the-k-files-astrolithic-megapunk

The End Hello and welcome to Bodies Without Organs presents The K-Files.

I am Sean, my pronouns are he and him, and I am joined by Matt. hello uh hi buddies yeah my name's matt um my pronouns are also he him and we are also joined by our friend down there in the antibodies cory hello good morning buddies yep my name is cory j white and my pronouns are they them well we are recording on what is for myself and matt a cold cold january night um for cory a i'm imagined sort of like quite warm january morning because of the the time zones and the globality of the earth and so on um it's quite i'm not sure what the

weather's like where you are up in the huddersfield map but down here on the south coast it's very appropriate uh to be recording uh something on this subject matter because it is a wonderful totally cloudless night sky out i went for a stroll before we started recording and it was that beautiful kind that that just that beautiful grand eeriness of a winter night sky with the sparkly sparklies overhead uh listening to and again getting into the mood for this listening to uh the kindred ep by burial which is something i try not to listen to too much because it makes be a bit emotional that one it's such a such a oh it's just really good but isn't it um i'm not going to flare around trying to describe what how burial makes me feel right now though i'm certain

that'll be uh subject matter for a later episode so this is the k-files and you might be wondering what the k-files is going to be about the k-files is us switching gear from our previous uh a preoccupation with Deleuze and trying to apply something similar to the work of Mark Fisher. So this is going to be a different kind of series to what we did before. This is going to talk a lot about media and it occurred to me today actually preparing to record this that this is also going to be a podcast that's going to be very much about England and Britain I think because we are going to be talking so much about the stuff that Mark Fisher wrote about and he obviously writes a lot

about English science fiction television and British music and so on, not exclusively by any means, but I think this is going to be, the lens is going to be changing what its focus is from what we've discussed over the last 12 months with Deleuze. So this is going to be a very interesting series of experiments i think uh and i'm very much looking forward to seeing where this takes us uh you two how do you feel how do you where do you think we're going to go with the k files well yeah like for me as someone who doesn't have you know the the academic training or the academic background with uh philosophy i have found mark fisher to be extremely accessible he

was probably my first entry point into reading theory and philosophy and from him on to other texts and writers. So, yeah, I'm really excited to get Doug in, you know, to some of his more obscure, like, blog posts and writings and, yeah, just use that as a lens to look at, you know, both the media that he references and just other things that might occur to us as we read through the posts. Yeah, I'm really excited about this project. Yeah, I mean, this is an odd one for me. If only because, I mean, I'm very familiar with Mark's work. No. Yeah, for any listeners that I suppose don't know,

or I suppose also viewers at this point, let's see the change that we've got for this season of the BWO is that we're also coming to your eyeballs as well as your ears. But yeah, I wrote a book about Mark a couple of years ago and edited Mark's final lectures for repeated books. But despite that foreknowledge, this wasn't my idea. And I think it's for that reason that I'm actually really excited about this. It's not something that I would have thought to have done precisely because it's almost obvious. but I'm really excited to actually read Mark with friends again. It's been a long time, years really, I think,

since I've had that opportunity. So, yeah, and it's strange in a way because I think almost with someone as difficult as Deleuze that we looked at for most of last year, or all of last year, it's so difficult that you do have to plan ahead. whereas Mark's work seems to offer like a slightly it's more accessible as Corey rightly said but then also at the same time that feels like it's more open in a way there's there's uh there's more to I don't know there's there's there's more to sort of explore outwards there's not there's not this wealth of secondary literature we can draw on to confirm our readings or whatever of this sort of stuff and that that's kind of um makes for a more exploratory

podcast which is i'm both kind of nervous about and also really excited about so um yeah this is a this is a really nice start to 2022 i think uh yes it's my my responsibility all of this i'm afraid um but the the thought came to me when i was out walking with my camera and i was listening I was listening to Pi Corner Audio's most recent album. I was taking pictures of this mysterious substation-looking thing, a town over and against a lovely late autumn, early winter sky. And I don't ask me why, but the thought just flashed into my head that it would be really good to do some podcasting about Mark Fisher. And yes, and it's interesting as well that over the years

I have been podcasting because as listeners to, we'll do pluggables at the end of it, but listeners of this podcast might be familiar with me from Weird Signal. Mark Fisher has always kind of been a presence in the podcasting that I've done and indeed the curiously, and this was completely unintentional, I'm aware that people might not think it was unintentional or might not believe us when we say that. We are recording this debut episode of the k-files on the anniversary of mark's death and indeed the first episode of weird signal was again unintentionally coincidentally recorded on the one year anniversary of mark's death and the day that he died my i my discovery of that was me sitting down in my living

room to start the weird and the eerie checking facebook on my phone just as i did say reflexively and the first thing i see being that mark fisher was dead um so yeah it feels um in a way that he has always kind of been i mean he's been his work has been a presence you know in my life for for years and he's always been either in the background or in the foreground of the podcast thing that i've recorded um not so much with um buddies without organs i think maybe because we did have a different focus um but he has always he has always been a presence there somehow so it feels like a high time to really really shift a gear and focus in on him and uh yeah because uh for for me myself

i've been aware of so much of his stuff i haven't read and wanting to have an excuse to do so at last you know or just to have something you know in my life it means i have to actually read a lot more of him more than just like the books we've all read like capitalist realism and ghosts of my life um so yeah i'm really excited for this project's exploratory potential um as well and uh again this is i think this is probably going to bring all of us into slightly more comfortable territory than maybe we have been dealing with deluxe because a lot like we are going to be doing just a fair bit of media criticism in this because of the uh again just because the the nature of the subject matter a lot of us is going to be talking about films and tv and so on um and i think with

that actually we probably ought to mention what it is we're going to be talking about today we are going to be talking about a very, very brief blog post in the Hypersicians blog. And it was, Matt, your idea that we cover this. It went up on February the 6th, 2005, a very short piece entitled Megalithic Astropunk, which is surprisingly hard to find when you Google it. So we'll just have to put it in the show notes. and this we what we're going to do is um we are just going to assume that you listener and or viewer have read this because again it's really short like it's less than five minutes reading you can do you can do this we believe in you although what we might do as well is put out

