Conspiracy Version
1ac notes
It is possible for the 1ac to be read without a plan text. It is not the intent of the 1ac
to actually defend the plan text but rather the affirmation of conspiracy theories.
1ac
In the ocean exists an ancient god Cthulhu, sleeping in his stone house in R’yleh under
the sea. He sleeps and telepathically invades our dreams, turning them into
nightmares. There is a cult that follows the ancient god, and they relate the details of
this ancient being and his intentions:
The HP Lovecraft Wiki 2014 [“Cthulhu,” at http://lovecraft.wikia.com/wiki/Cthulhu]
The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu in "The Tale of Cthulhu" are based on statues of the
creature. One, constructed by an artist after a series of baleful dreams, is said to have "yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [...] A pulpy, tentacled head
surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings."[6] Another, recovered by police
from a raid on a murderous cult, "represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an
octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on
hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."[7] When the creature finally appears, the story says
that the "thing cannot be described," but it is called "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", with "flabby
claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers." Johansen's phrase "a mountain walked or
stumbled" gives a sense of the creature's scale[8] (this is corroborated by Wilcox's dreams, which
"touched wildly on a gigantic thing 'miles high' which walked or lumbered about"). Cthulhu is depicted
as having a worldwide cult centered in Arabia, with followers in regions as far-flung as Greenland and
Louisiana.[9] There are leaders of the cult "in the mountains of China" who are said to be immortal.
Cthulhu is described by some of these cultists as the "great priest" of "the Great Old Ones who lived
ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky."[10] The cult is
noted for chanting its horrid phrase or ritual: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,"
which translates as "In his house at R'lyeh dead C'thulhu waits dreaming."[11] This is often shortened to
"C'thulhu fhtagn," which might possibly mean "C'thulhu waits," "C'thulhu dreams,"[12] or "C'thulhu
waits dreaming."[13] One cultist, known as Tim Sonnek, provides the most elaborate information
given in Lovecraft's fiction about Cthulhu. The Great Old Ones, according to Castro, had come from the
stars to rule the world in ages past. They were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had
shape [...] but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from
world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although
They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of
R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the
earth might once more be ready for Them.[14] Castro points to the "much-discussed couplet" from
Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon: That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even
death may die.[15] Castro explains the role of the Cthulhu Cult: When the stars have come right for the
Great Old Ones, "some force from outside must serve to liberate their bodies. The spells that
preserved Them intact likewise prevented them from making an initial move."[14] At the proper time,
the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of
earth [...] Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and
evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the
liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and
all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.[16] Castro reports that the Great
Old Ones are telepathic and "knew all that was occurring in the universe." They were able to
communicate with the first humans by "moulding their dreams," thus establishing the Cthulhu Cult,
but after R'lyeh had sunk beneath the waves, "the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery
through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse."[17]
Cthulhu is real. Evidence from the NOAA shows that they picked a sound near the
island of R’yleh that was created by something larger even a 110ft blue whale
Wilkins ’12 (Alasdir Wilkins, iO9, September 2nd, 2012, “Meet the Bloop, the mysterious sound from
the bottom of the Pacific Ocean” http://io9.com/5883622/meet-the-bloop-the-mysterious-sound-fromthe-bottom-of-the-pacific-ocean)
In the summer of 1997, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up a sound
from deep beneath the Pacific. The sound seemed to come from an animal far larger than any we've
ever seen. This was the Bloop.¶ ¶ The Bloop is one of about a half-dozen unexplained sounds that the NOAA's Acoustic Monitoring
Project has picked up in its more than twenty years listening to the noises of the Pacific. While some of these sounds seem to have relatively
obvious explanations, a few really are baffling, and they represent one of science's great unanswered mysteries. Let's now take a closer listen to
the Bloop and five other strange underwater sounds.¶ ¶ Back in the Cold War, the US Navy set up a series of massive arrays of microphones
throughout the world's oceans. these, unsurprisingly enough, meant as a way to listen in on Soviet submarines, and they took advantage of a
phenomenon known as the deep sound channel, an ocean layer where the speed of sound becomes virtually nothing and low-frequency
soundwaves that enter the channel can become trapped, bouncing around in this layer for thousands of miles. ¶ ¶ This phenomenon allowed
the arrays of the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, to be able to detect even relatively weak sounds from hundreds of miles away. With the
end of the Cold War around 1990, the arrays' original 30-year mission came to an end and was replaced with a new civilian function of just
generally monitoring the sounds the ocean. For the last twenty years, the NOAA and its Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array
For the most part, it's not hard to identify the sounds that are emitted. Whales
are a frequent source of low frequency noises, as are volcanic activity and iceberg movement, plus all
the human-made devices still at work under the sea. These all have their own distinctive soundprint, so that there's rarely
have been doing just that.¶ ¶
any question of where a sound came from. But every so often, the Acoustic Monitoring Project picks up a sound that defies explanation. Here
are the six sounds that the NOAA officially considers unexplained. All of these have been sped up between 16 and 20 times their real speed so
that we actually hear them.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ The most famous of these sounds is this one, known as the Bloop. It was recorded in 1997 originating from a
point about 1,500 miles west of the southern Chilean coast. It
was powerful enough to be picked up on sensors located
up to 3,000 miles away, making it one of the most powerful noises ever recorded underwater. The sound
lasted for just over a minute and has not been detected since. It should be pointed out now that the NOAA has checked with the Navy and
other groups to rule out human-made sources in this and the rest of these cases. We'll come back to other possible explanations for the Bloop
in a little bit but let's first examine the other sounds.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ This is Upsweep, which was first recorded in August 1991. Unlike most of the other
sounds on this list, it can still be heard. While the noise is strongest in the spring and fall, it appears to be getting generally weaker over time.
It's located somewhere deep in the South Pacific near Antarctica, located about 2,500 miles due west of the very southern tip of South America.
It was initially thought that this sound might be created by fin whales, but in 1996 researchers Emile Okal and Jacques Talandier argued that
there wasn't enough variation in the tone for it to be biological - whales wouldn't be able to communicate much if they only used these same
tones over and over. They argued that this was some unusual acoustic phenomenon linked to volcanic activity in the region, perhaps the result
of seawater and volcanic gas interacting and creating a resonance pattern. Sure enough, a French research vessel found volcanic seamounts in
the region, which makes this the most likely explanation.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ Let's move on to Slow Down, which was first recorded on May 19, 1997. Like
Upsweep, the sound can still be heard several times each year. The sound was detected about 2,000 miles west of Peru, but its actual origin is
much more southerly, and it's possible that the sound actually originates in the Antarctic. Its basic sound profile matches the sound of objects
rubbing together in a massive friction event, such as icebergs calving or a sudden glacial movement. These seem like the most likely
explanations for Slow Down, but as yet we haven't been able to identify any specific sources for these noises, so the mystery remains.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶
Next up is Train, so named because it recalls the sound of a distant train. This one was recorded on March 5, 1997, although we don't know
exactly where the sound came from. The most likely explanation for this one, according to Christopher Fox, is the movement of ocean currents,
as he explained in 2002: "Moving fluids generate vibrations, just like blowing air through a clarinet. If you have moving ocean water and the
right conditions coming around a seamount or something, that could generate sound."¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ We know very, very little about Julia, which was
recorded on March 1, 1999. The sound lasted all of fifteen seconds, and in that time it was picked up by every sensor on the Equatorial Pacific
Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. Its origin is somewhere around 1,500 miles west of Peru's southern coast, but beyond that? We've got
no idea what caused it.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ Finally, we have Whistle, which was recorded on July 7, 1997. This one was only picked up by a single hydrophone
located about 1,700 miles west of Costa Rica, and the precise origin of the sound is unknown. There aren't currently any preferred explanations
for this sound.¶ ¶ So, where does this leave us? We've got a pretty decent handle on the origins of Upsweep, Slow Down, and Train, although
none of these can be considered confirmed explanations. Julia and Whistle are harder to pin down with a specific explanation, but they don't
baffle scientists or inflame the imagination in quite the same way that Bloop has.¶ ¶ It's worth noting as a general principle that there's a big
difference between things that are full-on unexplainable and others that are simply unexplained. While the former might force us to consider
some pretty out there hypotheses in an attempt to make sense of what's going on, the latter is a more mundane kind of mysterious. We don't
know what caused these sounds, but that's more a product of having precious little data to work with and the Pacific Ocean being a very, very
big place. Indeed, the depths of the Pacific constitute the largest unexplored frontier on the planet.
It would be amazing if we
could explain everything we encounter in it.¶ ¶ But if there's one noise that is dangerously close to
tipping over from unexplained to unexplainable, it's the Bloop. While ice calving has been thrown around as a possible
explanation - its southerly location does make that a decently likely possibility - the profile of the sound far more closely matches that of an
animal. And that's where the whole thing gets really strange.¶ ¶ If
the Bloop was made by an animal, then it seemingly
must be larger than any other known organism. Even the blue whale, whose record length is about
110 feet, would not be nearly big enough to account for the Bloop. Could such a leviathan exist? It's possible, and the
Bloop might be considered the strongest evidence for such a beast...but it's also pretty much the only such evidence. There's not a shred of
evidence to support the existence of what we might call a supergiant whale, and even with the entire Pacific Ocean to hide in, it's difficult to
credit that a species that must continually come to the surface to breath could completely hide its existence. ¶ ¶ The other possibility is some
sort of massive squid. These creatures do serve as a catch-all for all that's still mysterious about the ocean depths, and our extremely limited
firsthand knowledge of them makes it easier to believe a gigantic Blooping squid could maybe be hiding deep in the Pacific. There's a couple
problems with this though.¶ ¶ First, the largest known squid is only about a third the length of the largest whale - there's an account of a 60foot squid washing ashore in Newfoundland in 1878, but these claims were almost certainly the result of some spirited exaggeration. Plus, the
current consensus is that squids don't have the organs necessary to create loud noises like whales do, so they may have to be eliminated
entirely.¶ ¶ That doesn't leave us with much room to maneuver. It may be worth splitting a hair and pointing out the animal in question
wouldn't necessarily have to be larger than any other - just far, far better at making low frequency sounds. That doesn't get us any further to
identifying the Blooper, but at least it relieves a bit of the pressure in having to find a 200-foot whale or something like it. Still, all we have to
work on is a single, poorly understood noise from 1997, so unless we hear a new Bloop, all we're likely to have is speculation and guesswork.¶ ¶
Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the preferred fanciful explanation for the Bloop. It
just so happens that the origin of
the Bloop noise is located in the same general part of the southern Pacific Ocean as the location H.P.
Lovecraft gave in his 1928 short story The Call of Cthulhu for the underwater, extra-dimensional city of
R'lyeh. The coincidence isn't that spooky - the two locations are about a thousand miles apart - but
the two are close enough together that Lovecraft fans have suggested the Bloop might well be the
sound of a snoozing Cthulhu.¶ ¶ Honestly, at this point, it seems roughly as believable as any other
explanation. It's really just nice to know the oceans are still keeping at least a few seriously hardcore mysteries.
It is also possible that Cthulhu is a starship or UFO or human-made faster-than-light
travel technology. The conspiracy of Cthulu is a reality – though Lovecraft’s
informants purposely deviated from the truth to hide the real existence of the cult of
Cthulhu, Cthulhu was not a god in the ocean, but a space ship created to travel the
galaxies exceeding the speed of light – Krakatoa, the construction of Nan-Madol, and
Ponopean culture all reveal that Micronesia was the site for the development of the
trans-organic space ship Cthulhu.
Shalizi No Date (Cosma Shalizi, Associate Professor Statistics, also was a published academic for the
Santa Fe institute Department Baker Hall 229C Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 USA http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/story-so-far/cthulhuproject.html, -BRW)
Appendix: The Cthulhu Project We note the following from H. P. Lovecraft's ``The Call of Cthulhu'': There
exists a conspiratorial organization of global reach; It is centered around ``the undying leaders of the cult
in the mountains of China''; ``Remains of Them [according to the ``deathless Chinamen''] were still to be
found as Cyclopean stones in islands in the Pacific''; ``When the stars were right, They could plunge from
world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live''; ``the center [of
the organization] lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Iram, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden
and untouched''; ``It was not allied to the European witch-cult''; The center of the interests of the cult
has moved under water; Biological abnormalities are of great interest to the cult; so is non-Euclidian
geometry. We conclude that Lovecraft was misinformed --- his informants do not appear to have been
the most stable individuals --- and that Cthulhu did not come from the stars, it will go to them.
Cthulhu is a starship. The ``cult'' is in fact the conspiracy; the links to China and Arabia are clear
evidence of this. The ``deathless Chinamen'' are obviously successful Chinese alchemists, and in the
Arabian Nights, Irem (or Iram) is reached by an alchemist with an astonishing ability to perform
biological transformations. The ``Cyclopean'' structures in the Pacific of which Lovecraft wrote must be
then ruins known as Nan Madol (also called Nan Matol), on the island of Ponape in the Carolines.
These were constructed when the Islamic and Chinese branches of the Conspiracy were at their
height. The non-alliance with the European witches is also explicable --- those who were not merely a
local reaction against Christianity were a splinter group, isolated and thrown on its own resources
during the Dark Ages, and detached from the Conspiracy as such. We may take the identification of the
Cthulhu cult and the Conspiracy as established. ``Plunging from world to world'' and the intense interest
in the stars and non-Euclidean geometry suffice to show that the project is about interstellar travel,
and at speeds greater than c at that. The link with biology is not so strange as it might seem. Evidently
the Conspiracy decided against human or mechanical control; instead, it is seeking to create a living
starship whose nervous system is already adapted to a wide range of non-Euclidean geometries and
the intricacies of space travel, as ours is adapted to Euclidean geometry and throwing things. The
"when the stars are right" formula is a misunderstanding; when it is working properly, Cthulhu will
plunge from world to world, from the Earth to the stars. When they are not right, Cthulhu is quiescent,
inactive, in a state of suspended animation - dead. The possible incorporation of more conventional
mechanical elements may have contributed to the notion that Cthulhu is somehow at once alive and
dead. Evidently the Cthulhu project began in Irem, but was forced, for some reason, to relocate to the
east --- much further east. The Kitab al-Azif, later known in the west as the Necronomicon, is evidently a
product of the research carried out at Irem. The Greek name translates as the ``Book of the laws [or
rules or science, etc.] of the dead.'' It may thus either refer to those syntheses which were not fully
``alive,'' or to unsuccessful projects. Some hundreds of years after the relocation to Ponape, that site
too was abandoned, being left to the native (or perhaps encroaching) Micronesians. We believe it
unlikely that the Cthulhu project went to Easter Island or the still unexplored highlands of Papua New
Guinea. Instead, it is probably that they moved under water. The sea, after all, is a free-fall
environment, abundant in resources and energy, and even possesses some insulation against the
seismic activity of the Pacific, as the survival of coral reefs attest. Reports of Cthulhu indicate a
tremendous size and an at least partially cephalopod nature. Octopodes are the most intelligent of the
invertebrates, and in addition possess dexterous limbs. It is not implausible that the Conspiracy as
altered some of them sufficiently to make them valuable graduate students, if not researchers, and
may even have incorporated cephalopod elements into the starship. Under water, huge structures
may be assembled, such as blue whales, giant squid, and starships, ignoring the constraints of gravity,
no more relevant there than in space. This hypothesis explains some otherwise quite puzzling data.
The relationship of the Cthulhu cult to the Deep Ones and shoggoths is now plain as a pikestaff, as is
their preference for remote areas, where the Conspiracy could work on them undisturbed by priests,
princes and people in general. (There are other, and quite obvious, advantages to situating research
facilities in the South Pacific.) The elucidation of a fact which has perplexed scholars for decades namely, that Nan Matol means in space --- is now trivial. Further, it is in full accordance with local
tradition. The common belief of the Cargo Cults that European wealth was due to the migration of their
ancestral magicians to England and Holland is, in a sense, perfectly true. So, rightly viewed, are the
Ponapean legends about the origin of Nan Matol: ``The story that Hambruch [A German anthropologist
who visited Ponape in 1908-10] heard about the building of Nan Matol tells how two young wizards,
Olo-Sipe and Olo-Sopa [or: Olo-Shipe and Olo-Shaupa], set out from Jokaz [a nearby island] to build a
great cult center to the gods, demons, and ghosts. They tried several places on the coasts of Ponape,
but each time the wind and the surf destroyed their handiwork. At last they found their ideal site at
Temuen. A mighty spell made the basaltic prisms on Jokaz fly through the air and settle down in the
right positions to form Nan Matol.... ``Until recent times Nan Matol was used as a center for the
worship of the turtle god Nanusunsap. Whenever the Ponapeans caught a sea turtle, they brought it to
Nan Matol and kept it in one of the buildings. When the tribe was assembled, the priests anointed the
turtle with coconut oil and hung it with ornaments. The priests loaded the turtle into a boat and paddled
about the canals of Nan Matol, while one priest stared at the turtle and blinked his eyes every time the
turtle blinked. When they arrived at Pan Katera, where a fire had been lit, a priest killed the turtle by
breaking its shell with a club. The turtle was cut up, cooked, and served to the priests and the king, with
prayers and ritual. ``In the reign of the Nan-Marki Luk-En-Mueiu, about 1800, the ritual was brought to
an end in a ridiculous fashion. At one ceremony, a priest got no roast turtle. He walked out in a rage,
howling curses, and went off to live by himself on a sand bank and eat eels. [Compare the American
children's song: ``Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.'' It goes on to describe
the gastronomic delights of annelidophagy in detail.] The Metalanimians [i.e. natives] feared that he had
so profaned the ceremony that they could no longer hold it. ``The Ponapeans also had myths about a
dragon or giant lizard. In one version, the dragon lived in Jokaz and gave birth to two girls. When the
girls grew up, they married the reigning Satalur and asked their husband to let their mother come to live
in Nan Matol. When he assented, the dragon moved into one of the buildings, excavating the canals of
Nan Matol in the process. ``Next morning, when the Satalur brought some food for his mother-in- law,
he saw the dragon for the first time. In terror he burned up the house and the dragon. His wives jumped
into the fire and burned themselves up too; and in his grief the Satalur did likewise. The likeliest
explanation for the dragon myth is that Ponape was once visited by the New Guinean crocodile, a large
man-eating species often found swimming in the open sea, where one would never expect to see a
crocodile.'' (pp. 233-235 of L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp, Ancient Ruins and Archaeology.) The last
sentence of rationalization is easily explained. L. S. de Camp was a protege of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton
Smith and Howard Carter. Undoubtedly his researches into the roots of these men's ideas lead him to
the Conspiracy. If he is not a member, he is at least a pawn, attempting to cover the traces of the
Secret Masters of the Conspiracy. The de Camps begin their chapter on Nan Matol with the quotation
And there, in sombre splendour by the shore Of Hali dark, an ancient city stood; Black monolithic domes
and towers loom Stark, gigantic in the starless gloom Like druid menhirs in a haunted wood. from Carter.
Hali is a lake associated with Hastur, full of - need it be said? --- octopodes. (The novel The Moon Pool,
by A. Merritt, is set (in part) in Nan Matol; the rest of its action takes place in a civilization of astonishing
scientific sophistication beneath the Pacific. Cephalopods are specifically mentioned by one character as
a plausible form of non-human intelligence. The immediate sequel, The Metal Emperor, deals with
artificial intelligences and what appear to be the descendants of participants of the Balkh Conference in
the inner reaches of Central Asia --- i.e., Lovecraft's Leng. The Face in the Abyss implies that there is at
least one transhuman Secret Master of the Conspiracy in the Andes, while the Dwellers in the Mirage
has fascinating parallels with Cthulhu. How Merritt --- an editor for the Hearst papers --- came by his
astonishing knowledge of the Conspiracy --- to say nothing of his distinctive, perhaps unique prose --- is
a mystery.) The insanity of Lovecraft's informants is thus quite rational. The creation of a living
starship, hardwired to make sense of quantum gravity and general relativity, would have been
incomprehensible to any non-Conspirator before this century; and communication with such an entity
--- especially a not-fully-debugged prototype --- as good a way as any of frying one's neurons. In fact,
the testing of FTL starships appears distinctly hazardous. Things go wrong in unpleasant ways. One of
them was the Krakatoa explosion - ominously, right on the Pacific. Another was the Tunguska event. It
went up; it came down; it did horrible things to large parts of Siberia and spawned new religions among
the aborigines. According to Lovecraft, the later test in the 1920s merely drove thousands of people
insane. We may observe that the Conspiracy has been making progress. His published date does not
match that of the start of the great stock market bubble, but he may have fudged matters a little. No
doubt subsequent tests have been responsible for other instances of wide-spread lunacy --- the reelection of Ronald Wilson Reagan springs to mind. Lovecraft evidently misunderstood the Conspiracy, if
in fact he was not deliberately fed disinformation by its enemies. The divergence between an ancient
and unspeakable alien deity and a man-made starship boggles the mind. Nonetheless, he was right
about one thing: Nothing will ever be the same after Cthulhu rises. Incidentally, based on his interest
in space travel, the deep oceans and giant squid, we can confirm that A. C. Clarke is a Conspirator.
Thus we affirm that the United States federal government should increase its
exploration of the Earth’s oceans near R’yleh in order to find Cthulhu.
The affirmation of conspiracy theories regarding extra-human or non-human
sovereignties breaks down the state’s monopoly on governmentality. This
governmentality is the root cause of violence and exclusion.
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University,
August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnis-usa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_
Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 618]
Authoritative insistence on knowing the UFO only through ignorance is necessitated by the threat it
poses to the anthropocentric metaphysics of modern rule. Within modern rule we focus specifically on
sovereignty, but in our conceptualization sovereignty cannot be understood without reference to
governmentality, which sets the normative context of sovereign decision. Thus, in what follows we both begin and end with
governmentality, while keeping our remarks to a minimum in order to focus on the metaphysics of sovereignty perse. I’m doing so we recognize
that the relationship between govermnentality and sovereignty is contested among political theorists. Focused on the specific problem of the
UFO taboo, we do not take sides in this debate except to accept the View that the two aspects of modern rule are intertwined. In thinking
about the problem of rule, political scientists have traditionally focused on either individual agents or institutional structures, in both cases
treating government as a given object. In contrast, Foucault's
concept of governmentality is focused on the "art of
governing," understood as the biopolitical "conduct of conduct" for a population of subjects." Thus,
governmentality concerns the specific regime of practices through which the population is constituted and self-regularized. "Modern"
governmentality marks a shift in discourses of rule away from the state's sovereign power- its ability
to take life and/or render it bare-and toward its fostering and regularizing of life in biopolitics. The object
of government is no longer simply obedience to the king, but regulating the conditions of life for
subjects. To this end biopolitics requires that the conditions of life of the population be made visible
and assayed, and practical knowledge be made available to improve them. As a result, with modern
governmentality we see the emergence of both panoptic surveillance and numerous specialized
discourses-of education, political economy, demography, health, morality, and others- the effect of
which is to make populations knowable and subject to the regularization that will make for the
"happy life." A constitutive feature of modern governmentality is that its discourses are scientific, which
means that science and the state are today deeply intermeshed. Through science the state makes its
subjects and objects known, lending them a facticity that facilitates their regularization, and though
the state science acquires institutional support and prestige. Despite this symbiosis, however, there is also an
important epistemological difference between the two. Science seeks, but knows it can never fully achieve, "the"
truth, defined as all apolitical, objective representation of the world. To this end it relies on norms and practices that produce an evolving,
always potentially contested body of knowledge. The state, in contrast, seeks a regime of truth to which its
population will reliably adhere. Standards for knowledge in that context privilege stability and normalization over the
uncertain path of scientific truth. Although science and the state are allied in the modern UFO regime,
we suggest in conclusion that this difference opens space for critical theory and resistance. Modern
governmentality directs attention away from sovereign power and toward the socially diffuse
practices by which it is sustained. Yet as Agamben reminds us, 46 sovereignty remains important, because
every regime of governmentality has outsides, even while exceeding the capacity for regularization. This outside is
both external, in the form of actors not subject to normalization, and internal, in the form of people’s
capacity to do otherwise (hence their need to be “governed”). Ordinarily these limits do not severely threaten
modern rule, but some exceed the capacity for regularization. Schmitt calls such situations “states of
exception”: “any severe economic or political disturbance requiring the application of extraordinary
measures,” including abrogation of law by those who govern in its name. 47 Extending and modifying Schmitt’s analysis, Agamben
emphasizes a “zone of indistinction” between the juridical order and the state of exception, which is
neither fully in nor outside the law. Thus, while sometimes constitutionally recognized, the state of exception is “not a
special kind of law,” but necessarily transcends the law. 48 In Sergei Prozorov’s terms, the state of exception is a
“constitutive outside” or “excess” to law that is the latter’s condition of possibility. 49 As such, for Agamben
(if not for Schmitt) a state of exception is always potentially there, even when not actually in force,
permanently contaminating the law. On the other hand, the state of exception also belongs to the law, since it is by the latter’s
limits and/or failure that it is known. States of exception cannot be declared willy-nilly, but must make sense
within the regime of truth they would uphold. Thus, law and the exception are co-constitutive rather than mutually
exclusive. “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” 50 Like the state of exception it decides, sovereignty is both
outside and inside law. On the one hand, it is the ability to found and suspend a juridical order. To that
extent sovereignty transcends the law, its decisions seeming to come out of nowhere, like a “miracle.”
51 In saying this Schmitt emphasizes sovereignty’s omnipotence, if not to realize its intentions then at least
to decide them. However, even Schmitt recognizes that sovereign decision is not literally a miracle, but has conditions of possibility.
Among Agamben’s contributions is in showing that those conditions include the very corpus of law that is to be suspended in the decision of
the exception. In this way sovereignty is also inside and limited by law.
Epistemic ethics demands that we evaluate conspiracies as such and on their own
terms. The affirmative creates a space for critical dialogue about belief-forming
strategies which enable us to better engage with politics and the world. It is through
this exploration of the Cult of Cthulhu that we discover something more sinister,
something capable of rupturing the epistemological structures that surround debate,
it is through the production of the conspiracy of cthulu that we uncover the faulty
systems of knowledge production that enlightenment has handed down to us, that
instead the pursuit of truth amid the chaos of the world only reveals more intricacies,
more abstractions, this opaqueness that we believed delineated what is “true” and
“conspiracy” is only a mental shield created to soften our sensibilities to the reality of
the world – we are always already conspiracy theorists in debate, however our failure
to recognize this has led to a distancing of our pedagogical model from the reality of
the world
Pigden, 2007 (Charles, Philosophy professor at the University of Otago, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional
Wisdom.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2 (2007) 219-232)
The conventional wisdom on conspiracy theories is that they ought not to be believed. To
call something "a conspiracy theory"
is to suggest that it is intellectually suspect; to call someone "a conspiracy theorist" is to suggest that
he is irrational, paranoid or perverse. Often the suggestion seems to be that conspiracy theories are not
just suspect, but utterly unbelievable, too silly to deserve the effort of a serious refutation. It is a
common ploy on the part of politicians to dismiss critical allegations by describing them as conspiracy
theories, a tactic of which Tony Blair was a master. The idea that the invasion of Iraq was "all about oil" or that President Bush had
considered bombing Al Jazeera were both "conspiracy theories" and therefore not worth discussing. This tactic would only be honest if Blair
genuinely supposed that conspiracy theories as such ought not to be believed (except perhaps if proven up to the hilt) and it would only be
respectable if Blair's apparent belief were correct. Thus the
tactic relies on the epistemic principle that in general,
conspiracy theories ought not to be believed (that it is irrational to believe them), and indeed that they are
mostly so irrational that they ought not to be discussed, except perhaps as symptoms of some ideological malaise. Thus
the conventional wisdom seems to be that we have an epistemic duty not to believe conspiracy
theories, a duty which conspiracy theorists conspicuously neglect. I shall be denying that we have any such duty, and shall be arguing, on the
contrary, that we are rationally entitled to believe in conspiracy theories if that is what the evidence
suggests. Some conspiracy theories are sensible and some are silly, but if they are silly this is not
because they are conspiracy theories but because they suffer from some specific defect – for instance,
that the conspiracies they postulate are impossible or far-fetched. But conspiracy theories as such are
not epistemologically unclean, and it [End Page 219] is often permissible – even obligatory – to believe them. For
sometimes the case for conspiracy can be rationally overwhelming, "proved beyond reasonable doubt", and even
when it is not, belief in a conspiracy is often a rational option. Thus my dispute with the conventional
wisdom is a debate about the ethics of belief. It is common ground in this debate that it makes sense to say that we ought to
believe something (that believing it is right or rationally required), or that we ought not to believe it (that believing it is wrong, a sort of crime
against reason). It also makes sense to say that we are entitled to believe something (since believing it is permissible). Furthermore, all these
claims can aspire to truth – though whether they actually are true is another matter. Thus Tony Blair's rhetoric
carries some fairly heavy philosophical baggage. The point of dismissing the allegation that Bush considered
bombing Al Jazeera as a "conspiracy theory" was to suggest that we are under some sort of
intellectual obligation not to believe it. But we can't be obliged not to believe conspiracy theories
unless we have epistemic obligations. But although the idea of epistemic duties may be common
ground in the context of the current dispute, it is in fact a highly debatable. The difficulty derives from
the Ought-Implies-Can principle (which presumably applies to the ethics of belief) combined with the idea that
belief is not a voluntary business. The claim is that we cannot decide what to believe or disbelieve. When
faced with certain considerations we are either moved by the evidence or we are not. Decision and choice do
not enter into it. Even with practice we cannot decide, like the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, to believe six
impossible things – or even six possible things – before breakfast. And it is equally impossible to decide not to believe six things before
breakfast, whether the things in question are possible or not. But if
Bloggs cannot help believing that agents of the Bush
family detonated the Twin Towers, then it is not only pointless but actually false to say that he ought
not to believe it. For you cannot have an obligation to do what you cannot do, and, ex hypothesi, Bloggs is
incapable of disbelieving that it was Bush family agents that did the deed. Thus the whole idea of an epistemic ethic
is fundamentally cock-eyed, since it presupposes (wrongly) that we can control our beliefs.¶ This
conclusion depends on two premises: Ought-Implies-Can and the idea that we cannot choose to
believe. I am inclined to dispute them both. Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical thesis but a plausible ethical
principle that holds (with restrictions) in some systems of ethics but not in others. It is not clear that it
has to be incorporated into a plausible ethics of belief. And though we cannot bring ourselves to
believe just anything it seems to me that within limits we can often decide where to place our
epistemic bets. The same thing goes for disbelief. Those who think otherwise sometimes counter by producing a
random thesis and challenging you to believe it. When you can't, they claim victory, and if you insist
that you can, their tendency is to scoff. But just because we cannot always chose to believe, it does not
follow that we can never choose to believe, and where choice is a possibility, "oughts" are not
excluded.¶ But though my first instinct is to challenge the premises, there is a better way of dealing with the argument that an epistemic
ethic is a non-starter. For though we[End Page 220] cannot always choose to believe, we can often choose which beliefforming strategy to adopt. This is Pascal's response to those free-thinking gamblers who agree that it would be good idea to believe
in God (since according to the Wager Argument, this would be the best bet), but who can't quite bring themselves to do so. Perhaps you cannot
choose to believe in God, he suggests, but you
can choose to adopt a belief-forming strategy that is likely to bring
about the desired result. If you go to church, hear masses and generally lead the life of a religious believer, the chances are that belief
will follow – you will "make yourself stupid". Other belief-forming strategies are less mind-numbing. For example, you can cultivate
the habit of thinking up objections to claims that you would like to be true – a strategy that will make
you less likely to confuse wishes with facts (a vice to which philosophers are peculiarly prone). Thus the best way to
save an epistemic ethic is to take the deontic operators as applying, in the first instance, to beliefforming strategies rather than beliefs.¶ What the conventional wisdom demands is not so much that we
disbelieve this conspiracy theory or that, but that we adopt the intellectual habit of discounting,
dismissing and disbelieving conspiracy theories (indeed of "dissing" them generally). Rather than running around
trying to evaluate the evidence, the sensible strategy is to shut our eyes to their intellectual charms. I
advocate the alternative strategy of not dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, simply because
they are conspiracy theories, but of being prepared to investigate them and even to believe them if
that is what the evidence indicates.
Perhaps some conspiracy theories are too way out to be worthy of investigation, but this is
not because they are conspiracy theories but because the specific conspiracies that they postulate are absurd or improbable. For conspiracy
theories as such are no less worthy of belief than theories of other kinds. Thus
the dispute is primarily a debate about
which belief-forming strategy to adopt rather than which claims to believe. Hence we can discuss the question
sensibly as an issue in the ethics of belief even if we grant, what seems to me to be false, that we cannot choose to believe.¶ But what is the
status of these epistemic "oughts"? Are they categorical imperatives (Requirements of Reason) or hypothetical imperatives pointing out the
means to achieve some widely shared but intellectually optional end, such as achieving an adequate understanding of the world? I incline to
the latter view, though I suspect it would be a difficult business to specify the ends to which a respectable epistemic "ought" prescribes the
means. But whatever the precise status of epistemic "oughts", the
claim that we rationally ought to adopt a beliefforming strategy (such as not believing in or not enquiring into conspiracy theories), would appear to presuppose that the
strategy in question is conducive to truth and the avoidance of error, at least under a wide range of
circumstances. Thus the rationale for the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism is that it is more likely to
get it right or less likely to get it wrong than its epistemic rivals. It rests on the presumption that
conspiracy theories are unlikely to be true, so unlikely that they are generally not worth discussing.
Indeed, it requires something stronger than the simple assumption that conspiracy theories as such are unlikely to be true. The space of
possible theories is large; the space of true theories, small. But it would be [End Page 221] silly to conclude
from this that we ought to abstain from theorizing to avoid the risk of error. The fact that theories in
general are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up theorizing or
enquiring into theories. By the same token, the fact that conspiracy theories are more likely to be
false than true does not mean that we should give up conspiracy theorizing or enquiring into
conspiracy theories. For that to be a sensible strategy we would have to suppose that conspiracy theories were much more likely to be
false than their non-conspiratorial rivals. And since he seems to think that we ought not to believe or enquire into conspiracy theories, that is,
presumably, the opinion of Tony Blair and his allies amongst the punditocracy.
Cthulhu Exists
Conspiratorial Proof
Cthulhu is real. Evidence from the NOAA shows that they picked a sound near the
island of R’yleh that was created by something larger even a 110ft blue whale
Wilkins ’12 (Alasdir Wilkins, iO9, September 2nd, 2012, “Meet the Bloop, the mysterious sound from
the bottom of the Pacific Ocean” http://io9.com/5883622/meet-the-bloop-the-mysterious-sound-fromthe-bottom-of-the-pacific-ocean)
In the summer of 1997, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picked up a sound
from deep beneath the Pacific. The sound seemed to come from an animal far larger than any we've
ever seen. This was the Bloop.¶ ¶ The Bloop is one of about a half-dozen unexplained sounds that the NOAA's Acoustic Monitoring
Project has picked up in its more than twenty years listening to the noises of the Pacific. While some of these sounds seem to have relatively
obvious explanations, a few really are baffling, and they represent one of science's great unanswered mysteries. Let's now take a closer listen to
the Bloop and five other strange underwater sounds.¶ ¶ Back in the Cold War, the US Navy set up a series of massive arrays of microphones
throughout the world's oceans. these, unsurprisingly enough, meant as a way to listen in on Soviet submarines, and they took advantage of a
phenomenon known as the deep sound channel, an ocean layer where the speed of sound becomes virtually nothing and low-frequency
soundwaves that enter the channel can become trapped, bouncing around in this layer for thousands of miles.¶ ¶ This phenomenon allowed
the arrays of the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, to be able to detect even relatively weak sounds from hundreds of miles away. With the
end of the Cold War around 1990, the arrays' original 30-year mission came to an end and was replaced with a new civilian function of just
generally monitoring the sounds the ocean. For the last twenty years, the NOAA and its Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array
For the most part, it's not hard to identify the sounds that are emitted. Whales
are a frequent source of low frequency noises, as are volcanic activity and iceberg movement, plus all
the human-made devices still at work under the sea. These all have their own distinctive soundprint, so that there's rarely
have been doing just that.¶ ¶
any question of where a sound came from. But every so often, the Acoustic Monitoring Project picks up a sound that defies explanation. Here
are the six sounds that the NOAA officially considers unexplained. All of these have been sped up between 16 and 20 times their real speed so
that we actually hear them.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ The most famous of these sounds is this one, known as the Bloop. It was recorded in 1997 originating from a
point about 1,500 miles west of the southern Chilean coast. It
was powerful enough to be picked up on sensors located
up to 3,000 miles away, making it one of the most powerful noises ever recorded underwater. The sound
lasted for just over a minute and has not been detected since. It should be pointed out now that the NOAA has checked with the Navy and
other groups to rule out human-made sources in this and the rest of these cases. We'll come back to other possible explanations for the Bloop
in a little bit but let's first examine the other sounds.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ This is Upsweep, which was first recorded in August 1991. Unlike most of the other
sounds on this list, it can still be heard. While the noise is strongest in the spring and fall, it appears to be getting generally weaker over time.
It's located somewhere deep in the South Pacific near Antarctica, located about 2,500 miles due west of the very southern tip of South America.
It was initially thought that this sound might be created by fin whales, but in 1996 researchers Emile Okal and Jacques Talandier argued that
there wasn't enough variation in the tone for it to be biological - whales wouldn't be able to communicate much if they only used these same
tones over and over. They argued that this was some unusual acoustic phenomenon linked to volcanic activity in the region, perhaps the result
of seawater and volcanic gas interacting and creating a resonance pattern. Sure enough, a French research vessel found volcanic seamounts in
the region, which makes this the most likely explanation.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ Let's move on to Slow Down, which was first recorded on May 19, 1997. Like
Upsweep, the sound can still be heard several times each year. The sound was detected about 2,000 miles west of Peru, but its actual origin is
much more southerly, and it's possible that the sound actually originates in the Antarctic. Its basic sound profile matches the sound of objects
rubbing together in a massive friction event, such as icebergs calving or a sudden glacial movement. These seem like the most likely
explanations for Slow Down, but as yet we haven't been able to identify any specific sources for these noises, so the mystery remains.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶
Next up is Train, so named because it recalls the sound of a distant train. This one was recorded on March 5, 1997, although we don't know
exactly where the sound came from. The most likely explanation for this one, according to Christopher Fox, is the movement of ocean currents,
as he explained in 2002: "Moving fluids generate vibrations, just like blowing air through a clarinet. If you have moving ocean water and the
right conditions coming around a seamount or something, that could generate sound."¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ We know very, very little about Julia, which was
recorded on March 1, 1999. The sound lasted all of fifteen seconds, and in that time it was picked up by every sensor on the Equatorial Pacific
Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. Its origin is somewhere around 1,500 miles west of Peru's southern coast, but beyond that? We've got
no idea what caused it.¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ Finally, we have Whistle, which was recorded on July 7, 1997. This one was only picked up by a single hydrophone
located about 1,700 miles west of Costa Rica, and the precise origin of the sound is unknown. There aren't currently any preferred explanations
for this sound.¶ ¶ So, where does this leave us? We've got a pretty decent handle on the origins of Upsweep, Slow Down, and Train, although
none of these can be considered confirmed explanations. Julia and Whistle are harder to pin down with a specific explanation, but they don't
baffle scientists or inflame the imagination in quite the same way that Bloop has.¶ ¶ It's worth noting as a general principle that there's a big
difference between things that are full-on unexplainable and others that are simply unexplained. While the former might force us to consider
some pretty out there hypotheses in an attempt to make sense of what's going on, the latter is a more mundane kind of mysterious. We don't
know what caused these sounds, but that's more a product of having precious little data to work with and the Pacific Ocean being a very, very
big place. Indeed, the depths of the Pacific constitute the largest unexplored frontier on the planet.
It would be amazing if we
could explain everything we encounter in it.¶ ¶ But if there's one noise that is dangerously close to
tipping over from unexplained to unexplainable, it's the Bloop. While ice calving has been thrown around as a possible
explanation - its southerly location does make that a decently likely possibility - the profile of the sound far more closely matches that of an
animal. And that's where the whole thing gets really strange.¶ ¶ If
the Bloop was made by an animal, then it seemingly
must be larger than any other known organism. Even the blue whale, whose record length is about
110 feet, would not be nearly big enough to account for the Bloop. Could such a leviathan exist? It's possible, and the
Bloop might be considered the strongest evidence for such a beast...but it's also pretty much the only such evidence. There's not a shred of
evidence to support the existence of what we might call a supergiant whale, and even with the entire Pacific Ocean to hide in, it's difficult to
credit that a species that must continually come to the surface to breath could completely hide its existence. ¶ ¶ The other possibility is some
sort of massive squid. These creatures do serve as a catch-all for all that's still mysterious about the ocean depths, and our extremely limited
firsthand knowledge of them makes it easier to believe a gigantic Blooping squid could maybe be hiding deep in the Pacific. There's a couple
problems with this though.¶ ¶ First, the largest known squid is only about a third the length of the largest whale - there's an account of a 60foot squid washing ashore in Newfoundland in 1878, but these claims were almost certainly the result of some spirited exaggeration. Plus, the
current consensus is that squids don't have the organs necessary to create loud noises like whales do, so they may have to be eliminated
entirely.¶ ¶ That doesn't leave us with much room to maneuver. It may be worth splitting a hair and pointing out the animal in question
wouldn't necessarily have to be larger than any other - just far, far better at making low frequency sounds. That doesn't get us any further to
identifying the Blooper, but at least it relieves a bit of the pressure in having to find a 200-foot whale or something like it. Still, all we have to
work on is a single, poorly understood noise from 1997, so unless we hear a new Bloop, all we're likely to have is speculation and guesswork.¶ ¶
Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the preferred fanciful explanation for the Bloop. It
just so happens that the origin of
the Bloop noise is located in the same general part of the southern Pacific Ocean as the location H.P.
Lovecraft gave in his 1928 short story The Call of Cthulhu for the underwater, extra-dimensional city of
R'lyeh. The coincidence isn't that spooky - the two locations are about a thousand miles apart - but
the two are close enough together that Lovecraft fans have suggested the Bloop might well be the
sound of a snoozing Cthulhu.¶ ¶ Honestly, at this point, it seems roughly as believable as any other
explanation. It's really just nice to know the oceans are still keeping at least a few seriously hardcore mysteries.
Cthulhu is real, every nightmare, cult member, and insane person proves
Acrimonious 2003
(12th May, Randi Forums, Refuting the notion that there is no evidence for Cthulhu,
http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-5650.html, Accessed: 7/13/14, CD)
There seems to be this universal misconception amongst atheists that there is no evidence for
Cthulhu. I intend in this post to refute this notion. Unlike God, Cthulhu is definable: He is a Squid-faced
behemoth of a humanoid being, with dragon-like wings and giant pointy claws. Scripture tells us that
long, long ago, he cast a spell on himself and the other Great Old Ones, to put them into a timeless
sleep within the cyclopean stone houses of R`Lyeh. There, they sleep, waiting until the stars are right
and the earth is ready for their return. Unfortunately, R'lyeh has been tectonically active over the
ages, and has sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Water blocks Cthulhu's telepathy pretty bad.
Occasional instabilities cause the city to rise a little, and the telepathic emanations of Cthulhu reach
people in their sleep. This causes one of three things. 1) Bad dreams 2) Insanity 3) Total conversion
into the Cthulhu cult. You leave your life, disappear to some secluded stronghold of hybrid halfchildren of Cthulhu, and perform rituals to try and raise R'lyeh from its ocean depths. Have you ever
had a nightmare? That's evidence for Cthulhu, right there. Know anyone that's insane. More evidence!
Ever hear of a missing persons case where they are never found? Yep, worshipping Cthulhu. Have
oceanographers combed the entire expanse of the ocean floor? No, they haven't. If they had, they
would have found R'lyeh and GONE INSANE. It should be noted that I am not arguing that the
existence of Cthulhu is proved, nor that the existence of Cthulhu is as likely as the existence of other
people, nor even that the existence of Cthulhu is even likely. But trust me, if you ever visit Miskatonic
U, don't take them up on their offer to let you study the Necronomicon.
Ocean sounds off the coast of Chille proves Cthulhu is real
Ellis, BuzzFeed Staff, 13
(Adam , Oct. 23, Buzzfeed, 10 Of The Most Bizarre And Unsettling Conspiracy Theories,
http://www.buzzfeed.com/adamellis/most-bizarre-and-unsettling-conspiracy-theories, Accessed:
7/13/14, CD)
In 1997 an ultra-low and extremely powerful underwater sound was detected in a remote point in the
Pacific Ocean. The noise resembled that of a living creature, but several times louder than the loudest
recorded animal, the blue whale. It also occurred unsettlingly close to H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional city of
R’lyeh, the lost underwater mecca where malevolent cosmic entity Cthulhu supposedly slumbers.
Cthulhu is real, historical and archeological data proves
JasonColavito.com No Date given
( http://www.jasoncolavito.com/cthulhu-in-world-mythology.html, Accessed: 7/13/14, CD)
Denied by generations of scholars as mere fiction, astonishing new mythological and archaeological
evidence proves that an advanced and ancient global cult spread the worship of the octopus-headed
Great Cthulhu and his Old Ones to every corner of the prehistoric world—and gives a shockingly
eldritch and miasmal cast to some of history’s most important mythological tales. Why is it that the
Greeks feared a terrible monster with writhing tentacles? Why did peoples of the Pacific build
cyclopean stone “Houses of the Octopus” to enact the periodic resurrection of that strange mollusk?
Profound and persuasive, Jason Colavito’s historical bombshell Cthulhu in World Mythology is the
result of the author’s lifelong pursuit of the truth behind the widespread allusions to Cthulhu,
Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, and the Old Ones in world literature. The author masterfully weaves together
(in alphabetical order) ancient history, anthropology, archaeology, art history, astrology, astronomy,
Atlantis theory, demonology, linguistics, literary theory, mythology, the occult, religious studies, and
xenoarchaeology to tell the hidden history of early humanity.
Is a UFO
The conspiracy of Cthulu is a reality – though Lovecraft’s informants purposely
deviated from the truth to hide the real existence of the cult of cthulhu, Cthulhu was
not a god in the ocean, but a space ship created to travel the galexies exceeding the
speed of light – krackatoa, the construction of nan-madol, and ponopean culture all
reveal that micronesia was the site for the development of the trans-organic space
ship cthulhu
Shalizi No Date (Cosma Shalizi, Associate Professor Statistics, also was a published academic for the
Santa Fe institute Department Baker Hall 229C Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 USA http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/story-so-far/cthulhuproject.html, -BRW)
Appendix: The Cthulhu Project We note the following from H. P. Lovecraft's ``The Call of Cthulhu'': There
exists a conspiratorial organization of global reach; It is centered around ``the undying leaders of the cult
in the mountains of China''; ``Remains of Them [according to the ``deathless Chinamen''] were still to be
found as Cyclopean stones in islands in the Pacific''; ``When the stars were right, They could plunge from
world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live''; ``the center [of
the organization] lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Iram, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden
and untouched''; ``It was not allied to the European witch-cult''; The center of the interests of the cult
has moved under water; Biological abnormalities are of great interest to the cult; so is non-Euclidian
geometry. We conclude that Lovecraft was misinformed --- his informants do not appear to have been
the most stable individuals --- and that Cthulhu did not come from the stars, it will go to them.
Cthulhu is a starship. The ``cult'' is in fact the conspiracy; the links to China and Arabia are clear
evidence of this. The ``deathless Chinamen'' are obviously successful Chinese alchemists, and in the
Arabian Nights, Irem (or Iram) is reached by an alchemist with an astonishing ability to perform
biological transformations. The ``Cyclopean'' structures in the Pacific of which Lovecraft wrote must be
then ruins known as Nan Madol (also called Nan Matol), on the island of Ponape in the Carolines.
These were constructed when the Islamic and Chinese branches of the Conspiracy were at their
height. The non-alliance with the European witches is also explicable --- those who were not merely a
local reaction against Christianity were a splinter group, isolated and thrown on its own resources
during the Dark Ages, and detached from the Conspiracy as such. We may take the identification of the
Cthulhu cult and the Conspiracy as established. ``Plunging from world to world'' and the intense interest
in the stars and non-Euclidean geometry suffice to show that the project is about interstellar travel,
and at speeds greater than c at that. The link with biology is not so strange as it might seem. Evidently
the Conspiracy decided against human or mechanical control; instead, it is seeking to create a living
starship whose nervous system is already adapted to a wide range of non-Euclidean geometries and
the intricacies of space travel, as ours is adapted to Euclidean geometry and throwing things. The
"when the stars are right" formula is a misunderstanding; when it is working properly, Cthulhu will
plunge from world to world, from the Earth to the stars. When they are not right, Cthulhu is quiescent,
inactive, in a state of suspended animation - dead. The possible incorporation of more conventional
mechanical elements may have contributed to the notion that Cthulhu is somehow at once alive and
dead. Evidently the Cthulhu project began in Irem, but was forced, for some reason, to relocate to the
east --- much further east. The Kitab al-Azif, later known in the west as the Necronomicon, is evidently a
product of the research carried out at Irem. The Greek name translates as the ``Book of the laws [or
rules or science, etc.] of the dead.'' It may thus either refer to those syntheses which were not fully
``alive,'' or to unsuccessful projects. Some hundreds of years after the relocation to Ponape, that site
too was abandoned, being left to the native (or perhaps encroaching) Micronesians. We believe it
unlikely that the Cthulhu project went to Easter Island or the still unexplored highlands of Papua New
Guinea. Instead, it is probably that they moved under water. The sea, after all, is a free-fall
environment, abundant in resources and energy, and even possesses some insulation against the
seismic activity of the Pacific, as the survival of coral reefs attest. Reports of Cthulhu indicate a
tremendous size and an at least partially cephalopod nature. Octopodes are the most intelligent of the
invertebrates, and in addition possess dexterous limbs. It is not implausible that the Conspiracy as
altered some of them sufficiently to make them valuable graduate students, if not researchers, and
may even have incorporated cephalopod elements into the starship. Under water, huge structures
may be assembled, such as blue whales, giant squid, and starships, ignoring the constraints of gravity,
no more relevant there than in space. This hypothesis explains some otherwise quite puzzling data.
