COLLAPSE IV
Editorial Introduction
Robin Mackay
Surveying a century in which experience has taught us
that man is capable of inventing ever more atrocious forms
of violence and horror, is it necessary to remark that much
of modern thought offers little to soothe, and much to
exacerbate our disquiet? Nietzsche famously observed that
the psychic well-being of the human organism is predicated,
minimally, upon a drastically partial perspective, and
ultimately upon untruth. Human cognitive defaults continue
to cry out against the insights which modern physics,
cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and the
rest seem to require us to integrate into our worldview. As
for philosophy, it has largely replaced wonder, awe, and
the drive to certainty with dread, anxiety and finitude.
Moreover, despite the diverse technological wonders
they have made possible, the modern sciences offer little
existential respite: There is no consolation in the claim that
(for instance) I am the contingent product of evolution, or a
chance formation of elementary particles, or that my ‘self’ is
3
COLLAPSE IV
nothing but the correlate of the activation of neurobiological
phase-spaces. Yet mundane thought, whether through
obstinacy or inertia, maintains its stubborn course
regardless, as if oblivious to their consequences, or at
most allowing them to subsist at a safely delimited, solely
theoretical level.
What if, prising the more disturbing elements of modern
thought loose from their comfortable framing as part of an
intellectual canon, we were to become fully attentive to
their most harrowing consequences? What if, impatient
with a consideration of their claims solely from the point
of view of their explanatory power and formal consistency,
we yielded to the (perhaps ‘unphilosophical’) temptation
to experiment with their potentially corrosive effects upon
lived experience? If the overriding affect connected with
what we ‘know’ – but still do not really know – about the
universe and our place in it, would be one of horror, then,
inversely, how might the existing literature of horror inform
a reading of these tendencies of contemporary thought?
These are some of the questions with which this
volume of Collapse sets out to grapple, imagining for a
moment a philosophy absolved of humanistic responsibilities, devoting itself to the experimental marshalling of all
possible resources in the service of a transformation that
would no longer be circumscribed within the bounds of the
purely theoretical, and thus striking an alliance with those
affects which, for the most part elided, nonetheless haunt
philosophical thought like its very shadow. A philosophy,
then, bound to experiment with the employment of horror,
that its insights might begin slowly but effectively to erode
anthropic automatism.
4
Editorial Introduction
Such experiments are already being undertaken – not
for the most part by philosophers, but by those working in
literature and the arts who, drawing upon the resources of
modern thought, have devised means by which to produce
experiences of the conceptual upheavals characteristic of
the post-Enlightenment age. It is the scenarios of weird
and horror fiction, the excessive existential sufferings of
literature, the abstract emotional engineering of sound-art
and music, and the poetical extrapolations of artists, that
are apt to put us in the place of individuals set loose from
the protective envelope of consensual reality, forced to
integrate directly the lacerating force of thoughts usually
blunted (even – or, sad to say, especially – in philosophical
discourse) by the knowledge that they are, after all, ‘only
thoughts’. It is through them that we identify ourselves
with tormented individuals compelled – even if only
momentarily – to live the problem of the rational corrosion
of our cherished self-image, to viscerally absorb thoughts
‘whose merest mention is paralysing’ (Lovecraft).
In the twentieth century, sf, weird fiction, and horror in
particular have furnished a laboratory for shaping narratives
pointedly informed by the conceptual paradoxes produced
by modern science and philosophy. And increasingly,
philosophy itself, and the high arts which so long looked
with disdain upon such pulp fictions, are realising with what
anticipatory clarity these genres have formulated problematics which are becoming ever more pressing, not only
conceptually and aesthetically, but even politically (given
what is at stake in our maintenance of a naïve, comfortable
self-image even as the most speculative theoretical insights
are immediately and ruthlessly operationalised throughout
the sociopolitical and commercial spheres, from advertising
to healthcare, from warfare to banking).
5
COLLAPSE IV
Given this discursive intersection between the attempt
to rethink reality through contemporary science and
philosophy, and the tropes of the horror ‘genre’, then,
there is a certain logic in examining together conceptual
armature and artistic dramatisation. It was this doubleedged approach that we decided to take in the present
volume, by bringing together contributions from authors
of weird fiction, artists, and philosophers– only to discover
ourselves vindicated by the impossibility of determining
where the concept ends and the horror begins. The theme
thus presented an opportunity to bring more fully to fruition
Collapse’s vision of an integration of elements originating
from very different spheres, mutually catalysing so as to
produce a series of conceptual ‘interzones’.
George Sieg’s contribution ably demonstrates how, in
examining the nature of horror as an affect, a rich intersection of cognitive, conceptual, existential and political
stakes comes into view. Firstly, unlike the essentially animal
responses of fear and terror, horror attaches especially to
the conceptual abstraction and reflexivity attendant upon
self-consciousness – which is as much as to say that homo
philosophicus is defined by a capacity for feeling horror. As
Sieg argues, horror is characterised more through its victims
than through its predators, and the victim’s itinerary is
always that from innocence to knowledge. Corollary to this
is the impossibility of flight to a ‘critical’ position on horror,
since it is ‘always already’ (even such hoary philosophical
locutions reveal a menacing aspect here …) the horror of
knowing horror – whence Sieg’s characterisation of horror
as peculiarly ‘gnostic’ (thus introducing a recurrent theme
of this volume).
