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Negarestani in R’lyeh
Ben Woodard
Oceanic panic: The fluid roots of navigation
Where are we when we think? Is the territory for thought that of land, sea, or
something unrecognizable? These questions are poetically invoked by Isaac
Newton’s renowned statement:
I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have
been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great
ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
After declaring Newton an incorrigible theist, the mathematician, theoretical
physicist, and philosopher of science, Hermann Weyl extended the oceanic
metaphor, writing with regard to Newton and his ilk:
Their excuse is that of an ocean traveler who distrusts the bottomless sea and
therefore clings to the view of the disappearing coast as long as there is in sight
no other coast toward which he moves. I shall now try to describe the journey
on which the old coast has long since vanished below the horizon. There is no
use in staring in that direction any longer. (1934: 179)
If thought has an altogether different territory, then how does it relate to the image
of the sea in relation to the land? This is not simply to proliferate metaphor, but
rather to ask after the terms by which philosophy might function as a method of
navigation and not merely as a mode of description. It is to ask how much can and
should philosophy ground itself in order to think speculatively, to think outward
towards another horizon? Thought as an ocean stirs up images of placidity and
turbulence equally. The surface of the water might be calm or restless, one upon
which we might idle or struggle without a suitable vessel or nearby shoreline. Or
perhaps we might float in a certain quietude – like Goethe’s Spinoza – or instead
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struggle with rogue waves and riptides as we desperately make our way back to
shore. It is easy to relish, in an ostensibly new materialist way, in the affectivity
of the boundless ocean, but this would be to maintain the supremacy of the
navigational surface and not the depths involved.
If there is a project that appears to invoke both models of thought
simultaneously, or to have one foot on land and one ostensibly in the deep
sea, then it would appear to be that of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis.
In what follows, the question will become: what is this oceanic continuum and
what is its relation to schizoanalysis and to the great history of reason as an
intellectual jockeying for stability? On the surface of things, the schizoanalytic
model – a schizo out for a walk is better than a neurotic on the couch – might
be considered with regard to the perilousness of navigating on the open sea of
thought. Removed one degree from the surface, with a vessel to carry us (the
regime of philosophy as organized thought for instance), navigation becomes
of the utmost concern, whether we follow Deleuze and Guattari or, via an act of
experimentation, propose an analysis of our own.
Of course, as a formalization of raw cognitive capacities, philosophy is
constructed upon numerous strata (physical, biological, chemical, and so on)
which determine the trajectory of thought in a number of ways. Navigation
therefore presupposes a strange complicity between physical space, biology and
the organism’s computational powers. The neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz
has investigated the human capacity for ‘dead reckoning’, or the way in which
birds migrate or lost dogs return home, which he argues involves a stratified
combination of these three factors. Berthoz’s research traces the navigational
efficacy of the vestibular system, that which provides balance in many mammals
connected to the inner ear. For Berthoz, it is the human being’s singular ability to
remember how our body has moved through various tilts and jerks that may be at
the root of our species’ impressive capacity for topographical memory (2000).
Philosophical tradition has often appealed to merely ideal representations, or
to the capabilities of reason divorced from the corporeal, in order to navigate.
From the stable shore of representation, the tidal wave of Kant’s Critique of
Judgment warns about appealing to the purported excesses of nature. Terra firma
marks the stable ground of thinking, whereas the oceanic appears as a threat to
such stability, as well as to the potential for discovery. It is along these lines that
British philosopher Nick Land accuses Kant of aquaphobia:
Is not transcendental philosophy a fear of the sea? Something like a dike or a
sea-wall? A longing for the open ocean gnaws at us, as the land is gnawed by
the sea. A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature rebels against the security of
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terra firma, provoking a wave of anxiety in which we are submerged, until we
feel ourselves drowning, with representation draining away. (1990: 107)
As Robin Mackay points out in his essay ‘Philosopher’s Islands’, rationality
operates from within the liminal zone between these solid and liquid fields
(2010). From the earliest philosophical texts of autodidactism, to Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, the island is a central figure within philosophical thought. Yet the
island, so often skewed as that position from which we can look out on to the
ocean, is often abstracted from its larger terrestrial context. Taken up in cosmology
and astrobiology, the entire Earth is described as an island, an apparently rare
zone of habitability. That is, the capacity of life on planet Earth appears strange,
adding a twist to the subsequent capacity we possess for thinking about life from
this particular locality. As Milan Ćirković puts it in ‘Sailing the Archipelago’:
We live on a small island. We have not yet ventured much beyond our immediate
locale on this small island; even our own inconspicuous location still holds great
mysteries for us. It seems that we find ourselves near the mountain peak of our
island, but even that is uncertain. We have only recently discovered that there
are other islands besides our home scattered in a vast (possibly infinite) ocean.
