The K-Files presents 'Robin Mackay A CCRU Retrospective'

The End Hello and welcome to Zero Books Presents

Bodies Without Organs Presents The Cave Files. I am Sean and I am joined as ever by Matt. Hi, Sean. Corey Hey buddies And our inaugural guest We have with us Robin Mackay Hello Hello Robin Am I the first guest you've ever had? The first guest we've ever had, yeah I didn't realise that until today When I was thinking how I was going to introduce you And realise that All through Buddies Without Organs we never had a guest So you are Are our very first great well uh i hope that i don't disappoint in that case i'm quite i'm quite

nervous i'm not sure why well the thing is we have nothing to compare you to so whatever performance you give us you're the best you'll be the best exactly you are also the you are you were also the first guest we ever wanted i remember we actually tried to some behind the seems gossip we did want to have you on to talk about um chronosis when we did that as part of our listening maybe we can talk a bit about that as we go on but um yeah so it's been i think we've all been wanting to chat to you for ages so yeah thanks for coming on yeah no problems so this episode is going to take a different format to our last episode uh where we were discussing a text uh we don't have a text uh you don't need to do any homework to enjoy this episode we are just

going to be us four buddies having a conversation basically uh we're going to be i kind of don't want to call it like although i suppose it is technically an interview i'd also don't want to think of it as one because that's just makes it stressful already for everyone involved uh this is just this is just a uh this really is just wanting to get you on uh robin because you are so connected with this with this world that we've been uh exploring um and that's really it really you know we just wanted to get you on so we could have like a good long conversation with you about not only about uh mark fisher but also your own work your your time with uh ccru what you're doing with urbanomic and um ultimately leading to why and this and we have we don't have an agenda as

such where we do have i did put together a little list of uh of prompts myself um we're going to be hopefully leading uh up to a conversation about by the north sea um which was a absolutely fascinating work which uh but we're not gonna not gonna jump into that right now we're not gonna preempt that because uh really what i want to start off with is just asking asking you to tell us a bit about yourself robin like for people who might not might not know who you are and i'm saying all of our listeners will could you just introduce yourself to us and just let us know a little bit about uh who you are uh what and what you do okay um my name is robin mckay and at the moment the main thing that i do and i have been doing for the last 15 years or so

is running the small publishing house in the uk called urbanomic specializing in contemporary philosophy, some art books, and really more than anything interested in the crossover between contemporary philosophy and other fields, music, art, science, and culture in general. So really trying to maintain a platform outside the academy for philosophical thinking that's serious, but that isn't necessarily following the model of the academic profession of philosophy, which I have been involved in. I mean, I did go to university, I did study philosophy,

and I've made two attempts at doing a PhD, neither of which I finished. So I have a kind of uneasy relationship to academia and always felt out of place, never really satisfied with the way in which thinking and philosophy was understood to work in the academy and the kind of systems and constraints that it was placed under. So I've kind of managed to eke out the living just about for over a decade now by I suppose just going after the things that otherwise wouldn't get published.

That's now kind of a principle for me. Like I wouldn't publish something that someone else would publish most of the time. And apart from that, I do a bit of writing myself and I try to do some philosophizing, but increasingly difficult to do so because the work of just kind of keeping Urbanomic running is quite a burden. But a burden I'm happy to have, but it kind of takes up almost all my time and then some. And I'm also doing translation work just from French. so I've translated a few books by Laruel, Badiou and a few others.

Excellent. I want to make sure that everybody on this call gets plenty of time to ask you questions. I mean, you, Matt and you, Corey, obviously. And you, Robin, any questions you have for or about us? Which one of you is Joe Rogan? oh yeah they couldn't be with us tonight um uh one one thing you said there actually but i'd like to um pick a little bit is you mentioned you are an easy relationship with the academy and all of us i think actually are in some sense para-academics maybe just by virtue of pursuing some kind of like philosophical philosophical

interests in some variety or the other without being in an institution anything like that you know i got my master's degree from sussex says four four four four years ago now uh and uh have occasionally gotten very very close to uh squandering any chance of financial stability i might have in the future by doing a phd but sanity always manages to steal my hand uh which is why i'm a podcaster now and uh and um and yes so i mean this this project here was was um i mean all the podcasts i've been involved with have been in some term to another one trying to force myself and people i'm friends with to keep on reading philosophy books whilst trying to keep hold down real world jobs with very varying levels of success but anyway you mentioned

your own dissatisfaction in the academy and especially the systems and the limitations that that involves i'm just wondering if you could go into a little bit of detail about that more specific more specifically yeah um i think i try to address that through two concepts that are really important to me and that are very important to mark fisher and that arose over and over again on K-punk, and that's the two concepts of punk and pop. So basically, I think I'm a punk in the sense that, in the original sense of the punk, it's just being someone who doesn't really fit in any of the social groups that are available and who doesn't really have anything at their disposal

apart from themselves. so it's kind of like um I don't have any background in anything I feel like I grew up in a town that was just like a really anonymous town with nothing going on and nothing interesting about it I don't have a like a strong family background of any kind of um specific culture or religion or anything um and so yeah I'm kind of just a punk and I arrived at university and I just punked around Like I didn't really go to lectures very much or I didn't really participate that much, to be honest. And I was so I always felt like I'm not really inside the academy, except during the years, obviously, like when we were doing CCRU and when I was involved in that kind of very tight community around Nick Land and Sadie and Mark Fisher.

That's a completely different thing, though. That, in a sense, didn't belong to the university. so I always felt like I was there but I never really I suppose it's also something to do with class that I never really felt like I was entitled to be there like I don't really feel like I'm entitled to be anywhere to be honest but so I don't I didn't have that sense of like this is my right to be in this wonderful world of knowledge and I'm going to make the most of it I just like hung around um so in that sense I never really had a strong relationship to it um but of course it was like an amazing experience to be at university just because it means getting away from home and um you know finding out about stuff um which I did as much through just kind of hanging

around talking to people as I did through going to the library or going to lectures um so yeah there's that kind of um punk side to it um in in that kind of uh very fundamental sense of punk um and then the pop side to it is like i got so uh passionate about philosophy like i was one of the people who's lucky enough to do a philosophy a level actually which i ended up doing quite by accident when it so when I was 17 and 18 um and I immediately understood that as like something that I totally connected with and I have two really amazing teachers there actually

as an A-level student um one of the things I remember the most was that we used to have to like read out um Socratic dialogues in class like so someone had to be Socrates and someone had to be Prasolus or whoever. And that was really good fun. And so, yeah, I got very passionate about it. I got very into it. But I gradually came to understand, you know, this is the process of learning philosophy is like, you have all these amazing thoughts, and then you realize that someone else has had them 270 years ago, or even 1000 years ago. So it's a humbling experience in that sense and i came to realize that most of what people do in universities is in a sense just like

coping with that and and um documenting locating themselves within that history and documenting like some small part of it they've chosen to specialize in and that wasn't really what i wanted to do what i wanted to do was if anything promote that passion for philosophy, like that thing that really grabs hold of you when there's an idea that you connect directly to the problems of your life and it kind of sweeps you away. So I'm more interested in how do you make philosophy, how do you make a pop philosophy?