just a little recording of one of us just reading it they'll go out alongside this and this short fun punchy little blog post is to do with the 1970s children's TV serial Children of the Stones so I have lots and lots and lots I want to talk about here I'm sure that we all do in fact so I'm just going to I'm going to throw this open to whoever wants to go first with this actually um well i maybe i wondered what could maybe set the stage at least is maybe talk about where why this post maybe why this blog um maybe give a bit of background as to what's going on here

um if that sounds good with you both anyway yes um because i guess that Sean, you're very correct that this is a very short post, but at the same time, as soon as you start these first few paragraphs, there's a sense that you're slightly jumping in at the deep end. Because it starts off pretty intensely. When Mark's kind of using this quite quasi-high theoretical language that seems quite obtuse. but I think that's mostly because he's using neologisms and concepts that he himself invented for himself and for others and I guess central to that is this concept of hyperstition

which is not only central to this post but it's also it comes from the hyperstition blog so I think first things first I thought I'd kind of try and situate this blog in a kind of short history very very short history because there's a lot to talk about and we've not got, well I mean we've got all the time in the world but for the sake of our own patience I think the Hypersician blog is really interesting it's not, you know, Mark's best known for his K-Punk blog but it wasn't the only one, it wasn't the only online project that he had and the Hypersession blog was sort of founded in 2004 so about a year after K-Punk or maybe even

the same year as a more of a collaborative writing project and a writing space for various people that had been part of the CCIU. For those that don't know the CCIU is otherwise known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit because this is kind of the onion of the sort of K-Punk family tree almost. They're going to have to sort of peel back a few layers here. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was this para-academic research group that was populated by various students at the University of Warwick and elsewhere. It wasn't really confined to the university, and it wasn't made up exclusively as students from that institution, but it did function in its orbit. The timeline of the CCI was quite complex for this reason,

something that its members I think often embraced and it's a it's a product of this cross-pollination between institutions so you have Warwick University on the one hand which had and continues to have a quite prestigious philosophy department which at that time featured academics like Keith Ansel Pearson and Nick Land and together they both taught contemporary continental philosophy which was stuff like Alain Badiou, Guillaume Deleuze who we're now quite familiar with, michelle henry and francois laroel and this is on the mid 90s um and around that time warwick was joined by sadie plant who had moved there from the university of birmingham who where she brought a bunch of her students with her including mark fisher who had previously been a part of um another

sort of research group called switch which featured people like stephen metcalf and angus Carlisle, neither of whom went to Warwick, but I think were also involved in the CCIU. You kind of see how complicated this gets. And soon enough, the CCIU kind of becomes this quite sprawling online cyber network of renegade academics who collectively produced all these different texts and graphic artworks and audio essays and performances. And later that kind of network expands even further and you have people like Kourjou Eshin, who became sort of a fan of work at first and then they contribute to publications and zines and things and i'm kind of rattling through all this if only because i think it's important to understand how fundamental this ethos of networking and collaboration was um but which wasn't strictly academic

and nor was it sort of fully independent either and it's largely for that reason i think that in around 2003 most of the ccius main players had sort of completed their phds or had somewhat notorious mental breakdowns and moved on to other places and other projects um but in reality you know that that the networks simply changed shape so people got more into blogging um and it was at that time that an even more sort of decentralized blogosphere came in being which was um fully independent of any academic institution actually which allowed for kind of this new influx of well an influx of new blood which included people like reza negustani and this is where the hyperstition blood comes in so um it's this sort of post ccriu collaborative space um resident negostani posted

a lot there um most of his posts were later sort of siphoned off and transformed into his first book um 2008 cyclonopedia but mark fisher was also a frequent poster there and there were other ccriu alumni like nick land robin mckay and a green span steve goodman and others and whether that's You know, that's either writing posts or just being an active part of the comment section. And Hypersdition is kind of the crowning sort of, well, for one thing, the title of this, the sort of name of this blogosphere is an acutely CCRU concept. I think we've already said before recording today that we could probably dedicate a whole episode to that concept. But I think for now, it's at least worth breaking it down in maybe probably the simplest of terms.

So hyperstition is clearly related to the word superstition. And we can define superstition as a sort of belief that makes fictions real. So if I step on a crack and my mother breaks her back, then I weave a web of coincidence and causation between two events. I make the fiction real I'm the one who makes these connections and constructs a narrative out of them and unbelief is central here too there's kind of the the the rational part of my brain might be wholly aware of the fact that my mother's broken back is is a coincidence and nothing to do with my stepping on cracks nevertheless the narrative I've constructed this this vague possibility can still be affecting like to the extent that i might still feel guilty

you know the the facts might not care about your feelings but it's sometimes also true that your feelings don't care about the fact so hyperstition kind of goes a step further it's it's it's a instead of a fiction that makes it's uh it's it's a fiction that makes itself real uh which we could say is like an urban legend or a meme or something like the mandela effect the the the the eye that is central to superstition is displaced and suddenly it's maybe not clear what sort of agency is acting on this belief to the extent that um certain ideas start to circulate through a culture maybe without origin or without the application of like a conscious human agency and this is something that we find so often in horror films and this is kind of this is what

the cciu was sort of most famous for and it's something that carries on in this hyperstition blog and especially in this post where um i guess you could say that horror films in general um might be one way of articulating certain worries or anxieties or fears that we as a society have but haven't yet given a proper form or a name to but which seemingly sort of emerge of their own accord and it's also and i think it's you know it's particularly important where these fears emerge from there's an air of philip k dick here that that that famous line from valis where he says that the symbols of the divine initially show up in the trash strata And the same is true here for Mark Fisher especially, but also the broader CCRU and the other members of the hyperstition block.