And the ocean is dead. (2009: 293)
Ćirković points out that habitability is not due simply to geographical location
but to topographical concerns, that is, the ‘height’ of our archipelago may have
much to do with its capacity to host life (at least life as we know it). High points
are most open to life, whereas down, closest to the water, life struggles to survive
and even to come into existence at all (Ćirković 2009: 318).1 This metaphor has
interesting traction when comparing the ocean-dwelling with the land-dwelling.
The constitutive contradiction of the deep sea is that it is a dark and cold space
yet full of life, seismically active, and shuddering with complex thermal current
movements. Large tracts of the ocean floor teem with life despite their often
appalling physical conditions; thermal vents eject super-hot matter which
instantly freezes, while rock flows like liquid in the topographical birth pangs
that circumscribe the entire planet. The constraints of the physical on the
biological are ungrounded, if only conceptually, by the apparent ungroundedness
of the topological movement of the ocean floor.
The productivity of the ocean as a massive mutagenic assemblage favourably
accords with Deleuze’s numerous images of becoming, taking on complex
actualizations which undo the assumed stability of the land. And yet the
geographic and topological in Deleuze and Guattari often appears overcoded
by the concept of life, by appeals to the body without organs, to transcendental
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anatomy, and to sense. In ‘Who Does the Earth Think It Is?’, geology and
geochemistry are quickly overruled by the vestiges of transcendental
anatomy (1987). Put differently, the schizoanalytic walk through life appears
as a promenade that dips into the depths only to affirm its pre-existing (vital)
trajectory. In this sense there is no building or progression of forms of life
(which no doubt expand chaotically in their own milieus), but only an origamilike play of forms inwards and outwards. The geological model is applied to the
biological without the recognition that the geological conditions the biological.
In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari stay on the connective surface of the
assemblage, but in the guise of probing the depths (despite Deleuze’s language
in The Logic of Sense). Horizontality betrays the depth supposedly accessed by
the logic of sense, a sense still overdetermined by receptivity (no matter how
wide that receptivity is broadened by Deleuze and Guattari).2
Surface construction speaks to the purported two-headed nature of
schizoanalysis, which is ‘not only a qualitative analysis of abstract machines in
relation to assemblages, but also a quantitative analysis of the assemblages in
relation to a presently pure abstract machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 513).
The abstract machine appears as a giant ocean with currents of form and content
as intertwined expressions facilitated by, but not reducible to, the ocean’s matter
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 68, 72). In his biography of Deleuze and Guattari,
FranÇois Dosse indicates that in their collaboration, Deleuze was the Earth
while Guattari was the sea (2011: 7, 10). With the former dominating the latter
only in state forms, in the rebirth of absolute space via fleet in being, the sea is
visually captured by the state apparatus for the navigation of ships (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 387). Yet again, this would appear to favour the surface over the
depths.
Following the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land developed the notion
of ‘hyperstition’, which attempts to make real fictional entities, largely by drawing
on the harsh affectivity of Lovecraftian worlds. Given Deleuze and Guattari’s
insistence that schizoanalysis is a practice or a pragmatism, Land’s hyperstition
is suggested as an active attempt to draw on schizoanalytic insights as part of
a post-critical vector of socio-technical transformation. Where schizoanalysis
dramatizes, in many respects, the relationship between the literary and the
philosophical via a purportedly ‘political’ experimentation, we might then ask:
does the schizoanalytic endeavour remain a hyperstition of sorts, yet one afraid
of going too far in any direction?
Since literary affect is so integral to hyperstition as an extension of schi
zoanalysis, we might pause to consider how literary and scientific apprehensions
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of the senses differ, prior to exploring how contemporary hyperstition necessarily
draws on both scientific and literary production for its efficacy. If for Land,
Lovecraft’s narrators hold a powerful appeal, it is precisely because they are often
scientists embroiled in maddening research on ancient oceanic cults, research that
inevitably renders them deranged, yet at once radically open to the outside. That
the oceanic features so prominently in Lovecraft’s work gives us to consider Land’s
extension of schizoanalysis as a schizo stroll become voyage proper: For Deleuze
and Guattari, the schizo out for a walk is a better model than the neurotic on the
couch, for, as with Büchner’s Lenz, he is out and about making connections. But is
Büchner’s literary account as mobilised by Deleuze and Guattari adequate in light
of Berthoz’s navigational research? The passive dispersal of Lenz into his environs
might be conceived of differently after Berthoz, with such considerations as the
predator-prey relation having more to say about perception than the nebulous
variety of affects given in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. As Berthoz writes:
We must completely change the way we study the senses. We must begin by
considering the goal of the organism, so that we may understand how the brain is
informed by the receptors, how it regulates their sensitivity, combines messages
from them, and estimates their value, according to an internal simulation of the
expected consequences of action. (2000: 263)
In order to avoid a simplistic opposition between science and philosophy,
however, I propose that we might instead pursue a non-trivial hybridization –
one offered by the theory and hyperstition of Iranian philosopher and novelist
Reza Negarestani.