And of course, I encountered Deleuze and Guattari and their concept of a pop philosophy, which is fair enough, like it's really cool, but Deleuze and Guattari were both, you know, haute bourgeoisie Parisians who had gone totally through the system and knew what they were talking about. Well, Deleuze wasn't. I mean, Guattari is more of a renegade, I suppose, but they were very well educated, you know. So then, you know, so I was kind of, I ended up being semi-educated in quite a sophisticated brand of philosophy, which in turn had internalized all the history of the philosophy that went before it. If you read Deleuze and Guattari,

there's so much stuff in there. It's like the entire history of philosophy and psychoanalysis and history and anthropology is all compressed into this thing. So I kind of understood what rigorous philosophy was, but then I also was like, well, how do you connect to that without spending the rest of your life locked in a room reading other people's footnotes? And that is the problem. That's like the tension and the problem that's still driving me today. I was kind of, maybe this is a way that can lead us into... some of the more specific projects almost but it's kind of linked to both of i guess sean's question and your and your way of introducing yourself that i think that it's a very humble

way of introducing yourself i think because i think that in a lot of ways what i remember that you sort of said that you know you you don't have so much time to philosophize but actually i think your role as an editor um maybe one of the most important editors that is kind of around in contemporary philosophy and in a kind of quite pop literary sense almost you kind of I kind of think back to like the sort of 60s 70s you'd have these kind of rock star editor sort of people that would like do the beats and they'd bring these people in I almost feel like you're one of those people which is I can't think of anybody else who sort of fills that role but do you how do how does that relate do you think to this sense of like the of a pop philosophy of kind of because in a way I suppose you are still reading other people's footnotes but it's actually the footnotes that

wouldn't be seen out in the world otherwise that are really particularly interesting ones no exactly and you know a lot of the authors that urbanomic has worked with are academics they have academic salaries they have academic jobs um but as i said it's not so much saying like i'm not saying that i've succeeded in producing pop philosophy i'm saying in a sense like that tension of trying to be rigorous and trying to communicate with what's really going on in philosophy in all of its rigor, but at the same time produce something that's communicable that someone outside of that sphere can pick up. That tension and that problem is really the thing, that's what I would call pop philosophy. Pop philosophy is not something that you succeed in or that exists. It's a problem that you pursue. And yeah, so the role of editor

is again, just like something that I fell into because when I was doing my second PhD that I didn't finish um you know so after when i was after i was at warwick i kind of decided to just leave philosophy behind and go and get a proper job and i had a job and i just like did the real world for about seven or eight years and then i realized the real world's shit and i want to do philosophy again um and then i so i started a phd and as soon as i got into a university setting i I was like, no, this is not it. This is not what I wanted to do. And that's when I started doing Collapse. So I kind of put together this journal, which was kind of my idea of what philosophy should be,

which involved taking things from all different places and kind of munging them together into this weird format where they communicated in a kind of... So the different elements communicated, even though they were from completely different places and kind of produced this weird map of concepts. And yeah, so I kind of accidentally did it just out of, in a sense, like out of a negative feeling of, I know that academic philosophy isn't what I want to do and then trying to produce something positive out of that. but as i said um it's only in recent years that i've started admitting this to other people but

first to myself a lot of the models i realize now for collapse were like totally low low culture um one of them being like vino annuals you know like these annuals you used to get um in the i guess they went up through the 80s probably and they don't exist anymore um they had like a selection of comics stories puzzles and stuff and i always remember as a child the feeling of having one of these books that seemed like it had so much stuff in it and all these heterogeneous elements um and then uh what was the other one oh yeah reader's digest so it's all like these somehow unconsciously i had this idea of the kind of book that i wanted to make

um produced this freakish thing uh but then but yeah so over the years then like retrospectively i've started saying i started looking at what i've done and being like oh that's what i do and then that kind of becomes self-reinforcing i kind of understand there's a certain type of yeah montage really like putting things together that is what i do and what i've ended up doing i remember quite a long time ago now must have been when this would have been more than 10 years ago now i remember uh alan moore attempting to do something similar with a magazine series that um him and some of his uh dodge him

logic yes exactly and the reason why that came to mind was i remember its motto was colliding ideas to see what happens yeah uh in fact i still have because i've got behind me i've got two um it's pure pure tangent now i've got two um plastic boxes filled with my uh old 2000 ad comics uh when one of those folders does contain uh the the entirety of dodgium logic which i think is actually worth a few pennies now uh so maybe i'll put the full set as well how many issues did it run for not that many because um i'm eight eight something like that because i in fact i remember the editorial of the very last issue alan more saying it transpires that our business model of

having no advertising and paying our contributors a decent wage was a terrible idea we've never broken even that's not the way to get on in publishing no it's never gonna work no there's nothing nothing wrong with being a bit mercenary um uh so you mentioned we've already mentioned in passing warwick ccru and allied entities and i would very very very very much like to hear from the horse's mouth what ccru was all about what it was to be in the inside how you came to it in particular and just what as for as much as you can because i know it was a period of you

know famous intensity just however you can articulate what it was like to be a part of that would be absolutely fascinating well um yeah so my time at warwick kind of half overlaps with the ccriu in the sense that i was there at the beginning of the ccriu but um as i mentioned i kind of just got sick of being at university and I wanted to leave and so like that latter part which is all the weird stuff that you see in the CCRU writings I wasn't actually there but I seem to be the only person who will talk about it publicly so I've now I've now accepted that role and I can maybe that's precisely why I was there in a sense in like during years when a

lot of these ideas were kind of fermenting if you like and forming so I kind of understand where they came from but to continue the story I was telling before when I arrived at Warwick I guess I had I didn't I hadn't chosen Warwick at all I don't really think like when I was a teenager I had any sense of like choosing anything in my life I just like wandered from one thing to another and that happened to be one of the universities that I happened to pick off a list. I didn't really know anything about it. I knew it had a philosophy department and I decided I wanted to carry on doing philosophy. And so when I got there in the first year, the only thing I really enjoyed doing was symbolic logic

because it was like computer programming. And I had been programming computers since I was like seven or eight years old. I had a ZX81. So I was really into computer programming. And in fact, I only started doing A-level philosophy because I had a timetable class and I couldn't do computer science. So things could have turned out very differently. And I could have been a lot richer today if that hadn't happened. But when I got there, like the first year courses, there was like something on Descartes. There was like an introduction to metaphysics and it was all quite disappointing. And I guess it was like only part of the way through that year or maybe in the second year.

When I was feeling really quite lost and didn't fit in and pretty depressed, really. and I think I must have chosen one of the courses on Nietzsche or something, which brought me into contact with Nick Land. And he was, like, a very generous and, like, he was always open to, like, conversations with anybody, and, like, there was no kind of discrimination between whether you were a staff member or an undergraduate or a postgraduate. And so there was a kind of group around him, a kind of shifting group of people who would meet in the bar and talk with him. And in talking with Nick, I kind of finally connected to someone who had something like the concept about what philosophy was for that I did,

which is that we're in like a massive abyssal black space of complete desolation. And we're like poking around trying to find some kind of features of this in this darkness. And it's kind of torturous, but also it's incredibly exciting. And so in those kind of, in a sense, childish or juvenile ideas about what philosophy should be, I finally, after a year of misery, found someone who was like, no, that is what philosophy is. And increasingly, this kind of group of people around him, which was like this kind of informal, it would be like totally grand to say it was like an informal seminar.