Sieg locates the historical kernel of horror in
the endotropic amplification of an anthropological
6
Editorial Introduction
commonplace – the Zoroastrian concept of druj as
xenophobia turned inward. However, in order for horror
to flower, he emphasises, another element is necessary –
a thoroughgoing materialism, in which the knowledge
of non-apparent conceptual distinction – the sensitivity
towards hidden otherness – is prevented from diffusing into
mysticism: The very birth, one might say, of the distinction
between philosophy and religion, is also the birth of horror.
It is this compaction, suggests Sieg, which finally blocks all
exit from a self-referential universe pregnant with horror
and yet (or precisely because it is) entirely rational – a
universe in which the innocent victim is defenceless before
the monstrous knowledge which invades them.
In his contribution Eugene Thacker details how
theology has, nevertheless, maintained a consistent historical
relation to horror. His ‘Nine Disputations on Theology and
Horror’ examines the extent to which the concept of ‘life’
owes its integrity to an immanent ‘after-life’ which is the
proper object of horror. If life is defined by a duplicity – the
distinction between the living being and life ‘itself’ – then,
according to Thacker’s historical survey of the ‘teratological
noosphere’, in the undertow of the questioning of life we
always find changing conceptualizations of afterlife, whose
horrific avatars are so many embodiments (or disembodiments) of this problematic duplicity. They provide us with
a handle on a fundamental question of biopolitics in its
varying historical forms: The suppression of the after-life
immanent to life, whose horror reveals that which is already
there prior to individual lives, the anonymous Levinasian
‘there is’ which, Thacker argues, is ‘a point of attraction
for ontology’ – in Thacker’s coinage, a ‘nouminous’ (both
noumenal and numinous) life. However as Thacker’s
‘disputations’ deepen, the ‘always-receding horizon’ of the
7
COLLAPSE IV
concept of life leads him to a more radical consideration of
‘life as non-being’, or the horror of ‘life-without-Being’.
In their ‘Czech Forest’ cycle, Prague artist collective
Rafani take an oblique approach to confronting a horrifying
episode in their national history. Although at their birth
Rafani announced themselves through overtly political
manifestos, by addressing this suppressed event through a
reappropriation of folk art, ‘Czech Forest’ displays a keen
ability to navigate the borders of the political, the mythical
and the aesthetic. In doing so, it adds a supplement to George
Sieg’s argument that horror has its roots in xenophobia and
the fear of the ‘enemy within’.
At the end of the Second World War, Czech inhabitants
of the now-liberated Sudetenland turned on neighbouring
Germans, whose families in some cases had inhabited the
forest region for over a century, and drove them out with
vengeful ferocity. The slogans reproduced in Rafani’s iconic
images (from the ‘Unofficial Decalogue of Czech Soldiers
in the Borderland’, a propaganda handbook published
at the time) demonstrate starkly enough how this triumphalist convulsion relayed the horrors suffered under
occupation, revisiting them once more upon the innocent.
But the ‘Czech forest’ of the title also conducts a deeper
current: the Forest, as fairy-tale locus of darkness, where
children get lost, monsters lurk, and, at dusk, branch and
leaf become menacingly animate. By subtly adapting the
folk-art-inspired woodcuts that often illustrate such tales,
Rafani’s work connects the transmutation of the rage of the
oppressed into xenophobic hatred, with the mythopoetic
roots of fear, thus transforming the story from national
history into psychogeographical fable of horror: it becomes
a reminder of what lurks beneath the comfort of homeliness,
and of the horror of the internal other.
8
Editorial Introduction
Graham Harman’s emblematic invocation of ‘the
electrons that form the pulpy torso of Great Cthulhu’
reminds us that the hard-nosed materialism that is a
prerequisite for the emergence of horror finds its equally
necessary counterpart in the polysemic qualifier ‘pulp’.
Historically describing the re-formed, low-grade paper used
to manufacture magazines carrying what was, and to some
extent still is, considered low-grade and derivative literature,
including fantastic fiction and comics, ‘pulp’ came to apply
also to the latter’s supposedly ‘generic’ nature. More than
coincidentally, it also sits well with what China Miéville
nominates, in his contribution, the ‘new (Weird) haptic’ –
a certain ‘palpability’ associated with horror and whose
avatar, Miéville proposes, is that exemplarily ‘formless’
creature, the octopus – le poulpe. Himself a contemporary
giant of weird fiction, and an unashamed champion of
pulp, in his essay Miéville clearly demonstrates that an
attentive reading of the history of the fantastic underpins
his fiction. He undertakes to extract from their various
historical combinations and scissions the two currents of
the weird and the ‘hauntological’. Taking the ‘skulltopus’
and its ‘extreme rarity […] in culture’ as an indicator that
the coexistence of the two genres makes them no less
inviolably distinct, Miéville argues that, if the rise of the
weird belongs to ‘crisis-blasted modernity’ – the enlightenment become dark – and if in contemporary capitalism we
live the weird, we are also haunted by ghosts of futures that
never happened: the superposed temporalities of the genres
expressing the tensions of post-modernity.