It's often the case that some of the most profound insights into our cultural moments or our contemporary structures of feeling can be drawn out from our cultural trash. And this is why Mark begins this post by focusing on Pulp Fiction. He writes,

visible mauls of contemporary post-modern entertainment culture where everything is not only known but knowing so it's for this reason that mark turns to these near forgotten 70s bbc serials that kind of haunted his youth like old doctor who episodes or things like the prisoner or sapphire and steel and the stone tape or in the case of this post children of the stones and this this stony theme is telling as well i think um mark's got a really great post on the stone tape that i'm not sure if that was just on his blog or also made it into um one of his books either way maybe that's another something else to be in front of the time um anyway to get to the point i think is that it's it's it's here that we kind of in this kind of stoniness this kind of

this strange agency of materiality that we encounter um these strange sorts of affects these kind of hyperstitional affects that are not produced by subjects but by objects so a kind of pop cultural materialism where our agency is put in tension by the strange forces that emanate from our surroundings so you know um Nietzsche often made the point about food you know he sort of the first a lot of Nietzsche's philosophy was written around that time that the the phrase you are what you eat first came into sort of circular well maybe not that phrase in particular but that idea at least came into circulation so he has this great line about how the way that german philosophers think probably can probably be explained by their steady diet of

sausages um but in our contemporary consumerist society you know we find ourselves tucking into a lot more than just sausages so fisher's question i think is you know we're not just here but i guess in general and i guess maybe this is something that is kind of distilled really nicely in this post i'm kind of interested to see what you guys think of this but one of his questions here is what does it say about his generation that they were raised on a steady diet of occulted, murky, trashy television programmes? And what does our more clinical and hyper-bright media diet tell us about ourselves today? I had a conversation with a friend on Saturday about this subject, actually, because he lent me a copy of a book,

which I'm not actually going to be referring to, it turns out. But we were talking about the 70s thing, and it's how it intersects with ontological culture and Fortean culture as well for that matter and he made a very very salient point where he said that all of these upsetting kids shows from the 70s you know Doctor Who Children of the Stones The Tomorrow People all of that in terms of its actual genuine disturbingness all of them pale in comparison to jimmy savile to uh the actual real mainstream good polite society

tv of the era right um that and he suggests that part of the interest in uh all the resurgence of interest in stuff like old doctor who children of the stones and so one of his active like cultural reclamation which has been kind of pioneered by people who grew up with it in some way or the other um and then propagated it to younger generations um is almost an act of like vindication but sort of like us spooky kids were never the ones that you ought to be worried about you know um and actually sort of like um strange echoes of this coming down uh coming down through years. Again, not only are we another thing that is significant about today is that shortly before

recording it was announced that the Queen has stripped Prince Andrew of his military honours and royal patronages because of his connection with a sex abuse scandal. So this is the, which almost, at this point, almost feels like such a thoroughly English thing to have happen. You know, sort of like another major establishment figure caught up with something incredibly nasty and seedy like this. Yes, and it's, but yeah, I think there's definitely some truth to that, this idea that in this media, which has this shadowiness to it and this general, you know, vibes of the weird and the eerie, this stuff that was, you know,

was regarded in some way or the other as somewhat suspect. like it receives this vindication by the discovery of what the respectable media artefacts actually were involved with, what was actually going on behind the scenes with them It's like the, I'd actually never thought of putting that together before but it feels like that line that's in this post right where it's, I mean, I guess we're gonna I don't want to jump right into the middle of it, but he talks about these pulp villains that you get in these pulp fictions. They're not straightforward, and this is a quote, not straightforwardly malevolent monsters,

but they can be beamingly altruistic administrators of the pleasure principle. And what does that describe if not a kind of Jimmy Savile or a Boris Johnson or even the strangely placating presence of monarchy? yes exactly i think sean just did a total strato analysis of the libidinal material nature of power that mark fisher mentions in the post just right there just yeah nailed it yeah well we can stop now uh yeah wrap it up um yeah christ um okay shall we start uh i think we should start talking about the meat of this a be in earnest um cory i think you have something that you want to talk about and i think that thing

is something to do with william burroughs isn't it yeah yeah so do you before before you do do can we just ignore i just want to acknowledge you because that might seem like a bit of a non-secretar um that uh there's this line here in the um in the post which i'll just read uh children of the stones is about petros the black hole vampire god of this in of this intensification and intensive death whose hunger for star energy is similarly diagrammed in burrow's nova trilogy there's also reference slightly later on in the post to um the villain of the piece uh the villain of the piece um being described here as an agent of uh burrow's notion of control just to just to set you up there

a little bit, Corey. Maybe there's some more setting up, actually, because, at least in terms of talking about Petros, what about Children of the Stones? Yeah, actually, yeah. No, you're quite right. What do you... Because, I mean, we all kind of watched it before Christmas. We haven't talked about Children of the Stones yet, have we? Okay. This is the problem, right? It's a post that gets so into the meat of things so quickly that I think even we... Maybe that's my own fault for that slightly dense introduction, but we've it's hard to dip your toe into this you are kind of immediately like dunked sort of witch trial was my it was my own fault for not being a good podcast dictator because i do actually have like in my notes written in front of me saying that like we need to talk about children

of the stones and 70s less of it all uh sub point sub point a plot summary uh okay cory you go first then in telling us what you thought about children of the stones before we move on to leon burrows okay um yeah no i thought like one of the good things about like cheap sci-fi is like well i guess like cheap sci-fi can go one of two ways it can either just look really cheap and terrible or it can force the creators to come up with really interesting ideas and interesting ways around the budgetary constraints and you know that's kind of what i felt was happening here is that it's like just really weird and spooky and eerie and like it does that with very little in the way of like effects or um or uh yeah good acting or anything much but it's just like a really

interesting story and it told you know yeah told really well for the time yeah i remember actually something i read in uh the english heretic uh book from repeater well i don't i don't think he was talking about the stone tape in particular but he was talking about like stuff from the 70s where he says something like look in the same way you wouldn't really like hold it against it but the special effects look bad you shouldn't hold the acting against it either you know there were you know it was a kid's show it was made you know sort of like yeah well actually that's it just it yeah it was a kid's show it was made up in 70s it wasn't really meant to look or feel anything other than how it does but that's sort of the that's that's like the the almost the 70s charm right it's all bit amdram like of atmosphere but then at the same time like also deeply occulted and sinister

that you can like it can be so something that's so mundane in terms of its production but actually has this like really on like genuinely unsettling sort of themes or or events or well at least for this one too i always think i think the soundtrack is just so bizarre for a kind of for any tv show It's the sort of thing you'd sort of like kind of under the skin, sort of contemporary art house horror vibe, not like a 70s TV show for the BBC. For ITV, which makes it even weirder. Was it ITV? I know, right? Yeah. Oh, it's HTV. What is HTV? HTV must be... It must be ITV. It comes just before ITV, right? No, it was produced by HTV and broadcasts on ITV.