Asymptotic depths, or Negarestani in a diving bell
Through the notion of the continuum, Reza Negarestani’s emerging ‘asymptotic
thought of the open’ demonstrates the potential philosophical expansion
of Berthoz’s scientific pursuit of the deep roots of sense. While Negarestani
begins his exploration of the trans-modern continuum in his essay ‘Globe of
Revolution’ (2011a), in which he asserts a call to pursue new forms of realism,
the putrid ovum of this thinking lies in the earlier essay, ‘Undercover softness: An
Introduction to the Architecture and Politics of Decay’ (2010). As Negarestani
puts it, the universe that is sensed or speculated is the calculation of forms, of a
sick and complicit mutation of forms, a grotesque and constant restructuring;
ideas as such emerge from the decay of objects: ‘The infinitesimal persistence
of the object becomes asymptotic to the extinction of the object’ (2010: 388).
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Since all production entails a certain closing off of the exterior into an interior,
all things decay, or remain less and less, as a part of the living.
Negarestani’s use of asymptotic reasoning is significant as it focuses on the
non-crossing of two infinite series, which approach one another but never fully
coincide. Robert Batterman defines asymptotic reasoning as a form of abstraction
which is internal to the modes of the scientific method, and which attempts
to determine, from the place of the inter-theoretical, how various theories (in
his case the theories of the specialized sciences) approach one another (2001:
3, 5). Put in general terms, asymptotic thought is that form of thought which
attempts to avoid the pitfalls of both reductionism and rampant emergentism by
recognizing that the special sciences, however imperfectly, encircle real physical
singularities, yet, in the attempt to grasp these singularities, there is room for
connections between theories. Batterman’s account of asymptotic reasoning
demonstrates that when one field of knowledge approaches another it is often the
case that the rules for epistemological explanation may change; something which
reductionism misses, as reduction assumes that all transitions are smooth.
Furthermore, asymptotic thought avoids the often crude caricature of science
(somehow as always secretly and dramatically positivist), where science is the
villain for continental thought and for the humanities more generally. Though
Deleuze excavated a means of relating philosophical thought to scientific
thought in creative ways, it would seem he also falls too far in favour of the
former against the latter (or at least, this has overwhelmingly become the case
with his followers, with only Manuel DeLanda threatening the balance in favour
of science). Before considering literary affectivity further, let us first pursue
the debt asymptotic reasoning owes to scientific research. This will enable us
to consider how schizoanalysis has to some extent enabled an asymptotic line
for post-Deleuzian writers and thinkers, whilst at once threatening to limit it
wheresoever the literary is privileged over the scientific.
In his Philosophy of Simulation (2011), DeLanda briefly addresses asymptotic
thought. Discussing the specific example of convection cells, he writes: ‘If a
convection cell or a chemical clock are disturbed by an outside shock they will
tend to return to their original period and amplitude after a relatively short
time. This tendency is referred to as asymptotic stability’ (13). Furthermore, this
resistance to shocks suggests an ‘objective explanatory irrelevance of the details
of the interactions’ (DeLanda 2011: 14). And yet DeLanda’s emphasis on the
regulative stability of models and simulation as an aid to computational reason
falls short of the speculative capacities of thought that Negarestani is attempting
to formulate following asymptotic reasoning. Furthermore, it means allowing
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uncritical seepage between external computational simulations and the internal
simulations Berthoz outlines. These uses of asymptotic thought collide in the
‘middle-ground’ of the chemical paradigm. The inter-theoretical wasteland
occupied by the asymptotic thinker becomes hard to define, particularly if we
wish to engage the apparently visible continuum of the oceanic Earth.
In ‘Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss’, Negarestani chastises the closed
dynamics of the sea. He writes:
Ecologically speaking, in an abyssal cosmos where heliocentric slavery has been
abolished, the aquatic vitality of the Earth is either a detoured expression of
a starless-nature that appears as rotting slime or the earthbound abyss which
erupts in the form of corrosive oil. (2011b: 2)
Furthermore:
However, the complicity between the water of life and cosmic climates or what
we call chemistry is endowed with a chemical slant; it gives the death of life
and water weirdly productive aspects. The irruption of cosmic climates into the
terrestrial biosphere generates a dynamics of death or line of exteriorization
whose expression and dynamism are chemical rather than spectral, ghostly or
hauntological. The dying water is blackened into heaps of slime and the biosphere
feeding on such water respectively dies or chemically loosens into the cosmic
exteriority. As these deaths have chemical slants, they spawn more contingencies
or lines of chemical dynamisms which render the universe climatically weird.
(2011b: 4)
Biological entities haunt physics with their regional negentropy. Yet the depth
of this haunting remains an open question for biology and the philosophy of
biology and chemistry. In an interview with Negarestani and Robin Mackay, Iain
Hamilton Grant outlines the particular strangeness of the chemical paradigm
for thinking, as it gives the empirical ‘an additional visceral dimension’, which
‘enables chemistry as a practice to have a specificity that separates it from the
other natural sciences’, as well as lending it a uniquely ‘synthetic ambition’ in
recreating nature (Grant in Mackay and Negarestani 2011: 41).
