Drawing Down the Truth

(Source: KingOvRats, http://kingovrats.deviantart.com/art/Lovecraft-Yog-Sothoth-Lurker-At-the-Threshold-373819633)

It has been said that the universal is a parasite, an inhuman irruption in the mundane order of things, something which grafts itself to the human organism and refuses to let go, sending society into great and terrible eruptions of Virtue and Terror. This designation of universalism as asocial, inhuman, or even inhumane, is an enormously fruitful one. The writer who is perhaps closest to questions of the inhuman is HP Lovecraft. The aim of the current essay is to interpret the universal through the lens of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. To facilitate more efficient communication, I have sought not to adopt the typical tone of messianic and ecstatic prophesy that often accompanies such speculations. That is not to say, however, that those who choose—if choice indeed it is—to adopt that mode of writing are by any means incorrect to do so. Whether I have been successful in this, I am unsure, due simply to the nature of the material to be presented.

The human organism is ruled by particularity, by particular desires, characteristics, molecules, hormones, structures, forces, notions, experiences, and social relations. No concept is yet universal simply for its conceptual nature. No generalization made by any human being has ever once been universal. No abstraction has ever left the concrete behind while yet remaining a product of the human mind. That absolute abstraction can be thought should in no way be confused with the process of its volitional generation out of the concrete, with its subordination to human minds. And nothing is more laughable than the concrete universal. But this is not to say the universal is empty – rather, it is absolute form.

Absolute form is necessarily the act of formalization itself, its own intimate non-relation to the formless. Abstraction, insofar as it is absolute, proceeds not from the particular to the universal but from the formless to the en-formed. It is not mere thought but thought in all its power and glory. En-forming the formless is a lateral move and not necessarily a hierarchical one like the dialectic of universal and particular. The universal is synonymous with the singularization of this cosmic passage, the giving-birth of the formless into the realm of form. The Lovecraftian expression of this reality is without a doubt symbolized by the deformed child of obscene and sorcerous rites.

In Badiou's philosophy, one is seized by a truth. Seized and devoured, we might say. While this process simultaneously engenders and empowers the subject, it is a strange empowerment indeed. In Lovecraft this is represented by the practitioner of the dark arts who can no longer control the beings he has evoked, but must nonetheless persist in his activities, for the truth has come to control him and he cannot tear himself away and return to mundane ignorance. But to speak of control is to remain beyond the reach of truth's tentacles. The individual body is controlled, perhaps, but the subject is always already part of truth itself, existing only in the activity of having been seized, having been devoured. This is the first, necessary moment of the formless en-formed. Truth is a parasite, indeed, and its local name, its malignant relationship to the body, bears the name “subject”. There is nothing more joyous than to proclaim: “I have been seized! I have been devoured!”

The horror of the universal is brought out best by a consideration of Yog-Sothoth. In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, it is written:

It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign...

All-in-One. One-in-All. Beyond-One. And universal. As the Lurker at the Threshold, Yog-Sothoth exists between form and formlessness, in the zone between duality and non-duality, between the Naught and the Two in 0=2. Escaping definition by both imagination and logic, art and science, Yog-Sothoth defies the categories without collapsing into a non-dual entity lacking individuation. For Yog-Sothoth exists as a discrete entity in one sense, and as non-dual non-entity in another. Yog-Sothoth is the non-duality of duality and non-duality, a formulation that is formally equivalent to the non-relation of relation and non-relation, the doctrine of singularity.

In “The Dunwich Horror”, it is written:

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate, an answer to the paradox of truths, “Why are there many truths and not one?” The truth is the gate, the in-between, the situatedness or specificity of any given subtraction. And in this capacity, it is also the passage between form and formlessness. It is the Gate to the further step of the formless en-formed. For to en-form the formless, one must first experience/think the absolutely formless. The gods of the Cthulhu Mythos are truths in their obscene proliferation, their parasitism of humanity.

