k-punk
« THE VANISHING WORKING CLASS | Main | CONTINUOUS CONTACT »
JANUARY 20, 2005
SIMON'S INTERVIEW WITH CCRU (1998)
(Was talking about this last night with Matt Woebot; it's no longer
up on Simon's site, so I think it's time it got another airing.
It's definitely a document of a moment in time, of moment inbecoming, and useful background for my Cyberfeminist Redux post,
which should be up tomorrow).
RENEGADE ACADEMIA
Simon Reynolds
“CCRU retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it
uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary
habitat. ...CCRU feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning
academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers +.... At degree-O
CCRU is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosphy
Department. Here it is now officially said that CCRU ‘does not, has
not, and will never exist’.”
—Communique from Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, November 1997.
Still nominally affiliated to the famously poststructuralist
Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It's the academic
equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used
unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the
tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between
traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the
CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use
the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which
way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by
natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics,
metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic
writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and
other forms of post-rave music.
According to CCRU, its frenzied interdisciplinary activity—as seen
in its Virtual Futures and Virotechnology conferences, and its
journals ***collapse and Abstract Culture—disturbed Warwick's
Philosophy Department, resulting in the termination of the unit.
Just as Kurtz disappeared “up river” into the Vietnamese jungle,
the CCRU have strategically withdrawn to their operational base in
an apartment in nearby Leamington Spa. Institutionally, they've
abandoned the university and linked up with renegade autodidacts
and para-academic activists like O[rphan] D[frift>], Matt Fuller,
and Kodwo Eshun.
CCRU was originally set up as a research unit for cybertheorist
Sadie Plant, freshly recruited to Warwick from Birmingham
University. With Plant's unexpected departure in early '97 to
become a freelance author (the acclaimed cyberfeminist polemic
Zeros + Ones, the self-explanatory Writing On Drugs), the role of
director of the CCRU was taken over by her ex-lover Nick Land.
Land is the kind of “vortical machine” around which swirl all
manner of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories—allegedly he
went through a phase of only talking in numbers, and was once
“taken over” by three distinct entities? True or not, there's no
denying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr.
Land has been a “strange attractor” luring students to Warwick
purely through his personal reputation and charisma. The Thirst For
Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land's sole
book-length publication, is a remarkable if deranged mix of prosepoem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the
implications of Bataille's thought. Prefiguring CCRU's struggles
with university bureaucracy, the book drips with anti-academic
bile, occasionally spilling over into flagellating self-disgust.
In the early Nineties, Land used to describe himself as a
"professor of delirial engineering." After the relatively down-toearth Sadie Plant's departure, Land has shepherded the CCRU into an
uncanny interzone between science and superstition, blending
Deleuze & Guattari and Norbert Wiener's cybernetics with his vast
knowledge of the occult, chaos magick and parapsychology: the I
Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like energy force),
Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, the
eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna, etc.
It's easy to see why Warwick University was consternated by CCRU's
research. Explaining one of their numerological diagrams (“an
attempt to understand concepts as number systems”), Land describes
it as gift from “Professor Barker.” Inspired by Professor
Challenger—the Conan-Doyle anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze &
Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism & Schizophrenia—Barker
appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who reveals various cosmic
secrets to the CCRU. “But we'd be a bit reluctant to say
‘imaginary’ now, wouldn't we?,” cautions Land. “We've learned as
much—well, vastly more from Professor Barker—than supposedly ‘real’
pedagogues!” Including Barker's ‘Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma’.
Following the materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human culture
is analyzed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum.
From the chemistry of metals to the cycles of capitalism, from the
non-linear dynamics of the ocean to the fractalized breakbeat
rhythms of jungle, the cosmos is an “unfolding traumascape”
governed by self-similar patterns and fundamental processes that
recur on every scale.