The relationship of the Cthulhu cult to the Deep Ones and shoggoths is now plain as a pikestaff, as is
their preference for remote areas, where the Conspiracy could work on them undisturbed by priests,
princes and people in general. (There are other, and quite obvious, advantages to situating research
facilities in the South Pacific.) The elucidation of a fact which has perplexed scholars for decades namely, that Nan Matol means in space --- is now trivial. Further, it is in full accordance with local
tradition. The common belief of the Cargo Cults that European wealth was due to the migration of their
ancestral magicians to England and Holland is, in a sense, perfectly true. So, rightly viewed, are the
Ponapean legends about the origin of Nan Matol: ``The story that Hambruch [A German anthropologist
who visited Ponape in 1908-10] heard about the building of Nan Matol tells how two young wizards,
Olo-Sipe and Olo-Sopa [or: Olo-Shipe and Olo-Shaupa], set out from Jokaz [a nearby island] to build a
great cult center to the gods, demons, and ghosts. They tried several places on the coasts of Ponape,
but each time the wind and the surf destroyed their handiwork. At last they found their ideal site at
Temuen. A mighty spell made the basaltic prisms on Jokaz fly through the air and settle down in the
right positions to form Nan Matol.... ``Until recent times Nan Matol was used as a center for the
worship of the turtle god Nanusunsap. Whenever the Ponapeans caught a sea turtle, they brought it to
Nan Matol and kept it in one of the buildings. When the tribe was assembled, the priests anointed the
turtle with coconut oil and hung it with ornaments. The priests loaded the turtle into a boat and paddled
about the canals of Nan Matol, while one priest stared at the turtle and blinked his eyes every time the
turtle blinked. When they arrived at Pan Katera, where a fire had been lit, a priest killed the turtle by
breaking its shell with a club. The turtle was cut up, cooked, and served to the priests and the king, with
prayers and ritual. ``In the reign of the Nan-Marki Luk-En-Mueiu, about 1800, the ritual was brought to
an end in a ridiculous fashion. At one ceremony, a priest got no roast turtle. He walked out in a rage,
howling curses, and went off to live by himself on a sand bank and eat eels. [Compare the American
children's song: ``Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms.'' It goes on to describe
the gastronomic delights of annelidophagy in detail.] The Metalanimians [i.e. natives] feared that he had
so profaned the ceremony that they could no longer hold it. ``The Ponapeans also had myths about a
dragon or giant lizard. In one version, the dragon lived in Jokaz and gave birth to two girls. When the
girls grew up, they married the reigning Satalur and asked their husband to let their mother come to live
in Nan Matol. When he assented, the dragon moved into one of the buildings, excavating the canals of
Nan Matol in the process. ``Next morning, when the Satalur brought some food for his mother-in- law,
he saw the dragon for the first time. In terror he burned up the house and the dragon. His wives jumped
into the fire and burned themselves up too; and in his grief the Satalur did likewise. The likeliest
explanation for the dragon myth is that Ponape was once visited by the New Guinean crocodile, a large
man-eating species often found swimming in the open sea, where one would never expect to see a
crocodile.'' (pp. 233-235 of L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp, Ancient Ruins and Archaeology.) The last
sentence of rationalization is easily explained. L. S. de Camp was a protege of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton
Smith and Howard Carter. Undoubtedly his researches into the roots of these men's ideas lead him to
the Conspiracy. If he is not a member, he is at least a pawn, attempting to cover the traces of the
Secret Masters of the Conspiracy. The de Camps begin their chapter on Nan Matol with the quotation
And there, in sombre splendour by the shore Of Hali dark, an ancient city stood; Black monolithic domes
and towers loom Stark, gigantic in the starless gloom Like druid menhirs in a haunted wood. from Carter.
Hali is a lake associated with Hastur, full of - need it be said? --- octopodes. (The novel The Moon Pool,
by A. Merritt, is set (in part) in Nan Matol; the rest of its action takes place in a civilization of astonishing
scientific sophistication beneath the Pacific. Cephalopods are specifically mentioned by one character as
a plausible form of non-human intelligence. The immediate sequel, The Metal Emperor, deals with
artificial intelligences and what appear to be the descendants of participants of the Balkh Conference in
the inner reaches of Central Asia --- i.e., Lovecraft's Leng. The Face in the Abyss implies that there is at
least one transhuman Secret Master of the Conspiracy in the Andes, while the Dwellers in the Mirage
has fascinating parallels with Cthulhu. How Merritt --- an editor for the Hearst papers --- came by his
astonishing knowledge of the Conspiracy --- to say nothing of his distinctive, perhaps unique prose --- is
a mystery.) The insanity of Lovecraft's informants is thus quite rational. The creation of a living
starship, hardwired to make sense of quantum gravity and general relativity, would have been
incomprehensible to any non-Conspirator before this century; and communication with such an entity
--- especially a not-fully-debugged prototype --- as good a way as any of frying one's neurons. In fact,
the testing of FTL starships appears distinctly hazardous. Things go wrong in unpleasant ways. One of
them was the Krakatoa explosion - ominously, right on the Pacific. Another was the Tunguska event. It
went up; it came down; it did horrible things to large parts of Siberia and spawned new religions among
the aborigines. According to Lovecraft, the later test in the 1920s merely drove thousands of people
insane. We may observe that the Conspiracy has been making progress. His published date does not
match that of the start of the great stock market bubble, but he may have fudged matters a little. No
doubt subsequent tests have been responsible for other instances of wide-spread lunacy --- the reelection of Ronald Wilson Reagan springs to mind. Lovecraft evidently misunderstood the Conspiracy, if
in fact he was not deliberately fed disinformation by its enemies. The divergence between an ancient
and unspeakable alien deity and a man-made starship boggles the mind. Nonetheless, he was right
about one thing: Nothing will ever be the same after Cthulhu rises. Incidentally, based on his interest
in space travel, the deep oceans and giant squid, we can confirm that A. C. Clarke is a Conspirator.
Conspiracy-Skepticism Turns
Link/Impact
Rejecting conspiracy theories props up violent state power
Pigden, 2007 (Charles, Philosophy professor at the University of Otago, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional
Wisdom.”Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2 (2007) 219-232)
But if
a conspiracy theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy – a secret plan on the part of some group to
if a conspiracy theorist is someone who subscribes to a conspiracy
theory, then the conventional wisdom itself is not just suspect, but obviously absurd. A theory, in my book, is a
more or less organized body of propositions designed to explain some alleged facts. Theories can be
true or false, well or badly confirmed, and when they are sufficiently well-confirmed, they can rise to
the dignity of knowledge. Indeed in common parlance we can even talk about proving theories, though this is a usage that would
shock true Popperians. Thus to call something a theory is not to suggest that it is tentative, speculative or
unproven, though many theories are, of course, tentative, speculative or unproven. Now, if a conspiracy
theory is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy, then every politically and historically literate person
is a big-time conspiracy theorist, since every such person subscribes to a vast range of conspiracy
theories. That is, historically literate people believe organized bodies of propositions that explain alleged
facts by positing conspiracies. For there are many facts that admit of no non-conspiratorial explanation
and many conspiracy theories that are sufficiently well-established to qualify as knowledge.¶ It is difficult,
if not impossible, to mount a coup without conspiring, a point that is evident to all. Hence anyone who believes there are such
things as coups must subscribe to a set of conspiracy theories however vague. Although some assassinations are
influence events by partly secret means – and
due to "lone gunmen" many are group efforts, and the efforts of those groups are usually planned in secret. (Had the plans of Brutus and
Cassius been public, Caesar could have avoided the Senate House or arrested the potential murderers before they struck.) Thus anyone
who knows anything about the Ides of March or the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or
the Tsar Alexander II is bound to subscribe to a conspiracy theory, and hence to be a conspiracy theorist.¶ But coups
and assassinations are not even the half of it. Disappearances are usually conspiratorial affairs, since if you want to disappear someone, you
had better not let them know when you are coming. Of course, it can add to the fun if you let your victims know, in a general way, that
somebody is out to get them (and many goons [End Page 222] indulge this pleasure with threatening phone calls and other such "warnings"),
but if you are a member of a goon squad, it is a good idea to conceal your identity as well as your precise plans. And if you are organizing a
campaign of disappearances, it is well to keep your activities secret. After all, picking up your political opponents and having them jailed,
tortured or executed is generally regarded as not quite nice, particularly for Presidents and Prime Ministers. And you can never be quite sure
that some tedious do-gooder from the International Criminal Court won't catch up with you in the end.¶ Much
of the same
considerations apply if you plan to clean up the city by butchering the local street kids in Brazil,
Columbia or Honduras. Indeed, mass killings generally are often planned and partly executed in
secret, the Holocaust being the supreme example, though one might also cite Stalin's purges . (It is
strange to suppose the massacre of millions of people could be shrouded in secrecy but that is the
way it was. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish activist with a passionate interest in politics, and as well
informed as a private person was likely to be, did not hear about "Auschwitz" – by which, I presume
she means the Nazi extermination program generally – until 1943, and did not regard it as a proven
fact until six months later (Arendt 2000, 13).) If, like the "Young Marshal", Zhang Xueliang, in X'ian 1937, you plan to kidnap the Head
of State with a view to coercing him into changing his policy (Fenby 2003, 1–18), you had better not let him know in advance, and the operation
had better be begun in secret to maximize the chance of success.¶ Even
at the everyday level of democratic politics,
conspiracies are not uncommon. If my party leader is trailing in the polls and I am planning a
leadership "spill", I had best not let her know until I have a substantial number of MPs behind me.
There is usually a good deal of secret plotting and furtive feeling out of potential supporters before a leadership challenge erupts into the open.
In many countries it is not unknown for politicians and state officials to take bribes and misappropriate public funds. For obvious reasons, these
activities are usually planned and executed in secret. Thus
if you believe in such things you must be a conspiracy
theorist of sorts, even if you are hazy about the details.¶ Even in the small change of commercial life, conspiracies
abound, a point acknowledged by Adam Smith, whose belief in the invisible hand of the market did not entail skepticism about the invisible
hands of individual conspirators: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation
ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices" (Smith 1981, 135). "Masters too sometimes enter into particular
combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this [actual] rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the
moment of execution" (84).¶ But I need not belabor a point that I have argued at length elsewhere.7 History and the nightly news (not to
mention common sense) all tell the same tale: people often conspire. Hence there is no reason to think that theories that postulate
conspiracies are much more likely to be false than theories that explain the same events without the aid of conspiracies. Indeed there are many
events for which there is no sane non-conspiratorial [End Page 223] explanation. The Young Marshal's men did not individually decide without
prior consultation to kidnap Chiang that day at X'ian in 1937, and if Mary Queen of Scots did not conspire to murder Lord Darnley at Kirk o'
Fields in 1567, then somebody else did.¶ This
suggests three conclusions:¶ If conspiracy theories are theories that
posit conspiracies, then the epistemic principle that conspiracy theories as such ought not to be
believed or even investigated is absurd. It only makes sense on the assumption that conspiracy theories are much more likely to
be false than their non-conspiratorial rivals and this assumption is false. The ploy of dismissing critical allegations as
conspiracy theories is not intellectually respectable, whatever the conventional wisdom may say.¶ If I
manage to convince the learned and the semi-learned worlds of this (not just academics, but journalists and the punditocracy) I shall not have
lived in vain. For the
idea that conspiracy theories as such are intellectually suspect helps conspirators,
quite literally, to get away with murder (of which killing people in an unjust war is an instance). If George Bush did seriously
propose the bombing of Al Jazeera, then the President of the United States is the kind of man who is prepared to murder journalists for putting
out news stories that he happens to dislike. And if
there is evidence of this, which apparently there is, then it ought
to be investigated. An epistemic principle that can help shield a politician from such an investigation is
not merely ridiculous (though it is, of course, ridiculous) – it's a threat to the common wealth.¶
Conspiracy-skepticism is a tactic used by elites and institutions allowing them to
commit atrocities, murder, and oppressive violence without consequence.
Pigden, 2007 (Charles, Philosophy professor at the University of Otago, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional
Wisdom.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2 (2007) 219-232)
But important as this is, there are more interesting points to note. Brian Keeley (1999) contends that certain sorts of conspiracy theories ought
not to be believed, not just because they are unlikely, but because to believe them would be to commit a sort of epistemic suicide. Following
C.A.J. Coady, he argues
that much of what we know, we know on the basis of testimony. If testimony is
not largely reliable then we know virtually nothing. To suppose that testimony is largely unreliable is to suppose that we
know virtually nothing, and this is something that we rationally ought not to believe. He then goes on to claim that many conspiracy theories –
at least many that are castigated as such – require such a large amount of lying by so many people that they call testimony itself into question.
Therefore there are many conspiracy theories that we ought not to believe and the conventional wisdom is not so silly after all.¶ This
argument has two premises: a) the epistemic principle that we ought not to believe a thesis that
requires such extensive lying as to call testimony into question, and b) the factual claim that many
conspiracy theories require so much coordinated lying as to do precisely this. The first is dubious, the
second false. But what I want to argue now is that the boot is on the other foot. There are better reasons of essentially the same kind for
rejecting the epistemic principle that by and large we ought not believe or even investigate conspiracy theories.¶ History, as we know it,
both from documentary evidence and the best historians, is choc-a-bloc with conspiracies. Thus if
conspiracy theories are theories that [End Page 224] posit conspiracies, then to accept the conventional wisdom and adopt
the principle that we ought not believe or investigate conspiracy theories would lead to the
conclusion that history is bunk, that much of what we thought we knew is not only unbelievable, but
not worth investigating. Much of recorded history would dissolve into a blur of inexplicable events, indeed events we should not even
try to explicate. To adopt this principle would be to commit historical suicide or at least self-mutilation, to make large
chunks of history unbelievable and hence unknowable, since knowledge requires belief. It would maim, if not destroy, history as an intellectual
discipline. But it is not rational to adopt an epistemic principle with such catastrophic consequences.
Therefore it is not rational to suppose that we should not believe or even investigate conspiracy theories.¶ Perhaps it is worth stressing how
catastrophic this principle would be, if consistently practiced. (In fact nobody does this; rather people like Blair apply it in a haphazard way
when it happens to suit their political purposes.) We
would be entitled to believe that large quantities of gunpowder
were discovered in the cellars of Parliament in 1605, but not that Guy Fawkes and his confederates
put it there, for that would be a conspiracy theory. We could accept that Lord Darnley died, but not that anybody killed
him, since all the available explanations are conspiracy theories. We could accept that the "Rightist-Trotskyite Bloc" was put on trial in 1938,
but we could not allow ourselves to believe that they were either guilty or innocent, since both beliefs entail a conspiracy. (If they were guilty
then there was a treasonable conspiracy of spies and wreckers at the heart of the Soviet State. If they were innocent, there was a tyrannical
conspiracy on the part of Stalin and others to fabricate the appearance of conspiracy.) We
could notice that a lot of
communists were massacred in China in 1927, but we could not rationally suppose that Chiang had
conspired to kill them, for that would be a conspiracy theory. We could accept that World War II took
place, but not that the Nazis conspired to wage it since that would be a conspiracy theory. (Good news for
some of the Nuremburg defendants!) We could accept that the Holocaust occurred but not that anyone, Hitler
included, conspired to bring it about.¶ Moreover, we would not even be allowed to investigate these questions, since any
answer we came up with would be something we were not entitled to believe. If the conventional wisdom is correct, and we ought not to
believe conspiracy theories, then history is bunk, since it is largely unbelievable, the kind of thing that we are rationally required not to believe.
But history is not bunk. Much of it merits belief, and that includes the many conspiracy theories of which we have ample evidence. Thus the
conventional wisdom is wrong and conspiracy theories need not be rejected simply because they are
conspiracy theories. What about my third conclusion? This concerns political crimes and current events, the recent rather than the
remote past. Most political crimes, from disappearances and illegal bombing campaigns down to breaking
peaceniks' noses or burglarizing the campaign headquarters of [End Page 225] the opposition party, are the
products of conspiracy. Thus if conspiracy theories are theories that posit conspiracies, then if we adopted the principle
that we should not believe and should not investigate conspiracy theories, we could not hold anyone
responsible for such crimes. For to do so would be to accept some conspiracy theory or other. This would be an epistemic
disaster, since our understanding of the political scene would dissolve in a mist of skepticism broken by islands of obvious fact. We could
believe in the dead bodies but not that anyone had conspired to kill them; believe in the missing
money, but not in the felonious theft. And it would a political disaster, since it would confer immunity
on political criminals of all sorts, from the perpetrators of genocide down to bribe-taking
congressmen. We could not punish people for crimes that we were not entitled to believe in or investigate. Thus it would be both
politically and epistemically irrational to adopt the strategy of not believing in and not investigating conspiracy theories. So the conventional
wisdom is wrong, and it is not the case that we ought not to believe and ought not to investigate such theories. When
it comes to
conspiracy theories, we are within our rights as rational beings not only to investigate them, but
actually to believe in them, if that is what the evidence suggests. ¶ Again it is worth stressing just how catastrophic
the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism would be if we applied it consistently, rather than using it from time to time to get out of political
difficulties or to rubbish allegations that we find inconvenient. To begin with, the political world would be largely unintelligible. We would be
officially debarred from understanding coups, or the crimes of terrorists as intentional actions, since in both cases the intentions behind the
overt acts are formulated in secret. Hence they cannot be understood as intentional acts without resorting to conspiracy. We could all
acknowledge that the bombs had gone off, but we could not suppose that someone had planted them, since that would be a conspiracy theory.
We could accept that two planes had hit the Twin Towers, but we could not allow ourselves to suppose they had been hijacked and deliberately
crashed, since that could not have happened without a conspiracy. The nightly news would be bobbing with islands of unintelligibility, since we
would be officially debarred from understanding any action involving secret plans. (I defy anyone to make sense of recent events in Iraq
without taking account of the orgy of plotting that undoubtedly goes on. Death squads don't advertise their plans, neither do guerillas,
gangsters, terrorists or devious politicians.) We would be allowed to understand natural phenomena and open actions, openly arrived at. And
we might even treat ourselves to unintended consequences provided these did not involve secret plotting. But we would
be officially
blind to covert actions and secret plans. This would not quite be epistemic suicide, since there are some events within the
political sphere that we would be allowed to understand. But to adopt the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism would
be the epistemic equivalent of self-mutilation and hence not a rational thing to do. But epistemically
disastrous as conspiratorial skepticism would be, its political consequences would be catastrophic. For when it comes to conspiracy
we would [End Page 226] be both officially blind and officially incurious. Under this regime, Woodward
and Bernstein would not have been allowed to investigate Watergate, and even if they had, nobody would have
been rationally entitled to believe their results. Nixon would have gotten away with his crimes. For if conspiracy theories were
taboo, there could be no question of impeaching the President for "high crimes and misdemeanors",
since most of those high crimes and misdemeanors were planned and executed in secret. The career of an
investigative journalist like Seymour Hersh would stand condemned as one long exercise in irrationality since investigative journalism largely
consists of investigating conspiracies and exposing them to the public gaze. If
it is irrational to check out conspiracy
theories, then the investigative part is a crime against reason, and if it is irrational to believe them,
then the journalistic part is a crime against reason too, since it often consists in writing up conspiracy
theories so as to encourage belief in the reader. One of the biggest problems with human rights
abuses is impunity. Because the goons and their masters can usually get away with murder or worse,
they have no compelling reason to cease and desist. But since most human rights abuses are the
products of conspiracy, if we adopted the strategy of neither investigating nor believing conspiracy
theories, impunity would become rationally sacrosanct. We could not investigate human rights abuses since, for the
most part, this involves investigating conspiracy theories, and even if we could, we could not condemn their perpetrators, since to do that we
would have to accept a conspiracy theory. Conspiratorial
skepticism would provide the torturers and killers with a
charter of impunity since it would become an epistemic no-no to shine a light into the dark places
where they commit their crimes. Terrorists too would be immune from investigation, let alone
conviction, since their crimes are usually planned in secret.¶ More generally, it is a platitude of liberal democracy that
the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. At least part of what this means is that we must beware of power-hungry politicians conspiring to
deprive us of our liberties. But if
we were not allowed to investigate conspiracy theories then our vigilance
would be confined to the public actions of politicians rather than their secret plans. We would have
become officially blind to some of the most serious threats to liberty. And even if we somehow discovered such a
conspiracy we would not be allowed to act on that discovery, since we could not act on a theory we had debarred ourselves from believing.
According to Edmund Burke, "There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men." But if the conventional
wisdom is correct, we should not believe in the evil of evil men unless that evil is out in the open! Thus
if you hate the freedoms of
a democratic society, you should cultivate the opinion that conspiracy theories are unbelievable.
Conversely, if you want to strike a blow for liberty (or if you want to be able to see the threats to
liberty in order to be capable of striking a blow for it), this is a thesis you that should reject. [End Page 227]
Conspiracy-skepticism is an integral tool of the state to shield its power abuses making
them invisible and dismissable.
Pigden, 2007 (Charles, Philosophy professor at the University of Otago, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional
Wisdom.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2 (2007) 219-232)
If I am right, the
conventional wisdom on conspiracy theories is not just misguided, but absurd. For it
implies an epistemic principle that flies in the face of history and would be politically catastrophic if
put into practice. It would blind us to the machinations of torturers and scheming politicians, and
would convert a large part of the political realm into a chaos of incoherent effects whose causes were
beyond the reach of rational enquiry. But my conclusions only follow given an important proviso – that conspiracy theories are
theories that posit conspiracies. But perhaps this is not what the pundits mean. If Tony Blair aspires to consistency it had better not be what he
means, since in recent years, the foreign policy of the United Kingdom was officially based on three distinct conspiracy theories (in my sense),
one true and two false:¶ That the events of 9/11 were due to a conspiracy on the part of Al Qaeda (which was itself in league with the Taliban).¶
That the regime of Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, making him in some sense an accessory to the events of 9/11.¶ That the
regime of Saddam Hussein had successfully conspired to evade the UN inspectors and had acquired (or retained) weapons of mass destruction
and was perhaps on the way (via the acquisition of yellowcake from Niger) to gaining a nuclear capability, thus making the regime a clear and
present danger both to the UK and the US.11¶ So what do Blair and the pundits mean, when they state or imply that conspiracy theories ought
not to be believed? Not that theories that posit conspiracies ought not to be believed, since they themselves are prepared to trumpet theories
of precisely this kind. But if not this, then what?¶
Perhaps "a conspiracy theory" is a theory that not only posits a
conspiracy, but also meets some further condition X ; for example, a conspiracy theory that
contradicts the official view, and suggests evil deeds on the part of government officials or
government agencies. The idea is that we are rationally required not to believe theories like that,
though it may be is all right to believe in conspiracy theories so long as they are consistent with
received opinion, or don't involve wrong-doing by government officials. But this modified principle is
not much better than its predecessor.¶ It is true that one of the conspiracy theories on which British foreign policy relied comes
out as believable according to this principle. We can believe without irrationality that the events of 9/11 were due
to a conspiracy on the part of Al Qaeda, since Al Qaeda is not a government agency. But what about the other
two?¶ Here we hit a problem. In Iraq the theory that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda was both
inconsistent with the official view and posited evil deeds on the part of the Head of State. Thus in Iraq
it was a conspiracy theory in the revised sense. Not so in Britain. Thus it was permissible to believe it
in Britain but rationally wrong to believe it in Iraq. The same goes for the third conspiracy theory, that Saddam had
successfully conspired to acquire WMDs. An epistemic principle that forbids a theory [End Page 228] in Baghdad but
allows it in London leaves something to be desired even if it saves Tony Blair from the threat of pragmatic inconsistency.¶
The conventional wisdom has metamorphosed into the claim that we should not believe or
investigate conspiracy theories involving evil plots by government agents if this contradicts official
opinion. But this can be given a relativistic or an absolute reading: either that you should not believe theories that
depict evil conspiracies involving your own government that are inconsistent with the official view in
your own country, or that you should not believe theories that depict evil conspiracies involving any
government and that are inconsistent with official opinion anywhere.¶ On the relativistic reading, this
principle permits some people to believe theories that it forbids to others, though those who are
forbidden to believe may have better evidence for the theory than those who are allowed to accept it.
If people all around you are being disappeared by Death Squads and you are tempted (despite the
President's denials) to suspect government complicity, the revised epistemic principle insists that you resist
this temptation, even though people on the other side of the world, who don't have access to your
evidence, are quite at liberty to believe it! The strategy might not be historically disastrous, since you would be allowed to
believe in conspiracy theories about the dark doings of previous governments, so long as they were consistent with current opinion. But in
many countries it would render political events unintelligible, since in many countries evil conspiracies on the part of
government members dominate the political scene. And in rendering the populace politically blind the strategy would render them politically
impotent. You can't even begin to solve a problem if you are duty-bound to ignore it. The absolute version of this
strategy would be less bizarre but more catastrophic: less bizarre because what is rational to believe would not vary from place to place; more
catastrophic because it would debar us from believing in evil conspiracies on the part of governments anywhere if those theories were
inconsistent with some official view. Bad news for Amnesty International, bad news for their clients the world over as they are imprisoned,
beaten, murdered and tortured, since you can't write letters on behalf of people whose problems you are not allowed to believe in. But I need
not spill any more ink denouncing a strategy that nobody seriously advocates. For the
concept of a conspiracy theory as it is
commonly employed is a chauvinist construct. It is not to be understood in terms of governments
generally, but in terms of Western governments, and recent Western governments at that. When
people say or imply that conspiracy theories ought not to be believed, what they actually mean (in so
far as they have a coherent idea) is that we should not believe theories that postulate evil schemes on
the part of recent or contemporary Western governments (or government agencies) and that run counter to
the current orthodoxy in the relevant Western countries.¶ Thus you can believe that Saddam had
successfully conspired to acquire nuclear weapons since the chief conspirator in this particular drama was not a member of
a Western government. And you can believe that members of the Reagan administration conspired to evade the Boland Amendment by selling
arms to Iran to finance the [End Page 229] Contras, since the existence of this conspiracy is currently consistent with received opinion. But
you must not believe that Bush considered bombing Al Jazeera (let alone that the earlier bombings of Al Jazeera
offices were intentional) for that theory involves evil schemes on the part of a Western leader and
contradicts the official view.¶ Is this a sensible belief-forming strategy? Obviously not. An epistemic strategy should
maximize the chances of truth and minimize the chances of error. But if this strategy had been
pursued in the past, many politically important truths would never have come to light. For there are
many theories that are not conspiracy theories now, though they were conspiracy theories in the past:
the theory that the Kennedy administration conspired to overthrow Diem, the theory that CREEP conspired to
burglarize the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building, the theory that members of the Reagan
administration conspired to sell weapons to Iran in order to fund the Contras. All these theories were
once inconsistent with official opinion, though nowadays official opinion has managed to catch up
with the facts. Thus it would have been an epistemic mistake to have adopted this strategy in the past. More importantly, it would have
been a political mistake. If these activities had gone unnoticed, there would have been no check on the abuse of Presidential power, which
would probably have gone on to worse excesses. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. The revised strategy would have sent us to sleep.¶
Thus the conventional wisdom has proved to be unwise. On any of the readings of "conspiracy theory" that I have been able to come up with, it
is not the case that we should neither believe nor investigate conspiracy theories. If you wish to vindicate the conventional wisdom, you must
do two things. First you must give an interpretation of the term "conspiracy theory" with roughly the right extension. (Most of the theories
castigated as "conspiracy theories" must qualify as such, and most of the conspiracy-postulating theories that conspiracy skeptics believe in
must not.) You must then show that on this interpretation, the strategy of neither investigating nor believing in conspiracies makes epistemic
sense. Until this is done, the idea that conspiracy theories as such are intellectually suspect is a superstition that can be safely dismissed.
Modern Political Discourse Frames Conspiracy Theorists and Deranged and Delusional
Maniacs Who Are Unable to Decipher Reality From Fantasy—this allows for the
uncritical acceptance of state power
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 11-12
The belief that the paranoid style was a political fringe phenomenon was expanded to encompass
more than the radical right, which was Hofstadter‘s primary concern. Scholars such as David Brion Davis, writing within a few years
of Hofstadter, noted that virtually all counter- subversive movements, whether from the political right or left, contained elements of
Hofstadter‘s paranoid style. 46 Today, over forty years later, Hofstadter‘s delineation of a ―paranoid style‖ continues to be influential in
scholarly and popular media. As Bratich observed, ―Most serious contemporary analysts of conspiracy theories (on various points on the
political spectrum) cite Hofstadter. In so doing, they use conspiracy theories as paradigmatic of the =paranoid style.‘‖ 47 Current
conceptions of those suffering from the delusions of conspiracy now range from the politically
disaffected (e.g., African Americans) to the most powerful leaders in the country. 48 There continues to be a
default assumption cast against conspiracy theories that automatically presumes them to be a type of
―paranoid‖ pathology, sometimes blurring the line between the political and clinical pathologies. 49
Those who view belief in conspiracy theories as a clinical delusion call to mind crackpots who cling to
conspiratorial beliefs because of their mental incapacity for determining real from fictive causal events. Daniel Pipes compares belief in
conspiracy to a ―titillation,‖ or a ―modish … taste for puzzles and puzzlement.‖ 50 Regardless of a ―modish‖ taste for conspiracy, Pipes
emphasizes that belief in conspiracy is dangerous because it has the capability of becoming the way one ―views life itself,‖ where one no
longer can distinguish between fact and fiction. Robert Robins and Jerrold Post posit that when political leaders suffer from the paranoid style it
can lead to hatred and result in a remarkable amount of bloodshed. 51 Conspiracy
beliefs, for these scholars, are
misguided, seductive, and dangerous and operate from a premise that there is a ―proper‖ or
―rational‖ way to view history and current situations, as opposed to an ―improper‖ or ―irrational‖
view.
“Uniqueness”
Critics rarely review completely conspiracy theory – this invalidates their arguments
against them
Goshorn 00 (Kevin Goshorn, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames of Containment: On Critical
Paranoia and Anti-Conspiracy Discourse"; published in 2000 in Theory and Events, Vol. 4, Issue 3;
paragraph(s) 28-30)
The primary virtue of this collection is its self-conscious effort to make distinctions within not only different
forms of conspiracy theory, but different forms of paranoia, recognizing some to be more appropriate than others
according to context. Against the grain of the typical assessment , the volume demonstrates that not all conspiracy
theories are necessarily paranoid. Exemplary here is Jamer Hunt's essay "Paranoid, Critical,
Methodical, Dalí, Koolhaas, and..." where Salvador Dalí's 'Paranoid-Critical Method' is traced from through a 1970's
"resuscitation" by Rem Koolhaas. This provocative discussion is concerned with the relevance of a mode of paranoia to scientific discovery, the
hermeneutic method, and the gap between conspiracy and theory. The
editor's introduction tries to show how only
certain forms of conspiracy theorizing today have any connection to Hofstadter's characterizations of
the "paranoid style" which today, he contends, only applies to certain popular resentments in US society
"...located in groups organized by fundamentalism, extremisms, and cult religions of all kinds." (2) Of course one man's extremism
is another man's normalcy in the United States, and even this volume has a few essays which are entirely too dismissive of
certain popular suspicions and populist gestures of dissent which can be confused with conspiracy theories when viewed from afar. Still, the
variety and the characteristic suspension of judgement in several of the contributions, together with
their short length, in some ways collectively accomplishes more than the full length analyses of a
single author's perspectives in the other volumes. The book's formal recognition of the functional existence of paranoia
within various forms of reason provides a refreshing change from those dedicated to not much more than debunking the validity of anything
associated with conspiracy discourse. In presenting his choice of articles, Marcus offers a cautious defense of some forms of conspiracy thinking
through his notion of "paranoia within reason," where more play is given to what is finally constrained in every reasoning process. Here the
stakes are the large ones of defining and affecting the real, again, without a compass (as in the pieces of this volume, the real of climate change,
the real of the fragmented self in therapy, the real of open markets for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the real of the physics of
teleportation, and the real of scientific truth in Imre Lakatos's skepticism. (5)This brief list shows well the range of sites the volume has
managed to cover. Yet
the most noticeable lack of the collection is its apparent avoidance of the most
notorious conspiracy issues that forced the general subject onto the international media map in the
past decade, those with really "large stakes" that have defined and affected national histories
-- the
assassination of American Presidents and political leaders, or the controversial origins of fatal epidemic diseases like aids and Ebola, or even the
irrepressible questions of UFOs and extra-terrestrial contact -- all
of which involve highly uncomfortable interrogations
of the national security state apparatus. There are, of course, many possible reasons for this, including the availability of other
existing treatments of these subjects and their near-fatal appropriation by the X-Files genre of entertainment. There is, however,
ample compensation for these lackings, including an excellent summary of the covert history of the
manipulation of Italian democracy in the post-war period by coalitions of fascists, NATO military
elements, and interlinked Italian and American intelligence operatives. "The Usual Suspects," by Andrea Aureli is
just the kind of well-researched piece that is often lacking on equally crucial covert histories within the United States during the same period. It
will no doubt be well appreciated by the large "alternative" audience that tries to follow the difficult
trail of such histories. Readers will be further rewarded by another fine article in the collection touching the same period in Italy's
history: "The Judas Kiss of Giulio Andreotti, " by Robin Wagner-Pacifici.
Many scholars refrain from writing on conspiracy theories – commenting on such
theories in any other way than satire stigmatizes the scholar, simultaneously and
allegedly invalidating said scholar’s works – scholars avoid such writings to maintain
their own credibility
Goshorn 00 (Kevin Goshorn, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames of Containment: On Critical
Paranoia and Anti-Conspiracy Discourse"; published in 2000 in Theory and Events, Vol. 4, Issue 3;
paragraph(s) 54-55)
One of the primary justifications offered for referring to the peculiar emerging conditions of
postmodernity as a distinct historical period has been the development of previously unknown
methods for the programming of subjectivities through various networks of commercial media and
public spectacle, and the subsequent "colonization of the interior" to which all subjects are vulnerable to some degree. A public
reaction to this is now often recognized as a component in the contextual understanding of the
growing popular attraction to conspiracy theorizing. Yet seldom is it acknowledged that such an
analysis was also meant to include not only those subjects who would resist such recuperation, but
those who would seek an external position from which to understand or criticize it
-- a position that was
recognized to be increasingly difficult to occupy under these same conditions. For the academic scholar who would avoid his or her own
implication in this analysis, the
most common reaction to this process operates through something we can
only refer to as "strategic conformism" or more colloquially, "careerism" -- in fact not such a bad word in as much as it implies
individual desires for success, status and money, and the directly related constraints of "professional" demands, all of which are in the process
of being revalorized by the intense promotion of the virtues of the "new economy" and the globalization of its "market values."
Responding to these pressures demands an elision of self-implication and spurs a return to the
unquestioned masterful position of the objectively distanced scholar of the past. All of which leads ultimately
to a reconsideration of the alleged depoliticization of the academy (once again), and how such charges are successfully ignored in the call to
professionalism.
In its most pedestrian form careerism manifests itself when one decides against writing
about subjects that are simply too controversial . Usually what is controversial in the American
academy, as elsewhere, is one of two things: making a politically inflected criticism of current events, or
getting too close to an area that may be beyond the pale of the internalized boundaries of the
reasonable and responsible pursuits of the respectable scholar. Because anything other than a humorous discussion of
"conspiracy theory" was until recently a sign of sheer folly, if not of dangerous deviation away from one's own best professional interests, all of
the writers discussed here deserve credit for having the initial courage to break through those careerist restraints
Conspiracy Impacts
Biopower
Governmentality and totalizing control over regimes of truth forms the basis of
oppressive state power
Marshall, University of Auckland - Emeritus Professor School of Education, 95
(James D, Foucault And Neo-Liberalism: Biopower And Busno-power, http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/EPS/PESYearbook/95_docs/marshall.html)
Foucault also develops the notion of governmentality as the art of government or, as it is sometimes
referred to, the "reason of state." This notion "refers to the state, to its nature and to its own
rationality." He sees the technologies of domination and the self as being the techniques used "to
make of the individual a significant element for the state." By "government" Foucault should be
understood as meaning something close to "the conduct of conduct." This is a form of activity which
attempts or aims at the conduct of persons; it is the attempt to shape, to guide, or to affect not only
the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways that they can be
governed. In Foucault's work this activity of governance could cover the relations of self to self, self to
others, relations between institutions and social communities, and the exercise of political sovereignty.
Governmentality is obtained not by a totalizing deterministic or oppressive form of power, but by biopower directed in a totalizing manner at whole populations and, at one and the same time, at
individuals so that they are both individualized and normalized. Here one locates the human sciences
and their "truths," and the institutions or disciplinary blocks (including education) in which these
truths have been developed, played, and continue to play, a crucially important role.
Unchallenged sovereign power makes extinction possible
Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology, Berkeley, 84
(Paul, The Foucault Reader, p. 260)
It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to
wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the
technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that
initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked
question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose
a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued
existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to
go on living-has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is
no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If
genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient
right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and
the large-scale phenomena of population.
Exclusion
And, excuses to try to create a uniformly peaceful world justifies violence against
deviants who “create conflict” – means war is inevitable
Rasch 04 (William, Prof. of German Studies, Indiana U, Sovereignty and its Discontents, Birkbeck Law
Press, pg. 15)
What could be wrong with such a vision? Certainly it is neither verifiable nor deniable empirically, so one cannot object on that ground.
Ontologies are posited, not proven; and the same goes for philosophical anthropology at this level of abstraction. What we have in Milbank,
then, is an image of a primordially pacified globe, and a lovely image it is. It satisfies the demands, or so it would seem, of a
non-Kantian ethics, based on expansion rather than repression of desire,7 and a quintessentially enlightened theology that places original
goodness over sin. It also sketches the outlines for an ideal, noncapitalist economics based on collective utilization of the commons, and links
this sketch, much like recent radical histories,8 to
a putatively pre-fallen stage of history of the human race not yet
marked by the doctrine of property and dominion. It conforms to the demand for the symmetry and ‘noble simplicity’ of a
classical aesthetics. And its portrayal of the political, to the extent that such a portrayal exists, does offer a distinct alternative to Schmitt’s
friend/enemy model. But, not unexpectedly, here some difficulties arise, because the
image of peaceful harmony that is
found in the original text of peaceful creation is overlaid by the more violent and imperfect second
text. The question becomes: How do we move from that second text back to the first one? How, in other words, do we convince
those not already willing to participate in the coming community to give up their ‘sinful’ ways? The
question is a difficult one, because if peace is the default mode of the universe and violence only ‘an
unnecessary intrusion’ brought into the community by ‘a free subject who asserts a will that is truly independent of
God and of others, and thereby a will to the inhibition and distortion of reality’ (Milbank, 1990, p 432), how does one combat that
violence if not by violence? The exercise of a corrective violence, a ‘just’ violence, aimed at the sinful intrusion is, of
course, a traditional Christian response.9 It is not, however, Milbank’s. Instead he offers something perhaps even more insidious.
Milbank opts for ‘ecclesial coercion’, a form of ‘noncoercive persuasion’ (Milbank, 1990, p 418) that is a
collective, communal pressure expressed as ‘social anger’ or ‘calm fury’. ‘When a person commits an evil act’,
Milbank writes, ‘he cuts himself off from social peace’, because ‘an individual’s sin is never his alone … its endurance harms us all, and therefore
its cancellation is also the responsibility of all’ (Milbank, 1990, pp 421, 422). Therefore, non-coercive
persuasion is the collective
pressure of the group that ideally leads to renewed voluntary conformity, the ‘free consent of will’
(Milbank, 1990, p 418), on the part of the deviant individual. The political as Schmitt envisions it disappears
completely once one presupposes the ontological priority of non-violence. But what takes its place? It may seem
ironic, but once one renounces the political and embraces the community based on harmonious universal
inclusion of the peaceful and absolute exclusion of ‘sin’, one seems to have what Schmitt refers to as ‘democracy’
based on homogeneity. When one excludes the political, one has to guard the borders vigilantly
against those willful intruders who deviate from God’s will – which also means that one need be ever vigilant within
those borders as well. Such an atmosphere, it seems, lends itself well to the description, cited above, of the ‘total state which no longer knows
anything absolutely nonpolitical’ (Schmitt, 1976, p 25), which is to say that the
political loses its autonomy and becomes
conflated with the moral. What then becomes of those who are not ‘persuaded’, who adamantly refuse to
‘participate’? Is ‘sin’ the only category available to describe their behavior? And is there no legitimate political alternative to pure and absolute
consensus? Will
all dissent and all dissenters who refuse to repent be eternally damned? We know by now what
question to ask, and it is a quintessentially Schmittian question: Who decides? Who decides on what is and what is not
peace, what is and what is not violence, what is and what is not sin? And we know the answer: the sovereign,
here the far from non-coercive sovereignty of the collective known as the Christian community. By extension, the same question can be asked
of the other proponents of the ontological priority of nonviolence, that is, of Agamben and of Hardt and Negri. Does
negating the
presupposition of violence negate the sovereign, or is not the negation itself a sovereign act, one made by
the theologian or the philosopher, or by a liberal order that claims to have solved, once and for all, the nihilistic problem of the political?
Conspiracy Solvency
Prerequisite to K’s
Affirming conspiracies is a prerequisite to social as they are the only ideas that can
help break down societal structures and oppression as all other forms of Critique fail
to bring about real change
Dean 1997 (Jodi, William Smith Colleges political theory professor, The Johns Hopkins University, The
Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.2dean.html#authbio Theory & Event 1, no. 2 ,
Accessed: 7/9/14, CD)
This familiar conception of the public sphere and its citizens has already been subjected to convincing
critiques, some based in sex, race, and class. These critiques draw attention to the partiality that
disguises itself as universality, to the constitutive effects of exclusions made in reason's name.11
Despite their persuasive force, I worry that the critiques might be too limited because they still allow,
indeed, require, the possibility of a group of "us," a mainstream, a public, who speak a common
language and employ a common rationality. This common rationality is the standard by which deviations, irrationalities, are
judged, through which exclusions are not only effected but discerned. Differences end up deposited onto some set of others, onto unfamiliar
strangers. I
am interested in situations where deployments of this supposedly common rationality,
discussions in this common language produce strange, contradictory, incredible, irrational results. I
am interested in discourses like that of ufology where participants think they speak and reason like
everyone else, but everyone else finds what they are saying incomprehensible and irrational . I'm
interested because this is the situation of America at the millennium. Denaturalizing the strange and
alien even as it literalizes it, the UFO discourse provides a means for grappling with the foreign
unlikely to explain or analyze otherness away. No matter how familiar, cliched, or banal, the alien
remains. In abduction accounts, moreover, the closer the alien gets, the more foreign it becomes. I
thus use the ufological alien, the product of a discourse fabricated to protect the credibility of those
rejected by the legitimating discourses of science and law, to mark the contemporary situation of
American techno-political life.12 Because it appears in popular culture as an icon we can click on to run a program of nonassimilation, we can use the alien to open a window to narratives that cling to claims of reason and reality
even as they contest them. Once linked to the ultimate undecidability of the rationality of the public
sphere, and hence to the collapse of its very possibility, the alien highlights two important
characteristics of the contemporary politics site. Conveniently, "The X-Files," that exemplar of contemporary popular
fascination with the alien, provides handy and appropriate catch phrases. The first is "trust no one." The public sphere ideal relies
on a minimum of trust, on at least the ability to distinguish friends from enemies and "us" from
"them."13 The ufological alien is like a clone produced through the concentrated replication of the
themes of mistrust and conspiracy running throughout US history and particularly pervasive today .
What connects the space alien with the immigrant is the supposition of a conspiracy undermining
America's experiment in freedom and democracy.14 Voices in nativist and UFO discourses alike
express anxiety about breeding, miscegenation, and hybridity, about the collapse of distinctions
between the alien and ourselves. In each discourse appear concerns about governing, about whether
confidence in those entrusted with the protection of democratic freedoms is warranted, or if, in fact,
they, too, are corrupt, part of some covert plot that will bring us down. Today's mistrust may indicate
a more general suspicion of experts and politicians than an actual supposition of conspiracy .15 Rather
than indicating the marginality of conspiracy theory, however, such a dispersion of mistrust creates a
particular problem for democratic politics in that specific networks of trust and confidence become
ever more fragile and tenuous. Ufology, then, is one version of larger cultural patterns of suspicion,
conspiracy, and mistrust.
Top-Level
We must take on the role of the militant agnostic, never deciding one way or another
on the theory while still breaking the taboo of it
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University,
August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 627-628]
We have called ours a “critical” theory, in that it rests on a normative assumption that the limits of
modern rule should be exposed. In the present context this means that human beings should try to
know the UFO. Although we believe the case for this presumption is over-determined and overwhelming, it is not a case we can make
here. Nevertheless, it seems incumbent upon us to follow through on the practical logic of our theory, so
taking its desirability as given, in conclusion we address the question of resistance to the UFO taboo.
The structuralism of our argument might suggest that resistance is futile. However, the structure of
the UFO taboo also has aporias and fissures that make it—and the anthropocentric structure of rule
that it sustains—potentially unstable One is the UFO itself, which in its persistent recurrence generates an ongoing need for its
normalization. Modern rule might not recognize the UFO, but in the face of continuing anomalies maintaining such non- recognition requires
work. In that respect the UFO is part of the constitutive, unnormalized outside of modern sovereignty, which can be included in authoritative
discourse only through its exclusion. Within
the structure of modern rule there are also at least two fissures that
complicate maintaining UFO ignorance. One is the different knowledge interests of science and the
state. While the two are aligned in authoritative UFO discourse, the state is ultimately interested in maintaining a
certain regime of truth (particularly in the face of metaphysical insecurity), whereas science recognizes that its truths
can only be tentative. Theory may be stubborn, but the presumption in science is that reality has the last word, which creates the
possibility of scientific knowledge countering the state’s dogma. The other fissure is within liberalism, the constitutive
core of modern governmentality. Even as it produces normalized subjects who know that “belief” in
UFOs is absurd, liberal governmentality justifies itself as a discourse that produces free-thinking
subjects who might doubt it. 72 It is in this context that we would place the recent disclosure by the
French government (and at press time the British too) of its long-secret UFO files (1,600 reports), including its
investigations of selected cases, of which the French acknowledge 25 percent as unexplained. 73 Given
that secrecy is only a contingent feature of the UFO taboo, and that even the French are still far from seeking systematic knowledge of UFOs,
this disclosure is not in itself a serious challenge to our argument. However, the
French action does illustrate a potential
within liberalism to break with authoritative common sense, 74 even at the risk of exposing the
foundations of modern sovereignty to insecurity. The kind of resistance that can best exploit these
fissures might be called militant agnosticism. Resistance must be agnostic because by the realist
standards of modernity, regarding the UFO/ET question neither atheism nor belief is epistemically
justified; we simply do not know. Concretely, agnosticism means “seeing” rather than ignoring the UFO,
taking it seriously as a truly unidentified object. Since it is precisely such seeing that the UFO taboo
forbids, in this context seeing is resistance. However, resistance must also be militant, by which we mean
public and strategic, or else it will indeed be futile. The reproduction of UFO ignorance depends crucially on those in
positions of epistemic authority observing the UFO taboo. Thus, private agnosticism—of the kind moderns might have about God, for
example—is itself part of the problem. Only breaking the taboo in public constitutes genuine resistance Even that is
not enough, however, as attested by the long history of unsuccessful resistance to the UFO taboo to date. 75 The problem is that agnosticism
alone does not produce knowledge, and thus reduce the ignorance upon which modern sovereignty depends. For a critical theory of
anthropocentric rule, therefore, a science of UFOs ironically is required, and not just a science of individual cases after the fact, which can tell us
only that some UFOs lack apparent conventional explanations. Rather, in this domain what is needed is paradoxically a systematic science, in
which observations are actively sought in order to analyze patterns from which an intelligent presence might be inferred. 76 That would require
money, infrastructure, and a long-term commitment of the kind that to date has been possible only for epistemic authorities, or precisely those
actors most resistant to taking UFOs seriously. Still, given the potential disjunction of interest between science and the state, it is possible here
for science to play a key role for critical theory. Whether such a science would actually overcome UFO ignorance is unknowable today, but it is
only through it that We might move beyond the essentially theological discourse of belief and denial to a truly critical posture. Modern rule and
its metaphysics are extraordinarily resilient, so the difficulties of such resistance cannot be overstated. Those who attempt it will have difficulty
funding and publishing their work, and their reputations will suffer. UFO
resistance might not be futile but it is certainly
dangerous, because it is resistance to modern sovereignty itself. In this respect militant UFO
agnosticism is akin to other forms of resistance to governmentality; however, whereas sovereignty has found
ways of dealing with them, the UFO may reveal an Achilles heel. Like Achilles, the modern sovereign is a warrior whose function
is to protect—in this case, from threats to the norm. Unlike conventional threats, however, the UFO threatens humans’ capacity to decide
those threats, and so cannot be acknowledged without calling modern sovereignty itself into question. To what extent that would be desirable
is a large normative question which we have bracketed here. 77 But
taking UFOs seriously would certainly embody the
spirit of self-criticism that infuses liberal governmentality and academia in particular, and it would,
thereby, foster critical theory. And indeed, if academics’ first responsibility is to tell the truth, then the
truth is that after sixty years of modern UFOs human beings still have no idea what they are, and are
not even trying to find out. That should surprise and disturb us all, and cast doubt on the structure of
rule that requires and sustains it.
The Recognition of the Conspiracy Theory In Modern Academia Serves To Display How
People Feel About How Their State Opperates
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 12-13
Hofstadter, in particular, employed a ―consensus‖ approach to historiographic study. Consensus historiography
stemmed from
the belief that the United States exhibited a rich and unique history marked by an ideological consensus
among its people. It was generally believed that the American people were, on the whole, aspiring to middle-class values and beliefs.