Lovecraftian truth exists not only as a symbolic relation to the truths associated with other spheres and other processes (Badiou's “conditions”, for example), but also with respect to the direct mystical experience of the formless and the universal. Non-duality does not form the end of gnosis, but can be perceived as a stepping-stone to what is beyond it. By these means can Sunyavada be subordinated to the second ruler of Thaumiel, to Universe B. The logico-metaphysical structure of reality must be stripped away in order to produce mystical speculations, to live and experience radically novel logico-metaphysical structures; the formless en-formed. Yog-Sothoth, we might say, is partially in Universe A, partially formless, and partially in Universe B (and C, and D...). He is a being of many dimensions, even many metaphysical structures, many realities. This knowledge is a gnosis beyond gnosis, and its possibility is attested to only in the most obscure and suppressed traditions.

This process is not just some single truth but the doctrine of truth, the Idea of truth itself. If this is heresy, then so be it.

Does the universal precede this process in which the human organism takes part? The human mind is too weak to produce the universal; the contagion must spread from an outside source, the Beyond. For the secular Badiou, truth is a creation of our activity. But in light of absolute form, the projection of logico-metaphysical architecture (otherwise known as reality) is an activity as spontaneous as the emission of cosmic rays by impossibly distant supernovae. This is not to say, however, that the distinction of self and other holds in the vacuum of theory that quantifies over metaphysics as such.

Lovecraft, unfortunately, was too reactionary to see the beauty of this parasite from the stars. In his stories, the dark magicians are wholly blameworthy, ushering in the end-times with their improper speculations. Lovecraft was still too humanist, unable to praise the end-times for their singularity, their self-authorizing and self-legitimating auto-creation. Readings of Lovecraft that reduce the Great Old Ones to symbolic representations of racial miscegenation are perhaps correct on one level, but on another they miss the point entirely.

Does this have to do primarily with the “Other”? Not exactly, since the category of the “Other” is bound up with so many wholly-en-formed social and political identitarian negotiations. And I'd rather not get into Levinas.

The political implications of the foregoing associations are vast. Absolute form can only be generic, the enactment of which is the precise meaning of egalitarianism if it be properly understood. Lateral abstraction, defined by Atus 0 and VIII, is rigorously equivalent to Badiou's conception of truth, as long as it is radicalized with reference to form and formlessness. Truth is the promise of intimate non-relation between form and formlessness. Absolute generic equality, as impossibly organized activity, is the always-incomplete enactment of itself. And here is how formlessness infects forms in their potentialities, their actuality producing its own virtual-in-actual by virtue of the Beyond-One.

But precisely which moment of our process corresponds to Badiou's truth? Truth is what opens onto infinity, the trajectory of an infinite subtraction. Therefore truth is the opening of possibility, the opening onto formlessness which in the end will have produced absolute form itself.

Communism is the domain of Yog-Sothoth. All right-wing readings of the Outer Gods have insufficiently understood the radicality of formlessness and its (non)relation to forms in their bloated overgrowth. Absolute form, as formalization, as the occulted and situationally pathological purification of form, is the assertion of the ultimately incomprehensibility of particularity, being as a result the ultimate and absolute expression of communism as process.

What we have been outlining is a structure or essence internal to the regime of form and formlessness itself. The dialectic of particular and universal has already been shed in the work of Lovecraft, though of course their non-relation remains a major point of interest. The universal must be of another order, and cannot be defined as the result of the humanistic process of abstraction conceived in the usual way. Yog-Sothoth has always already abstracted Himself (is it really a “he”?), affirming that very process as unintelligible in the wake of His success. Did it ever happen? Could such a thing possibly have come to pass?

Yes, Saint-Just and Robespierre were the first confirmed victims of the contagion. The ultimate goal of the epidemic was (and undoubtedly remains to this day) the birth of monstrous forms unintelligible to society. The internality of the procedure, however, is ignored by any and all critiques thereof. It is no mistake, no whim of contingency, that communism is impossible. In fact this is its greatest strength. But how is one to prepare for such a thing, to make one's vessel appropriate to the in-dwelling of truth? The antennae of Azathoth, otherwise known as the backside of the twin petals of the ajna chakra, perhaps provide a mystical key (although the hidden potential of the vissuddhi remains relatively unexplored on this point). Intellectually, we would recommend the generic faculty of speculation applied the study of mathematics and its inherent limits.