It wasn't. It was just like people drinking in the bar. but um there was a sense of there being a group uh and that was uh in itself interesting the group there was a group that was at the university but there wasn't academic that wasn't you know uh an organized um an organized entity a body without organs one might say yes indeed um and uh i guess at that time already there was this sense in which there was a kind of synthetic program of philosophy going on like people would there were people from different departments who were in that group like people who were doing um physics uh people who were from the business school

people from law people studying literature uh and there was this kind of cross-pollination of ideas, I suppose vaguely centered around the ideas of complexity theory and emergence and autopoiesis, but also increasingly engaged with the new realm of the digital, the internet, et cetera. um so yeah that kind of i suppose that was very a very formative thing for me to suddenly see that you could link together these ideas from all these different spheres

and that in a sense like nick was if not at the center of it um he was the person who would kind of make these unexpected connections and feed them back into the group a lot of the time uh and you know let's face it also you know things do change but he was a very charismatic and inspiring person um and you know he gathered people around him and that it was really exciting uh and a very positive very positive person like in spite of you know you can read um his early work like first for annihilation and think this is like some grim dark person who's obsessed with the darkest aspects of the universe but he's like

an incredibly positive kind person who would like i say like talk to anyone and engage with anyone on any level um so kind of super conductor really between um uh different uh pools of ideas um and uh sometime some at some point along the way uh there was also music involved and there was like the kind of university clubs and stuff that we used to go to um so that was all pre-ccru and at that time um really from all the same motives that

I was mentioning before I started making what I now know was a fanzine at the time I didn't know again like i was such a punk i didn't even know about punk things like fanzines so i was just like i'm just gonna make this magazine on the photocopier with loads of weird uh pseudo philosophy stuff about technology and whatever and just did it um and then like invented a launch party in the philosophy common room and then like i don't know photocopied 100 copies of it or something and uh i guess i probably at that time uh sent a message out on one of these early cyberculture mailing lists so made some kind of connections there so that was the first the first

version of collapse was this fanzine which ran for like just two issues because i was too lazy to print the third one. And then, so I think Nick had kind of began to be an attractor for the philosophy department and a lot of PhD students kind of came and wanted to work with him. And so that group around him grew. And at a certain point, then the CCIU began really kind of was invented as a vehicle, I think, for Sadie Plant to come and kind of set up a research center in Warwick, which

would, in a sense, like it was designed to formalize this vague area of study that had been emerging, i.e. complex systems, understanding culture as a cybernetic system, understanding the effects of digitization and automation on human culture, understanding the effects on how the human can be understood, this whole broad spectrum of questions. um so cciu was kind of an official thing uh at first for a while um and sadie who had been at the

department for cultural studies at birmingham um moved to warwick um and she brought with her i think five or six of her then phd students from birmingham one of whom was mark and that was a really interesting situation okay because you've got someone who isn't trained in philosophy and she's bringing these students who aren't trained in philosophy but who have a um but you have a background in kind of thinking about culture and have a disenchanted with the

current model of cultural studies so they're trying to think find new ways to think about culture say he was trained in philosophy but um uh i've lost my train of thought there yeah so yeah but say he was trained in philosophy um but what i was going to say was there was this kind of interesting tension then that was produced because the philosophy department i mean i don't know what the actual story is but the philosophy department was or certain elements in the department were not happy about this kind of intrusion of something which wasn't proper philosophy. At the same time, it seems to me like there was some kind of

marketing angle on this because Sadie kind of got into a few Sunday magazines and stuff. I think they were promoting it as some kind of innovative new thing for the university. she was the it girl of the 21st century right so the independent called her at one point yeah yeah or um yeah or uh her and nick were described as being the um the sartre and de beauvoir of the of the late 20th century which i think that was in the sunday times and then someone wrote in a letter which was printed the next week which said more like beavis and butthead which nick was really

delighted with you know he thought that was a far better thing to be compared to i think um i just find it strange that um academic figures even ended up in like the sunday times like i couldn't imagine that happening today well i mean they do but for the worst possible reasons don't they like um but uh yeah yeah so the idea that somehow there could be like excitement around uh a philosophy lecturer yeah that does seem strange um yeah but i think it was a failed attempt like in there was someone somewhere i think he was like trying to produce this figure and it didn't quite work um uh so yeah there was a i kind of met some mark uh and

the like the other people who he hung around with um earlier because they had this thing this was what really appealed to me they had basically what was a theory gang that was the first time I ever came across a theory gang which was called switch and they used to turn up at conferences and um there's like four or five of them and they'd like stand in a line passing the mic to each other like intoning this cryptic kind of intoxicating theory, fictional stream of consciousness type of thing. And everyone would just be like totally silent,

not know what to make of it. And then someone would like get up and start talking about footnotes. I was just going to say, does something that's so slightly like you're about to say they would go to these conferences and would fundamentally start rapping about philosophy. Yeah. Yeah. It was called slam poetry. Yeah. Probably not too far off. They already had like this kind of idea of, I suppose, theory as performance or as, as a, like a cultural object in its own right, not like theorizing about culture in a kind of patronizing way, which I think is how they saw ultimately the status quo in cultural studies was that um it was always talking about culture and talking down to culture even when it

was studying um subcultures there was a i don't know if this is maybe a bit of a nerdy point but i just kind of came to mind because i think that um yeah i'm curious if this was an adaptation because i know that mark's phd was in philosophy and literature and that's still a course that they run was that like a development from that time then do you think of of bridging those two things consciously around that time or warwick philosophy department had quite a pioneering um program in philosophy and literature so you had a lot of people there who were studying things like blanchot um so that existed i think for some time before and of course like you've got to remember

Warwick was one of the maybe like three or four universities in the UK that did continental philosophy at all. So that in itself was kind of freakish. In fact, the department was kind of split. There was like quite a lot of analytic philosophers as well. And they kind of cohabited more or less harmoniously. But yeah, the philosophy and literature program had been there for a while. I didn't know that about Mark's PhD though. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess it's all, it's philosophy and he's basically writing about, I guess, a lot of William Gibson. So Flatline Constructs makes a bit more sense in that, I guess. When Sadie set up this unit in Warwick,

there was a cybernetic culture program and some of the people who were there, I'm sure Steve Goodman actually has a PhD in cybernetic culture. There's like five or six people in the world who have a PhD in cybernetic culture from that short period. That's about Steve Goodman of Hyped Up Records. Yeah. Just so people know. Yeah. Yeah. So, because the next part of that story is that I think essentially the environment became so hostile and Sadie just felt like, why am I doing this? these people don't want me here, that really the official existence of that entity,

this cybernetic culture entity, really lasted, I think, between six and nine months or something. It wasn't really there for a long time. And Sadie left. and so the people who she had transferred to Warwick I suppose then consolidated into a kind of a support group to be able to survive in this environment and to more or less of an extent kind of then melded with this group that was already there kind of around Nickland um and so that then like i think they had demanded or asked nicely and they were given

a bare office at the end of the corridor which had then they wrote ccriu on the door and you know we used to kind of go and hang out there and that's all the ccriu was then really was just like a name on a door that didn't really exist, but that was a way to bind together these people who had kind of arrived at Warwick in the expectation that there was this kind of new synthetic discipline that was being sketched out and developed there, I think. I think that listening, I listened earlier quite recently

to an early talk that Sadie gave at the time when she was setting up the programme. And that's the tone that I hear in that, is that there was a kind of optimism that from all sorts of angles, from all sorts of disciplines, the disciplinary model was no longer good enough. And what was needed was some kind of overarching way of looking at complex systems, at their interactions, at the way that cultural forces work. And so CCIU kind of became that, but outside of any academic context. I mean, inside the academy spatially, but really outside conceptually.