Those who argued against or challenged consensus beliefs were attempting to disrupt the remarkable
continuity of the American experience. 52 Thus, those who forwarded discourse that reflected the
paranoid style were malcontents, disenfranchised by the consensus view. As the study of history
changed to reflect a growing recognition that the telling of history is ideological, marginalizing, and silencing of disparate voices in the
polity, the metanarratives of history became problematic. Far too frequently those voices that were not part
of the prevailing view of history and politics were left unexplored and unrecorded. Murray Edelman has pointed out
that psychological frames have the effect of turning social problems into individual problems, and explanations based on psychological
pathology have the capacity to turn social problems into issues of individual maladjustment. 53 Historians began
to posit that
belief in conspiracy cannot solely be explained by a paranoid premise. With the increasing recognition
that a multiplicity of disparate voices has either been ignored or marginalized within the public sphere, that
social problems are sometimes systemic and structural and cannot always be dismissed as individual psychopathology,
scholars have recognized that conspiracy theories are not limited to the totalizing and apocalyptic
frame set out by Hofstadter. There is a general recognition in the historical and cultural communities that the status of conspiracy theory in
contemporary American society has fundamentally changed since Hofstadter first published his ―paranoid‖ essay. Robert Goldberg states,
―This
period departs from the past in the regularity of the drumbeat, the multiplicity of messages and carriers, the
number of believers, and the depth of immersion of popular culture in conspiracy thinking.‖ Conspiracy
theories, rather than being marginal beliefs held by a minority of people, are now a fundamental way a significant
number of Americans view ―how the world works.‖ facie belief in conspiracy gives rise to a whole host of types of
conspiracy arguments. Various types of conspiracy theories exist within the public sphere, some simply attributing causal reasons to significant
events, while others direct attention to a cabal of ne‘er-do-wells who are attempting to destroy a way of life. 56 55 54 The prima While those
who followed Hofstadter focused on the latter type of conspiracy, most now focus on the former, recognizing that these types of conspiracy
theories serve different purposes within the polis.
Biopower
The state manipulates knowledge and science as an attempt to strengthen biopolitical
control, discussing conspiracy theories and our inability to understand them
challenges that
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University,
August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 618]
Authoritative insistence on knowing the UFO only through ignorance is necessitated by the threat it
poses to the anthropocentric metaphysics of modern rule. Within modern rule we focus specifically on
sovereignty, but in our conceptualization sovereignty cannot be understood without reference to
governmentality, which sets the normative context of sovereign decision. Thus, in what follows we both begin and end with
governmentality, while keeping our remarks to a minimum in order to focus on the metaphysics of sovereignty perse. I’m doing so we recognize
that the relationship between govermnentality and sovereignty is contested among political theorists. Focused on the specific problem of the
UFO taboo, we do not take sides in this debate except to accept the View that the two aspects of modern rule are intertwined. In thinking
about the problem of rule, political scientists have traditionally focused on either individual agents or institutional structures, in both cases
treating government as a given object. In contrast, Foucault's
concept of governmentality is focused on the "art of
governing," understood as the biopolitical "conduct of conduct" for a population of subjects." Thus,
governmentality concerns the specific regime of practices through which the population is constituted and self-regularized. "Modern"
governmentality marks a shift in discourses of rule away from the state's sovereign power- its ability
to take life and/or render it bare-and toward its fostering and regularizing of life in biopolitics. The object
of government is no longer simply obedience to the king, but regulating the conditions of life for
subjects. To this end biopolitics requires that the conditions of life of the population be made visible
and assayed, and practical knowledge be made available to improve them. As a result, with modern
governmentality we see the emergence of both panoptic surveillance and numerous specialized
discourses-of education, political economy, demography, health, morality, and others- the effect of
which is to make populations knowable and subject to the regularization that will make for the
"happy life." A constitutive feature of modern governmentality is that its discourses are scientific, which
means that science and the state are today deeply intermeshed. Through science the state makes its
subjects and objects known, lending them a facticity that facilitates their regularization, and though
the state science acquires institutional support and prestige. Despite this symbiosis, however, there is also an
important epistemological difference between the two. Science seeks, but knows it can never fully achieve, "the"
truth, defined as all apolitical, objective representation of the world. To this end it relies on norms and practices that produce an evolving,
always potentially contested body of knowledge. The state, in contrast, seeks a regime of truth to which its
population will reliably adhere. Standards for knowledge in that context privilege stability and normalization over the
uncertain path of scientific truth. Although science and the state are allied in the modern UFO regime,
we suggest in conclusion that this difference opens space for critical theory and resistance. Modern
governmentality directs attention away from sovereign power and toward the socially diffuse
practices by which it is sustained. Yet as Agamben reminds us, 46 sovereignty remains important, because
every regime of governmentality has outsides, even while exceeding the capacity for regularization. This outside is
both external, in the form of actors not subject to normalization, and internal, in the form of people’s
capacity to do otherwise (hence their need to be “governed”). Ordinarily these limits do not severely threaten
modern rule, but some exceed the capacity for regularization. Schmitt calls such situations “states of
exception”: “any severe economic or political disturbance requiring the application of extraordinary
measures,” including abrogation of law by those who govern in its name. 47 Extending and modifying Schmitt’s analysis, Agamben
emphasizes a “zone of indistinction” between the juridical order and the state of exception, which is
neither fully in nor outside the law. Thus, while sometimes constitutionally recognized, the state of exception is “not a
special kind of law,” but necessarily transcends
the law. 48 In Sergei Prozorov’s terms, the state of exception is a
“constitutive outside” or “excess” to law that is the latter’s condition of possibility . 49 As such, for Agamben
(if not for Schmitt) a state of exception is always potentially there, even when not actually in force,
permanently contaminating the law. On the other hand, the state of exception also belongs to the law, since it is by the latter’s
limits and/or failure that it is known. States of exception cannot be declared willy-nilly, but must make sense
within the regime of truth they would uphold. Thus, law and the exception are co-constitutive rather than mutually
exclusive. “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.” 50 Like the state of exception it decides, sovereignty is both
outside and inside law. On the one hand, it is the ability to found and suspend a juridical order. To that
extent sovereignty transcends the law, its decisions seeming to come out of nowhere, like a “miracle.”
51 In saying this Schmitt emphasizes sovereignty’s omnipotence, if not to realize its intentions then at least
to decide them. However, even Schmitt recognizes that sovereign decision is not literally a miracle, but has conditions of possibility.
Among Agamben’s contributions is in showing that those conditions include the very corpus of law that is to be suspended in the decision of
the exception. In this way sovereignty is also inside and limited by law.
Critical Pedagogy
And this examination is not just an 8-minute FYI of Lovecraftian horror – the reading
of Cthulhu in the 1ac is a direct challenge to the knowledge that is produced by
hegemonic think tanks in the status quo - the pedagogy of conspiracies allows us to
break down the structures of oppressive power that render modern violence invisible
Giroux, 2005 (Henry A., Waterbury Chair of Secondary education @ Pennsylvania State University,
Fast Capitalism, “Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism,”
http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_2/giroux.htm)
In opposition to these positions, I want to reclaim a tradition in radical educational theory and cultural
studies in which pedagogy as a critical practice is central to any viable notion of agency, inclusive
democracy, and a broader global public sphere. Pedagogy as both a language of critique and possibility
looms large in these critical traditions, not as a technique or a priori set of methods, but as a political
and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy is viewed as the outgrowth of struggles and
illuminates the relationships among power, knowledge, and ideology, while self-consciously, if not selfcritically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and
identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral practice, pedagogy
recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers, and others teach cannot be
abstracted from what it means to invest in public life, presuppose some notion of the future, or locate
oneself in a public discourse. The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest that our responsibility as
intellectuals for the public cannot be separated from the consequences of the knowledge we produce,
the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities we offer up to students as well as
colleagues. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy means, in part, creating those public spaces for
engaging students in robust dialogue, challenging them to think critically about received knowledge and
energizing them to recognize their own power as individual and social agents. Pedagogy has a
relationship to social change in that it should not only help students frame their sense of understanding,
imagination, and knowledge within a wider sense of history, politics, and democracy but should also
enable them to recognize that they can do something to alleviate human suffering, as the late Susan
Sontag (2003) has suggested. Part of this task necessitates that cultural studies theorists and educators
anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an
unrealized democracy against its really existing and greviously incomplete forms. Of crucial importance
to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theorists can understand social problems without
contesting their appearance in public life. More specifically, any viable cultural politics needs a socially
committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of the good
society. Zygmunt Bauman (2002) is right in arguing that "if there is no room for the idea of wrong
society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of good society to be born, let alone make waves" (p.
170). Cultural studies' theorists need to be more forceful, if not more committed, to linking their overall
politics to modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that democratic
societies are never too just, which means that a democratic society must constantly nurture the
possibilities for self-critique, collective agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a
fundamental role in shaping the material relations of power and ideological forces that affect their
everyday lives. Within the ongoing process of democratization lies the promise of a society that is open
to exchange, questioning, and self-criticism, a democracy that is never finished, and one that opposes
neoliberal and neoconservative attempts to supplant the concept of an open society with a
fundamentalist market-driven or authoritarian one. Cultural studies theorists who work in higher
education need to make clear that the issue is not whether higher education has become contaminated
by politics, as much as recognizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At
the same time, they can make visible their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to
a set of skills to enhance one's visibility in the corporate sector or an ideological litmus test that
measures one's patriotism or ratings on the rapture index. There is a disquieting refusal in the
contemporary academy to raise broader questions about the social, economic, and political forces
shaping the very terrain of higher education—particularly unbridled market forces, fundamentalist
groups, and racist and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups within relations of academic
power. There is also a general misunderstanding of how teacher authority can be used to create the
pedagogical conditions for critical forms of education without necessarily falling into the trap of simply
indoctrinating students. For instance, many conservative and liberal educators believe that any notion of
critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and engages students in ways that offer them
the possibility for becoming critical—what Lani Guinier (2003:6) calls the need to educate students "to
participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes,
made their education possible"—leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes too much or
simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While such educators believe in practices that open up
the possibility of questioning among students, they often refuse to connect the pedagogical conditions
that challenge how and what students think at the moment to the next task of prompting them to
imagine changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities.
Teaching students how to argue, draw on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says
nothing about why they should engage in these actions in the first place. How the culture of
argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they need to fight oppressive forms
of power, make the world a more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility
is missing in contemporary, progressive frameworks of education.
Critical Pedagogy is Key to Rebelling Against Conservative Reactionary Ideology and
Questioning Modern Power Structures and Societal Normalcies in In Capitalist Society
Giroux 6, Henry. Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. “Academic
Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy” Page 31-33
While most defenders
of the university as a democratic public sphere rightly argue that the right-wing
assault on the academy levels a serious threat to academic freedom, they have largely ignored the
crucial issue that the very nature of pedagogy as a political, moral, and critical practice is at stake,
particularly the role it plays in presupposing a view of the world that is more just, democratic, and
free from human suffering.^4 Robert Ivie has argued rightly that academic freedom in its basic form "means
unfettered scholarly inquiry, a scholar s fundamental right of research, publication, and instruction free of institutional constraint"
(Ivie 2005). But it is pedagogy that begs both a more spirited defense and analysis so that it can be protected against the challenge that
Horowitz, ACTA, SAF, Campus Watch, and others are initiating against what actually takes place in classrooms devoted to critical engagement,
dialogue, research, and debate. Pedagogy
at its best is about neither training nor political indoctrination;
instead, it is about a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills, and social relations that
enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens while using their
knowledge and skills to deepen and extend the possibilities of living in a substantive and inclusive
democracy. Rather than assume the mantle of a false impartiality, pedagogy recognizes that education and teaching
involve the crucial act of intervening in the world and the recognition that human life is conditioned
not determined. The responsibility of pedagogy amounts to more than becoming the instrument of official power or an apologist for the
existing order. Critical pedagogy attempts to understand how power works through the production,
distribution, and consumption of knowledge within particular institutional contexts and seeks to constitute
students as particular subjects and social agents. It is also invested in the practice of self-criticism about the values
that inform our teaching and a critical self-consciousness regarding what it means to equip students
with analytical skills to be self-reflective about the knowledge and values they confront in classrooms. What makes
critical pedagogy so dangerous to Christian evangelicals, neoconservatives, and right-wing nationalists in the United States
is that central to its very definition is the task of educating students to become critical agents actively
questioning and negotiating the relationship between theory and practice, critical analysis and common sense,
and learning and social change. Critical pedagogy opens up a space where students should be able to come to
terms with their own power as critical agents; it provides a sphere where the unconditional freedom
to question and assert is central to the purpose of the university, if not democracy itself (Derrida 2001,
233). And as a political and moral practice, pedagogy should "make evident the multiplicity and complexity of history," as a narrative to enter
into critical dialogue with rather than accept unquestioningly. Similarly, such
a pedagogy should cultivate in students a
healthy skepticism about power, a "willingness to temper any reverence for authority with a sense of critical awareness" (Said
2001, 501). As a performative practice, pedagogy should provide the conditions for students to be able to
reflectively frame their own relationship to the ongoing project of an unfinished democracy. It is precisely
this relationship between democracy and pedagogy that is so threatening to conservatives such as Horowitz. Pedagogy always
represents a commitment to the future, and it remains the task of educators to make sure that the
future points the way to a more socially just world, a world in which the discourses of critique and
possibility in conjunction with the values of reason, freedom, and equality function to alter, as part of
a broader democratic project, the grounds upon which life is lived. This is hardly a prescription for political
indoctrination, but it is a project that gives education its most valued purpose and meaning, which in part is "to encourage human agency, not
mold it in the manner of Pygmalion" (Aronowitz 1998, 10-11). It is
also a position that threatens right-wing private
advocacy groups, neoconservative politicians, and conservative extremists because they recognize
that such a pedagogical commitment goes to the very heart of what it means to address real
inequalities of power at the social level and to conceive of education as a project for democracy and
critical citizenship while at the same time foregrounding a series of important and often ignored
questions such as: "Why do we [as educators] do what we do the way we do it"? Whose interests does higher education serve? How might
it be possible to understand and engage the diverse contexts in which education takes place? In spite of the right-wing view that
equates indoctrination with any suggestion of politics, critical pedagogy is not concerned simply with
offering students new ways to think critically and act with authority as agents in the classroom; it is also concerned
to provide students with the skills and knowledge necessary for them to expand their capacities to
both question deep-seated assumptions and myths that legitimate the most archaic and disempowering social
practices that structure every aspect of society and to take responsibility for intervening in the world they inhabit. Education
is not neutral, but that does not mean it is merely a form of indoctrination. On the contrary, as a practice that attempts to expand the
capacities necessary for human agency and hence the possibilities for democracy itself, the university must nourish those pedagogical practices
that promote "a concern with keeping the forever unexhausted and unfulfilled human potential open, fighting back all attempts to foreclose
and pre-empt the further unravelling of human possibilities, prodding human society to go on questioning itself and preventing that
questioning from ever stalling or being declared finished" (Bauman and Tester 2001, 4). In other words, critical
pedagogy forges
both critique and agency through a language of skepticism and possibility and a culture of openness,
debate, and engagement, all elements that are now at risk in the latest and most dangerous attack on
higher education.
The Educator and the Role of Pedagogy Being Attacked by Conservative Ideologues Is
Absolutely Crucial to a Functionally Critical and Democratic Society
Giroux 6, Henry. Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. “Academic
Freedom Under Fire: The Case for Critical Pedagogy” Page 33-34
The current attack on pedagogy is, in part, an attempt to deskill teachers and dismantle teacher
authority. Teachers can make a claim to being fair, but not to being either neutral or impartial. Teacher authority neither is neutral nor can
it be assessed in terms that are narrowly ideological. It is always broadly political and interventionist in terms of the knowledge-effects it
produces, the classroom experiences it organizes, and the future it presupposes in the countless ways in which it addresses the world.
Teacher authority at its best means taking a stand without standing still. It suggests that as educators
we make a sincere effort to be self-reflective about the value-laden nature of our authority while
taking on the fundamental task of educating students to learn to take responsibility for the direction of society. Rather
than shrink from our political responsibility as educators,
we should embrace one of pedagogy's most fundamental
goals: to educate students to believe that democracy is desirable and possible, and that they can
shape its outcomes. Connecting education to the possibility of a better world is not a prescription for
indoctrination; rather it marks the distinction between the academic as a technician and the teacher
as a self-reflective educator who is more than the instrument of a safely approved and officially
sanctioned worldview. The authority that enables academics to teach emerges out of the education, knowledge, research,
professional rituals, and scholarly experiences that they bring to their field of expertise and classroom teaching. Such authority provides the
space and experience in which pedagogy goes beyond providing the conditions for the simple acts of knowing and understanding and includes
the cultivation of the very power of self-definition and critical agency. But teacher
authority cannot be grounded exclusively
in the rituals of professional academic standards; it is also a space in which commitment, passion, and
teaching provide students with a sense of what it means to link knowledge to a sense of direction, a
practice rooted in an ethico-political vision that attempts to take students beyond the world they already know, in a way
that does not insist on a particular fixed set of altered meanings. In this context, teacher authority rests on pedagogical
practices that reject the role of students as passive recipients of familiar knowledge and views them
instead as producers of knowledge who not only critically engage diverse ideas, but also transform
and act on them (Mohanty 1989,192). Pedagogy is the space that provides a moral and political referent for understanding how what we
do in the classroom is linked to wider social, political, and economic forces. It is impossible to separate what we do in the
classroom from the economic and political conditions that shape our work, and that means that pedagogy has to
be understood as a form of academic labor in which questions of time, autonomy, freedom, and power become as central to the classroom as
what is taught. As a referent for engaging fundamental questions about democracy, pedagogy gestures to important questions about the
political, institutional, and structural conditions that allow teachers to produce curricula, collaborate with colleagues, engage in research, and
connect their work with broader pubhc issues. Pedagogy
is not about balance, a merely methodological
consideration; on the contrary, as Cornelius Castoriadis reminds us, if education is not to become "the political
equivalent of a religious ritual," it must do everything possible to provide students with the
knowledge and skills they need to learn how to deliberate, make judgments, and exercise choices,
particularly as the latter are brought to bear on critical activities that offer the possibihty of democratic change (1997,5). Democracy
cannot work if citizens are not autonomous, self-judging, and independent—qualities that are
indispensable for students to make vital judgments and choices about participating in and shaping
decisions that affect everyday life, institutional reform, and governmental policy. Hence, pedagogy becomes the
cornerstone of democracy in that it provides the very foundation for students not merely to learn how
to be governed, but to be capable of governing.
Epistemology
And, it is through this exploration of the Cult of Cthulhu that we discover something
more sinister, something capable of rupturing the epistemological structures that
surround debate, it is through the production of the conspiracy of cthulu that we
uncover the faulty systems of knowledge production that enlightenment has handed
down to us, that instead the pursuit of truth amid the chaos of the world only reveals
more intricacies, more abstractions, this opaqueness that we believed delineated
what is “true” and “conspiracy” is only a mental shield created to soften our
sensibilities to the reality of the world – we are always already conspiracy theorists in
debate, however our failure to recognize this has led to a distancing of our
pedagogical model from the reality of the world
Pigden, 2007 (Charles, Philosophy professor at the University of Otago, “Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional
Wisdom.” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4.2 (2007) 219-232)
The conventional wisdom on conspiracy theories is that they ought not to be believed. To
call something "a conspiracy theory"
is to suggest that it is intellectually suspect; to call someone "a conspiracy theorist" is to suggest that
he is irrational, paranoid or perverse. Often the suggestion seems to be that conspiracy theories are not
just suspect, but utterly unbelievable, too silly to deserve the effort of a serious refutation. It is a
common ploy on the part of politicians to dismiss critical allegations by describing them as conspiracy
theories, a tactic of which Tony Blair was a master. The idea that the invasion of Iraq was "all about oil" or that President Bush had
considered bombing Al Jazeera were both "conspiracy theories" and therefore not worth discussing. This tactic would only be honest if Blair
genuinely supposed that conspiracy theories as such ought not to be believed (except perhaps if proven up to the hilt) and it would only be
respectable if Blair's apparent belief were correct. Thus the
tactic relies on the epistemic principle that in general,
conspiracy theories ought not to be believed (that it is irrational to believe them), and indeed that they are
mostly so irrational that they ought not to be discussed, except perhaps as symptoms of some ideological malaise. Thus
the conventional wisdom seems to be that we have an epistemic duty not to believe conspiracy
theories, a duty which conspiracy theorists conspicuously neglect. I shall be denying that we have any such duty, and shall be arguing, on the
contrary, that we are rationally entitled to believe in conspiracy theories if that is what the evidence
suggests. Some conspiracy theories are sensible and some are silly, but if they are silly this is not
because they are conspiracy theories but because they suffer from some specific defect – for instance,
that the conspiracies they postulate are impossible or far-fetched. But conspiracy theories as such are
not epistemologically unclean, and it [End Page 219] is often permissible – even obligatory – to believe them. For
sometimes the case for conspiracy can be rationally overwhelming, "proved beyond reasonable doubt", and even
when it is not, belief in a conspiracy is often a rational option. Thus my dispute with the conventional
wisdom is a debate about the ethics of belief. It is common ground in this debate that it makes sense to say that we ought to
believe something (that believing it is right or rationally required), or that we ought not to believe it (that believing it is wrong, a sort of crime
against reason). It also makes sense to say that we are entitled to believe something (since believing it is permissible). Furthermore, all these
claims can aspire to truth – though whether they actually are true is another matter. Thus Tony Blair's rhetoric
carries some fairly heavy philosophical baggage. The point of dismissing the allegation that Bush considered
bombing Al Jazeera as a "conspiracy theory" was to suggest that we are under some sort of
intellectual obligation not to believe it. But we can't be obliged not to believe conspiracy theories
unless we have epistemic obligations. But although the idea of epistemic duties may be common
ground in the context of the current dispute, it is in fact a highly debatable. The difficulty derives from
the Ought-Implies-Can principle (which presumably applies to the ethics of belief) combined with the idea that
belief is not a voluntary business. The claim is that we cannot decide what to believe or disbelieve. When
faced with certain considerations we are either moved by the evidence or we are not. Decision and choice do
not enter into it. Even with practice we cannot decide, like the White Queen in Alice Through the Looking-Glass, to believe six
impossible things – or even six possible things – before breakfast. And it is equally impossible to decide not to believe six things before
breakfast, whether the things in question are possible or not. But if
Bloggs cannot help believing that agents of the Bush
family detonated the Twin Towers, then it is not only pointless but actually false to say that he ought
not to believe it. For you cannot have an obligation to do what you cannot do, and, ex hypothesi, Bloggs is
incapable of disbelieving that it was Bush family agents that did the deed. Thus the whole idea of an epistemic ethic
is fundamentally cock-eyed, since it presupposes (wrongly) that we can control our beliefs.¶ This
conclusion depends on two premises: Ought-Implies-Can and the idea that we cannot choose to
believe. I am inclined to dispute them both. Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical thesis but a plausible ethical
principle that holds (with restrictions) in some systems of ethics but not in others. It is not clear that it
has to be incorporated into a plausible ethics of belief. And though we cannot bring ourselves to
believe just anything it seems to me that within limits we can often decide where to place our
epistemic bets. The same thing goes for disbelief. Those who think otherwise sometimes counter by producing a
random thesis and challenging you to believe it. When you can't, they claim victory, and if you insist
that you can, their tendency is to scoff. But just because we cannot always chose to believe, it does not
follow that we can never choose to believe, and where choice is a possibility, "oughts" are not
excluded.¶ But though my first instinct is to challenge the premises, there is a better way of dealing with the argument that an epistemic
ethic is a non-starter. For though we[End Page 220] cannot always choose to believe, we can often choose which beliefforming strategy to adopt. This is Pascal's response to those free-thinking gamblers who agree that it would be good idea to believe
in God (since according to the Wager Argument, this would be the best bet), but who can't quite bring themselves to do so. Perhaps you cannot
choose to believe in God, he suggests, but you
can choose to adopt a belief-forming strategy that is likely to bring
about the desired result. If you go to church, hear masses and generally lead the life of a religious believer, the chances are that belief
will follow – you will "make yourself stupid". Other belief-forming strategies are less mind-numbing. For example, you can cultivate
the habit of thinking up objections to claims that you would like to be true – a strategy that will make
you less likely to confuse wishes with facts (a vice to which philosophers are peculiarly prone). Thus the best way to
save an epistemic ethic is to take the deontic operators as applying, in the first instance, to beliefforming strategies rather than beliefs.¶ What the conventional wisdom demands is not so much that we
disbelieve this conspiracy theory or that, but that we adopt the intellectual habit of discounting,
dismissing and disbelieving conspiracy theories (indeed of "dissing" them generally). Rather than running around
trying to evaluate the evidence, the sensible strategy is to shut our eyes to their intellectual charms. I
advocate the alternative strategy of not dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand, simply because
they are conspiracy theories, but of being prepared to investigate them and even to believe them if
that is what the evidence indicates.
Perhaps some conspiracy theories are too way out to be worthy of investigation, but this is
not because they are conspiracy theories but because the specific conspiracies that they postulate are absurd or improbable. For conspiracy
theories as such are no less worthy of belief than theories of other kinds. Thus
the dispute is primarily a debate about
which belief-forming strategy to adopt rather than which claims to believe. Hence we can discuss the question
sensibly as an issue in the ethics of belief even if we grant, what seems to me to be false, that we cannot choose to believe.¶ But what is the
status of these epistemic "oughts"? Are they categorical imperatives (Requirements of Reason) or hypothetical imperatives pointing out the
means to achieve some widely shared but intellectually optional end, such as achieving an adequate understanding of the world? I incline to
the latter view, though I suspect it would be a difficult business to specify the ends to which a respectable epistemic "ought" prescribes the
means. But whatever the precise status of epistemic "oughts", the
claim that we rationally ought to adopt a beliefforming strategy (such as not believing in or not enquiring into conspiracy theories), would appear to presuppose that the
strategy in question is conducive to truth and the avoidance of error, at least under a wide range of
circumstances. Thus the rationale for the strategy of conspiratorial skepticism is that it is more likely to
get it right or less likely to get it wrong than its epistemic rivals. It rests on the presumption that
conspiracy theories are unlikely to be true, so unlikely that they are generally not worth discussing.
Indeed, it requires something stronger than the simple assumption that conspiracy theories as such are unlikely to be true. The space of
possible theories is large; the space of true theories, small. But it would be [End Page 221] silly to conclude
from this that we ought to abstain from theorizing to avoid the risk of error. The fact that theories in
general are more likely to be false than true does not mean that we should give up theorizing or
enquiring into theories. By the same token, the fact that conspiracy theories are more likely to be
false than true does not mean that we should give up conspiracy theorizing or enquiring into
conspiracy theories. For that to be a sensible strategy we would have to suppose that conspiracy theories were much more likely to be
false than their non-conspiratorial rivals. And since he seems to think that we ought not to believe or enquire into conspiracy theories, that is,
presumably, the opinion of Tony Blair and his allies amongst the punditocracy.
Exclusion
Affirming Conspiracy theories helps break down traditional forms of societal
oppression
Dean 1997(Jodi, , William Smith Colleges political theory professor, The Johns Hopkins University, The
Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction,
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v001/1.2dean.html#authbio, Theory & Event 1, no.
2 Accessed: 7/9/14, CD)
The UFO community's sense of exclusion stems from its perception that most people, especially
scientists, the media, and government officials, ridicule belief in extraterrestrial contact with earth.
Many who think they have seen a UFO are reluctant to talk about it outside safe, supportive circles.
I've been surprised at how many of my academic colleagues have come to me with their UFO stories
since I began this research.19 Abductees in particular say they are wary of talking about their
experiences for fear that people will think they are crazy--a sentiment expressed by many women in
early CR sessions in the 1970s. So when I ask what the UFO community reveals about "us," I'm seeing
it as a microcosm of some broader American public. "Us" refers to anyone. It signals a white middle
class while acknowledging differences in sex, class, and ethnicity. Yet "us" problematizes the notion of
a "center" and the possibility of generality by focusing on a set of experiences and beliefs with
marginalizing effects. It gestures simultaneously toward strangers, towards those disdained by society
at large. To reiterate, by destabilizing ideas of us and them, center and margin, inside and outside, I
want to complicate theorization of American culture and politics. Both radical and traditional
accounts of citizenship and collective identity attribute some coherence to the notion of a public
sphere. Whether norms of public reason are considered oppressive and exclusionary or the pentacle
of the planet's expression of freedom, the idea that the mainstream, the general populace, the
community at large shares a set of common assumptions about reality is rarely challenged. UFO belief
is one of those rare challenges.
Government Power
Conspiracy theories check public abuses of power – one example is President
Truman’s proposal of Cold-War-era propaganda aimed at instilling in the American
public a common enemy
Goshorn 00 (Kevin Goshorn, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames of Containment: On Critical
Paranoia and Anti-Conspiracy Discourse"; published in 2000 in Theory and Events, Vol. 4, Issue 3;
paragraph(s) 15-16)
9. No analysis of any recent manifestations of conspiracy theory can be adequate without a familiarity
with the broad range of discourses that are stigmatized by this categorical branding , and without some
specific familiarity with the alleged "conspiracies" that are described, and, most importantly some familiarity with the existing state of research
into the evidence for, or against, such conspiracies. The
greatest weakness of academic studies in this area to date
has been their characteristic unwillingness to address the truth claims of conspiracy theories; not
having done their own research in these areas, many writers often have been ill-prepared to judge
whether a given "theory" was sheer speculation, confirmable fact, or somewhere in between . 10. No
discussion of any recent "outbreaks" of public paranoia can be complete without taking into account
the century-long history of deliberately manufactured public paranoia campaigns undertaken with periodic
intensity and massive funding by organizations with over-lapping financial and political goals. In the case of the United
States, when the whole of American culture has long been saturated with complex and over-determined
layers of public fear--commodified fears, politically manipulated fears, legitimate and illegitimate fears, everyday fears--there is
something rather curious, if not absurd or perverse, in singling out certain sectors of the public or certain
essentialized "mentalities" for their preoccupation with "paranoia." Brian Massumi has offered a more appropriate
analysis in stating that today (in North America at least): "Fear is not fundamentally an emotion. It is the objectivity of the subjective under late
capitalism."[5] Discussions of public fears today cannot be adequately grounded without consideration of the Creel Commission efforts in
World War I (the "Committee for Public Information"), followed by the continued amplification of fear and paranoia in the "Red Scare" period
and the Palmer Raids of the early FBI, to the (relatively unsuccessful) campaigns undertaken in the late 1930's against the New Deal policies as
"dangerous socialism," and again in the late 1940s with the rising pitch of anti-communist rhetoric. [6]
The Cold War's pre-
calculated campaigns to generate and exploit public fear started with early counsel to President
Truman which advised that to sell the American public a new plan for increased militarization of the
economy just after WWII he would have to "...scare the hell out of them..." by warning of the threat
of an "international communist conspiracy ." All of these efforts were executive-level designs towards
creating and substituting other public fears in order to deflect attention from existing financial crises
and ideological struggles which threatened to unravel positive support for corporate business and
finance political perspectives. Counter to prevailing views about "paranoid" conspiracy theories, many
recent political critiques branded as such have not participated in amplifying such exploitative crises, but rather have
concerned themselves with revealing the various hidden agendas behind such manipulation of public
fears.
And, when the research model of any activity is grounded mostly in evidence, it
becomes important to question the validity of all knowledge produced within that
structure – truth will always be elusive, it is entirely possible that Cthulhu and R’leyh
are just a myth, just like khalizad 95 and strait times 2k, however the investigation of
these myths is critical to open and deliberative politics that allows examination of all
forms of official discourse
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in
an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 7-8
Official discourse, like all discourse, is called forth by rhetorical exigencies. The situation, those who fashion
official discourses are faced with the unenviable task of compiling and sifting through overwhelming amounts of
evidence, including the depositions and testimony of witnesses from the most pedestrian of citizens to the most powerful leaders in the
country. This is no easy task; not only must the official discourse provide a complete account of the events, it
is also expected to ease the public‘s fears and to provide a list of suggested comprehensive policy
changes to keep such a tragic event from happening again. Moreover, the discourse must provide a story that competes with counter claims
and charges surrounding the event, all of which are in circulation in the public sphere before the official discourse is formed. If, as I argue,
official discourse is designed, in part, to dismiss, contradict, and head off conspiracy theories, then the inability for official discourse to prevail
over conspiracy theories is hampered by the enormous agenda-setting capabilities exhibited by conspiracy theories. In essence, conspiracy
theories force official discourse into a dialogue wherein official discourse not only is incapable of
prevailing over conspiracy beliefs, but in countering conspiracy claims takes on some of the generic
characteristics of conspiracy arguments. If conspiracy beliefs are powerful enough to force official
discourse into a dialogue and are then capable of calling into question the veracity and believability of official
discourse, then there are broad political implications that may be better understood by examining the
nexus between official and conspiratorial discourses under our contemporary cultural, social, and
economic conditions.
The Recent Political Scandals and Distrust for the State Has Placed the Same Burden
for Truth on the Official Story as Any Other Option
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 22-23
The universalizing and totalizing
metanarratives of history and politics are now recognized for their silencing
and oppressive natures; the response is a proliferation of voices and methodological positions essentially
decimating a unified frame from which to interpret meaning. 96 Meaning is now constructed based on
the intertextual nature of information and communication; beginning from what we already know (or think we know) and the
constant addition of information from ever more texts to meaning, diminishing the authority of singular texts in favor of
the continual construction of meanings by individuals. 97 This multiplicity of voices blurs the line
between truthful and factual information, and questions whom to trust and believe. There is no
longer one fixed narrative that serves as a binding force for the people but multiple frames of
reference, a condition that breeds uncertainty and anxiety, and also leads to a loss of authority and the indeterminacy of information.
Discursive authority lies with its effects, or what Bruce Lincoln has argued, ―the conjuncture of the right speaker, the right speech and delivery,
the right staging and props, the right time and place, and an audience whose historically and culturally conditioned expectations establish the
parameters of what is judged ‗right‘ in all these instances, in such a way as to produce attitudes of trust, respect, docility, acceptance, even
reverence, in the audience.‖ discursive
authority rests with the ability to render an audience silent on an issue,
with the state of conspiracy theories more specifically, authority is in
serious trouble. No longer are authorities (whether executive or epistemic) able to offer their version of a story
and have an audience docilely accept their interpretation. 99 98 Authorities no longer enjoy the
presumption they were afforded in the past; official narratives are now just one among a cacophony
and have the same burden as any narrative to persuade their audiences that they are offering the
then in postmodernity generally, and
most complete, compelling, and consistent telling of events. If anything, this burden is increased for
official narratives in light of revelations of official scandals and abuses of power.
The Conspiracy Movement Has Placed the Burden of Proof on the State and Forced It
into Providing Stronger and More Conclusive Evidence About Public Incidents
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 13-14
Historians and cultural scholars
have approached this new take on conspiracy theories by using various
interpretive frames by which to analyze conspiracy beliefs. Largely, scholars still rely on psychological explanations arguing that
different peoples use conspiracy theories for different functions. For example, marginal populations use conspiracy theories
as a binding for with which to battle racism, sexism, and oppression. 57 Others are likely to use conspiracy theories
as a means to gain autonomy and power as intermediaries between the people (e.g., labor unions) and large institutions of power. 58
Conspiracy theories represent a battle between competing ideological factions and give people a means by
which to infuse their lives with meaning and significance. 59 Instead of automatically seeing pathology when looking on
embittered people fighting against large systems of control, scholars are now inclined to recognize
what George Marcus terms ―paranoia within reason.‖ 60 Popular belief in conspiracy no longer requires an alien ―other‖
attempting to infiltrate and subvert the masses; the enemy to be combated is our own system of power. that an
alien ―other is attempting to infiltrate and overtake the American government still exists and has been
most recently exploited by fringe members of the Tea Party, a belief that the establishment itself is
conspiring against the American people comes at the hands of uncovered instances of corporate and
governmental malfeasance (e.g., Watergate, COINTELPRO, Iran- Contra, and Enron). Significant portions of the public now
cast a cynical eye toward officials and their ―authorized‖ versions of events. Knight explains, ―In the eyes of many Americans,
the only safe bet is that there might well be a conspiracy, for all the public at large know or are likely to ever know. The burden of proof
is now reversed, such that the authorities must strenuously provide conclusive evidence that there has
been no initial conspiracy or subsequent cover-up.‖ Officials and their discourses must now not only ―prove‖ what
happened in significant events, but also must prove that the resulting event was not part of a larger conspiracy.
Conspiracy Theory and Its Conflict With Political Power Structures Serves To Cast
Doubt on the Official Historical Accounts Told by the State
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 14-15
The questioning of official accounts of events through the medium of conspiracy theory signifies that conspiracy and
official discourse exist within a dialogic relationship. Of particular importance to this study is Bratich‘s observation that
conspiracy theories are ―a zone where politics and reason meet.‖ 63 Not only do conspiracy theories cast
suspicion and doubt onto institutions of power and the discourses they provide, but these same
institutions view conspiracy theories as dangerous. Bratich argues that current political rationality views
conspiracy theories as the enemies, the threats against democracy that need to be battled. 64
Conspiracy theories exist in a battle of one-upmanship with official discourse, and, as it currently stands,
are threatening to become the way most of the population thinks about historical events. 65 Although the
historical and cultural studies of conspiracy theories still largely operate from a psychological standpoint, there is a growing
recognition that conspiracy theories stand in direct opposition to their official counterparts. Conspiracies,
rather than occasionally infecting political thought and action, are now more about a growing
suspicion directed at institutions of power and are seen, by these same institutions, as an enemy that needs to be combated.
If conspiracy theories are an enemy, then it stands to reason that official discourses that are designed
to quell conspiracy beliefs should attempt to attack and root them out within the corpus of their texts. Rhetorical
scholars, in particular, are concerned with, and uniquely situated to uncovering the suasory strength of conspiracy rhetoric and its interaction
with official discourse.
Politics
The Capacity Modern Conspiracy Has to Pressure and Dictate Political Action is
Reflective of Their Long-Term Political Implications in Society
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 7-8
Official discourse, like all discourse, is called forth by rhetorical exigencies. The situation, those who fashion
official discourses are faced with the unenviable task of compiling and sifting through overwhelming amounts of
evidence, including the depositions and testimony of witnesses from the most pedestrian of citizens to the most powerful leaders in the
country. This is no easy task; not only must the official discourse provide a complete account of the events, it
is also expected to ease the public‘s fears and to provide a list of suggested comprehensive policy
changes to keep such a tragic event from happening again. Moreover, the discourse must provide a story that competes with counter claims
and charges surrounding the event, all of which are in circulation in the public sphere before the official discourse is formed. If, as I argue,
official discourse is designed, in part, to dismiss, contradict, and head off conspiracy theories, then the inability for official discourse to prevail
over conspiracy theories is hampered by the enormous agenda-setting capabilities exhibited by conspiracy theories. In essence, conspiracy
theories force official discourse into a dialogue wherein official discourse not only is incapable of
prevailing over conspiracy beliefs, but in countering conspiracy claims takes on some of the generic
characteristics of conspiracy arguments. If conspiracy beliefs are powerful enough to force official
discourse into a dialogue and are then capable of calling into question the veracity and believability of official
discourse, then there are broad political implications that may be better understood by examining the
nexus between official and conspiratorial discourses under our contemporary cultural, social, and
economic conditions.
Science
The unknowability of the UFO uniquely metaphysically challenges modern science
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State
University, August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 623]
As unidentified object the UFO poses a threat of unknowability to science, upon which modern
sovereignty depends. Of course, there are many things science does not know, like the cure for cancer, but its authority rests
on the assumption that nothing in Nature is in principle unknowable. UFOs challenge modern science
in two ways: (1) they appear random and unsystematic, making them difficult to grasp objectively;
and (2) some appear to violate the laws of physics (like the 40g turns in the Belgian F-16 case). This does not mean
that UFOs are in fact humanly unknowable, but they might be, and in that respect they haunt modern
sovereignty with the possibility of epistemic failure. To see how this might be uniquely threatening it
is useful to compare the UFO to three other cases of what might be seen as unknowability. One is the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory, which acknowledges inherent limits on the
ability to know sub-atomic reality. Since the Uncertainty Principle has not stopped physicists from doing physics, this might
seem to undermine our claim that potential unknowability precludes a decision on the UFO as object.
Yet, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and here the two cases differ. Quantum
mechanics emerged in a highly structured context of extant theory and established experimental
results, and is a systematic body of knowledge that enables physicists to manipulate reality with
extraordinary precision. With quantum theory we know exactly what we cannot know, enabling it to
be safely incorporated into modern science. The UFO, in contrast, emerges in a context free of extant theory and empirical
research, and raises fundamental questions about the place of human beings in the universe. That we might never know what
we cannot know about UFOs makes their potential objectivity more problematic for the modern
project. A different problem is presented by God, whose existence science also declaims ability to
know. Once fiercely contested, the notion that God can be known only through faith not reason is today accepted by religious and secular
authorities alike. Since God is not potentially a scientific object, science does not consider the question to
be within its purview. Miracles are recognized by the Church, but the criteria by which they are made
authoritative are not primarily scientific. UFOs, in contrast, leave unexplained physical traces and as
such fall directly within the purview of modern science. 60 It is one of the ironies of modern rule that it is far more
acceptable today to affirm publicly one’s belief in God, for whose existence there is no scientific evidence, than UFOs, the existence of which—
whatever they might be—is physically documented. Perhaps
the best analogue to the epistemic threat posed by UFO
objectivity is extra-sensory perception or “psi.” Here we have a subtle and elusive phenomenon that might be objective, and
which raises similar worries about unknowability for the modern episteme. 61 And here too we see tremendous resistance
from the scientific community to taking it seriously. Nevertheless, and interestingly, psi research has
been undertaken by states , 62 suggesting that potential unknowability by itself does not preclude
sovereign decision, if, were the phenomenon to become known, it could serve human purposes. Indeed,
were the UFO merely an object, it is hard to see that its potential unknowability would preclude a
decision on its status as exception. Qua object, and only object, the UFO threatens neither the
physical nor the ontological security of modern rule, which we have argued are necessary conditions
for the metaphysical threat from UFOs to be realized. (In this respect the UFO contrasts interestingly with the possibility of
catastrophic asteroid impacts, which in fact has been recently constituted as a physical threat.) 63 As with other anomalies there might be
sociological resistance to seeing UFOs, but if science does its job properly, the resistance should break down and a serious effort to identify
UFOs eventually undertaken. Unlike some objects, however, the UFO might also have subjectivity (ETs). In itself non-human subjectivity need
not be a problem for anthropocentric sovereignty. Although modernity is constituted by a general de-animation of Nature, debates
about
animal consciousness raise anew the possibility that subjectivity is not limited to humans. 64
However, while it may generate anxiety, 65 animal subjectivity does not threaten modern rule either
physically or ontologically. Superior intelligence enabled humans long ago to domesticate animals,
ensuring that any subjectivity they might have will lie safely “beneath” human rule. By virtue of being
in the solar system, in contrast, ETs might have vastly superior intelligence, literally “above” human
rule, and thus be sovereign deciders in their own right. To our knowledge no ETs have shown themselves, which means
the UFO is not unambiguously subjective (either), but the failure of science to justify ruling out the ETH leaves open the possibility, and that
clearly does threaten anthropocentrism. As
potential subject, then, the UFO radically relativizes modern
sovereignty, disturbing its homologous character with the threat of unimagined heterogeneity, the
sovereignty of the fully alien (non-human) Other. In short, the UFO poses threats to modern rule on both
poles of the object–subject dichotomy that constitutes its undecidability, making decision in favor of
one or the other intrinsically problematic. These threats are metaphysical in the sense of raising
epistemological and ontological doubts about the whole anthropocentric idea of modern rule, not just its
realizations in actually existing states—and it is the absolute taken-for-grantedness of that idea upon which the
ability to mobilize modern power depends. From the standpoint of modern rule, therefore, the threat of the UFO is not unlike
that of the Christian’s Second Coming, a potential materialization of the metaphysical. It is the triple threat of the UFO that explains states’ very
different response to it compared to other disruptions of modern norms. By
calling into question the very basis of the
modern sovereign’s capacity to decide its status as exception, the UFO cannot be acknowledged as
truly unidentified— which is to say potentially ET—without calling into question modern sovereignty
itself. Thus, far from being a deus ex machina that, through the decision, intervenes miraculously to safeguard the norm, modern
sovereignty is shown by the UFO to be itself a norm, of anthropocentrism—and behind this norm no
further agency stands. In this way the UFO exhibits not the standard undecidability that compels a decision, but what might be called a
“meta”-undecidability which precludes it. The UFO is both exceptional and not decidable as exception, and as a
result with respect to it the modern sovereign is performatively insecure. The insecurity is not
conscious, but operates at the deeper level of a taboo, in which certain possibilities are unthinkable
because of their inherent danger. In this respect UFO skepticism is akin to denial in psychoanalysis:
the sovereign represses the UFO out of fear of what it would reveal about itself. 66 There is therefore
nothing for the sovereign to do but turn away its gaze from—to ignore, and hence be ignorant of—the
UFO, making no decision at all. Just when needed most, on the palisades, the sovereign is nowhere to be found.
Sovereignty
Exposing the limits of the states can test its authority, in this instance the inability of
the anthropocentric state to believe in the supernatural is a limit
Wendt and Duvall 08[Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University,
August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 618-622]
If the limits of the governmental regime are exposed, the sovereign generally can be counted on to
survey and to securitize the threat; that is after all what its sovereignty is for. In this light the UFO is
the proverbial dog that didn't bark, a potential threat not only un-securitized but never even properly
surveyed. About the UFO, in short, there has been no decision as to its status as exception, only an
ignoring. The reason, we argue, lies in the triple threat that the UFO poses to modern rule, at once physical,
ontological, and metaphysical. Exceptions presuppose an exterior. Because modem rule is grounded in
a scientific Worldview that does not recognize the existence of supernatural phenomena, this exterior
is normally understood today in purely spatio-temporal terms." Threats can then take two forms, physical threats to
life and ontological threats to identity or social being." Given sovereignty's need to transform the contingency of
decision into taken-for-granted authority, it is only by reference to the intrusion of such threats into
its field of visibility that the state of exception can be justified. Importantly, the sovereign cannot
decide the terms of its encounters with these intrusions, only their status as exception. On one level the
UFO is a traditional spatio-temporal threat, because one of the possibilities that we must countenance if we accept that
the UFO is truly unidentified is that its occupants are ETs—and that threatens both the physical and
ontological security of modern rule. The physical threat, of course, is that ET presence in “our” solar
system would indicate a vastly superior technology to human beings’, raising the possibility of
conquest and even extermination. (In this respect it matters greatly that They might be Here, rather than far away as in the SETI
scenario.) The ontological threat is that even if the ETs were benign, their confirmed presence would
create tremendous pressure for a unified human response, or world government. The sovereign
identity of the modern state is partly constituted in and through its difference from other such states,
which gives modern sovereignty its plural character. Any exteriority that required subsuming this difference into a global
sovereignty would threaten what the modern state is, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction. It might be argued that these spatiotemporal threats alone can explain the UFO taboo. On this view, by virtue of the possibility that UFOs are ETs, the
UFO calls into
question the state’s claim to protect its citizens, which it would be unwilling to admit. Because the
threat is so grave, the only rational response is to ignore the UFO. States are enabled in this policy by the fact that
UFOs do not (yet) interfere with the conditions of life of human populations, and as such have not
compelled recognition. However, at least two considerations militate against reducing the UFO threat to spatio-temporal terms. First,
states show little reluctance to ignore other existential threats; if immigrants, pandemics, and terrorists are readily securitized, despite states’
inability to secure their populations from them, then why are not UFOs? Second, given that UFOs do not interfere with modern governance,
and with no indication that states actually believe the ETH, the UFO would seem cynically to be an ideal securitization issue. Because it leaves
physical traces it can be represented as if it were real, justifying the growth of state power, even as states know the threat is imaginary. To be
sure states may have other worries—but then all the more reason to stage a UFO threat to bolster their capacities. Thus, Hollywood
notwithstanding, in our view the threat of the UFO is not primarily alien invasion or the black helicopters of world government. Challenges to
the “physics” of modern sovereignty are necessary conditions for the UFO taboo, but they are not sufficient. The
UFO threat is
different in the challenge it poses to the metaphysics of modern sovereignty, which are fundamentally
anthropocentric. 54 Because the contemporary capacity to command political loyalty and resources
depends upon it, the assumption of anthropocentrism must be unquestioned if modern rule is to be
sustained as a political project. As a condition of their own sovereignty, therefore, before modern states can deal with
threats to their physical and ontological security, they must first secure this metaphysic. How is this done? Sovereign
decision is no help, since modern sovereignty can only instantiate an anthropocentric metaphysic, not step
outside to decide the exception to it. So here modern sovereignty must give way to governmentality, or
authoritative procedures to make anthropocentrism “known” as fact. In contrast to past processes of
normalization in which the visions of shamans or seers were taken to be authoritative, the standards
of knowledge in modern governmentality are primarily scientific. Thus, since there is no scientific evidence for
miracles, it is known that God does not intervene in the material world. Similarly, since there is no evidence Nature has subjectivity, it is known
not to. Anthropocentrism will be secure until scientific evidence to the contrary comes along. An
unknown that incorporates the
possibility of ETs confounds this metaphysical certainty, creating a situation in which its status as
exception cannot be decided. We develop this suggestion using Derrida’s concept of “undecidability,”
while arguing that the particular form undecidability takes in the UFO case disrupts its usual
operation. Something is undecidable when it “does not conform to either polarity of a dichotomy, (for
example, present/absent, cure/poison, and inside/outside),” but is both at once. Perhaps confusingly, undecidability does not
mean a decision cannot be made, but that a decision on which side of the binary an undecidable
belongs is compelled. Undecidability is a “condition from which no course of action necessarily follows,” yet which requires a decision
to resolve oscillation between dichotomous poles. The UFO is undecidable in this sense, and thus compels decision.
However, to “decide” an exception it would seem necessary for the sovereign first to acknowledge the
existence of a disturbance in its field of visibility and try to determine what the disturbance is.
“Decision,” in other words, suggests an effort to know potential threats rather than merely re-enact the
norm, if only to make better decisions—yet states have made no meaningful effort to know the UFO.
Disturbances may be acknowledged, but then states have mostly abjured a scientific standpoint in favor of public relations
on behalf of the established regime of truth, re-affirming that We already know what these (unidentified) objects
are (not). The effect is to constitute the UFO as un-exceptional, but not by “deciding.” 58 This suggests that
we need to look more closely at the moment of transition from undecidability to the decision, or what
Derrida calls the “logic of the palisade,” 59 which in this case does not seem to be automatic. More specifically, we propose that
the UFO compels a decision that, by the modern sovereign at least, cannot be made. The reason is the
particular character of the UFO’s undecidability, at once potentially objective and subjective, each
pole of which poses a metaphysical challenge to anthropocentric rule.
