A Brief History of Geotrauma
Robin Mackay
Freud, Ferenczi, Lovecraft, Bodkin, Challenger, Cane,
Barker, Land, Parsani. Unilkely characters. Crackpots,
every one of them. Frauds, fakes, pseudoscientists at
best. Indisciplined thinkers breeding speculative mon-
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grels. Hysteria, neuronics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, geotraumatics.
Through misinterpretations, imaginary convergences,
forced couplings and other shady maneouvres lacking
in the principled behaviour expected of a scholar, they
claimed to have invented a new discipline referred to
by various names at various times; but no-one clearly
understood what the goals, methods or principles of
this new discipline were.
And yet, there was something important here;
something on the verge of being forgotten. There
would have been no trace,
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
the Geo-cosmic Theory of Trauma would not even
have been a memory, if it weren’t for the work of the
Plutonics Committee.
Not that it was easy. An indirect approach was necessary. A contemporary advocate, a new candidate. If he
didn’t exist, he would have to be invented. And this
time, something had to get through.
The committee had its eye on the widest possible target market. So the primary task was an understanding
of how ideas travel—an epidemiology of the concept.
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It obviously couldn’t be an academic. Things have
changed: freaks like Land and Parsani wouldn’t even
get through the doors of a university these days. No, it
would have to be an outsider—exotic, even.
Some peculiar maverick, self-taught, no qualifications;
a lone voice who comes out of nowhere.
He—or she—must be credibly unreachable, hidden
away. Somewhere on the Axis of Evil, maybe, to add
some political intrigue: A persecuted dissident scouring the outer reaches of the web to find other sickminded individuals, he comes across Land,
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
retired from philosophy and now promulgating conspiracy
theory
and
peddling
neo-occultist
speculations. Land passes on the last Barker manuscript to him.
Then he discovers Parsani’s notebooks in Iran, realizes the Bodkin-Cane connection, and begins to piece it
together. It could have happened that way.
Then move him to the Far East. Someplace no-one
ever goes. Not even China or Japan—Malaysia. Construct his writings in a kind of tortured, gnomic style
that combines extreme etymological acuity with a sick
imagination that comes of watching too many horror
movies.
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Anyhow, he’s probably sick in some way. Insomniac,
delirious, unable to function normally; sick with some
kind of middle-eastern fever. That could be the case.
Invisible, his character must exude a sort of enigmatic
charisma, and an aura of exoticism. Since he comes
from outside, almost anything would be credible. Keep
him hidden for as long as possible, unseen but effective.
Personal appearances made and cancelled. Visa problems, poor health, whatever it takes. If it gets to the
stage where he does have to appear, it has to be done
well—no expense spared.
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But above all, the ideas keep coming, exerting a subterranean influence. All that is necessary is that he
exist long enough to effectuate inception. Once the
ideas take, once the ideas are embedded, he can easily
be retired. Anything could happen to a freak like that.
It’s true, the Committee took risks. Carried away with
their creation, they ventured a few unnecessarily baroque twists. A fictional quantity expounding the
theory of its own hyperstitional inexistence? A puppet
who tells us what is pulling our strings?
In the end, no-one would be crazy enough to believe it
wasn’t true.
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*
**
Going up that river was like travelling back
to the earliest beginnings of the world, when
vegetation rioted on the earth and the big
trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was
warm, thick, heavy, sluggish . . . The long
stretches of waterway ran on, deserted, into
the gloom of overshadowed distances . . . We
were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an
earth that wore the aspect of an unknown
planet.
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
– Tall trees.
– When were you born?
– So you're one of the dreamers now. You've
beheld the fata morgana of the terminal lagoon. You look tired. Was it a deep one?
Accessing files.
The psychical material in such cases of
hysteria presents itself as a structure in several dimensions which is stratified in at least
three different ways. (I hope I shall presently
be able to justify this pictorial mode of expression.)
To begin with there is a nucleus consisting in memories of events or trains of
thought in which the traumatic factor has
culminated or the pathogenic idea has found
its purest manifestation. Round this nucleus
we find what is often an incredibly profuse
amount of other mnemic material which has
to be worked through in the analysis and
which is, as we have said, arranged in a
threefold order.
In the first place there is an unmistakable linear chronological order which obtains
within each separate theme. . . .