Disabusing us of any suspicion that the link between
horror and philosophical thought is a purely modern
invention, Reza Negarestani’s contribution recounts
9
COLLAPSE IV
how a certain hideously ingenious torture was no sooner
historically recorded than its most gruesome details were
employed as a conceptual resource for philosophical
meditation. Building on a fragment from a lost work by
Aristotle, ‘The Corpse Bride’ launches a necrophilic investigation into the idea of ontology as a system of metaphysical cruelty which reveals vitalism to be a ‘farce’ played out
among the remains of the already-dead.
In imbuing a famous Etruscan torture with universal
pertinence, Negarestani’s Aristotle becomes a prophet
of terror, insistent that any intelligible ontology as such
mobilises non-belonging (or nothing) through the agency
of a chain of putrefactory ratios or problematic intimacies
with the dead. Aristotle assimilates the bond between soul
and body with the bond between corpse and living victim,
wherein only the differential layer of blackening or nigredo
can properly be called ‘life’. Yet in Negarestani’s argument,
even this chemistry of horror is only a preface to a deeper
bond with the void which Aristotle seeks to dissimulate.
The final twist in Negarestani’s investigation, in which the
glorification of negativity or the subtractive mobilization of
non-belonging (Badiou, Zizek, et al.) is revealed as an implicit
and unconditional affirmation of the radically exterior,
adds new and macabre detail to his previous Collapse
essays on absolute exteriority and ‘affordance’: survival
becomes an art of living with the dead, of maintaining a
ratio of intensive decay to extensive putrefaction, of abiding
in nigredo.
What follows from Negarestani’s probing of the
problematic conjunction of nekrous and philia, the dead and
the essence of affirmation, reads like a thoroughly perverse
twisting of Deleuze’s dialectic of problem and solution, and
10
Editorial Introduction
a retrospective ‘blackening’ of the history of differential
calculus he associates with it: for ‘what could be worse for
vitalism than at once being animated through a necrophilic
alliance, and simultaneously, protected under the aegis of
the void’?
The work of Jake and Dinos Chapman has continually
toyed with the cohabitation of horror and laughter,
employing the debasement of form and image as a weapon
against moral self-certainty. Proof of concept in this respect
was achieved in their (2004) ‘improvement’ of Goya’s
famous Disasters of War through ‘rectifications’ that yanked
the atrocity-victims into a cruelly absurd cartoon universe
that addressed the viewer far more intensely and disquietingly than the ‘originals’ with their patina of historical
didacticism and art-historical legitimation.
In the drawings they contribute to our volume, the
Chapman brothers continue a preoccupation with the
uncannily vacant images of the children’s colouring book
(see e.g. Gigantic Fun [2000], My Giant Colouring Book [2004]).
In I Can See, vulgarised Bataillean themes vie with the
vacant potency of stereotyped simulacra reproduced for
juvenile consumption; the comically brutal irruption into
these adumbrated banalities of fragments of body-horror,
and an insidious cross-breeding with the Chapmans’ own
stock of cartoon atrocities, engenders a menacing air of
inanity that resists easy decipherment. The artists’ programmatic impoverishments, testing the limit at which the image
will cease to conduct the craving for improvement, might
be read in the light of Negarestani’s Aristotelian arithmetic
as a willed acceleration of the putrefaction of the form of
art, an iterative process of decay which, however, only ever
momentarily disturbs the veneration of ‘what remains’.
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COLLAPSE IV
The Chapmans’ extended practical joke on the art-world
continually subverts any anticipation that a work should
supply abreactive or cathartic moral reinforcement through
didactically-framed images (‘eye-care’?). Instead it invites a
jarring and problematic convulsion, an irresolvable horror
vacui.
If Lovecraft’s name resounds throughout this volume,
making several of his tales ‘required reading’ for the
collected articles, it often does so through the filter of
another work. Hardly a work of ‘secondary literature’
– despite its biographical form, it is more of a passionate
affirmation and exacerbation of Lovecraft’s great themes
– Michel Houellebecq’s H.P.Lovecraft: Against the World,
Against Life1 is one of the few studies to successfully explore
the singular qualities of Lovecraft’s work. And, as little as
it may seem evident at first, reading Houellebecq’s own
work through his appreciation for Lovecraft reveals a
profound influence. Houellebecq’s characters too live out
the ‘unlivable’, encountering in heightened form the cosmic
horrors which modern society simultaneously unleashes
and suppresses; they are individuals who have taken into
their very soul the full weight of what we know about our
universe and our place within it. Yet unlike Lovecraft’s
doomed heroes, for the most part Houellebecq’s remain
trapped within the banal everyday: with no respite even
through the negative transcendence of madness, the
world becomes a relentless trial, its everyday rituals and
objects beacons of desolate horror. Houellebecq’s poems
– a selection of which we are delighted to include in this
volume translated into English for the first time – distil his
powerful vision into translucid moments of dread certainty.
1.Trans. D. Khazeni, San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005.
12
Editorial Introduction
The poems record moments when the obtuse momentum
of life draws it momentarily into proximity with the indifference of the universe; they offer no affirmation, no
redemption, but only an icy clarity, a kind of conciliation
with this indifference. The most innocuous spaces of the
everyday (‘the insides of cupboards’) become abysmal
revelations, whilst the empty repetitions of life reveal time
as an implacable horror of merciless recurrence ‘every day,
until the end of the world’.