Libidinising “flows” and investing them with an intrinsically
subversive power, Deleuze & Guattari have been criticised as
incorrigible Romantics. CCRU develop this element of A Thousand
Plateaus into a kind of mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU
call “Gothic Materialism” (“ferro-vampiric” cultural activity which
flirts with the inorganic and walks the “flatline" between life and
death), Anna Greenspan talks about how “the core of the earth is
made of iron, and blood contains iron,” about how the goal is to
“hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the BodyWithout-Organs.” Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the Deleuzian
utopia, an inchoate flux of deterritorialized energy; Greenspan
says they take the B-w-O as “an ethical injunction,” a supreme
goal.
* * * *
O[rphan] D[rift>] also talk about “metal in the body” and seeking
the B-w-O. Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective,
O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at the
CCRU-organised Virtual Futures 96 conference at Warwick, and are
set to stage an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's
Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and
Ranu Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as Fine Art students
at the prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their
ideas about creating a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic
terrorism oriented around “schizoid thinking,” pre-linguistic
autistic states and man-machine interfaces proved way too radical.
Formed in late 1994, OD was shaped by two mindblowing experiences:
“experimentation with drugs and techno,” and a 1993 encounter with
Nick Land.
“Before CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very
intensively for a while,” says Roberts. “We fed him image
experience, tactile readings of the stuff he was buried in
theoretically. He wanted his writing to kick in a much more
experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful about
having a man you could ring up and ask: ‘what's radiation?,’
‘what's a black hole?’”
OD's collective debut was a multimedia installation at London's
Cabinet Gallery. What began as a catalogue for the show escalated
into an astonishing 437 page book, Cyberpositive. Like Plant's
Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text of sampled writings
that aren't attributed in the text. But where Plant offers
footnotes; OD merely list the “asked” and “un-asked” contributors
at the end. Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a sort of
canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual universe, placing
SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as post-structuralist
theorists. “We treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as
any notional theorist,” says Nick Land, “At the same time, every
great philosopher is producing an important fiction. Marx is
obviously a science fiction writer.” For her part, Sadie Plant
regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and Cadigan as
“more reliable witnesses,” precisely because, unlike theorists,
“they don't have an axe to grind.”
The most highly-charged passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty
chunks of Plant/Land writing and Roberts's and Mukherjee's
evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD experience. “I used to
write a lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious,”
recalls Roberts. “Tracing what's happening in all the different
sound channels and what they're doing spatially and physically to
you.” The language veers from masochistic mortification of the
flesh (“deep hurting techno,” “the meat is learning to know loss”)
to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession (“white
darkness,” “the fog of absolute proximity,” “psyclone,” “beautiful
fear”). “It's trying to process the dissassembling of the self,”
says Roberts. “Maybe what you're calling abject, we'd call melting.
The violence of the sounds in techno, it’s like you're being turned
inside out, smeared, penetrated.”
Despite her facial piercing and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts
has a sort of burned-out, aristocratic air that suggests Marianne
Faithfull circa 1969. A half-smile flickering on her lips, as if
she’s privy to some kosmik joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter—
as though some unutterably alien zone of posthuman consciousness
hasn't quite relinquished its hold. Which may be a pretty accurate
description of the state of play. If CCRU have something of a
cultic air about them, OD go a lot further. Combining Mayan
cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they seem to
believe that humanity will soon abandon the “meat” of incarnate
existence and become pure spirit.
Throughout Cyberpositive there’s the recurrent exhortation “we must
change for the machines;” while the book ends with the declaration
—“human viewpoint redundant.” Not only do OD reckon Charles Manson
had some good ideas, their East London HQ contains several cages of
snakes—proof of their determination to get really serious about
voodoo rites. The obsession was sparked by Gibson’s Count Zero, in
which cyberspace has spontaneously generated entities equivalent to
the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology). Throughout the
interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits with baby boa
constrictors wrapped around his body. His other contribution to the
evening is to make some sandwiches—daintily quartered, but
containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. "Too radical for me",
I confess after one nibble. Rich's eyes
light up triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.