[I]n Breuer’s analysis of Anna O, . . .
under each of . . . seven headings ten to over
a hundred individual memories were collected in chronological series. It was as
though we were examining a dossier that had
been kept in good order.
They make the work of analysis more
difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproducing the memories, they reverse the order in
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which these originated. The freshest and
newest experience in the file appears first, as
an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience with which the series in fact began.
Such groupings constitute ‘themes’.
These themes exhibit a second kind of arrangement. Each of them is—I can not
express it in any other way—stratified concentrically round the pathogenic nucleus.
The contents of each particular stratum
are characterized by an equal degree of resistance, and that degree increases in
proportion as the strata are nearer to the nucleus. Thus there are zones within which
there is all equal degree of modification of
consciousness, and the different themes extend across these zones. The most peripheral
strata contain the memories (or files), which,
belonging to different themes, are easily remembered and have always been clearly
conscious. The deeper we go the more difficult it becomes for the emerging memories to
be recognized, till near the nucleus we come
upon memories which the patient disavows
even in reproducing them.
A third kind of arrangement has still to
be mentioned—the most important, but the
one about which it is least easy to make any
general statement. What I have in mind is an
arrangement according to thought-content,
the linkage made by a logical thread which
reaches as far as the nucleus and tends to
take an irregular and twisting path, different
in every case. This arrangement has a dynamic character, in contrast to the
morphological one of the two stratifications
mentioned previously. While these two
would be represented in a spatial diagram by
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
a continuous line, curved or straight, the
course of the logical chain would have to be
indicated by a broken line which would pass
along the most roundabout paths from the
surface to the deepest layers and back, and
yet would in general advance from the periphery to the central nucleus, touching at
every intermediate halting-place—a line resembling the zig-zag line in the solution of a
Knight’s Move problem, which cuts across
the squares in the diagram of the chessboard. . . .
We have said that this material behaves
like a foreign body, and that the treatment,
too, works like the removal of a foreign body
from the living tissue. We are now in a position to see where this comparison fails. A
foreign body does not enter into any relation
with the layers of tissue that surround it, although it modifies them and necessitates a
reactive inflammation in them. Our pathogenic psychical group, on the other hand,
does not admit of being cleanly extirpated
from the ego.
Its external strata pass over in every direction into portions of the normal ego; and,
indeed, they belong to the latter just as much
as to the pathogenic organization. In analysis
the boundary between the two is fixed purely conventionally, now at one point, now at
another, and in some places it cannot be laid
down at all. The interior layers of the pathogenic organization are increasingly alien to
the ego, but once more without there being
any visible boundary at which the pathogenic material begins. In fact the pathogenic
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organization does not behave like a foreign
1
body, but far more like an infiltrate.
The theory of trauma was a crypto-geological hybrid
from the very start. Darwin and the geologists had already established that the entire surface of the earth
and everything that crawls upon it is a living fossil
record, a memory bank rigorously laid down over unimaginable aeons and sealed against introspection;
churned and reprocessed through its own material,
but a horrifying read when the encryption is broken,
its tales would unfold in parallel with Freud’s, like
two intertwining themes of humiliation.
Abandoning the circumspection with which
Freud handles what he still supposes to be ‘metaphorical’ stratal imagery, Dr Daniel Barker’s Cosmic Theory
of Geotrauma, or Plutonics, flattens the theory of psychic trauma onto geophysics, with psychic experience
becoming an encrypted geological report, the repercussion of a primal Hadean trauma in the material
unconscious of Planet Earth. Further developing Professor
Challenger’s
model
of
‘generalised
stratification’, Barker ultra-radicalises Nietzschean
genealogy into a materialist cryptoscience.
Who does the Earth think it is? It’s a matter
of consistency. Start with the scientific story,
which goes like this: between four point five
and four billion years ago—during the Hadean epoch—the earth was kept in a state of
superheated molten slag, through the conversion of planetesimal and meteoritic
1
Sigmund Freud, The Psychotherapy of Hysteria (1895), in
vol. 2 of Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth, 1953-1974).
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
impacts into temperature increase (kinetic to
thermic energy).