In his reading of the work of Thomas Ligotti – one of
the foremost contemporary exponents of weird fiction – in
tandem with the neurophilosophy of Thomas Metzinger,
James Trafford argues that the horrifying travails of
Ligotti’s protagonists give phenomenological expression to
insights anticipating those presented in Metzinger’s extraordinary treatise Being No-One. The latter includes explicitly
as one of its goals the achievement of a theory that can be
‘culturally integrated’;2 Trafford’s suggestion is that such
an integration may imply a passage through horrors similar
to those described – and generated – by Ligotti’s singularly
suffocating tales.
Metzinger’s central contention is that the apparent
immediacy or transparency of phenomenological
appearances owes itself to an instrumental miscognition: transparency is in fact a ‘special form of darkness’.
Ligotti’s fiction, premissed upon the catastrophic undoing
of this miscognition, this protective opacity, documents the
experience of the unravelling of selfhood.
Sieg argues that the monster is a less indispensable
element of the horror genre than the victim, and it is the
victims in Ligotti’s fictions, in their plumbing of the depths
2. T. Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (London: MIT Press,
2004).
13
COLLAPSE IV
of a ‘spinning abyss’ (recalling the ‘layers within layers
of horrific depravity’ revealed to Sieg’s gnostics) that
Trafford sees as revealing the dark truth of Metzinger’s
‘nemocentrism’.
In his own contribution, Thomas Ligotti demonstrates that not only is self-consciousness a precondition
for horror, the two are inextricable. ‘Thinking Horror’ is
thus a pleonasm: the new epoch heralded by the dawn of
self-consciousness is characterized by the production of
‘horrors [and] flagrantly joyless possibilities’ and – swiftly
ensuing – the erection of psychic defences against truth,
either explicit, socialised, or in the form of commonplace
ironies and homely platitudes (‘being alive is okay’).
If Ligotti’s fictions represent so many twisted descents
into the void, here it is offered to us neat, in the manner of
a classic, if unhinged, essayist, and with a certain humour
indissociable from such dismal truths. Eschewing any
orientation of his position according to the standard co-ordinates of a philosophical orthodoxy, Ligotti introduces
us to the obscure figures who form his secret lineage of
pessimism, and invents a pulp philosophy at once bracing
for its brutal honesty and perversely enjoyable for its
mordant wit.
Whilst much contemporary thought remains doggedly
committed to continuing the perennial philosophical battle
against mechanism and determinism, focusing increasingly
sophisticated conceptual resources on the characterisation of
‘singularities’ or ‘events’, Ligotti aligns himself, against ‘the
crushing majority of philosophers’, with a pessimistic creed
which, refusing to imprudently postulate such exceptions,
instead assigns itself the sole task of outlining the futility of
man’s lot and the comical details of his desperate attempts
14
Editorial Introduction
to think without thinking horror. Ligotti rightly locates the
interest of this programme less in its conceptual innovation
than in its audacious defiance of the snares of rhetoric and
the delights of intellectual sophistication. For, rather than
reason, is it not these latter passions which govern more
‘sophisticated’ philosophical architectonics, and in doing so
obscure the conceptual vistas that might open up to those
brave or foolhardy enough to interrogate philosophically the
‘taboo commonplaces’ which they superciliously outlaw?3
For Ligotti, though, perhaps even such interrogations risk
tainting the crystalline clarity of thinkers such as Zapffe and
Mainländer, for whom the real question swiftly becomes
a practical one – in a reprise of the Gnostic abhorrence of
nature and will-to-extinction.
One might of course argue that, even in writing, such
thinkers, and Ligotti himself, yield to the tide of life. Even
the will to know, to think, and to write, may itself be a
sublimated form of the not knowing that is crucial to survival.
But if thinking and writing can themselves be sources of
distraction, a thinking and writing of ‘concept horror’
attempts to force the reader to secrete something of the
poison that is buried within them; it is a kind of demonic
invocation. No less than his fictions, Ligotti’s straightforward account of our ‘malignant uselessness’ succeeds in so
far as its language – like that of Lovecraft’s eldritch incantations – ceases to be representational and begins to summon
the very desolate reality it describes, doing away with all
cultivated distance and calm objectivity. Ligotti counsels
precisely this surreptitious promotion of disillusionment, to
be carried out patiently by those in every age to whom it
3. A rare and fine example of such a dispassionate experiment in nihilism is Ray
Brassier’s recently published Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). (See also ‘The Enigma of Realism’ in Collapse II,
15-54.)
15
COLLAPSE IV
falls to carry on the bad work, hastening the dissolution of
the horrors of consciousness and life, and returning us to
the void.