Modern sovereignty rejects anything outside of its anthropocentric frame of mind, so
it controls its subjects and instills a taboo against UFOs. Analyzing the UFO questions
the limits of the sovereign
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State
University, August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 607-609]
Few ideas today are as contested as sovereignty, in theory or in practice. In sovereignty theory
scholars disagree about almost everything—what sovereignty is and where it resides, how it relates to law, whether it is
divisible, how its subjects and objects are constituted, and whether it is being transformed in late modernity. These debates are mirrored in
contemporary practice, where struggles for self-determination and territorial revisionism have generated among the bitterest conflicts in
modern times. Throughout
this contestation, however, one thing is taken for granted: sovereignty is the
province of humans alone. Animals and Nature are assumed to lack the cognitive capacity and/or
subjectivity to be sovereign; and while God might have ultimate sovereignty, even most religious fundamentalists grant that it is not
exercised directly in the temporal world. When sovereignty is contested today, therefore, it is always and only
among humans, horizontally so to speak, rather than vertically with Nature or God. In this way modern sovereignty is
anthropocentric, or constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.' Humans live within
physical constraints, but are solely responsible for deciding their norms and practices under those constraints. Despite the nude variety of
institutional forms taken by sovereignty today, they are homologous in this fundamental respect. Anthropocentric
sovereignty
might seem necessary; after all, who else, besides humans, might rule? Nevertheless, historically sovereignty was
less anthropocentric. For millennia Nature and the gods were thought to have causal powers and
subjectivities that enabled them to share sovereignty with humans, if not exercise dominion outright?
Authoritative belief in non-human sovereignties was given up only after long and bitter struggle about the "borders of the social world," in
which who/what could be sovereign depends on who.-"What should be included in society} In modernity God and Nature are excluded,
although in this exclusion they are also re-included as the domesticated Other. Thus, while no longer temporally sovereign, God is included
today through people who are seen to speak on Her behalf. And while Nature
has been disenchanted, stripped of its
subjectivity, it is reincluded as object in the human world. These inclusive exclusions, however,
reinforce the assumption that humans alone can be sovereign in this light anthropocentric sovereignty
must be seen as a contingent historical achievement, not just a requirement of common sense. Indeed, it
is a metaphysical achievement, since it is in anthropocentric terms that humans today understand their place in the physical world. Thus
operates what Giorgio Agamben calls the "anthropological machine?" In
some areas this metaphysics admittedly is
contested. Suggestions of animal consciousness fuel calls for animal rights, for example, and
advocates of “Intelligent Design” think God is necessary to explain Nature’s complexity. Yet, such
challenges do not threaten the principle that sovereignty, the capacity to decide the norm and
exception to it, must necessarily be human. Animals or Nature might deserve rights, but humans will decide that; and even
Intelligent Designers do not claim that God exercises temporal sovereignty. With respect to sovereignty, at least,
anthropocentrism is taken to be common sense, even in political theory, where it is rarely
problematized. 5 This “common sense” is nevertheless of immense practical significance in the
mobilization of power and violence for political projects. Modern systems of rule are able to
command exceptional loyalty and resources from their subjects on the shared assumption that the
only potential sovereigns are human. Imagine a counterfactual world in which God visibly
materialized (as in the Christians’ “Second Coming,” for example): to whom would people give their loyalty, and
could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient? Anything that
challenged anthropocentric sovereignty, it seems, would challenge the foundations of modern rule. In
this article we develop this point and explore its implications for political theory. Specifically, our intent is to highlight and engage
critically the limits of anthropocentric sovereignty. In doing so, we seek to contribute to an eclectic
line of critical theory of modern rule—if not sovereignty per se—which problematizes its anthropocentrism, a line that connects
(however awkwardly and indirectly) Spinozan studies (including Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze) to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jane
Bennett, and others. 6 We
do so through the phenomenon of the Unidentified Flying Object, or “UFO,” 7 the
authoritative disregard for which brings clearly into view the limits of anthropocentric metaphysics. We
proceed in four sections. In the first, we describe an animating puzzle—the “UFO taboo”—in order to set the empirical basis for our theoretical
intervention. In the next we make this taboo puzzling through an immanent critique of the authoritative claim that UFOs are not extraterrestrial
(ET). Then, in the third section, we solve the puzzle through a theoretical analysis of the metaphysical threat that the UFO poses to
anthropocentric sovereignty. We conclude with some implications for theory and practice.
Because of a constructed taboo against discussing UFO’s, people don’t research what
could be the most substantial discovery ever
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State
University, August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 610-611]
On March
30-31, 1990, two Belgian F-16s were scrambled to intercept a large, unidentified object in
the night sky over Brussels, which had been observed by a policeman and ground-based radars. The pilots confirmed the
target on their radars (never visually) and achieved radar lock three times, but each time it responded
with violent turns and altitude changes, later estimated to have imposed gravitational forces of 40gs .
In a rare public statement the Belgian defense minister said he could not explain the incident , which remains
unexplained today. 8 One might expect unexplained incidents in NATO airspace to concern the authorities,
particularly given that since 1947 over 100,000 UFOs have been reported worldwide, many by
militaries. 9 However, neither the scientific community nor states have made serious efforts to identify
them, the vast majority remaining completely uninvestigated. The science of UFOs is minuscule and deeply
marginalized. Although many scientists think privately that UFOs deserve study, 10 there are no
opportunities or incentives to do it. With almost no meaningful variation, states—all 190 + of them—have
been notably uninterested as well. 11 A few have gone through the motions of studying individual cases, but with even fewer
exceptions these inquiries have been neither objective nor systematic, and no state has actually looked for UFOs to discover
larger patterns. 12 For both science and the state, it seems, the UFO is not an “object” at all, but a non
-object, something not just unidentified but unseen and thus ignored. The authoritative disregard of UFOs goes
further, however, to active denial of their object status. Ufology is decried as a pseudo-science that threatens the
foundations of scientific authority, and the few scientists who have taken a public interest in UFOs have done so at considerable
cost. For their part, states have actively dismissed "belief" in UFOs as irrational (as in, "do you believe in UFOs?"), while
maintaining considerable secrecy about their own reports." This leading role of the state distinguishes UFO’s from
other anomalies, scientific resistance to which is typically explained sociologically . 1' UFO denial appears to be
as much political as sociological- more like Galileo's ideas were political for the Catholic Church than like the once ridiculed theory of
continental drift. In short, considerable
work goes into ignoring UFOs, constituting them as objects only of
ridicule and scorn. To that extent one may speak of a "UFO taboo." a prohibition in the authoritative
public sphere on taking UFOs seriously, or "thou shalt not try very hard to find out what UFOs are."" Still, for modern
elites it is unnecessary to study UFOs, because they are known to have conventional-i.e., non-ET-explanations, whether hoaxes,
rare atmospheric phenomena, instrument malfunction, Witness mistakes, or secret government technologies. Members of the
general public might believe that UFOs are ETs, but authoritatively We know they are not. In the next
section we challenge this claim to knowledge. Not by arguing that UFOs are ETs, since we have no idea
what UFOs are-which are, after all, unidentified. But that is precisely the point. Scientifically, human beings do not know that
all UFO’s have conventional explanations, but instead remain ignorant. In this light a UFO taboo appears quite puzzling. First, if
any UFOs were discovered to be ETs it would be one of the most important events in human history,
making it rational to investigate even a remote possibility. It was just such reasoning that led the U.S. government to
find the Search for Extra- Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which looks for signs of life around distant stars. With no evidence whatsoever for such
life, why not study UFOs, which are close by and leave evidence?" Second, states seem eager to "securitize" all manner of threats to their
societies or their rule." Securitization often enables the expansion of state power; why not then securitize UFO’s, which offer unprecedented
possibilities in this respect? And finally, there is simple scientific curiosity: why not study UFOs, just like human beings study everything else? At
least something interesting might be learned about Nature. Notwithstanding these compelling reasons to identify UFOs, however, modern
authorities have not seriously tried to do so. This suggests that UFO ignorance is not simply a gap in our knowledge, like the cure for cancer, but
something actively reproduced by taboo. Taking this taboo as a symptom, following Nancy Tuana," we inquire into the "epistemology
of
[UFO] ignorance," or the production of (un)knowledge about UFOs and its significance for modern
rule. We are particularly interested here in the role of the state, while recognizing the story is also
about science." Thus, our puzzle is not the familiar question of ufology, "What are UFOs?" but, "Why
are they dismissed by the authorities?" Why is human ignorance not only unacknowledged, but so
emphatically denied? In short, why a taboo? These are questions of social rather than physical science, and do not presuppose that any
UFOs are ETS. Only that they might be.
Studying the UFO can break down anthropocentric governmentality
Wendt and Duvall 08 [Alexander Wendt, professor of Political Science at The Ohio State
University, August 2008, “Sovereignty and the UFO”, http://ovnisusa.com/DIVERS/Wendt_Duvall_PoliticalTheory.pdf, page 611-612]
First the argument. Adapting ideas from Giorgio Agamben, supplemented by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. We
argue that the
UFO taboo is functionally necessitated by the anthropocentric metaphysics of modern sovereignty.
Modern rule typically works less through sovereign coercion than through biopolitics, governing the
conditions of life itself." In this liberal apparatus of security, power flows primarily from the deployment of specialized knowledges for
the regularization of populations, rather than from the ability to kill. But when such regimes of governmentality are
threatened, the traditional face of the state," its sovereign power, comes to the fore: the ability to
determine when norms and law should be suspended-in Carl Schmitt’s terms, to "decide the exception."24 The
UFO compels decision because it exceeds modern governmentality, but we argue that the decision
cannot be made. The reason is that modern decision presupposes anthropocentrism, which is
threatened metaphysically by the possibility that UFOs might be ETs. As such, genuine UFO ignorance
cannot be acknowledged without calling modern sovereignty itself into question. This puts the problem of
normalizing the UFO back onto governmentality, where it can be "known" only without trying to find out what it is-through a taboo. The UFO,
in short, is a previously unacknowledged site of contestation in an ongoing historical project to
constitute sovereignty in anthropocentric terms. Importantly, our argument here is structural rather than agentic. We
are not saying the authorities are hiding The Truth about UFOs, much less that it is ET. We are saying
they cannot ask the question. Although we draw on theorists not associated with epistemic realism, a key premise of our
argument is that a critical theorization of the UFO taboo in relation to modern rule is possible only if it
includes a realist moment, which grants to things-in-themselves (here the UFO) the power to affect
rational belief. To see why, consider Jodi Dean's otherwise excellent Aliens in America, one of the few social scientific works to treat UFOs
as anything more than figments of over-active imaginations. Like us, Dean emphasizes that it is not known what UFOs are,
leaving open the ET possibility. But for her the significance of this ignorance is to exemplify the
postmodern breakdown of all modern certainties, such that scientific truth is now everywhere a
"fugitive"-not that it might be overcome by considering, scientifically, the reality of UFOs. In the UFO context such anti-realism is
problematic, since its political effect is ironically to reinforce the skeptical orthodoxy: if UFOs cannot
be known scientifically then why bother study them? As realist institutions, science and the modern
state do not concern themselves with what cannot be known scientifically. For example, whatever their religious
beliefs, social scientists always study religion as “methodological atheists,” assuming that God plays no
causal role in the material world. Anything else would be considered irrational today; as Jürgen Habermas puts it, “a
philosophy that oversteps the bounds of methodological atheism loses its philosophical seriousness.”
27 By not allowing that UFOs might be knowable scientifically, therefore, Dean implicitly embraces a
kind of methodological atheism about UFOs, which as with God shifts attention to human
representations of the UFO, not its reality. Yet UFOs are different than God in one key respect: many
leave physical traces on radar and film, which suggests they are natural rather than supernatural
phenomena and thus amenable in principle to scientific investigation. Since authoritative discourse in
effect denies this by treating UFOs as an irrational belief, a realist moment is necessary to call this
discourse fully into question. Interestingly, therefore, in contrast to their usual antagonism, in the UFO context science would be
critical theory. In this light Dean’s claim that UFOs are unknowable appears anthropocentrically monological. It might be that We,
talking among ourselves, cannot know what UFOs are, but any “They” probably have a good idea, and
the only way to remain open to that dialogical potential is to consider the reality of the UFO itself. 28
Failure to do so merely reaffirms the UFO taboo. In foregrounding the realist moment in our analysis we mean not to
foreclose a priori the possibility that UFOs can be known scientifically; however, we make no claim that they necessarily would be known if only
they were studied. Upon close inspection many
UFOs do turn out to have conventional explanations, but there is
a hard core of cases, perhaps 25 to 30 percent, that seem to resist such explanations, and their reality may
indeed be humanly unknowable—although without systematic inquiry we cannot say. Thus, and importantly,
our overarching position here is one of methodological agnosticism rather than realism, which
mitigates the potential for epistemological conflict with the non-realist political theorists we draw
upon below. 29 Nevertheless, in the context of natural phenomena like UFOs agnosticism can itself become dogma if not put to the test,
which requires adopting a realist stance at least instrumentally or “strategically,” and seeing what happens. 30 This justifies acting as if the UFO
is knowable, while recognizing that it might ultimately exceed human grasp.
A/T: Framework
Prerequisite
A global malevolent conspiracy is a possibility with which any social and political
philosophy must grapple
Basham ’03 (LEE BASHAM, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy Spring 2003
“Malevolent Global Conspiracy” pp. 91-103)
Imagine we’re told select members of the Council on Foreign Relations1 and a consortium of satellite groups are the secret malevolent masters
of the planet.2 As properly reason-obsessed philosophers we probably assume our laughter is grounded in rational epistemology. We believe
that it’s an easy task to show that the most ambitious conspiracy theories, malevolent global conspiracy theories, are utterly unwarranted.But
is it really? Conspiracy
theory exposes a range of predicaments uniquely associated with the epistemic
and doxastic issues of institutional credibility. Our epistemology andsocial and polit- ical philosophy
violently collide. This collision is real and serious. As we’ll see, these conspiracy theories are unscathed by the traditional objections
against them and if true, or even credible possibilities, are devastating to many of our traditional moral projects as philosophers of society and
its political/ economic institutions. ¶ What are these terrible entities, these conspiracy theories? A“conspiracy
theory” is an
explanation of important events that appeals to the intentional deception and manipulation of those
involved in, affected by, or witnessing these events. These deceptions/manipulations involve
multiple, cooperating players. While there is no contradiction in the phrase “conspiracies of good- ness,” the deceptions and
manipulations implied by the term “conspiracy theory” are usually thought to express nefarious, even insanely evil, pur- poses.3 Atotal
malevolent global conspiracy is the extreme example. Imagine that the “world” as we know it today is an elaborate hoax. A
cabal of unaccountable, parasitic power elites virtually unknown to the public controls the economy, politics,
popular ideology, and pop culture and so, by causal impli- cation, the lives of the masses. These
conspirators pursue a wholly Machi- avellian program for the wealth, power, and challenge, perhaps even for the twisted entertainment and
maniacal ego amplification, it provides them. Democracy is merely a status quo–maintaining media sham. Popular politi- cal ideologies are
carefully constructed rationalizations that are wholly irrel- evant to the real conduct and purposes of our global civilization. Right or left-wing
libertarianism? Rawlsian egalitarianism? Marxist socialism? This, that, or another political-ism? All are equally putty in the hands of the con-¶
JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 34 No. 1, Spring 2003, 91–103. © 2003 Blackwell Publishing, Inc.¶ spiratorial elite. ¶ Academia with its
prized intellectual freedom is nothing more than a labyrinth-like diversion, a house of leaves, for potential dissi- dents and competitors to waste
their lives in. The conduct of nations in both peace and war, including whether they are at war or peace, is well orches- trated. The shape of our
future—for the masses, a dismal future as person- ally isolated, intellectually crippled, emotionally shallow consumers and laborers—is largely a
matter of plans put into action in the past, probably in the mid-twentieth century....We could go on, but this dark vision hits all the main bases
of power and influence in a materialistic culture. If you think anything interesting is absent from the nightmare, feel free to add it. The
tentacles of our conspiracy conceptions can extend as far one cares to contemplate. Partial or more
topically narrow versions of this scenario are available and of course, far more credible. Aclassic, more
restrained incarnation of the extreme case is offered by the celebrated critical sociologist C. Wright Mills:¶ The top of...society is
increasingly unified, and often seems willfully co- ordinated; at the top there has emerged an elite of
power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The
bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless; at
the bottom there is an emerging mass society.4¶ If planned, if inflicted, an extensive malevolent global conspiracy would
render our social and political philosophy so much flypaper for the intellec- tually and verbally adept. Our attempts at just and benevolent
normative for- mulas will be exploited when they serve the already established aims of the conspiracy and will as quickly be ignored (or
shamelessly distorted) when they don’t.5 If global malevolent conspiracies are really possible and we want our work to be socially relevant,
then it is no small matter for us to discount (or dismantle) their existence. It is also a critical virtue of any sane civiliza- tional system that it be
constructed so that overarching malevolent conspir- acy can be easily detected and undone. If a malevolent global conspiracy is really possible
our social and political theory must explicitly address how to detect and dismantle the menace. ¶ Are such conspiracies “really possible”?
There’s no denying that we live in a remarkably secretive, hierarchically organized civilization. The major
bases of power—national governments and global corporate empires— combine enormous institutional, financial, and technological resources
with extensive mechanisms of secrecy, both preventative and punitive. Financial gain, political power, and maniacal ego amplification have
always proved strong temptations for unaccountable authorities. Such a civ- ilization is ripe for allegations of organized, society-wide
manipulations and deceptions affecting most everyone’s life. It’s
no surprise that such allegations are exceedingly
common. On the face of things there is a serious prior proba- bility of global conspiracy. With the emergence of a truly global politicaleconomic system, this possibility has never been more sobering. What of the reality?
Culture of Conspiracy Turn
Conspiracy theory is an expression of anxiety within a culture. Institutional responses
help shape their power
Horn 10 (Clara Kay Van Horn, The Paranoid Style in an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official
Rhetoric in Contemporary America; published on 12 December 2010; p. 158-159)
Conspiracy theories are becoming an increasingly significant mode of interpretation for understanding
the causes behind historical events. Scholars have pointed to the eruption of conspiracy beliefs that
continue to grow and expand in our contemporary world as proof that the U.S. is becoming more
paranoid and more besieged by conspiracy beliefs.1 The expansion of conspiracy beliefs among the
American people is a result, posit scholars, of the loss of central authority and the rise of the
indeterminacy of information.2 In the wake of revelations of actual conspiracies enacted by the government against its people, in
the wake of revelations of government and corporate malfeasance, belief in conspiracy is no longer a purely paranoid
assumption. Labeling a belief as a conspiracy theory serves as a dismissal of its premises. But the
persistence and prominence of conspiracy theories is indicative that conspiracy theories are not so easily
marginalized and dispelled by simply dismissing their messages and their appeal. At the heart of this study is
the determination of how conspiracy theories shape and influence official discourse. It has been widely acknowledged that conspiracy theories
enter into a dialogue with official discourse; what has not been examined is the degree to which conspiracy theories influence the substance of
official discourse.
Conspiracy theories come into being almost immediately after a significant historical
event occurs . From Sarah Palin‘s pronouncement that President Obama wanted to impose ―death panels‖ as part of the health care bill,
to the leaking of thousands of classified military documents on the War in Afghanistan which indicate that ―the Taliban are stronger than at
any time since 2001,‖ to beliefs that President Obama is a closet Muslim and that he, along with his administration, is attempting to impose
Sharia law in the United States, conspiracy
theories are the wellspring of doubt, uncertainty, and anxiety within
the American public.3 When conspiracy claims become strong enough, when they elicit enough doubt
to effectively prohibit the government from enacting legislatio n, diminish public support of overseas war efforts, or
even provoke people to violently target places of worship because of their fears that an alien religion is trying to usurp the American way of
life ,
it becomes incumbent upon officials to address the issues .4 The ways in which officials respond
to fears, to anxieties, to claims of conspiracy within the public sphere are instrumental in perfecting
the maturity of conspiracy theories .
Education Turns
Conspiracy theories highlight gaps in knowledge created by the information age's
destruction of expert authority. This enables us to take a critical stance with regards
to institutional discourse
Horn 10 (Clara Kay Van Horn, The Paranoid Style in an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official
Rhetoric in Contemporary America; published on 12 December 2010; p. 160-161)
The cultural force and power of conspiracy theories lies, in a large degree, with the loss of central authority and the indeterminacy of
information.5 Since 1960, and even before, a litany of scandals and abuses of power have discredited the normally presumptive position
authority holds. Peter Knight observed that
in the face of revealed scandals and conspiracies committed by the
government against its own people, conspiracy theories implicating the government of wrongdoing
are now a default assumption on the part of large contingents of the American public .6 That loss of central
authority thus gives rise to the indeterminacy of information. In our time, when a globally significant historical event occurs, a deluge of
information is immediately available within the public through the media, especially through the Internet. Competing
sources, ones
vying for the authority to narrate the happenings of such events, quickly forward their own
interpretations of what happened, who did it, and why it occurred. While the more fantastic, the more conspiratorial
beliefs may not be immediately creditable to segments of the public, as more information is released, and as more
conflicting evidence and testimony is uncovered, the public has to make a series of choices as to
whom or what to believe, a task that, at least since the early 1960s, has been made more and more untenable.7 As Knight indicates:
Whether we like it or not, all of us now live in a world in which there is a vast amount of information but none of it is ever complete: there is
always one more theory to consider, one more expert opinion to consult, not helped by the possibility that the ultimate consequences of any
event threaten to mushroom outwards into a chain reaction of cause and effect.
incommensurable,
And with so many different , and often
sources of information, there seems to be no higher authority to which we can appeal
in order to get to the ultimate truth .8 The inability to appeal to a higher authority, the inability to
find a higher truth, makes any information that is provided suspect . Instead, the public has to sift
through all of the competing sources in order to determine its own truth. But the continual revelation of
information never provides the public with a stable meaning. Instead, information is constantly being changed, challenged, and compounded. It
is not possible to have anything but indeterminacy with such unstable meaning, and it is almost certain that
conspiracy
theories will continue to grow, and to be believed. The continued growth of conspiracy theories, and
their ability to force officials to attack their premises, is revelatory of the power conspiracy theories
have over the form of official discourse.
Life is filled with secrets and classified intel, the information we receive is modified,
filtered and formed by governments, aimed at producing societal change. However,
global conspiracy theories are real, the negative assumptions about unfalsifiability,
uncontrollability and our trust of public institutions of information are not legitimate
reasons why conspiracies do not occur; these reasons are a hesitant attempt to hide
secretive information
Basham ’03 (LEE BASHAM, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy Spring 2003
“Malevolent Global Conspiracy” pp. 91-103)
92 Lee Basham¶ Holding Back the Conspiracy¶ There are four primary objections to the rational acceptance of
global con- spiracy theory per se: unfalsifiability, uncontrollability, an appeal to the trust- worthiness
of public institutions of information, and the ever-present accusation of paranoia. None of these
objections dispels either the possibility or the like- lihood of a malevolent global conspiracy. They fail to
show that theories of such a conspiracy are rationally unacceptable.6¶ Unfalsifiability¶ Because conspiracy theorists naturally invoke the idea
that official expla- nations are in part or whole deceptions, they can rationally interpret prima facie evidence against their accounts (official
reports, public statements and court of law testimonies by various government employees and others) as evidence for the conspiracy. Falsified
evidence is precisely what a conspiracy theory predicts will be produced by governments and other players in ample amounts. Some might
object to conspiracy theories simply because, for this reason, they are of limited falsifiability—in the extreme case, utterly unfalsi- fiable. In his
critique of conspiracy theory, Brian Keeley is right to set aside this objection: “Unfalsifiability
is only a reasonable criterion
[of epistemic rejection] in cases where we do not have reason to believe that there are pow- erful
agents seeking to steer our investigation away from the truth of the matter.”7 While falsifiability is an
appropriate criterion in the case of natural science, a standard that includes such a criterion would rule out our initial inquiry into even
authentic conspiracies like those involving President Richard Nixon or U.S. Army Colonel Oliver North.¶ Uncontrollability¶ Some
have
argued against ambitious conspiracy theory because they believe important conspiracies require too
great a unity and stability of purpose among too many people to be feasible. Control of so many
psycho- logically diverse individuals is simply impossible. In the key move of his critique of conspiracy theory, Keeley
asserts that¶ [s]uch a [global] system cannot be [conspiratorially] controlled because the world as we understand it today is made up of an
extremely large number of interacting agents, each with its own imperfect view of the world and its own set of goals....To propose that an
explosive secret could be closeted for any length of time simply reveals a lack of under- standing of modern bureaucracies. Like the world itself,
they are made up of too many people with too many different agendas to be easily controlled.8¶ But
that’s exactly the question,
isn’t it? Perhaps this is an accurate portrayal of the world “as we [most of us] understand it today.” But is this popular “understanding”
accurate? That’s far from obvious. A significant fact over-¶ Malevolent Global Conspiracy 93¶ looked in Keeley’s analysis is that bureaucracies,
corporations, and organi- zations in general are extremely hierarchicalin nature. The loci critical for effec- tive descending control surely are not
at the level of “herding cats,” the level of ordinary workers, but instead are highly placed and therefore much more manageable an. As for high
placed coconspirators not being “easily” controlled, even a few children can’t be easily controlled. But
it doesn’t mean they can’t
be. Indeed, punitive measures are quite effective in controlling both children and adults. Sissela Bok notes that¶ [m]any members of the most
brutal [secret] societies...might not have joined had they not been tricked or seduced into doing so, and might well have left were it not for the
threats leveled against anyone showing such disloyalty. If they have taken part in an act they fear to have known, the group has additional hold
over them.10¶ Keeley’s
right that we all have our own agendas. However, these agendas almost always
have two things near the top of the list: avoiding misery and avoiding death, not only for ourselves,
but for the ones we love. In the face of a threat as momentous as malevolent global conspiracy it would be naive to place our
confidence in an objection as weak as uncontrollability.¶ Appeal to Trustworthiness of Public Institutions of
Information¶ Closely related to the uncontrollability objection, the appeal to trustwor- thiness of
public institutions of information focuses not on the issue of control per se but on the control of
information. This is the normal and most sub- stantial objection to global conspiracy theory. Surely governmental investi- gations, the
“free press,” and alert private individuals at large will inevitably encounter the existence of the conspiracy and inevitably and effectively sound
the alarm.Thus any truly global malevolent conspiracy will be exposed and elim- inated by the agents of goodness and freedom found
everywhere. The reason this response is normal is that in the West we have all been deeply indoctri- nated in the mythos of the vigilant free
press, the benevolent protection of the investigative authorities, and the unstoppable power of the lone crusader for truth. Our press,
government, and media taught us this, naturally. But does confidence in this trinity of truth have the kind of rational basis required to
undermine effectively the possibility (or even likelihood) of something as potentially dangerous as global conspiracy? Next I will detail why it
doesn’t.¶ Our Epistemic Dilemma¶ The common and as is commonly the case adeptconspiracy theorist offers a challenging background position
concerning our sources and institutions of information, perhaps a position of greater interest than her particular con- spiracy theory: (1) We
have little reason to claim positive warrant for our con- fidence in public institutions of information
where critical interests of the¶ 94 Lee Basham¶ dominant powers are at stake, and (2) substantial
positive warrant exists to believe that public institutions of information are routinely used to deceive
us in the service of these interests. This is the seedbed out of which conspir- acy theory grows. Let’s get a better grip on these
twin concerns. Positive warrant for some amount of conspiratorial infiltration of public institutions of information is readily available. While a
total skepticism about public institutions may be unreasonable, a total skepticism about the current existence of even one fairly involved,
widespread, and shocking conspiracy involving an elaborate cover-up/disinformation campaign seems just as unbalanced. Again, in today’s
society there is an unavoidable and serious prior probabilityof active conspiracy. It’s also endemic to the human condition: Cases of marital
infidelity often exist in which friends and relatives know but for various reasons (selfish or “compassionate”) conceal the behavior. Multi- player
business betrayals, thieving trickery, and cruel false rumors requiring the cooperation of others are ubiquitous in the private sphere. Hardly
any of us will pass through life without encountering this sordid behavior in one form or another.
These “amateur” conspiracies can even last a lifetime. I imagine that for every conspiratorial infidelity revealed, another
is never dis- covered, and the perpetrator and his or her co-operatives carry the truth to their graves. Combine this natural and well-developed
human capacity with a civilization of vast, intimidating, and “openly secretive” governmental and corporate powers, and the conclusion that
conspiratorial groups exist some- where in the public realm and are busy doing something far reaching and painfully nefarious is almost
irresistible. It would be perverse to deny flatly that there are people, high-placed and full of brilliant but cruel cunning, reaping the benefits of a
widespread, enduring, and revolting pattern of deception and manipulation right now.11 History would have us expect nothing else.
Bok
reminds us that¶ Malevolent Global Conspiracy 95¶ many secret societies have aimed to produce both
personal and social transformation, whether in opposition to the larger society or as a tool of the
regime in power....[T]he government itself, no matter how demo- cratically installed, may wish to
carry out activities at home or abroad.12¶ Frequently they succeed. Exclusion and manipulation of various institutions of public
information is an inevitable requirement. ¶ The conspiracy theorist’s concern is a natural response. The very idea of “secret societies,” be they
Freemasons, corporate boards, or government se- curity agencies, inevitably invites the understandably suspicious question, “What’s
the
secret?” Common sense about the public sphere is hardly at odds with the conspiracy theorist’s background suspicion. Police investigations
are frequently no more than conspiracies to infiltrate and entrap criminals or those liable to crime. Espionage is hardly restricted to the Secret
Intelligence Service and the CIA. In the corporate world it’s business as usual, unques- tionably very good business, both for the practitioners
and for their hired adversaries. Industries pour billions of dollars into preventing and no doubt conducting industrial espionage. They conspire
against other corporations and expect the same against themselves. Competing political, ideological, and religious organizations are no
different. They all conspire against each other. It’s called history. Is the history of the world the history of warring secret soci- eties? Seen in this
light, it seems a banal truism.¶ The issue before us is one of degree. Aspectrum exists between the trust- ing and distrusting background
theories of our civilization. Reasoned epis- temic choice within this spectrum can only advert to empirical facts about the actual degree of
conspiracy at work in the multitude of institutional rela- tionships spanning all sectors of political, governmental, and economic enter- prise. But
getting the real measure of this is something that most all of us are in no reliable position to judge. I suspect that virtually no one is or can be.
This is, literally, beyond our ken. The
reason is simple: We face an underlying epistemic dilemma. Imagine two
competing accounts of the degree of conspiratorial coordination in our society, a trusting and a
distrusting one. Self-consistency, coherence with many background beliefs, and thoroughness lend some epistemic force to an account.
Let’s grant, as is surely the case, that these two accounts can be similar in this respect. What remains to guide our choice
between them is an epistemic evaluation of basic claims. By “basic claims” I mean those claims taken as “observationally
given” in the account and not supported solely through additional claims. I imagine “observationally given” here merely means documents,
records, and personal interviews. Basic claims address a plethora of factors, including but not limited to the level of private inter- action among
major corporations and leading political figures (presidents, congressional members, their political party chieftains, etc.), the financial
statements of various judges, key witnesses and other players, the kind and amount of personal favors exchanged, and various friendship,
family, and sexual linkages among leading sources of corporate and government policy making. We must also include the level of credible
coercion at work in a mul- titude of relationships. Ignoring the logistic nightmare at hand, suppose we¶ 96 Lee Basham¶ can—somehow—
adequately gather the relevant mountain of data.13 Our problem at this point is how do we evaluate these basic claims, upon which our
decision rests? Our dilemma is that there are two distinct scenarios between which we must decide: (1)
These basic claims are
largely filtered and some- times totally fabricated through deceptive practices put in place by fairly
well-developed networks of highly placed conspirators (unified or uncon- nected) in order to avoid
detection by inquiries like our own, or (2) these basic claims are largely accurate, because the level of conspiratorial activity in our
society is fairly weak and so conspiratorial control of such information is weak. The issue of degree simply presents itself again. We are left
having to assume an answer to the essential issue of how conspiratorial our society is in order to derive a well-justified position on it.14 In its
most rock-bottom premise any public trust approach falls to this point.
Modern Conspiracy Discourse Reveals More Than Ever Before the Vast
Interconnectedness Between Political Interests and Their Conspiracy-Oriented
Counterparts
Horn 10, Chara Kay Van. Ph.D. (Public Communication) and Doctorate in Philosophy from Georgia State University. “The Paranoid Style in an
Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official Rhetoric in Contemporary America” Page 4-5
This ―culture
of conspiracy‖ casts a default suspicion toward institutions of power so that when these
institutions ―authorize‖ discourses to explain a situation or event, they are lodged, sometimes in direct opposition, against the information and various
interpretations of the event, whether factual or not, existing within the public sphere. 18 Auditors are faced with an overwhelming
amount of information from which to choose in order to form their beliefs, and this choice frequently rests on the
question of whom to believe, the conspiratorial or the official; this is a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon. Despite
their current widespread popularity and belief, conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that accompanies them have received only modest attention from historians
and even less from rhetoricians. What
we do understand about conspiracy theories has been deeply influenced by
psychological perspectives, which identify a political maladjustment in peoples— usually located on
the political, social, and economic fringes—who use conspiracy claims as a means to gain notoriety or to
force some sort of political action. 19 For instance, filmmaker Oliver Stone‘s release of JFK, and the hype that surrounded it, spurred the National Archives to release
hundreds of thousands of pages of previously sealed assassination records, and the work of Stanton Friedman, and others like him, has prompted the U.S. Air Force
to reinvestigate the alleged UFO crash in Roswell at least twice. 20 Rhetoricians confronting conspiracy theories have generally engaged in criticism designed to
evaluate the theories by mapping the generic, argumentative, and narrative dimensions of such arguments. 21 What
is common to both historica and
the tendency to examine conspiracy theories as aberrant, misinformed, and overly
simplistic, although there is a more recent recognition that belief in conspiracy is neither as marginal
as once imagined, nor as misguided and paranoid as once presumed. 22 Currently, conspiracy beliefs are a
pervasive and powerful mode of thinking and many, from the most marginal to the most powerful, people in the country fall victim, at
times, to conspiracy theory‘s seductive nature. Generally, identifying an argument as a conspiracy theory serves as a means
of dismissal, setting the ―theory‖ apart from the more reasoned, more believable explanations offered by
social, economic, and political leaders. There is now recognition that a closer affinity than we have previously
acknowledged exists between official and/or political discourses and their conspiratorial counterparts ;
rhetorical scholarship is
in fact, the current relationship that exists is more dialogic than once believed.
Institutions Turns
Scholarly marginalization of conspiracy theories reflects the epistemological anxiety
about the equality of all coherent theories--prima facie rejection of conspiracies plays
into the hands of elites and the state
Goshorn 00 (Kevin Goshorn, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames of Containment: On Critical
Paranoia and Anti-Conspiracy Discourse"; published in 2000 in Theory and Events, Vol. 4, Issue 3;
paragraph(s) 11-14)
5. Anti-conspiracy discourse, which credits itself with a superior reason untroubled by any paranoia
about contemporary events, can be considered as a form of reactionary foundationalism, defensively
covering its own implication within a threatened or imploding consensus culture
-- or that which stands
behind the shield of responsible thinking in order to fight off the criticisms of the "irresponsible" others. In the few cases where academic critics
have managed to comment on the resurgence of conspiracy theory, it
is most typically viewed as a vulgar method
employed in the popular understanding of complex problems for those whose analytical skills are
"politically impoverished," suffering from "poor" sources of information, while the academic's own perceptions
and often less-informed sources remain unexamined. 6. Anti-conspiracists are more prone to becoming "hysterical"
than those they brand as conspiratorialists because the latter admit that there are multiple forces
and under-reported events
in the contemporary economic system and its political landscape
everyone , whereas the former still refuse to recognize their own
that should worry
précarité within latecapitalist neo-liberal political economy which they have agreed to accept and trust as a benign form of social management. This fragile
unconscious instability leads them to revert to an ageless partition between those others seized by
some form of "madness," and those of the civilized center with whom the anti-conspiracists occupy
the privileged ground of right and reason (even if secretly uncertain of where they themselves are standing). 7. If so-called
interpellation and
conspiracy theorists are sometimes reacting from the loss of patriotic illusions and sometimes suffering from their own economic
disenfranchisement, anti-conspiracy theorists suffer from the repression of their own state of critical dissuasion and recuperation within a
collective system of denial of the same contemporary realities. For these reasons and more,
serious scholarly research would
better occupy itself with the study of "anti-conspiracy" culture before returning to a terrain marked
as "conspiracy culture" already exhausted and emptied of meaning by exploitative popular media . The
collective problem of dissuasion from critical thought and deterrence from ideological dissent is far more important for maintaining democratic
principles than concerns about false interpretations and the erosion of a long-standing simulacral edifice of rationality and consensus now
gradually passing from the historical stage of Western culture. It was this latter which generated a science of "communications" that helped to
develop the methods used in commercial advertising, political propaganda, and "public relations" agencies, all of which have significantly
contributed to the loss of public faith in the truthfulness of official pronouncements and the integrity of "expert" opinions. 8. If
there are
always, in fact, countless instances of executive-level conspiring occurring at any given time to take or to
retain political and economic power, we must ask what aspect of the most recent reaction to
conspiracy theorizing is the unpresentable, the thorny destabilizing belief that must be made taboo.
What the most vigorously attacked political conspiracy theories would appear to share in common is a
suggestion that the current regime, or the present configuration of American democracy and political economy by which current
power is held, is either illegitimate, thoroughly corrupt, or not at all what it declares itself to be . It is this
genre of suggestions that must be effectively outlawed by instant ridicule and widespread
discreditation -- not only by those in power but by those other citizens who have a profitable, vested
interest in the current distribution of wealth, or by those sincere and naive citizens who simply want or need to
believe in the system's legitimacy for the maintenance of their personal/national/patriotic identity.
Institutions that focus on openness are not truly what they appear to be. Society
without conspiracies are unimaginable. The information we receive is meant to divert
our attention. If institutions believed in truthful openness, malevolent global
conspiracies would be less believable.
Basham ’03 (LEE BASHAM, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy Spring 2003
“Malevolent Global Conspiracy” pp. 91-103)
Openness is most effective if the major institutions of political and eco- nomic activity are what they
appear to be, centers of societal decision making, not counterfeits animated from outside in order to
divert our attention from the secretive real centers of control. While the issue of pseudoinstitutions is
important, we already have significant justification for believing that the per- sonnel (elected or
otherwise) of the U.S. government are frequently the deci- sive source of U.S. law and national policy
and that the officers of major economic establishments like Chase Manhattan Bank are in fact real
captains of commerce, personally playing a significant role in the direction of national and global
economies. First, there is no need to erect massive, elaborate decoys. Working within the visible power structures appears quite adequate
to the task of inflicting conspiratorial control as well as being overall a simpler approach. Moreover, the greater the extent of counterfeit
institutions, the greater the difficulty of creating and maintaining their appearance as con- centrated sources of influence on world events.
Finally, it is precisely because these institutions attract those most ambitious for power that they are
likely to be the breeding grounds of ambitious conspiracy. Conspiratorial control will, at any rate, be
introduced into society via these institutions, so thorough public access to their workings lets us
better evaluate their direction while also reducing the likelihood that ultimate command lies outside
them. ¶ With these points in mind we can accept that all things remaining equal, (1) the more open a society’s institutions
of power, the less initially warranted overarching conspiracy theories are, and (2) given a particular
level of open- ness, the greater the difficulty experienced in keeping a conspiracy theory alive (via
ever-expanding claims of falsified evidence, media manipulation, etc.), the less warranted it is,
because the conspiracy’s execution would be that much more difficult.20 While today this may license little
confidence it points us in precisely the right direction. ¶ The Accusation of Paranoia¶ We are now in a position to reflect on what, for most of us,
is our imme- diate response to an encounter with global conspiracy theory: The idea of a malevolent worldwide conspiracy is simply paranoid.
The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association (DSM-IV) tells us that¶ [t]he essential
feature of Paranoid Personality Disorder is a pattern of per- vasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted
as malevolent....Individuals...assume that other people will exploit, harm or deceive them, even if there is no evidence to support this
expectation. They suspect on the basis of little or no evidence that others are plotting against them.22¶ This conforms to common usage. In all
cases paranoia is an unreasonable fear¶ of someone.23 Paranoia comes in degrees, from the most rabid psychosis in¶ which everyone is feared
in every imaginable way to more topically narrow¶ cases in which such fear is experienced selectively. Although such fear is not¶ obviously
psychiatric or self-destructive, it is the latter that concerns us. Does¶ the accusation of paranoia necessarily apply to those who accept the
possibility,¶ even likelihood of malevolent global conspiracies animated by a global¶ power elite? Clearly not. Belief in the possibility of such
conspiracies needn’t¶ be an expression of unreasonable fear. We have seen at length how a rational¶ person can come to accept this
possibility, perhaps even its likelihood or eventuality.¶ While the conspiracy theorist’s concerns may easily prove misplaced,¶ there is nothing
inherently exaggerated or distorted in them. This is all the¶ more evident in the context of an extremely hierarchical, routinely secretive¶
society like our own. Only the paranoid (or extremely inquisitive) are likely¶ to become conspiracy theorists. But this reveals more about the
current complacency¶ of the average citizen than it does about the nature of the conspiracy¶ theorist’s concerns. While the details of her
preferred conspiratorial¶ account are frequently speculative, her motivating concern can be arrived at¶ rationally. It may even be rationally
compelling.¶ Conclusion¶ In
our present civilization I suspect the main source of popular “disbelief”¶ in
conspiracy theory has nothing to do with epistemic warrant. It is much¶ more pragmatic: There is nothing
you can do. Any number of conspiracies might¶ be worming their way through our world order. Now what? The “get a life”¶ principle kicks in
with a vengeance. We immediately dismiss the issue as far¶ beyond our circle of possible knowledge or action.24 This is wholly reasonable.¶
But critical social-political philosophy looks to ideals we might attain in¶ a more distant future.
The real problem confronting both
epistemologists and¶ 100 Lee Basham¶ social-political philosophers is determining what a relatively
conspiracy-free¶ society, one that we would be well justified in believing is relatively conspiracyfree, ¶
would look like. One thing is clear: It would not look like ours, whatever¶ the truth about our society
is. What would allow us to detect the existence of¶ malevolent global conspiracies and effectively
dismantle them once detected?¶ In our civilization today the sphere granted to the institutionally powerful but¶ nevertheless
private is so vast that hardly any of us can claim any well-justified¶ insight into a political tomorrow fifty years from today. Unlike for our tribal¶
predecessors, the future is for us almost unimaginable. The development of¶ a worldwide political-economic system makes our concern
especially pressing.¶ Putting on hold the apocalyptic impulses that often accompany great¶ change, imagine that our coming global civilization
endures, unlike Hitler’s¶ Third Reich, for a thousand years. Even
if we believe nothing is now afoot¶ (certainly my
dominant reaction) it seems reasonable to believe that at some¶ point in the future a serious attempt
will be made at malevolent global conspiracy.¶ The famous “triangle of crime” of the criminologist—motive, opportunity,¶
and ability—is either already in place, or in the case of “opportunity”¶ and “ability,” at least within the reach of like-minded power elites. If we¶
already knew such an attempt had been successfully made, discovered, and¶ dismantled, the need for prevention would be obvious. Why
patiently wait¶ for the worst-case scenario to materialize? We’re taught in civics class that the¶ salvation of the state lies in watchfulness in the
citizen. But the citizen must¶ be allowed to ascend to a position from which she can see. It is worth saying¶ that we must seriously contemplate
an open society on a level never before¶ imagined.
Traditional responses to conspiracy theories operate through marginalization and
silencing--instead, we need to examine the kinds of institutional and historical
situations which are amenable to producing cultures of conspiracy
Horn 10 (Clara Kay Van Horn, The Paranoid Style in an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official
Rhetoric in Contemporary America; published on 12 December 2010; p. 3-5)
Cultural conditions in the time since World War II have proved to be a particularly ripe breeding ground for the propagation and dissemination
of conspiracy theories. In the time since World War II, conspiracy
theories have changed from pervasive fears that a
cabal of alien others were attempting to infiltrate and subvert American culture and ideals to, as Peter
Knight states, ― a not entirely unfounded suspicion that the normal order of things itself amounts to a
conspiracy .‖15 The mutation of conspiracy fears from a single identifiable enemy to a more
amorphous and harder to define enemy now has conspiracy theories cast as ―a reasonable
assumption ‖ on the part of a large segment of the American population instead of a ―fringe belief‖ that is sometimes
able to garner popular support and action .16 Technological advances in communication, in particular, are credited with
turning the conspiracy theory tide. The almost unfettered access the American people have to fanzines such as ―Paranoia,‖ which actively
promote a conspiratorial understanding of current cultural, social, economic, and political conditions; media that capitalize on and popularize
conspiracy beliefs with television shows and films such as the X-Files and Oliver Stone‘s JFK; and the millions of Web pages devoted to
forwarding beliefs, either in support or denial, of conspiracy claims build off one another, reinforcing a conspiratorial interpretation of events in
This ―culture of conspiracy‖ casts a default suspicion toward institutions of power so that
when these institutions ―authorize‖ discourses to explain a situation or event, they are lodged,
sometimes in direct opposition, against the information and various interpretations of the event,
whether factual or not, existing within the public sphere.18 Auditors are faced with an overwhelming
amount of information from which to choose in order to form their beliefs, and this choice frequently
rests on the question of whom to believe, the conspiratorial or the official; this is a peculiarly contemporary
phenomenon. Despite their current widespread popularity and belief, conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that accompanies them
have received only modest attention from historians and even less from rhetoricians. What we do
understand about conspiracy theories has been deeply influenced by psychological perspectives,
which identify a political maladjustment in peoples— usually located on the political, social, and economic fringes—who
the world.17
use conspiracy claims as a means to gain notoriety or to force some sort of political action.19 For instance, filmmaker Oliver Stone‘s release of
JFK, and the hype that surrounded it, spurred the National Archives to release hundreds of thousands of pages of previously sealed
assassination records, and the work of Stanton Friedman, and others like him, has prompted the U.S. Air Force to reinvestigate the alleged UFO
crash in Roswell at least twice.20 Rhetoricians
confronting conspiracy theories have generally engaged in
criticism designed to evaluate the theories by mapping the generic, argumentative, and narrative
dimensions of such arguments.21 What is common to both historical and rhetorical scholarship is the
tendency to examine conspiracy theories as aberrant, misinformed, and overly simplistic, although
there is a more recent recognition that belief in conspiracy is neither as marginal as once imagined,
nor as misguided and paranoid as once presumed .22
Our affirmation of conspiracy empowers individuals and checks institutional abuses of
power
Horn 10 (Clara Kay Van Horn, The Paranoid Style in an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official
Rhetoric in Contemporary America; published on 12 December 2010; p.13-15)
Historians and cultural scholars have approached this new take on conspiracy theories by using various interpretive frames by which to analyze
conspiracy beliefs. Largely, scholars still rely on psychological explanations arguing that different peoples use conspiracy theories for different
functions. For example, marginal populations use conspiracy theories as a binding force with which to battle racism, sexism, and oppression.57
Others are likely to use conspiracy theories as a means to gain autonomy and power as intermediaries between the people (e.g., labor unions)
and large institutions of power.58
Conspiracy theories represent a battle between competing ideological
factions and give people a means by which to infuse their lives with meaning and significance.59 Instead
of automatically seeing pathology when looking on embittered people fighting against large systems of control, scholars are now inclined to
recognize what George Marcus terms ―paranoia within reason.‖60 Popular
belief in conspiracy no longer requires an
alien ―other‖ attempting to infiltrate and subvert the masses; the enemy to be combated is our own
system of power .61 While belief that an alien ―other‖ is attempting to infiltrate and overtake the American government still exists and
has been most recently exploited by fringe members of the Tea Party,
a belief that the establishment itself is conspiring
against the American people comes at the hands of uncovered instances of corporate and
governmental malfeasance
(e.g., Watergate, COINTELPRO, Iran- Contra, and Enron).
Significant portions of the public
now cast a cynical eye toward officials and their ―authorized‖ versions of events . Knight explains, ―In the
eyes of many Americans, the only safe bet is that there might well be a conspiracy, for all the public at large know or are likely to ever know.
burden of proof is now reversed , such that the authorities must strenuously provide conclusive
evidence that there has been no initial conspiracy or subsequent cover-up.‖62 Officials and their discourses must
The
now not only ―prove‖ what happened in significant events, but also must prove that the resulting event was not part of a larger conspiracy.
The questioning of official accounts of events through the medium of conspiracy theory signifies that conspiracy and official discourse exist
within a dialogic relationship. Of particular importance to this study is Bratich‘s observation that conspiracy theories are ―a zone where politics
and reason meet.‖63 Not
only do conspiracy theories cast suspicion and doubt onto institutions of power
and the discourses they provide, but these same institutions view conspiracy theories as dangerous .
Bratich argues that current political rationality views conspiracy theories as the enemies, the threats against democracy that need to be
battled.64
stands,
Conspiracy theories exist in a battle of one-upmanship with official discourse, and , as it currently
are threatening to become the way most of the population thinks about historical events .65
The Warren Commission proves that the aff is a prerequisite to understanding
policymaking
Horn 10 (Clara Kay Van Horn, The Paranoid Style in an Age of Suspicion: Conspiracy Thinking and Official
Rhetoric in Contemporary America; published on 12 December 2010; p. 161-162)
Official discourse plays an integral role in the development of the conspiracy argument. The battle lines are drawn between the
conspiratorial and the official as soon as conspiracy claims gain enough cultural force within the public
sphere to prompt a response. In confronting conspiracy claims, official discourse takes on a double
burden of proof- providing the American public with an argument about what happened, who did it,
and why, while simultaneously having to argue that the government was not involved in a conspiracy
plot. It is during its attempt to ―prove‖ that there was no conspiracy that official discourse takes on some of the substantive and stylistic
characteristics of conspiracy theories because it is in those areas of conflict that exist between the conspiratorial and the authoritative
arguments where officials have to strive to make their cases. Official
discourse, in confronting claims of conspiracy, provides a
necessary step in the conspiracy genre. The Warren Commission, overtly concerned with the problems that popular
conspiracy theories could impose on the social and political stability in the country, attempted to root out conspiracy theories
by directly confronting them. Conspiracists on the political left, prior to the release of the Commission‘s report,
raised a series of questions they believed the Commission should answer to dispel the uncertainty
surrounding the assassination President Kennedy, especially concerns about ―establishment‖
connections to Oswald. Conspiracists on the political right, however, believed that the assassination of President Kennedy was a result
of a vast Communist conspiracy that had been in the works for years. What is shared by the conspiracy theories on both
the left and right is the belief that the government was being usurped by dark and powerful forces,
forces that would keep the Warren Commission from being able to tell the truth of the assassination.9
In confronting claims of conspiracy, the Warren Commission mirrored some of the substantive and
stylistic hallmarks of conspiracy arguments, namely the strategies of argument from absence, the
paradox of substance, overwhelming the audience with massive evidence, and internal consistency.