As the solar system condensed, the rate
and magnitude of collisions steadily declined, and the terrestrial surface cooled, due
to the radiation of heat into space, reinforced
by the beginnings of the hydrocycle. During
the ensuing—Archaen—epoch the molten
core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal
exogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor of
terrestrial transmutation. And that’s it. That’s
plutonics, or neoplutonism. It’s all there:
anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior content,
impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism. The
descent into the body of the earth corresponds to a regression through geocosmic
time.
Trauma is a body. Ultimately—at its
pole of maximum disequilibrium—it’s an
iron thing. At MVU they call it Cthelll: the
interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid
metallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressurecooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter than
the surface off the sun down there, three
thousand clicks below the crust, and all that
thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsubjective memory of the outside, running the
plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via
the conductive and convective dynamics of
silicate magma flux, bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally
pulses to the orbit of the moon.
Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare,
nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth, crosshatched by intensities, traversed by thermic
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waves and currents, deranged particles, ionic
strippings and gluttings, gravitational deepsensitivities transduced into nonlocal electromesh, and feeding volcanism . . . that’s
why plutonic science slides continuously in2
to schizophrenic delirium.
Let’s retell the story.
At the birth of the solar system, deviating from
the protoplanetary disk that is to become the central
body, a tiny, uniform spherical mass emerges from the
solar nebula. Within 500 million years, a sudden sinking of matter into a dense metallic core—the ‘Iron
Catastrophe’—precipitates the formation of a differentiated, layered planetary structure, its molten inner
matter surrounded by a thin rocky mantle and cold
crust. This brittle surface seals into the depths the repressed secret of Earth’s ‘burning immanence with the
sun’.
But the face of Earth does not remain still. The
shifting visage of the planet results from the combination of external processes—climatic denudation and
deposition—and internal processes—the movement of
igneous or magmatic fluids. These two groups of processes transform the surface of the earth and shape the
destiny of everything upon it. Their energy sources
are, respectively, the sun, and its repressed runt sibling, the inner core of the earth. Thus, the thin crust
destined to shield the inhabitants of Earth from its
primal trauma, wears on its face the continuallyshifting expression of the helio-plutonic bond.
Periodically, the pressure of magma in depth impels it to move in the direction of least resistance:
repressed energy erupts onto the surface, forming ig2
Daniel Charles Barker, “Barker Speaks,” in Nick Land,
Fanged Noumena (Falmouth/NY: Urbanomic/Sequence,
2011), 497-9.
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neous intrusions through the crustal rocks. The terrestrial symptoms that crystallise around these periodic
outbreaks of plutonic catharsis are far-reaching and
ramified.
Resident Alien; The Insider. Trauma is at once a
twisted plot, a geological complex, and a heavilyencrypted file-system. The archives come to the surface only to be churned and folded back into the
detritus of their own repression. The tendrils of the
‘pathogenic nucleus’ merge imperceptibly with ‘normal tissue’. And every living individual that ever
existed is a playback copy, drawn from the recording
vaults, trapped in a refrain that sings the glory of
Cthelll.
Beyond the restricted biocentric model outlined
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Barker’s theory extends trauma to encompass the inorganic domain. The
accretion of the earth is the aboriginal trauma whose
scars are encrypted in/as terrestrial matter, instituting
a register of unconscious pain coextensive with the
domain of stratified materiality as such.
It is not known whether Barker was ever in direct
contact with Dr. Bodkin, although the latter developed
his work while serving on the covert research mission
that preceded ‘Project Scar’. In any case, among the
features their theoretical works share is a reworking,
through this radicalised Freudian theory of trauma, of
the discredited biological notion that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. If the biological is but a tortured
incantation of Cthelll’s seething inner core, genealogy,
stratoanalysis and information theory promise a cryptography of this cosmic pain; and Haeckel’s
recapitulation thesis provides a suggestion for how an
hysterico-biological filing-system might be formatted.
Cryptography has been my guiding thread,
right through. What is geotraumatics about,
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even now?—A rigorous practice of decod3
ing.
How would such a cryptography proceed? It’s not as
easy as opening files, unpacking cases. Freud knows
the core can’t be reached by so direct a route. The reverse-file-system, continually encrypted by its own
access log, cannot be unpacked directly, but only
through an experimental engagement with the twisted,
rhizomatic plotlines that emerge from it . . .
not only . . . a zig-zag, twisted line, but rather
to a ramifying system of lines and more particularly to a converging one. It contains
nodal points at which two or more threads
meet and thereafter proceed as one; and as a
rule several threads which run independently, or which are connected at various points
4
by side-paths, debouch into the nucleus.