Ligotti’s text appears in our volume alongside a series
of photographs by Oleg Kulik, a Russian artist whose
work includes photography and photoassemblage but
which culminates in his extraordinary live actions.4 One
of the first artists from post-Soviet Russia to have garnered
international attention, Kulik’s work thematises the porous
boundary between animal and human (a tendency which
reached its infamous apex in ‘Dog House’ [1996] when,
exhibiting himself as a chained canine, Kulik was arrested
for physically harming and mentally traumatising members
of the public who flouted the warning to ‘beware of the
dog’). As well as extending Kulik’s researches into what
Mila Bredikhina has called ‘zoophrenia’,5 Kulik’s ‘Memento
Mori’ complexifies the dialectic of life and death, presenting
us with images of creatures who are doubly dead –
already corpses, their deaths have been preserved through
interment in a museum. Of course, we still cannot help
reading their visages as anthropomorphic signifiers, now
all the more macabre. Evincing all the stuffed-shirt dignity
of victorian portraiture, the photographs could also be
read as an extended ‘family tree’ – an ancestral archive we
might prefer to keep in the closet. Not only do they act as
‘memento mori’, reminding us of the horror of personal
death; they also remind us, as does Ligotti, of the senseless
and indifferent continuum of life of which we are an insignificant part, and of the absurd folly of our enshrining
any part of it, stuffed and preserved, for posterity.
Perhaps Kulik thus identifies in advance the museums and
4. See the essential Oleg Kulik: Art Animal (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 2001) for
documentation of Kulik’s work from 1993-2000.
5. Ibid., passim.
16
Editorial Introduction
commemorative discourses in which his own work is
destined to be preserved as cultural mausolea, even as he
promotes the simultaneous fascination and horror that the
mummified object, in its living death, evokes.
The alternately accusing and mutely questioning faces
of the dead monkeys describe a strange twisting associative
dance with Ligotti’s text, the nuances of dumb bewilderment and silent petition inviting us to identify ourselves
simultaneously with Kulik’s photographic subjects and the
hapless, self-deluding targets of Ligotti’s rant. A deeply felt
unease, and the troubled laughter that accompanies it, is the
inevitable initial response to this marriage of text and image.
But ironically, read within the context of Kulik’s work,
‘Memento Mori’ obliquely hints at an egress from Ligotti’s
dead end. For Kulik’s performances seek a zoophrenic
overcoming of the limitations of the anthropic through a
plunging into the animal. The involvement of ‘the point of
view of different biological species in aesthetic practice,’ the
artist proposes, ‘will produce a new renaissance’6 – Since
the anthropomorphisation of the animal can only subject
it to a further death, we should rather zoomorphise the human.
This strategy of a ‘forward-to-nature’7 zoofuturism implies
that escape from ‘the crisis of human schizophrenic culture’8
might involve intimacy with a horror that walks on four
legs – a horror that has left its teeth-marks on witnesses
to Kulik’s uncompromising and profoundly disturbing
animal-becomings.
In this volume we present the final part of a ‘trilogy’
of essays by Quentin Meillassoux, which proposes a
6. Ibid., 1.
7. Ibid., 51.
8. Ibid.
17
COLLAPSE IV
wholly different, rationalist, antidote to despair. In previous
contributions, Meillassoux presented his thesis of ‘absolute
time’ or ‘the necessity of contingency’, founded upon a
re-examination of Hume’s problem.9 In ‘Spectral Dilemma’,
he unveils the ethical consequences of the position,
introducing the conception of the ‘virtual god’ that lies at
the heart of the philosophical system to which the acclaimed
After Finitude10 – although a significant intervention in its
own right – is a prolegomena. In his meditation on irremediable bereavement, Meillassoux asks, with regard both
to the spectres of those whose loss is personal to us, and
to those belonging to the atrocities of the last century and
which seemingly cannot be dispelled, how it is possible to
escape the shadow of such deaths, thus to hope once more.
Meillassoux’s answer to this question will surprise many,
but undoubtedly constitutes a consistent development
from his central philosophical contentions. Identifying the
dilemma presented by the theist and atheist responses to
the demands of ‘essential mourning’ – namely, that one
must hope something for the dead, but that any existing
god, having to be held responsible for their sufferings, can
only be the object of horror and repugnance rather than
veneration – Meillassoux shows that the ‘impossible’ conciliation of the parties must be sought through a thinking of
the divine character of inexistence, which is further expanded
into a very particular modal thesis, revealing the solution
to the ‘spectral dilemma’ to be a formal counterpart to the
speculative-rational solution of Hume’s problem.
9. Q. Meillassoux, ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’, Collapse Vol. II (2007), 55-82 and
R. Brassier ‘The Enigma of Realism’, 207-34, in the same volume; ‘Subtraction and
Contraction’, Collapse Vol. III (2007), 63-107.
10. Trans. R. Brassier (London/NY: Continuum, 2008).
18
Editorial Introduction
Meillassoux presents us here with a foretaste of what
he will develop of a divinology, in rupture with the very
couplet a/theism. But if the question for the bereaved is
then no longer that of having enough time to mourn, but
of what type of time, then, glancing forward to Benjamin
Noys’ reading of Lovecraft’s conception of time, we might
wonder whether the god who is to come, but whose arrival
depends upon a lawless ‘hyperchaos’, is not destined to visit
upon its devotees a ‘Horror Temporis’ more terrible still than
the dilemma from which it frees them. Inspired by Meillassoux’s conception of ‘absolute time’, Noys suggests that, if
(as Harman argues) the comparison between Lovecraft and
Kant does not hold good, at least one affinity between them
may yet be attested: in the introduction into weird fiction
of the affect corresponding to the ‘empty form of time’.
