Welcome to the first lecture in the philosophy of the CCRU lecture series, CCRU, otherwise known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. This first lecture serves both as an introduction to the course, but also as an overview of some of the fundamentals needed to understand the work of the CCRU. So, what is or was the CCRU? CCRU, as I have already said, stands for Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. It was a cultural theorist collective that existed at Warwick University between 1995 and 1997 in some form and then 1997 to 2003 in another form, though I imagine these dates are fairly hazy as the actual
history of the CCRU itself is extremely hazy and it's hard to get a grip on it at any point really. It was set up by Sadie Plant, who is the author of Zeros and Ones, which many of you may have read, and had a very brief existence within the philosophy department at the university. After this, it existed as a student-run collective until 2003. regarding the actual existence of the ctru it is important to mention that the the sign on the door to their sort of office which i believe was an unofficial office read the ccru does not has not and will never exist so from sort of day one the the ccru as i understand it didn't truly want to be part of the the academic structure or any part of the bureaucracy that was going that goes on
within universities. It's made clear from that that historically you know the CCRU has never been in a sort of favourable position with regards to authority, academia or institutions. Alongside this the CCRU members and affiliates include Sadie Plant who I've already mentioned, Nick Land who's the author of Fang Numenah, Mark Fisher the author of Capitalist Realism, Luciana Parisi, Matthew Fuller, Steve Goodman who's also known as Code9, the DJ, Anna Greenspan, Harry Kunzru, Jake and Dinos Chapman, the artists and there's many more many more and there's also sort of a large cadre of people who are affiliated with them and are based within CCRU's work it's all quite hazy it's all quite mysterious and there's sort of a myth going
on there which we'll sort of dive into at 30 points and many of these people are still working today and I think you know I believe are still readily accept that they're affiliated with the CCRU. The CCRU was unorthodox and it became increasingly experimental under the leadership of Nick Land who took over after Sadie Plant left to do other things. It combined Land's libidinal materialist philosophy with cyber feminism, post-structuralism, cybernetics, rave culture, science fiction, occultism, philosophy, post-structuralism and continental philosophy and at its heart the CCRU in my opinion was attempting to find a connection of sorts between a multitude of disciplines and in their efforts strip back the entire idea of
what a discipline is especially in regard to philosophy. They wish to sort of melt the edges of thinking into an assemblage of highly charged originality. The existence of the CCRU is not well known beyond a very narrow intellectual sort of highly online circle and some of the problems with this is that it's the mythology and the biography of the CCRU that is pronounced over the actual work. Now of course the work was extremely difficult to get a hold of for a long time. It existed in snippets in various places and most of it was lost as Robin McKay says in the forward to CCRU writings. But what I'm trying to do with this course is sort of focus primarily on their actual work as philosophy, because I think it's relatively important, and it's some
of the most interesting philosophical work to come out of the UK for a very long time. The primary text we will be referring to in relation to the CCRU specifically is CCRU writings, 1997 to 2003. Alongside this, I will dip into various helpful passages from Nick Lanz Fangnumina. Both of these are published by Urbanomic Publishers and there'll be links for where you can find them but also obviously the CCRU writings is from the time when the CCRU were working, were actively working and the pieces that I'm going to be using from Lanz Fangnumina are the the essays which were also written around the the time of the CCRU so between 1997 and 2003. As I've said before Robin McKay he's the editor of the CCRU writings, founder of
publishing and he was also a member of the ccriu so really you can't get any better than than this work in the foreword of the ccriu writings robin states there is nobody positioned to accept attribution for the work of the ccriu nor has there ever been and he considers the book sheer documentation as opposed to a sort of guide or outline of the ccriu's aims and work so there isn't really any sort of clear secondary writing on the work of the CCRU and I don't suppose there will really ever be because there's only this one book and there's these adjacent texts but I think a short course on their philosophy will actually, it expands into so many territories that if you aren't familiar with them and they're largely primarily continental philosophy then it's tough
to get your head around especially if you're coming at the CCRU from a non-philosophical background which I've found many people are. So something I'd like to make clear in this introduction is that even though much of the philosophy of the CCIU is analysable and relatively grounded within continental philosophy, specifically the work of Emmanuel Kant, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Coitari, I do need to make it clear that vast areas of the CCIU's work is only made clear by a certain form of experience. And as such, the task of these lectures is to outline the philosophy, the theorization and the writing of the CCIU as opposed to any conjecture regarding practice. With that said there are various hints of practice scattered throughout especially within the final lecture on the numagram but there's certain methodologies and practices which I think will guide one towards what it is the CCIU
was sort of envisioning in terms of the mixture of practice and philosophy. This lecture series is a clear way for a beginner who's someone who's just come across the work of CCIU to get a hold on the philosophy underlying their work alongside an understanding of what it was they hoped to achieve from this philosophy but much of this language that I'm using right now is quite difficult to explain why it's sort of a bit of a problem in relation to the CCIU because they're targeting things from an inhuman point of view at no point during the CCIU's writings other than a couple of essays called communique one and communique two which i'm about which i'll explain in a minute other than this the cciu is targeting philosophy from an inhuman point of view as much as this can be done from someone who is obviously a human writing it but they're always never on the side
of the human they're never on any side it's sort of a completely untemporal productive purely productive sort of plane of philosophy as opposed to a sort of human target or something in relation to man so yeah CCRU writings begins with these two texts titled communique one or communique two now both of these act as sort of abstract philosophical biography of the group as opposed to any actual real background now there are various snippets of biography laying around an experiment in inhumanism by Robin McKay is a clear one which I will link and there's also sort of reviews and things along these lines which you can sort of gather what was going on with the ciu rather roughly but there's no fully fledged biography uh anywhere and and one statement
within communique one which is on page seven of the ciu writings does make it clear as to why any time spent looking into biographical details of the ciu in relation to their work might be useless ciu defines cybernetic culture imminently as the mode of propagation characterizing flat productive collectivities. Such flatness, whose intensive quanta are CCRU units or barkers, involves one, coincidence or product process, two, counter-chronic arrival from machinic virtuality, three, absolute impersonality, ahistoricity, and extraterritoriality. This might seem complex, this probably looks really really complex now, but I promise that by the end of the lecture series
such sentences will begin to make sense however i'd like to pay closer attention to the final sentence there regarding impersonality the ccru can't be considered a collective in any sort of human grouping sense as i've sort of already said but more an assemblage of bodies and ideas which had certain obscure and alternative aims alongside this the ccru rarely mentions their biography or the biography of their members outside of those two communique texts which i think are sort of token text just for people to get a hold of and I don't necessarily think they're too important unless you're looking at the history of philosophy as opposed to philosophy itself and so to reiterate this isn't a lecture series on the CCRU themselves or their history which I know many people are interested in but this is a series on their philosophy their work