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"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and
flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
director's cut of unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999; short remix appeared in
Springerin, 2000
by Simon Reynolds
Smack in the middle of the United Kingdom, Leamington Spa is like a less picturesque Bath--genteel,
sedate, irredeemably English in a Masterpiece Theater sort of way. But the town has darker
undercurrents: Aleister Crowley was born here in 1875, and today it's home to a mysterious entity
called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Now in its third year of existence, CCRU's institutional
status is, to say the least, disputed. Which is why its membership is currently holed up in an office
on The Parade (Leamington's main street), rather than working c/o the Philosophy Department of
Warwick University a few miles away, as was the case the last academic year.
Since my knowledge of CCRU stems from its disorientating textual output--the journal Abstract
Culture--plus a few wilfully opaque email communiques, I've scant idea what I'll encounter after
pressing the button marked 'Central Computer'. Inside CCRU's top-floor HQ above The Body Shop, I
find three women and four men in their mid to late twenties, who all look reassuringly normal. The
walls, though, are covered with peculiar diagrams and charts that hint at the breadth and
bizareness of the unit's research.
But before I can enquire further, I'm entreated to sit in the middle of three ghettoblasters. CCRU
have prepared a re-enactment of a performance-cum-reading given at their Virotechnics conference
in October 1997. The first cassette-player issues a looped cycle of words that resembles an
incantation or spell. From the second machine comes a text recited in a baleful deadpan by a
female American voice--not a presentation but a sort of prose-poem, full of imagery of
"swarmachines" and "strobing centipede flutters". The third ghettoblaster emits what could either be
Stockhausen-style electroacoustic composition or the pizzicato, mandible-clicking music of the
insect world. Later, I find out it's a human voice that's been synthetically processed, with all the
vowels removed to leave just consonants and fricatives.
Even without the back-projected video-imagery that usually accompanies CCRU audio, the piece is
an impressively mesmeric example of what the unit are aiming for--an ultra-vivid amalgam of text,
sound, and visuals designed to "libidinise" that most juiceless of academic events, the lecture. CCRU
try to pull off the same trick on the printed page. Their "theory-fiction" is studded with neologisms,
delirious with dystopian cyberpunk imagery, and boasts an extravagantly high concentration of ideas
per sentence. Bearing the same distillate relation to its sources (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari,
Paul Virilio,William Gibson) that crack does to cocaine, CCRU-text offers an almighty theory-rush.
What CCRU are striving to achieve is a kind of nomadic thought that--to use the Deleuzian term-"deterritorializes" itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy crosscontaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and
complexity theory, connectionism). It's a project of monstrous ambition. And that's before you take
into account the the most daring deterritorialisation of all--crossing the thin line between reason
and unreason. But as they say, later for that.
Founded in the 1960s, Warwick rapidly became the epitome of a modern university.
Through the early to mid Seventies, the university was rife with militancy--not just student unrest,
but discontent amongst the staff (70 percent of whom at one point gave a vote of no confidence in
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the Vice Chancellor). Socialist historian E.P.Thompson was a "thorn in the side of the
adminstiration", recalls one Warwick veteran, and eventually left because he wasn't given the
Labour History Unit he was promised. At the same time, Warwick was ahead of its time in terms of
seeking corporate funding, such that by the mid-Eighties Margaret Thatcher could describe it as her
favourite university. "Warwick University Inc." (as E.P. Thompson titled a book) is financially buoyant
compared with other British universities, and well prepared for any future withdrawal of
government funding that may be up the current Labour administration's sleeve.
Warwick also has a very modern Philosophy Department. It is Britain's largest graduate school in
philosophy outside Oxford, with about 120 postgraduate and masters students, and a similar number
of undergraduates. The majority are lured by the department's reputation as the country's leading
center for Continental Philosophy. Events like the October 1997 "DeleuzeGuattari and Matter"
seminar and "Going Australian", a February 1988 conference devoted to the new school of Australian
feminist philosophy, indicate the kind of work going on at Warwick. It is to this cutting edge
Philosophy Department to which CCRU was linked in a fatally ambigous fashion.
In a typically gnomic e-mail, CCRU outlined its history. "Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from
October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat.
...Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent
researchers +.... At degree-O Ccru is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosphy
Department. Here it is now officially said that Ccru does not, has not, and will never exist'. " CCRU
sees itself as the academic equivalent of Kurtz, the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox
methods to achieve superior results than the tradition-bound US military. CCRU claim that its
frenzied interdisciplinary activity embarrassed the Philosphy Dept, resulting in the termination of
the unit. Just as Kurtz disappeared "up river" into the Vietnamese jungle, the CCRU have
strategically withdrawn to their operational base above the Body Shop.