I guess I know that I'm maybe going to set Sean up here because I know Sean was particularly interested. I guess part of what we were talking about in I think our first session was, I guess between the three of us, you probably, maybe this isn't a fair way to divvy ourselves up, but I guess we're quite, there's plenty of overlap that's why we get on so well but i guess that there's shown you particularly in sort of the occulted stuff cory you're sort of more on the on the sort of fiction side of things and i guess that i'll i'll take philosophy at a punt but i guess we all sort of share those interests um but i guess that one thing i was thinking of was that you were talking about this you mentioned this sense of autopoiesis is kind of a part of um can you define that please matt yeah that's it i was actually asking you robin what i was asking robin if you

could define that maybe how that relates to that relationship between sort of theory fiction and I guess more of the occulted stuff that gets drawn into the CCIU as well sorry what are you asking me to define autopoiesis autopoiesis right yeah um that's a concept that came from these two uh guys working in biology Varela and Maturana who are working kind of on the I think on the border of biology and complex systems and just trying to understand um you know what's the difference between a purely physical system uh governed by chains of cause and effect

and a biological system which seems to have some kind of um higher level unity so autopoiesis is a way of understanding how complex machines maintain themselves and reproduce, I guess, or reproduce themselves at least. So it's part of a kind of family of different concepts that I think was emerging over the late 20th century, which tried to find rigorous ways to think beyond a purely physicalist, determinist model.

And tried to say, you know, what's happening in these extremely complex systems can't be understood purely from the point of view of a load of little billiard balls, like bashing into one another on a grand scale we have to come up with some kind of conceptualization of the way in which the difference that these systems fit together at different scales and the way in which they reproduce their identity and that obviously that also connects with the concept of feedback which was a hugely important concept um for um before and during the ccriu era the concept of negative feedback being the idea that

a system adjusts itself to the any excitations that are coming from outside it so as to preserve its identity so negative feedback was the thing that the the theory of autopoiesis and most of cybernetics was concerned with is like how do things maintain themselves in a hostile environment um how do they stay the same but then i guess the real uh thrust of the innovation of how nick was thinking these things and how sadie was thinking them was to foreground positive feedback instead was to foreground these instances in which rather than adjusting itself to stay the same,

the system would kind of escalate, take in energy and escalate and transform and change into something else. The prime example, of course, being capitalism, which rather than maintaining itself in a stable state seems to consume exponential amounts of energy and produce exponential amounts of transformation to the point where it becomes highly unpredictable and uncontrollable. That's not what I thought autopoiesis meant at all. Well, that's great. Maybe I'm totally wrong. No, no, no, no. I mean, autopoiesis is basically like, just means making yourself, right?

Self-becoming. Well, that's it. I guess I didn't actually know the answer, but I think in my head, I'd associate it with, I think, and I don't want to get too bogged down in the nomenclature, but there's a really like, Schelling's got these lectures on mythology and he talks about poesy in there. And I always thought it was kind of related, but actually from what you said, I guess they kind of are relatable. So I guess what, I guess it's, I wondered what the relationship between autopoiesis was to culture, but I guess that's, I mean, I'm imagining if there's that feedback loop, it's maybe between what you were talking about at the start, right? That maybe the, if we've got these layers, this pop layer and this punk layer, or yeah, this sort of pop layer and this sort of occult layer or whatever you want to call it. Well, in a sense, poesis is a really interesting word because yes, when we hear poesis, we think of poetry and therefore we think of the cultural production and the things that humans make.

But poesis really is just like any kind of production. um so that in a sense is kind of what the ccriu was trying to do like to to say culture is a type of production and cybernetics is the best way to understand production therefore we need a cybernetic theory of culture yeah this is what i was just saying that's that's the significance that heidegger finds in the term poesis in its relationship with with poetry and yeah his and his phenomenological explorations becoming that's neither here nor that's for a different podcast it doesn't actually exist um i'd like to um i would like to talk a little um or rather i'd like to maybe prompt cory uh to maybe ask some questions about science fiction uh as a way of

continuing this discussion a little bit as as as to how the ccri you functioned and what his influences were yeah i mean because for me personally the um sections on burrows uh talk to me the most because i'm a big fan of him and discovered the ccriu collection after having read you know most of burrows published works um so i guess and that also ties into the occult angle because we know that um burrows was an adept uh curse wielder if nothing else um so yeah like how how did you find well like how did the the literary elements kind of feed into the ccriu's greater program was it simply that they were like like informal informal or more was

it um like yeah is it simply that people enjoyed burrows and found a way to work him in or was there considered to be like a deeper meaning there there was so to go back to like the general setting at warwick i think um there was already possibly like a community of a small community of people around the philosophy and literature program who were already kind of trying to think authors science fiction authors like philosophically and certainly I think by the time I arrived there or by the time I became aware of Nick's work the way that I would have become aware of Nick's work was that you'd meet someone in the bar and they'd be like did you know there's a lecturer who in the

philosophy department who thinks that he's a cyborg who's come from the future so um you know nick was already kind of using these science fiction tropes in in his work um on uh on the level of content in the sense that it was an attempt to like shake philosophy out of its complacency and say like look point philosophy towards the future and towards thinking we can no longer keep working with these ancient traditional models of the human and of being and so on. We have to understand that all of these things are being dismantled bit by bit by capitalism.

So it was in a sense like the content of the thinking itself is science fictional, But there's also a formal stylistic element that the text itself is a cybernetic machine. The text itself is like this thing that's exciting the reader and bringing them into this kind of virtual space and using the reader as a channel for positive feedback. and I always say like with cybernetic culture you've got to understand it in those two ways you've got to understand it as being understanding how cybernetic machines how the age of technology infiltrates culture

but also understanding how culture itself is a cybernetic machine And so I think Nick was really on that path already, was with kind of absorbing the early cyberpunk writings like William Gibson and Neil Stevenson. and at the time I suppose in the 90s like the that amazing kind of period of these movies like Terminator and Predator which became kind of like core texts in a way especially obviously like the time element in Terminator and I think if we're going to talk

about ccie we're going to have to like talk about time sooner or later um because of course burrows also comes up in the text lemurian time war which i just think is like one of the most intense uh inexhaustibly fascinating philosophical texts ever i just it's just amazing um and yeah so these these figures like burrows philip k dick as well um i mean they are yeah these are people in whom science fiction and philosophical speculation are already like totally entangled and inextricable i think aren't they um and so in a way you could say ccriu is one of the few enterprises to really extend that