Time, released from its anthropocentric cycles, becomes
unhinged and threatening in its indifference to humanity;
fully purified, as in Meillassoux, of sufficient reason, it
implies a ‘suspension of natural laws’. Invoking the ‘archefossil’ as emblem of cosmic temporal disquiet, Noys notes
that the Meillassouxian universe, freed from the yoke of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason by a time whose vicissitudes
are not even ameliorated by lawfulness, carries the Lovecraftian implication of a ‘material “outside” responding to
no law’, a truly ‘unmasterable’ god – it is the universe of
Azathothic materialism, releasing us ‘into the experience of the
horror of […] the seething vortex of time’. And, as we know,
those of Lovecraft’s protagonists who fall under the eldritch
shadow of beings hailing from this ‘outside’, far from finding
their hope replenished, finish traumatised and deranged.
Given the trajectory of ‘irrealism’ which accompanies the
discovery of horror temporis, Noys concludes fittingly by
showing how Peaslee’s ‘researches’, unsatisfactorily abridged
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COLLAPSE IV
in the ending of Lovecraft’s tale, might be completed from
the perspective of a contemporary philosophy of the real
which reveals time itself as the ‘shadow’.
German artist Todosch11 (whose work, like that of
Oleg Kulik, has involved an uncanny intimacy with the
animal: one of his live actions, connected with the infamous
‘Hundetunnel’ project in Chicago,12 involved implanting
dog fangs into his mouth for a year) produces work which
seems to invite myths and/or rationalisations whilst simultaneously repelling them: How to ‘explain’ live actions causing
great public inconvenience and stress-testing public reaction
(various Sisyphean labours including dragging six carriages
of scrap through the streets from Berlin to the Hanover
Expo); fictional institutions (Das Falten von Böhmen, Conscious
Force) which realise themselves through an exhaustive
documentary archive; or the painstaking production of
strange objects (cute pokemon-like critters that turn out to
have been carved from Carrera marble) like fetishes of a
classical alien culture? A part of their disarraying force, and
the irresistible desire to quell it with some narrative, results
from a forced confrontation with the brute materiality of the
heterogeneous matter that surrounds us but whose opacity
and intractability are systematically suppressed through
commodification and habituation. Refusing to make it serve
him, as an artist Todosch repeatedly takes the burden of
(physical, informational, cultural) ‘stuff’ upon himself. The
drawings which he contributes to this volume of Collapse
might be understood both as a depiction and a channeling
of this heterogeneous, cloacal, sinewy, abstract matter.
The ‘stuff’ is never quite recognisable, but is recognisably
11. A.K.A. Thorsten Schlopsnies. See http://todosch.felix-werner.net/
12. See ‘Thorsten Schlopsnies – Todosch’, in Umelec 2, 2005, 51-4.
20
Editorial Introduction
impure, and evidently in the process either of coagulation or
of decomposition – a research study from one of Todosch’s
fictitious institutions, The Institute for Recycling Reality?
Quite apart from the general ineptitude attacked by
Graham Harman, there is a particular want of critical
finesse in denouncing as ‘continental science fiction’ the
work of Iain Hamilton Grant, who his readers will
know as the foremost exponent of steampunk materialism,13
but who has latterly become – judging by his more recent
works’ protracted descent into what he has described as
‘the nuclear night of the unthinged’14 – chief scribe of idealist
horror. In his essay on Lorenz Oken, which accompanies
Todosch’s drawings, Grant adds an extraordinary coda to
the powerful case put in his recent book15 for the contemporary importance of a philosophy of nature.
As anticipated in Grant’s earlier account in Collapse16
of the necessarily speculative form of its central problem
– that of accounting for its own possibility qua natural
production – the chief horror of naturephilosophy is that
of an evacuation of the ‘comfort zone of interiority’.17 If
‘the Idea is exterior to the thinking, the thinking is exterior
to the thinker, and the thinker is exterior to the nature that
produced it’, then naturephilosophy’s vocation, in the shape
of thinking the production of thought, is to turn ‘us’ inside
13. See, e.g. ‘At the Mountains of Madness: The Demonology of the New Earth and
the Politics of Becoming’, in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. K. A. Pearson (London:
Routledge, 1997); and ‘Burning AutoPoiOedipus’, in Abstract Culture 2:5 (At http://
www.ccru.net/swarm2/2_auto.htm).
14. ‘The Chemistry of Darkness’, in PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 9 (2000),
36-52: 36.
15. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (NY/London: Continuum, 2006).
16.�See ‘Speculative Realism’, in Collapse III, 307-449.
17. Ibid., 334, 343.
21
COLLAPSE IV
out, in the process making it impossible ‘for anyone to
recognise themselves in the production of their thoughts’.18
This is accompanied, too, by an unpleasant community with
the lower orders, far beyond zoophrenia (and even within
the individual – in Oken’s theory of recapitulation the body
becomes an infolded horror in which the head is a spine,
the jaws and teeth deterritorialized limbs and nails ...).