"There is no conspiracy, it's so pedestrian," insists Professor Andrew Benjamin, Director of Graduate
Studies at Warwick's Philosophy Department. Benjamin is a well-respected post-structuralist scholar
with numerous books to his name. As editor of the Warwick Studies in Philosophy (the best-selling
Continental Philosophy series in the English language), he's responsible for anthologies like The
Difference Engineer: Deleuze & Philosophy Audibly beaming with pride, the Australia-born Benjamin
talks up Warwick as "an incredibly fabulous philosphy dept where Deleuzians lie down with
Derrideans, and even lie down with analytic philosphers. Basically, there isn't any postmodern crap
done here, it's quite rigorous stuff."
According to Benjamin, CCRU was originally set up for Dr Sadie Plant, freshly recruited from
Birmingham University to be a Research Fellow attached to Warwick's Faculty of Social Science. But
the unit--organised around her interests in cyber-theory and involving a number of postgraduate
students she'd brought over from Birmingham--was initially tied to the Philosophy Department,
owing to Plant's particular interests, like Deleuze & Guattari. The plan was for the unit to become
an independent, freestanding entity, with the postgrads registered as CCRU rather than philosophy
students. But Dr Plant unexpectedly quit her job March 1997, before the paperwork was completed.
The university decided to wind CCRU down, with Plant's main ally at Warwick, Nick Land, taking
over her role as Director for the unit's final year of official existence.
But when Benjamin elaborates on the procedural intricacies, it's easy to empathise with CCRU's
paranoia. "See, there isn't such a thing as the CCRU," he insists. "Within the university system you
can set up a thing called a center for research, then you take the planned center to various
committees and put it through this system in whose terms that center would be legitimised, have an
external committee overseeing standards, et cetera. Because Sadie left early, that procedure didn't
happen. Officially, you would then have to say that CCRU didn't ever exist. There is, however, an
office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with CCRU on the door, there's a group of
students who meet there to have seminars, and to that extent, it it is a thriving entity. Informally, it
did exist, still does, lots of things go on under its aegis. But that office will disappear at the end of
the year. A number of students thought there was a conspiracy, there's a lot of gossip and carry-on,
but the fact is--had Sadie decided to pursue an academic career, CCRU would have been a viable,
ongoing entity."
Thin as rake in her brown leather jacket, dragging on a Camel Light, Sadie Plant looks every bit the
cyberpunkette. Currently, she's the most famous "media academic" in Britain--writing for quality
newspapers, pontificating on the famous BBC Radio programme "Start The Week" (a sort of highbrow
Howard Stern) alongside Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. Plant's elevation to intellectual celebrity status
began well before the late 1997 publication of her acclaimed Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The
New Technoculture. Although she's far from happy with the marketing of Zeros as a Nineties
cyberfeminist equivalent to The Female Eunuch, there are striking parallels between Plant and
Germaine Greer (who taught at Warwick's English department before quitting to write Eunuch).
"When I went to see the Vice Chancellor about leaving, he said 'I don't believe it, Germaine Greer
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pulled this on us as well'", says Plant, flashing her buck-toothed smile.
We're in a cafe in Birmingham, the industrial Midlands metroplis where Plant grew up and where she
returned after quitting Warwick.The way Sadie tells it, she never really wanted to be an academic
in the first place, but just fell into a university career. After transforming her Manchester University
philosophy PhD on Situationism into The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International In A
Postmodern Age, Plant accepted a Lecturer's position at Birmingham University's Department of
Cultural Studies. Back in the Seventies, when it was called Centre For Contemporary Cultural
Studies, the department was a vibrant place, home of the "resistance through rituals" school of neoGramscian subcultural theory (Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, et al). But the CCCS spirit was
long gone by the time Plant arrived. The only redeeming aspect was the undergraduate and
graduate students, who shared Plant's enthusiasm for rave culture and digital technology.
Plant was on the verge of quitting academia for good, when the opportunity of a Research
Fellowship at Warwick presented itself in 1995. Warwick was already a cyber-theory hotbed, what
with its 1994 and '95 Virtual Futures conferences. There were strong alliances between like-minds at
Birmingham and Warwick: the VF events had involved some of Plant's Birmingham proteges (who
appeared at VF95 in their proto-CCRU incarnation Switch), while Plant and Nick Land had actually
been creative-and-sexual partners for a couple of years and remained close. With the promise of her
very own research center dangled before her, Plant decided to give academia one last shot, and
brought many of her Birmingham students with her to form CCRU.