Drawing down the truth is synonymous with the taking-root of a sidereal communism, since Yog-Sothoth is above all the Beyond-One. Sothis, the star of Set, the sun behind the sun, is a similar symbol, the point of the Beyond that exceeds the planar and planetary system of association. As the root of the power of formlessness, the rays of Sothis disrupt the regime of form and produce a new extension of intelligibility. And every such extension is simultaneously a disruption or reconfiguration. This is the necessary effect of radical novelty, the inherently excessive formlessness. When philosophers assign novelty to the void, they make an error. It comes not from nothing, but from a lateral, sidereal ontology of formlessness and its bizarre generations, the formal characteristics of which remain to be specified.

It is not that everything has been transcended in this process. That would be an unfortunate reintroduction of duality, that ultimate poverty of form.

It is furthermore a difficult truth that the formal nature of the operations under consideration produces not only formlessness as such, but a universal and therefore in the last instance real en-forming of itself. It all follows from the simple inhumanity of the Ideas. Nothing is as alien to humankind as universal truth, and yet this reality is pitifully misunderstood. With these considerations in mind, we can say with, if not certainty, then at least a certain speculative rigor: Lovecraft was the greatest egalitarian of his time. And no sociologizing opinions can deny us this.

The Use of Metaphysics

A fear common among many philosophers is that they don't matter, that their work is unimportant. I presume anyone who has had a philosophical thought has also felt this way, though different philosophers will of course have different ideas of what "mattering" is, and their lack of mattering could be due to a wide variety of factors.

One of my own fears in this regard is due to political commitments. I instinctively so hate the category of individuality and the individual that I wonder whether I can reconcile metaphysical issues with political ones. It used to be that I used the defense of "truth" or "knowledge" or any other such lofty goals, but in the end this truth or knowledge would probably be for me and the few people I influenced directly, at this point only in conversations and almost entirely fellow students. But how can I justify my thought through appeal to truth, when this truth is not for all? It may be "for all" in some sense, as in its address, but in all likelihood such abstracted desires are just rarefied ego-inflation.

Does thought matter? In particular, does academic and intellectual production matter? I would ask: Does it matter for politics, for the collective? Even if I analyze capitalism, even if I attempt to champion a watertight reading of Badiou as an egalitarian, what does such a thing do?

I have to believe that thought matters, that academics matter. Certainly, politics matters. The problem is that sometimes I think that only politics matters. I would imagine that many intellectuals, raised on Marx and currently invested in communist theorists like Zizek and Badiou, feel this way as well.

Perhaps I am becoming more pessimistic about the possibilities for changing the world. The old Gramscian phrase "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" offers no respite.

I do believe that metaphysics is one of the most important things, and something which is governed not simply by practical expediency. But as far as justifying my own intellectual practice, I run into problems. It is not as if I am doubting either metaphysics or my political commitments. But I am questioning my role regarding politics, the production of knowledge, and so on.

I want to know what it is possible to think. I think philosophy and mysticism allow one to approach a viable answer, though of course the possibilities, being endless, can only be accrued, added together, conjoined, and filled in by more and different thoughts and theories which allow for their production. This is not to say that I have become a relativist with regard to philosophical systems, only that different systems allow for different thoughts. True and false, correct and incorrect, useful or not, are all further potentialities. The goal is both to survey the landscape of thought and then chart a path to traverse it. Ontologies, broadly conceived in the new and most eminently fashionable way, are the most general kind of mapping (this, combined with speculative experience of a perhaps esoteric type). The bones are then filled in, with perhaps even concrete analysis as a final product. But that is not my specialty, not my capability. Maybe at some point.

So what am I to do? Keep reading, keep thinking, realize my project is not necessarily justified. Probably even come up with a theory glorifying this impossibility of justification.

Notes on the Ineffable & Its Relation to Philosophy

The various esoteric traditions provide a jumping-off point, particularly in the bizarre combinations of symbolism and intuited systems of relation between those symbols, for theorizations of form and formlessness. The “ineffable” is of course a central category of mystical and magickal philosophies, but to remain, willfully or not, on the experiential level is to miss a prime opportunity to theorize the relation between form and formlessness (or non-relation as the case may be). However, every occurrence of formlessness is simultaneously experiential and “abstract” or theoretical. A study of form and formlessness must therefore incorporate the insights of its experience.