To return to Batterman we might suggest that it seems necessary to plunge
into the depths in order to move outwards, to speculate. This means that one
must approach what could be either an irreducible singularity or a gradient which
requires the advent of a theoretical field without knowing the proper bounds
of that newly created horizon. In some regard we cross into the hyperstitional,
making fictions real and running with them while simultaneously feeding them
into abductive reasoning. By drawing on the fiction of HP Lovecraft, particularly
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his focus on the strangeness of writing and the sea, Nick Land’s concept of
hyperstition enables precisely such a process.
Well known for his fascination with madness and all things tentacular, Lovecraft
also displayed a career-wide obsession with writings materialized through the
image of the found document. His characters write until the bitter end, impossibly
managing to scrawl their final scream as testament to the truth of the doublyformatted fiction one is reading. Lovecraft’s tales swing back and forth, affirming
and complicating the validity of their narrator’s accounts. This is evident as early as
his story ‘Dagon’, which begins with the narrator drug-addled and contemplating
death by defenestration once he has found the strength to complete his account.
Having been sunk and captured by German forces in The Great War, we learn that
the narrator had managed to escape on a small boat, yet that in becoming lost, had
awoken to find his vessel caught in a black mire (Lovecraft 2008: 23). He muses:
I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some
unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been
thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for insurmountable millions of
years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. (Lovecraft 2008: 24)
It is difficult not to hear Deleuze’s musings on the oceanic island in this account,
which he describes as always ready to punch through the surface (2004: 9).
Tortured by wild dreams, the narrator of ‘Dagon’ attempts to navigate the
unending plain. In horror, the sea vanishes and he can see only unending
blackness. Soon he comes across a monolith inscribed with ‘aquatic symbols
such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, mollusks, whales, and the like’ (Lovecraft
2008: 25). Here, the tale accelerates: upon seeing what he assumes is the fish-god
Dagon, the narrator runs to his boat and is eventually picked up and taken to a
hospital in San Francisco. The narrator admits to his impending suicide attempt
as a slippery body is heard making a noise at the door.
That the fishy God possessed the power to write is, for Lovecraft, particularly
terrifying. It is the odd constructions, both lithographic and architectural, that
bother Lovecraft’s narrator so, a theme carried through from ‘Dagon’ to the
stories ‘The Temple’ and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. The oft-quoted opening of ‘The
Call of Cthulhu’ clings to oceanic metaphor:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the
midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
(Lovecraft 2008: 355)
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The alternatives Lovecraft names to such correlation are either madness or the selfimposed ignorance of a new dark age. But rather than endorsing irrationalism,
he notes that scientific rationalism is necessary, albeit self-destructive. In this
sense, we might suggest that Deleuze and Guattari err when they refer to
different epochs of Lovecraft’s work in A Thousand Plateaus, attempting to align
his early tales (inspired by Poe, but even more so by Dunsany) with sorcery
and incantation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 251). It remains fair to suggest that
Lovecraft surpassed and rejected these early tales of sorcery, transforming the
concept into that which describes the rationalized space between Nature and
lawful nature as humanity understands it.3
But is the simultaneous power and insufficiency of writing-as-categorization
(which Deleuze and Guattari fail to acknowledge as the ‘sorcery’ in Lovecraft’s
work), the central weirdness of his writing? Delivered as a found document,
‘The Call of Cthulhu’ purports to be the rattled account of an academic reading
fragments of other manuscripts. It twists deeper still as the much feared yet
fictional Necronomicon is invoked within its passages. While Deleuze and
Guattari may have dismissed him as a paranoid, we might instead follow Land
and Negarestani in embracing him as a paranoiac investigator, one paradoxically
revealing of asymptotic reasoning. Admittedly, this is possible only if we
sufficiently detach Lovecraft’s regional concerns with specific cultures and
traditions. If we do so, we find that his work powerfully attests to an effusive yet
non-vitalistic life, one that informs the notion of the asymptotic as much as it is
enabled by it.4
Tentacular life and asymptotic life
Before considering further how this species of Lovecraftian hyperstition
demonstrates asymptotic reasoning for analysis of the late capitalist epoch, it
serves to acknowledge how a number of other authors have embarked upon
similar voyages. In their bizarre Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (2012), Vilém Flusser
and Louis Bec enter similar territory when they create a scientific fable of a
strange deep dwelling creature, thereby circling around the mythologization
of speculation on life. While the entire text centres on the strangeness of any
relation between human and non-human (however unfortunately couched
in Heideggerian dasein), Flusser and Bec bid us to consider ‘[h]ow we would
conduct ourselves if dragged to its depths, where eternal darkness is punctured
only by its bioluminescence’ (2012: 5).
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Flusser and Bec shift between the ontological impact of such difference by
moving from environmental to historical roots.