For the first year of its existence, 1995/1996, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was characterised
by "a frantic atmosphere" of interdisciplinary excitement, involving reading groups, lectures series,
research-sharing sessions, seminars like 1996's Afro-Futures, and the confrontational journal
****Collapse. There was an exhilirating sense of being at the heart of something new. This first phase
of the unit's life climaxed with Virtual Futures 96: Datableed, which was wholly organised by the
CCRU (the first two VF's had been put together by postgraduates attached to Professor Benjamin's
Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature). Advertised as "an antidisciplinary event" aiming
"to explore the smearing of previously discrete cultural spheres", VF96 alternated DJ sessions with
sound-and-vision enhanced talks by a diverse range of guests--theorist Manuel De Landa, journalists
Steve Beard and Mark Sinker, SF writer Pat Cadigan, and cyberfeminist Linda Dement, to name just a
handful.
By the second year of its existence, tensions emerged between the CCRU-virus and its host, the
Philosophy Department. Warwick had expected something closer to traditional notions of
cyberculture: Internet studies, basically. But what actually took shape reflected Plant and Land's
interest in hooking up cybernetics in the original Norbert Wiener sense (information flows, dissolving
the difference between living and non-living systems) to compatible elements of Deleuze & Guattari
(schizo-analysis, machinic desire, the biomechanical continuum of material reality), plus chaos,
complexity and connection theory. "Cyber", as CCRU conceived it, also connoted "cyberpunk": the
theory-fiction goal of academic writing that rivalled the hallucinatory rush you got from
Neuromancer and Blade Runner.
Warwick clearly got more than it bargained for. Benjamin admits to having "mixed feelings about
what Sadie and Nick do", professes to be mystified by "the meaningless term" that is cyber-theory,
and keenly stresses the fact that CCRU and the Philosophy Department "are quite separate things".
One of Benjamin's administrative colleagues notes drily that "very little" CCRU work "was published
in philosophy journals." For her part, Sadie Plant emphasises the practical problems caused by the
CCRU students' interdisciplinary approach, like "the need for external examiners.... It would have
suited us to be able to just sweep all that away, but it's not so easy."
CCRU are less diplomatic, railing against "disciplinary templates" that obstruct "real research".
"You're not allowed to follow these things where they want to go," says Mark Fisher, a cleancut young
man who speaks with an evangelical urgency and agitated hand gestures. "You're not allowed to find
anything out.... Because who would mark it?!". He cites the example of the PhD work of CCRU's
Suzanne Livingston, which was challenged by one Philosophy Department member on the grounds-"what's neurology got to do with capitalism?".
After Plant left, CCRU embarked upon a second phase of trying "to occupy the university" and create
a "non-disciplinary" atmosphere by forging links with postgraduates in the Mathematics and Science
departments. But this petered out "with no real engagement". The final breaking point came with
the Fall '97 Virotechnics conference, which CCRU decided to hold off campus at a media conference
center in Wolverhampton, 35 miles from Warwick. According to CCRU, Nick Land effectively had to
resign his lecturer's job in order to attend Virotechnics. "Nick had to cancel a simultaneously
scheduled seminar at the university, hastily set up as an opportunity for him to explain the
increasingly perplexing direction of CCRU's research", explains CCRU's Steve Goodman. Every couple
of years, the staff of university departments make an assessment of the publications the
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department has produced. Since the kind of work Land and his proteges were producing was not
considered philosophy, and therefore not counted in any departmental assessment, Land felt obliged
to resign, effective the end of the academic year.
Virotechnics was the culmination of the unit's second-phase attempt "to rigorise a kind of
diagrammatic study programme in the university," says Land, referring to CCRU's alloy of science and
philosphy. "That was really not acceptable, it's fair to say, to the Philosophy Department. So the
third phase is take that programme outside the university." While CCRU members continue to finish
their PhD's and teach, they regard these activities as " lower-order intensity"; the real action takes
place at the Leamington HQ. "There's nothing more unproductive than engaging in this lifelong
struggle to get intensity into the academy," says an exasperated Fisher. "It's hopeless and thankless."
He maintains that the Philosophy Dept's attitude to CCRU ranges from "outright hostile" to
"embarassment", but the general strategy "is to wait for it to die rather than to actively kill it."
Nick Land is the kind of "vortical machine" (to use a fave CCRU trope) around which swirl all manner
of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories. Didya hear about the phase Nick went through only
talking in numbers? Or the time he was taken over by three distinct entities? True or not, there's no
deying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr Land has been a "strange attractor"
luring students to Warwick purely through his personal reputation. A colleague who sat in on Land
classes in the early Nineties remembers both his "impressive pedagogic commitment" and his
charisma. "Despite his diffident, tentative way of suggesting things, Nick had a real presence.... It
was conspicuous that his gang of groupies did fall apart during his sabbatical term."
