Hideous Gnosis Unbound: The Apotheosis of Speculative Realism

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”   (John Maynard Keynes)

Dungeon Mastery or, Here We Go Again

At school, I once was part of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign where we had been sent to an alternative dimension in which it very slowly (over the course of a year) crept up on us that a nightmare being from the “Cthulhu Mythos,” scourge of freaked-out parents in the early 1980s, was In Charge at the bottom of the ocean. 

We didn't stick around to find out who. Much to the annoyance of the Dungeon Master, who was we believed looking forward to having us exterminated, we used a Limited Wish scroll in our possession to get us the fuck out of there. 

And then I found myself, for a second time, in Trumpworld. When something has happened twice, you've definitely been sent to an alternative dimension and  you will definitely need powerful magick to get back. 

John Maynard Keynes once said that a man of action is someone possessed by thought, in a form that gives the lie to thinking as such (HT Andy Wilson). The mind is a terrible thing, wasted or no, and it's not idealism to say that “All of the buildings, all of the cars / Were once just a dream / In somebody's head” (Peter Gabriel). 

It's taken me way too long to see it, but I realize this week--synchronistically with a Facebook post on it only half-ironic by Steven Shaviro--that, down to the internet-ness of it all, we are now living inside a really daft and aggressive realization of some of the worst tendencies of the Speculative Realism movement. 

There's nothing more anti-intellectual than a normalized intellectual. And there's nothing more ironic than a normalized intellectual thinking they are outside of academia. Terry Eagleton, the ultimate Oxford don (I know, I was his student) was of this mind, and so were many who latched onto the movement named Speculative Realism after a conference run by Ray Brassier and Graham Harman at Goldsmith's University of London. 

Craving for a real world beyond thought, fantasizing that it destroy thought, was always dangerous and never to do with liberation. Fascism was always a kind of para-academia, and with a couple of tweaks Nietzsche (always into mastery, if not the six pack abs of the Ultimate Man) could easily inspire the peusdo-intellectual machismo of the Nazis. Likewise the tentacled darkness of the dankly masculine world of online philosophy blogging around 2010 gave way to what only appeared to be nothing to do with it, incels, 4Chan and Trump's image of the 300-pound young man in his mother's basement pumping out fascist memes, Kekistan and chaotic neutral Slaad-like beings (I know my D&D; so does Musk; Graham was a dungeon master of note too). 

If the philosophy blogosphere thus gave way to the fantasies of “beta males” about alphas, much as Nietzsche summoned the superman, this world of abject Jabbas gave way to the manosphere, with Trump as its monstrous point de capiton. From this temporal distance, the absolute break between realities—Obama time and Trump time, to put it another way—now seems smoothed over, and the rough beast slouching towards the White House to be born started its shambling mound journey around 2010 in the form of the philosophy blogosphere which I had suddenly become aware of, thanks to a post by Levi Bryant that equated my “strange stranger” with the OOO object. I never had to sign a loyalty oath against theory, so this fusion of Derrida and OOO always seemed plausible to me. But I can totally understand why to many it wasn't on the cards. 

Somewhere in the middle (2015 to 2018) I wrote hyposubjects with Dominic Boyer. We D&D fans got Cthulhu into the book and talked some about the fascism latent in the SR view…but now it’s metastasized in ways we predicted. 

It's been creeping up on me for weeks, then I read about the tech broligarchs' “dark” this and “dark” that, Yarvin and the “exterminists” and all that. And it all came flooding back. All the feelings, the frustration, the why-don't-you-see, the outrage, the being ridiculed for going slightly off message for a white guy... 

The slimy void SR despised OOO, the overlap was Lovecraft, but Graham Harman's Lovecraft was very different from the Alien: Resurrection-like obsession with Cthulhu. I was mad later at Donna naming her book The Cthulucene, it seemed tone deaf. But on reflection there was a knowing irony to her title with which I concur. Only a white man would welcome extermination. 