One cannot fail to be struck by Austin Osman Spare's use of sigils as a way to escape language. This then would be a further possibility of escape beyond Lacan's proposals of mathematics and punning. A sigil is emptied of content, becomes pure form to consciousness. But then its content is only occulted in some manner, manifesting of course as the wish if the casting is successful. While the implications of this line of thought remain cloudy to me at this point, the promise of a formal ontology informed by speculative experience is tantalizing.

Another obvious point of contact is non-duality, advaita. The non-dual is the ineffable, since language is partition, splitting, duality. The experience of non-duality, however, is said to transcend both language and rationality. I do find it interesting, however, to contrast non-duality and Oneness. If reality has a more interesting and complex structure than simply duality (say, complex differentiations of various types), non-duality could relate to some of those differentiations but not others. For example, non-dual states of consciousness could still apprehend triadic differences. Of course non-duality is supposed to include all differentiations, but the word choice is suggestive of new possibilities of thinking speculative consciousness.

Many writers are unclear, however, as to whether the ineffable (taken as an esoteric category) is unthinkable, unrationalizable, unspeakable, or whatever else. Certainly, since language is not in essence reason (and the problems encountered in formal languages as they relate to natural languages are here instructive), there may be things unspeakable in some sense which are yet thinkable in another, most likely highly speculative, sense. It seems obvious to me at least that speculative reason and speculative imagination can apprehend things not communicable, or at least beyond the current system of linguistic or even more broadly communicative possibility. This is to suggest a dialectic (of a sort) between the ineffable and the thought of the ineffable.

There is also the related question of the relativity or absoluteness of the ineffable. Is there an absolutely ineffable reality, experience, or entity? Or, as seems intuitive to me, is the ineffable always such in relation to some system of putting-into-words or putting-into-thought, or perhaps better, of en-forming? The question of all religion, and of the occult philosophy, seems to me a question of the relation between the formless, form, and the proper method of en-forming.

There is a great intellectual conservatism within the esoteric community. This primarily manifests as a baulking at the crucial philosophical moment of en-forming. Either the ineffable shall forever remain ineffable, or it will be en-formed in an ill-fitting form, within an ill-fitting philosophical structure.

Note that this is not the problem of explaining or somehow putting experiences into words, as if qualia could actually be contained in words and summoned to the surface in all their intensity through cognition. While this is certainly possible in certain states of consciousness, it is a separate question than the one being posed here.

Here, the issue is the structuring of experiences into a system. I claim that experiences can be theorized, and furthermore that theory can be experienced. There is not so great a gulf between the two as has often been supposed, especially within the esoteric community. Theory and experience are both thought. And lest one think that this a “mere” thought, it is worth pondering the meaning of Parmenides when he says that “thinking and being are the same thing”.

Is it, then, a kind of Marxist thesis, in which structure and history (or in Badiouian terms, being and event) are at odds, history providing a moment of disruption of the structure, which it then reorganizes. The result is a new structure, transformed by the moment of history. This new structure has, in turn, its own possibility of history or breakdown. The question is: How are these various ineffable moments related to one another as regards the question of absoluteness or relativity?

Obviously, within the system these extra-systemic moments are ineffable. Hence from within the system they all appear, perhaps, as the same thing, a kind of undifferentiated ineffability. The system follows the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, or at least appears to follow it in the case of mysticism. Whether this is warranted is difficult to say, but perhaps it would be a matter of (speculative) decision whether there is a oneness to ineffability or whether it is multitudinous. This undoubtedly corresponds to various esoteric doctrines.

There will always be ineffability, or formlessness, so far as I can see. No system is complete, no structure lacking the moment of history. Although perhaps certain religious or esoteric beliefs can be interpreted as positing God's system, which of course cannot have history in the above way. Nothing can be ineffable to God, and this is perhaps also another take on the justification of all actuality. On the other hand, certain esoteric currents coincide with left-wing politics in that the justification lies not in structure but in history, not in actuality but in the ruthless criticism of everything existing transposed to the spiritual, ideological, political, or whatever level.