htv being now being itv wales and west previously known as harlech television i am just reading this off wikipedia um and actually yeah and and indeed mark has mentioned the music here saying and i'm just going to read this quote uh the thing that children who saw the serial when it was first broadcast are liable to attain most powerfully in their spinal cord body memory is the music harrowing eternal atonal chants reminiscent of penderecki and leggetti which made the looming close-ups of Megalith's scream of millennia-old panic like the young viewers of Doctor Who the audience of Children of the Stones was infected by sounds far more disturbing and deranged than anything Rock has ever come up with and he's not wrong he's not wrong it is um yeah I do yeah but

yes we should we will acknowledge though um like it is it is weird and it is eerie but there is also just it is also charming and funny like uh not always intentionally um just because of the circumstances of its creation and yes it's very stagey it's um but it's also absolutely delightful i will say uh that the thing that does just make it tremendously funny is at the ad break and god knows why this is here like i don't know if like there's like like a continuity announcer would speak over this but there's always a point when it comes to the ad break it says end of part one where the camera doesn't cut away it just keeps on focused on whoever spoke last on their face and it will just hold for about 10 odd seconds of them just like trying not to look

at the camera and not always succeeding in not looking at the camera either which is absolutely oh it's beautiful yeah um yeah it makes you think they filmed it live or something but it's yeah it's like that weird it's like an weird snl breaking thing i actually i actually sent um i i sent a um the the youtube of the first um episode of this to a friend uh who just sort of like just sort of like a little recording with back of his iphone saying what are they saying here like it's completely impenetrable what's the saying at points here no it isn't but listen to yeah fuck that was saying i'm sorry but i'm saying something like you know it's a very good chance that all of this is either the first or second take uh of each scene

because you know they didn't they wouldn't have had budget for more than that and that's actually like something doctor who like especially like old creaky doctor who is notorious for is they would just go with like the first take sometimes and which is why you have all of these like um wonderful moments of people just tripping up over the lines or missing their mark uh because they just they not i don't want to say they didn't care it was just sort of like well can't do it again though can we um william heart be budgetary like you literally don't have the film stock yeah like william like william hart in particular the first doctor as as time went on and his memory started to go basically and he would there are these moments where he does just trail off and

there'll be like 10 seconds or so of just moments until someone else like just jumps ahead to their as we were saying doctor um and these were like oh it's just it's just really quite fun and jolly please watch the uh children of the stones but yeah this is um yeah i will put a link to it too actually in the oh it's all on youtube yeah yeah the whole series is available on youtube which is quite special actually the yeah and it should be said though like um your level of enjoyment of it is going to depend on like your your mental bandwidth when it comes to this like um like uh i'm not being fully like it is it is a slog stuff like this like if you

don't have like the bug for it like this was like in preparation for this was when i finally sat down and watched children of the stones and i tried twice before to do so um and and i was only able to get through it by watching it like over a week in chunks at lunchtime basically because it like, otherwise it would just get too much because it is quite, yeah just the thought taken taken in too strong a dose like the thoughts just can get a bit overwhelming but I imagine it'd be something very very fun to watch at the party, remember those I mean yeah I remember that the first time I think I've watched this

it was a few years ago it was in some the it was in robin mckay's front living room in cornwall actually um and i remember as both after it it's about i think all together it's about two and a half hours long and fell with sort of a glass of like a bottle of wine between us just a little bit delirious by the end yeah it definitely takes its toll there was some delicious we will get back onto the theory in a bit but we have to keep talking about this a little bit more but like in particular the moment where um oh god what's his name the villain uh i've got his name here hendrick hendrick when he um is performing his ritual and he's sat there on his throne which rotates before the beam of energy shoots up into the black hole and there's just the fact he visibly is just shifting it around on his feet it's well holding on to the hand so it doesn't

like fall over as he does so oh it's delicious it's delightful well okay no we have to summarize the plot then we have to get back on we have to get back on track um so it's um it's it's a story which is quite simple but also weirdly complicated at the same time like surprisingly complicated when you actually get down to the structure of it and i think that's one of the reasons why it is so memorable because once you if you do stick with it and get through to the end like you will be pleasantly surprised at how solid the plot actually is and like how it's expecting a lot from its audience actually and like the things like the production values and the acting don't help it in that regard but you get a story which is actually surprisingly sophisticated in terms of

the narrative complexity um of the piece and what it's about it's about um this this young boy and his father who's an astrophysicist uh who moved to this village i think it's called milbury uh in the series but it's filmed in avebury in wiltshire of the avebury circle um so which is a for people who don't know is a village um which was just built within a stone circle uh it's not too far it's about like an hour's drive away from stonehenge it's rough it's in like the same area of the country uh it's a much better it's a much better like visit than stonehenge though to be perfectly honest because you don't have to pay because it's like it's literally just a village is there so you just go to this village and then you just wander around you can touch and

climb on the stones and so on because there's unlike stonehenge there's no way they could keep you away from them because the village is just in the midst of it and it is one of the weirdest places you'll ever visit it's absolutely fantastic it's really really cool to go there actually like is is awesome so he they they move to this uh to to this village i'm not quite sure why he's gone there to do astrophysical research i can't remember if the reason was ever given for this but he does so and basically what they discover is there is this separation in the village between people who one might describe as ordinary people and then the happy people of the village who are just um well again to quote from mark fisher here he says that um uh oh god where is it there we go uh the syria opens by presumably self-consciously echoing invasion of the body snatchers children of

the damned quatermass to the wicker man and stepford wives inducting its two leads astrophysicist adam break and his son matthew into a near-closed community of happy people one of the great services such fictions provided was to make its young viewers intensely suspicious both of happiness as an emotional state and of those who proffer it as a libidinal political goal which i think is a really really interesting statement here and what they discover over the course of the serial is that the stones of the stone circle are aligned somehow with a black hole uh deep in outer space and that a certain cycle of events has actually been repeating there through the centuries quite archetypal in some ways

there's the arrival of the two travellers to the village there is the barber surgeon who is crushed by the stones and there is the high priest the magus who is leading this community and what they seem to be doing is they transmit their I suppose I mean this is where we can start getting the weeds of it you know what is it they actually are giving up to the black hole god you know it's some kind of um free will i suppose would be the easiest way of passing it but it's a certain kind of psychic depth is what they sacrifice to it in exchange for this simple-minded happiness that they then enjoy would you agree