tradition rather than studying it from outside you know they're really like synthesizing these elements from um from these different places and um producing more of this type of writing which at once has the compelling character of fiction and the kind of incisive theoretical equipment that's drawn from philosophy. I also seem to find some video game culture leaking in. I can't remember the name of the piece, but there's one in the back half of the collection that's basically kind of seems like the description of a video game that would be quite like Resident Evil, but in a CCRU setting and it's just um yeah so I also saw like yeah video game influence coming in

which would have been like I guess kind of more of a cultural cutting edge than it is now where it's you know ubiquitous that comes uh from so that's really the next period of the story is that a certain point um I guess when most of the people who were doing cybernet that were part of cybernetic culture program and were finishing up their PhDs. Nick also left. Basically, they just kind of jumped ship, left Warwick and were living in Leamington Spa, famously above the body shop. And I think that's the time from which most of these writings date. So in a sense, that's

when it became really an intense kind of production regime. I think it became more intense and they were producing, they were kind of coagulating this whole mythos and this whole set of ideas into a very consistent framework and producing all of this stuff without having any outlet for it necessarily or any official status or reason to do it um sometimes that's when the best way comes out yeah exactly yeah yeah just like following this line um feverishly i think is the right word um just yeah so sorry that so that what i was going to say was so i think that

part of that was this kind of uh what obviously would seem from our perspective a deludedly megalomaniac idea that ccriu is going to become like this massive um corporate entity producing video games that are going to infiltrate people's minds and um yeah so that was kind of one of the spin-off projects that was mooted at that at that time i think so i'm interested well you will uh i assume i assume at least some of you were reading grant morrison's the invisibles during all of this right i felt like it was the other way around when i read cci i was pretty sure that grant morrison was plugged into the cci's output

you see the thing is like it's interesting that you you brought up burrows and i i'm saying like in a sense, CCIU were carrying on the tradition. They really were taking in these ideas from burrows and slotting them into this new kind of expanded framework. But there's very few kind of precursors otherwise, I think. And when I talk to people about CCIU, they're often like, oh, well, they must have known about this, or they must have been reading this. And I think the amazing thing about CCRU is some of it just genuinely just came from nowhere. There's something truly disturbing about it in the sense you can't really understand.

Yes, part of it is synthesizing a whole load of different sources, but there's a there's a dimension to it that is to this day very strange and um inexplicable as to how this kind of uh disturbing consistency can arise from such a messy situation uh i might use this and i'm i do want us to talk about time travel don't worry but um i will use this as a list and i'm aware that this might be more to do with the latter period of ccriu which you weren't involved with but i want to talk at least a little bit about the influence of um

occultism on the project and especially as that's a very good lead in you gave it you gave the the implication of CCRU being infiltrated by extra human intelligences. But especially Kenneth Grant's work seems to loom through a lot of, I mean, not a lot, but there certainly seems to be influences coming in from that direction. And I was just wondering if there is something that you can tell us a little bit more about, even if it is just talking a little bit more about the general kind of like a spooky atmosphere of the place and i think it isn't limiting and if i recall correctly levington spa is of course the birthplace of alice the crow yeah right yeah so um may or may not be above the body shop but

well a few of the a few of the um cciu nick anna and mark i think lived in a house in levington spa that they later i think only later found out was the place where he was born where crowley was born so some of these writings were actually written in that house yeah uh i mean i'm not an expert on occultism uh i suppose all that i can talk about is what i understand to be uh the the driving idea behind the pneumogram which is uh as a kind of subversion of the tree of life and therefore of a large part of the occult tradition, but also its connection

to numerology and to the Kabbalah and so on. And I think the numagram was kind of, if we can say it's devised, everyone involved always says it's invented, but if we can say it's devised, it's devised so as to be an occult instrument that doesn't require any belief. You don't have to believe in anything in order to work the numogram. And that's because it's rather than being based on some kind of esoteric use of numbers or numerology in the traditional sense in which numbers are associated with, each number is associated with a kind of mythical figure or something. The numagram at its core is

just simply like a thing that works and is based on the numbers that we know and on very basic arithmetic. So it kind of forms this incredibly solid, unquestionable basis for doing this working. And then around that, there's the whole system of demons, which is kind of... I think of it as something like the I Ching, like it's a way in which you can understand the world. If you become well versed in moving around the pneumogram and understanding the zones and understanding the passages between them, then it's a way in which you can look at the world.

Just the same as once you use the I Ching enough, you begin to enter into its consistency and begin to see the world in the way that the I Ching sees the world. That's kind of the type of instrument it is. And then on a third layer outside that, then you've got this whole series of stories, which are kind of about how the numogram was discovered. This kind of history of all these fictional figures like Echidna Stilwell, who are associated with it, which serves as a kind of a fictional universe that draws you in to the system.

So it's really interesting. It's a kind of a whole apparatus. It's not just an occult working. It also has this whole apparatus designed to bring you into the world through the fiction. so it's a really interesting kind of uh i think very novel amalgam of um uh syncretic occultism fiction um and philosophical thinking about time we've been speaking for um we don't have a time limit or anything like that i'm just conscious rather of just that being that we probably we do have probably all have uh things

to do at some point so i think there's a couple of couple of last topics i think and we should aim to cover firstly just carrying on from that um i would like i think it would be good if we did speak specifically about time and time travel uh especially because i know there's and we should also talk a little bit about Children of the Stones because I know that you wanted to talk to us a little bit about that. Let's cover that off and then move on to concluding by talking about By the North Sea. Time travel. Actually, I'm just going to ask it. I actually promised myself I wasn't going to try and delve into the lurid details with CCRU because I don't think that's… But how do you time travel?

That's the question we want to know. But what I was going to ask is, you know, when Nick Land said that he is a cybernetic organism, come back from the future, did he mean that? You know, when he was saying these things, or he was saying these things, what's the tone? What's the vibe? You know, is this Deadline seriousness, or is this a jovial clownishness, or something somewhere in between? Oh, that's such a difficult... In a sense, it's the wrong question because it's a temptation to try and think in terms of belief. Like, are we meant to believe that he really believes that or not? The question is one of producing machines, right?

The text is a machine that produces a certain intensity in the reader and produces, in a sense, those texts themselves are like occult workings that become a way of seeing the world, like they change a way of seeing the world. And that's their function. Whether or not anyone believes in it is kind of beside the point, I think. But let me say this, that I think during my strong memory of being involved in this group of people at Warwick, and I think one of the reasons why everyone who was involved in that scene has been somewhat kind of dazed and confused for years afterwards and decades even afterwards,

is that there was definitely something very strange going on there in terms of like this building together this collective way of thinking about reality that was very far removed from the consensual model. Yeah. there's one way I think of maybe putting that question and it's maybe going the other way but I remember we thought about this a lot when I was a student at Goldsmiths and I remember this kind of has overlap really because um I don't know if people there will be some people who were aware of

this who are listening um but I have a bot that I made called Geopoetics that was partly from um a class that Robin that you taught at Goldsmiths for a couple of years um but I guess that and this this will revert back I guess because it's but it's it's kind of maybe there's something about that question of time travel in there that I think with with that um as a sort of tool in itself as a kind of pop tool I think a lot of people when I made that bot a lot of people were making bots they're quite they were quite common things for a while and you kind of look at the inner working of a sort of thing like that. And I guess it was sort of delved into the workings of it. And it's a thing called a Markov chain. So you literally have a set. I guess it's like the I Ching. You have a set text. You sort of, you have a sort of system