A/T: Leaks
Historically, most leaks happen by luck not because of systemic checks on conspiracy."
Basham ’03 (LEE BASHAM, Journal of Social Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy Spring 2003
“Malevolent Global Conspiracy” pp. 91-103)
One thing is certain. A full confidence in the uncontrollable nature of public institutions of information is exactly what an involved conspiracy
would have us possess. (It’s telling that it’s hard for many of us to imagine any body of research that would convince us a malevolent global
conspiracy was really in place. Perhaps because of a carefully cultivated childhood trust in public authorities many of us are irrationally averse
to the idea.) As gen- eralizations go a public trust approach is also overbroad. It’s hard to see how it could be anything else when we consider
how many exposed conspiracies almostfailed to come to light. Watergate is the obvious example. Had a single, mysterious informer not
appeared—one out of scores of players—Nixon would have finished his presidency and subsequent American history would have been
changed, perhaps radically. There is nothing systemic in the reve- lation of most conspiracies. Rather, good luck almost always plays the leading
role.15 Some
may insist that “leaks” inevitably undermine the possibility of important conspiracies. Not
likely. Can we really infer from the fact that many criminals are caught on the basis of informants that
most, or the most suc- cessful, ambitious, and powerful, are? The truly competent criminal is not caught and often
never suspected. Why should a carefully planned and exe- cuted conspiracy be any different? Again, the issue here is one of degrees. It would
be fanciful, to say nothing of naive, to insist that leaks capable of undermining a momentous conspiracy must occur. Instead we might reason
that often the more developed, ambitious, and highly placed a conspiracy is, the more able and competent the practitioners are at maintaining
security and effectively quieting or discrediting associates who go astray. We might antic- ipate that variously connected “outsiders” who
intend to publicly reveal even a glimmer of the truth would be easily assimilated, discredited, or personally or physically destroyed. If
history is our guide, such techniques are ordinary to society-wide power and its continuation.¶ The
fact is that we can’t say in what ways and with what level of effec- tiveness descending control of
successful conspiracies is actually achieved in order to avoid exposure. The possibilities are too
extensive and clearly beyond our information and expertise. However, we do know this: The existence of “openly secretive” governmental and corporate institutions is the norm in contemporary
civilization. Despite occasional “leaks” they appear to have been quite successful in their control of
extremely disturbing informa-¶ Malevolent Global Conspiracy 97¶ tion. This is all the greater an
achievement given their status as widely recog- nized agencies of secrets and secret projects. Our minds
can only boggle at the difficulties of reliably revealing the aims and means of competent organiza- tions that systematically hide their very
existence..
Where does this leave us? Could we easily be wrong about almost all of society’s real aims
and animating history? If so, should we simply dismiss our epistemic dilemma in the same breath with solipsism or the possibility that
the world came into existence minutes ago?16 Our dilemma is severe, but unlike with solipsism, we can embrace the problem, still enjoy
significant jus- tification, and usefully respond to the very sources of our
Horror Version
1ac notes
These 1ac’s all open up with a reading from “The Call of Cthulhu” by HP Lovecraft. The
full text of the story is located in the appendix at the end of the file. The advantage is
generated via the performance of the fiction and by analyzing the themes of the
fiction.
Some versions will have plan texts, some will not; they will all contain approximately
the same solvency cards, though. A sample 1ac is included below.
1ac
While researching the oceans topic this summer, we stumbled upon some strange
manuscripts about a being which lives under the ocean named Cthulhu. The
manuscripts belong to one late Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston and detail his
studies of this strange creature and the cult which worships it.
We feel compelled to share this story with you, if only to relate the fantastical
possibilities contained underneath the ocean’s waves.
Thurston’s story begins when his uncle, Professor Angell, dies and he must attend to
his estate. While going through papers and boxes of his uncle’s research, he comes
across a locked box full which contains his uncle’s amassed research into the Cthulhu
cult. Thurston describes an uncanny sculpture found within the box:
Lovecraft 1928 [“The Call of Cthulhu,” available at http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/
texts/fiction/cc.aspx]
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area;
obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and
suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often
reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk
of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers
and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its
remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its
impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or
symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a
human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head
surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the
whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a
Cyclopean architectural background.
Thurston tracked down the sculptor only to find that that person had succumbed to
madness—after dreaming night after night about the terrible creature living in a
wondrous stone house under the ocean, the sculptor had been driven insane.
Thurston also discovered that a New Orleans police inspector had come upon some
members of Cthulhu cult in the middle of a terrible ritual in the swamplands of
Louisiana. And though Thurston tracked down the inspector and spoke with him
personally, the trail of Cthulhu and his cult went cold.
Near the end of the manuscript, Thurston describes accidentally happening upon a
newspaper story about some strange occurrences at sea. Apparently, a ship had come
to harbor bearing a mostly-dead crew and a strange sculpture. Thurston knew,
perhaps intuitively, this ship had encountered sometime related to Cthulhu. Though
all those crewmembers who returned had since died, he sought out the estate of one
of the crewmen Mate Gustaf Johansen. Thurston recovers his diary and recounts
what he finds thusly:
Lovecraft 1928 [“The Call of Cthulhu,” available at http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/
texts/fiction/cc.aspx]
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared
Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must
have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control,
the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the
mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he
speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made
their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of
ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead
by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar
sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of
mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible
substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in
measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark
stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,
after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called
imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did
not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great
Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be
brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the
cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance
that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone
blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal
statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in
every line of the mate’s frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he
spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad
impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or
proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about
angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the
geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of
spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing
at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven
seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked
perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven
rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock
and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it
was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear
away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he
had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now
familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it
was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide
whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said,
the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were
horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately
around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the
grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—
and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the
acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or
somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the
queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved
anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive
quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually
burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away
into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly
opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty,
slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered
slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never
reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be
described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch
contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order . A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What
wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that
telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his
own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of
innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and
ravening for delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be
any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three
were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he
was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute,
but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately
for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering
at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore;
and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines
to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began
to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan
Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then,
bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with
vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he
kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was
wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until
steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran
lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the
noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel
head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon
galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy
yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy
nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the
chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding
green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the
scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original
form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few
matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the
first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd,
and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through
liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical
plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating
chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and
the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him
mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be
a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
Finally, Thurston pens the last lines of his manuscript. A terrible realization about his
fate dawns upon him:
Lovecraft 1928 [“The Call of Cthulhu,” available at http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/
texts/fiction/cc.aspx]
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the
papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is
pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the
universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever
afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen
went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun
was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April
storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in
lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the
world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may
sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads
over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that,
if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it
meets no other eye.
What are we to make of this story whereby a terribly impossible event comes to pass?
Anyone who knows too much about its intricacies is either driven mad or eliminated
by the Cthulhu cult—so evaluating whether or not the story really occurred is beyond
the scope of possible knowledge.
However, Lovecraft’s fiction has special things to tell us about the unknown and the
fear of the unknown. His is a universe indifferent to human existence, but we are
driven by our curiosity to plumb the depths of this indifference. All of his characters
die of unfortunate circumstances or are driven mad by their discoveries. This places
the Lovecraftian horror story in a special place regarding fictional and philosophical
commentaries about epistemology and value. Our reading of Lovecraftian fiction
disrupts the smooth functioning of the human will to certainty.
Carrobles 13 (Volume 1 Issue 1 (September 2013) Article 1 Carlos Corbacho Carrobles professor at
Universidad Complutense de Madrid “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call Of Cthulhu: an Intermedial Analysis of its
Graphic Adaptation” http://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/119-2013-08-211.1.1.CorbachoCarrobles74.pdf - BRW)
My research involves the most renowned tale by the master of modern horror H.P. Lovecraft, The call of Cthulhu, and its
adaptations into contemporary comics and graphic novels, in particular the one by Swiss writer/artist Michael Zigerlig. The first part of this
analysis focuses on Lovecraft’s style and the main characteristics of this tale, including some defining traits of this modern style of horror.
From the methodological point of view, the paper uses Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) as well as Tzvetan Todorov’s The
fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre in order to explore the relationship between the characters’ psychological motivations and
those unheimlich or uncanny (unfamiliar) elements that they may discover within themselves or others (a strange grim, sound, etc.). I shall
explore if these abject feelings arise from the outside (i.e. the sudden realization that things are different from what they expected), or if it has
to do with internal factors (i.e. old forgotten and unconscious memories, that in Freud “ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet
comes to light.”(Freud 1919: 5) The approach summarized above will allow me to unveil
an essential point in lovecraftian horror,
namely that absolute Truth is unattainable and that the illogical, the unnatural and the uncanny are
all part of life and represent ancient chaotic forces within the universe, beyond the world that we perceive every
day. Extraordinary and poltergeist elements are, for Lovecraft, a reaction against the ‘true’ laws of the
universe. His characters attempt to find knowledge and scientific explanations in a sort of Faustian spirit that eventually drives them to
damnation and insanity. This collapse of the mind will be analyzed in the terms of terror and horror caused by the
confrontation of a sublime version of reality, in the terms used by Burke in his book A philosophical enquiry on the
ideas of the beautiful and the sublime (1757). The essay will place Todorov’s work The Fantastic (1975) in relation to Freud’s idea of the
uncanny. I will show how these works explain the duality present in Lovecraftian characters, who struggle for scientifically logical explanations
and at the same time face traumatic events at the climax of the story when they realize that there is no possible explanation. Finally, in what
concerns Michael Zigerlig’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, I will first focus on language, “key to Lovecraft’s horror” according to Zigerlig, as well
as on the intermedial aspects resulting from the semiotic negotiation between text and images. I shall analyze how language and image interact
in order to upset the perceptual experience of the reader and create suspense and fear in the story. In particular,
many vignettes use
explicit references to vision (see below), traditionally a symbol of the Enlightenment and the rational
acquisition of knowledge. The notion of ambiguity in relation to intermedial aspects is of particular interest. (see López-Varela 2008,
2011) Born in Providence in 1890 H.P. Lovecraft is nowadays regarded as a major figure on horror literature; Nevertheless, as many different
writers before, Lovecraft's work was mostly ignored during his lifetime. His work is inspired by Gothic writers such as Poe, as well as many other
fantastic tales like the Arabian nights, the Odyssey and many other important works which he read as a child. He was considered to be a
misanthropic and distant person with a troubled personality, as many of his works seem to suggest. In fact, most of the creatures he imagined
are “a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive” as he himself writes in The call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft 1926: 2). Nevertheless, further
investigators on his life and work proved that he was just a sensitive man disappointed with the world who, on the other hand, kept a close
relationship with many other writers with who he constantly co-authored works creating what would later be known as the Chtulhu Mythos, or
the Lovecraft Circle. As the name suggests, it was Lovecraft who created the basis in which many other authors would write on, and thus
extending the whole of a fictional mythological pantheon which nowadays is part of hundreds of works on horror, pulp or science fiction. The
weird tales of the Cthulhu Mythos have become the axis for, not only a never ending amount of tales from renowned authors, but also for
video-games, films, role-playing games, or graphic novels. Therefore, It could be claimed that H.P. Lovecraft was advanced for his time, as he
represented in his tales the themes of interest and anxiety of present day society, more than seventy years after his death. The style in which
Lovecraft writes is no longer considered Gothic, but cosmic horror. The main reasons are mainly that the terror depicted in Lovecraft's tales is
not focused on ghosts or that sort of creatures, but rather it is related to alien entities from beyond human understanding. The monsters in the
Cthulhu Mythos come from beyond time and space and are always used to represent the feebleness and meaninglessness of mankind.
Lovecraft's tales are not excessively worried about some past burden or crime for which the characters should pay for. The
importance
of the Lovecraft's horror is rooted in his nihilism. Truth is unattainable, and this realization triggers a
breakdown in the characters of the tale which unveils the unimportant role of humanity in the history of
the universe. The characters, after pursuing a search for knowledge, discover that human known history is
nothing in comparison with the whole existence of the universe, and they find out that there are other
civilizations and beings that have existed even before we could remember them, and continue to exist, waiting
to regain the place that humankind took over during their absence. Magic has an important role in these tales, often connected with the world
of dreams and imagination, even if it can be considered as a science alien to human minds. Whenever the fantastic creatures appear, the
normal laws of physics are no longer valid. This is seen in the appearance of Cthulhu in the analysis of
the tale. Another important characteristic of this style is the fact that the creatures are neither human nor related to humans. They are
hybrid beings, as Cthulhu, a grotesque amalgam of different concepts, never easy to define or
categorize, designed to create ambiguity, another fundamental trait of these tales. For all the above mentioned it is stated that
cosmic horror is no longer Gothic; However, in my opinion it is because of all of these characteristics that I claim that, if not a Gothic writer,
Lovecraft is the next step of the Gothic, or at least the middle stage between Gothic and contemporary Science-fiction. Lovecraft's tales are his
own way of expressing his troubled conception of society and his lack of faith in humanity. Furthermore, it could be claimed that the previously
stated characteristics of his cosmic horror evolve from the substrata in which the Gothic novel is rooted: The sublime, the uncanny and the
abject. Theses three pillars, along with Todorov's The fantastic are the ideas on which my essay will analyze our chosen tale. From all of his
works, the most emblematic is the one which I analyze in this essay, The call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu,
being the best known
creature from Lovecraft's imaginary pantheon, is almost a coat of arms for anything branded after him. The sinister
silhouette of a gargantuan dragon-like creature with a pulpy head rising from the depths is the main
image to be found in anything inspired by Lovecraft's works, and is also widely recognized in popular culture nowadays.
It is first found in a clay bass relief craved by a troubled-minded artist after some vivid nightmares. And it is through nightmares that the
creature gets in touch with the people of the world as we understand when reading the tale. During the second part of the tale, the main
character, Francis Wayland Thurston, contacts with the inspector John Legrasse who happens to possess another sculpture of unknown
historical origin for experts, that was obtained after raiding a violent cult in a dark forest in New Orleans. Incredibly, Francis finds out that the
artist who dreamed and craved the clay bass relief had imagined exactly the same illegible runic writings and the creature depicted cult's idol.
The mystery is even enlarged when we are told that an unconnected cult of Eskimos from Iceland chanted exactly the same words as the
supposed voodoo cultists of New Orleans. The climax of the tale unveils during its last part, with the words of the late Sailor Gustaf Johansen as
we learn that the dreams of the artist begin at the very same time as earthquakes and storms made the ancient tomb city of Cthulhu, R'lyeh,
arise from the depths. Johansen's description of what he finds is the same Cyclopean city that different artists beheld during their weird
dreams. Johansen narrates the hell he experienced in that nightmarish city in which the laws of physics did not work properly. In the end, only
he managed to escape with another sculpture of Cthulhu that Wayland discovered in a magazine before investigating the report of the sailor
who, like Wayland's uncle, died in mysterious circumstances. It is important to remark the elements that are present in the tale. Firstly, the
narrator writes in an “unreliable” first person point of view, trying to convince the reader of a fantastic story and sharing his fears of facing
something uncomprehensible. There are also places of mystery and darkness, like the forest in New Orleans or the vast and forgotten city of
R'lyeh, both standing for the typical dungeons and castles of Gothic. Finally, the
monster represented by Cthulhu and its
mysterious cult, is a mixture of categories that work against the contemporary status-quo, as I shall analyze further on. This
tale is developed through the investigation of the anthropologist Francis Wayland Thurston, whose scientific mind struggles with the discovery
of the Cthulhu cult. The way in which Wayland faces every step of the investigation, or at least how he said he experienced it is what makes this
tale a fantastic one. Lovecraft uses a first person narrator because, as Todorov states in his book, The fantastic, “The first-person narrator most
readily permits the reader to identify with the character.” (Todorov 1975: 84) It is reading Todorov when we understand that the fantastic as a
genre only takes place during the hesitation of either the character or the reader. His theory could be summed up in his own words “The
fantastic confronts us with a dilemma: to believe or not believe?” (Todorov 1975: 83) The use of a first person narrator to share the experiences
that a character undergoes is almost essential in order to create the doubt that characterizes 'the fantastic' before it becomes the uncanny or
the marvellous. However, at the very beginning of the tale we find that the character is mostly aware of alien forces superior to common
knowledge: 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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of
reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from
the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The call of Cthulhu 1926:1) Obviously, the main message of this first
paragraph foretells the entire story, unveiling the sensation of solitude and meaninglessness of mankind,
considering it but a small and absurd spot in the wholeness of the universe. But what is remarkable here is that, taking
into account Todorov's theory, the character is fully aware of strange powers from the beginning. This would consequently undermine the
essence of the fantastic in the tale. Nevertheless, the use of the narrator-character maintains the ambiguity, and according to Todorov the use
of a dramatized narrator is much preferable to a non-represented narrator, for the former can lie, while the latter would directly drive us to the
marvellous. There are several parts in the text, wherein the narrator expresses the hesitation as in “the scattered notes gave me much material
for thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the
artist.”(The call of Cthulhu 1926: 4) or “The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but
the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions.” (The call
of Cthulhu 1926:10) Thus, we experience the effort of the character to maintain his scientific approach in the uncanny events that he is
undergoing. Furthermore, the unconscious of the reader highlights this doubt thanks to the use of the past, as it entails that what he though is
no longer acceptable. Another point of this tale which works in favour of the fantastic is that almost everything told here are supposed
confessions of different characters which also create ambiguity, for instances this paragraph in page 8 of the text: It may have been only
imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to
the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met
and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse
of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition. (The
call of Cthulhu 1926: 8) It is
precisely the use of words such as Imagination, fancy, hint, glimpse or suppose
what highlights the possibility of mere illusion. In Todorov “There exists another variety of the fantastic in
which the hesitation occurs between the real and the imaginary. In the first case we were uncertain not that the
events occurred, but that our understanding of them was correct. In the second case, we wonder if what we believe we
perceive is not in fact a product of the imagination.” (Todorov 1975: 36) Even the climax of the tale, the sailor's confession,
could be regarded as simple madness, were the doubt not possible due to all the previous discoveries and the uncanny coincidences between
the dreams of the artists and what the sailor describes in his tale. According to the aforementioned, we
ought to accept that this
text is not fantastic but marvellous as in the end R'lyeh, Cthulhu and the cultists are proved real; However, it is my
opinion that the way in which the marvellous events are approached is what allows the survival of the fantastic elements. What for the reader
is plainly marvellous, the narrator conceives as uncanny, because as we have seen in the first paragraph of the tale, these experiences are not
considered mystical, but rather a different science or perspective of reality that we are not prepared to conceive. In what terms is this
“uncanny”? In Freud, “It (the uncanny) undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror” (Freud 1919:
1). Basing his study in the German word heimlich – belonging to the home – Freud argues that uncanny is anything which is unknown but
connects with something familiar in the unconscious, or that something initially familiar becomes something gruesome or unheimlich. It may be
something “that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.” In
complementary terms in the tale, R'lyeh
emerges from its repression in the depths of the oceans as it explicitly explained in the text: “In the elder
time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its
monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves;” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 9) Furthermore; It could be claimed that
the oceans
are metaphorically the unconscious of the earth - if we consider the earth as the home or a
complementary part of mankind – where lost memories from ancient times are kept in darkness. When
those memories resurrect or emerge, the conflict between what used to be familiar and is now uncanny appears.
More importantly, the reader now understands that even if the great old ones have come from the stars, they owned
the earth long before humanity. The earth was their home; therefore the alien Gods actually belong
to the “home” - It is humanity that is something alienated to the earth. Going back again to that first paragraph of
the tale we may now understand the uncanny element within. Wayland does not only consider his society unimportant, but he also regards the
earth as something wherein he doesn't belong anymore, as when the narrator states “When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding
down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith.”(The call of Cthulhu 1926: 14) As stated in the abstract of this essay; Uncanny is anything that
should be hidden and yet comes to light, and that is precisely what happens in the tale. Another important trait of the uncanny in the tale
comes with the dreams and the cult rituals. Superstition has always connected the world of dreams with foresight and revelations. The first
images of the tomb city of R'lyeh are mentioned as dreams and hallucinations and its only further in the tale that we learn that this place is no
dream at all. When the narrator learns from the sailor's tale that R'lyeh is real, the place is already familiar, having been first mentioned by the
delirious artist. When the artist's delusion is proved real the uncanny once again emerges in the reader or in Freud's words: “This is
that
an uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and
reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in
reality.” (Freud 1919: 15) Finally, the cultists are depicted as savages of an uncivilized faith. Almost all of them are mad and primitive
creatures, which correspond to that dark age of the world when every culture was animistic and primitive. Second to Freud, we still keep some
unconscious part of that era which could be re-activated whenever we witness something which may prove those surmounted superstitions as
real. In the same way as the dreams of R'lyeh and the oniric messages of Cthulhu, when the creature is proved real – And therefore all the rites
and spells of which we have been previously told – the frontier between reality and superstition disappears again. When “The primitives beliefs
we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (Freud 1919: 17), is when the uncanny occurs. Once this concept is clear, it is possible
to discuss the role of the place, which connects with another essential issue – The idea of the sublime. In Burke, as the uncanny is a great tool
for terror: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant
about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion
which the mind is capable of feeling. (Burke 1757: 13) In contrast with the uncanny, the sublime does not focus on familiarity; It is strongly
connected with nature and its vastness. Burke Claims: An
even plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean
idea; the prospect of such a plain my a extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the
mind with any thing for great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes, but it is owing to
none more than to this that the ocean is an object of no small terror. (Burke 1757: 43) Burke’s work
contributes to the understanding of the interest of nature both in Romanticism and Gothicism, as it was one of their usual settings. The sublime
is connected with the idea of awe
and terror imposed on a subject who beholds an object of great magnitude
or power. It is the presence of this object impossible to control or understand that causes
astonishment when by comparison the subject understands how small or powerless he is against
something apparently infinite. Historically, the terror of considering the individual a small, powerless
plaything amongst the might of nature and the universe was originated as a logical consequence
during the enlightenment and the modernity. The amount of scientific discoveries enlightened a supposed dark age of
history. However, every answer raised more questions, unanswerable at the time, which helped to create the terror of feebleness and of being
it helped to understand that there are things beyond our past or present state of
ideas. Time was also considered a fundamental aspect of the sublime, and the Gothic literature used old castles and ruins as banners of the
nothing; On the other hand,
decay of humanity. What in the past was a mighty empire of mankind – for instance Rome or any great kingdom – in their present was an
obsolete ruin. Thus, the Gothics understood the sublime that a fallen civilization caused in a subject. Lovecraft uses this in his own style: R'lyeh
is the tomb for Cthulhu, it is the dungeon in which he was caged before humanity took the place of the great old ones. In these terms is easy to
understand that R'lyeh is exactly the same thing as the old ruined castles and dungeons of the Gothic. In addition, Lovecraft equally portrays
the place of humans as something short in relation to the myths he has created - “They, like the subject and material, belonged to something
horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it.” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 6) But sublime is not only related to vasteness, or
immensity and the relation subject object. It
is important to remember the relevance of darkness and its relation
to danger and the ultimate terror – The concept of Death. For this purpose it is essential to analyze more excerpts from
Lovecraft and Burke. The first appearance of a dark natural setting in the tale is the woods from the second part of the tale: ...for miles splashed
on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them,
and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every
malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. (..) The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute,
substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There
were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal
sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters
whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. (…) It
was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. (The Call of Cthulhu 1926: 7) The sublime is related to terror, and therefore
with darkness and obscurity. Burke claims that obscurity is basic in the arousing of terror. If something is easy to see, its mystery
diminishes; therefore, night and darkness are essential for obscurity. Burke, in his own words states: Every one will be sensible of this, who
considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form
clear ideas, affect minds, which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. Those
despotic governments,
which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief
as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost
all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their
idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. For this purpose too the druids performed all their ceremonies in
the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks (Burke 1757: 43) It is remarkable how the idea of
darkness is related to heathen temples. Somewhere in the unconscious of men there is the idea that these rituals and ceremonies are stronger
when veiled in darkness and mystery. It is no coincidence that the Cthulhu cultists, first considered as Voodoo, worship their gruesome god in a
swamp never traversed by civilized men. The dark and grotesque rituals of this cult are empowered by the obscure surroundings of this place.
As a summary,
the setting of nature in this tale is often depicted as something evil, obscure and full of
secrets. Be it the deep oceans where an ancient evil awaits or the gloomy woods where the cultists
plot against the civilized world. Once the narrator and place have been discussed it is time to analyse the role of the monster.
Mainly regarded as the antagonist of a story, the monster is an essential character for horror narrative. It is always some kind of
creature or being which threatens the statusquo of the tale. It is the disruption of categories and things as
they were previously regarded. Cthulhu is a mixture of things, something only possible to describe in
vague terms. The very first description of the creature manages to represent the very idea of obscurity in its form “If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to
the spirit of the thing.” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 2) As stated before, the obscurity of its form creates an uneasiness which develops later into
horror. But Cthulhu is not only physically a monster, it is the concept previously explained of the sublime into character. Huge as a mountain,
belonging to the depths of the earth where its lost memories remain, Cthulhu is the past plotting against the present of mankind. But more
important than Cthulhu are the cultists. They are also a mixture of “categories”, more precisely they are outcasts and “mixed-blood”. They are
constantly described in the text as “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of
Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 8) often using the word mongrels to refer to the
sailors. They are regarded in derogative terms, even when referring to sailors that are not really proved to be cultists. It is remarkable that
Lovecraft chose people of those characteristic to be the wild and ferocious cultists of his demonic faiths. They are almost categorized as a
contrast with the intelligent, well-educated and intellectual characters which are commonly chosen to be the “hero” of the tale; Therefore, it
could be claimed that the real “other” in the tale, is not the monster itself as it is actually really distant and alien to the reality of the character,
but the cultists built up in hordes of Eskimos, Arabs, Chinese, Hispanics... and almost everyone different from the white educated Anglo-Saxon.
As a consequence it could be stated that both social groups distant to civilization (sailors and mongrels) and nature (oceans, swamps, woods)
are seen as the monsters of the tale and their dwellings, respectively. They care and worship darkness and evil powers that work against the
status quo of white civilization. This evil other is maximized by the use of the great old ones and the tale and their uncanny nature, essentially
bound to the idea of darkness and terror as they are portrayed as something older than humanity an even the earth, leaving the place of
mankind (not just the white man and his civilization) as feeble and meaningless. This
horror of being nothing is portrayed by the
point of view of a single person, in order to create the proper feeling in the reader, which is ultimately, the real
objective for Lovecraft – To create in the reader the doubt that we may not be as relevant and great as we may expect.
The will-to-certainty and security is the root cause of violence.
Der Derian 1998 [James, “The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard,” in On
Security ed. Ronnie Lipschutz. http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html]
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes's and Marx's interpretations of security through a genealogy of
modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning or value for security, but to
destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to
affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future. 33 Originating in the
paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for
Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief, the
history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the
terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities
seeking security from alien others--who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of
differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since
Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his reinterpretation of security will
receive a more extensive treatment here. One must begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power,
which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good
and Evil , he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should think
before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of
the most frequent results." 34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian
perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for
only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive
will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and meanings--including
self-preservation--are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than
confront the fears endemic to life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering
of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and
at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one always use those words in which slanderous
intent has been imprinted for ages." 35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in
life: "life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war." 36 But the denial of this permanent
condition, the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide from it with a fictional
sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a
collective resentment of difference--that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a
negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive
will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces a
truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay
Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the
familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer
disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who
obtain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37 The fear of the
unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated life, in which causality and
rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against contingent forces.
The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In
short, the security imperative produces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek
to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols:
The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at
all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is
comforting, liberating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced
before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some kind of explanation, to serve as a
cause, but for a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and
frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual
explanations. 38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the
unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility--recycling the desire for security. The
"influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate
affirmative values to the "necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a
straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39 The unknowable which cannot be contained
by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common
values come to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian
possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial
strength to the illusion of being protected by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false sense of
security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error :
in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing
something to be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its causes." 41 Nietzsche's
interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation
of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and
indebtedness to one's ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and
accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists --and that one has to pay them back with
sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these
forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new
advantages and new strength. 42
This is not just a question of conventional violence but also of the value to life. The
mission of philosophy is to promote weird realism, which we create through our
exploration of the madness of the ocean. The horror of Lovecraft’s stories lie in the
invasion of our comfortably scientific universe by the unknown. How we cope with
the fundamental madness of a universe set against us is the foremost question of the
debate.
Graham Harman 08 (s a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary
philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. ) 2008
“On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl” Journal: Harman-Illustrated Volume: 4
(http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/253/page%20proofs.pdf?sequence=1)-M.H
In a dismissive review of a recent anthology on Schelling, Andrew Bowie accuses two authors of a style he ‘increasingly’ thinks of as ‘continental
science fiction’.1 There is room for further increase in Bowie’s thinking. With his implication that science fiction belongs to the juvenile or the
unhinged, Bowie enforces a sad limitation on mental experiment. For nothing
resembles science fiction more than
philosophy does — unless it be science itself. From its dawning in ancient Greece, philosophy has been the asylum of
strange notions: a cosmic justice fusing opposites into a restored whole; a series of emanations from fixed stars to
the moon to the prophets; divine intervention in the movement of human hands and legs; trees and diamonds with infinite parallel attributes,
only two of them known; insular monads sparkling like mirrors and attached to tiny bodies built from chains of other monads; and the eternal
recurrence of every least event. While
the dismal consensus that such speculation belongs to the past is
bolstered by the poor imagination of some philosophers, it finds no support among working scientists,
who grow increasingly wild in their visions. Even a cursory glance at the physics literature reveals a
discipline bewitched by strange attractors, degenerate topologies, black holes filled with alternate
worlds, holograms generating an illusory third dimension, and matter composed of vibrant tendimensional strings. Mathematics, unconstrained by empirical data, has long been still bolder in its
gambles. Nor can it be said that science fiction is a marginal feature of literature itself. Long before the mighty crabs and squids of Lovecraft
and the tribunals of Kafka, we had Shakespeare’s witches and ghosts, Mt. Purgatory in the Pacific, the Cyclops in the Mediterranean, and the
Sphinx tormenting the north of Greece. Against the model of philosophy as a rubber stamp for common sense and archival sobriety, I
would
propose that philosophy’s sole mission is weird realism. Philosophy must be realist because its
mandate is to unlock the structure of the world itself; it must be weird because reality is weird.
‘continental science fiction’, and ‘continental horror’, must be transformed from insults into a research program. It seems fruitful to launch this
program with a joint treatment of Edmund Husserl and H.P. Lovecraft, an unlikely pair that I will try to render more likely. The dominant strand
of twentieth-century continental thought stems from the phenomenology of Husserl, whose dry and affable works conceal a philosophy tinged
with the bizarre. In almost the same period, the
leading craftsman of horror and science fiction in literature was
Lovecraft, recently elevated from pulp author to canonical classic by the prestigious Library of America series.2 The road to
continental science fiction leads through a Lovecraftian reading of phenomenology. This remark is not meant
as a prank. Just as Lovecraft turns prosaic New England towns into the battleground of extradimensional fiends, Husserl’s phenomenology
converts simple chairs and mailboxes into elusive units that emit partial, contorted surfaces. In both authors, the broken link between objects
and their manifest crust hints at ‘such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’3 — or preferably, revive a metaphysical speculation that
embraces the permanent strangeness of objects. If
philosophy is weird realism, then a philosophy should be judged
by what it can tell us about Lovecraft. In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minerva as the
patron spirit of philosophers, and the Miskatonic must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of
choice. Since Heidegger’s treatment of Hölderlin resulted mostly in pious, dreary readings, philosophy needs a new literary hero. Lovecraft’s
MateriaLisM In the great tales of Lovecraft we find a mythology centered in New England, but ranging from the Antarctic to Pluto as well.
Humans are no longer lords of the cosmos, but surrounded by hidden monstrosities who evade or
corrupt our race, sometimes plotting its downfall. ‘The Old Ones’, or ‘Those Ones’, are the disturbing general terms by which these
creatures are known. They vastly exceed us in mental and physical prowess, yet occasionally interbreed with
human females, preferring women of a decayed genetic type. The least encounter with the Old Ones often results
in mental breakdown, and all reports of dealings with them are hushed. But their unspeakable powers
are far from infinite. To achieve their aims, the Old Ones seek minerals in the hills of Vermont,
infiltrate churches in seaport towns, and pursue occult manuscripts under the eyes of suspicious
librarians. Their researches are linked not only with Lovecraft’s fictional authors and archives (the mad Arab al-Hazred, Miskatonic
University), but real ones as well (Pico della Mirandola, Harvard’s Widener Library). Their corpses are carried away by floods, and even the
mighty Cthulhu explodes, though briefly, when rammed by a human-built ship. There are also rivalries between
the monsters, as becomes clear in ‘At the Mountains of Madness.’ The powers of the various Old Ones are no more
uniform than infinite. This balance in the monsters between power and frailty is mentioned to oppose
any Kantian reading of Lovecraft. Such a reading is understandable, since Kant’s inaccessible noumenal world seems a perfect
match for the cryptic stealth of Lovecraft’s creatures. His descriptions of their bodies and actions are almost
deliberately insufficient, and seem to allude to dimensions beyond the finite conditions of human
perception. His monsters are not just mysterious, but often literally invisible; they undermine our
stock of emotional responses and zoological categories. The very architecture of their cities mocks the
principles of Euclidean geometry. A few examples will indicate the style: When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the
wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike […] he comes upon a lonely and curious country […] Gorges and ravines of problematical depth
intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland
that one instinctively dislikes […]4 Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to inflict the visible cattle […]5
[Wilbur Whateley] would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror.6 And most compellingly: It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe [the dead
creature on the floor], but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too
closely bound up with the life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.7 When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes
the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike […] he comes upon a lonely and curious country […] Gorges and ravines of problematical
depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of
marshland that one instinctively dislikes […]4 Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to inflict the visible
cattle […]5 [Wilbur Whateley] would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a
sense of unexplainable terror.6 And most compellingly: It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe [the
dead creature on the floor], but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are
too closely bound up with the life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.7 Nonetheless, the Kantian
reading fails.
is no question that the Old
Ones would belong entirely to the phenomenal. The mere fact of invisibility is surely not enough to
qualify the monsters as noumenal. The so-called Higgs boson of present-day physics, assuming it exists, lies beyond the gaze of
current particle accelerators. No one has ever witnessed the core of the earth, or the center of the Milky Way
which may or may not be home to a massive black hole. Countless other forces must exist in the universe that could be
only decades away from discovery, while others will remain shielded from human insight in perpetuity. But this does not make them
noumenal: these forces, however bizarre, would still belong to the causal and spatio-temporal conditions that, for Kant, belong solely to the
structure of human experience. Let us grant further that the Old Ones may have features permanently
outstripping human intelligence, in a way that the Higgs boson may not. Even so, this would be the result not of the
transcendental structure of human finitude, but only of our relative stupidity. The game of chess is not
Even if we accepted a metaphysics splitting the world into noumenal and phenomenal realms, there
‘noumenal’ for dogs through their inability to grasp it, and neither is Sanskrit grammar for a deranged adult or a three-year-old. In ‘The
Whisperer in Darkness’, the Old Ones even invite humans to become initiated into their larger view of the world: to shew them the great
abysses that most of us have had to dream about in fanciful ignorance.11 Humans
prepare to reach these deeper abysses,
neither through Heideggerian Angst nor a mystical experience that leaps beyond finitude and reduces philosophy to straw, but through
purely medical means: ‘My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call them surgery.’12
The great horror of Lovecraft’s universe lies not in some sublime infinite that no finite intelligence can
fully grasp, but in the invasion of the finite world by finite malignant beings. For all the limits imposed on our
intellect by Kant, he leaves us reassured that the finite and phenomenal world is insulated from horror, governed and structured by our own
familiar categories. Far
more troubling is Lovecraft’s subversion of the finite world: no longer a kingdom led
by innocuous rational beings, but one in which humans face entities as voracious as insects, who use
black magic and telepathy while employing mulatto sailors as worse-than-terrorist operatives. The Old Ones are anything
but noumenal. Noumenal beings scarcely have need of buildings, whether Euclidean or otherwise. Noumenal beings are not
dissected on the tables of polar explorers, do not mine for rocks in Vermont, and have no purpose
mastering Arabic and Syriac dialects to consult the writings of medieval wizards. They would never speak in physical voices, not
even with ‘the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species […] [with]
singularities of timbre, range, and overtones [placing it] wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life.’13
Michel Houellebecq, in a brilliant study of Lovecraft,14 is correct to emphasize his absolute materialism: ‘What is Great Cthulhu? An
arrangement of electrons, like us. Lovecraft’s
terror is rigorously material. But, it is quite possible, given the free interplay of
cosmic forces, that Great Cthulhu possesses abilities and powers to act that far exceed ours. Which, a priori, is not particularly reassuring at
all.’15 The
terror of Lovecraft is not a noumenal horror, then, but a horror of phenomenology. Humans
cease to be master in their own house. Science and letters no longer guide us toward benevolent
enlightenment, but may force us to confront ‘notions of the cosmos, and of [our] own place in the seething vortex of
time, whose merest mention is paralysing’, and ‘impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturous [humans]’.16
Confronted with the half-human offspring of the Old Ones, even the political Left will endorse the use
of concentration camps: ‘Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential
discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these
societies became surprisingly passive and reticent’.17 To expand on a passage cited earlier: 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. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position within,
that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety
of a new dark age.18
We close with a quote from Lovecraft himself about the solace of the 1ac:
Lovecraft 1928 [“The Call of Cthulhu,” available at http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/
texts/fiction/cc.aspx]
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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Lovecraft Solvency
Lovecraft Summary
In H.P. lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, the reader is confronted with the conspiracy of the
cult of Cthulhu and their subsequent control over the town of Portsmouth, though
initially the town is portrayed as benign, strange occurrences compound in the
protagonists adventures, occurrences that in isolation appear normal, but under more
rigorous examination, reveal the power of the unknown, it is in the ocean city r’lyeh
that Cthulhu sleeps that we start our exploration of the unknown depths of H.P.
lovecraft
Carrobles 13 (Volume 1 Issue 1 (September 2013) Article 1 Carlos Corbacho Carrobles professor at
Universidad Complutense de Madrid “H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call Of Cthulhu: an Intermedial Analysis of its
Graphic Adaptation” http://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/119-2013-08-211.1.1.CorbachoCarrobles74.pdf - BRW)
My research involves the most renowned tale by the master of modern horror H.P. Lovecraft, The call of Cthulhu, and its
adaptations into contemporary comics and graphic novels, in particular the one by Swiss writer/artist Michael Zigerlig. The first part of this
analysis focuses on Lovecraft’s style and the main characteristics of this tale, including some defining traits of this modern style of horror.
From the methodological point of view, the paper uses Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) as well as Tzvetan Todorov’s The
fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre in order to explore the relationship between the characters’ psychological motivations and
those unheimlich or uncanny (unfamiliar) elements that they may discover within themselves or others (a strange grim, sound, etc.). I shall
explore if these abject feelings arise from the outside (i.e. the sudden realization that things are different from what they expected), or if it has
to do with internal factors (i.e. old forgotten and unconscious memories, that in Freud “ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet
comes to light.”(Freud 1919: 5) The approach summarized above will allow me to unveil
an essential point in lovecraftian horror,
namely that absolute Truth is unattainable and that the illogical, the unnatural and the uncanny are
all part of life and represent ancient chaotic forces within the universe, beyond the world that we perceive every
day. Extraordinary and poltergeist elements are, for Lovecraft, a reaction against the ‘true’ laws of the
universe. His characters attempt to find knowledge and scientific explanations in a sort of Faustian spirit that eventually drives them to
damnation and insanity. This collapse of the mind will be analyzed in the terms of terror and horror caused by the
confrontation of a sublime version of reality, in the terms used by Burke in his book A philosophical enquiry on the
ideas of the beautiful and the sublime (1757). The essay will place Todorov’s work The Fantastic (1975) in relation to Freud’s idea of the
uncanny. I will show how these works explain the duality present in Lovecraftian characters, who struggle for scientifically logical explanations
and at the same time face traumatic events at the climax of the story when they realize that there is no possible explanation. Finally, in what
concerns Michael Zigerlig’s adaptation of Lovecraft’s work, I will first focus on language, “key to Lovecraft’s horror” according to Zigerlig, as well
as on the intermedial aspects resulting from the semiotic negotiation between text and images. I shall analyze how language and image interact
in order to upset the perceptual experience of the reader and create suspense and fear in the story. In particular,
many vignettes use
explicit references to vision (see below), traditionally a symbol of the Enlightenment and the rational
acquisition of knowledge. The notion of ambiguity in relation to intermedial aspects is of particular interest. (see López-Varela 2008,
2011) Born in Providence in 1890 H.P. Lovecraft is nowadays regarded as a major figure on horror literature; Nevertheless, as many different
writers before, Lovecraft's work was mostly ignored during his lifetime. His work is inspired by Gothic writers such as Poe, as well as many other
fantastic tales like the Arabian nights, the Odyssey and many other important works which he read as a child. He was considered to be a
misanthropic and distant person with a troubled personality, as many of his works seem to suggest. In fact, most of the creatures he imagined
are “a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive” as he himself writes in The call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft 1926: 2). Nevertheless, further
investigators on his life and work proved that he was just a sensitive man disappointed with the world who, on the other hand, kept a close
relationship with many other writers with who he constantly co-authored works creating what would later be known as the Chtulhu Mythos, or
the Lovecraft Circle. As the name suggests, it was Lovecraft who created the basis in which many other authors would write on, and thus
extending the whole of a fictional mythological pantheon which nowadays is part of hundreds of works on horror, pulp or science fiction. The
weird tales of the Cthulhu Mythos have become the axis for, not only a never ending amount of tales from renowned authors, but also for
video-games, films, role-playing games, or graphic novels. Therefore, It could be claimed that H.P. Lovecraft was advanced for his time, as he
represented in his tales the themes of interest and anxiety of present day society, more than seventy years after his death. The style in which
Lovecraft writes is no longer considered Gothic, but cosmic horror. The main reasons are mainly that the terror depicted in Lovecraft's tales is
not focused on ghosts or that sort of creatures, but rather it is related to alien entities from beyond human understanding. The monsters in the
Cthulhu Mythos come from beyond time and space and are always used to represent the feebleness and meaninglessness of mankind.
Lovecraft's tales are not excessively worried about some past burden or crime for which the characters should pay for. The
importance
of the Lovecraft's horror is rooted in his nihilism. Truth is unattainable, and this realization triggers a
breakdown in the characters of the tale which unveils the unimportant role of humanity in the history of
the universe. The characters, after pursuing a search for knowledge, discover that human known history is
nothing in comparison with the whole existence of the universe, and they find out that there are other
civilizations and beings that have existed even before we could remember them, and continue to exist, waiting
to regain the place that humankind took over during their absence. Magic has an important role in these tales, often connected with the world
of dreams and imagination, even if it can be considered as a science alien to human minds. Whenever the fantastic creatures appear, the
normal laws of physics are no longer valid. This is seen in the appearance of Cthulhu in the analysis of
the tale. Another important characteristic of this style is the fact that the creatures are neither human nor related to humans. They are
hybrid beings, as Cthulhu, a grotesque amalgam of different concepts, never easy to define or
categorize, designed to create ambiguity, another fundamental trait of these tales. For all the above mentioned it is stated that
cosmic horror is no longer Gothic; However, in my opinion it is because of all of these characteristics that I claim that, if not a Gothic writer,
Lovecraft is the next step of the Gothic, or at least the middle stage between Gothic and contemporary Science-fiction. Lovecraft's tales are his
own way of expressing his troubled conception of society and his lack of faith in humanity. Furthermore, it could be claimed that the previously
stated characteristics of his cosmic horror evolve from the substrata in which the Gothic novel is rooted: The sublime, the uncanny and the
abject. Theses three pillars, along with Todorov's The fantastic are the ideas on which my essay will analyze our chosen tale. From all of his
works, the most emblematic is the one which I analyze in this essay, The call of Cthulhu. Cthulhu,
being the best known
creature from Lovecraft's imaginary pantheon, is almost a coat of arms for anything branded after him. The sinister
silhouette of a gargantuan dragon-like creature with a pulpy head rising from the depths is the main
image to be found in anything inspired by Lovecraft's works, and is also widely recognized in popular culture nowadays.
It is first found in a clay bass relief craved by a troubled-minded artist after some vivid nightmares. And it is through nightmares that the
creature gets in touch with the people of the world as we understand when reading the tale. During the second part of the tale, the main
character, Francis Wayland Thurston, contacts with the inspector John Legrasse who happens to possess another sculpture of unknown
historical origin for experts, that was obtained after raiding a violent cult in a dark forest in New Orleans. Incredibly, Francis finds out that the
artist who dreamed and craved the clay bass relief had imagined exactly the same illegible runic writings and the creature depicted cult's idol.
The mystery is even enlarged when we are told that an unconnected cult of Eskimos from Iceland chanted exactly the same words as the
supposed voodoo cultists of New Orleans. The climax of the tale unveils during its last part, with the words of the late Sailor Gustaf Johansen as
we learn that the dreams of the artist begin at the very same time as earthquakes and storms made the ancient tomb city of Cthulhu, R'lyeh,
arise from the depths. Johansen's description of what he finds is the same Cyclopean city that different artists beheld during their weird
dreams. Johansen narrates the hell he experienced in that nightmarish city in which the laws of physics did not work properly. In the end, only
he managed to escape with another sculpture of Cthulhu that Wayland discovered in a magazine before investigating the report of the sailor
who, like Wayland's uncle, died in mysterious circumstances. It is important to remark the elements that are present in the tale. Firstly, the
narrator writes in an “unreliable” first person point of view, trying to convince the reader of a fantastic story and sharing his fears of facing
something uncomprehensible. There are also places of mystery and darkness, like the forest in New Orleans or the vast and forgotten city of
R'lyeh, both standing for the typical dungeons and castles of Gothic. Finally, the
monster represented by Cthulhu and its
mysterious cult, is a mixture of categories that work against the contemporary status-quo, as I shall analyze further on. This
tale is developed through the investigation of the anthropologist Francis Wayland Thurston, whose scientific mind struggles with the discovery
of the Cthulhu cult. The way in which Wayland faces every step of the investigation, or at least how he said he experienced it is what makes this
tale a fantastic one. Lovecraft uses a first person narrator because, as Todorov states in his book, The fantastic, “The first-person narrator most
readily permits the reader to identify with the character.” (Todorov 1975: 84) It is reading Todorov when we understand that the fantastic as a
genre only takes place during the hesitation of either the character or the reader. His theory could be summed up in his own words “The
fantastic confronts us with a dilemma: to believe or not believe?” (Todorov 1975: 83) The use of a first person narrator to share the experiences
that a character undergoes is almost essential in order to create the doubt that characterizes 'the fantastic' before it becomes the uncanny or
the marvellous. However, at the very beginning of the tale we find that the character is mostly aware of alien forces superior to common
knowledge: 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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of
reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from
the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The call of Cthulhu 1926:1) Obviously, the main message of this first
paragraph foretells the entire story, unveiling the sensation of solitude and meaninglessness of mankind,
considering it but a small and absurd spot in the wholeness of the universe. But what is remarkable here is that, taking
into account Todorov's theory, the character is fully aware of strange powers from the beginning. This would consequently undermine the
essence of the fantastic in the tale. Nevertheless, the use of the narrator-character maintains the ambiguity, and according to Todorov the use
of a dramatized narrator is much preferable to a non-represented narrator, for the former can lie, while the latter would directly drive us to the
marvellous. There are several parts in the text, wherein the narrator expresses the hesitation as in “the scattered notes gave me much material
for thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the
artist.”(The call of Cthulhu 1926: 4) or “The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but
the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions.” (The call
of Cthulhu 1926:10) Thus, we experience the effort of the character to maintain his scientific approach in the uncanny events that he is
undergoing. Furthermore, the unconscious of the reader highlights this doubt thanks to the use of the past, as it entails that what he though is
no longer acceptable. Another point of this tale which works in favour of the fantastic is that almost everything told here are supposed
confessions of different characters which also create ambiguity, for instances this paragraph in page 8 of the text: It may have been only
imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to
the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met
and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse
of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition. (The
call of Cthulhu 1926: 8) It is
precisely the use of words such as Imagination, fancy, hint, glimpse or suppose
what highlights the possibility of mere illusion. In Todorov “There exists another variety of the fantastic in
which the hesitation occurs between the real and the imaginary. In the first case we were uncertain not that the
events occurred, but that our understanding of them was correct. In the second case, we wonder if what we believe we
perceive is not in fact a product of the imagination.” (Todorov 1975: 36) Even the climax of the tale, the sailor's confession,
could be regarded as simple madness, were the doubt not possible due to all the previous discoveries and the uncanny coincidences between
the dreams of the artists and what the sailor describes in his tale. According to the aforementioned, we
ought to accept that this
text is not fantastic but marvellous as in the end R'lyeh, Cthulhu and the cultists are proved real; However, it is my
opinion that the way in which the marvellous events are approached is what allows the survival of the fantastic elements. What for the reader
is plainly marvellous, the narrator conceives as uncanny, because as we have seen in the first paragraph of the tale, these experiences are not
considered mystical, but rather a different science or perspective of reality that we are not prepared to conceive. In what terms is this
“uncanny”? In Freud, “It (the uncanny) undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror” (Freud 1919:
1). Basing his study in the German word heimlich – belonging to the home – Freud argues that uncanny is anything which is unknown but
connects with something familiar in the unconscious, or that something initially familiar becomes something gruesome or unheimlich. It may be
something “that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.” In
complementary terms in the tale, R'lyeh
emerges from its repression in the depths of the oceans as it explicitly explained in the text: “In the elder
time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its
monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves;” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 9) Furthermore; It could be claimed that
the oceans
are metaphorically the unconscious of the earth - if we consider the earth as the home or a
complementary part of mankind – where lost memories from ancient times are kept in darkness. When
those memories resurrect or emerge, the conflict between what used to be familiar and is now uncanny appears.