Needless to say, trauma belongs to a time beyond personal memory—Evidently, Geotraumatics radicalizes
Professor Challenger’s insistence that schizoanalysis
should extend further than the terrain of familial drama, to invest the social and political realms; pushing
beyond history and biology, it incorporates the geological and the cosmological within the purview of a
transcendental unconscious. The root source of the
disturbance which the organism identifies according
to its parochial frame of reference—mummy-daddy—
or which it construes in terms of the threat of individual death, is a more profound trauma rooted in
physical reality itself. Trauma is not personal, and the
time of the earth is recorded, accreted, knotted up inside us. All human experience is an encrypted
3
4
Barker, “Barker Speaks,” 494.
Freud, Psychotherapy of Hysteria.
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
message from Cthelll to the cosmos, the scream of the
earth.
Fast forward seismology and you hear the
earth scream. Geotrauma is an ongoing process,
whose
tension
is
continually
expressed—partially frozen—in biological
5
organization.
Nietzsche suggested that the structure and usage of the
human body is the root source of the system of neurotic afflictions co-extensive with human existence; but
this is also a planetary neurosis. Geotraumatic cryptography must proceed as ultra-genealogy, accessing
these memories deep-frozen and imprinted in the
body and determining the planetary events which they
index.
Vertigo’s dramatization of hysteria may seem to
linearise Freud’s topologically-twisted model, suggesting that the core may be reached, repetition escaped,
through linear regression, through an accessing of personal memory, a peeling back of layers. Perhaps it is
only the exigencies of visual entertainment that take it
off the couch, outside the therapist’s office; but it intuits the kinship of the system of hysteria with nonhuman systems of memory; and (very possibly Hitchcock was reading Bodkin as well as Freud) it sees
traumatic regression activated not through introspection but through return to a former environment, with
the unconscious tacked onto geography in the form of
affect-triggers. Tall trees.
Hence we return to Haeckel’s recapitulation thesis. In his formulation of ‘neuronics’, Bodkin sought to
understand the unconscious as a time-coded spinal
memory, a series of evolutionary chemical-response
triggers sensitive to climatic conditions. Neuronics
5
Barker, “Barker Speaks,” 499.
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sets out to empirically map the relation between psychic organization, biological phylogenesis, and
environmental stimuli. Bodkin’s disconcertingly prescient theory discusses the prospect of an inundation of
the planet, during a runaway climatic shift, causing
tropical heat and oceanic expansion. His experiments
chart the resulting modifications of the unconscious,
as climate change triggers the shutting-down or reawakening of behaviours belonging to prior
evolutionary stages of the human.
Notwithstanding the ‘discredit’ of Haeckel’s thesis—that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that every
individual being, in its development, reiterates the
stages of evolution of its remote ancestors—like Barker, Bodkin discerns a theoretical potency beneath the
linear simplicity that allows its easy dismissal. If major evolutionary changes are the result of catastrophic
shifts in the planetary environment—the onset of ice
ages, changes in the atmosphere, the parting of tectonic plates, significant rises in temperature—then the
biological can be understood, in geotraumatic terms,
as a map of geological time.
Along these lines, the emergence of Barker’s theory of ‘spinal catastrophism’ makes the necessary
corrections and provides a model for geotraumatic diagnostic procedure:
I was increasingly aware that all my real
problems were modalities of back-pain, or
phylogenetic spinal injury, which took me
back to the calamitous consequences of the
precambrian explosion, roughly five hundred million years ago. . . .
Erect posture and perpendicularization
of the skull is a frozen calamity, associated
with a long list of pathological consequences, amongst which should be included most
of the human psychoneuroses. . . .
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
The issue here—as always—is real and
effective regression. It is not a matter of representational psychology.
Haeckel’s . . . Recapitulation Thesis . . .
is a theory compromised by its organicism,
but its wholesale rejection was an overreaction. [Bodkin’s] response is more productive
and balanced, treating DNA as a transorganic
memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record,
without
rigid
onto-phylogenic
correspondence.
The mapping of spinal-levels onto neuronic time is supple, episodic, and
diagonalizing. It concerns plexion between
blocks of machinic transition, not strict isomorphic—or stratic redundancy—between
scales of chronological order. Mammal DNA
contains latent fish-code (amongst many oth6
er things).