The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land's sole book-length
publication to date, is a remarkable if deranged mix of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and
rigorous explication of the implications of Bataille's thought (if taken seriously, comparable to
"syphilis of the mind"). Prefiguring CCRU's struggles with university bureaucracy, the book drips with
anti-academic bile, occasionally spilling over into flagellating self-disgust. Philosophy itself is
castigated as "the excruciation of libido". Thirst For Annihilation's polymathically perverse range of
learning (thermodynamics, cyclone formation, the Menger sponge), and phrases like "vortex of
vulvo-cosmic dissolution" that blend scientific language with darkside mysticism, anticipate the
CCRU's work.
In the early Nineties, Land was wont to describe himself as a "professor of delirial engineering",
recalls the colleague. He also went through a "glorious phase in which he offered millenial
prophecies for the next global meltdown in world markets, a deduction based on past such cycles. It
rather smacked of an infatuation with the power of numbers."
As much chaos magician as chaos theorist, Land is said to be thoroughly versed in the gamult of
occult knowledge and parapsychology: the I Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like
energy force), Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the eschatological
cosmology of Terence McKenna (a neo-hippy evangelist for plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin
and DMT). Much of CCRU's thought seems to emanate from an uncanny interzone between science
and superstition. (Both of which appeal to rigorous method, of course.)
After reading Thirst For Annihilation's valedictory salute to "the saints, shamans, werewolves,
vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed,", and his self-description in ***Collapse as "a
palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking the
crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism", I expected Land to be an
emaciated and eldritch figure. Stick insect thin, he is. But Land's gentle voice and impishly twinkling
eyes make him closer to a playgroup leader than a dark magus. He and the CCRU crew ply me with
endless cups of tea while explaining the curious diagrams on the walls.
There's a chart that synthesises Kabbalah's Tree of Life with H.P. Lovecraft, and is related to a
magickal system called tangential tantra. "Instead of summoning or invoking, you're setting up a
magical event that will be cut across from the forces of the Outside, so unanticipated events will
happen," explains Land. Another poster--influenced by J.G. Ballard's concept of "deep time" as
outlined in his catastrophe novel The Drowned World--depicts a cross section of the human spine,
with different vertebrae aligned to different phases of human prehistory. And there's a chart that
divides human history into a series of periods--"the primitive socius, the despotic state, capitalism" -culminating in a post-human phase named "Unuttera", which I learn refers to "The Entity or
polytendriled abomination" at the End of Time.
The most recent diagram represents the culmination of CCRU's forays into the occult numerological
techniques of digital reduction and triangular numbering. A spiral bisected by a number scale that
descends from 9 to one, the diagram looks rather ordinary. But as CCRU explain its implications to
me at considerable length (something to do with allowing them to understand "concepts as number
systems) it becomes clear they sincerely believe it contains something on a par with the secret of
the universe. The 9-spiral mandala--the Barker Scale, they call it--is the end-product of CCRU's
determination to abandon "the fuzziness of discursive articulation" (philosophy) and move into "a
much crisper, more rigorous and productive diagrammatic style", says Land. ("Crisp and rigorous" is
one of his favourite phrases, despite the stress it puts on his weak 'R').
The diagram was a gift from "Professor Barker". Inspired by Professor Challenger--the Conan-Doyle
anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze & Guattari in "The Geology of Morals" section of A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia--Barker appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who hips the
CCRU to various cosmic secrets. "But we'd be a bit reluctant to say 'imaginary' now, wouldn't we?,"
cautions Land with a mischievous glint in his eye. "We've learned as much--well, vastly more from
Professor Barker --than supposedly 'real' pedagogues!". As CCRU's "avatar", Barker has revealed the
"Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma". Following the materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human
culture is analysed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum. From the chemistry of
metals to the non-linear dynamics of the ocean, from the cycles of capitalism to the hypersyncopated breakbeat rhythms of jungle, the cosmos is an "unfolding traumascape" governed by selfsimilar patterns and fundamental processes that recur on every scale.
Libidinising "flows" and investing them with an intrinsically subversive power,
Deleuze & Guattari have been criticised as incorrigible Romantics. CCRU develop this element of A
Thousand Plateaus into a kind of mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU call "Gothic Materialism"
("ferro-vampiric" cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and walks the "flatline" between
life and death), Anna Greenspan talks about how "the core of the earth is made of iron, and blood
contains iron", about how the goal is to "hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the
Body-Without-Organs". Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the Deleuzian utopia, an inchoate flux of
deterritorialised energy; Greenspan says they take the B-w-O as "an ethical injunction", a supreme
goal.
^^^^^^^^^^^
O[rphan] D[frift>] also talk about "metal in the body" and seeking the B-w-O. Another Landinfluenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at
VF96 and are staging an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's Beaconsfield Arts
Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as
Fine Art students at the prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their ideas about creating
a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic terrorism oriented around "schizoid thinking", prelinguistic autistic states and man-machine interfaces proved way too radical. Formed in late 1994,
OD was shaped by two mindblowing experiences: "experimentation with drugs and techno", and a
1993 encounter with Nick Land.