with that yeah i mean i almost think it's it's i mean it's the end of this is something else this I was going to say, it's something probably to unpack, but I feel like they're just giving themselves up to power, right? Like kind of indeterminate power without origin almost, as if they're just seduced by energy. But, yeah, I mean, the implications of that get quite weedy and metaphysical quite quickly, so that's not really a simple statement to make. But, yeah, that's also kind of the power of it too, right? the indeterminacy of what they're actually giving themselves up to. I think I have... So the focus of my notes here is on talking about... It is talking in quite a lot of detail about my ideas

around ley lines and stone circles, which I'm going to hold off on for a bit because I think that's actually a really good jumping-off point to handing the reins over to Corey for a bit because I know you have stuff prepared about burrows and control and I think is very relevant to what we were just talking about. Yeah, yeah. So one thing that's readily apparent if you read a lot of Borough's writing is that he seems to perceive the universe itself to be an inherently hostile place, perhaps even anti-human. But then to say it's anti-human, it might sound kind of like cosmic horror, but I think there's still a distinction there. like cosmic horror you can kind of sum it up with two two main ideas the first being that there are

horrors in this universe that are literally incomprehensible and trying to comprehend them will drive you insane and the second idea is that humanity is insignificant like we are completely beneath the notice of the elder gods and other entities and if they do kill us it'll just be as a side effect of some other action that they're taking like maybe they're just taking a shit and then, you know, an entire country dies because they don't realise that people are under their butthole. So then, like, with Burroughs, it's not so impersonal as that. Like, with Burroughs, it's as though the evil recognises us, like, intimately and deeply. And it even, like, maybe recognises things in us

that we would rather not admit were there. It's an intensely personal hatred that's aimed directly at you and it can emanate from anyone or even anything in your vicinity. So that means that in Burroughs writing, the forces of control might be ubiquitous and largely arbitrary, but if they choose to target you, they're going to target you with all of the intensity of someone bearing a very personal grudge. so with burrows control is stifling dehumanizing even anti-human um and it's a kind of a system that must be battled at every junction in contrast what we see with children of the stones is a seemingly benevolent system of control um so beyond hendrix's or hendrix need to feed on star

energy he does seem genuinely concerned for his little human pets like he he seems to want what's best for them and like even though they are kind of hollowed out um through the process they are still like outwardly happy um it doesn't so like it might not seem like an anti-human system of control but it is thoroughly anti-individual um and i think i don't know if sean might want to talk about this but that kind of seems to tie into uh british folk horror uh and even hot fuzz like the overriding importance of the greater good the greater good yes the um i mean for me when it comes to when it comes to like the foundational the fundamental character

of folk horror right it seems i mean and i'm certain that's something that people you know can and will uh argue intensely you know sort of like for for a definition of it but for me what's going on here and where this plugs into folk horror is for me what the fundamental theme for folk horror for me is this notion that within the parochial there is something cosmic or at least something radically other and i think this is what like we can't just pass over the endearing folkiness of children of the stones if i would take place in sort of like a charming little village and you know there's the the village school and the village library uh the village doctor there's the morris dancing and so on uh in the same way but you know in the wicker

man you have all of these charming features of you know small of a small town life and indeed with hot fuzz as well all you know um but there is this um familiar folky charming pleasantness to the whole thing but under the surface there's something like i said either cosmic or radically other and obviously with children of the stones it was both obviously it's uh but um it is very literally cosmic you know this is a village built within a stone circle which has a literal physical connection with a alien black hole god you know um and i think so yes it does um it really does kind of encompass these themes really really uh neatly and again something else and and and

you're really right there cory as well that's a figure that often appears in these um films or these tv shows is the benevolent controller uh and you're here it's it's hendrick there um in in um hot fuzz i really like you brought up in hot fuzz there's i think his name is jim broadbent's character and the village council and uh obviously the great like figure of this is lord summer isle in the wicker man who again sort of like he seems like an affable charming uh gentleman and you know very similar character character to hendrick i imagine there is some kind of like i imagine there was influence one way or the other i can't quite remember which would have come out first um i think possibly this might have come out before the wicker man but that doesn't matter

and they're archetypal figures anyway but both of them like you said do seem to genuinely have a beneficence to them they care about their people and they don't necessarily want to do the more unpleasant sides the more unpleasant duties here but they do them all the same because they believe it is sincerely for the greater good sort of like Lord Summerisle I mean I love the Wicker Man very very dearly is an excess it's an exceptional film and one of the very a moment i've always found quite disturbing is when he tries to comfort can't spoil howie by reminding him that so well reminding him that well you as a christian should appreciate that this is martyrdom you are you are

going to sit with the saints for this you know this doesn't happen anymore you're gonna be burned by the pagans right and the thing is like he does seem to mean it like he does want to sort of be a source of comfort here and again with and with hendrick you know this it doesn't seem to be suggesting this or like he um he does seem to think that this is just going to make everything better but at the same time of all of this and this is why i think it is important to think of these as figures who are darkly reflective of establishment real life establishment figures is that i mean they can say that if they can say that and act like well you know this is this hurts me as much as it hurts you but you're still the lord of the manor and i'm not you know like you're

still the creepy old guy hanging around with the kids you know it's um there's there's limits to this and i think it's it's um this and i think the truth here is you know that that beneficence is its own can be its own form of control surely um yeah well i'll pick back up um from exactly there what you were saying um so i think like even if like hendrick's apparent benevolence does act as a as a good form of control um if you are a control addict um it's something that burrows could never consider because for Burroughs, I think, like, loss of autonomy or self would be completely unconscionable.

So, like, he sees control of any sort, I feel, as always being an attack by a hostile alien presence. So then if you take the dichotomy between hostile and benevolent forces of control, that kind of made me think of Matrix Resurrections versus the original movie. like in the original movie Cypher was like villainous because he was willing to sell out his friends in order to regain entry into the matrix and like experience an easy life and in Resurrections it's kind of shown that that choice to remain inside is understandable like it's not necessarily a good choice to make it's not necessarily helpful or healthy

but it is something that you know you can understand and I think like that part of the film is really timely because like in the wake of the pandemic and the onrushing climate crises we're likely to face in the coming years a lot of people will prefer to stick their heads in the sand like why walk away from a malice when you can happily watch your Disney Plus play Fortnite get food delivered to your door by underpaid gig workers and forget about the suffering child imprisoned in the city's dungeon um like these dystopian dreams of a metaverse peddled by zuckerberg and others are simply the logical endpoint endpoint of this tendency towards a blissful ignorance it will like literally obfuscate the myriad very real problems of the very real world for this kind of like clean and