On the basis of this ‘diagonal’ model, Bodkin’s experimental
studies
record
the
effectuation
of
archaeopsychic ‘regressions’ in his subjects through
extreme environmental triggers, noting the extramental, trans-individual vector of such regression:
What am I suggesting? That Homo sapiens is
about to transform himself into Cro-Magnon
and Java Man, and ultimately into Sinanthropus? No, a biological process is not
completely reversible.
The increased temperature and radiation are indeed alerting innate releasing
mechanisms. But not in our minds. These are
the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes
carried in every chromosome and gene. Eve6
Barker, “Barker Speaks,” 500-1.
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ry step we've taken in our evolution is a
milestone inscribed with organic memories—from the enzymes controlling the carcarbon dioxide cycle to the organisation of
the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways
of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is
a record of a thousand decisions taken in the
face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis. Just
as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original
traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so our subjects are being
plunged back into the archaeopsychic past,
uncovering the ancient taboos and drives
that havebeen dormant for epochs. The brief
span of an individual life is misleading. Each
one of us is as old as the entire biological
kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The
uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its
central nervous system is coded time scale,
each nexus of neurones and each spinal level
marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. . . .
The further down the CNS you move,
from the hind-brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, the further you descend
back into the neuronic past. For example, the
junction between the thoracic and lumbar
vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great
zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish
and the airbreathing amphibians with their
respiratory rib-cages . . .
If you like, you could call this the Psychology of Total Equivalents—let's say
‘Neuronics' for short—and dismiss it as
metabiological fantasy. However, I am convinced that as we move back through
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
geophysical time so we re-enter the amnionic
corridor and move back through spinal and
archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each
epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as
recognisable to anyone else as they would be
to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine.
Except that this is no scenic railway, but a
total re-orientation of the personality. If we
let these buried phantoms master us as they
re-appear we'll be swept back helplessly in
7
the flood-tide like pieces of flotsam.
If infantilism were all the past had to offer, then psychoanalysis would be time-travel, and the future
would be well-balanced. Announcing themselves as
hyper-Freudianism, Neuronics and the Cosmic theory
of Geotrauma shift from the imaginary familial circuit
to the lagoons of deep time. They introduce diagonalised matter-memory in order to study the twisted
indexing of the Geo-Archaeo-Psychic.
As to Land, perhaps what he found most valuable
in Barker’s work was the extension of geotraumatic
theory into human culture and to language in particular, via this keying of the geotraumatic body-map to
environmental stimuli; and the potential for development of modes of decoding of cultural phenomena
that escape the signifier. Bipedalism, erect posture,
forward-facing vision, the cranial verticalization of the
human face, the laryngeal constriction of the voice, are
themselves all indices of a succession of geotraumatic
catastrophes separating the material potencies of the
body from its stratified actuality. Just as the bipedal
head impedes ‘vertebro-perceptual linearity’, the human larynx inhibits ‘virtual speech’. One cannot
7
Dr. Bodkin’s Journal.
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dismantle the face without also evacuating the voice.
Perhaps inspired by Parsani’s invocation of the Middle-Eastern vowel-less battle-cry against solar empire,
Land affirms that, in geotraumatic terms, the human
voice itself is—via the various accidents of hominid
evolution—the enfeebled expression of geotrauma:
Due to erect posture the head has been twisted around, shattering vertebro-perceptual
linearity and setting up the phylogenetic
preconditions for the face. This right-angled
pneumatic-oral arrangement produces the
vocal apparatus as a crash-site, in which thoracic impulses collide with the roof of the
mouth. The bipedal head becomes a virtual
speech-impediment, a sub-cranial pneumatic
pile-up, discharged as linguo-gestural development
and
cephalization
take-off.
Burroughs suggests that the protohuman ape
was dragged through its body to expire upon
its tongue. It’s a twin-axial system, howls
and clicks, reciprocally articulated as a vowel-consonant phonetic
palette,
rigidly
intersegmented to repress staccato-hiss continuous
variation
and
its
attendant
becomings-animal. The anthropostructural
head-smash that establishes our identity
8
with logos . . .