"Before CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very intensively for a while," says Roberts.
"We fed him image experience, tactile readings of the stuff he was buried in theoretically. He
wanted his writing to kick in a much more experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful
about having a man you could ring up and ask: 'what's radiation?', 'what's a black hole?'".
OD's collective debut was a multimedia installation at London's Cabinet Gallery. What began as a
catalogue for the show escalated into an astonishing 437 page book, Cyberpositive. Like Plant's
Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text of sampled writings that aren't attributed in the text.
But where Plant offers footnotes; OD merely list the "asked" and "un-asked" contributors at the end.
Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a sort of canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual
universe, placing SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as post-structuralist theorists. "We
treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as any notional theorist," says Nick Land, "At the
same time, every great philosopher is producing an important fiction. Marx is obviously a science
fiction writer." For her part, Sadie Plant regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and
Cadigan as "more reliable witnesses", precisely because, unlike theorists, "they don't have an axe to
grind".
The most highly-charged passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty chunks of Plant/Land writing and
Roberts's and Mukherjee's evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD experience. "I used to write a
lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious," recalls Roberts. "Tracing what's happening in
all the different sound channels and what they're doing spatially and physically to you". The
language veers from masochistic mortification of the flesh ("deep hurting techno", "the meat is
learning to know loss") to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession ("white darkness",
"the fog of absolute proximity", "psyclone", "beautiful fear"). "It's trying to process the
dissassembling of the self," says Roberts. "Maybe what you're calling abject, we'd call melting. The
violence of the sounds in techno, it's like you're being turned inside out, smeared, penetrated."
Despite her facial piercing and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts has a sort of burned-out,
aristocratic air that suggests Marianne Faithfull circa 1969. A half-smile flickering on her lips, as if
she's privy to some kosmik joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter--as though some unutterably alien
zone of posthuman consciousness hasn't quite relinquished its hold. Which may be a pretty accurate
description of the state of play. If CCRU have something of a cultic air about them, OD go a lot
further. Combining Mayan cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they sem to believe
that humanity will soon abandon the "meat" of incarnate existence and become pure spirit.
Throughout Cyberpositive there's the recurrent exhortation "we must change for the machines";
while the book ends with the declaration--"human viewpoint redundant."
Not only do OD reckon Charles Manson had some good ideas, their East London HQ contains several
cages of snakes--proof of their determination to get really serious about voodoo rites. The obsession
was sparked by Gibson's Count Zero, in which cyberspace has spontaneously generated entities
equivalent to the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology). Throughout the interview, a shavenheaded OD member called Rich sits with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other
contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches--daintily quartered, but containing peanut
butter mixed with sardines. "Too radical for me", I confess after one nibble. Rich's eyes light up
triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"Cyberpositive" was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land. First aired at the
1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon, "Cyberpositive" was a gauntlet thrown down at the Leftwing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term "cyberpositive" was a twist on
Norbert Wierner's ideas of "negative feedback" (homeostasis), and "positive feedback" (runaway
tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized "negative feedback",
Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback--specifically,: the tendency of market forces to
generate disorder and destabilise control structures.
"It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily
but it wasn't ever going to get anywhere," says Plant. "If there was going to be scope for any kind
of....not 'resistance', but any kind of discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have
to come from somewhere else." That elsewhere was certain passages in A Thousand Plateaus where
Deleuze & Guattari suggest that, in Plant's words, "you don't try and slow things down, you
encourage them to go fast as possible. Which was interestingly connected to Marx's ideas about
capitalism sweeping away the past. So we got into this stance of 'oh well, let it sweep away! Maybe
it should sweep away faster'." Other crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De
Landa's idea of "capitalism as the system of antimarkets", and, says Plant, historian-of-everyday-life
Fernand Braudel's conception of capitalism as "an amalgam of would-be free market forces and
state/ corporate/centralised control functions. So there isn't really any such thing called
'capitalism', it's just a coincidence of those two really extreme and opposed tendencies."
Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organising activity: street markets,
"the frontier zones of capitalism", what De Landa calls "meshwork", as opposed to corporate, topdown capitalism. It all sounds quite jovial, the way they describe it now--a bustling bazaar culture
of trade and "cutting deals". But "Cyberpositive" actually reads like a nihilistic paean to the
"cyberpathology of markets", celebrating capitalism as "a viral contagion" and declaring "everything
cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind". In Nick Land solo essays like "Machinic Desire" and
"Meltdown", the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a
perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the "dark will" of capital and technology, as
it "rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities". In "Meltdown", Land
declares: "Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag".