that you put numbers into and it will generate numbers back out and use that to read the sort of core text that you have. So this bot spews out weird sentences from my notes from that seminar. And I guess actually another way of putting that now that's maybe more current, this was five years ago, but I think it's very much how we think about like Google Deep Dream, right? You have, but maybe that way, you have the other way around. You don't really see the numbers that are going into that sort of system, but you input an image or a concept and it will, into this kind of closed system and it will spew out these kind of alternate ways of seeing the world or these kind of twisted visions on life and they always often think of the numogram like that it's kind of like

in this kind of accelerated cultural time we've been lifting for the past couple of decades it's almost like a relatively rudimentary form of that as if it's that's kind of the the base system and what you put into it what you put out of it as if you could reduce that down to a symbol the symbol of that kind of system, be it a Twitter bot or AI deep dream, is kind of like the numogram. It's that kind of tool. But if you reduce it back far enough, you do get something that feels wholly occulted. And I think that's always the tension that I loved about it, that as much as it feels utterly occulted in the CCRU context, we're actually that kind of system we use all the time. We just don't really think about it or know about it. Yeah, right. It's a model for engaging with reality, yeah.

I mean, from the point of view of like, if you want to say, did CCIU know something about the future that at the time no one else did? I think there are plenty of things that you could point to. Like there weren't many people talking about the things that CCIU were talking about at that time, certainly in Western academia. but also you know what's really fascinating now is that you know if you want to do a podcast about the numogram you should be inviting like people who are like in their teens who are like total experts on it who i meet on the online now which is amazing because you've got to remember tiktok which is don't don't um underestimate the sheer like absolute utter disappearance of cciu like

after 2001 just didn't exist no one knew about it no one cared about it no one was interested in it for decades and so there's something really fascinating that it's almost like the um the hysterical crazy complexity of the online world that has emerged only in the last like seven eight years now finally is a suitable place for people to be engaging with this stuff um you know whether you you could take that various ways you know people are now insane enough to be taking this seriously or um it was serious to begin with uh but that i mean that in itself is really fascinating but from the point of view of time

you know a simple way to put it would just be it's the intuition that sense travels backwards we can no longer make sense of the present on in the terms that we have inherited from the past things are happening before they make sense and therefore you know the only way to truly engage with the present reality is to project it forward and to think back from the future. But technically, if you want to talk about it philosophically, I think it's like a mixture of Kant and Freud. Because with Kant, you have the introduction of transcendental philosophy,

which basically means the only things that we have access to are appearances. And appearances are conditioned by space and time. And then you have the idea of the noumenon. Is there something outside that's the actual thing apart from the appearance? Is there something beyond the appearance? There's no way for us to know because we're we're always trapped inside time and space. And this is where it connects to the whole Burrows thing about being trapped in the reality studio and this whole kind of many different kind of discourses of suspicion about the system of reality and who's controlling it,

which comes out in the Who's Pulling Your Strings and texts like that. So there's this idea from Kant that things are being our experience is assembled through these conditions of space and time, but it's assembled from something else, some ulterior thing, which is outside of time. And then from psychoanalysis, I think, and maybe this was not specifically a source, but ambiently, you get this conception of the idea that you can rewrite your experience. So the crucial thing that happens in psychoanalysis or any kind of therapy, right, is that you end up saying something and you didn't know you were

going to say it and you didn't know it was true. And yet it's you who's speaking it and you're talking about yourself and what you say transforms what you knew about yourself. And it transforms your past into something else. So in effect, psychoanalysis, the analysand in psychoanalysis is engaged in a form of time travel, in a form of the manipulation of time, which according to the chronological normal conception of time should be impossible. You can't go back and rewrite the entire past. And then the CCRU bring these stories, these philosophical stories about

time together in a way that I think is heavily influenced by Marvel comics, science fiction, in which there are these two warring forces. There's the architectonic order of the eschaton, the AOE, who their whole mission is to secure time and to make sure that no one ever doubts that things move in a certain sequence and you can't get outside of that sequence. You're trapped inside of the timeline and everything's already completely determined forever, like from the beginning to the end. But the whole point is in order for the AOE to have

to exist in order for this time police to be there then it must be the case that in fact there are some leakages like there are some kind of um escape routes there is some kind of egress or else there is something that there's some instances in which something gets in from outside time from outside chronological time um and of course like in psychoanalysis that would be um things like deja vu or the symptom in general. The symptom in general is something that's outside of the present time. It's something that's acting from another order of time in the present. And so you have this suspicion that perhaps there are instances in which we can get outside the

timeline, break outside the timeline. And that then becomes the other side of this kind of of Manichean battle, which is the Lemurians. The Lemurians are the ones who can travel outside of the timeline and connect things in this disordered anomalous way. And so to go back to this question about did Nick really believe he could travel backwards in time and so on, let me refer back to what I said about the pneumogram. I think what the CCIU did, and this was something that happened before the numogram existed as well. What this group of people were doing was building a way of understanding reality that they could share

and that in creating a vocabulary to talk about reality differently, you create this microculture within which you all are kind of reinforcing each other in talking in a certain way about reality and therefore actually altering your perception of reality. And I absolutely understand that that sounds like a cult and it shares a lot of features with what cults do. But I think the difference, I guess, would be this was kind of a collective creative endeavor. But that's what it ended up doing, I think, is produce a vocabulary that's consistent, a consistent way to talk about reality that's far from the normal story, the AOE story.

I think that's kind of the most important legacy, almost. Or at least that's the thing that seems to carry forward, that even without that specific kind of mythological structure, I guess what a lot of people that were involved in the CCIE, like yourself and Mark and others, always carried forward was that kind of linguistic playfulness of always not necessarily relying on the nomenclature of kind of canonical philosophy, but actually, well, that's what Kojo would always say, right? You're concept engineers. And that's kind of a, it's something that I always think about all the time, that especially, remember something that came up recently, was someone was talking about capitalist realism as like a really, you know, such an engaging and accessible book,

and yet talked about one phrase in it that was, you know, that's alienating to the everyman or something. But I guess the point is always that that's sort of the point. You want to, you have to introduce new concepts because that's how you come to find that journey outside of, yeah, that kind of temporal, I don't know, like bottom bowling lane. This is a point at which you should talk about Mark's specific contribution, really. Sure. Which is that, which goes back to this question of pop, of like Mark was really, I remember like when Mark first arrived at Warwick and we would have conversations like he'd tell

me about stuff like Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy, stuff from cultural studies. And I'd tell him about Kant and we'd have these weird conversations of meeting in the middle. And Mark was a hell of an amazingly receptive thinker who could grasp the essentials of something and then redeploy it. And I think the way that he redeployed things was by, as he always said, like thinking through pop culture. That's the only way I can think, he used to say, like I have to think through music or through movies or through comics. And I think that to me is like the really crucial, the crucial contribution of Mark

in CCIU or where I see his signature is like, let's not just have the numogram, right? let's not just have this device with numbers on it. Let's also not just have these demons with funny names that are attached to the passages between the numbers, but let's also then have this other layer of these kind of Marvel comics like storylines with all these characters, which serve as a way to bring in a reader who's not really necessarily conscious of where they're going with it. They're just like, this is a cool story. And then they discovered this thing called the numogram. And then the thing in the story called the numogram