Since a universe where even thought is a natural
production, its ‘content’ thus having no necessary purchase
on that production, is indeed something ‘very difficult to
imagine’,19 we might say that a successful naturephilosophy
would be a kind of forcible manipulation of the imagination;
that it must appear in the form of a literally mind-bending
speculative science/fiction and a brutal dismemberment
of the body of representational thinking, relegating the
Kantian a priori to a mere natural-historical prius, thought
being separated from its conditions not by some absolutised
transcendental membrane but by an asymmetry in the
time of production.20 Naturephilosophy thus provides the
formal schema for precisely that negation of the ‘insularity
of transcendental subjectivity’ which (as Trafford argues)
is harboured by the neuroscientific viewpoint and which
afflicts Ligotti’s tormented protagonists.
If this gives us permission to speak of naturephilosophy
as a kind of intellectual self-harm, an auto-horrification,
Grant insists that against its ‘better judgement’, contemporary philosophy must indeed inflict this harm upon
itself once again. Does post-Kantian philosophy, he asks,
bowed by the blows of naturalism, dare escape the ‘trap’ of
18. Ibid., 343.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 343.
22
Editorial Introduction
reasserting its ‘comfort zone’ through some neo-Fichtean
subordination of the natural conditions of thought (irrecoverably – indeed horrifically – excessive for thought itself)
to a pacificatory illusion of self-knowledge, and a resubordination of physics to ethics? In reasserting the need
for a (necessarily speculative) account of nature to revoke
Kant’s ‘daring act of reason’ which ineluctably peters out
into the ‘ethical process’, Grant selects the model in which
naturephilosophy’s science-fictional credentials are most
ostentatiously paraded – Lorenz Oken’s monstrous (in
size as in content) account of the natural generation of the
universe.
In pursuing the ultimate ground of nature on the basis
that the whole of nature is involved in each part, Oken
characterises what Thacker described as the immanent
‘after-life’ of life as a universal Ur-slime [Urschliem]. But since
each successive sphere of nature constitutes an appearance
of ‘something from nothing’, then that ‘nothing’ appears
as another element in the naturephilosophical system:
Ur-slime and Zero, mucus and matheme, are thus pitted
against each other as true genetic elements of nature. Grant’s
negotiation of Oken’s twisted dialectic of Zero, the ‘sink’
at the ‘core’ of existence, and Slime as its ‘oozing ground’,
ends in the affirmation of an ‘ontological queasiness’ that
cannot be ceded to the hygienic instinct. In a conclusion
which demonstrates the capacity of naturephilosophy to
offer new and profound readings of contemporary philosophical problems – in this case that of Badiou’s mobilisation of a dialectic of ‘animal’ and ‘number’ against Deleuze
– Grant argues that the impossibility of abstracting away
‘the shock of the objective world’ means that there can be
no ‘slime-free matheme’ unless via a unilateral assertion of
23
COLLAPSE IV
the impossibility of a philosophy of nature – which would
be simply to blanch squeamishly at that twisting, oozing
process which is thinking (or being thought by) nature.
Using the search-engine as a stratigraphical probe to
sample the online collective unconscious, artist Steven
Shearer assembles vast archives (sometimes partially
exhibited as works in their own right) recording otherwise
uncelebrated cultural and social formations, including in
particular the young fans who draw sustenance from the
hyperenergetic musical genre of death metal. The Poems
series (2001–present) draws upon an extensive archive of
death metal band and song names, evidence of the genre’s
unremitting quest to make the cutting edges of language
coincide with the violence of its sonic bombardment.
Resynthesising the archive material to create a hysterical
cycle of disturbing, fantastical, and absurd narratives and
imagery, Shearer’s well-honed method of selection yields
a striking and consistent objective cross-section of this
cultural matter.
Although the relentless, hysterical fervour of the Poems
is certainly amusing at times, Shearer’s work never stoops
to ironic condescension. Like the lambent depictions of
longhaired fans in his glowering Munch-like paintings, or
in portraits which make of the humble biro an old-masterly instrument, the Poems are imbued with a sensitivity
to a collective existential quandary whose inhabitants
seek to anchor themselves to the most extreme point of
reference in a world of demonstrable mediocrity. And as
Shearer’s Poems forcibly and prolongedly hold the viewer’s
gaze captive at the point where language is flattened out
into a continuous and impassive appeal to what it can’t say,
his work rediscovers this extreme point. Beyond the lyrics’
24
Editorial Introduction
superficial preoccupations with death and violence lie more
real and more profound depths of horror, distributed socialexistential complexes rather than personal pathologies.
Seen in the light of Shearer’s other work – for instance,
his archive of thousands of eBay photographs that unintentionally afford glimpses into metalheads’ home lives – the
evident absurdity of the Poems’ unremitting nihilism, the
distance between such extremity and ‘real life’, becomes
an index of isolation and of the psychic torment of socialisation, showing how the metalhead’s absolute ‘no’ to life
anchors them against their inevitable concession to the
tepid homeliness of ‘reality’.
In their painstakingly hand-drawn form, the Poems
have been exhibited both in galleries and in public spaces
– Notably, during the 2006 Berlin Biennial, on the flank
of an eight-storey building (see p. 322). Thus transformed,
they invite a little of the negative sublime unapologetically
celebrated by this subculture into the overlit, overfinanced
spaces of the contemporary arts whose executives once
told Shearer (as documented in Sorry Steve [1999]): ‘when
we talk about celebrating cultural diversity, we don’t mean
yours’.21 It is through a sort of sociological alchemy that
Shearer distils and recombines – so they can no longer be
overlooked – the potent elements of what Lovecraft might
have called a shoggoth-culture, with all the class associations
implied in this (one of Shearer’s favourite epithets for his
works is ‘lumpen’). Shearer’s poetic invocations also echo
those of Lovecraft, who considered his task to be to excite
a physiological response in his readers. Again, like the
famously overdone Lovecraftian prose – itself frequently
21. See the beautiful recently published monograph accompanying Shearer’s 2007-8
shows in Birmingham and Toronto: Steven Shearer (Birmingham/Toronto: Ikon
Gallery/Powerplant, 2007).