This gloating delight in capital's deterritorialising virulence is the CCRU's reaction to the stuffy
complacency of Left-wing academic thought; a sort of rubbing salt in the wounds (as when Land
jibes at the "senile spectre" of Socialism, an allusion to The Communist Manifesto). "There's
definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely
schleroticised, institutionalised thought," says Mark Fisher. "Marx has been outdated by cybernetic
theory. It's obvious that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever
died of contradictions!". Exulting in capitalism's permanent "crisis mode", CCRU believe in the
strategic application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos. The real struggle, says
Fisher in fluent Deleuzian, is within capitalism and between "homogenisation processes and nomadic
distribution.".
What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not
the past coming apart, but "the future coming together". Where Land gives this idea a millenial spin
(he's described capitalism as "an invasion from the future", a virus retrochronically triggered by
some kind of artificial intelligence to create the conditions for its own assembling--an idea that
reads like it was spawned by watching Terminator on acid), Plant's attitude is more humanely
ambivalent. In the mid-Eighties, for instance, she supported the Coal Miner's strike, a revolt against
Thatcherite modernising policies and an attempt to preserve a traditional working class culture.
Since then, she has come to believe that the privatisation and anti-welfare policies pursued by the
Conservative goverment in the 1980s really did constitute "a revolution". She talks approvingly of
the end of "the dependency culture", arguing that this helped catalyse the Nineties upsurge of
British pop culture, fashion and art.
"Obviously it is painful for any particular community that ends up on the scrapheap of history", Plant
says, looking appropriately pained. "But I've got a far more evolutionary view of history these days.
Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures". In the face of this
"reality", she argues, the British Left is comparable with the Church of England: "Every so often it
comes out and makes some moral statement about how terrible things are, but what's it going to do
about it? Nothing."
Many Left-wing theorists would retaliate by arguing that the Plant/Land/CCRU pro-market stance is
merely an intellectual accomodation to "realities" imposed by top-down corporate forces; that by
mapping techniques appropriate for natural phenonema (chaos theory, non-linear dynamics) onto
capitalism, they've effectively naturalized the free market, resulting in a kind of post-Deleuzian
version of Social Darwinism. Judith Williamson--Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex University,
and writer for the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian--accuses the CCRU of "inevitabilism".
"All these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve one from morality," she says.
"Most of capitalism's flows are deeply pernicious." The trouble with inevitablism is that it removes
human agency from the picture, complains Williamson. "But human will is not nothing -- there have
been these huge acts of courage and altruism throughout history." As neo-Deleuzians devoutly
committed to impersonality, agency is precisely what Plant and the CCRU demote. "Nothing takes
the credit--or the blame--for either the runaway tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate
them," argues Plant in Zeros + Ones. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been incidental to
these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo are far too complex to be attributed to
attempts to make them happen or hold them back".
Williamson is an old sparring partner with Plant, Land and CCRU, having had
several public fights with them at various academic events. The author of Consuming Passions: The
Dynamics of Popular Culture, Williamson belongs to an earlier, Marx-influenced phase of British
cultural theory, so the the clash between her and CCRU is partly generational. Recalling a famous
spat in the bar of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, she recalls finding it "spooky that Nick
Land and all these people spoke as one. You could not get 20 of my postgrad students in a room and
have them agree with me. I find that scary--that messianic quality, like they've got the message"...A
lot of what they say reminds me of tripping experiences, where you have that feeling that
everything coheres and makes sense."
Another Williamson accusation--that CCRU lift ideas from chaos and complexity that describe
material process but "apply them in a metaphorical way... as if using a concrete thing for a
metaphor makes it not be a metaphor"--would especiallly infuriate CCRU. Metaphor, figurative
language, the whole realm of representation and ideology: these are the enemy, as far as CCRU are
concerned. "Our analysis is materialist, rather than ideological," says Goodman, "Whether the scale
is geological, oceanic, socio-cultural, there are parallels going on at every scale". Despite drawing a
lot from post-structuralism's assault upon the sovereign ego, CCRU detest deconstruction, precisely
because of its treatment of the text as a cosmology and everything as metaphor. "The only thing
that's powerful about books--their ability to plug into other machines outside themselves-- is
completely destroyed by treating them as this macro-interiority that spreads over everything," spits
Fisher, co-author of the hilarious and coruscating Abstract Culture rant "Pomophobia".
Hungry for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously renounce postmodernism's wan
fatalism (the idea that we're at the end of everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left
(Fisher talks, cyborg-style, about the relief of having "the false memory-chip of Socialist
authenticity" removed from his brain). In the process, they've jettisoned the concept of "alienation"
in both its Marxist and Freudian senses. They speak approvingly of "surplus value", sublimation and
commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies. Where "Cyberpositive" noted how how runaway
capitalism had accessed "inconceivable alienations", CCRU's collective essay "Swarmachines" goes
further and climaxes with the boast: "alienated and loving it".