sterile corporate reality like it's they're definitely coming from it thinking they're offering benevolent control but you know i think to many of us it seems horrifying um all right so back to children of the stones the show was made for kids um and so because of that like the the effects of the happification process um that we see a kind of skewed towards you know like childish endeavors like we see that it makes them creepily happy sociable non-violent and and for some reason very very good at maths um but then it leaves the question of like how would it actually affect the adults we don't really see that much apart from like the the surface level happiness um so like i'm left wondering like how would it alter their behavior

and their beliefs like would the process like quash like queerness for instance like um there's no there's no sense of what would happen and i think that would be something really interesting to explore um and then like the other part of it that i can't help but thinking of is in the modern day with a similar like process turn people into happy like perfect happy workers ready to slave away for capital um like it's it's kind of easy to imagine that in our age of economic precarity and like wealth inequality someone might undergo a process like this if it meant that they were freed from depression and anxiety that we like that are increasingly

you know suffered because of the I guess the pressures of society and you know that maybe they'd go through the process if they were guaranteed a job at the other side or maybe just like a place in an actual community because capitalism has done a great job of atomizing our society so then I start thinking about technocratic control and how every week there's a new startup that's planning to use machine learning and invasive apps to make people better, more efficient workers. And it's tied to a pervasive idea that Fisher definitely mentioned in his writings, particularly capitalist realism, that whatever is wrong with a person is A, purely a personal failing

and not a reflection of increasingly hostile social systems, and B, it's fixable if we have the right data. Now, Burroughs would find this horrifying. It's like, I think he'd see it as the perfection of a hostile and anti-human system of control. And, you know, what would he have us do? He'd have us smash the control images, smash the control machine. In Naked Lunch, Burroughs wrote, you see, control can never be a means to any practical end. Control can never be a means to anything but more control, like junk. so the people at the top they've become control addicts fueled by technocratic ideology and bullshit beliefs like long termism they all see

themselves as Hendrix but above it all they all see themselves as Hendrix or Petros being above the rest of us and they think that they're controlling us for our own good they don't care what we have to say in the matter yes and i think you're very right to connect this with um with corporate information control and monitoring uh i mean because you're precise and i and you're quite right to drop to to to mention that uh berserk as well right because that what facebook was was was doing you know all of his time with um was gathering out you know was algorithmically gathering data about us in order to try and direct and command our emotional responses to a stimuli uh and doing all of this

under not necessarily saying this well actually i suppose yeah no the whole thing was saying this all of this is making us all happier and more connected and more sociable right we're actually just all it was doing was funneling us into ever more um niche theaters of control right um and part of me almost thinks that like the scrappiness and the low production values of something like children of the stones and the fact that it is so long and quite like boring means it's resistant to being processed away you know by by um by the machines in some ways because like it's something that you can't really all you could do would be to try and file away the things that make it distinctive to make it less less distinct you know um i'm conscious of time and i think we probably

all i think we probably all still have quite a lot we want to talk about so we might try and rattle our way through things a little bit um actually speaking of time i have some things i want to talk about uh about when it comes to uh time circles and so on and indeed like i have good segue thank you and uh some remarks about and this is something i was tweeting about the other day actually i think it's quite interesting to think about is what is why is so much british sci-fi tv obsessed with time travel uh because it and this is something you see like the like big british sci-fi tv show of all time is doctor who which is about a time traveling space alien and but this is something that does crop up a lot

like Children of the Stones is very much concerned with these loops in time Sapphire and Steel like Fisher writes about it in Sapphire and Steel time is like this corrosive force that's trying to push its way in and even like more recently when the BBC revived Doctor Who we had the unedifying spectacle of ITV's Prime Evil time javelin dinosaurs um it wasn't good and the i think there's two ways to think about this uh and we could say that there's like a material and the symbolic dimension to this obsession with time travel firstly is and as we have been saying definitely part of it is a budget thing that they were not producing these these shows with enormous amount of money and you know why not try to find a use

for this period set we happen to have you know uh and this was actually like a curse that the original series of star trek suffered under which is why there's this endless parade of gangster planets and cowboy worlds in original star trek uh and but i think in in symbolic terms it's fact this is very interesting because i think it implies that there's this sense that here in britain we've kind of remained trapped within time and trapped within our own past and there's something you know with sci-fi you know is the genre that's meant to be the most like future oriented but we keep on pulling it backward into the past um and this is you know this is inaugurated by you know hg wells is the time machine although he sends it off into the future but obviously there is within

this notion, like, bringing time itself into question as a thing to be contemplated has always kind of, like, been running, seems sort of always been running through British science fiction and fantasy writing. And, you know, it's significant, I think it's culturally significant that, you know, we haven't had a radical temporal rupture in British history since, you know, Cromwell's Commonwealth, that was a rupture that gets suited, that gets stitched together again, and Cromwell's corpse gets desecrated to try and make almost like a ritual action to try and turn back the clock, so this is something that we're just going to pretend didn't happen in order to preserve the neat flow of time. And if we want to get Freudian about it, and I see

no reason why we shouldn't get Freudian about it, this sense of the only direction to move in when it comes of time is either stationary or to go backwards, is of course extremely reminiscent of the death drive, which manifests itself as repetition, as the eternal present moment, or as the endless attempt to recover the past out of this perception of the past's simplicity and security. Hence why this is the death drive, because this is a drive that could only resolve itself ultimately in um the ultimate return to simplicity which would be to return to the inorganic to return to death and you know i think it's significant that at the end of the stone tapes the people

not stone tapes of children of the stones the people of milbury are turned to stone by the entity um you know the happy people are all frozen in place they are literally petrified right but i think if we pursue pursue the notion of time repetition here even further we see that like we're dealing with something surprise again surprisingly sophisticated with the stone with with the stone not uh not the stone tapes children of the stones um because this isn't a time loop like you would see in some episodes of doctor who where eventually keep on repeating themselves this is much more interesting this is a time spiral right because the difference between a circle and the spiral is the spiral is the spiral is this self-repeating but self-transformative

figure while the circle is a stationary figure you know the coordinates for a spiral as it as it extends and expands differ you end up somewhere else even though you're somewhere similar to where you were before um or you could think of it as um as a sine wave almost you know which is always in motion somehow and though you the form repeats it doesn't repeat in the same location you know um the the repetitions of the cycle of time that's that is trapped within the stones aren't exact people move about they they come and go they seem to move with the time with time of the outside well you know they're not stuck in prehistoric times um but they're these fundamental features all these archetypal roles that always have to be played out you know there's always the magus