I got screamed at for saying it by an accelerationist in Amsterdam. OOO was vilified for its alliance with Jane Bennett's quasi-animism. My Haitian French translator loved Realist Magic for this very reason. Meillassoux-style SR-ers despised it for that reason. 

For going off message concerning the supremacy of (white) (male) (human) thought, four white boys (Graham, Levi, Ian and me) got into a lot of trouble. It didn't hurt that we were white boys. And that, giddily pugnacious, we channeled Lennon with our "We're more popular than Deleuze now" vibe, earning ourselves many a symbolic book-burning from anti-human anthropocentric fundamentalists. 

But that “mad black Deleuzianism” has now fully objectively arrived in the form of tech bro, STEM-y fantasists who never had to take a theory class and thus overlapped in another way with the anti-"linguistic turn"-ism of that moment. Having taken many a theory class and counting myself a Derridean I saw the risks of this aspect quite clearly. On the Marxist side of things (Fisher for instance) it led to a workerism that didn't understand race or gender at all, bombing communist theory back to before the stoned age. 

Kanye West, future visitor to the Trump White House, sported a leather jacket with IN THE DUST OF THIS PLANET emblazoned on the back. That was a tell, in hindsight. 

The “hideous gnosis” of “there's only a material world and your tame ideas about it, even forms of materialism, are as nothing compared to its omnipotent reality” mapped perfectly onto a know-it-all techie elitism and supremacy that had always lurked in the machine code of agrilogistical society, based as it is on farming, an algorithmic practice that is implicitly conservative, as all recipes are, guidelines based on past success. "It worked last year so we'll do it again this year" is how an innocent desire to increase happiness by storing grain became fossil fuel emissions and imminent planet death, via the seeming tameness of smoothly cycling “nature.” 

The absolute division between the latent and manifest image, the real and reality, always a cool kid version of the same old same old of matter versus mind, maps nicely, upside-down (ideology is a camera obscura, says Marx) onto the fake binary of class and identity politics, and the fascist fantasy of tech bros and their slaves. 

It was Cartesian dualism, disguised as Deleuze and weaponized. Matter, and the white male minds that understood it best, versus everything else. 

For Marxist SR this meant that Kant's noumenal world was that of incomprehensible and all-powerful matter, a perfect camera obscura image of the fascist dictator. Or the long arms of Cthulhu, the very sight of whom, like a Trump tweet, would inevitably drive you insane. 

A white guy who came up with “dark ecology” way back in 2005 before the online Schellingian abyss had even opened up, is now wincing at how the tech bros stole the darkness, because the way SR stole the darkness had already flattened the noir-ish irony inherent in my usage of it in an isometric way. “Dark Enlightenment”? The Enlightenment was already dark insofar as the concept Man obscured whiteness behind a veil of transparency, providing cover for colonialism and imperialism. Tech bro darkness is more of the same, returning in a farcically horrific form. 

Marx said history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He forgot to add: then as oh-so-ironic Grand Guignol and nightmare audience-participation-time fascism.  

Locke may have supplanted Habbakuk to strip the mystical Puritanism from the concepts of freedom and justice, giving rise to Sam the American Eagle's rectitude and politeness (just don't mention how enslaved people built the capitol). 

But then Nick Land supplanted Locke and all that was solid and had melted into air returned as slimy death for all the “NPCs” of this world, humans and anonymous materials alike, all in the service of transhumanist eternity and Google-eyed omniscience. 

And wave upon wave of demented avengers, a whole zombie army of cheerful white people with Twitter handles, marched out of obscurity into the dream to just follow orders by just hitting retweet. 

How do I feel? Mostly I'm pissed. I'm pissed about it. And resolute. We did three OOO seminars in those years, and it's time for a fourth, I dare say, where I get the band back together with a host of others, at my place (Rice University); and we say fuck you to this whole vibe. Being despised for allowing daffodils to not-access the thing in itself just as not-great as humans can't, and for holding that maybe trees were also people and chairs were alive, has been beaten into the threat of my wife being rounded up and deported.