The idea, says Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend of Lyotard and Blade Runner--"the proletariat as
this synthetic class, of a revolution that's on the side of the synthetic and artificial. The concept of
'alienation' depends on the notion that there's some authentic essence lost through the development
of capitalism. But according to Barker's Geo-Cosmic theory of trauma, everything's already
synthetic." If reality really is a bio-mechanical continuum, there's no reason to resist capitalism's
escalating dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the creation of artificial desires.
Willamson condes that "if there's one thing that's quite endearing about CCRU, it's the search for a
kind of optimism.... Today it's very hard to have those sort of Sixties feelings of 'oh God, things are
exciting, things can get better, new things can happen'". The mania of CCRU's texts--a mood-blend
of euphoric anticipatioin and dystopian dread that Mark Dery called "dysphoria"--is certainly
contagious. "A lot of things are exciting, but is it true?," cautions Williamson. "Music is a good
parallel--you don't think 'this music explains the universe' just because you finds it charges you up".
Again, the CCRU would fervently disagree. "The musical model is really key to us," says Land. "It's
absurd to say that music doesn't represent the real and therefore it's an empty metaphor. Every
theorist who hasn't a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia."
Not only do the CCRU derive a lot of their energy from music--specifically, the British rave genre of
jungle a/k/a drum & bass--but popular culture is where their ideas seem most persuasive. Right
from its late Eighties beginnings, rave culture's motor has been anarcho-capitalist and
entrepreneurial: from promoters throwing illegal parties in warehouses and fields, to drug dealing.
Even after its co-optation by the record and clubbing industries, rave music's cutting edge comes
from the grass-roots: small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios, specialist record
stores, pirate radio.
Sadie Plant attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of dependency culture,
forcing people "to get real and find some ways of surviving" but also to invent "new forms of
collectivity" (the micro-utopian communality of the rave).
As a postgraduate in Manchester, Plant was swept up in that city's legendary 1988-90 rave scene.
Currently, she's co-running a jungle club in Birmingham called Kleptomania, for which she creates
back-projections involving "video feedback", an "orgasmically beautiful" effect that makes
"everything looks like it's come from another world". Plant is also writing about book about the
interface between drugs and technology. CCRU has a musical sub-component, Ko-Labs, engaged in
making jungle tracks. The unit's latest recruit is Jessica Edwards, a researcher who has no affiliation
with Warwick University whatsoever, but who used to be a professional dancer at raves and recently
completed an undergraduate thesis entitled "Mapping the Liminal- Pentecostalism, Shamanism and
Drum & Bass".
Despite being rave theorists and "sub-bass materialists", CCRU are surprisingly cagey when the topic
of drugs is introduced. Acknowledging the cyborgizing, viral usefulness of drugs--as anorganic
elements that enter the nervous system and engineer precise changes in consciousness--Land
nonetheless resists the "relapse into a biographical narrative". Anna Greenspan talks of the negative
"crash-and-burn" syndrome caused by drug abuse, and says the CCRU are more interested in building
sustained plateaus of intensity. One outcrop of this is Suzanne Livingston's research into "long term
rewiring of perception"--techniques of flash and flicker that restructure the brain, as already used
by advertising, MTV, and rave promoters (lights, lazers and strobes).
As well as being galvanised by music, the CCRU are also influenced by the theory-driven leading
edge of music journalism. One of their associate members is Kodwo Eshun, contributor to magazines
like iD and The Wire and author of the forthcoming More Brilliant Than The Sun, a study of "sonic
fiction" in black music from Sun Ra to jungle. He was guest of honour at CCRU's Afro-Futures seminar
and gave a talk at VF96. Eshun describes himself and the CCRU as "concept-engineers", as opposed
to thinkers. Critique, he argues, is a rhetorical mode that puts the heavy burden of History on your
shoulders, whereas the concept-engineer is into speculation. "Most theory contextualises,
historicizes and cautions; the concept-engineer uses theory to excite and ignite," Eshun proclaims.
Where "thinker" evokes an effete and impotent ivory-tower detachment, "engineer" suggests
someone who gets down-and-dirty with the material word (in Deleuzian terms, someone who
operates and maintains desiring machines). Like a DJ or jungle producer, the concept-engineer is "a
sample-finder": s/he's free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value of a theory and simply use
the bits that work, in the spirit of Deleuze & Guattari's offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit
rather than gospel.