For Land, therefore, as for Bodkin, the schizoanalytic
‘treatment’ of geotrauma, the discovery of the ‘innate
releasing mechanisms’, is a matter of ‘real and effective regression’, which can only be carried out on an
experimental and empirical basis, on the basis of a
certain hypothesis concerning the relation between
time, matter and trauma.
8
Barker, “Barker Speaks,” 502.
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
A noteworthy outcome of this hypothesis is a certain deepening of pessimism: Ultimately, nothing
short of the complete liquidation of biological order
and the dissolution of physical structure can suffice to
discharge the aboriginal trauma that mars terrestrial
existence. A collective becoming-snake of human civilization would be only the first step.
When, in the 1990s, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit—probably, it is thought, through the
agency of the aged Anatole Alasca, once assistant to
Professor Challenger—disinterred the by then all-buthermetic Daniel Barker from his lab at MVU for that
last CCRU interview, Nick Land embarked upon his
short-lived revival of the Geocosmic Theory of Trauma
through a series of experiments in microcultural destratification, documentation of which has recently
been rediscovered.
Land was a relay, keeping the signal alive, but of
course he didn’t last long, he burnt out just like Barker
before him. In 99-2000 Parsani joined us, but he was
too far gone to be of any help. That’s why the Committee needed a new candidate.
So where is ‘Negarestani’ supposed to go with
this?
He begins by elaborating on the story so far: the
conspiracy to return Cthelll, the earth’s core, repressed
runt sibling of the sun, to immanence with its solar
mothership; the plotting of the return of the Tellurian
insider; and the agency of oil as tellurian lube. All this
we know and approve of.
But what is important is this: Ultimately, a theory
that locates the source of the ills of the human psyche
in the accretion of the earth 4.5 billion years ago is—
obviously—far too parochial for the purposes of the
Committee. It owes its local inhibitions to Land’s
fondness for Bataille and his disproportionate attention to Freud’s later, flawed model of trauma in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
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According to Bataille’s ‘solar economy’, the most
basic economic problem is not scarcity but the exorbitant excess of solar energy; all movements on this
planet, from the basest physical processes through to
the highest sophistications of life and culture, consist
only in labyrinthine detours of one and the same vector—the profligate expenditure of energy by the sun.
The secret of all apparently stable and economically
conservative being is that it is already pledged to solar
abolition, it already belongs to the sun and its radical
horizon of death.
Negarestani recognizes the just alignment of Bataille’s notion of the Solar Economy with Freud’s
speculative thesis concerning the nature of organic
life: According to ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, the
preservation of a lifeform in relation to the excessive
energy source it draws upon, demands the sacrifice of
a part of that lifeform: the creation of a mortified outer
surface or crust—‘a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli’—that protects it from its exorbitant
source of energy. Thus, the survival and individuality
of an organic lifeform, biological, psychic or cultural,
is based on the repression of an originary trauma in
which it encountered, in all its naked power, the
source of energy that would also be its death.
Lifeforms are lagoons, repressed pockets of forgetting,
temporarily protecting themselves against the outside
that created them and will destroy them.
Thus we can say that all forms of life are solutions to the same problem; managing the excoriating
excess of solar energy which will eventually consume
them in death. As modes of life become more complex
and more numerous, their dependence upon the excessive power source only grows stronger; as
Negarestani argues, there is a mutually-reinforcing
symmetry between the plurality of life and the monism of death. Another way to put this is that, from the
point of view of the securitised individuated lifeform
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
closed up against its traumatic encounter with solar
excess, the sun inevitably becomes the single and absolute horizon or vanishing point for all life.
This development of what Negarestani will call
the ‘monogamous model’ of the relation between terrestrial life and the sun, is relayed in the cultural and
economic forms of capitalism. Capitalism appears as a
crazed thanatropic machine, unlocking the earth’s resources—in particular, the fossil fuels that were, in
more optimistic times, referred to as ‘buried sunlight’—to release them to their destiny of dissolution,
and thus accelerating the consumption of the earth by
the sun.
by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and
spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a
volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since
9
the 1700s.
Mankind is the first lifeform to contemporaneously
communicate with geological time; a gigantic volcano,
a holocaust of consumption, a fault in the file-system.
Yet this unbridled consumption also manifests itself
culturally in an ever-increasing complexification and
elaboration of multiple ‘ways of life’ and supposedly
infinite possibilities and differentiation.