We feel a connection with life-forms supported by bones, while other forms
of life disgust us. Though existential philosophy has concerned itself with the
idea of disgust, it has never attempted to formulate a category of ‘biological
existentialism’, to advance something like the following hypothesis: ‘Disgust
recapitulates phylogenesis’. This hypothesis is advanced here. (2012: 11)
China Mieville’s essay ‘Skulltopus’ (2008) charts similar waters in his discussion
of the tentacular ovum, or the emergence of the cephalopodic in weird and
proto-weird tales from Hugo, to Verne, to William Hope Hodgson, to Lovecraft.
Mieville highlights Hugo’s striking statement that the cephalopod requires us to
rethink philosophy as well as the common association the tentacled beast has
with the vampire (2008: 109). The connection to the vampiric seems especially
erroneous, however, particularly when filtered back through Lovecraft. The
immortal status of both appears as a weak point of consonance, where the
cephalopodic is considered a companion to deep time, suggesting Cthulhu as
an ‘arche-fossil-as-predator’ (Mieville 2008: 113). The uneasy softness of the
octopus makes its longevity appear strangely more abnormal, as if the notion
of solidity (both mental and physical) would seem to better stand the test of
time – as per the undying, fortified corpse of the vampire.
This strange relation of the skeletal to time is folded inwards by the character
of Dr Bodkin from JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, who entertains this crossimbrication of softness/hardness via onto- and phylo-genesis in the following
sense:
I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter
the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic
time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch,
each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as
recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time
machine. (1962: 44)
Flusser and Bec seem to grant this trauma to the non-boned as well: ‘An organism
is a stratified memory constructed of superimposed suppressions somewhat
like geological formations’ (2012: 27). The writing, tracing, or registering of the
different domains of trauma indexes the varying difficulties of thinking in the
folding or dead zones between traumas or between sciences. Flusser and Bec
make the strange claim that science is only interesting in so far as we can use it
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to orient ourselves (2012: 17). Yet what does this mean for speculation, and for
the asymptotic wastelands between theories – the floating out into who-knowswhat and towards who-knows-where?
In Peter Watts’ novel Starfish (2008), a team of biologically and technologicallymodified workers are placed in a monitoring station along the Juan de Fuca
ridge. They each exhibit gross psychological damage (as both victims and
victimizers), as only such psychologies are capable of tolerating the immense
figurative pressure of their proscribed occupation. The vulnerability of the
novel’s protagonist, Lennie Clarke, marks the (re)connection of geo-trauma (or
bio-geo-trauma) to the Earth. Watts illustrates the pressure thusly:
The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding form the chimney at the
north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught
in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed
steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres. (2008: 112)
The traces of Clarke’s physical abuse prepared her for the crushing depths of
the sea floor bottom; by way of her folded psychological character, we see how
Clarke sees herself as an organism used by a geochemical locale:
She’s been deluding herself all this time. She felt herself getting stronger and she
thought she could just walk away with that gift, take it anywhere. She thought
she could pack all of Channer inside of her like some new prosthetic. But now.
Now the mere thought of leaving brings all her old weakness rushing back. The
future opens before her and she feels herself devolving, curling up into some soft
prehuman tadpole. (Watts 2008: 283)
Following a Deleuzo-Guattarian schema, Luciana Parisi (2004) outlines Elaine
Morgan’s adaptation of Alister Hardy’s theory of the aquatic ape, in which a
shore-like existence leads to vaginal migration and the erasure of the visible
and olfactory signs of sexual excitement. These geo-traumatic, geochemical
transplantations are complicated by accidental human constructions, by the
tidal wave of capitalism, which washes away these biological signs in obscurity,
recoding them in cultural practices, practices that all too often result in a
virulent sexism that simultaneously praises and rages against the fluidity of the
feminine. Despite their warning about deterritorializing too much, therefore,
Deleuze and Guattari might be seen to cut through the nested dynamics of
folding, sliding instead into the aquatic jaws of thinkable equilibrium. Pictured
stalking out into the sea, their thinking might appear to be folding cephalopods
as so many starched shirts. As I have suggested above, we might sustain instead
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Negarestani’s post-schizoanalytic perspective, from within which trauma
transplants ‘universal contingency into regional fields’ (2011a: 29).
Remaining with the case of Lennie Clarke, however, it would appear that the
forces of capital are unable to control the posthuman workers they have created.