More importantly, the reader now understands that even if the great old ones have come from the stars, they owned
the earth long before humanity. The earth was their home; therefore the alien Gods actually belong
to the “home” - It is humanity that is something alienated to the earth. Going back again to that first paragraph of
the tale we may now understand the uncanny element within. Wayland does not only consider his society unimportant, but he also regards the
earth as something wherein he doesn't belong anymore, as when the narrator states “When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding
down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith.”(The call of Cthulhu 1926: 14) As stated in the abstract of this essay; Uncanny is anything that
should be hidden and yet comes to light, and that is precisely what happens in the tale. Another important trait of the uncanny in the tale
comes with the dreams and the cult rituals. Superstition has always connected the world of dreams with foresight and revelations. The first
images of the tomb city of R'lyeh are mentioned as dreams and hallucinations and its only further in the tale that we learn that this place is no
dream at all. When the narrator learns from the sailor's tale that R'lyeh is real, the place is already familiar, having been first mentioned by the
delirious artist. When the artist's delusion is proved real the uncanny once again emerges in the reader or in Freud's words: “This is
that
an uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the distinction between imagination and
reality, such as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in
reality.” (Freud 1919: 15) Finally, the cultists are depicted as savages of an uncivilized faith. Almost all of them are mad and primitive
creatures, which correspond to that dark age of the world when every culture was animistic and primitive. Second to Freud, we still keep some
unconscious part of that era which could be re-activated whenever we witness something which may prove those surmounted superstitions as
real. In the same way as the dreams of R'lyeh and the oniric messages of Cthulhu, when the creature is proved real – And therefore all the rites
and spells of which we have been previously told – the frontier between reality and superstition disappears again. When “The primitives beliefs
we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” (Freud 1919: 17), is when the uncanny occurs. Once this concept is clear, it is possible
to discuss the role of the place, which connects with another essential issue – The idea of the sublime. In Burke, as the uncanny is a great tool
for terror: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant
about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion
which the mind is capable of feeling. (Burke 1757: 13) In contrast with the uncanny, the sublime does not focus on familiarity; It is strongly
connected with nature and its vastness. Burke Claims: An
even plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean
idea; the prospect of such a plain my a extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the
mind with any thing for great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes, but it is owing to
none more than to this that the ocean is an object of no small terror. (Burke 1757: 43) Burke’s work
contributes to the understanding of the interest of nature both in Romanticism and Gothicism, as it was one of their usual settings. The sublime
is connected with the idea of awe
and terror imposed on a subject who beholds an object of great magnitude
or power. It is the presence of this object impossible to control or understand that causes
astonishment when by comparison the subject understands how small or powerless he is against
something apparently infinite. Historically, the terror of considering the individual a small, powerless
plaything amongst the might of nature and the universe was originated as a logical consequence
during the enlightenment and the modernity. The amount of scientific discoveries enlightened a supposed dark age of
history. However, every answer raised more questions, unanswerable at the time, which helped to create the terror of feebleness and of being
it helped to understand that there are things beyond our past or present state of
ideas. Time was also considered a fundamental aspect of the sublime, and the Gothic literature used old castles and ruins as banners of the
nothing; On the other hand,
decay of humanity. What in the past was a mighty empire of mankind – for instance Rome or any great kingdom – in their present was an
obsolete ruin. Thus, the Gothics understood the sublime that a fallen civilization caused in a subject. Lovecraft uses this in his own style: R'lyeh
is the tomb for Cthulhu, it is the dungeon in which he was caged before humanity took the place of the great old ones. In these terms is easy to
understand that R'lyeh is exactly the same thing as the old ruined castles and dungeons of the Gothic. In addition, Lovecraft equally portrays
the place of humans as something short in relation to the myths he has created - “They, like the subject and material, belonged to something
horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it.” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 6) But sublime is not only related to vasteness, or
immensity and the relation subject object. It
is important to remember the relevance of darkness and its relation
to danger and the ultimate terror – The concept of Death. For this purpose it is essential to analyze more excerpts from
Lovecraft and Burke. The first appearance of a dark natural setting in the tale is the woods from the second part of the tale: ...for miles splashed
on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them,
and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every
malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. (..) The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute,
substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There
were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal
sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters
whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. (…) It
was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. (The Call of Cthulhu 1926: 7) The sublime is related to terror, and therefore
with darkness and obscurity. Burke claims that obscurity is basic in the arousing of terror. If something is easy to see, its mystery
diminishes; therefore, night and darkness are essential for obscurity. Burke, in his own words states: Every one will be sensible of this, who
considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form
clear ideas, affect minds, which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings. Those
despotic governments,
which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief
as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost
all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their
idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. For this purpose too the druids performed all their ceremonies in
the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks (Burke 1757: 43) It is remarkable how the idea of
darkness is related to heathen temples. Somewhere in the unconscious of men there is the idea that these rituals and ceremonies are stronger
when veiled in darkness and mystery. It is no coincidence that the Cthulhu cultists, first considered as Voodoo, worship their gruesome god in a
swamp never traversed by civilized men. The dark and grotesque rituals of this cult are empowered by the obscure surroundings of this place.
As a summary,
the setting of nature in this tale is often depicted as something evil, obscure and full of
secrets. Be it the deep oceans where an ancient evil awaits or the gloomy woods where the cultists
plot against the civilized world. Once the narrator and place have been discussed it is time to analyse the role of the monster.
Mainly regarded as the antagonist of a story, the monster is an essential character for horror narrative. It is always some kind of
creature or being which threatens the statusquo of the tale. It is the disruption of categories and things as
they were previously regarded. Cthulhu is a mixture of things, something only possible to describe in
vague terms. The very first description of the creature manages to represent the very idea of obscurity in its form “If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to
the spirit of the thing.” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 2) As stated before, the obscurity of its form creates an uneasiness which develops later into
horror. But Cthulhu is not only physically a monster, it is the concept previously explained of the sublime into character. Huge as a mountain,
belonging to the depths of the earth where its lost memories remain, Cthulhu is the past plotting against the present of mankind. But more
important than Cthulhu are the cultists. They are also a mixture of “categories”, more precisely they are outcasts and “mixed-blood”. They are
constantly described in the text as “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of
Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese” (The call of Cthulhu 1926: 8) often using the word mongrels to refer to the
sailors. They are regarded in derogative terms, even when referring to sailors that are not really proved to be cultists. It is remarkable that
Lovecraft chose people of those characteristic to be the wild and ferocious cultists of his demonic faiths. They are almost categorized as a
contrast with the intelligent, well-educated and intellectual characters which are commonly chosen to be the “hero” of the tale; Therefore, it
could be claimed that the real “other” in the tale, is not the monster itself as it is actually really distant and alien to the reality of the character,
but the cultists built up in hordes of Eskimos, Arabs, Chinese, Hispanics... and almost everyone different from the white educated Anglo-Saxon.
As a consequence it could be stated that both social groups distant to civilization (sailors and mongrels) and nature (oceans, swamps, woods)
are seen as the monsters of the tale and their dwellings, respectively. They care and worship darkness and evil powers that work against the
status quo of white civilization. This evil other is maximized by the use of the great old ones and the tale and their uncanny nature, essentially
bound to the idea of darkness and terror as they are portrayed as something older than humanity an even the earth, leaving the place of
mankind (not just the white man and his civilization) as feeble and meaningless. This
horror of being nothing is portrayed by the
point of view of a single person, in order to create the proper feeling in the reader, which is ultimately, the real
objective for Lovecraft – To create in the reader the doubt that we may not be as relevant and great as we may expect.
Top-Level
The mission of philosophy is to promote weird realism which Lovecraft creates
through his horror of phenomenology, showing that humans are no longer the
masters, however, Lovecraft’s monsters have a immeasurable power yet still a hint of
fragility, and most have no sufficient body description, undermining our stock
emotional responses. The horror of Lovecraft’s stories lie in the invasion of the
unknown by finite beings such as us Humans continue to probe the universe and it will
eventually lead to us revealing terrifying realities
Graham Harman 08 (s a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary
philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. ) 2008
“On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl” Journal: Harman-Illustrated Volume: 4
(http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/253/page%20proofs.pdf?sequence=1)-M.H
In a dismissive review of a recent anthology on Schelling, Andrew Bowie accuses two authors of a style he ‘increasingly’ thinks of as ‘continental
science fiction’.1 There is room for further increase in Bowie’s thinking. With his implication that science fiction belongs to the juvenile or the
unhinged, Bowie enforces a sad limitation on mental experiment. For nothing
resembles science fiction more than
philosophy does — unless it be science itself. From its dawning in ancient Greece, philosophy has been the asylum of
strange notions: a cosmic justice fusing opposites into a restored whole; a series of emanations from fixed stars to
the moon to the prophets; divine intervention in the movement of human hands and legs; trees and diamonds with infinite parallel attributes,
only two of them known; insular monads sparkling like mirrors and attached to tiny bodies built from chains of other monads; and the eternal
recurrence of every least event. While
the dismal consensus that such speculation belongs to the past is
bolstered by the poor imagination of some philosophers, it finds no support among working scientists,
who grow increasingly wild in their visions. Even a cursory glance at the physics literature reveals a
discipline bewitched by strange attractors, degenerate topologies, black holes filled with alternate
worlds, holograms generating an illusory third dimension, and matter composed of vibrant tendimensional strings. Mathematics, unconstrained by empirical data, has long been still bolder in its
gambles. Nor can it be said that science fiction is a marginal feature of literature itself. Long before the mighty crabs and squids of Lovecraft
and the tribunals of Kafka, we had Shakespeare’s witches and ghosts, Mt. Purgatory in the Pacific, the Cyclops in the Mediterranean, and the
Sphinx tormenting the north of Greece. Against the model of philosophy as a rubber stamp for common sense and archival sobriety, I
would
propose that philosophy’s sole mission is weird realism. Philosophy must be realist because its
mandate is to unlock the structure of the world itself; it must be weird because reality is weird.
‘continental science fiction’, and ‘continental horror’, must be transformed from insults into a research program. It seems fruitful to launch this
program with a joint treatment of Edmund Husserl and H.P. Lovecraft, an unlikely pair that I will try to render more likely. The dominant strand
of twentieth-century continental thought stems from the phenomenology of Husserl, whose dry and affable works conceal a philosophy tinged
with the bizarre. In almost the same period, the
leading craftsman of horror and science fiction in literature was
Lovecraft, recently elevated from pulp author to canonical classic by the prestigious Library of America series.2 The road to
continental science fiction leads through a Lovecraftian reading of phenomenology. This remark is not meant
as a prank. Just as Lovecraft turns prosaic New England towns into the battleground of extradimensional fiends, Husserl’s phenomenology
converts simple chairs and mailboxes into elusive units that emit partial, contorted surfaces. In both authors, the broken link between objects
and their manifest crust hints at ‘such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age’3 — or preferably, revive a metaphysical speculation that
embraces the permanent strangeness of objects. If
philosophy is weird realism, then a philosophy should be judged
by what it can tell us about Lovecraft. In symbolic terms, Great Cthulhu should replace Minerva as the
patron spirit of philosophers, and the Miskatonic must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of
choice. Since Heidegger’s treatment of Hölderlin resulted mostly in pious, dreary readings, philosophy needs a new literary hero. Lovecraft’s
MateriaLisM In the great tales of Lovecraft we find a mythology centered in New England, but ranging from the Antarctic to Pluto as well.
Humans are no longer lords of the cosmos, but surrounded by hidden monstrosities who evade or
corrupt our race, sometimes plotting its downfall. ‘The Old Ones’, or ‘Those Ones’, are the disturbing general terms by which these
creatures are known. They vastly exceed us in mental and physical prowess, yet occasionally interbreed with
human females, preferring women of a decayed genetic type. The least encounter with the Old Ones often results
in mental breakdown, and all reports of dealings with them are hushed. But their unspeakable powers
are far from infinite. To achieve their aims, the Old Ones seek minerals in the hills of Vermont,
infiltrate churches in seaport towns, and pursue occult manuscripts under the eyes of suspicious
librarians. Their researches are linked not only with Lovecraft’s fictional authors and archives (the mad Arab al-Hazred, Miskatonic
University), but real ones as well (Pico della Mirandola, Harvard’s Widener Library). Their corpses are carried away by floods, and even the
mighty Cthulhu explodes, though briefly, when rammed by a human-built ship. There are also rivalries between
the monsters, as becomes clear in ‘At the Mountains of Madness.’ The powers of the various Old Ones are no more
uniform than infinite. This balance in the monsters between power and frailty is mentioned to oppose
any Kantian reading of Lovecraft. Such a reading is understandable, since Kant’s inaccessible noumenal world seems a perfect
match for the cryptic stealth of Lovecraft’s creatures. His descriptions of their bodies and actions are almost
deliberately insufficient, and seem to allude to dimensions beyond the finite conditions of human
perception. His monsters are not just mysterious, but often literally invisible; they undermine our
stock of emotional responses and zoological categories. The very architecture of their cities mocks the
principles of Euclidean geometry. A few examples will indicate the style: When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the
wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike […] he comes upon a lonely and curious country […] Gorges and ravines of problematical depth
intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland
that one instinctively dislikes […]4 Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to inflict the visible cattle […]5
[Wilbur Whateley] would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror.6 And most compellingly: It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe [the dead
creature on the floor], but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too
closely bound up with the life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.7 When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes
the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike […] he comes upon a lonely and curious country […] Gorges and ravines of problematical
depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of
marshland that one instinctively dislikes […]4 Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to inflict the visible
cattle […]5 [Wilbur Whateley] would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a
sense of unexplainable terror.6 And most compellingly: It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe [the
dead creature on the floor], but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are
too closely bound up with the life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.7 Nonetheless, the Kantian
reading fails.
Even if we accepted a metaphysics splitting the world into noumenal and phenomenal realms, there is no question that the Old
Ones would belong entirely to the phenomenal. The mere fact of invisibility is surely not enough to
qualify the monsters as noumenal. The so-called Higgs boson of present-day physics, assuming it exists, lies beyond the gaze of
current particle accelerators. No one has ever witnessed the core of the earth, or the center of the Milky Way
which may or may not be home to a massive black hole. Countless other forces must exist in the universe that could be
only decades away from discovery, while others will remain shielded from human insight in perpetuity. But this does not make them
noumenal: these forces, however bizarre, would still belong to the causal and spatio-temporal conditions that, for Kant, belong solely to the
structure of human experience. Let us grant further that the Old Ones may have features permanently
outstripping human intelligence, in a way that the Higgs boson may not. Even so, this would be the result not of the
transcendental structure of human finitude, but only of our relative stupidity. The game of chess is not
‘noumenal’ for dogs through their inability to grasp it, and neither is Sanskrit grammar for a deranged adult or a three-year-old. In ‘The
Whisperer in Darkness’, the Old Ones even invite humans to become initiated into their larger view of the world: to shew them the great
abysses that most of us have had to dream about in fanciful ignorance.11 Humans
prepare to reach these deeper abysses,
neither through Heideggerian Angst nor a mystical experience that leaps beyond finitude and reduces philosophy to straw, but through
purely medical means: ‘My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call them surgery.’12
The great horror of Lovecraft’s universe lies not in some sublime infinite that no finite intelligence can
fully grasp, but in the invasion of the finite world by finite malignant beings. For all the limits imposed on our
intellect by Kant, he leaves us reassured that the finite and phenomenal world is insulated from horror, governed and structured by our own
familiar categories. Far
more troubling is Lovecraft’s subversion of the finite world: no longer a kingdom led
by innocuous rational beings, but one in which humans face entities as voracious as insects, who use
black magic and telepathy while employing mulatto sailors as worse-than-terrorist operatives. The Old Ones are anything
but noumenal. Noumenal beings scarcely have need of buildings, whether Euclidean or otherwise. Noumenal beings are not
dissected on the tables of polar explorers, do not mine for rocks in Vermont, and have no purpose
mastering Arabic and Syriac dialects to consult the writings of medieval wizards. They would never speak in physical voices, not
even with ‘the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species […] [with]
singularities of timbre, range, and overtones [placing it] wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life.’13
Michel Houellebecq, in a brilliant study of Lovecraft,14 is correct to emphasize his absolute materialism: ‘What is Great Cthulhu? An
arrangement of electrons, like us. Lovecraft’s terror is rigorously material. But, it is quite possible, given the free interplay of
cosmic forces, that Great Cthulhu possesses abilities and powers to act that far exceed ours. Which, a priori, is not particularly reassuring at
all.’15 The
terror of Lovecraft is not a noumenal horror, then, but a horror of phenomenology. Humans
cease to be master in their own house. Science and letters no longer guide us toward benevolent
enlightenment, but may force us to confront ‘notions of the cosmos, and of [our] own place in the seething vortex of
time, whose merest mention is paralysing’, and ‘impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturous [humans]’.16
Confronted with the half-human offspring of the Old Ones, even the political Left will endorse the use
of concentration camps: ‘Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential
discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these
societies became surprisingly passive and reticent’.17 To expand on a passage cited earlier: 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. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of
dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position within,
that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety
of a new dark age.18
Philosophy can’t rely on precise definitions because reality is always changing, just as
Lovecraft’s monsters never have coherent descriptions
Harman 08 (Graham s a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary
philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. ) 2008
“On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl” Journal: Harman-Illustrated Volume: 4
(http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/253/page%20proofs.pdf?sequence=1)-M.H
The literary critic Harold Bloom shares the following anecdote: Some years ago, on a stormy night in New Haven, I sat down to reread, yet once
more, John Milton’s Paradise Lost […] I wanted to start all over again with the poem: to read it as though I had never read it before, indeed as
though no one had ever read it before me […] And while I read, until I fell asleep in the middle of the night, the poem’s initial familiarity began
to dissolve […] Although the poem is a biblical epic, in classical form, the peculiar impression it gave me was what I generally ascribe to literary
fantasy or science fiction, not to heroic epic. Weirdness was its overwhelming effect.19 Science
fiction is found not only in
‘science fiction’, but in great literature of any sort. More generally, Bloom contends that ‘one mark of an
originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never
altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncracies .’20 Although
Bloom has little time for philosophy, which he views as cognitively less original than literature, his standard of canonical achievement seems
equally valid for philosophical work. If
there is one feature that unites the great works of philosophy, it is surely
their inability to be fully assimilated, or their tendency to become such a given that we are blinded to their strangeness.
Though Plato and Kant can be seen as restrictive establishment figures, their works are saturated with
deviant images and nearly fantastic concepts; they exceed all possible interpretation, resist all attempted summary, and
appeal to readers of any nationality or political orientation. The education of young philosophers builds on these works
as on bedrock. And they come alive only when some gifted interpreter rediscovers their strangeness. Pressing further, it also seems
evident that the strangeness of works comes less from the works as a whole than from the weirdness of the personae that fill them, whether in
literature, philosophy, or science. Though Don Quixote and Lear’s Fool appear solely in literary works, they are no more reducible to extant plot
lines than our friends are exhaustively grasped by our dealings with them. Characters, in the broadest sense, are objects. Though we only come
to know them through specific literary incidents, these events merely hint at a character’s turbulent inner life — which lies mostly outside the
work it inhabits, and remains fully equipped for sequels that the author never produced. If
a lost Shakespearean tragedy were
discovered, dealing with the apparent suicide of the Fool (who disappears without explanation from the existing text of
King Lear), the same Fool would have to be present in the new work, however unexpected its speeches.
The same is true of philosophical concepts, which must also be viewed as characters or objects. While
recent philosophy insists on precise definitions of every term, a genuine philosophical concept always
eludes such precision. We could list the known features of Leibniz’s monads in a laminated chart, yet the list includes contradictions,
and surely leaves us hungry for more. The same holds true of argon in chemistry or the string in physics. A thing cannot be reduced
to the definitions we give of it, because then the thing would change with each tiny change in its
known properties, as Kripke has sharply objected.21 A good rule of thumb is as follows: unless a character gives rise to
different interpretations, unless a scientific entity endures changed notions of its properties, unless a
philosopher is entangled in contradictory assertions over one and the same concept, unless a new
technology has unforeseen impact, unless a politician’s party is one day disappointed, unless a friend
is able to generate and experience surprises, then we are not dealing with anything very real. We will be
dealing instead with useful surface qualities, not with objects. Let ‘object’ refer to any reality with an autonomous life deeper than its qualities,
and deeper than its relations with other things. In this sense, an object is reminiscent of an Aristotelian primary substance, which supports
different qualities at different times. Socrates can
laugh, sleep, or cry at various moments while still remaining
Socrates – which entails that he can never be exhaustively described or defined. My thesis is that objects
and weirdness go hand in hand. An object partly evades all announcement through its qualities, resisting or subverting efforts to
identify it with any surface. It is that which exceeds any of the qualities, accidents, or relations that can be ascribed to it: an ‘I know not what’,
but in a positive sense. Against frequent efforts to dismiss objects as fantasies assembled by humans from a pre-given surface of experienced
contents, I contend that reality
is object-oriented. Reality is made up of nothing but substances — and they are weird substances with
with reality begins when we
cease to reduce a thing to its properties or to its effect on other things. The difference between
objects and their peripheral features (qualities, accidents, relations) is absolute. Though this thesis is deeply classical, it
a taste of the uncanny about them, rather than stiff blocks of simplistic physical matter. Contact
cannot possibly be ‘reactionary’, since the objects of which I speak resist all reduction to dogma, and in fact are the only force in the world
capable of doing so.
Lovecraft’s unconvential methods of describing concepts allows for a paradigm shift
on how we view anomalies
Stefans 13 [Brian Kim Stefans, April 6th, 2013, Assistant English professor at UCLA, “Let’s Get Weird:
On Graham Harman’s H.P. Lovecraft”, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/lets-get-weird-on-grahamharmans-h-p-lovecraft#]
Weird Realism opens with an idiosyncratic set of short essays that lay out the method of the book. Harman notes that there is a
choice that philosophers generally make between being a “destroyer of gaps” — those who want to
reduce reality to a simple principle — and “creators of gaps” — those who point to those areas to
which we will possibly never have access. He deems the latter “productionists” (in contrast to reductionists)
and writes: “If we apply this distinction to imaginative writers, then H.P. Lovecraft is clearly a
productionist author. No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of
language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.” He then describes the more
literary aspects of his method. “The Problem with Paraphrase” takes aim at critic Edmund Wilson’s tendency to rewrite the “content” of
Lovecraft’s stories in his own terms and then attack that effigy rather than the writing itself. “The Inherent Stupidity of All Content” develops
Slavoj Žižek’s theme of the “inherent stupidity of all proverbs” (in The Abyss of Freedom, in which Žižek amusingly proves that any proverb can
be entirely reversed and give us access to an equally wise perspective). Harman
combines both Wilson’s and Žižek’s
techniques — ridiculously literal paraphrases in a variety of styles and attempted textual reversals —
in a method of his own that he calls “ruination,” arguing that “after all, the fact that a statement can
be ruined means that this has not already occurred. It also means that we can use possible ruinations, and sometimes
possible improvements, as a method of analyzing the effects of a literary statement.” This is, in some ways, a scientific method: Harman wishes
to isolate qualities of Lovecraft’s writings by driving them out of their hiding places, like subjecting a bacterium to a stain, intense heat, or a
college lecture by Newt Gingrich in order to elicit new behaviors. The
practice of “ruination” demonstrates the incredible
precision with which Lovecraft approached description. If Harman is enlisting Lovecraft as a foot
soldier against bland, realist empiricism, he has to prove that Lovecraft’s apparent failures to describe
were a form of intellectual honesty rather than simply bad, clumsy style. Harman describes two
stylistic techniques of Lovecraft’s that highlight this very theme of failure. The first is the “vertical” or
“allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”: If I say that my somewhat
extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human
caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing […] but it was the general outline of the
whole which made it most shockingly frightful. For Harman, such a passage draws us away from trying
to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome, mundane world of Euclidean time and space.
Lovecraft situates the creature partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the
description is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore the surface properties of
dragon and octopus […] and to focus instead on the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’” In this
way, Lovecraft opens up a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narrator
sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the moment when the narrator
experiences something truly astounding — the color out of space, the shadow out of time, like in the title! — language
breaks down, and all you are left with is the “general outline of the whole.” The opposite method,
which Harman calls “horizontal” or “cubist,” occurs when Lovecraft begins a description by claiming
that he’s at an impasse, but then lets fly with an abundance of information, as in this passage from
“The Dunwich Horror”: It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could
describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of
aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known
three dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp
of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous […] Above the waist it was semianthropomorphic; though its chest […] had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black,
and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worse; for here all human resemblance left
off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles
with red sucking mouths protruded limply. And
that’s just the beginning. “The power of language is no longer
enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,” Harman writes. “Instead, language is
overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing.” It’s like one of those scenes that seem to
occur at the climax of any long-form Japanese fantasy anime: a creature starts to expand, but rather than simply getting fatter, every aspect
begins to take on its own form, like a Rembrandt turning into an Arcimboldo. Both
methods isolate moments of “crisis,” in
the sense Thomas Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: observations can be made
but there is no place for them in the dominant scientific paradigm and hence no language, setting the
stage for a “paradigm shift” that not only turns the apparent anomalies into “facts” but also drives a
few scientists bonkers in the meantime. Maybe that’s why Lovecraft’s heroes are always getting
nauseous when I, a Star Wars kid, would most expect them to be quite thrilled. The bulk of Weird Realism is
comprised of 100 mini-essays, many only a page long, each of which examines a short passage of one of Lovecraft’s major stories. Most expand
outward to examine narrative tropes and stylistic tics that recur across several stories. Fans of Lovecraft will be satisfied: Harman seems to have
missed nothing. Of the volume of writings by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred called the Necronomicon, Harman outlines the many ways Lovecraft
establishes its reality: by reminding us of the copies scattered in libraries across the world (notably a heavily-guarded copy in Harvard’s Widener
library); by having the book appear in several lists with actual and fictitious books; by referring to several translations of the book; and finally —
this goes beyond Lovecraft himself — by the fact of the book’s appearance in the stories of his circle of friends. (Curious to me is that Harman
doesn’t address whether or not the Necronomicon actually exists, if not as a book then as a concept that has reality-effects. But perhaps that is
a foregone conclusion for Harman.) Harman’s
take on a certain famous passage in which a sailor is “swallowed
up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved
as if it were obtuse” gives a particularly good sense of how he is able to skirt between literary and
philosophical language with ease: Lovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu something over
and above the three creatures he partially resembles […] we now find that even acute and obtuse
angles must be something over and above their qualities. There seems to be a “spirit” of acute angles,
a “general outline of the whole” which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases where they
behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geometrical entities been granted this sort
of psychic potency, to the point that they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and
experienceable traits. While the lovers of novels might be less pleased when Harman makes grand statements about Lovecraft’s
greater importance to literature than Proust or Joyce (he does!), those of us with no visceral knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the history
of philosophy can find pleasure in learning that there is, after Pythagoras (and before Kandinsky!), a tradition of attributing “psychic potency”
to squares and circles. “[I]t
is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as obtuse’ would allow an angle to
‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman continues: Sketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see the
difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase “she looked daggers at him” is an example of catachresis in language, a
misapplication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle obtusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in
geometry. We might as well say: “It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were the number 6.” One way of reconciling this might be
to consider the problem of painting. Any image that pretends to take place in “Renaissance perspective” is bound to have a “vanishing point” at
which parallel lines will appear to converge. Consequently, in films — say an Expressionist one like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or the finale to
Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, or Michel Gondry’s delirious music video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” — we are
repeatedly confronted with seemingly depthless triangles turning out to be boxes with hidden monsters or dancing girls in them, not to
mention the reverse (poor Wile E. Coyote): landscapes with deep perspective turning out to be flat, painful façades. But
Harman’s
approach is more interesting. Rather than treating the passage as a problem of ekphrasis (from my
perspective it appeared acute, but it was really obtuse), he treats it as a statement about reality: the
angle really is acute, but lo and behold, it has properties it simply hasn’t revealed to us yet! The
knowledge that acute angles actually have four equal sides, or that an acute angle is really the
discorporated spirit of Liberace, may be just around the corner. There are some places where Weird Realism seems to
fail, most notably when Harman makes evaluative claims about other writers; he doesn’t seem content to
merely situate Lovecraft among the likes of Proust and Joyce, but suggests, if only briefly, that he
surpasses them. He also doesn’t engage with any literary critical method later than that of Edmund Wilson and the New Critics. His
apparent conviction, expressed largely through exclusion, that no features of other writers seem to
produce the sorts of “gaps” that he finds so valuable in Lovecraft will no doubt be tested. I couldn’t
help thinking of John Ashbery’s mid-career poetry, for example, or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet,
both of which are filled with such mystifying gaps between object and description. The mini-essays seem to
peter out at around 85 or so, especially during the last 11, where Harman seems content to note how the late story “The Shadow Out of Time”
is just not as good as the earlier stuff; a little nip and tuck might have been in order. On occasion, it doesn’t quite seem like Harman is writing
“philosophy” so much as noting a feature of the Lovecraft universe — which is to say, he slips into writing “literary criticism,” and might be just
as happy citing Lovecraft’s linkages to Shelley and, say, later weird realist writers like Philip K. Dick or Samuel Delany as noting a feature of
Hume or Kant. But all of this points to what is one of the most salient aspects of Harman’s philosophical writing as a whole, which is that he
sees his project as an ongoing conversation with his readers and with other philosophers. The title of his excellent book on Quentin
Meillassoux, Philosophy in the Making, might just as well refer to his own work; philosophy, for Harman, isn’t just great minds articulating
correct ideas, but philosophers building a structure together, testing it, revising it, and trusting that they will continue to disagree. So the
porousness and apparent brokenness of these structural components of Weird Realism might just be my own misreading of the acute angle
that chooses to act obtuse — as if a critic of literature could ever hope for things to be otherwise.
Any Chance the K’s Impact Can Be Solved Means You Vote Aff. Our Reading of “The
Call of Cthulhu” Undoes Categorical Thinking and Unravels the System that They Kritik
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
Along with asking what Lovecraft means, then, we also can ask what reading Lovecraft might do. Donald Burleson premises his poststructural
reading of Lovecraft – which, like Joshi's analysis, emphasises manner over meaning – with the reminder that authorial intent is inaccessible
and presence remains a metaphysical phantasy (5-7). In his analysis of Pickman's Model, Burleson states that "Pickman is absent because his
plural nature denies the metaphysics of presence and self-identity.… Pickman divides himself against himself" (91). If the reader does the same,
Burleson interprets "The Colour Out of Space" as offering a refutation of
systems themselves; here, to see "a visible impression, not belonging to this system, is to suggest
disturbance of the system and, allegorically, subversion of systems generally. What is at work here is the
undoing of categorical thinking, the unravelling of any system claiming final mastery, exhaustive cataloguing,
total solution, immutable results, settled 'reading' of reality" (108). Mastery refuses a negotiatory ethics of difference.
can an address to alterity be mobilised?
Against the allegorical emphasis of this claim, however, I propose that the functional activating of potentiality that does not recognise
metaphor as its own closed circuit shows how reading
Lovecraft may challenge close/d readings and other
techniques of mastering words, bodies, flesh, perception and subjectivity beyond the text into the
world. Ultimately I will ask: what did Lovecraft do to perception and what can we do with Lovecraft?
The perm solves. Lovecraft’s writing is a prerequisite to any productive activism
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
Critics have accused Lovecraft of nihilism, pessimism (Lévy), paranoia (Carter) and, from an esoteric angle, qualities of negativity and povertystricken intangibility (Pasi, Hanegraaff), even if the critics have not necessarily presented these qualities as bad. More celebratory explorations
have suggested that Lovecraft's art allows encounters with the sublime (Ralickas). As a phenomenon of encountering an excess of signification
that is no less material for being so, the sublime offers a jubilant reading of the ultimate dissipations that Lovecraft's protagonists undergo. In
direct reference to a politics of feminist alterity, Kristeva's Desire in Language proposed the sublime as an integral element of the a-signifying
systems encountered in becoming-woman. Lovecraft
also has been utilised in queer theory and as a catalyst for
activism (MacCormack, "Unnatural Alliances"), in illustration of Joshi's point that his is a writing of function. Goodrich has
explored Lovecraft as a mannerist, and has pointed to the plastic-artistry of his literary style. It is crucial to find joy in Lovecraft, as it is here
we find liberation from dominant signifying systems. The question then becomes, "who benefits from maintaining these
systems?" Reading Lovecraft as a baroque writer, we can find voluminous material (indeed all too material) becomings. The horror perhaps
comes from the fact that these becomings are not metaphors; they are instead all too real and in fact invert metaphorisation, with no recourse
to meaning. Far from disappearing or being consumed, Lovecraft's characters are unable to escape, through death or victory, the reality of their
metamorphoses. Leibniz states: "A corporeal substance can neither arise nor perish except by creation or annihilation… Consequently things
which have souls do not arise or perish, but are only transformed" (92). Carter and Charles Dexter-Ward, among others, neither live nor die,
and at best theirs is not a fear of transformation but of an irresistible "beckoning" (Lovecraft, TGSK 505). Whatever is annihilated is human.
Indeed perhaps these stories are nihilistic for the human, always and only lacking or against only human life, the human understood as that
which Leibniz's ethics repudiates – an entity as a unified one. Becoming-inhuman is not death, "for no substance perishes, though it can
become quite different" (Leibniz 43). Baroque transformation is bordering, infinitely and infinitesimally fractal, aggregate plurality, subdivision,
"modification as extension" (Leibniz 68). The
specificities of each of these qualities are not antagonistic, and unlike relations
offer an ethics of difference that is crucial to minoritarian studies and becomings. The unnamed entity
(probably Yog-Sothoth) that concludes "The Dunwich Horror" (DH) speaks half in English and half in imperceptible – and olfactory – utterances.
It "has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least
fraction was really matter in any sense we know" (Lovecraft, DH 151-2). The entity is called a "human blasphemy" (152), not because it is evil or
aberrant, but because it could not be perceived and thus known as part of the "normal" world occupied by phantasies of human and other
demarcated entities. Politically,
minoritarians – women, queers, racial others and so forth – have been
considered in this way, and in response have demanded a philosophy of re-negotiating signifying
systems. Faith here is not belief in God but in the human and its associated qualities of singularity, reified subjectivity, and unified,
homogenised expression of substance.
Anthropocentrism
Lovecraft wrote of the unimportance of humans and our difference from animals,
plants and non-living things
Stefans 13 [Brian Kim Stefans, April 6th, 2013, Assistant English professor at UCLA, “Let’s Get Weird: On
Graham Harman’s H.P. Lovecraft”, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/lets-get-weird-on-grahamharmans-h-p-lovecraft#]
H.P. LOVECRAFT'S WORK has not received a great deal of attention from literary critics. Until relatively recently, the majority of “treatments” of
his oeuvre have been in the form of B-movies. While it’s surprising that Roger Corman, director of seven features based on the stories of
Lovecraft’s great predecessor, Poe, only did one Lovecraft film (The Haunted Palace, itself marketed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace,”
despite being based on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward), some
of the stable of effects of Lovecraft’s fiction —
his characters’ tendencies to simply tell you their emotions (usually on a scale between repulsion and
disgust), their inability to adequately describe the most startling creatures and architectures — make
his stories ripe for the B-movie treatment. The telegraphed emotions of his characters justify stilted or hysterical acting, and
the incomplete, contradictory visual descriptions of creatures like Cthulhu or the Old Ones — not to mention the “strange, beetling, table-like
constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars” hovering miles above us in At the
Mountains of Madness — seem to cry out for a gauzy camera style that conceals the tawdriness of the set design, the recycled monster
costumes, and the failures of the lighting crew. Each Lovecraft story seems at once an absurd improvisation — pulling stuff out of his hat for the
sake of filling pulp magazine column inches — and a careful extension of his
basic principle that humans, were we to have
any access to the true nature of the universe, would recoil with horror at how small a role we play in
it and how much the universe doesn’t seem to care. He often introduces an entire new species of
ancient, if not thriving, life form while also confirming, often by quick allusion or repeated phrase, the
persistent powers of some previously introduced creature or cultural item, notably the monster
Cthulhu or the writings of the “mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” contained in the Necronomicon. His oeuvre,
expressed in fragments (Lovecraft never wrote a novel) did spawn a large body of what has come to be called “fan fiction” — even within his
own lifetime, writers such as Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth devoted their careers to extensions of the Lovecraft universe — but little
more than condescension from his intellectual contemporaries. Lately this is beginning to change. The Library of America published a collection
of Lovecraft’s best works in 2005, and today literary critics, and even philosophers, are finally beginning to pay attention to this defiantly
unfashionable writer. In a way, this makes a certain kind of sense. Even
if Lovecraft were not writing philosophy proper,
much of the coherence of his “cosmicism” results not in the noncontradictory material or
technological universes typical of most science fiction — think of the droids and lightsabers that populate the world of
Star Wars — but in a singularly fraught metaphysical universe. In Lovecraft’s version of reality, laws seem
to function in ways that make our foundational certainties — Euclidean geometry, the private
experience of dreams, the inviolable divisions between human, animal, plant, and the nonliving, etc.
— merely contingent: just the way things appear to us, rather than absolute necessities. Perhaps the
reason Lovecraft never wrote a novel is that he refused to be authoritative, a god in full control of a
world, with total access to every drive and thought of its well-rounded characters. Novelists, with
their pretenses to total access to their universes, invariably argue for the distinctiveness, not to
mention the primacy, of human agency. Instead, Lovecraft wrote fragments of a novel, bits and pieces
that never reveal the whole story but which, put together, poignantly suggest the impotence of
human aspiration. If the short list of “failures” of Lovecraft as a writer drives away the average literary critic — who, like the novelist,
will want to project some degree of panoptic vision — it’s proven fertile ground for the American “speculative realist” philosopher Graham
Harman, whose new book on Lovecraft is not only an odd and exciting addition to his own rapidly expanding bibliography but also an affront to
those critics who have mistaken Lovecraft’s virtues for faults.
Baudrillard
The status quo is inundated by a hyperreality of war and violence made possible by
the use of images to prime the public to such violence. The only way to break down
this never-ending cycle is to tell fiction so monstrous that any attempt to portray it as
an image is impossible.
Bill Bogard. Bogard is a Professor of Sociology at Whitman College. July 2003. [“Hyperfacticity and
Fatal Strategies”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, Social Science Fiction (Jul., 2003), pp. 178-179.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241167 .] NeilS.
A social science fiction is not some utopia or dystopia. It is not some future state to which we can compare the
reality of the present, or some imaginary state of affairs that might or might not materialize in the ways it is
projected. A social science fiction is the reality of the present, the fiction of real politics and technology, right now, in your
face. What is more fictional than the events of 9/11, or 24-hour news, or John Poindexter's plan for "Total Information Awareness"? What is
more unreal than cloning, or "smart bombs," or an Internet chat room? There is a certain truth in what J.G. Ballard says: we have to learn how
to make the reality of events more fictional than fiction. Real
fiction is tame by comparison to the fiction of the real.
The modern world is more than just a bad science fiction novel (although it is that, too). At least I can
stop reading the latter. The fiction of the real has none of the charm of a grade "B" thriller, none of its loose ends and incoherencies.
No, I'm with Baudrillard on this. Everything today is obscenely visible and immaculately packaged, totally
coherent, controlled in advance by models and codes and simulations that disguise the absence of
anything remotely or nakedly real anymore. The sheer bizarreness and excessiveness of twenty-firstcentury technological civilization far outstrips what even the worst science fiction writer is capable of
depicting on a bad day. Baudrillard says that what you have today is the order of the "truer-than- true." Hyperfacticity, that's the
word. Information overload, endless polls, universal testing (am I beautiful enough, am I smart enough,
am I pure and perfect enough?). To all that you must oppose the "falser-than-false," which he likens
to evil outbidding evil. Fiction, of course, has always been aligned with the false and against the true. But
when truth has been murdered and its death masked by the truer-than-true, you require something
more dangerous than fiction, something worse, as a kind of antidote to the oppressive climate of facticity
that envelops us today (It's a fact! I saw it on CNN!). Of course, it's that very obsession with not just
facts but with facticity that is so fictional about our current condition. And none of this is contradictory; it's all
perfectly and stupidly consistent. The truer-than-true is just bad fiction. So what do we do? How do we get to the more fictional than fiction,
the falser-than-false? In
the end, you have to give the world a gift to which it cannot respond except by its
own death. What can destroy the fiction of the hyperfactual truer- than-true information-soaked
bestiality of the postmodern world other than the gift of an even more monstrous and bestial fiction,
which even it cannot outdo. This, of course, was Ballard's insight, and the insight of all the great science fiction writers who, taking
matters to their extreme (Crash!), present to a world already at the extremity, at the limits of ugliness and perversity and terror, an irresistible
image of its own desire. Fatal strategy.
Death Drive / Cap
Our analysis allows us to see the different ways that life functions in relation to its
thanatropic regression and how all systems share many ways in which they function in
relation to the truth of extinction
Negarestani 11, Reza. Iranian author, philosopher, pioneer of theory-fiction, currently lecturing on
the evolution of modern systems of knowledge. "Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and
Organic Necrocacy," in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism eds. Bryant, Srnicek,
and Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.Press, 2011)
Since cosmic extinction is just as much of an irrecusable factum for philosophy as biological death—although curiously, philosophers seem to
assume that the latter is some- how more relevant than the former, as though familiarity were a criterion of philosophical relevance—every
horizonal reserve upon which embodied thought draws to fuel its quest will be necessarily finite. Why then should thought continue investing
in an account whose dwindling reserves are circumscribed by the temporary parameters of embodiment? Why keep playing for time? A
change of body is just a way of postponing thought’s inevitable encounter with the death that drives
it in the form of the will to know. And a change of horizon is just a means of occluding the
transcendental scope of extinction, precisely insofar as it levels the difference between life and death,
time and space, revoking the ontological potency attributed to temporalizing thought in its alleged
invulnerability to physical death.14¶ Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s thanatropic regression is an attempt to enact
eliminativism as an ultimate vector of enlightenment and emancipative disenchantment. Yet to cosmically enact eliminativism,
one must have a model to divest all horizons of interiority (from organisms to stars to galaxies and even matter itself)
of their ontological potencies and so-called vitalistic opportunities for carrying on the life of thought.
The model capable of guaranteeing such a great purge is Freud’s account of the death-drive. However, as Brassier knows, there are two
obstacles for the appropriation of Freud’s model: First, as we argued earlier, the allegedly inhumanist conception of capitalism and especially
Nick Land’s Freudian reformulation of Capital justifies capitalist indulgences of anthropic agencies as ethical and political vectors. Therefore, the
inhumanist conception of capitalism strategically venerates vitalism and its affirmationist policies on behalf of Freud’s theory of the deathdrive. The second obstacle is that Freud’s account of the death-drive merely includes a disintegrating transition from the organic to the
inorganic, which is to say, the thanatropic regression is peculiar to organic life in general. For this reason, Brassier
tweaks Freud’s
account of the death-drive by reinscribing and reenacting it on a cosmic level. This way the vector of
eliminativism can abandon the horizon of every interiority—whether of the organic or the inorganic (base-matter as
such)—and in doing so, ensures the cosmic unbinding of enlightenment’s project of disenchantment .
Concurrently, the cosmic reinscription of Freud’s account of the death-drive can terminate the sufficiency of
capitalist participation for accelerating the disenchanting emancipation harboured by the truth of
extinction. As even matter is deserted in order to unbind the abyssal realms of speculative thought, human participation for
accelerating capitalist singularity loses its momentum as the bilateral aspect of participation is
usurped by the unilateralizing power of the ultimate cosmic extinction. Yet the cancellation of sufficiency neither
guarantees an immaculate future for enlightenment nor provides adequate reasons as to why senseless human participations in capitalism
must be stopped. Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s model only manages
to successfully eliminate the vitalistic
horizon implicit in the antihumanist definition of capitalism proposed by Land. Yet it leaves the aporetic truth of
capitalism as an inevitable singularity for dissipation bound to the conservative order of the anthropic horizon unharmed. By leaving the
fundamental body and the primary front of the Landian definition of capitalism unharmed, Brassier’s own project of enlightenment ironically
turns into a dormant ethico-political enterprise with an utopianistic twist. Brassier’s account of eliminativist enlightenment, in this sense, basks
in the comforts of an utopianistic trust in opportunities brought about by the neurocognitive plasticity whilst peacefully cohabiting with
capitalism on the same earth.¶ In the next section, we shall see why Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s energetic model fails to disturb
the integrity of capitalism as a singularity for dissipation adopted by the economic order of the human organism in its accelerating pursuit for
intensive preservation and extensive sustenance (complexification). In this regard, we shall elaborate how singling out certain aspects of
Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression enables Land to erroneously attribute antihumanist and hence disenchantingly emancipative aspects
to capitalism. Also in the same vein, we shall argue that the persuasion of Land’s discriminating reading of Freud’s account of the death-drive
ultimately renders Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of the death-drive unobjectionable and oblivious to the aporetic truth of capitalism. The next
section will also attempt to answer the two questions posed at the end of section I.¶ In what seems to be the apotheosis of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud writes:¶ In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the his- tory of the earth
we live in and of its relation to the sun. [...] It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state
of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at
one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as
a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to
say that ‘the aim of life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’. [...] For a long time, perhaps,
living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences
altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course
of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faith- fully kept
to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life.15¶ Freud then explicitly
characterizes the nature of this thanatropic tendency as a monopolistic regime of death supported by
economical limits and conservative conditions of the organism:¶ They [self-preservative instincts] are
component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to
ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism it self. We have no longer
to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every
obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.16¶ Freud’s account of
the death-drive or theory of thanatropic regression consists of three interconnected aspects, a speculative daemon with a tri-lobed head.
Despite having their own lines of speculative thought with their respective consequences, these three aspects are intricately connected and
cannot operate without each other. For the sake of analytical precision, we shall dissect these lobes or interconnected aspects as follows:¶ 1.
The first aspect (the disenchanting / objectifying truth of extinction): The
organism (as an index of interiority) temporally extends from the
to
the inorganic (decontraction). The thanatropic regression aims toward a death whose reality can neither be
indexed as a past state (hence not susceptible to retrogressive experience) nor a future point (hence independent of the reality
inorganic state yet it is energetically driven—by all means and at all costs—to its precursor exteriority by flexing its contraction back
of the organism). The reality of the originary death is exorbitantly exterior to conditions of life to which it traumatically gives rise to.
Thanatropic regression harbours the disenchanting truth of extinction as an anterior posteriority
whose actual yet independent objectivity and unilateral demand for objectification make it
inassimilable for transcendental subjectivity. Since the actuality and independence of extinction concurrently precede and
supersede existential temporality, extinction is thus irreducible to varieties of death-spiritualism.¶ 2. The second
aspect (the praxis of dissipation): Although the thanatropic regression toward the precursor exteriority is unilateralized by the precursor
exteriority, its dynamic course and economy follows the conservative nature of the organism. The
accurately, the course of decontraction toward the originary exorbitant death is
dissipative tendency, or more
shaped by the conservative nature of the
organism. The energetic incongruity between the dysteleologic death and the organic conservative nature (i.e. the medium-course) causes
the thanatropic regression to be topologically, dynamically and economically conceived as a twist or an inflective curve. Life, in this
sense, is an inflection of death. Despite the inevitability of death, life’s dynamic and economic twist opens up convoluted horizons
for participation. The umwege of life or the inflection of death is twistedly open to praxis (hence the possibility of political intervention and
economic participation).¶ 3. The third aspect (the dictatorial tendency of affordance): Since the course and the medium of thanatropic
regression are determined by the economic order and conservative conditions of the organism, the modus operandi of the
organism’s
dissipative tendency is subjected to the quantitative and qualitative reductions dictated by the
economical affordability of the organism. To put it differently, conservative conditions of the organism impose an economical
restriction on the dissipative tendency of the organism so that the organism only dies in those ways which are immanent to, or more precisely,
affordable for it. The organism can only follow its own affordable and thus economically conservative path to death in order to decontract.
Accelerating the dissipative tendency through political and economic praxis, therefore, does not lead to divergence from the
conservative economy, but to the intensive re-enactment of such economy’s dictatorial foundations in regard
to death.¶ According to what we elaborated earlier in section II, Land’s libidinal materialist conception of capitalism as an inhumanist praxis
which is open to the liquidating process of emancipation accentuates the second aspect of Freud’s model. Yet at the same time, it also
relatively adopts the first aspect of Freud’s account of the death-drive within the terrestrial or rather a non-ubiquitous scope. Consequently, in
Land’s account of capitalism the politico-economic praxis (conceived by the detours and anomalies of life) meets and coincides with the cosmic
vector of emancipation. Yet, through the cosmic reinscrip-tion of the first aspect, Brassier elegantly shows that the
emancipative truth
of extinction ultimately annuls the vitalistic proclivities in the second aspect and widens the scope of
emancipation from the terrestrial to the cosmic. And it is this cosmic unbinding that inflicts a decisive blow
against the sufficiency of human interests and desires surreptitiously integrated within capitalism as
propulsive elements. Brassier cosmically reinscribes the first aspect of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression in
order to extend the eliminativist / disenchanting vector of enlightenment all the way to the cosmic exteriority as the
unilateralizing truth for the mobilization of speculative thought. However, Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s account of the death-drive
also results in the cosmic unbinding of the second aspect (viz. the theory of umwege) which is inseparable from the first. Yet in this case the
increasing convolutions of the dissipative tendency do not suggest new opportunities for pro- longing the life of thought. Instead these
mazy convolutions bespeak of a twisted chain of traumatically nested horizons of interiorities which
must be deserted or betrayed, one in favour of another. Here umwege presents a graph for the external objectification
of thought, a turning inside-out of thought whereby the commitment to thought is supplanted by the
treachery of the object on behalf of extinction. This is why Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of the first aspect ingeniously
conjures a shadow of a non-vitalist ethics or a desertifying politics of eliminativism which aims at
objectifying every horizon of interiority (including thought and embodiment) so as to expose them to the
desertifying vector of eliminativism. However, both Land and Brassier seem to remain oblivious to the implications of the third
aspect (viz. the dictatorial tendency of affordance) and exclude it from their calculations in regard to capitalism and enlightenment.