there's always the barber surgeon and presumably there's always the two visitors as well of whom you know under adam and matthew and hendrick and so on are just the latest manifestations of this of this this process which is more complicated than just a circle and uh this is tangential but this is all tangents this is quite in some i'm going to bring up kenneth grant right um i'm going to bring up kenneth grant here who is one of alas the crowley's disciples and arguably his last living disciple actually and the reason i'm bringing him up is because in his book outside the circles of time and just the name of it should give you you know reason enough to want to look at if we're talking about something like this,

about a science fiction or cult fantasy about time. And the reason I'm doing so is he presents this notion of eonics, of the occult science, of the progression of the eons, and he complicates it very, very interestingly. And I'm just going to read this, so there's only a couple of paragraphs. The ancient Gnostics developed an elaborate eonology involving time cycles and words of magical power. Similarly, Far Eastern systems had their yugas, maha-yugas, kalpas and maha-kalpas, cycles within cycles. And in recent times, within the lifetime of many readers of this book, a new eon has dawned, the age of Aquarius, known under various names by different cults.

It is said that an eon endures for approximately 2,000 years, but an eon is also defined as being an immeasurable period of time, and metaphysics has shown that time is a very tricky commodity, perhaps more so even than its sister concept, space. The couplet from the Necronomicon, that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die, is of sinister import. In fact, as the occultist Afrata Achad and others have shown, quite independently of each other, the eons are not necessarily successive. There may be eons between eons, periods of time so infinitesimally small as to be indeed immeasurable, Such a Hadid eon from a mundane viewpoint, however, need not be immeasurable. It need not be in time at all. And that may seem not especially relevant to what we're talking about here,

but what I think is kind of being brought together here in this particular cultural artefact is this kind of strange esotericism of time, of this notion that to the mundane eye, time is strictly linear and moves in successive stages but to the initiate to those who see beyond the veil right to the hendrix of the world or to um the matthews because of course you know he has second sight something we've not mentioned here about the about um the uh the child leads in this is meant to have esp there's a set of this discovery of there's actually a great deal more complexity to time but you have these movements with it but you have these spiral formations of time you have these cycles of time and you have these events and places and this is

in this is hauntology 101 right where the past re-announces its presence it re-announces its presence to the present where it destabilizes the narratives the simple narratives of um uh of control and command over the world that we create for ourselves where time becomes this you know like sapphire and steel corrosive force that cannot really be tamed and is of a threatening character and especially of a threatening character to to systems of control ultimately that it can that both past and future can announce themselves somehow and radically alter the fabric of the fabric of the libidinal order we have been recording for about an hour now

I'm wondering how I still have like I've got loads of nonsense here about ley lines but I want to throw I want to throw this open to Matt because myself and Corey I mean I always talk a lot on these but I want to throw this over to Matt for a bit we might want to start guiding ourselves a little bit towards conclusions soon-ish. Yeah. I mean, actually, I wondered if that might work really well. I'm sort of, I'm kind of aware that this being our sort of first episode, I don't really know how we've kind of both, we've all sort of bounced around a bit maybe. And I guess I was, especially after my own sort of rambling intro, I was a bit concerned that maybe this wasn't the firmest place to start for our listeners.

But actually, I think this kind of bounces things back to kind of what I wanted to evoke maybe at the beginning from what you've just said Sean what you've just shed there's something that's nicely folk horror about that anyway yeah it's this oddly enough to give ourselves an unnecessary additional bit of continuity what you've just said sort of feels like quite similar to what we were discussing on our last Deleuze episode, talking about the logic of sense and the eon and chronos that Deleuze talks about there. But I mean, that's probably by the by

for anyone that's coming to us afresh. But I think that one thing that we talked about there was this sense of stoicism that I think is something that Deleuze has and also something that Mark has and especially maybe as a sort of go-between someone like Spinoza has, who is also mentioned in this post, where there's this understanding that there is this sort of power out there, right? That this kind of transcendental, in a sort of transcendental void of, however you're kind of coming to this, whether it's sort of through this esoteric tradition, um occulted tradition or philosophically or through

folk horror pulp bbc tv television series um they all kind of share this strange this this sort of background noise right this this this this which is power um as this kind of of indeterminate somewhat ambiguous um thing that acts upon us um and i guess what's so where people like the cciu or even just mark himself in these various different interests um i think respond to that is it's kind of resisting the message of children of the stones right is that this force exists it is out there and if you like you can give yourself fully over

to it in exchange for some version of that power but there's also something to be said for the another kind of power that emerges from resistance to it right so um that that's kind of this there's this paragraph that uh where where mark's talking about um what what's kind of the message of this of this tv show what's the message of a lot of philosophy or or esoteric um uh hermetic thoughts all the rest of it um and i think you know mark has questions that i think are applicable across the board he says you know are we being asked then to side with human consciousness against the alien unconscious you know do we have to somehow pick a side here between um our own sense

of rational individual agency or are we giving over to this kind of the the barozian anti-humanist um universe that has its own sense of agency that's kind of unknown to us whether you call that god or nature or whatever else but um and then mark continues though isn't after all you have freedom from the passions of spinoz's goals so isn't it isn't it actually yeah well as as as As Corey, as you were saying, this sense of happiness is this not wholly, well, it's attractive, it's seductive. You know, happiness is powerful because it seduces us into a certain kind of way of being maybe. But as Mark then says again, yes, we can say that we should sort of free ourselves from our sad passions.