25
COLLAPSE IV
verging on the comical or hysterical – the Poems obsessively
invoke or engender, rather than merely describing, the
objectless cosmic horror that inhabits every thinking being
– the non-sense that ungrounds sense – but which some, by
force of circumstance, are closer to than others, so that they
may even cherish the secret of its constant closeness as a
source of psychic sustenance.
‘On the Horror of Phenomenology’ finds Graham
Harman arguing, against a certain normative notion of
philosophical ‘maturity’, in favour of the demonstrable and
necessary weirdness of philosophy. Turning to Husserl’s
phenomenology as a test case, Harman suggests that
reading its insistence on the excessiveness of intentional
objects against Lovecraft’s descriptive delirium might
provide some pointers towards the type of ‘weird realism’
he advocates.
Problematising a Kantian reading of Lovecraft, Harman
concurs with Miéville that a hallmark of weird writing is that
it takes on the ‘unspeakable’ with an ‘excess of specificity’ in
description; adding that, rather than suggesting a noumenal
‘backworld’, this is the excess of a phenomenal realm
pregnant with the menace of ‘malignant beings’ which are
threatening precisely in so far as they stalk the very same
web of experience whose threads we too clamber along,
attempting to ignore their more ominous vibrations.
Using literature’s manufacture of unassimilable and
inexhaustible objects as a model for the production of philosophical concepts, Harman insists that the latter’s excess
over any definition makes them, too, excessive phenomena,
intentional objects whose properties can never be exhaustively enumerated – precisely the model proposed by
Husserl’s sensitive and meticulous phenomenology.
26
Editorial Introduction
Reading the persistent poring of phenomenological
description over its object against Lovecraft’s circumlocutory evocations of the unspeakable, Harman discovers –
like Negarestani – that ‘real objects taunt us with endless
withdrawal’. The probing of a disconnection between
the ‘excessive presence’ of intentional objects and the
withdrawing correlate that binds their qualities is the motor
of both phenomenology and horror – As Miéville argues,
the weird and the horrific are always palpable, but their
pulpy flesh ultimately always escapes our grasp. What
appears at first to be a mere similarity between literary
style and philosophical programme reveals, according to
Harman, a common strategy for intuiting this faultline in
the object, this ‘weird tension in […] phenomena’.
Kristen Alvanson’s contribution presents us with a
deformation produced in thought in its ongoing struggle
to encompass the horror of nature’s indifference to its classificatory desires. Her Arbor Deformia is a cross-section of a
discursive phylum, the product of the baffled internal forces
and tendencies of reason.
Images such as those in Alvanson’s contribution (not
least the fearsome ‘spider-goat’ [p. 366], whose branch in
the Arbor surely neighbours that of Miéville’s ‘skulltopus’)
have always been the object of simultaneous fascination
and repulsion. Her photographs capture unfortunate
creatures in already preserved form, as ‘doubly-dead’ as
Kulik’s monkeys; all-too familiar, but so repugnant as to
oblige us to a discursive dissociation. As she notes, they
therefore seem to breed conceptual monstrosities, out-ofcontrol taxonomical systems as deranged as the beings they
are designed to corral into rational discourse. The Arbor
Deformia, integrating the biological and taxonomical levels
27
COLLAPSE IV
of this twofold teratologism, gives an inventive graphical
solution to the twisted logics of Paré’s sixteenth-century
classifications.
It is not only Miéville’s essay, whose very title exhibits
the combinatorial dis-ease it discusses, that vindicates this
thesis according to which, when reason turns its classificatory attentions toward monsters, taxonomy itself tends to
become diseased and monstrous; in fact, Alvanson’s work
seems a fitting coda to the entire volume in its affirmation
that one does not bring the concept to bear on horror
without horror simultaneously investing the conceptual.
We would like to offer our sincere thanks to all of
our contributors for their work and commitment, and
for having collaborated so willingly in our experiment in
concept-horror. Their enthusiasm and generosity has made
possible a volume whose diversity and wealth of conceptual
interconnections this brief overview has only been able to
hint at. We hope that the work collected here will – in line
with our subtitle – provide inspiration both for further
philosophical research, and for further development in
the shape of literary and artistic creations fit to assemble
philosophical ideas into machines for effective deterritorialization, whether it be through the ‘experiential gnosis of
horror’, ‘multiple fraud’, ‘zoophrenia’, ‘mental experiment’,
‘neurotechnology’, the ‘shock of the objective’, ‘molecular
disembowelment’, ‘necrophilic reason’, the ‘furtive broadcasting of disillusionment’ or even, in the last resort, through
‘purely medical means’ … Let the horrors commence.
Robin Mackay,
Falmouth, April 2008.
28