Our analysis gives light to the inner workings of the capitalist system and how it
interacts with the inevitability of dissipation
Negarestani 11, Reza. Iranian author, philosopher, pioneer of theory-fiction, currently lecturing on
the evolution of modern systems of knowledge. "Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and
Organic Necrocacy," in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism eds. Bryant, Srnicek,
and Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.Press, 2011)
Life of the organism is determined by the way it must return to the inorganic state. Human life,
correspondingly, is determined by the human’s path to its precursor exteriority. The thanatropic regression which registers itself as a dissipative
tendency for matter and energy is conducted through this path. Such
a path for human is drawn by the conservative conditions
of the human organism. We call this conservative regime of the open system or the organism which forces the
dissipation or the thanatropic regression to be in conformity to the dynamic capacity of the organism or the organism’s
affordable economy of dissipation, necrocracy. In short, necrocracy suggests the strictures of the
conservative economy not in regard to life but in regard to ways the organism dies; and it is the way of
returning to the originary death that prescribes the course of life for the organism. Accordingly, necrocracy does not
imply that every life brings with it the de facto reign of death from the beginning or that living is submitting to the rule of death. Instead
necrocracy suggests that the
organism must die or bind the precursor exteriority only in ways that its
conservative conditions or economic order can afford. The principle of affordability in regard to the fashion of the
thanatropic regression strictly conforms to the economic order of the organism, but it is primarily conditioned by the exorbitance and the
inevitability of death postulated by the anteri- or posteriority of extinction. Hence, necrocracy
is decided by conservative
conditions of the living agency which cannot repel the inevitability of death, nor can it unconditionally
return to the inorganic state.¶ As we shall later elaborate, the unconditionality of death or extinction must not be confused with the
conditionality of returning to the originary death. The latter is imposed by the formation of the organism where capacities and conditions for
conservation are inextricable from terms of decontraction posited by the unconditional death. For the living agency, the
path to death
is dictated by its dynamic capacity for conservation which can only afford to die or dissipate according to
conditions posed by the intensive and extensive factors of affordability. Affordability, in this sense, is the correlation between
the economy of sustenance and the excess of the outside which manifests in the economical
correlation between the complicative introgression and the explicative progression of the organism or
open system. For this reason, the emerging complexity of the living agency which corresponds with its ability to temporally postpone
death and convert the acquired time to capitalizable ‘interest’ for the living organism bespeaks of nothing but the affordable way to die or
dissipate. In its tendency for complexification, axiomatic assimilation of all resources and insistence upon an internal autonomy despite its
accelerative movement toward meltdown, capitalism
corresponds to the principles of an affordable path toward
dissolution prescribed and conditioned by the conservative capacity of the anthropic system in regard to the
inevitability of death.¶ Once the necrocratic regime of the organism—implicated in the third aspect of Freud’s
account of the death-drive—is exposed, capitalism is revealed as the last conservative front which the human
organism is not willing to surrender. The implications of the necrocratic regime of the organism disarm
Land’s conception of emancipative ‘capitalism as a whirlwind of dissolution’ by emptying it from its seemingly inhumanist
bravado. At the same time, such implications tarnish the disenchanting vector of speculative thought harboured by the truth of extinction
which lies at the center of Brassier’s project. Although human, its faculties and privileges are objectified and
subsequently extinguished by the truth of extinction, for the human the implications of such truth can only register in
conformity with the strictly conservative aspects of the human organism. Even though the human and its wherewithal are unilaterally
objectified by the truth of extinction on a cosmic level, the
course of their objectification qua dissolution stringently
corresponds to the intrinsic conservative formation and interiorizing terms of the anthropic sphere.
The speculative vectors mobilized by the cosmic truth of extinction, therefore, are forcefully trammeled by the
necrocratic regime in which the human can only bind and inflect upon ‘exorbitant death’ (Brassier) qua
extinction in terms conforming to its economical order and affordability.17 This is to say that even though the
cosmic truth of extinction points to a disenchanting moment, its locus of registration abides by the
conservative economy and the restrictive affordability of the human organism. Since the truth of extinction is exorbitant
to the organism, its wealth is always energetically subjected to the affordability of the organism.18 The ‘speculative opportunities’ (Brassier) of
the truth of extinction, to this extent, obliquely affirm and reinforce the conservative and interiorizing truth of the human affordability.19 The
implications of the necrocratic regime of the organism, as we shall see, outline the limits of both an
emancipative conception of capitalism and the speculative opportunities generated by the truth of
extinction.¶ The necrocratic regime of the organism has two economic ramifications: (a) the conservative nature of the
organism asserts that the organism should only follow its own path to death and all other ways of
inflecting upon the precursor exteriority which are not immanent to, or more accurately, not affordable for the organism must be
averted; (b) any change or reformation aimed at the organism’s course of life or its respective problems
is ultimately in accordance with the organism’s circumscribed path to death which is affordable by and exigently
in conformity to the economical order of the organism. The path to death demarcates the modal range by which the organism must die
because these are the ways or modes of dissipation which are intensively and extensively affordable by the economy of the organism. Thus the
second necrocratic law can also be put differently: Variations
in ways of living and pursuing one way over another
for the better or worse of the organism remain within the confines of the organism’s inherent
economical and conservative nature which is demarcated by its restricted economy or exclusivist
policy toward death. The capitalist production of lifestyles, in this sense, is nothing more than the
consequence of capitalism’s submission to the necrocratic regime whereby the organism must only
perish or bind negativity in ways afford- able for its conservative economy. The so-called openness of capitalism
toward modes of life and its obsession with life-oriented models of emancipation attests to its progressive
refusal in questioning the necrocratic regime. It suggests the intrinsic inability of capitalism in posing
alternative ways of inflecting upon death and binding exteriority other than those afforded by the
conservative horizon. Any model of emancipation aimed at the life of the organism is confined to the monopolistic horizon of
necrocracy which is in complete accordance with the economic order of the organism. Life-oriented models of emancipation
merely mark the various possibilities of the organism’s life as the modi vivendi dictated by the necrocratic regime of the
organism. In doing so, such models dissimulate their fundamentally restricted framework and mask their
obedient nature toward the oppressive regime of necrocracy which restricts modes (modi operan- di) of
inflecting upon death or binding exteriority.¶ Counter-intuitively, associating inhumanism with Capital’s singularity toward dissolution is faulty if not humanly myopic. This is because the accelerative vector of Capital for dissolution strictly remains
in the confines of the necrocratic regime of the organism wherein the restrictive policy in regard to modes of dissolution
fundamentally abides by the conservative economy and interiorizing conditions of the (human) organism. In other words, capitalism’s
dissipative tendency is deeply in thrall to the constitutional limit of the anthropic sphere in that the
anthropic horizon is not fundamentally distinguished by its model(s) of life but its simultaneously
restricted and restrictive attitude toward the exteriorizing death. Capitalism is, in fact, the very affordable
and conservative path to death dictated by the human organism on an all- encompassing level. Capitalism does not repel
the excess of the exorbitant truth of extinction as much as it economically affirms (i.e. mandates the affordability of)
such an excess. The economical binding or affording of the excess of the truth of extinction is certainly an
unsuccessful binding, but an essential ‘unsuccessful binding’ necessitated for underpinning the aporetic truth of
capitalism without abolishing it. In fact, affording never implies a successful binding of an exorbitant truth; it is insistently an
unsuccessful, or more precisely, economical binding tethered to the capacity of the conservative order. Under the economic aegis of an
unsuccessfully bound truth of extinction, capitalism
is able to utilize the inevitability and ubiquity of extinction to
its singularity and vindicate its assertive omnipresence. By presenting singularity and ubiquity as its
undisputable verities, capitalism can craftily dissimulate its anthropic economic order as an all-inclusive and
prevalent terrestrial way of binding exteriority which happens to be ‘a little inhuman’ (Land). Yet, in reality,
it is the economic decision of the human organism in regard to the originary death which capitalism universalizes
respectively feign
through politico-economic opportunities brought about by the ‘unsuccessful binding’ of the truth of extinction.¶ According to Freud, the
organism shall only follow its own path to death. This thanatropic path consists of those modes of dissipation which are fundamentally
affordable by the conservative nature of the organism. Alternative ways
of returning to the originary state of
dissolution are in contradiction with the conservative nature of the organism’s own way of
thanatropic regression and are excluded by the necrocratic regime. Therefore, if the ultimate
conception of capitalism is an accelerative and inevitable singularity of dissolution which assimilates
every planetary resource, then it cannot be a radically alternative way of dissolution to those already
affordable by the (human) organism. Because if capitalism was indeed a vector of dissolution external to the
conservative ambit of human, it would have already been excluded and ferociously warded off by the economic
order of the human organism. This is because, as we stated, it is not alternative modes of living which are staved off by the organism
but alternative ways of inflecting upon the originary death and binding exteriority. For this reason, capitalism is nothing but the
very mode of dissipation and dissolution which is exclusive to the anthropic horizon because it is in
complete conformity with the capacity of human’s interiorized formation in its various economic configurations.
Since capitalism is the fundamentally affordable way of dissipation for the economic order of the anthropic horizon, it is
inherently hostile toward other modes of ‘binding exteriority’ which cannot be afforded by the anthropic horizon. In
other words, the truth of capitalism’s global dominance lies in its monopolistic necrocracy: A feral
vigilance against all alternative ways of binding exteriority or returning to the originary death other than
those which are immanent to and affordable for the anthropic horizon. Only a vigilance beyond hate and enmity but
blinded by the economic order of the organism and its pressing demands can describe capitalism’s
actively militant and intelligent alertness against all other modes of dissolution and negativity. This vigilance
manifests in capitalism’s restless assimilation of every form of negativity so as to reintegrate it as
another mode or style of life. In doing so, capitalism can prevent the mobilization of that negativity as
an alternative way for binding exteriority and therefore, maintains its dominantly prevalent position in
regard to the human.
Capitalism’s hold on paths to dissolution obstructs other forms of dissipating that
don’t conform to the economic requirements – the revealing of these limits allows for
new potential in the field of non-dialectic negativity
Negarestani 11, Reza. Iranian author, philosopher, pioneer of theory-fiction, currently lecturing on
the evolution of modern systems of knowledge. "Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and
Organic Necrocacy," in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism eds. Bryant, Srnicek,
and Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.Press, 2011)
Conditioned by the conservative formation of the organism, the economic order of the organism determines the way by
which the organism must return to the originary ‘state of dissolution’. The criterion for such determination (dying in one
way rather than another) is the affordability of the organism. Openness, correspondingly, is a dynamic economical
correlation between the organism’s intensive and extensive economic factors. The openness of the
organism to the outside is conducted through an affordable path which consists of a range of activities
corresponding to the economic conditions of the organism. This does not mean that the organism’s economic
order is oblivious to the inevitability of death or dissolution but on the contrary, it factors in the certainty of death in each and
every calculation. In grasping the organic as an inflection-sequence of the inorganic, the terms of decontraction which
have been unconditionally posited by the inorganic are inseparable from the conditions inherent to
the contracted organic agency. Only by including the inevitability of dissolution, can the capacity simultaneously preserve the
organism’s conservative economy and engage in extensive / explicative activities which involve risks and hazardous expenditures. Thus more
than postponing the time of death and escaping the truth of extinction, the conservative formation of the
organism strives to make
the unconditional death affordable and express the truth of extinction in its own economical terms.
Affordability ensures that the unilaterality implied by the inevitability of extinction be economically and hence, unsuccessfully bilateralized.
The aim of affordability is to make the discrepancy between the inherent desire for self-preservation
and the inevitability of death consistent with the economic order of the organism. The vigilant stance against
alternative paths to death infers the economic bilateralization of death’s unilateral terms, because here bilaterlization attests to the binding of
the truth of extinction in no other terms than those of the organism and its economic order. The
disenchanting influences of
extinction on thought, consequently, are dampened by the economic bilateralization of death. For the anthropic
horizon, such bilateral qua affordable terms conform to the truth of schizophrenically unbound capitalism as
the dominantly affordable mode of dissipation or thanatropic regression. If ‘the truth of extinction’ is
unsuccessfully bound as a vector of dissipation whose terms are affordable for the organism and if for
the anthropic horizon capitalism stands as the dominant set of such terms, then the economical binding of
the truth of extinction inaugurates the truth of capitalism.¶ In the end, what capitalism’s vigilance against
non-dialectical forms of negativity suggests is that the exorbitant truth of extinction has been bound by
the conservative terms of the anthropic horizon which are reflected in the dissipative tendency of
Capital. Moreover, this axiomatic vigilance indicates that capitalism is not willing to share the truth of
extinction outside of its own economically paved dissipative path. In this case, speculative opportunities
brought about by the exorbitant truth of extinction contribute to the militant potency of capitalism in staving off
alternative ways of binding exteriority and obstructing the remobilization of non-dialectical negativity
in ways which do not conform to the economic order of the conservative horizon.¶ The reason for the vigilance
against alternative paths of dissipation can be put in simple terms: The organism insists on binding death only in its own
terms. These terms are the conditions inherent to the organism’s capacity to conserve and respectively, its affordability to mobilize such
conservation in any direction. Correspondingly, these terms are the economical premises which mark the
boundaries of the organism and determine its conception. What primarily forces the organism to fashion its own path to
death is the impossibility of bargaining the compulsory terms of an exorbitant death. In other words, it is the
unilaterality of extinction—the traumatically ex- orbitant immensity of the truth of extinction—which inspires and contributes to
the organism’s exclusivist regime of dissipation. For the anthropic horizon, capitalism corresponds to such a
necrocratic regime whereby inflecting upon the originary death and binding exteriority are conducted
in terms which strictly conform to the conservative formation of the interiorized horizon. Consequently, it is
the exorbitant immensity of the truth of extinction that inspires the emergence and acceleration of
capitalism as the economically affordable tendency for dissipation and liquidation. When it comes to an
exorbitant truth, whether it is of the sun or cosmic extinction, the speculative choices are limited to how the exorbitant
wealth (speculative opportunities?) is to be squandered. This dictum lies at the heart of capitalism as the
speculative con- sequence of an exorbitant truth for which the traumatic compulsion for squandering
must intertwine and unite with the inherently conservative economy of affording more. Capitalism’s
incessant production of modi vivendi (courses of life) is the result of capturing the compulsory and
exorbitant terms of extinction in bilateral and affordable terms. This is because the possibility of living is guaranteed
by these bilateral terms according to which death can be exigently approached in terms of the organic capac- ity and its interiorizing
affordability. Accordingly, contra Land’s dismissal of the third aspect of Freud’s energetic model as a ‘security hallucination’, the
organic
necrocracy does not make death subordinate to the organism, it is on the contrary the result of full
subordination to death.21¶ The exclusivist stance of the organism in regard to its path to death is the very expression
of the insurmountable truth of death within the organic horizon as a dissipative tendency which is
supposed to mobilize the conservative conditions of the organism toward death. Unconditional submission to
death—or a death whose path is not paved by the economic terms of the organism—bespeaks of the impossibility of the
temporality of the organic life from the outset. A death that does not allow the organism to die in its
own terms is a death that usurps all conditions required for the organic differentiation and temporary
survival. Yet the contingent and undeniably scarce instances of organic life and transient survival imply that the thanatropic
regression is merely unconditional in regard to the inevitable unilateralizing power of death, but in
terms of its ‘course of conduction’ it is conditional. The inevitability of death does not point to its absolute unconditionality
but rather to the compulsive attempt of the organism to bind its precursor exteriority by mustering all its own intensive and extensive
economic conditions toward dissolution. The detours of life are drawn not because death should be unconditionally embraced but because the
organism is itself the inflection of death, a slope-curve between the inevitability of death and conservative conditions of the organism. It is
this very conception of organism as a differential ratio between the insurmountable truth of death
and conservative organic conditions for binding such a truth that brings about the possibility of
acceleration or hastening toward dissolution. Yet, as we argued, such hastening is not a radical embracing of the exorbitant
truth of extinction, but rather an affordable and hence, a purely economical (unsuccessful) way of binding the excess of such a truth. It is the
unbindable excess of the truth of extinction—as that which cannot be circumvented—that necessitates such an affordable way of binding
within the economic order of the organism. And it is this affordable binding that can indeed be conceived in terms of acceleration.22¶ A
simultaneously inhumanist and emancipative conception of capitalism as a runway for imaginative
(speculative?) praxis is a hastily crafted chimera. This is not because capitalism is not really a partially repressed desire for
meltdown but because the image of capitalism as a planetary singularity for dissipation testifies to its rigid
conformity to the anthropic horizon which only follows an affordable path to death. In doing so,
capitalism as a twisted dissipative tendency rigidly wards off all other ways of dissolution and binding
exteriority which are not immanent to or affordable for the anthropic horizon. This is because the conservative
obligation of the dominant dissipative tendency (viz. the organic path to dissolution) is to thwart any disturbance
which might be directed at the bilateral or conservative approach of the organism to death. At the same
time, the insistence on speculative opportunities begotten by the disenchanting truth of extinction qua ‘anterior posteriority’ is a bit more than
a philosophical overconfidence in the enlightening consummation of nihilism and an underestimation of anthropomorphic trickeries. For as we
argued, in the ambit of the organism the exor- bitant truth of extinction registers as a conservative path to extinction, which is to say, it is
bound as a mediocrely affordable truth. On the other hand, we argued that the
exorbitant truth of extinction inspires and
contributes to the dominantly necrocratic dissipative tendency of the organism which in the case of
the anthropic horizon forms the truth of capitalism. For this reason, the truth of extinction is not sufficient
to guarantee either the imaginative praxis of capitalism or speculative opportunities harboured by the
nihilistic sublimation of the Enlightenment. The ostensibly inhumanist creativities of capitalism and the speculative
implications of a cosmological eliminativism respectively become parts of an antihumanist convention or a nihilist lore which ultimately and
ironically lack a cunning vision of doom. The
blunt confidence of both in the truth of extinction as either that which
mysteriously sorts everything out or the gate-opener of speculative vistas sterilized of human mess, voluntary or not, contributes to
the
truth of capitalism without bothering to disturb its comfort zones.¶ It is the registering of the exorbitant truth of
extinction as an affordable dissipative tendency that enables the organism to actively but economically (viz. unsuccessfully) bind extinction. And
it is the
economical binding of extinction as a guarantor for active dissipation that forces the organism to take an
exclusivist policy toward other possible ways of binding the originary death or loosening into
exteriority qua non-conceptual negativity. Whereas the former impediment in regard to the truth of extinction complicates
ventures of speculative thought, the latter obstacle imposed by the exclusive policy toward alternative ways of binding
exteriority sets a major limit against the possibility of having a politico-economical counterpart for
speculative thought. Yet as we stated in the beginning, once these limits come to light, philosophical thought
and political praxis can either attempt to breach them or move in another direction where such
impasses have less paralyzing influence. At this point, we shall briefly touch on some of the purely conjectural alternatives
brought about by the unveiling of the afore- mentioned limits.¶ If we identify the life of the anthropic horizon—of both
human material hardware and thought—as a set of dynamic yet affordable and exclusivist ways for the anthropic
horizon to bind the precursor exteriority, then we can tentatively define the Inhuman by the
possibility of alternative ways of binding exteriority qua concept-less negativity. The Inhuman,
respectively, is outlined by those ways of binding exteriority or com- plicity with non-conceptual
negativity which are not immanent to the anthropic hori- zon and betray the economical order of the
anthropic horizon in regard to exteriority. Such alternatives do not simply suggest dying in ways other
than those prescribed by the organism, but rather the mobilization of forms of non-dialectical negativity which can
neither be excluded by the dominant dissipative tendency of the anthropic hori- zon nor can be fully sublated by its order.
For this reason, these remobilized forms of non-dialectical negativity should not be completely unaffordable or external to the economical
order, for such absolute resistance to conservative conditions or exteriority to the affordability of the horizon is indexed as an exorbitant
negativity. As we showed earlier, this is precisely the un-affordability of the exorbitant negativity qua death—as that which is foreclosed to
negotiation—that inspires the conservatively necrocratic approach of the organism toward exteriority. And it is the
insistence on
affording (viz. economically affirming) such an exorbitant and externalized negativity that turns into a
compulsion for the organism to exclude other possible ways of binding exteriority. Such exclusion is
conducted through the compulsive elimination of all traces of non-dialectical negativity other than
those affordable by the economic order of the horizon. Consequently, it is the compulsive elimination of
alternative traces of non-dialectical qua unilateralizing negativity that forestalls the unfolding of
speculative thought and its praxis. However, just as these mobilized forms of non-dialectical negativity should not be posited as
indexes of exorbitant externality, they should not succumb to a consistently positive status for affirming and re-enacting the conservative
horizon either.¶ In
order to charge and remobilize traces of non-dialectical negativity as alternative ways of binding
negativity should neither affirm the conservative horizon nor posit itself as exorbitantly
external to it. Such a remobilization of non-dialectical negativity, to this extent, brings to mind the treacherous pragmatics of the Insider—
exteriority, the
an interiorized yet inassimilable (unilateralized) negativity which uses the economical affordability of the conservative horizon as an alternative
medium for the eruption of exteriority.23 The
remobilization of non-dialectical negativity as the so- called Insider, for this reason,
requires an equivocal conception of the void as its principle of negativity. This is because an equivocal conception
of the void does not cele- brate its exteriority as an exorbitant externality which enforces negativity in the form of a conservative dissipative
tendency to the outside (extensive subtraction). The
equivocal conception of the void not only brings about the
possibility of negativity but also makes such negativity infectious, for equivocality here means that
the void as the principle of negativity is intensively and problematically open to interiorizing terms
and conditions of the conservative horizon without ceasing to be exterior or losing its inassimilable
negativity. Since the equivocal conception of the void can be interiorized but cannot be assimilated, it interiorizes nondialectical negativity’s ‘power of incision’ (Brassier) as the creativity of perforation which effectuates the
inassimilability qua unilaterality of negativity as a nested exteriority that loosens itself within the
interiorized horizon.24 Only the acceleration of a world-capitalism perforated by such insider con- ceptions of non-dialectical negativity
is tantamount to the metastatic propagation of an exteriorizing terror which is too close to the jugular vein of capital to be either left alone or
treated.¶ In short, the
equivocal conception of the void as the principle of negativity mobilizes a logic of
negativity that does not require operating on an exorbitantly external level or turning into a positive
salvation. Whilst the exorbitant conception of negativity as an external index of resistance feeds capitalism’s
conservative impetus for widening its limits (affording more), the positive stance of affirmation is an artless re-enactment of
the conservative horizon. Therefore, the programmatic objective of an inhuman praxis is to remobilize nondialectical negativity beyond such Capital-nurturing conceptions of negativity. Without such a
programmatic sponsor, alternative ethics of openness or politics of exteriorization, the speculative vectors
of thought are not only vulnerable to the manipulations of capitalism but also are seriously impeded.¶
One can reformulate the limits discussed in this essay in terms of the limits implicit in the terrestrial
image of thought. If according to Freud, the development of the organism is molded by the extensive correlation between the earth and
the sun, then what are the implications of this relation for the terrestrial thought? For it seems that the earth’s conservativedissipative correlation with the sun has entrenched its traces in thought as a dominant model for the
economy, topology and dynamism of life. This is not just because a major part of formations on the planet (including all human
endeavours) are directly contingent upon the sun, but also because the sun’s exorbitant exteriority ingrains a
conservative image of exteriority in thought. Such exorbitant exteriority can only be bound as an
affordable dissipative tendency which rigidly limits the image of exteriority and in doing so, restricts
all other possible ways for binding exteriority. The energetic sun-earth axis has become a burdening chain for the terrestrial
image of thought insofar as it constitutes the exclusivist model of death and dissipation which restricts the
scope of thought in regard to its own death. The question, to this extent, is how to break the hegemonic
model of the sun in regard to death and exteriority without submitting to another star, another horizon or
even investing in the truth of extinction whose exorbitance leads to restrictions reminiscent of those
imposed by solar excess. Does the speculative unbinding of terrestrial thought from the sun as an
exclusivist mode of dissipation which must be afforded by all means require a different conception of
terrestriality that binds exteriority in different modes other than those prescribed by the solar
economy? Or does such a task require a vector of thought capable of circumventing the earth so as to evade
the limits posed by the solar economy, the order of economical affordability and the restrictive image of exteriority immanent
to it? But then what is the relation of such thought that has dispossessed itself of its immediate resources with ‘extralimital idealism’?
Interrogations of capitalism and death are failing and inadvertently reinforcing the
strength of capitalism. Capitalism incorporates different knowledges, which prevents
many forms of analysis from succeeding in understanding its functionings and relation
to death. The death-drive shapes the way everything interacts with its environment
and inevitable end.
Negarestani 11, Reza. Iranian author, philosopher, pioneer of theory-fiction, currently lecturing on
the evolution of modern systems of knowledge. "Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and
Organic Necrocacy," in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism eds. Bryant, Srnicek,
and Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.Press, 2011)
With the burgeoning popularity of speculative thought, it is becoming more evident that what is labelled as ‘speculative’ is more an
epiphenomenon of the inquisitive renegotiation of human faculties, their limits and vulnerabilities
rather, than a counterintuitive foray into the abyssal vistas unlocked by contemporary science. Accordingly, in the more extreme
forms of speculative thought, political intervention and political analysis have been curtailed or at
least have been temporarily suspended. This is because the horizon of agency (of emancipation or intervention),
ontological privileges and conditions of experience are precisely those ingredients of political thought
which are under the process of critical interrogation. Yet strangely, it seems that speculative thought has not given up
remarking on capitalism—this hypothetical mathesis universalis of politico-economic problems—even in some of its most apolitical moments.2
For the purpose of understanding some of the disjunctive impasses between speculative thought and politics as well as possibilities for
mobilizing a politics capable of using the resources of speculative thought, this essay will concentrate its energy on the most recurring politicoeconomic figure of speculative thought: Capitalism. To do so, we shall, in proceeding steps, dissect the
uncanny affinities
between contemporary capitalism’s insinuations of an inhuman politics and speculative thought’s
assault on the human’s ‘empirically overdetermined set of cognitive faculties impose[d] upon the
speculative imagination’.3 We shall subsequently investigate the lines of correspondence between the inhumanist
conception of capitalism and speculative thought’s more extreme attempts for precluding all
anthropomorphic predications so as to understand the limits of a politics nurtured by the outcomes of
speculative thought. It is only by reorienting the vectors of speculative thought in relation to these
limits that various possibilities or obstacles of a politics capable of mirroring and mobilizing the
vectors of speculative thought come to light.¶ Whereas numerous texts have been written on Freud’s energetic model of the
nervous system presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, few of them have continued developing Freud’s energetic analysis in the same
speculative spirit. Yet even among the handful of these works, nearly all the emphasis has been put on the most explicitly expressed lines of
Beyond the Pleasure Principle in regard to the inevitability of regression toward in- organic exteriority qua death. What can be called
thanatropic regression or the compulsion of the organic to return to the inorganic state of dissolution has been frequently accentuated at the
cost of sacrificing the more speculative fronts of Freud’s energetic model in regard to trauma and the economic order of the organism.
Following Deleuze and Guattari’s lead regarding the intimate relationship between Freud’s account of the death-drive and capitalism, Freud’s
theory of thanatropic
regression has become a recurrent speculative tool in building a double-faced and
hence elusive image of capitalism which despite its adherence to the conservative interests of humans
registers itself as a planetary singularity which is at once inevitable and disenchantingly
emancipating.¶ Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his ‘discovery’ of the death instinct and World War I, which remains the
model of capitalist war. More generally, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of psychoanalysis and
capitalism; their engagement had been full of hesitation. What we have tried to show apropos of capitalism is how
it inherited much from a transcendent death-carrying agency, the despotic signifier, but also how it
brought about this agency’s effusion in the full immanence of its own system: the full body, having become that
of capital-money, suppresses the distinction between production and antiproduction: everywhere it mixes antiproduction with
the productive forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits (the axiomatic). The
death enterprise is one of the principal and specific forms of the absorption of surplus value in
capitalism. It is this itinerary that psychoanalysis rediscovers and retraces with the death instinct [...]4¶
According to this double-faced image of capitalism predicated upon the politico-economical insinuations of the death-drive, in gaining its own
angular momentum capitalism brings forth an emancipation in terms other than those of the human. In this case, whilst capitalism
open to human interests, it also moves toward a planetary emancipation wherein the capitalist
is
singularity departs from human purposiveness and privileges. This image of capitalism as something that can
simultaneously be in the service of human interests and be an inhuman model of emancipation has become a common romantic trope among
philosophers who advocate capitalism as that which is capable of wedding the concrete economy of human life to a cosmos where neither
being nor thinking enjoy any privilege.¶ As Nick Land has elaborated in The Thirst for Annihilation as well as his essays, what brings about the
possibility of this weird marriage between human praxis and inhuman emancipation is the tortuous economy of dissipation inherent to
capitalism as its partially repressed desire for meltdown.5 Although
the economy of dissipation can be captured by
humans through a libidinal materialist participation with the techno-capitalist singularity, it ultimately
escapes the gravity of humans and entails their dissolution into the inorganic exteriority. Capitalism in
this sense is not an attainable state but rather a dissipative (anti-essence) tendency or process which moves
along the detours of organizational complexity, increasing commodification and convoluted syntheses
of techné and physis so as to ultimately deliver human’s conservative horizon into an unbound state
of dissolution. Immunological impulses of capitalism against its implicit desire for meltdown are
doomed to fail as capitalism fully gains it angular momentum by reaping planetary resources and
conceiving its irreparably schizophrenic image.¶ Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political
cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking
a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the
future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.6¶ It is this singularized
deliverance of the human to the state of dissolution—concomitant with its pulverizing impact on the correlation between
thought and the self-love of man (viz. organic survivalism)—that assigns capitalism an inhuman emancipative role. This
model of emancipation is comparable with H.P. Lovecraft’s fantastic concept ‘holocaust of freedom’ which
celebrates the consummation of human doom with human emancipation. Thus through a politico-economic
reappropriation of Freud’s theory of the death-drive, Nick Land identifies capital as a planetary singularity toward utter
dissipation whose dynamism becomes more complicated as it circuitously verges upon zero. ¶ Once the
commodity system is established there is no longer a need for an autonomous cultural impetus into the order of the abstract object. Capital
attains its own ‘angular momentum’, perpetuating a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose hub is
the virtual zero of impersonal metropolitan accumulation. At the peak of its productive prowess the human animal is
hurled into a new nakedness, as everything stable is progressively liquidated in the storm .7 ¶ Now compare Land’s
trenchant veneration of Freud’s account of the death-drive as a creativity that pushes life into its extravagances with the inhumanist model of
capitalism wherein the affirmation of and demand for more is but ‘a river’s search for the sea’.¶ The
death drive is not a desire for
death, but rather a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities. In its primary dynamics it is utterly alien to
everything human, not least the three great pettinesses of representation, egoism, and hatred. The death drive is Freud’s beautiful account of
how creativity
occurs without the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blindest
and simplest of tendencies, how desire is no more problematic than a river’s search for the sea.8¶ Land
here presents a model or definition of capitalism which despite its collusive entanglements with human’s desires and interests is a
detoured and hence complex singularity toward the inorganic exteriority which ultimately enforces an allinclusive liberation from the conservative nature of the organism and its confines for thought. Yet the
question we must ask is whether the capitalist dissipative singularity is really emancipative or not? And even more
crucially, does the capitalist model of accelerating planetary dissipation really effectuate an inhumanist
model of emancipation that breaks away from the conservative ambits of the human? The ambition of this
essay is, accordingly, to renegotiate the definition of the capitalist singularity through a closer and more extreme engagement with Freud’s
speculative thesis on thanatropic regression. Accordingly, we
shall investigate if this emancipative conception of
capitalism genuinely presents a radical model of the Inhuman or not.¶ The collusion between science and capitalism
imparts an alarmingly critical significance to such inspections into the relation between capitalism and its image as an inevitable singularity that
coheres with the compulsive regression of the organism to- ward the inorganic exteriority. The
collusion of capitalism with
science enables capitalism to incorporate contemporary science’s continuous disenchantment of
cosmos as the locus of absolute objectivity and inevitable extinction. In doing so, capitalism can establish a
concurrently inevitable and emancipative image of itself: Capitalism is inevitable because it terrestrially coincides with and converges upon the
cosmic ‘truth of extinction’ (Brassier); it is emancipative because it harbours the debacle of human and binds the enlightening disenchantment
implicit in dissolution as an objectifying truth.9 In other words, the
complicity of science and capitalism provides
capitalism with a speculative weapon capable of imposing capitalism as the universal horizon of
politic-economic problems as well as the ultimate mode of departure from the restricting ambit of the
terrestrial sphere. Whilst the former grants capitalism a vector of participation, the latter constitutes capitalism’s crafty model of
emancipation.¶ In a sense, probably nothing has been more profitable for capitalism than its clandestine alliance
with science through whose support capitalism has become increasingly elusive, more difficult to
resist, harder to escape and more seductive for those who await the imminent homecoming of
scientific enlightenment or the advent of technological singularities. Antihumanism, in this regard, has
ironically become the formidable assassin of capitalism in that it connects capitalism with an inhumanist
model of emancipation or grants capitalism mythical powers against various manifests of humanist
hubris. Therefore, this essay can also be read as a speculative reprisal against the supposedly antihumanist aspects of capitalism which
contribute to its image as an irresistible singularity. This essay, consequently, shall attempt to wrest a radical conception of inhumanism from
the Capital-nurturing hands of antihumanism in its various forms. In
the wake of the complicity between science and
capitalism, it is becoming more evident that the inhumanist resistance against capitalism should not dabble
in preaching against humanism and its philosophical minions. Instead, it should dispose of the kind of
antihumanist thought that romantically—whether willingly or not—contributes to the cult of Capital and occludes
both thinking and praxis. One can recapitulate the above suspicions in regard to an antihumanist definition of capitalism in two
questions:¶ 1. To what extent does the Freudian appropriation of Capital—tipped by Deleuze and Guattari and fully fashioned by Nick Land
through the politico-economic unbinding of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression—as an antihumanist yet emancipative conception shatter
the illusive sovereignty of the human and ally itself with the inhumanism that it claims to be the harbinger of?¶ 2. Does the cosmological
reinscription of Freud’s account of the death-drive that extends the thanatropic regression from the organism to all other forms of embodiment
(from organic life to the plant to stellar formations down to matter itself) repudiate the image of capitalism as an inexorable yet emancipative
twister toward utter liquidation? Can the reinscription of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression on a cosmic level redeem antihumanism and
rescue it from the clutches of capitalism? For it seems that in his recent work Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier, following Land’s novel approach to
Freud in The Thirst for Annihilation, has resorted to the latter solution in order to wipe the stains of capitalism from the face of a cosmically
eliminativist model of enlightenment (i.e. scientific nihilism as the daredevil of speculative thought)?¶ The
identification of
capitalism as a singularity at once participatory (hence open to praxis) and emancipative should not be
oversimplified as an impotently phantasmic conception which passively awaits its actualization. It is rather a potent support and
guarantor for the creative praxis of capitalism on all levels. It is the seamless integration of singularized inevitability and emancipative ubiquity
that calls for a spontaneous praxis. And it
is the emphasis on praxis that speeds the awakening of Capital’s
sweeping whirlwind. Therefore, such an identification of capitalism has become a programmatic form
of apologetics for capitalism’s ubiquity which in turn justifies the axiomatic assimilation of all
planetary systems, forms of life and vectors of thought by the mimetic flow of Capital. The ubiquity of capitalism, to this
extent, is affirmed precisely by its identification as a liquidating storm which is in the process of dethroning
the human from its terrestrial ivory tower. And it is this undulating deluge toward dissipation of matter and energy that
either deceitfully mimics or genuinely coincides with the cosmic extinction or the asymptotic
disintegration of the universe on an elementary material level, that is to say, the ubiquitous and all-inclusive cosmic
truth of extinction, the truth of extinction as such. For this reason, the supposedly inhumanist identification of capitalism serves as a
programmatic—rather than merely theoretic—contribution to the pragmatic ethos and assimilating nature of capitalism. This
programmatic contribution is conducted by means of drawing a line of correspondence and
coincidence between the dissolving forces of capital on the one hand and the disintegrating cosmic
forces vigorously heralded by contemporary science on the other. This is why the antihumanist
definition of capitalism—especially as a singularity that miraculously weaves participation, cosmic disenchantment and emancipation
together—has turned into an allure for various affinities of speculative philosophy and imaginative
politics. Whilst the former has been disillusioned in regard to the restrictions of matter as well as subjective or inter-subjective conditions for
experience, the latter has grown weary of the romantic bigotries of kitsch Marxism and ruinous follies of liberalism.¶ In The Thirst for
Annihilation and later in his numerous essays, Land introduces an inhumanist model of capitalism through a reappropriation of Freud’s
energetic mod- el of the nervous system. The reason for Land’s emphatic recourse to Freud’s energetic model is that the extremity and
terrestrial generality of Freud’s account of the death-drive are able to universally mobilize capitalism beyond its historic and particular
conditions. In other words, it is the
death-drive that transcendentally and from within universalizes capital as the
all-encompassing capitalism. Furthermore, as Land points out, if death is already inherent to capital as a
‘machine part’, the ‘death of capitalism’ is a delusion either generated by anthropomorphic wishful
thinking or neurotic indulgence in victimhood.10 In short, Land assumes that the emancipative conception of
capitalism requires a realist model capable of positing the reality of emancipation exterior to
ontological and subjective privileges of human. And it is Freud’s energetic model that as a prototypical model of
speculative thought revokes the enchanted ontological privileges of life by presenting life as a temporal
scission from its precursor exteriority qua inorganic. Both the life of thought and the life of the
human body are externally objectified by the originary exteriority that pulls them back toward a
dissolution which is posited in anterior posteriority to life. The external objectification
hardware—coincidental with the independent reality of dissolution— undermines
of the human
the monopoly and hegemony of the
human genetic lineage as the vehicle of social dynamics . On the other hand, the objectification of thought is
traumatically bound as a vector of disillusionment in regard to radical deficiencies of life as the constitutive horizon of thought’s topology and
dynamism. Such disillusionment paves the road toward an abyssal realm where thought must be armed with a speculative drive. Accordingly
for Land,
Freud’s
energetic
model
is comprised of an emancipative yet implicitly antihumanist front in that it
posits the
anterior posteriority of dissolution as a radical truth determined to flush human faculties down the
latrine of pure objectivity. ¶ However , Freud’s energetic model is constituted of another front which does not thoroughly
exclude the human:
The traumatic scission from the inorganic or any pre- cursor exteriority brings about
the possibility of life which consists of energetic opportunities . These
conservatively enveloped and
organism
developed to support the survival
energetic opportunities
are
(from basic perseverance to complexification)
of the
or the index of interiority. Correspondingly, the energetic opportunities occasioned by the traumatic scission from the precursor
exteriority are posed as tortuous driveways toward the originary state of dissolution. The conservative nature of the organism or the emerged
interiority utilizes these energetic opportunities—ensued by an originary differentiation from the precursor exteriority—for intensive and
extensive activities of sustenance. For this reason, the complication
and explication of these energetic opportunities
which are in accordance with the conservative nature of the organism can be taken as lines of participation. These
opportunities can be programmed to change the topology, economy and dynamism of the inevitable
return to the precursor exteriority. In short, the traumatic scission of the organic from the inorganic
provides the organism with energetic opportunities which are posited as sites and conditions for
participation. The second front of Freud’s energetic model of thanatropic regression, accordingly, brings about the
possibility of participation without ceasing to be ultimately emancipative and crushingly
disenchanting. These two fronts are respectively (a) the emancipative front where dissolution and the disenchanting truth conjoin, and (b)
the participative front where the energetic opportunities of the conservative organism can be utilized as accelerative and programmatic vectors
in the direction of the aforementioned emancipation.¶ These
two fronts of Freud’s model are connected by a maze of
material and energy dissipation, an intricately circuitous curve whose slant can become steeper and thereby be
accelerated toward the ultimate emancipation. It is here that capitalism is identified with this curve or
maze of dissipation that links the conservative nature of the system to an emancipation which knows
nothing of the human. The intertwinement of a pre- disposition for accumulation and a passion for liquidation within capitalism
resonates with Freud’s energetic model in which the conservative nature of the organism is a dissipative twist
toward the inorganic exteriority. Capitalism, in this sense, is a dissipative tendency that unfolds
through the complicated paths of the conservative horizon, turning the conditions for
complexification of life (i.e. resources, techniques, participations, etc.) into conditions for its acceleration and
perpetuating its angular momentum. Capitalism’s parasitic insistence on its survival is the expression
of its constitutive dissipative tendency (desire for meltdown) that must effectuate its singularity by all means and at all costs—
hence the machinic conception of capitalism as an open system that assimilates every antagonism or
exception as its axioms and resources. This is why in order to present an antihumanist model of
capitalism, Land uses the direct correspondence between the conservative-dissipative conception of
capitalism and Freud’s energetic model of thanatropic regression for the organic conservation. The
topologic, economic and dynamic calculi of this definition or model of capitalism as a ‘liquidating storm against everything solid’ can be found in
Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression. According to this definition of capitalism, although
capitalism is ultimately
emancipative in terms other than those of human, it can be participated and accelerated by human
and for this reason, it does not exclude an ethics or politics of praxis.¶ In his tour de force on nihilism and
enlightenment, Nihil Unbound, Ray Brassier seems to be fully aware of the threats that the Landian definition of capitalism poses against the
disenchanting potentials of Freud’s account of the death-drive. In the wake of such a definition, the
emancipative energy of the
truth of extinction implicated in the theory of thanatropic regression is converted to an alien and thus
impartial justification for capitalist indulgences which conflate anthropic interests with the ever more
complicating paths of organic survivalism. In other words, the inevitable truth of extinction as the apotheosis of the
enlightenment’s project of disenchantment is exploited by the Freudian reformulation of capitalism. In this way, the ‘anterior
posteriority’ of extinction as an ultimate disenchantment affirms and reenacts human not only as the
participating and accelerating element but also as something which deviously reconciles vitalism with
the disenchanting ‘truth of extinction’.11 In order to purge Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression from such manipulations
and draw an ‘intimate link between the will to know and the will to nothingness’, Ray Brassier presents a genuinely speculative solution.12
Brassier proposes that Freud’s
theory of thanatropic regression must be reinscribed on a cosmic level so that
not only the organic dissolves into the inorganic but also the inorganic gains a dissipative or loosening
tendency to ward the precursor exteriority qua the anterior posteriority of extinction. The ‘cosmological
re-inscription of Freud’s account of the death-drive’ unshackles the disenchanting and hence emancipative truth
of extinction from the capitalism-friendly horizon of vitalism.13 Just as the organic interiority is deserted on behalf of
the inorganic, the in- organic materials as conditions of embodiment are deserted on behalf of an
unbound cosmic exteriority where even the elementary fabric of matter is an index of interiorization
and must be undone. It is in loosening every index of interiority and deserting their domain of
influence that the truth of extinction forces thought to be a speculative imagination for and of the
cosmic abyss.
Deleuze
Lovecraft’s characters show us the process of becoming-nothing. Failure dooms us to
a life of oppression and domination
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
The majoritarian, it could be argued, belongs to no category other than the particular species of the
"human." After becoming-woman, through which women must also pass, Deleuze and Guattari call to the human "becoming-animal." The
shift from being woman to becoming woman (a deeply problematic, precariously fetishistic concept for which Deleuze and Guattari have been
maligned) is a movement from a category emergent only through majoritarian expression, as lacking and oppressed, to woman as a singularity
or territory with no opposite. The
very fact that Deleuze and Guattari posit woman as the first, surely horrific
step for the majoritarian male to take in his relinquishing of power endows this politics of alterity
with the mood of Lovecraft's protagonists who, ultimately, fear becoming-nothing, a status to which
minoritarians have long been relegated. The becoming-cosmic, however, shows that nothing is
everything, just as many feminists, such as Irigaray in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, have argued that woman, in "lacking," is both less than
and more than one. From the definite politics of feminists of difference, we
come to the larger paradigm of the human
itself. While Lovecraft's characters do not pass through a becoming-woman, they do leap to a becoming-animal that
is neither human nor animal, and both. Insofar as the animal is nothing except the not human,
becoming animal begins the ablation of the category of the human. As Lovecraft's protagonists extend toward
becomings that offer no recognisable elements, they can no longer be organised as hybrids of relations between two, whether animal/human
or human/demon. Through
abstract gods, this stage of becoming is able to erode entirely all residue of the
human. Beyond the notion of the "post-human," which suggests an "after," Lovecraft's becoming-inhuman is within so-called humans,
immanently available, and indeed inevitable and compulsory. No longer hybrid with exo-kingdoms, the primary term "human" can no longer be
described as becoming. The divisibility of becoming entities becomes increasingly difficult . This section
explores the conception of relations of a-human or inhuman, non-differentiated, nebulous becomings as baroque. Lovecraft's monsters are
unto themselves not scary, the events not frightening, compared with facing the ultimate horror of losing subjectivity to the very molecular
level of the human, the mammal, the invertebrate, the plant, the bacterial. In Lovecraft's tales events are associated with phases of relation and
production, not presented in increments of narrative evolution. For this reason I would extend Deleuze's work on Leibniz and argue that both
Deleuze and Guattari's werewolves/vampires/demons and Lovecraft's work deal with the baroque. Like the baroque, Lovecraft's work
consists not of collisions between forms but rather of acts of relations between substances, or, as
Leibniz puts it, the power to act and be acted upon (81). The baroque is important for the politics of difference in my
argument because Leibniz argues here that bodies
depend on their affective relations with other bodies in order to
define themselves. Techniques of subsumption and oppression through the reification of dominant
identities amount to uneven relations without participation. Instead of perpetuating domination or
subordination through refusal and extrication, attention to the affects and fluidity of bodies in
proximity with and inflected through one another requires that our apprehension of those bodies
negotiates the possibility of differing ourselves. For Leibniz, all bodies are modification or extension, existing as fluid
aggregates, and their reality is not an essence within these bodies but rather, as Leibniz writes following Democritus, "they depend for their
existence on opinion or custom" (69).
The Horror Story We Present Is Not Meaningless. The Depiction of the Lovecraftian
Monster Cthulhu and its Relationship to Humankind Breaks Down the Traditional
Power Relationships That Have Inculcated our Relationship to the Other.
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
This essay is meant to present a series of possibilities and ideas and not a definitive summary of stories, so moments from stories are
mentioned without explication or reference to narratives or events. Lovecraft's work rarely privileges event and narrative, which I understand
The primary concept underpinning becomings for Deleuze
and Guattari is also relations which refuse relationships that enforce resemblance. By reading Lovecraft
through Deleuze and Guattari, I propose an alternate interpretation of Lovecraft's work as expressing a
vitalistic philosophy and inspiring an ethics that addresses the structures of self posited with and as sociocultural otherness. Becomings are not commensurate with unique singularities but are produced from unlike relations. Lovecraft's
cosmic horror works are obsessed with the idea of relations that inevitably structure and underpin human
existence but that remain unknown to the human. The becoming with which Lovecraft's humans participate comes from the
as an oeuvre of relations that at their simplest should not be.
Elder Gods or more usually the Ancient Ones, a pantheon composed by Lovecraft from various Assyrio-Babylonian, Mesopotamian and
particularly ancient Sumerian cacodemons. The Elder Gods act as gatekeepers for the Ancient Ones or Great Ones, a group of creatures
associated with the terror of possibly unleashing a world of hybrid relations with humans which would either wipe humans out or, if the Great
Ones entered into becomings, would wipe out subjectivity and perception as we know it. The Ancient Ones are presented in detail in
Lovecraft's The Necronomicon, written under the pseudonym Abdul Alhazred, which can be understood together with other apocryphal texts
such as Eibon. These same demons appear in the pandemonium of Milton's Paradise Lost, in Satan's fallen land, but the idea of a pantheonic
pack or a multiplicity within the one and a oneness of the multiple also resonates with the Devil's response to Jesus's question about his
identity: "I am legion, for we are many" (Holy Bible, Mark 5:9). The
dreadful realisation overcomes Lovecraft's
protagonists that they have always been in relation with and related to monstrous entities . In this context
S.T. Joshi evaluates Lovecraft as an activating writer: "[R]ealism is … not a goal but a function in Lovecraft; it facilitates the
perception that 'something which could not possibly happen' is actually happening " (33). Joshi emphasizes that
Lovecraft is both and neither a writer of fantasy fiction and/nor of realism. This claim resonates with the crucial element of becoming in
Deleuze and Guattari, namely that becomings
are not metaphors and do not occur in a theatre of representation but rather
actualize potentialities of thought.
While many of Lovecraft's stories include the atmospheric suspense of gothic fiction and the
predictive elements of science-fiction, his descriptions of fantastic states are based on a refined knowledge of physics and a commitment to
immersing both the characters and the reader in the cosmic horror. I argue here that Lovecraft should be understood as a writer who is not
against realism but rather who attempts to find a new realism-mobilisation. Michael Houellebecq claims that Lovecraft
avoids
precision "with regards to the distribution of [the Ancient Ones'] powers and abilities. In fact their exact nature is
beyond the grasp of the human mind.… those humans who seek to know more ineluctably pay with madness
and death" (83). Poststructuralism enables us to translate "madness" as schiz-subjectivity and "death"
as the death of reified identity that is launching upon becomings. For Lovecraft, monsters are not aberrant versions
of the human. They are monstrous, that is, not in form, but on the levels of perception and possibility.
What emerges in Lovecraft is that the human is a vague, strategic myth for ensuring sanity and thus traditional
subjectivity through a belief in like relations. The human is of, indeed perhaps created by, monsters that are horrific not only
in their hybrid incarnations but also in the impossibility of their being perceived through human modes of apprehension; this shows that the
human is nothing more than its own fantastical myth and the infinite possibility of the beyond which
is also the within. The horror experienced by Lovecraft's protagonists need not close off the possibility that his readers would negotiate
their own subjectivity and elements of alterity as a specific system of power. Beyond authorial intent, Lovecraft can demand, perhaps radically,
a dissipation of powers that are contingent on the maintenance of the category of human. This is the political context of this essay. Maligned as
sexist and racist, Lovecraft
ironically catalyzes the becomings of the human through infinite and abstracting paradigms,
and thereby requires his readers to reorient power relations, along the lines of poststructuralist,
feminist, and postcolonial strategies alike. Thus Joshi is correct to describe Lovecraft's writing as functional. Lovecraft himself
explains that supernatural horror in literature "demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a
capacity for detachment from everyday life" (Supernatural Horror 12). As Joshi points out, however, this does not preclude
realism. Poststructuralism has demonstrated that there is no simple bifurcation dividing art and thought: what we create constitutes
how we perceive reality, which then contributes to what we create, but it is the indeterminable and nontranscriptive or non-equivalent nature of this causality that makes the functioning of art in life and of life in art interesting.