turns out to be an actual thing, or is it an actual thing? Like, is the diagram illustrating a story, or is the story true? Or is the story something that was made up based on the fact that the diagram is a real thing? and I think that amazing kind of way of thinking rigorous philosophical concepts through pop culture can only come from someone who understands that you know when you read a Marvel comic you're reading philosophy like those concepts already in there that's what those thing you know they're all to do with like insane powers and forces beyond the human realm

philosophy and concepts are already going on in those in those stories um yeah so i think that's that's kind of where i where i recognize mark's distinctive contribution let me apologize about the um skateboard spanner noises that are going on in the background oh is that what's going on it's like a whole workshop going on we're making a cup of tea or something i mean it just adds to the punk you know it adds to the punk energy though doesn't it oh that's just literally a skateboard in the background you want to see my new skateboard

yes this is my new deck i just got to set it up you see it oh it's you have to put it in front of robin i think it's blurry it glows in the dark oh cool eye eyeballs yeah it's full of eyeballs it's by a british artist that's cool did you get it local yeah sorry you see like the real expert on ccriu is in the background all the time while i was just talking rubbish it feels like a parable almost doesn't it the real the real master sits behind quietly constructing the skateboard and has no need to speak yeah but i mean you know what i was saying you know that the cciu just didn't exist for all that time um yes amy's one of the people who kind

of reassembled it really like she kind of put together a lot of this history which and in doing so kind of connected back a lot of the people back together so we could reassemble the history of what the hell happened um it's kind of interesting that i mean it is kind of like going to therapy like every time i talk with steve it's kind of like we're doing a post-traumatic cciu therapy session to try and put together the story of what the hell happened and to try and rebuild a continuous timeline that's what i was thinking when you were talking about psychoanalysis like i guess that's that way of looking back at the past to read it differently in the present into the future as a kind of like let's kind of do the ultimate callback to i guess

where we started of a kind of like autopoiesis of the self um sort of vibe um but i guess that's and i mean i mean maybe that's a nice segue into what um i know we wanted to kind of bring things forward to the present um you've kind of from you've gone from making sort of fanzines in in with the i guess it was warwick's repographics department on the old photocopier to now having you know your full-blown publishing house um and i guess yeah you have been revisiting a lot of this stuff over the years but i guess how does how is how is a lot of this sort of factored into what you do nowadays and um and how much is is that i guess well i guess that's it really yeah what what's what's that influence that's kind of carrying forward specifically about what you're

interested in right now uh yeah i mean the whole trajectory of ergonomic inevitably because it most of the time it's just been me doing it is also a kind of an autobiography of me groping towards trying to work out what it is that I want to do so part of the reason why the publication catalogue of urbanomic is so eclectic and yet I hope consistent is because it's like to do with me ricocheting between all of these different types of thinking and orienting myself within the field of what's possible in contemporary thinking in order to kind of blindly find some way forward.

And since Mark's death in 2017, which then led to re-editing or publishing the CCIU writings through urbanomic um that's now become far more of a part of my thinking and i suppose like consciously thinking a part of what i'm trying to do is to not necessarily in a nostalgic way to try and recapture those lost intensities of what was going on there because i think that's impossible but at least to provide an environment or to be an enabler for that kind of um

microcultural production to happen precisely just by like urbanomic being a space where things get connected and linked together in strange circuits that otherwise wouldn't have have done um so yeah i think probably unconsciously it's been an influence for a long time and increasingly it's more conscious because people are asking more about CCIU and I'm thinking more about it and I'm more accepting of the importance of that period of my life, I suppose, and trying to be faithful to it rather than kind of, I don't know, trying to either deny it or move on from it

or just do something completely different. I'm trying to think of ways in which to retain a kind of fidelity to that kind of crazy insistence that you can do this type of thing. There's no place for it in the world. It might seem like there's no audience for it, but you can still do it. You can connect together all this stuff and produce something that's neither philosophy nor theory nor fiction. and encourage other people to do that yeah i think it's kind of just might take 15 years for people to start to get it yeah i suppose that's the other i mean i guess it's

that's i think that's partly what's so interesting about where things have gone in the way because i guess it's we should acknowledge as we already have done you know this is technically a zero books podcast at least as at the moment but i guess it's part of that same network i suppose that Mark and Tarek were also at Warwick around that time. And I guess there's a similar sort of sentiment, right, that I guess people have taken in their own directions. But I guess it's how much of an impact that can have, I guess, between these different loosely connected... I mean, also, I guess, if people haven't heard it, there's a great session of the Zero Books archives that was being run with Owen Hazley talking about the influence of semiotext on, I guess, Zero. And I suppose that's probably the same for you, right, with urbanomic um it's uh it's it's amazing how that's carried on there were some of the first

books that i encountered where i was like uh yeah they were a real like cultural object and they had a kind of attitude the let those the little love foreign agent semiotic series no definitely a huge thing um but yeah it's absolutely right i think like if you look at the manifesto that Mark and Tarek wrote for the for Repeater and for Zero, you can see exactly like it's that insistence that even if there isn't a space for this, we're going to make the space for this to be able to happen and it's very much along the same

lines as the CCIU in the sense that it's not about academia it's about culture it's about the fact that you want the ideas to engage with the wider culture and i think that's in a sense is like one of the testaments to ccriu is that you know a lot of the people who are involved in that um at that time have gone on to do things that are important culturally and not necessarily just like um you know gone on to write some good papers and go to conferences you know like you just have to look at hyperdub to see like that there's these completely different cultural vectors that ccriu has had these has its kind of tentacles

into so the final point um that i would like us to discuss before we let you go uh is the talk about by the North Sea and uh yes really if you could just tell us what that was and tell us about um what the genesis of that project is a little bit and yes if you could yeah if you could tell us tell us a little bit about by the North Sea really because it's really good uh it was a It's a fascinating and just a very, very, very interesting thing, which I had a wonderful time listening to when it was uploaded

before it disappeared again into the ether. Yeah, it's a strange artifact, and I don't really know quite what it is, but it's something that I've been working on for five years. and it is very much part of the process that I was talking about before of kind of recollecting in every sense like going back and trying to make sense of that period trying to make sense of my relationship with Mark and very immediately it was work that came out of the need to make some kind of sense of Mark's death or in fact to try to make something that would put down a marker to

for me to go back to and recall the terrible sense of lucidity that came from knowing that Mark was gone and that there's so many things that I had somehow imagined would happen one day that now were never going to happen like somehow I always had in my mind that we would together go back, kind of get back together at some point in the future and be able to form that kind of collective, productive, exciting kind of milieu again. And so the focus for that, that feeling, became this project that Mark and I worked on briefly in 2001.