As Mao said, “It is right to rebel”.

These considerations in some sense lead me to conclude that, perhaps, Badiou's four truth-procedures need to be complemented by a fifth, that of religion/mysticism/esotericism, various manifestations of which could be related to Badiou's subjective forms.

Molluscan Metaphysics Part I

The world is populated by bizarre shadow-objects, which really are neither objects nor simply processes. Beings have numerous components, including processual vectors, primary and secondary qualities more statically construed, relations necessary and accidental, essences, and even formal principles of entailment on a more abstract level.

It is the art and science of (often speculative) abstraction which marks a "thisness" as envelope or shell of a being. Speculative imagination essentializes it on a qualitative level, and speculative reason illuminates its formal structure. Ordinary consciousness of course apprehends in most cases only accidents.

It is conceivable that there are beings which are made up only of essentialities, just as there may be beings with nothing essential in them whatsoever. It is also possible that there are many empty shells. Shell secretion is a natural function of all beings but for a few, equivalent in their structure to the modern day gastropods if relatively terrestrial, or to stellar cephalopods if their relations and non-relations are of a more speculative character. These are, it should go without saying, the formless.

Most of being passes successively from hierarchy into form, where the seeds of hierarchy exist only as a certain entailment between the essences of beings. The power of this entailment, however, cannot be overstated, and it sometimes occurs that essence becomes accident under its sway (or vice versa).

A universal is not something which exists in each being, nor is it a shell under which all beings fall (though there is such a thing, and it is pure chaos). Instead, it is a principle of entailment (we might say, artistically, a rule of derivation) which has an unrestricted domain. These probably exist in the rarefied atmosphere of the purest emanations, or perhaps in the burning passage of a stray comet. No one said such things were eternal.

Of course all this remains to be more clearly formulated, and at some point even formalized.

Notes Towards a Manifesto

Form is the new essence.

Form and formlessness constitute a non-relation. Form alone brings about the breakdown of form, through its own necessary and formal entailment. Just as a new proposition is derived, so is the very breakdown of intelligibility.

We need a new Wissenschaft der Logik. Something which reunites speculative reason with the recent advances of formal ontology. But since thought is generic, we will need speculative imagination too.

There are formless "things" and things which are only form, and sometimes the two are indiscernible.

Our goal, then, will be en-forming the formless. But in delicate matters such as this, one cannot lead head first with the light. Paths must be followed, debts paid. Thought must enter the darkness, grapple with the unthinkable, and emerge victorious on the other side. Or perhaps it must learn to see in the dark.

The Kavalactonic Kutulu

Tiki heads with burning neon eyes, psychedelic patterns on enormous screens which thrash and writhe when no one is looking, shiny lacquered surf boards and a bar lined with bamboo, ceiling lights cloaked in patches of sky. Tentacled professors, communist wizards, addicts and ex-addicts with shaking hands, artists and thinkers deep in samadhi - they drink their kava and make faces as they sublimate into whisps of higher consciousness, fragments of lazy force floating up to Somewhere Else. All of it has the quality of a transcendent absurdity. An ancient tiki sitting next to me turns and whispers reassurance to my dully buzzing mind: "You are witness to a fractal image with contradiction at every level. This place, and you along with it, is a bubbling cauldron of fuzzed-up half-thoughts. Let's see what we can come up with..."

So sit back and enjoy; a krush will do you wonders. It always does.

Like a health-goth version of a William Gibson novel, the architecture of impossibility on display at Krave is clearly meant to mirror the inner Sprawl of the oozing ochre mind, drowning in euphoria and contented emptiness. Equal parts Lovecraft and Ramana Maharshi, Krave demands of us, "Who is the eye that watches the I? And are you too not just such an eye as well? On the end of a segmented stalk, perhaps?" As the outside world dissolves, everything becomes a mirror of the mind. But your mind? No, for there is something inhuman in Krave, from the endlessly repetitive house music with the bass turned way up to the 8-hour looping Youtube vidoes of deserted beaches playing silently at the end of the bar.