It is important, here, to distinguish the posthuman from the posthumanist and
transhuman. The posthumanist takes a position in which ‘we’ (whatever strange
collective that designates) should move beyond the human by fostering deeper
relations with the components of our wider ecologies (our pets, our plants, the
other various creatures and inanimate powers, texts, and things which appear
vibrant in our presence). Following such thinkers as Ray Kurzweil, transhumans
believe that the human can be technologically or biotechnologically surpassed,
with one popular end goal being the digitization and uploading of all human
consciousness. Watts’ glib tales maintain the problematic stubborness and weird
ness of the biological in this regard, specifically insofar as it is nested inside sex:
Living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual
advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary
afterimages swarming across Clarke’s field of view; something flees under cover
of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the
current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth. (Watts 2008: 34)
In Alien Oceans (2009), Stefan Helmreich evaluates the bottom-slime of the Earth’s
oceans after the Germanic tradition of sublime aesthetics, drawing also on Huxley
and Haeckel in his discussion of the first slime or urschleim (74).5 In a chapter
entitled ‘Abducting the Atlantic’, Helmreich opens with an initially promising
discussion of C. S. Peirce’s theory of abduction, but soon descends into moralistic
finger-wagging at the potential ‘violence’ of speculative research, jumping off
from abductive claims with little argument other than his claim that the violence
of abductions haunts the logical meaning of the term (2009: 173). Helmreich
seems aware, however, of the complex connections and alliance-immersion of
working in a medium such as the ocean, where the entire dynamical space seems
encased in strange forms of life, from solar-gulping Prochlorococcus at the surface,
to deep-sea hyperthermophiles, even likening the oceanic genome to Deleuze
and Guattari’s ‘Body without Organs’ (2009: 176, 200). This appears consonant
with Negarestani’s account of the conservatism of Catherine Malabou’s approach
to neuro-plasticity – her wariness towards the Post-Copernican Open as she
advocates being inflexible as a means of resisting capital (Negarestani 2011a: 49).
But how is any kind of neutrality feasible when swimming in a world of
complicity? What kind of neutrality does Helmreich want given that he also
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critiques computational logic? (2009: 85). Even down at the sub-basement of the
biological there is no stalwart inflexibility, no safe-haven for Malabou and other
(weak) posthumanists to inhabit. As Longo, Montevil, and Kauffman point out,
flexibility lies at the heart of the dynamics of the biological:
[T]here are no laws that entail, as in physics, the becoming of the biosphere,
and a fortiori, the econosphere, or culture or history, or life in general. In the
same sense, geodetic principal mathematically forces physical objects never to
go wrong. A falling stone follows exactly the gravitational arrow. A river goes
along the shortest path to the sea, it may adjust it by nonlinear well definable
interactions as mentioned above, but it will never go wrong. These are all
geodetics. Living entities, instead, go wrong most of the time. (2012: 17)
Life in the oceanic is life in a chemical field, one that makes us as organisms
susceptible to invasion. Ecological history then appears as little more than an
‘accelerating litany of invasions’ (Watts 2009: 118). To address Malabou’s concern,
then, is to rework the question around the degree to which the capitalist threat
is capable of harnessing the unending openness of the oceanic continuum or the
radical nature of such dynamics.
Node – The capitalist cloning
of the fluidic continuum
The environmental activist and marine biologist Rachel Carson once said that
when life came ashore millions of years ago it brought a piece of the ocean with it.
One of the most notable outcomes of life on land was the eventual birth of trade
and debt. Broadly construed from the schizoanalytical perspective, capitalist
acceleration threatens to speed us back to the sea through a technological
progress unbound. Under this metaphorical construction, capitalist technologies
become those forces which transport us to a world of pure fluidity.
In Maelstrom (2009), the second novel of Watts’ Rifters trilogy, Lennie Clarke,
‘a woman turned amphibious by some abstract convergence of technology and
economics’, is tracked by a futuristic FEMA, the Complex Systems InstabilityResponse Agency (CSIRA), more informally referred to as the ‘entropy patrol’
(Watts 2009: 19, 60). That Clarke’s tracking follows a nuclear detonation and
a tidal wave sufficient to destroy half of the west coast of a mega-country,
proves salient; Watts’ novel repeatedly emphasizes the reality of entropy and
the stumbling attempt of computation to catch up with chaos: ‘what good is a
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map when the landscape won’t stop changing?’ (2009: 90). Following Clarke’s
reintroduction to modern society, a strange hybridized menace of biological and
technological pathogen emerges, a nest of n-dimensional correlations: ‘[a] dark
entropic monoculture was growing beneath the wider riot of usual breakdowns’
(Watts 2009: 120, 168).
Despite the gleeful chaos that might be said to follow in the wake of a hyperbolic
Deleuzianism, schizoanalysis cannot abide entropy. Deleuze and Guattari might
appear to call for an approach to theory and experiment that suggests a swimmer
who has forgotten about the resistance of the waters themselves. Liquid capital,
or financial capital, is the castle in the sand at the edge of the flood of matter.
Aware of the threat of the oceanic, Nick Land floods the world in a swamp of
cancerous matter. He redraws the Kantian schema as a rotting oil derrick in the
face of a sublime tidal wave.
