasising the etymological root between encircle and cyclone, describing a kind of destructive epistemology. In this sense, it is a general account of the knowledge we have that nonetheless addresses a question Thacker articulates as follows: “When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world?”
Links:
— “In the Dust of This Planet” on Radiolab
— Kyle Anderson, “Why You Need to Read the Horror Masterpiece, Uzumaki”, Nerdist
— Vincent Le, “Philosophy’s Dark Heir: On Nick Land’s Abstract Horror Fiction”, Academia.edu