* * * * * *
“Cyberpositive” was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant
and Nick Land. First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium
Pharmakon, “Cyberpositive” was a gauntlet thrown down at the Leftwing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term
“cyberpositive” was a twist on Norbert Wierner's ideas of “negative
feedback” (homeostasis), and “positive feedback” (runaway
tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener
valorized “negative feedback,” Plant/Land re-positivized positive
feedback—specifically the tendency of market forces to generate
disorder and destabilize control structures.
“It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique
could be maintained quite happily but it wasn't ever going to get
anywhere,” says Plant. “If there was going to be scope for any kind
of....not ‘resistance,’ but any kind of discrepancy in the global
consensus, then it was going to have to come from somewhere else.”
As well as Deleuze & Guattari, another crucial influences were neoDeleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa's idea of “capitalism as the
system of antimarkets.” Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up,
grass-roots, self-organizing activity: street markets, “the
frontier zones of capitalism,” what De Landa calls “meshwork,” as
opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds quite
jovial, the way CCRU describe it now—a bustling bazaar culture of
trade and “cutting deals.” But “Cyberpositive” actually reads like
a nihilistic paean to the “cyberpathology of markets,” celebrating
capitalism as “a viral contagion” and declaring “everything
cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind.” In Nick Land’s essays like
“Machinic Desire” and “Meltdown,” the tone of morbid glee is
intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse
and literally anti-humanist identification with the “dark will” of
capital and technology, as it “rips up political cultures, deletes
traditions, dissolves subjectivities.”
This gloating delight in capital's deterritorializing virulence is
the CCRU’s reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic
thought. “There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy
between anti-market ideas and completely scleroticised,
institutionalized thought,” says CCRU's Mark Fisher. “It's obvious
that capitalism isn’t going to be brought down by its
contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!” Exulting in
capitalism's permanent “crisis mode,” CCRU believe in the strategic
application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos.
Hungry for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously
renounce postmodernism's wan fatalism (the idea that we're at the
end of everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left. In
the process, they've jettisoned the concept of “alienation” in both
its Marxist and Freudian senses. They speak approvingly of “surplus
value,” sublimation and commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies.
Where “Cyberpositive” noted how how runaway capitalism had accessed
“inconceivable alienations,” CCRU's collectively written essay
“Swarmachines” goes further and climaxes with the boast: “alienated
and loving it.” The idea, says Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend
of Lyotard and Blade Runner—“the proletariat as this synthetic
class, and revolution that's on the side of the synthetic and
artificial. The concept of ‘alienation’ depends on the notion that
there's some authentic essence lost through the development of
capitalism. But according to Barker, everything's already
synthetic.” If reality really is a bio-mechanical, geocosmic
continuum, there's no reason to resist capitalism’s escalating
dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the
creation of artificial desires.
The mania of CCRU's texts—with their mood-blend of euphoric
anticipation and dystopian dread—is contagious. Much of the time
they're trying to create a “theory-rush” that matches the buzz they
get from contemporary sampladelic dance music; they describe, halfjokingly, what they do as “sub-bass materialism.” “The musical
model is really key to us,” says Land. “It's absurd to say that
music doesn't represent the real and therefore it’s an empty
metaphor. Every theorist who hasn’t a real place for music ends up
with one-dimensional melancholia.” Not only do the CCRU derive a
lot of their energy from music (specifically drum & bass and UK
garage, which one member of the unit actually makes and Djs under
the name Kode 9) but popular culture is where their ideas seem most
persuasive. Right from its late Eighties beginnings, rave culture’s
motor has been anarcho-capitalist: from promoters throwing illegal
parties in warehouses to drug dealing. Even after its co-optation
by the record and clubbing industries, rave music's cutting edge
comes from small labels, cottage-industry producers with home
studios, specialist record stores, pirate radio. Sadie Plant
attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of welfare
and “dependency culture,” which forced people “to get real and find
some ways of surviving” but also to invent “new forms of
collectivity” (the micro-utopian communality of the rave).