Back at the water’s surface, Negarestani heads for a converted oil derrick out
in the middle of nowhere, perhaps one converted so as to quicken high-speed
trade as suggested by Wissner-Gross and Freer (2010). We might conceive of the
oil derrick as the reversion to the material base for capital as presented in the
video game Oil Rush. Following global flooding from glacial melting, warring
parties scramble for numerous oil derricks as the last source of readily obtainable
energy on the planet. For financial capital, shaving milliseconds off of trades also
means the blasting of tunnels for fibre-optic cables linking city to city, a physical
ungrounding of the land itself. The effects of capital have fully saturated not
just the economic conditions, but also the very material conditions of life. It is
not just a threat of precarity that we find ourselves under, but the possibility of
expulsion from life itself. As Negarestani has it:
Capitalism, in a similar manner, sniffs out planetary waters so as to employ its
models of accumulation and consumption through their chemical potencies.
This is not only to use the hydraulic efficiency of terrestrial waters in order to
propagate its markets and carry out its trades, but more importantly to overlap
and associate its indulgences with the very definitions and foundations of life.
(2011b: 3)
The economic attempts to unfold our liquidity back out into the world while
claiming to erase the dangers of contagious paranoia, thereby closing out
‘unproductive’ contingency. Are Deleuze and Guattari to blame? Does the
hyperbole of Nick Land’s accelerationism point to the rotting potato roots of their
project? In ‘Becoming Animal’ they say ‘so experiment’. But as Land’s analysis
Negarestani in R’lyeh
205
indicates, this often leads to an excess of tactics without strategy. The problem
is that this is what capitalism seems to be doing: it embraces all tactics to profit
off of them, but the necessity of applying a cost exposes an underlying strategy
which is as obvious as it is gross. Life itself is reduced to profit over cost. High
speed trade and liquid assets have made an ocean out of capital and populated it
with creatures (algorithms) which behave in fundamentally unpredictable ways
(unleashing one, a firm managed to render themselves insolvent in less than a
second). If it is much less a jungle out there than an ocean, then it is tempting
to pollute. The trick of sustaining capital is that the costs incurred may be equal
to or more expensive than its relatively positive creations. That is, the cost of
experimentation is that of allowing any given capitalist sea monster to expand
its territory without risk of drowning the entire enterprise.
The philosopher-economist Elie Ayache suggests that the attempt to harness
radical contingency in financial markets is akin to a form of writing-as-price.
Ayache’s ‘In the Middle of the Event’ (2011) describes how probability is cut into
by contingency, since in order to think probabilities one must create models,
models which have preset parameters (19). Ayache’s The Blank Swan (2010)
addresses how thinking contingency in the pricing of derivatives goes completely
beyond the probabilistic model, with writing-as-price as part of the changing of
context (20–1). This writing in turn relates to the liquidity of the market as a newly
recognized possibility, which in turn furthers the strangeness of writing-as-price:
‘Liquidity is the opposite of a ground on which one can build the edifice of value.
Liquidity is a moving ground, a flowing continuum’ (Ayache 2010: 48, 56).
Beyond making all that is solid melt into air, technological capitalism gives
an extra layer of self-awareness to the creatures living in it. In this sense, capital
becomes an ocean (or chemical medium) in which we swim: life seems unlivable
without it and the outlying bound of capital (which is the purely ideal impossible
dream of limitless production) appears indistinguishable from the water at
hand, from day-to-day life. Because of this illusion, the cost involved in local
exchanges is measured against not only the local terms but also against the far
horizon of capital, while appearing ideally limitless is considered hyper-fragile in
the intimacy of the exchange. Furthermore, worthlessness can be equated with
pure form or even formlessness, that of the productive yet strangely undivided
ocean.6
For all of these reasons, the endless acceleration of capitalism seems
impossible. The only possible options seem to be either to drown or to embrace
the catastrophe (the catastrophe of the sea is the tidal wave, the tsunami). In
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Watts’ narrative, the tidal wave is also spun by the capitalist machine; the
key becomes weaponization, particularly of survivors, and specifically the
character of Lennie Clarke. This might return us to the quiescence of Goethe’s
floating Spinozist cork with which we opened, an image of capitalist life if
there ever was one: ‘Lennie Clarke was a mutant; the same environment that
turned everyone else into bobbing corks had transformed her into barbed wire’
(Watts 2009: 313).
Conclusion: The writing of the aquatic continuum
In 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129 sank in deep water some 1,500 miles
northwest of Hawaii. In order to acquire the vessel without Soviet interference, the
CIA approached Howard Hughes, whom they commissioned with constructing
the Glomar Explorer, a vessel, the cover story went, built to harvest manganese
modules off the ocean floor. The story, which indexes one of Land’s hyperstitional
heroes, Maximillian Crabbe, points again not only to the weirdness of fictions,
but also to the weirdness of the actual structures in the sea, to crystal nodes, like
islands in the ocean, reminiscent of crystals in the vestibular system, like bones
scaffolding the squishy meatsacks of life. We might imagine the ship, retrofitted
for oil drilling and still in use to today, discovering Negarestani in R’lyeh.