We should try and make ourselves happy, but freedom from, and again to quote Mark, freedom from sad passions is not the end of the story. It is at the price of a happy passivity, a blank-eyed disengagement from all outside, as all your energy is sucked, or maybe zucked, by the ultimate interiority. which I think it's kind of, it's almost disorientating, maybe that's kind of the point how many things that kind of applies to in this sort of cultural melting pot that we've got, whether this is these, the sort of strange lack of interiority that this TV series has I guess I was thinking, Sean, when you were saying about the kind of it's sort of brokenness

or the kind of slightly amateurish or not, I guess not wholly, you know, held together nature of this kind of production. There's something attractive in that because it's not self-contained. The outside of the narrative of the story kind of leaks in a little bit. You can kind of sense that this is a drama. It doesn't consciously break the fourth wall, but you're aware of its own outside. To what extent, you know, there's a sense that this kind of very, that the dramas that we have today don't have that. They're very, very clean, very well produced to the point that we don't have that sense of an outside anymore. The same, that could be as true of something like,

I don't know, the latest sci-fi drama to something like Facebook. And I guess there's this constant tension between, do we just submit ourselves to this or what can be gained from, if not outright rejection, but maybe a kind of, to place these things in tension, to kind of poke your fingers through the holes of these things, maybe winding them up a little bit. It's the sort of final thing that Mark says towards the end of this post. Control needs something to control. No circuit can function without an outside. No circle is ever completely closed. and I think that that's something that

is maybe something that we'll have to kind of unpack as we sort of go forward with this series maybe but you know it's a very difficult thing almost to wrap your head around because it's not that it's never that clear cut nothing about this is clear cut nothing about Mark's work is clear cut and kind of know that you said this will be my final point because I don't want to ramble on again too much but I'm kind of aware that Sean you also you sort of unbeknownst to us really we hadn't really thought about it in advance but yeah this is the today is the when we're recording this it's the fifth anniversary of Mark's death and I always I always hate this day if anything because it's always the there's always this sense that what what happened to Mark um the fact that Mark committed suicide is always um it's it's kind of laying over his work is it comes to define it

now I think what's actually most interesting about Mark's work is it's kind of incongruity yes Mark ended her own life but the things that he was working on that time were probably some of his most hopeful and most excited writings the same can be said of you know when Mark's a lot of his writing is kind of more depressive maybe more melancholic sort of like this own essay there's a kind of pessimism to this post in its sense that you know we're kind of at the mercy of things beyond our control and but there's a there's a joy in that kind of melancholia there's there's a joy in horror it's not a tautology that horror is bad happiness good there's you know all of these things have to be put in tension and every time that they're sort of announced to us um and i think that's you know that's true enough of all of us we can't just reduce

um our lives our work our culture um to these various you know these these these we can't control these things we you know we literally don't if uh control needs something to control we feel like we need to control our own narratives often it's the case that we don't have control of them at all and they wiggle around and uh uh uh and interrupt our us and our thoughts and our and our beliefs and our trajectories um and that's what mark i think did best i think that's what the but how deep that goes how complex that idea becomes is maybe something that this post kind of really and this tv show summarizes in a really well not a simple way at all but a really fascinating way that's kind of almost inexhaustible i'm sure we could keep talking about this for

hours and maybe we should we shouldn't but we could and that's kind of what i think is so exciting about this show about this post about this series about mark's work you know there's it's all intention and that's precisely where control and uncontroll go to war yes um i'm just gonna say a cut i want to say a couple of points and these will be the my closer remarks about the stone circle about about the standing stones themselves and this is and this really is quite, this very much is just territory of what I reckon. But I think this does lean into, or connects with general themes we've been talking about here, about the sense of the incompleteness of systems of control and how they always come up against

these forces that extend beyond them, especially forces of time in some sense or the other. And I think what is so culturally fascinating about the Standing Stones of Britain is they serve that purpose of announcing the outside and the unknown. You know, there's this sense that the culture that produced these very impressive, very complicated works, which are massive, of a huge scale, would have required enormous amounts of coordination, like multi-generational coordination and planning in order to put them together.

there is something baffling about them and they there's the sense i think where the reason why we find them so fascinating is because they announced this they announced this outside to us they announced this thing that lies out that lies outside of our ability to really comprehend what function it may have possessed um they do feel alien in a very real way you know there's a reason why you get like the eric van danikans of the welcome and i was literally aliens i did it or rather john mitchell's to say it was the atlanteans who had the knowledge to produce these things because there's this sense where they don't they don't fit in you know like and we have and actually to go back to this what i was saying about britain's understanding of time

and the sense of being trapped in time because we don't have these temp we haven't had these my theory of it being because we haven't had like a radical rupture for such a long time that we have this sense of being trapped within our own history but things like the standing stones announce the fact that other peoples and other ways of living not necessarily better but different ways of living have existed here and they produced things and they and it's almost there was a the reverse of the you know the poem ozymandias you know um where instead of these things being monuments to the tragedy of humanity because everything we build turns to dust.

Just the fact almost that they're still here and just announcing themselves overwhelmingly gives always a sense of hope that there are things that lie outside of narrow systems of libidinal control. There are potentialities and possibilities virtualities if you want to get delusian about it um but stand outside of that and um again like i was saying i'm not sure if um any of you ever been to havebury but like it's really good to go to havebury because it's just very strange and i think that's why you know if there is like a real value to things like folk horror and hauntology it is precisely in that doing that simple thing reminding us that uh things can be other than what they are and that the flow of time isn't just this

single straight line going in a single preordained direction forever into greater and greater control that it can be interrupted and that we can discover the complexities of the of the eons within the eons waiting to have their magic words spoken well without further ado it's getting it's It's getting late for myself and Matt And it is still very early For you Corey But I am also sitting next to quite a hot radiator I've just realised I feel quite uncomfortable now So So Not quite sure when this is going to be going up

To have gone up by the time you'll be Hearing and or watching this For obvious reasons Where can people find you Corey? The easiest thing to do is to find me on Twitter at CJ White. My pinned tweet is links to the Nothing Here newsletter, my books, and this project. But yeah, everything's there. Twitter at CJ White. And Matt, where can people find you? You can find me at xenogothic.com or Xenogothic basically is my handle on all social media. So just give it a Google. And you can find me on Twitter at Hauntonaut.

I may or may not start blogging again this year. And I will say no more about that until anything happens, actually. I may or may not start blogging this year and I'll put up blog stuff if and when I do. Not quite sure when we're going to be recording next, but we are planning on having a much more regular recording schedule for the K-Files than we succeeded to have with our Bodies Without Organs, where we manage at best one a month. We're hoping to do more than that, but it will be life and work depending, obviously. But thank you for being with us. We hope that you've enjoyed this experience. Let us know. Let us know in the comments, because that's the thing, because this will be on YouTube, won't it? Let us know in the comments. remember to like and subscribe

like and subscribe and hit that damn bell and yeah you can find us on twitter at BWOPod and yeah until such a time as when all there is to say is happy day happy day buddies happy day good night