Krave exists only as contradiction, as impossibility, as absurdity; this is no doubt its greatest strength. No, Krave cannot exist. Not to the feeble human mind. This is a fact, but what is its meaning?

There is a sense in which Krave is out of time, withdrawing from the sordid outside world into a self-illumined autonomy as pure as it is senseless. Yes, here we have the sense of senselessness itself, an overwhelming and irrefutable intuition of the unintuitable. At Krave, impossibility itself is subtracted and purified from the lesser contradictions of the empirical world. A singularity is always inhuman, its truth akin to an alien parasite. Yes, let us raise our coconut shells to Azathoth, for his domain is truth and we are in Him as He is in us.

The Deep One sitting next to me shakily uncoils his languid chins, spits on his swollen lips, and pukes up a smile: "What is the meaning of this? Are we going up or ever down in this collective abstraction?"

You do know this is a collective enterprise, don't you? How could it be otherwise? You wouldn't grill us with your questions unless you'd done some questioning of your own beforehand, would you? What? Are you being detained? Well not by me at any rate...

"We have," I say, pointing at nowehere in particular, "several aesthetic senses here, where usually there is just one. Really, these are nothing but abstract images, an image without a concrete visual component. When you walk through that door, you are confronted with numerous abstract images, each of which contradicts the others. Taken together - and this higher level is quite a rare thing - this is the cosmic contradiction of Krave."

It is like seeing a face which you later cannot recall, but still you know what it looked like. Yet concrete faces are each a face, but Krave is only Krave. An abstract image is an aura, speculative imagination as opposed to speculative reason. It is the Cartesian intellect apprehending pictorial essence. And what if these essences were not externally opposed to one another, but were contradictory in their innermost determination, their mucoid unmanifestation withdrawing from sense at all levels, in all senses?

Pristine Pacific islands, cyberpunk technofuturism, psychedelic New Age naturalism.
A shaman's hut, a nightclub in the year 3000, a tunnel through outer space and into the point at the center of the universe.
Contradictory abstract images are sublated into a singularity, what can only be called the Krave Aesthetic.

And there is nothing like it.

It is precisely when an abstract image is the sheath or essence of lower-order abstract images, each moment contradicting the others, that we have an aesthetic singularity.

And thank Yog-Sothoth for that.
Kava fhtagn!

Fragments

• Manilla Road is the greatest band of all time. I'm not entirely sure why or how. But they are. Crystal Logic and The Deluge are particularly amazing, but above all Open the Gates is probably my favorite album of theirs, maybe my favorite album of all time. However, I'm not really sure how to write about Manilla Road, since all my interest and training so far has been in extreme metal. I think the way to study and understand extreme metal is pretty much totally different from how to study and understand non-extreme musical forms, even heavy metal.
• At some point (too lazy to check right now), brutal death metal album covers switched from old school dark art to this weird semi-cartoony brightly-colored stuff - compare Disavowed, Pyaemia, or Disgorge to most stuff coming out now on the big BDM labels like Inherited Suffering, Amputated Vein, Coyote, and Lacerated Enemy. Or see the difference between Abominable Putridity's first and second albums, or the old and new covers for Iconic Vivisect's "Monument of Depravity". I think this coincides maybe with a shift of imagery from gore to bizarre creates/absurd sci-fi shit. Sort of a weird shift, not sure how to understand it quite yet.
• I'm currently interested in seeing where BDM/slam will go - innovative bands utilizing slam and regular old BDM with technical or experimental structures seems the way to go. Above all this is 7 H. Target, and also maybe Iconic Vivisect, whose album I enjoyed immensely. But even those two bands are going in very different directions, since the latter use slams but I wouldn't call them a slam band by any means. 7 H. Target on the other hand is pretty much the outer extreme of coolness I've seen possible with slam so far. A lot of BDM came out last year, but I haven't seen too much yet this year. I wonder what is to come.
• I feel like sludge/atmospheric/blackened/whatever is getting pretty popular, based on some of my feeds. What's the appeal?