To break thought out of its capture by the monogamous model, even though the propaganda of the solar
empire runs through the entirety of biological life and
human culture—including the flawed variants of geotrauma theory. This is Negarestani’s first mission—
To broaden still further the theory in rescinding the
status of the sun as sole ‘image of exteriority’, as ultimate singular horizon for all life. The sun is not the
absolute or the abyss, but only a local blockage, a re9
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (New
York: Thomas Dunne, 2007), 40.
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LEPER CREATIVITY
striction, a blind spot that obscures the opening of the
earth onto a more general cosmic economy which
produced it and which will consume it, along with the
sun.
In 3.5 billion years, the core of the aging sun
grows hotter, causing a severe greenhouse effect that
sterilises the entire biosphere; its outer surface cools,
expanding to engulf the inner planets. In 7 billion
years, the earth slips out of orbit but, outside the small
chance that it could be flung out into the ‘icy desolation of deep space’, is dragged into the core of the Sun
to be evaporated, its only legacy a small amount of
fuel for the red giant’s farewell glow. The sun becomes
a ‘small block of hydrogen ice’; 100 trillion years into
the future, all the stars go out, followed by an era populated only by the ‘degenerate remnants’ that survive
40
the end of stellar evolution. 10 years, the cosmic catastrophe of proton decay ushers in the era of black
holes, where the only stellar objects left are black
holes ‘convert their mass into radiation and evaporate
at a glacial pace’, and then the scarcely-conceivable
‘dark era’ populated by atomic waste products entering into desultory, increasingly rare and fruitless
10
chance encounters.
The cosmic abyss is deeper than the solar furnace. Earth’s monogamous relationship with the sun is
just one chapter in a weird epic narrative that does not
find its climax in annihilatory conflagration.
And therefore, the terrestrial plots that play out in
the human psyche must be traced back beyond the
paltry 4.5 million year lifespan of the planet. The
trauma is deeper still, and more weird, than Challenger, Barker or Land had imagined.
10
See F. C. Adams, “Long-term astrophysical processes,” in
Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. N. Bostrom and M. M.
Cirkovic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
To contemplate these icy, inevitable vistas of
cosmic time is in a certain sense already to go beyond
geotrauma. The viewpoint of an ecology radical
enough to take in these extra-solar eschatologies not
only breaks through terrestrial concerns, but also
through the ‘solar horizon’ that has governed our
thought on and of the earth.
As Negarestani will say, ‘to be truly terrestrial is
not the same as being superficial’. To be truly terrestrial is to embrace the perishability of the earth, and
its implication in the universe, beyond the local economics of the relation between the sun and the
surface; to replace the monogamous relation between a
contingent earth and the necessary and absolute sun
around which its planetary path winds, with a relation
of multiplicity between this planetary body and the
cosmic contingencies which led to its formation, a
cosmic chemical conspiracy that works through the
earth, and which finds its dissolute destiny beyond
the sun. Chemophilosophy; geotrauma unearthed.
*
**
So now you know. It was all a twisted plot. For years,
they thought they were making all this up. But the
Committee was telling them what to write . . .
The ‘Speculative Realist’ racket provided a perfect opportunity; capitalizing on the vogue for
imagining one can subtract theoretical thought from
the human imaginary, from narrative and from sense,
through Negarestani we are able to inject it, precisely,
with the narrative element that is, as paradoxical as it
may seem, an integral part of the procedure. Signification cannot be crushed without following plots that
tell ever-new stories of the earth. It’s not a matter of
using science or a new metaphysics to eradicate such
tales, but of constructing a science of real plots, which
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is what Geotrauma—in Negarestani’s hands—
becomes. The compulsive-repetitive symptoms that
are human culture cannot be overcome simply by precipitately stripping them down to a reductive
physical, metaphysical or relational states. The instigation of a collective schizoanalysis must proceed
through the development of the experimental means
for ‘real, effective regression’, for meticulous decryption.
it is quite hopeless to try to penetrate directly to the nucleus of the pathogenic
organization. . . . We ourselves undertake the
opening up of inner strata, advancing radially, whereas the patient looks after the
peripheral extension of the work.
We must get hold of a piece of the logical thread, by whose guidance alone we may
11
hope to penetrate to the interior.