As well as being galvanized by music, the CCRU are influenced by
the theory-driven leading edge of music journalism. One of their
associate members is Kodwo Eshun, contributor to iD and The Wire,
and author of the book More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In
Sonic Fiction (Quartet), a study of Afro-futurist music from Sun Ra
to 4 Hero. Eshun describes himself and the CCRU as “conceptengineers.” “Most theory contextualises, historicizes and cautions;
the concept-engineer uses theory to speculate, excite and ignite,”
Eshun proclaims. Like a DJ/producer, the concept-engineer is “a
sample-finder,” free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value
of a theory and simply use the bits that work (in the spirit of
Deleuze & Guattari's offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit
rather than gospel).
“Concept-engineer” is a good tag for the outerzone of “independent
researchers” to which CCRU is connected. Renegade autodidacts like
Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak whose techno-zine break/flow
brilliantly analyzes rave culture in terms of “surges of intensity”
and “impulsional exchanges.” And like Matthew Fuller, a media
theorist/activist with a background in anarchist politics and links
to the hacker underground. Fuller’s CV of cultural dissidence
includes flypostering, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast
Breeder, the scabrous freesheet Underground, and a series of
anarcho-seminars dedicated to the praxis of media terrorism. Fuller
also put out the anthology Unnatural: Techno-Theory For A
Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land's “Cyberpositive.”
Discussing his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about
dismantling traditional “modes of political address” and developing
a sort of post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true
concept-engineer, he believes in ransacking theory texts for taskspecific ideas. “Publishers like Autonomedia and Semiotexte produce
material that you don't have to be an academic to get into, so it
circulates outside those milieux. When I give presentations at
academic events, it's easy to see I'm in a more powerful position
than the academics—I can steal all the advantages of their
discipline, plus do something else with it that fucks it up
totally.” Noting that Deleuze & Guattari are already being
institutionalized into “the most dreary, saintly area of
discourse,” Fuller says he’s dedicated to “cracking open those
texts again, thinkers who originally opened stuff up to delirium
and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and
narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the
reader. In that respect, there's a lot more to be learned from
fiction than theory.” Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose
forthcoming Writing On Drugs will include a fictional component,
and who hopes her future books will become “pure fiction.”
“The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang—Ph.D.
students with attitude!,” says Eshun. Loathing the “necrotic side
of philosophy, the chewing-over of dead thinkers’ entrails,” and
bored limp by the “delibidinising” atmosphere of seminars, CCRU
used to attend academic events, claims Eshun, expressly “in order
to disrupt, undermine and ridicule.... They'd get into pitched
battles with Derrideans!"
Weary of such sports, Plant and CCRU have all enthusiastically
embraced the idea of escaping “institutional lockdown” by going
freelance. The CCRU hope to become a kind of independent thinktank, selling “commodities” on the intellectual free market—like
their strikingly designed Abstract Culture (each “swarm” consists
of five separate monographs bundled together) and, in the future,
CD's, CD-ROM's and books.
It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies
will rejoin forces once they’re out in the freemarket wilderness.
Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says
she couldn’t really go along with the trip into numerical
mysticism, not least because she didn't like finding herself “in
the role of the sensible, conservative one—not a role I'm used to!”
CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented their guru’s premature
departure from Warwick. “Nick Land's hermetic, he wants acolytes,”
says Eshun. “Whereas Sadie’s this total communicator. Zeros + Ones
is the return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can’t
think of any other writer with the same ambition. Sadie wants the
world and I think she'll get it.”
For CCRU work, post-CCRU activity, and allied ‘renegade
autodidacts’ check out these sites:
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit -- http://www.ccru.net/
K-Gothic -- http://www.k-gothic.net/
Datacomb -- http://www.k-punk.net/k-punk.net
K-Punk -- http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/
Hyperdub -- http://www.hyperdub.com/
Kode 9 -- http://www.ccru.net/kode9.htm
Abstract Machines -- http://www.ccru.net/abstractmachines.htm
Orphan Drift -- http://www.orphandrift.com/
Matthew Fuller -http://www.autonomedia.org/behindtheblip/index.html
(originally published in an abridged version by Springerin
magazine, Vienna, 1999)
Posted by mark at January 20, 2005 11:31 AM | TrackBack