GOTHIC–HAUNTOLOGICAL CIRCUIT

"The future is closer than it used to be, closer than it was last week, but postmodernity remains an epoch of undead power: it’s all over yet it carries on."

"Gothic Materialism is above all an abstract materialism, distinguished from other types of materialism, (including what Baudrillard disparagingly refers to as ‘anthropo-Marxism’ [SED 140), and from every sort of idealism, by its focusing principally on the organ grinder – the nonorganic processes of stratification that produce the organism – rather than the monkey – anthropoid consciousness as manifested in an experience of subjectivity screened through the (Freudian) perceptual-consciousness-system. Such processes have agents, but they are not human, humanistic, or subjectivist; they are ‘Abstract Machines.’"

"Gothic fiction offers a ready-made term for this state of anorganic animation: undeath. In line with Freud’s analysis of the ‘un’ prefix in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’, undeath, of course, does not designate the opposite state of death (life); rather it is synonymous with the concept of unlife. Following Freud again, who famously maintains that there is no negation in the unconscious, we can think of unlife and undeath not as opposed to life – or death – but as designating a continuum which includes, but moves beyond, the so-called living."

"A-Death is a hybrid product, involving convergences between at least four distinct lines of rapid technocultural transformation. A-Death combines ‘micropause abuse’ - deliberately reversed biotechmnesis - with immersion-coma time aberrances, generating, modulating, and rescaling sentience-holes (Sarkon-lapses). These are toned by ‘Synatives’ (artificial drugs) which add zone-texture, and spliced into hyperstition trances as occultural events."

"During excavations in the cross-cut Mesolimbic splinter-slopes, Barker discovers Anomalous Cryptolith, MU Geocatalog Item: It-277. It Clicks, Instantly. A key, or a Ticket. What was KT? Physico-semiotic lock-in to Tool-Sign Gridstacks."

"The Ungrund is ‘without personality’ (SW VII: 412) and ‘precedes all distinction’. Nor is it a ‘product of antitheses’. [...] The unground remains as absolute, and does not contain, but merely potentiates differenciation."

"The way out of this unhelpful opposition is to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing. [...] The first refers to that which is (in actuality is) no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality (the traumatic ‘compulsion to repeat’, a fatal pattern). The second sense of hauntology refers to that which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual (an attractor, an anticipation shaping current behaviour)."

"Without using either term, Penman’s 1995 essay showed that Afrofuturism and hauntology are two sides of the same double-faced phenomenon. The concept of Afrofuturism has always done double work. First, it liberates futurism from the master narratives of white modernity, which positioned Africa as origin, at the furthest remove from the terminus of history projected in Euro-American Science Fictional visions of the future. Second, Afrofuturism unravels any linear model of the future, disrupting the idea that the future will be a simple supersession of the past."

"The future didn’t disappear overnight. Berardi’s phrase ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ is so apt because it captures the gradual yet relentless way in which the future has been eroded over the last 30 years."

"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’."

"As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something."

"Ontological density without identifiable form is abstract horror itself. As the Great Filter drifts inexorably, from a challenge that we might imaginably have already overcome, to an encounter we ever more fatalistically expect, horrorism is thickened by statistical-cosmological vindication. The unknown condenses into a shapeless, predatory thing."

"We refer to such augmentations, which extend audition to encompass the imperceptible and the not-yet or no-longer audible, as unsound. The term refers not only to what humans cannot hear, but also to non-cognitive, inhuman phenomena connected to the unknown, including the hum, hyperrhythmia, and auditory hallucinations. Some of these anomalous phenomena are also fictional. [...] This is unsound as a speculative probe. The notion of undead, for this book, is a cipher, constantly recrypted by socio-economic, political, aesthetic, techno-scientific, juridical, and other forces."