And it was a project where we wanted to make a documentary. It was meant to be a film, a documentary film, about this town in Suffolk in the east of England called Dunwich, which over the centuries has kind of gradually fallen into the sea. It's part of the East Anglican coast that's being slowly eroded by the North Sea. And Mark and I had both gone there as children on holiday. And we both knew about it. And we had this idea that this story could somehow be integrated with the CCIU mythos, mainly through this one mention in the CCIU writings of the Trinitarian Church of Dagon,

which is meant to be this some kind of cult that was dedicated in kind of a Lovecraft style to to like bringing back the old ones and reconnecting humans with their aquatic origins which obviously connects to like a whole series of things in in the CCIE writings about the sea and water and human like regression biological heredity a whole kind of complex of of concepts about the sea and so the idea was like yeah to kind of

weave these things together and to make this documentary film that would be kind of a I guess a documentary fiction so we actually went to Dunwich we spent a couple of days there and we interviewed a couple of people one guy in the museum at Dunwich and another guy who is a diver who kind of explores the ruins there's a famous legend about Dunwich that there's like 14 churches or something under the sea there. And they say that you can hear the church bells ringing under the sea sometimes. It's got this kind of quasi-romantic image. But when you go there, there's just nothing there because it's all under the sea. It's just like a beach. And then you can walk up on the cliff. And at the time we were there in 2001,

there was one gravestone left right on the edge of the cliff, which was from the last church that fell down the cliff into the sea. And then there's like... It is still there. It is there. Only just... Right. It's only just, yeah. And then, so after we kind of started off on this project, it just never happened. And Mark and I had this weird kind of relationship where we just wouldn't talk for years on end. And, but as I said, like, I always had the expectation that one day we'd probably finish it or we'd do something with it. And over the years, I'd gone back to it and kind of written a few treatments of the documentary,

and then like a kind of fictionalised version of the trip that we made to Dunwich as well. And so in 2017, I just kind of wrote this thing that since then I've been just kind of trying to put together, first as a film, and then when I realised that was insanely ambitious just as an audio piece. Yeah, and I'd kind of given up and then not given up and added bits to it over the years. And it kind of accreted. It has a lot of layers, some of which I wasn't consciously aware of, I think. So, yeah. So the final, to put it very briefly, the final piece is like an hour-long audio piece

in which there's these different layers. So the sum of the footage from the actual trip we made to Dunwich in 2001, there's the interviews. Then there's me kind of telling the story of that from the viewpoint of 2017. Then there's like a fictionalized version of it, which involves Templeton, one of the characters from CCIU mythos. and then kind of on the outermost or innermost shell, part of this kind of system of embedded shells, there is Echidna Stilwell, who's kind of in correspondence with someone about Dunwich and trying to understand how this Church of Dagon

fits into her inquiries about the nature of time. And at each level, what's at stake is going back to this, what I was saying about the AOE and the Lemurians. What's always at stake is the idea of finding some way of thinking time that will enable you to negotiate with finality and with the fact that something's ended. right like how do we how can i understand that some things are never going to happen again and my answer to that at the time was i'm going to go back and like make this thing as if mark was still doing it with me i guess we should say that um of everything that we've discussed tonight we will put things in the

show notes um but i guess we can't put bad north scene in the show notes because we we so we had it for the sort of premiere online for the 4k bunk um sort of a memorial lecture that happens at goldsmiths every year um and i guess you've you've you've sort of decided that you want to kind of replicate that experience of a of a sort of specific listening that you you will maybe you you're planning to show it again but is that is that part of that do you think that that um a way of preserving that kind of intensity um yeah definitely about i mean like this is the approach that Mark and Justin took with their amazing audio piece on Vanishing Land, which is kind of based around the same area of Suffolk. And I'm sure like the thing that Mark and I did, this abortive attempt to do this thing

was one of the precursors to that piece, I'm sure. And so their attitude towards it was always like, it should be something that people are in a room together listening to and it's an experience a shared experience and i kind of liked the idea for by the north sea as well um i think it was good to do it online and it above all like it gave me a deadline and i actually finished it which is an amazing feeling like like a whole period of my life is now i've been able to kind of let go of it so that was great um but ideally I'd like it to be heard in an actual place. But I'm also thinking about maybe releasing it in some other way.

So yeah, for the people who would like to hear it, hopefully it won't be too long before there's an opportunity. I mean, there's a whole other discussion here that could be had about extremely online culture and what enables creative work to get done, right? I feel like the demand that everything always has to be immediately available to everyone on every platform can be stifling to culture or it can be the demand for everything always to be aired continually is a problem for me at least. And I think part of what is interesting about CCRU is it's like people in this kind of pressure cooker environment without any contact with the outside, like brewing this stuff up over years without really letting it out.

And part of that, I think, is what produces really interesting work. one uh thought off the top of my head i just want to throw out there just on the subject of forgetting and the forgetting of the ccru uh is is um uh so let me start the thought again um the thing that that reminds me of is the one of the principles for the creation of a magical sigil in Austin Osmond's spare system, although arguably it's Spares slash Kenneth Grant's system, because apparently Grant was the one who reminded Spare of his own writings in this regard, is that once the sigil has been created,

the symbol has been created and then energised, it has to be forgotten. Otherwise it won't work. and although obviously CCRU hasn't been forgotten it has been remembered as being and and did reconstruct it in some ways it's interesting what you're saying there like you know after you know 2001 or whatever it does it evaporates almost it does sink away and it's only now 20 odd years later that uh like you know you know as I said flippantly you know for TikTok which is are exploring the outer regions of human experience via the numogram now. And, you know, maybe there's something to that. Maybe CCRU as hyper-sidual is definitely something

that's waiting to be written by someone, isn't it? Yeah. There's a lot of ticks in CCRU. Say that. Well, we've been talking for quite a long time now, not far after the two-hour mark. I think this is as good a place as any to bring this conversation to a close Robin thank you so so much for making time for us you have been a tremendous sport am I the best guest you've ever had so far? the very best the very very best absolutely thanks for asking me on it's really good to talk about all this stuff where can people find you online robin um at urbanomic.com and my personal website read this.wtf

i think is i think that was partly our inspiration i think we were quite glad to have got um buddies without.org for us yeah i think read this.wtf is is uh is may just pip the post for uh sums up my achievements it's great it's beautiful design too it's really worth uh exploring yeah yeah go and dive into stuff matt where can people find you uh you can find me um at xenogothic on uh twitter instagram facebook at xenogothic.com cory same question and all my links are on twitter at cj white and you can find me at haunt on twitter uh my pinned post at the moment and

i need to put this in my bio there's a link to uh a link to my blog which i'd kind of like remembered but i do have called haunted nautics which i want to try and do more stuff with this year because i've barely i've completely fallen out of the habit of writing i previously have been fairly good at blogging uh where i in theory in theory in theory over this year going to be putting up some uh some wank talking about voluminal because that's still current isn't it right hey yeah yeah i really enjoyed your recent but put yourself down too i've got so i have at least two more brewing um but i need to just actually sit down and i need to sit down and finish that bit of Paul Verrilleo

I was reading in order to make it work so anyway we have been the Buddies Without Organs plus one join us next time which again is going to be more soon it's not going to be we're not going to have big gaps between episodes like we did with Buddies Without Organs it was only because of circumstances completely out of my control but we had to delay this as much as we have done but we're going to get good tight turnarounds with this probably maybe um so watch the space uh where we will be doing something really really good and fun next time i'm not going to say what i'm going to keep it a secret um but we're going to be doing some uh good fun bit of uh writing next week or next time next month uh thank you everybody for uh for being here thank you listener for listening and uh

goodbye bye bye what about Children of the Stones though oh well that's why we're going to have you on again we'll have you on again