^^^^^^^^^^^
"Concept-engineer" is a good tag for the outerzone of "independent researchers" and amateur
autodidacts to which CCRU is connected. Renegade theorists like Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak
whose techno-zine Break/Flow brilliantly analyses rave music in terms of "nonconceptual thought"
and "impulsional exchanges", and celebrates the techno underground as a rhizomatic, insubordinate,
post-media economy. And like Matthew Fuller, a media theorist/activist with a background in
anarchist politics and links to the hacker underground. Fuller's CV of cultural dissidence includes
flypostering, pirate radio, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast Breeder, the scabrous freesheet
Underground, and a series of anarcho-seminars like "Seizing The Media" dedicated to the theory and
praxis of media terrorism. Fuller also put out the anthology Unnatural: Techno-Theory For A
Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land's "Cyberpositive" and an essay by CCRU member
Steve Metcalf.
Discussing his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about dismantling traditional "modes of
political address" and developing a sort of post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true conceptengineer, he believes in ransacking theory texts for task-specific ideas. "Publishers like Autonomedia
and Semiotexte produce material that you don't have to be an academic to get into, so it circulates
outside those milieux. When I give presentations at academic events, it's easy to see I'm in a more
powerful position than the academics--I can steal all the advantages of their discipline, plus do
something else with it that fucks it up totally."
Noting that Deleuze & Guattari are already being institutionalised into "the most dreary, saintly area
of discourse", Fuller says he's dedicated to "cracking open those texts again, thinkers who originally
opened stuff up to delirium and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and narrative
strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the reader, so to speak. In that respect, there's a
lot more to be learned from fiction than theory." Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose
work-in-progress, Writing On Drugs, includes a fictional component. Plant says she hopes that
subsequent books will become "pure fiction".
^^^^^^^^^^^^
"The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang -- PhD students with attitude!," says
Eshun. Loathing the "necrotic side of philosphy, the chewing-over of dead thinkers' entrails", and
bored limp by the "delibidinising" atmosphere of seminars, CCRU used to attend academic events,
claims Eshun, expressly "in order to disrupt, undermine and ridicule.... They'd get into pitched
battles with Derrideans!". Enhancing this picture of intra-academic gang-warfare, two of CCRU's
allies from another university once turned up to an event sporting "colors": they'd printed up T-Shirts
that mimicked the logo of Dolce & Gabbana, but stood for Deleuze & Guattari!
Weary of such sports, Plant, Land and CCRU have all enthusiastically embraced the idea of escaping
"institutional lockdown" by going freelance. In addition to her drugs book, Plant is working on a film
screenplay and says she can't imagine ever returning to academia. The CCRU hope to become a kind
of independent think-tank, selling "commodities" on the intellectual free market--like their
strikingly designed Abstact Culture (each "swarm" consists of five separate monographs bundled
together) and, in the future, CD's, CD-ROM's and books. "The whole saga of the first phase of the
CCRU was to do with negotiating bureaucratic space," says Fisher. "But we quickly realised that the
institution didn't depend on university space itself , but on the collectivity."
It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they're out in
the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says she
couldn't really go along with the trip into numerical mysticism, not least because she didn't like
finding herself "in the role of the sensible, conservative one --not a role I'm used to!". CCRU, for
their part, seem to have resented her premature departure from Warwick. Perhaps CCRU's fervent
emphasis on collectivity stems in part from what Kodwo Eshun characterises as "an adaption to this
harsh feeling of abandonment by this person who they really admired and who they decided to
devote three, four years of their lives around." Plant, meanwhile, says she felt uncomfortable with
being a guru figure.
"Nick's hermetic, he wants acolytes", says Eshun. "Whereas Sadie's this total communicator. Zeros +
Ones is the return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can't think of any other writer with the
same ambition. Sadie wants the world and I think she'll get it. " CCRU, meanwhile, are toying with
the idea of relocating wholesale to India.
Posted by SIMON REYNOLDS at 12:18 PM
22 comments:
Pete Um said...
Bloody useful, ta.
January 26, 2010 at 2:56 PM
Martyn Amos said...
This takes me back... I was tangentially involved with the CCRU via my research in
molecular computing (I did my Ph.D at Warwick '93-'96), and helped with the two
"big" VF conferences.
One of the last times I saw Nick was in the Coop on Earlsdon high street; in his
basket were about six Pot Noodles, and a cabbage ("because I don't want to get
scurvy").
May 29, 2011 at 8:27 AM
Stephen Alexander said...
Those interested in NL and this period at Warwick,
might like to see the following post in which I give my take on it ...
http://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/nick-land-and-darkenlightenment.html?m=1
August 3, 2017 at 5:25 AM
Stephen Alexander said...
Readers interested in Land and this period at Warwick, might like to see the
following post on torpedo the ark ...
http://torpedotheark.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/nick-land-and-darkenlightenment.html?m=1
August 3, 2017 at 5:45 AM
Joan Broadhurst said...
Just to say that Andrew Benjamin had nothing to do with the Virtual Futures 94 &
95 conferences. They were student led and funded as had been the Deleuze
conference 2 years earlier.
March 27, 2018 at 6:24 AM
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