Lovecraft placed his fictional city at coordinates close to a point of unreachability,
the point most lost at sea, farthest from all land. Sunken and forgotten, R’lyeh
seems impossibly constructed, housing an impossible creature, the monstrosity
named Cthulhu, and whom it is said may be so long-lived as to outlive death
itself. On the other hand, away from the non-Euclidian dimensions of R’lyeh,
there is the hard and closed loops of the computational regimes exemplified in
the figure of the vicious techno-science of the Nazis, descending to the depths,
yet forever missing their target (Flusser and Bec 2012: 71).7
The lesson, perhaps, is that the rigidity of the computational mode is as
illusory as is the fluidity of the affective mode and that neither of these equals the
rational. Significantly, this does not mean that ‘anything goes’, nor does it mean
that one should entertain a humanist or anti-Copernican conservatism. While
the desert islands of Deleuze and Guattari may suggest one solution, one has to
ask if their conditioning of thought as life and of life as thought does not already
do too much to pre-map the great outdoors of the unbounded continuum.
Beyond schizoanalysis we stray into a world of muck, of manipulative epis
temology, abduction, cunning, and intuition.8 Computability is not knowability
Negarestani in R’lyeh
207
(Watts 2008: 113). Variable excess in the deep leads to a twisted form of intuition
or instinct in heavy space. Again, to quote from Watts’ Maelstrom: ‘Intuition
is not clairvoyance. It’s not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary,
that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously – but no less
rigorously – than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person’
(Watts 2009: 320). Following this, schizoanalysis does not suffice as the historical
and political capture of the conditions of analysis (or its writing), insofar as those
conditions are the unfolding of an unlimited thinkability and not the dangerous
(however fallible) navigation of the continuum. This in turn suggests that textual
bodies are recursive traps and that, contra Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestions via
their discussion of ‘regimes of signs’ in A Thousand Plateaus, one cannot have
a post-signifying regime that is simultaneously thinkable and yet not a part of
nature.
Following Lorenzo Magnani, Gilles Châtelet and Alain Berthoz, we might
instead take writing as an extension of the gesture and particularly as it
relates to predation (Magnani 2001: 14). Furthermore, we might take it as an
extension of the strangeness of the creative synthesis of which human beings
are capable. An adequate exploration of the synthetic, as Magnani shows, is
required in order to demonstrate the experiential status of the synthetic, to
demonstrate the synthetic as an early attempt at abductive thinking (2001:
37–8). This requires, as Magnani outlines via Poincare, a form of non-naive
conventionalism that acknowledges that science is that which translates the
crude facts that the body detects into theories (2001: 105). This, in turn, leads
to a complex overlapping of the interior and the exterior which points back
towards the uncertain emergence of synthesis itself (Magnani 2001: 165–78).
Following from this, and from Kant’s ‘What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in
Thinking?’, we are left with the difficulty of obtaining the limits of our singular
horizons, of determining each thinker as a mobile unit of thought, that draws
out a patchworked horizon of reason.
Finally, to return to our opening rift between Newton and Weyl, asymptotic
thought challenges schizoanalysis not only to think through the pragmatics
of its ‘walk’, or the forms of its navigation through concepts, but also its
dismissal of the negative. This means addressing not only the troubling depths
of synthesis, but the means by which thought moves without view of land
and how one sees thoughts approaching one another, analysing the shores
of difference and not simply marking them as such. It is on this basis that we
might suggest Negarestani’s ‘insider’ out on a voyage is a better model than a
schizo out for a walk.
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Notes
1 For a longer discussion of islands in philosophy, see my On An Ungrounded Earth
(2013).
2 One can see a strange type of inversion in Mieville’s later work Railsea, in which a
comical retelling of Moby Dick happens on a nest of railroad tracks with unknown
origin. The Oceanic is given as demonstrating a level of dynamic structure as
opposed to the constructivism of the rail system, even the oceanic rail system, the
mobilization of ungrounded navigation in sailing as a model for thought on the
continuum. Though the rail system can also be taken as the privileged framework
engendered by disaster as in the work of Rene Thom.
3 See also Patricia MacCormack (2010), ‘Lovecraft through Deleuzo-Guattarian
Gates’. Postmodern Culture 20, 2.
4 For a longer discussion of Lovecraft and the philosophy of life, see Eugene
Thacker’s After Life (2010) as well as my Slime Dynamics (2012).
5 Helmreich does not mention earlier theorists of the urschleim, such as Lorenz
Oken. For an interesting philosophical discussion of Oken, see Grant, Iain
Hamilton (2009), ‘Being and Slime’, in Collapse, Vol. IV. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
6 Many of these points I owe to conversations with Karen Dewart McEwen.
7 Given Flusser and Bec’s connection of this with Heideggerian dasein, one might
also mention here Timothy Morton’s repeated invocation of Heidegger’s philosophy
as a Uboat of being which misses the deeper coral reef of objects beneath it.
8 Thought on complicity, on cunning reason (Metis), and other indirect modes of
redirecting the navigation of the continuum. As the work of Benedict Singleton
has pioneered, Metis, as cunning reason, might be imagined as the connecting
of two bear traps by razor wire. Traps bring two lines of navigation together,
connected indirectly and as the results of differing traumas.
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