Unpick the individual, travel down her spine, into the
rocks, through the iron core, attaining a burning immanence with the sun, and exiting towards the
unknown.
Above all, Negarestani’s ‘universalist’ reconstruction of the theory of trauma, and his continual
rethinking of ‘The Insider’ in yet more xenoeconomical terms, must be understood in the wake of
the committee’s recent reappropriation of Ferenczi’s
work for the cause. For Ferenczi, trauma is not a hole
punched into the organic by exteriority. This model
would only reflect—all too-closely—the empirical occasioning cause of the theoretical recognition of
trauma. Nor is it, even (as in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle) a founding event synonymous with the constitution of the organic individual per se, and which
11
Freud, Psychotherapy of Hysteria.
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
constricts its path to death. Trauma is a perennial boring or a vermicular inhabiting of the organic by the
inorganic:
the inassimilable presence of the universal
continuum within the regional field, a resident yet alienating presence that has been
bored and nested into the horizon from different angles, contingently, gradationally,
infinitesimally. We call this resident yet
inassimilable index of exteriority that can
neither be expelled nor reintegrated within
12
the interiorized horizon, the Insider.
Ferenczi’s traumata are plotholes that must be
plumbed, outward itineraries that must be travelled.
The time of trauma is altered. Geophilosophy was always a chemophilosophy: just as it needed to explode
the constricted space of the individual and escape to
the political surface of the earth, and just as it was
then necessary to understand the apparently stable
surface as an arrested flow and to penetrate to the
depths, the cosmic theory of geotrauma now needed to
pass through the core of the earth only to escape its
inhibited mode of traumatic stratification and to carry
its interrogation further afield, or rather according to a
new mode of distribution.
The Committee’s question is: which practices,
conspiracies, theories, insurgencies, setting out from
the local surface, will ‘assist the earth in hatching its
inner black egg’; which plots will assist in decrypting
the addresses of traumatic agents no longer understood as foreign bodies that assault the protective
12
Reza Negarestani, On the Revolutionary Earth (unpublished); subsequently published as “Globe of
Revolution. An Afterthought on Geophilosophical Realism,” Identities 17 (2011): 25-54.
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membrane of the organic individual, nor even as a repressed fragments of a greater exuberance; but as
xeno-chemical insiders, Old Ones waiting to be awakened. What stimuli will key into the triggers that will
attach us to a Kurtz-gradient, disintricating the tangled
themes that surface as reality-symptoms, allowing us
egress into dreams where the lagoon of personal
memory drains into a sea of cosmic trauma?
Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a
succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon, each of which seemed
to represent one of his own spinal levels. At
times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore
apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft
beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy
carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the
emptiness of the long stretches of sand total
and absolute, filling him with an exquisite
and tender anguish.
He longed for this descent through archaeopsychic time to reach its conclusion,
repressing the knowledge that when it did
the external world around him would have
13
become alien and unbearable.
How can the revolutionary subject, through
deepening and widening its traumas, attain
topological and categorical equivalence with
the universal absolute? Likewise, how can
the regional horizon—as a relatively open set
excised from the universal absolute—find its
equivalence with the absolute through deep13
Dr. Bodkin’s Journal.
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MACKAY – BRIEF HISTORY OF GEOTRAUMA
ening its geophilosophical synthesis and
stretching its nested traumas by dilating and
14
twisting them?
It’s a question of writing, but also of mapping. That’s
where Cane comes in. Once you see the Atlas you’ll
know where to go.
The Plutonics Committee had to exert some pressure, to get things moving.
There is nothing for it but to keep at first to
the periphery of the psychical structure. We
begin by getting the patient to tell us what he
knows and remembers, while we are at the
same time already directing his attention and
overcoming his slighter resistances by the
use of the pressure procedure. Whenever we
have opened a new path by thus pressing on
his forehead, we may expect him to advance
some distance without fresh resistance.
After we have worked in this way for
some time, the patient begins as a rule to co15
operate with us.
It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively,
simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis
proceed.
*
**
14
15
Negarestani, On the Revolutionary Earth.
Freud, The Psychotherapy of Hysteria.
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It was over. Only later would all of this take on concrete meaning. The double-articulated mask had come
undone, and so had the gloves and tunic, from which
liquids escaped. Disarticulated, deterriorialized, Negarestani muttered that he was taking the earth with
him.
36