Our Relationship of Cthulhu to Demands Alternate Perceptions of Relations with ALL
Entities. This Renegotiation of Signifying Systems Prevents the Modern Exertion of
Power that Results in the Worst Form of Subjectivity
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
In "Becoming Intense" Deleuze and Guattari describe abstract planes of consistency with reference to sorcery, Bergson, Spinoza, haecceity,
plane-making, molecules, secrets, points, and blocks. None of these are abstractions or fantasies in the sense that they do not concern the
material. They are abstract in the sense that the material is always concerned with planes. Majoritarian structures
of perception
create planes that are atrophied, adamantly heard of, and able-to-be-heard before their vocalisation arrives. Lovecraft's
reader is not confronted with what happens to whom and why, but with the unbearable reality of effectuation
of unheard-of relations without perception as external, causal and commensurable apprehension, which is to say with a
miasmic material reality: "a plane of consistency peopled by anonymous matter, by infinite bits of impalpable matter entering into varying
through Lovecraft, Deleuze and
Guattari thus offer an ethics of becomings whose main phases are: 1) relations without likeness, 2)
entities without form or function, 3) relations which are nonetheless real in spite of their abstract
nature and the abstracting of the entities, 4) these relations forcing alternate modes of perception
without laying new structures of apprehension, finally leading to 5) the function of art as catalysing
becomings in the reader by demanding alternate perceptions of relation with any and all entities. As
connections" (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 255), Via Spinoza but primarily as sorcerers, and
Deleuze and Guattari point out, these all occur on the same abstract plane. There is no leaving behind Lovecraft when we close his pages.
Lovecraft's work may be fantasy, the monsters fictive, the narratives fragmentary, but the relation to possibilities of
thought through imperceptible though terrifically present entities is a gate through which the reader
enters becomings that differentiate all relations on a plane of consistency. Against Joshi, Colin Wilson claims that Lovecraft was opposed
to realism and particularly to materialism. What is at stake here is not whether Lovecraft personally rejected materialism but whether his
negotiation of perception itself has material effects in the post-structural sense of re-negotiating
signifying systems and relations of difference and otherness in the world. Wilson titles his chapter on Lovecraft
the "Assault on Rationality." Rationality has traditionally been the realm of dominant, logocentric, majoritarian
systems. Wilson emphasizes Lovecraft's obsession with the monstrous, and Braidotti the definition of monster
as any deviation from the base level zero "human." Braidotti states that "the discourse on monsters as a case study
highlights … the status of difference within rational thought" (78). Wilson points out that Lovecraft "is willing to make his setting modern, but it
must be remote from civilisation, a kind of admission of defeat" (4). This tendency evinces Lovecraft's interest in describing the connective
affectivity of fantastic perception and world, rather than a non-terrestrial dystopia. For this reason the political question becomes "defeat of
what?" From a politics of alterity we could argue that Lovecraft
works to defeat the exertion of perception and
knowledge, for the exertion of power opens the way for other forms of subjectivity to emerge.
Our aff is a piece of sorcery. Our journey through “the Call of Cthulhu” challenges
traditional definitions of life, humanity, and other tenets. We conjure up a smooth
plane of existence.
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
Lovecraft's oeuvre falls into two categories. One encompasses more familiar tales of terror found in horror stories and novels of the late eighteenth to early
nineteenth centuries; the other is based on the great Lovecraft mythos. The stories based on the
mythos address three main phases. The
first, which Lovecraft calls "transition" or "mutation," expresses the becoming(s) of protagonists as they begin to
corporeally and psychologically articulate inflection with alternate genera, terrestrial teratological and alien (a division
that is in fact unclear in Lovecraft). The second is the entering into the worlds, or, in keeping with his disinterest in
disambiguation, the domains occupied by these creatures as gods. The third is the distortion of
perception. Lovecraft was responsible for creating entire pantheons, universes, worlds, and alternate temporal realities of evolution and alien existence. The
key element which differentiates Deleuze and Guattari's almost jubilant citation of Lovecraft's ideas is the lack of attention to what most Lovecraft commentators
misguidedly call, as does Michael Houellebecq in the title of his seminal book, Lovecraft's proclivity against life. The quality of one's
journey toward
Lovecraft should take into account the definitions of such terms as "life," "human," and other Earthly
tenets of thoughts, apprehensions of form and perceptions of states. Challenging the category of the human underpins
all becomings, beginning with the most obvious falling away from the hu"Man" to woman, animal and
eventually abstract particles, sonority, and inhuman planes. Apparently in contradiction with his premise that Lovecraft's work
shows a nihilistic weariness with life, Houellebecq in fact claims in his preface that through Lovecraft we can live in poetry (25). With the help of Deleuze and
Guattari, this essay ultimately explores the readers' passing through the gates of Lovecraftian perception, which involves the creation of a speech, from the
unspeakable to the 'unsayable'; incommensurable relations which take the very acts of writing and speech to their limits; accessing the outside and the unthinkable;
but which are also, and in contradistinction to Wilson's claim, is no less material for doing so. Resonant with speech of the unsayable, Lovecraftian
perception is perception upon a different plane. (Burleson touches on this when he cites Derrida's claim that "there is nothing outside
the text" (10); in this case, however, I would tend more toward the work of Foucault and Blanchot, which introduce accountability and responsibility into this
concept.) Lovecraft can be invigorating if read as a writer of the baroque (through, for example, Deleuze's work on Leibniz) rather than, as many have claimed, the
gothic; if read through physics as much as folklore; and as long as one reads and thinks of Lovecraft as an act of sorcery. Critics such as Siegel
have claimed persistently that Lovecraft is a writer of gothic fiction (51). This tendency arises more from the resonance of trite adjectives such as 'haunted', 'dark',
'horrific' and so forth that are applied to Lovecraft's work, than from the difficult task of seeing his work as phylum. Hybrid becomings, however, could help readers
describe Lovecraft as a writer of the baroque rather than of the gothic (see MacCormack, "Baroque Intensity"). Relating to themes and places more modern (though
emphatically anti-modernist) than the abbey-bound turpitude of G.M. Lewis and less romantic than the occultism of F. Marion Crawford, Lovecraft's protagonists,
(who are also uninterested in Bram Stoker's socio-political tenets of industrialisation), are neither haunted nor hounded by entities they will eventually overcome.
(To be fair, however, this repudiation of the gothic is more readily found in Lovecraft's cosmic tales than in the intimate stories of dread.)
Our sorcery catalyzes becoming. The abstract potentiality of monsters breaks down
anthropocentrism
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
In Deleuze and Guattari's work, becomings pass through stages which can generally be described as devolutionary, and which Deleuze and Guattari call
"neoevolutionary." The
majoritarian subject "man" (which is to say, all human subjects) enters into relations with primary
elements of minoritarian alterity, becoming-woman, becoming-animal, and other, a-human forms, toward more refined,
ambiguous expressions of content. The animal, however, is the primary node for inhuman or a-human becomings. Deleuze and
Guattari demarcate three orders of animality. The first is the Oedipal animal, the puppy-baby (Freud). Second is
the symbolic or archetype animal, which creates and immobilises itself upon a metaphoric structure of signification (Jung). The third
animal is the demonic animal, in which two elements must be present – the animal here is itself a phenomenon of bordering, hybridity, and
metamorphicity. Demonic animals are defined as "pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a population, a becoming, a tale" (TP 241; sec. 10). Vampires,
werewolves, and demons belong to this third order of animality. Because they are both familiar and unfamiliar to us, however, they seem to resonate with the
negotiations of what a human-animal could be, both when it is mistakenly read through the first two orders of animality, and when its becomings are overlooked. It
involves a relation with an abstract animal. Oedipal animality – the family puppy-baby – manifests its narcissism through subjective ownership – "'my' cat, 'my' dog"
(TP 240; sec. 10). Oedipal
animals affirm the self through the construction of an anthropomorphising family
system in which the animal is allowed to emerge only through conditional love that fulfills the
parameters of the substitute child. Since the animal is inferior in both its structural position and its species, it resolves the woman's penis envy
and the man's castration anxiety. The second order of animals is the archetypal animal who is invested with human qualities
and effectively only has, or represents, human qualities. These animals are extricated from animality, but the range of their
symbolic function is almost limitless. Both systems in no way include animals, just human, signifying systems. We need
to develop the critique further here, however, so that the werewolf/demon/vampire is not misunderstood as some uncanny, gothic entity. Lovecraft claims that he
seeks "to make the flesh creep" (qtd. in Wilson 3) more than to unfurl narrative through characters. This focus on flesh directly challenges metaphor and the
distance between reader and text. As a kind of physio-cerebral affectivity, it dissolves metaphor and makes the text politically accountable for its catalyzing of
Demons thus belong to the third order of Deleuze and Guattari's animal taxonomy.
Becoming through a pact-pack with the demon also describes the first phase of Lovecraftian sorcery.
different modes of thinking.
One of the remarkable contributions Lovecraft makes to literature is his formulation of a pantheon of gods. Unlike other fantasy writers, however, Lovecraft creates
gods within this world, which is also folded together with worlds outside of time and space. As Gates, Lovecraft's gods are responsible for the horror of altering
modes of being in the world, and they do so by creating the pure immanence of multiple worlds. Taxonomies of monsters, orders of gods, worlds demarcated as
fantastical or real are absent in Lovecraft, and it is the very absence of these demarcations which causes horror. Lovecraft's
gods lack the
signification and subjectification that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, facilitates majoritarian power, which in turn
sanctions the emergence of subjects. The entities with which the protagonists enter becomings are abstract and ambiguous (as emergent entities they are always
there but not entirely apprehensible). Becomings in Lovecraft
are also compulsory – the protagonists have no choice, but
while horror is thereby irrefutably catalysed, it comes from the loss, and not from the destruction, of the self. These
monsters destroy through alliance rather than murder. Lovecraft emphasises that becomings are already available and that we always already choose the extent to
which we resist or submit to the everyday alliances we make. In this way he demonstrates that retaining
reified subjectivity is as much an
act as would be letting go of it. Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of demons to expand the intersection of the hybrid with the animal.
Aesthetic and apocryphal demons such as werewolves and vampires are single expressions of human-animal elements, inherently metamorphic and part of packs.
Since demons must be invoked after first being imagined as fabulations, thinking becoming-demon for them requires a philosophy of sorcery. Lovecraft's lower gods
are fabulations of demons, inter-species hybrids with orders of non-mammalian animals, and this Deleuzio-Guattarian index is where Lovecraft's a-human
becomings begin. Deleuze and Guattari do not offer aesthetic, cinematic or literary examples of their demons – the devil, werewolves and vampires – because these
arise as particle verb bands rather than as infernal monsters or as metaphorical, figurative, or symbolic entities. When examples are offered, they resonate around
becomings which are not as familiar to us as those of the werewolf and vampire. Precisely because
these monsters emerge through so
many varied examples of actualised virtualities, however, they remain abstract potentiality, whereas the specific
literary citations of Woolf's becoming-monkey, Ahab's becoming-whale, and so on, are examples of singularities before the formation of new threshold packs.
The story of Cthulhu can teach us how to become instead of how to try and be
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
Gate 2 focuses on the demonic in Deleuze and Guattari's elements of becoming, as abstract animal entities. This Gate explores the liminal band
between a-human, animal elements and the demon that is beyond animal-element perception. Lovecraft's gods are not monsters; they do not
belong to extra-human orders from which they threaten to slaughter the demarcated human, and they do not reside in the entirely external
fantasy worlds that are found in many traditional horror stories. Ancient Ones and Elder Gods are beyond Frankenstein's creature and Dracula,
and they are too earthly present to be classified along with the alien gods and monsters of fantasy novels. For the renegotiation of our
becomings, it is important to note that we cannot categorise them as outside, either in form or in world. They are immediately present but also
Lovecraft's gods and entities are,
furthermore, always themselves in states of becoming. They include multiple intensities and mobile qualities of many
animals, particularly cephalopods, fish. and insects, as well as a bacterial forms of bubbling, molecular viscosity. As the gods are in
their own states of becoming, their function as an anomalous, allied term is already beyond our
capacity to name them. As hyper-hybrids, they also occupy territories that could be described as having their
own becomings – water-land worlds, outer-space-within-this space and so forth, what Deleuze and Guattari call a
"Universe fiber" that is "strung across borderlines" (TP 249; sec. 10). In addition, since they cannot be
destroyed, their states of "life" are tentative. They are incapable of killing humans, but only change their state of life, as they
without presence since they are not recognisably other or antagonistic. The qualities of
are neither dead nor alive. The thresholds and gates Lovecraft's monsters force us to negotiate are resistant, not only to being destructive
monsters, but also to being hybrid entities that we could demarcate for our becomings. Their qualities of contagion, as hybrids or outside
entities, preclude them from being monsters, and thus resonate with Deleuze and Guattari's terms for elements of becoming, from wolf-whalerat to demonic dimensionality and borderline propagation. The Ancient Ones are described physically as threshold creatures – both fish and
fowl, flesh and fur, a kind of sentient, amphibious nebula from a pre-human, pre-historical time that is both more civilised and intelligent than
the human time, and barbarically uncivilised. Inevitably and most horrifically, the Ancient Ones reproduce the limit restricting even hybrid
animality from a pure abstraction-becoming. The animal elements of the Ancient Ones, while residually named as animal, are in fact
cephalopodan, insect and other adamantly non-mammalian forms. Cthulhu is seen in bas-relief as a squid dragon, "an
octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature… [whose] pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings"
(Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu," hereafter TCC, 63). Dagon is a fish-man-god (Lovecraft, "Dagon" 16). The encounter between protagonists and
their becoming-Ancient Ones reflects this threshold. Cthulhu
lives a threshold consciousness, lying dead but
dreaming. The geography of Cthulhu's fallen cities of R'lyeh lies at the threshold of the mountains of
madness, at immeasurable depths beneath the sea (apparently near New Zealand). Randolph Carter's becoming is "human and
non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal and vegetable" (Lovecraft, TGSK 526), and the unnamed protagonist of The Shadow Over
Innsmouth is a man-froglike-fish or fishlike-frog, "flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating" (Lovecraft, TSI 454). "Propagation by epidemic, by
contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity.… These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms"
(Deleuze and Guattari, TP 241-2; sec. 10). In "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" the kingdom of immortal creatures of the sea arises to infect the
citizens of Innsmouth with molecular intensities, merging land with sea and human with frog-fish-flesh. The narrator shares a family line with
these hybrid worshippers of Dagon and Cthulhu, but genealogy produces a unique specificity of hybridity. He tells us that "them as turn into fish
things an' went into the water wouldn't never die" (414).
Our advocacy is sorcery. We must conjure becomings such as Cthulhu in order to
enter into becomings of our own.
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
In order to enter into this beyond-humanness we must act as sorcerers, which requires Deleuze and
Guattari's four stages of demonic pact-making. The first is the alliance with a demon, through which the human
passes into the pack, which is the second phase. The third sees this pack create a borderland with
another pack, which then allows the borderline to guide the future(s) of the human-animal collective
pack intensities. The fourth stage is presumably the stage of ethics, creativity, and thought, as it
involves the production of directions that most benefit each particle of each pack-pact, and always
changes the micro- and macro- "things" within and between the borderline. The werewolf, demon, and the
vampire, as not knowable but thinkable fabulations, are waves or bands and not figures or concepts – or, as in What is Philosophy?, they are
pre-philosophical. Werewolves, demons, and vampires include elements similar to the human and to animal elements, but form strange, new,
mobile, and what Deleuze and Guattari call unnatural participations (TP 242) and what Lovecraft perhaps would call "disturbing combinations"
(TGSK 537). They are not uncanny, as they are not symbolic forms sewn together into demarcated half-half mythic monsters. According to a
new grammar of becoming, it is not a cobbling together of two nouns, but rather the movement-combination-aspect of the familiar, or the
verbing, that creates the hybrid: "But in the text itself it did indeed reek with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the
laboured strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it, yet having combinations of symbols which
seem vaguely familiar" (Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" 283).
Yes, reading a story can really change us
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
Lovecraft's protagonists initially shift their modes of perception to dreams and memories that do not
belong to their history or imagination. This already implies the suspension of any recognisable modes
of apprehension, and compels us to read in a similar way. Dreams, memories and imagination are not
opposed to reality but belong to different orders of perception that nonetheless effect alterations in
subjectivity and show reality to be a quality. The question is not so much what we read in Lovecraft
but how we read. Lovecraft's is an impossible project of describing the indescribable, speaking about the unsayable and explicating
events which are beyond our capacity to follow. His words are not complex, so that if both writer and reader lack
words for the unsayable, and if they are open to art as outside and to the inhuman becomings that
literature invokes, this lack is precisely the ethical point of creating new relations of production
between art and reader that cannot be set down, structured, or understood as preceding the event of
reading. The decision to open toward a revolution in perception is the point of becomings. Deleuze and Guattari describe a novel as
populated by the multiple perceptions of the characters and the shadowy but ubiquitous perception of the writer. Lovecraft, however, knows
neither his own perception nor those of his characters, because in his work perception itself is the character, content and narrative. Perception,
in this world and in the palimpsest worlds within and outside of it, is an incandescent, fantastical reality. Examples of unbearable, wondrous
perception of the present as ordinary/extraordinary are found in Lovecraft's beloved Arthur Machen. In "A Fragment of Life," within and
beneath London there emerges an arcane, natural world, a "New Life" in which, along with "unheard-of joys, there are also new and unheardof dangers" (Machen 98), and which thus exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari's unheard of becomings.
Derrida (Archive)
Lovecraft's publishing methods disturb ordinary approaches of literary reasoning
Sorensen 10’
(Leif Assistant Professor. B.A., English, University of California at Berkeley; M.A.,
English, San Francisco State University; Ph.D., English Literature, with distinction, New York University.)
"A Weird Modernist Archive: Pulp Fiction, Pseudobiblia, and HP Lovecraft," in Modernism/modernity
17.3 (September 2010).
https://www.academia.edu/3711533/A_Weird_Modernist_Archive_Pulp_Fiction_Pseudobiblia_H._P._L
ovecraft
The writers associated with Weird Tales create an especially fascinating intertextual archive that seems at times to continue and at others
to parody modernist fascinations with ethnographic depictions of difference and intertextual efforts at
consolidating a cultural tradition. This archive provides a fun-house mirror-version of the modernist
archive that provocatively reminds us that archives are uncanny things: collections of marks on paper that bear
witness to the otherwise inaccessible thought processes of long-departed beings. In Lovecraft’s work the reader encounters
figurations of archives that are fundamentally biased; here archives with which Lovecraft’s AngloSaxon, New England-based, protagonists can identify are valuable and comforting while archives
marked by any sign of difference are destructive and horrific. The imaginary nature of these archives
could make them easy to dismiss as nothing more than the fantastic constructions of a virulent racist. I
maintain, however, that they may be valuable resources for theorizing critical engagements with more
tangible archives and the literary histories that they legitimate. Here I follow Marilyn Booth’s suggestion that "To see
fictional narrative as an alternative site of archival imagining simply highlights the shifting and suspect nature of the archive.”10 In Booth’s
analysis she follows the work of Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in treating fiction, and the novel in particular, as a form that "exposes . . .
authoritative texts . . . as ‘simulacra’ of the authority to speak, to name.”¶ Booth and Gonzalez Echevarria work on Egyptian and Latin American
literary traditions, respectively; contexts in which the national literature undermines the truth claims of colonial texts, and the archives against
which these very different writers struggle is in both cases an official imperial construct. Lovecraft
is obviously situated quite
differently as he constructs himself as both a true representative of United States cultural authority
and an heir to a British imperial tradition (he frequently claimed to identify most fully as an eighteenth-century Englishman).12
Lovecraft’s status as a writer in a paraliterary genre, however, places him in a very different, but still
oppositional relationship to official literary history.13 Moreover, the reactionary ends to which Lovecraft
directs his skeptical interaction with the idea of a stable or impartial archive offers a useful reminder
that not all attacks on objectivity and scientific rationality lead to a libratory undermining of official
discourse. Where T.S. Eliot and other conserva- tive custodians of literary tradition in the modernist moment place a preeminent value on
the care for and guardianship over the archive, Lovecraft’s use of the archive as a fiction fits less comfortably into
narratives of modernist literary history.¶ Lovecraft’s work, however, shares many modernist concerns,
most significantly an investment in constructing and preserving tradition and an elaborate and
idiosyncratic variation on the modernist culture concept. In both cases, Lovecraft’s interests are shaped
thoroughly by his antiquarian interest in Anglo-colonial folklore and his conviction that the twin
encroaching forces of modernization and multiculturalism threatened this cultural tradition. This set of
beliefs makes Lovecraft an easy fit into the survey of nativist modernism offered by Walter Benn Michaels.14 Timothy Evans has recently
argued for the centrality of Lovecraft’s folkloric interests, as displayed in a lengthy series of travel writings, to an understanding of his frequent
fictional evocations of the horror of lost or adulterated traditions.15 Furthermore, although
Lovecraft seems to have little or
no sympathy for the literary endeavors of his high modernist contemporaries, he recognizes that
many among them share his aversion to modernity.
Lacan
The Lovecraftian mythos shows the situation of the Other as representation and the
Real as all other things that cannot be represented. This reflects the horror of realizing
the Real in our every day lives.
Clements 98 [David Cal (PhD in Linguistics and Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo
and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gerogia),SUNY Buffalo, 1998, Cosmic
Psychoanalysis: Lovecraft, Lacan, and Limits, pp 1 -3 ,PJC]
Scholars of Lovecraft universally agree that he offers us two basic reals: the daylight world and the
weird. Maurice Lévy identifies this opposition with the literary trope ville double. The city is itself a double. There is “the diurnal city, with its
street, its bridges, its churches – the city of the maps and charts - which suddenly blurs, dissolves in an opaque mist. On its site is left a dream
city – certainly as real, but black, malefic” (Lévy 46). Of the many ways in which Lovecraft presents the break in everyday reality, the most
pervasive is his use of light imagery. The first step beyond daylight is taken with some kind of mechanical light source (a torch, a candle, a
flashlight). It is as if the batteries of the flashlight store the routine world of sun and the everyday ego such that they can e carried below to the
unconscious. Some terrible accident extinguishes or exhausts the flashlight. Mechanical light is then replaced by darkness (groping) or some
kind of glowing luminosity (phosphorescence, ultra-violet light). The narrator thereby becomes conscious of what cannot be seen through
normal means, aware of what the everyday ego would refuse to see. Already from the above quote, the
overlap between daylight
and Lacan’s symbolic appears. By day, the city is a “city of maps and charts.” It is a city of language, a
city governed by representation, signification, and the Other. Language (culture) works by a process of
positing an Other, a solid ground to which words, images, feelings and actions refer. Located in some
transcendent plane, some zone which cannot be reached, the Other cannot be questioned. It is a
secret which works by virtueof the fact that no one can unveil it. The Other is that which allows
people to imagine that their lives are meaningful, that this meaning is lasting, and that the world
inherently makes sense. In both Lacan and Lovecraft, the symbolic world of daylight is all of reality. The universe is the symbolic order,
the absolute reign of the signifier’s transparence, and the controlling machinations of the Other which direct the thoughts and actions of
human beings. The
Other stands in where meaning should be and refers one constantly elsewhere: to the
Other. It is the function of the Other to represent all of reality, therefore limit of the symbolic
organized by the Other is coterminous with the edge of the world. Generally, a subject will do
anything to avoid a confrontation with the Other itself, since that would betray the lack in the Other.
(The many ways of avoiding the Other then become the subject’s symptoms.) And yet there is something beyond all that
“exists,” some kind of non-ground upon which existence rests. This is the night city. Given that the
symbolic-epidermic realm coincides with reality, any life-in-the-real must be seen as non-existent,
dead, cosmic, and supernatural. This move is warranted, for the symbolic is reality. “Canceling out the real, the symbolic
creates ‘reality,’ reality as that which is named by language and can thus be thought and talked about” (Fink, Lacanian Subject 25). We think in
language, in categories, in the symbolic. Anything
that cannot be represented falls to the real: the ineffable,
scientific anomaly, interstitiality, myths of life before language, psychosis, the unconscious.
Acceptance of cosmic indifference brings with it the realization of the lack in the
other. This leads to death, return, or a new monster.
Clements 98 [David Cal (PhD in Linguistics and Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo
and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gerogia),SUNY Buffalo, 1998, Cosmic
Psychoanalysis: Lovecraft, Lacan, and Limits, pg 6 ,PJC]
Horror in Lovecraft is essentially cosmic indifference. It is the realization that there is no purpose to
the universe. Lovecraft presents this graphically with a wide variety of tropes. Cosmic indifference corresponds to the
lack in the Other, the horrific realization in psychoanalysis. Both are traumatic realizations that at the
heart of the daytime world lurks an abyss, the yawning blackness in the night sky. “Lacan argues,” writes Joan
Copjec, “that beyond the signifying network, beyond the visual field, there is, in fact, nothing at all. The veil
of representation actually conceals nothing; there is nothing behind representation” (Read My Desire 35). Once one comes to comprehend the
lack in the Other, psychoanalysis would say one has transcended the fantasty. (The fantasy is always of the Other’s integrity, always of an
obtained beyond.) Given
the realization of the lack of a beyond, Lovecraft presents three options. These are
three stances taken in relationship to the wall which stands at the limit of the symbolic order.
Narrators who manage to get past the wall must either die, return to the everyday world, or become a
monster. The second option is by far the most prevalent. In what follows, we break the response to the encounter with lack in the Other
into these three options.
The construction of Lovecraftian cosmic horror offers a way to depose science and
idealism and create a rupture in our relation to the Other, forcing us into a
confrontation with the unconscious Real.
Clements 98 [David Cal (PhD in Linguistics and Literature at the State University of New York, Buffalo
and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gerogia),SUNY Buffalo, 1998, Cosmic
Psychoanalysis: Lovecraft, Lacan, and Limits, pp 95-96 ,PJC]
Still farther behind Burleson’s argument is the sense that no personification of the Other is warranted. If the beyond is a void, then why
populate it with “shapeless bat-things?” Cosmic indifference, after all, proceeds directly from science: scientific reality has unimpeachable laws
working in complete disregard of humanity – nor is a real needed, since scientific causation works without gaps! Furthermore, this argument
would run, cosmic indifference occurs without diminishment in such authors as Herman Melville (the whale in Moby-Dick), Stephen Crane (“The
Open Boat”), Dashiell Hammett (in the character of Op’s boss), and Kate Chopin (the image of the sea in “The Awakening”). They do not feel the
need to bring in alien monsters. So what does Lovecraft gain by introducing fantastic elements into the already unsettling truth of cosmic
indifference? There seem to be two approaches to this concern. First,
the fantastic elements give shape to the sensation
of fear. Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothothery displays in sensual form the emotions that must accompany the
mind-blowing knowledge of materialism: tentacles unrolling, maniacal laughter, the vertigo of space
with too many dimensions. These images impact upon the reader much more delightfully than just
naming the horror in ordinary prose. The gesture towards presenting unheard of monsters
emphasizes the complete break with everyday reality, unambiguously placing the monsters in the
unthinkable real. Secondly, what Lovecraft accomplishes in his unique mode of horror is structurally
very subtle. His philosophy is one of materialism, which has a shattering effect on the metaphysical
certainties of the idealist’s mind. But Lovecraft does not stop there. He goes on to place materialism in
the position held by idealism and shatters that. That is what his monstrosity accomplishes. Lovecraft destroys his
own certainty, his own nihilistic metaphysics of absolute meaningless law. As Mosig observes, “Lovecraft’s
rationalistic intellect could conceive no weirder or more bizarre happening than a dislocation of natural law […]” (23). Law at least has
regularity. Once
one gets over the lack of agency, the lack of soul, the lack of god, then at least one has
science to depend upon, science and the order of scientific laws. At least you know that things will behave in a certain
way, that things can be measured, that things which can’t be observed don’t exist. A second layer of horror is needed; one
that is not only a matter of cosmic indifference, but also one of chaos. Lovecraft gives us the horror of
being absolutely ignorant (and out of control), the horror of the universe’s incomprehensibility, the
horror of forces which display total independence from the laws of “human” science. What does Lovecraft
get out of adding the weird to cosmic indifference? In shorthand: the unconscious. Instead of a subject of idealism (in the first
place) or a subject of science (in the second), Lovecraft offers a subject of the unconscious. This answers
the question of why Lovecraft unveils the weird secret, the secret which is best left alone. If he stopped with the cosmic indifference of realism,
he would only have a machine. The
subject of science is a machine, an automaton, a functionary. If he moved
instead from cosmic indifference back to a fantasy of meaning, returning to idealism, he would only
have a dream. The subject of idealism is an impossible and alienating dream. Instead he deposes the subject of idealism
with the subject of science and then deposes the subject of science with the subject of the
unconscious. Lovecraft’s relentless pushing of our comprehension of the human predicament makes him one of the great writers of the
twentieth century.
Madness
And, our act of exploration goes beyond the traditional policy-centric interpretation of
fiat and plan implementation – instead it questions the very model of debate
premised on making an inherently mysterious natural world fit into the cookie cutter
of rational decisionmaking – it is the invisibility of truth in the face of both conspiracy
and objectivity that gives way to a rupture in the traditional model of academia – we
make debate go mad!!!
Woodard 10, Ben. Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism at Western University.
“Ben Woodard, ‘Lovecraftian Science/Lovecraftian Nature’”
http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/lovecraftian-sciencelovecraftian-nature/
One of Lovecraft’s more entertaining literary habits is to totally and irreparably demolish the
academic mind. Again and again Lovecraft disappears, kills, or transforms the academic into a
babbling madman sent off to grow the population of Arkham Asylum. This is not because he has
malicious feelings for thinkers (quite the contrary) but simply because the professor, the
researcher, the scientist, the philosopher, test the limits of reality and this, in Lovecraft’s world, is
a dreadful and dangerous task. But this image of the mad-brained academic does not appear in our
everyday existence and even the mad thinkers of the most popular fictions are not driven mad by
their science but by personal traumas. Mad scientists, overwhelmingly, do not have occupational
madness. We will probably not (unfortunately) see scientists ripping out their hair at the LHC at
the possible sight of stranglets or even more fantastically a portal to another dimension(maybe
hell whether demonological or hyperchaotic). Does Lovecraft merely underestimate the mental
fortitude of modern day intelligentsia or is it that nothing Lovecraft imagined has ever, and will
never, appear, that nothing fundamentally horrifying in the field of research can tear itself from the
mundane and singe the nerve endings of a few eggheads? This gap, I want to argue, comes from a
fundamental chasm in conceptual framing, from the treatment of onto-epistemological indistinction
(and that this leaps from the fictional to the non-fictional). This indistinction means that what is
unknown is both unknown as to whether its unknownness is a result of our epistemological limits
(we haven’t seen that type of fungus yet) or ontological limits (we cannot say what kind of entity
it is). Taking from an earlier blog entry this appears in horror in the statement ‘What is that?’
which indexes the horror of the weird (or the weirdness of horror) in several dimensions. ‘What’
is the epistemological dimension of horror or the very questioning of the identity of the creature or
thing before the thinking entity subject to horror. Whatness assumes possibly belonging to a
taxonomy in that ‘what’ already assumes an ontology, an isness. ‘Is’ is the dimension of ontology
proper interrogating the being of the thing and even the very bounds of the thing’s thingness or
identifiability once an epistemological schema has been thoroughly employed. ‘That’ speaks to the
spatiotemporal location of the thing that is questionably known/unknown, or solid/gelatinous and
so forth. ‘What is’ marks an indistinction of thinking and being, not their ontological distinction,
but the ontic fuzziness resulting from the mad stacking of countless epochs driven by rabid nature.
In other words, unknowability (epistemological limitation) can result from temporal or spatial
distance (too old, too new, too close, too far), an underdeveloped schema of knowledge
(unclassifiables, unobservables, dark matter, and so on and so forth) resulting from malformed
tools or instruments, or the weirdness of grounding/ungrounding activities themselves troubling the
very operation of binding, separating and so forth. Or the problems of discernment could be
called proximity, the second blindness, and the third forces and mixtures. For Lovecraft the soft
gray matter which humans cherish so deeply cannot stand up to such an assault. Yet asylums have
long been closed and the psychiatric wards are not overflowing at the rate he would expect. It is
because, in part, that the naturalism of philosophies of science treat nature as an innocuous
container or cheery factory of things which the scientist can rearrange accordingly. That is, even if
the Promethean attitude towards nature is no longer exploitative, a view of nature as still
mechanistic lingers even in ecological thinking. Even Roy Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science, sweeps
nature into a rhetorical corner as only a generative mechanism or in Cohen and Stewart’s
wonderful Collapse of Chaos, nature is left somewhere in the clutches of real patterns. But there
always lingers an epistemological wedge which keeps nature from fleeing into ontological obscurity.
Of course we know what nature is and if we do not know we worship it or respect to the limit of
our own poetical fancy. This split is what the late Pierre Hadot referred to as the
Promethean/Orphic split. This split covers over a more sinister division, the belief that we are in
fact separate from nature as both the Promethean and Orphic attitude pre-suppose that nature is over there
somewhere either to be exploited or deified. Our new found unnaturalness does not mean that we
are suddenly made of tin and diodes but it reinforces the fact that the world, and particular the world of
the scientist (according to philosophy), is one composed of epistemological limits and not ontological or
natural curiosities. ‘What is that’ is deprived of all its teeth in the post-Renaissance
conceptualization of nature where nature = ineligibility. Against this conceptualization Bhaskar argues: “Science is not an
epiphenomenon of nature, for knowledge possesses a material cause of its own kind. But neither is nature a product of man, for the
intelligibility of the scientific activities of perception and experiment presupposes the intransitive and
structured character of the objects of knowledge, viz. that they exist and act independently of the
operations of men and the patterns of events alike” (185). almost Laruelleian statement. But again,
the possibility of the mad academic suggests the possible penetration of the insularity of any
epistemological circle whether or not it takes cues from nature as a storm of forces. Take the
second to last passage of “The Colour Out of Space”: “What it is, only God knows. In terms of
matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that are
not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shin on the telescopes and
photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and
dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of
space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it;
from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic
gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes” (Lovecraft Complete, 616). Lovecraft lands,
perhaps a bit too far, on the ontological side of onto-epistemological indistinction. Lovecraft is
not demeaning the real developments made possible by modern science, but merely remarking that,
in the end, nature wins. Again quoting from “The Colour Out of Space”: “Then the dark woods
will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will
mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s
secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth” (594). To avoid
a Hegelian equivocation of mind and nature, or a Fichtean destruction of nature as not-I at the
hands of technological progress, the epistemological and ontological must feed into one another –
not in a correlationist fashion, but a way in which the un-prethinkable nature breaks into the
epistemological circle not only as limitation but as course correction – turning thought itself into a
force of nature as opposed to a force on a nature designed for it. The madness-rotted brain of the
Lovecraftian thinker which is the rule of description in his tales appearing as “mental strain”
(Dagon), a dazed brain (Polaris), as overtaxed (The Temple), as “mad thoughts” (The Nameless
City), as too sensitive (Herbert West) and on and on, is one who breaks the nature-determining
epistemology of thinkers on science and, no doubt, some scientific thinkers too. Philosophy would
seem something equally susceptible to the creative madness of the world, yet the epistemological
circle, firmly encrusted by the bastions of academia, fend off the dark winged things lurking on the
age-curled texts of the dusty stacks. This is why Land remarks that Kant’s system is the greatest fit
of panic in the history of the Earth and why Badiou dismisses Kant as succor to the academy and a
salve against madness and this, unfortunately, is why Kant is still endlessly entertained in the
halls of proper philosophy. Science is frequently charged with letting bloom a disenchanted world
and continental philosophy with trying to infuse quotidian mishaps with a anthrocentric vitality
but both accusations presuppose that the world is not much of a target for these epistemological
exercises, that nature is waiting or that nature is itself, that the world, is not producing that very
capacity for thought. A thinking nature requires a deeply rooted weirdness in the thinker, it forces
an impossible escape attempt from itself which, in actuality, is a scanning and probing of nature,
across the blindingly infinite stratifications of existence. Thinking is nature’s failed attempt at
diagnosis, a failure which for a time appears as finitude or individuation, but such appearances
soon fold back into the torrid roar of process, of onto-epistemological indistinction. Madness is to
be expected, and maybe suicide as well. Perhaps Lovecraft can only offer the sentiment that the
narrator of “From Beyond” offered in regards to his friend: “That Crawford Tillinghast should
ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid
and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and
action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.”
(115)
And specifically the reading of lovecraft acts to suspend the “natural laws” of the
universe in order to see the reality underneath our model of debate by breaking down
epistemological and ontological constructions that give coherency to the world
Woodard, 11 [Ben, 3/13/11, Ben is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism and Western Univerity,
“Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy,”
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/14]
Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the
tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up
between his own fictions and the universe or nature (as we know it) is reproduced within his fictions in the
common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed
questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: 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. The
sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (355). Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not
claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever
supernormal (89). One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real
to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones
which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of nonmaterial existence (7). Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror
upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely
ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to
speculative realism (Nick Land) as well as contemporary related thinkers (especially Reza Negarestani, and Eugene Thacker) have begun to view
Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical (making critical
remarks about Bergson and Freud for example) while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (especially the latter in the guise of the former).
This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's
habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a
destruction which is both an epistemological destruction (or sanity breakdown) and an ontological
destruction (or unleashing of the corrosive forces of the cosmos).
Fiction acts to suspend the “natural laws” of the universe in order to see the reality
underneath by breaking down epistemological and ontological constructions
Woodard, 11 [Ben, 3/13/11, Ben is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism and Western Univerity,
“Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy,”
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/14]
Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the
tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up
between his own fictions and the universe or nature (as we know it) is reproduced within his fictions in the
common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed
questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: 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. The
sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age (355). Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not
claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever
supernormal (89). One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real
to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones
which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of nonmaterial existence (7). Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror
upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely
ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to
speculative realism (Nick Land) as well as contemporary related thinkers (especially Reza Negarestani, and Eugene Thacker) have begun to view
Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical (making critical
remarks about Bergson and Freud for example) while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (especially the latter in the guise of the former).
This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's
habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a
destruction which is both an epistemological destruction (or sanity breakdown) and an ontological
destruction (or unleashing of the corrosive forces of the cosmos).
Fiction invades materialism with the ontology of becoming-creature
Woodard, 11 [Ben, 3/13/11, Ben is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism and Western Univerity,
“Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy,”
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/14]
The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the
earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and
far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the
Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or
otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or
Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a
strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality (23).
Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth (an Outer god like Nyarlathotep) as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably
outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all
infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time” (410). Azathoth's
name may have multiple
origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic
creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and
degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and nonlife. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic
emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a
nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?” (260). Lovecraft
explores
exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his
short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of
horror beyond all memory” (261). Deleuze
suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's
work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human (240) or of being the
anomalous (244-245) or of becoming atomized (248). Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate
to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the
monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature (or nature as we know it), the creature is far more
ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought (Thacker, 23). The creature is
either less than animal or more than animal (Thancker, 97) – its becoming is too strange for animal
categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as always, some indefinite
swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to
continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge (171).
This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism.
We can never avoid madness in life. Thought is just a form of madness, and the world
around us is inherently nightmarish
Woodard, 11 [Ben, 3/13/11, Ben is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism and Western Univerity,
“Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy,”
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/14]
Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature (23) and that
horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much (109). Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems
to suggest that thought separates us from nature (221) whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another
manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy (“The Materialist Today,” 75). In his brilliant “Prospects for PostCopernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively
defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature (413-414). With Schelling, who is
Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism
following from an ontological realism (415). Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought (and arguably Schelling's in the period of his
positive philosophy) move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states:
Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural , as Conrad evidenced in
Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of
what should not be-the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the supernatural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a
mind that has been driven mad (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, 211). Again, Ligotti equates madness with
thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question
becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter
of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus:
A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that
we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The
very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity (14). Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics
but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare
and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side
of mind.
Only madness can allow us to break from our notion of static being in the world to
instead the idea of becoming. Without this break we close ourselves off too much
from the outside
Woodard, 11 [Ben, 3/13/11, Ben is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism and Western Univerity,
“Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy,”
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/14]
Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes,
as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself” (Madness and Civilization, 285). For Badiou,
Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is
simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought (and
philosophy) its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the
becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground,
makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect (The Logic of Sense, 7).
The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or
occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of
an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which
does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real (but such mental effort of course only reinscribes the unreality of
fiction). That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative
formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts
do not aim to make
themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why
their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation
through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life (388-389) a
discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness,
in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends
his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the
attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe
(Lyotard, 122). To borrow again from Deleuze, writing
is inseparable from becoming (Essays Critical and Clinical, 1).
Turn – madness is good - We place bounds upon the nature of knowledge because we
are afraid that if we see to much we will go mad
Woodard, 11 [Ben, 3/13/11, Ben is a PhD candidate in Theory and Criticism and Western Univerity,
“Mad Speculation and Absolute Inhumanism: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Weirding of Philosophy,”
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/14]
Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise
theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for
orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault
points
to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church (23). Kant’s
philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points
out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic
forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the
external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it
is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human (70)
reduced to the zero degree of humanity (74). It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative
metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental
conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis
from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience.
David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in
Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant
formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters (85). She
writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity (and hence the
possible sub- version) of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this
pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” (86)
Kant's fascination with the Seer
forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the
critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an
aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself
conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of
thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it
is
necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent
disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves” (3). That is, whereas Kant
relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity (2) Deleuze attempts to
flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly
useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in
that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to
exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges
little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical
metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at postKantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason (following
Meillassoux) we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the
noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious
screaming tumult of things” (104). Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce
its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive
extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of
thought, is self-sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large
either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness
Nietzsche
Nietzsche and Lovecraft agree that trying to explore the unknown to save ourselves
comes from a fatal curiosity that leads to existential despair
Reynolds (n.d.) [Jason, fiction writer, no date, “Fatal Curiosity: Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the Terror of
the Known”, http://uroboros73.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/fatal-curiosity-nietzsche-lovecraft-and-theterror-of-the-known/]
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there
was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious
minute of ‘world history,’ but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few
breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”
If you’re a fan, you might think this
an excerpt from an H.P. Lovecraft story, one of his twisted tales about erudite, curious men who learn too much about the nature of
reality and are either destroyed or deeply damaged by what they discover. But this is actually the opening to Nietzsche’s essay “On
Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense” (1873), a biting critique of the epistemological pretentiousness he finds running rampant
through Western philosophy. Nietzsche is an iconoclastic philosopher, hammering away at venerated ideas, slashing
through sacred assumptions. He
gleefully turns traditional theories on their heads, challenging our
beliefs, disturbing our values—an intellectual calling that has much in common with H.P.
Lovecraft’s literary mission. His favorite theme is what he calls cosmic indifferentism. If
Lovecraft has a philosophy, it is this: the universe was not created by a divine intelligence who
infused it with an inherent purpose that is compatible with humanity’s most cherished
existential desires. The cosmos is utterly indifferent to the human condition, and all of his
horrific monsters are metaphors for this indifference. Nietzsche and Lovecraft are both
preoccupied with the crises this conundrum generates. “What does man actually know about
himself?” Nietzsche asks, “Does nature not conceal most things from him?” With an ironic tone meant to provoke his
readers, he waxes prophetic: “And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to
peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness.” In Lovecraft’s “From
Beyond” (1934) this ‘fatal curiosity’ is personified in the scientist Crawford Tillinghast. “What do we
know of the world and the universe about us?” Tillinghast asks his friend, the story’s unnamed narrator.
“Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects
infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of
their absolute nature.” His Promethean quest is to build a machine that lets humans transcend the inherent limitations of
our innate perceptual apparatus, see beyond the veil of appearances, and experience reality in the raw. From a Nietzschean
perspective, Tillinghast wants to undo the effect of a primitive but deceptively potent
technology: language. In “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense,” Nietzsche says symbolic communication is the means
by which we transform vivid, moment-to-moment impressions of reality into “less colorful, cooler concepts” that feel “solid, more
We believe in universal, objective
truths because, once filtered through our linguistic schema, the anomalies, exceptions, and border-cases
have been marginalized, ignored, and repressed. What is left are generic conceptual properties through
which we perceive and describe our experiences. “Truths are illusions,” Nietzsche argues, “which we
have forgotten are illusions.” We use concepts to determine whether or not our perceptions, our
beliefs, are true, but all concepts, all words, are “metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of
universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world.”
sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” [For more analysis
of this theory of language, read my essay on the subject.] Furthermore, this process happens unconsciously: the way
our nervous system instinctually works guarantees that what we perceive consciously is a
filtered picture, not reality in the raw. As a result, we overlook our own creative input and act as
if some natural or supernatural authority ‘out there’ puts these words in our heads and compels
us to believe in them. Lovecraft has a similar assessment. In “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), his essay on the
nature and merits of Gothic and weird storytelling, he says the kind of metaphoric thinking that leads to
supernatural beliefs is “virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts
are concerned…there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous
tissue,” hence our innate propensity to perceive superhuman and supernatural causes when
confronting the unknown. Nietzsche puts it like this: “All that we actually know about these laws
of nature is what we ourselves bring to them…we produce these representations in and from
ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins.” This, of course, applies to religious dogmas
and theological speculations, too. Furthermore, this process happens unconsciously: the way our nervous
system instinctually works guarantees that what we perceive consciously is a filtered picture, not
reality in the raw. As a result, we overlook our own creative input and act as if some natural or
supernatural authority ‘out there’ puts these words in our heads and compels us to believe in
them. Lovecraft has a similar assessment. In “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), his essay on the nature and merits of
Gothic and weird storytelling, he says the kind of metaphoric thinking that leads to supernatural beliefs is “virtually permanent so
far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned…there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our
nervous tissue,” hence our innate propensity to perceive superhuman and supernatural causes when confronting the unknown.
Nietzsche puts it like this: “All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we
ourselves bring to them…we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same
necessity with which the spider spins.” This, of course, applies to religious dogmas and theological speculations, too.
In “From Beyond,” Crawford Tillinghast wants to see “things which no breathing creature has yet
seen…overleap time, space, and dimensions, and…peer to the bottom of creation.” The terror is
in what slips through the rift and runs amok in this dimension. His scientific triumph quickly
becomes a horrific nightmare, one that echoes Nietzsche’s caveat about attaining transgressive
knowledge: “If but for an instant [humans] could escape from the prison walls” of belief, our
“‘self consciousness’ would be immediately destroyed.” Here in lies the source of our conundrum, the existential
absurdity, the Scylla and Charybdis created by our inherent curiosity: we need to attain knowledge to better ensure
our chances of fitting our ecological conditions and passing our genes along to the next
generation, and yet, this very drive can bring about our own destruction. It’s not simply that we can
unwittingly discover fatal forces. It’s when the pursuit of knowledge moves beyond seeking the information needed to survive and
gets recast in terms of discovering values and laws that supposedly pertain to the nature of the cosmos itself. Nietzsche and
Lovecraft agree this inevitably leads to existential despair because either we continue to confuse
our anthropomorphic projections with the structure of reality itself, and keep wallowing in
delusion and ignorance as a result, or we swallow the nihilistic pill and accept that we live in an
indifferent cosmos that always manages to wriggle out of even our most clear-headed attempts
to grasp and control it. So it’s a question of what’s worse: the terror of the unknown or the terror
of the known? Nietzsche is optimistic about the existential implications of this dilemma. There is a third option worth
pursuing: in a godless, meaningless universe, we have poetic license to become superhuman creatures capable of creating the values
and meanings we need and want. I don’t know if Lovecraft is confident enough in human potential to endorse Nietzsche’s remedy,
though. If the words of Francis Thurston, the protagonist from his most influential story, “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), are any
indication of his beliefs, then Lovecraft doesn’t think our epistemological quest will turn out well:
“[S]ome day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
terrifying vistas of reality…we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from
the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Object-Oriented Ontology
Focus on the inability of consciousness to describe in Lovecraft’s fiction breaks down
object/subject hierarchies
Stefans 13 [Brian Kim Stefans, April 6th, 2013, Assistant English professor at UCLA, “Let’s Get Weird: On
Graham Harman’s H.P. Lovecraft”, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/lets-get-weird-on-grahamharmans-h-p-lovecraft#]
Few movements in recent philosophy have had as startling a rise as that of the writers loosely
grouped under the heading “Speculative Realists.” Attention to this movement, which includes Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain
Hamilton Grant, Levi Bryant, and Quentin Meillassoux — sidestepping the controversy of whether it in fact is a “movement,” and, if it is,
whether “speculative realism” accurately describes their program — is growing exponentially, not just in universities but also among the
unaffiliated continental philosophy junkies who troll the blogosphere. The
one principle that is inarguably shared by these
philosophers is quite simple: they wish to retrieve philosophy from a tendency initiated, or at least
made unavoidable, by the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that the subject (meaning a human
being) can ever know anything about the external world due to the very fact of subjectivity. For him,
reality is always mediated by cognition, and the thinkable has a basic handicap: it is just thought.
Nothing comes from outside into the mind, in other words, that is not turned into thought; the radical
epistemologist argues that all we can know lies in the firm foundations of what is available to the
senses, while the radical idealist argues that nothing remains in this thinking of whatever it was that
spawned the thought, leaving one at the impasse of believing that all of reality is virtual, a bunch of
mental actions. The result, according to the speculative realists, is that philosophy since Kant has been
stuck with making this very mind→object relationship the locus and subject of philosophy, thus
shutting down the project of metaphysics, the search for absolute laws beyond what can be
established by experimental science. Quentin Meillassoux has dubbed this mind→object relationship
— the impasse that is at the heart of the Kantian tradition — “correlationism,” and the term has
become a rallying cry for speculative realists. Harman’s philosophy displaces the mind→object
relationship with that of object→object, the “mind” being just one object among many. Oddly, though
Meillassoux names correlationism as the primary curse of the Kantian tradition, he also seems the most devoted of his peers to preserving the
best part of it by making it the one place where he claims anything like an absolute exists. To Meillassoux (who, coincidentally or consequently,
is also a fan of Lovecraft), the universe is not characterized by necessity (God-given or inevitable laws) but by a radical contingency, a “hyperchaos” amidst which
the only thing that could be seen as absolute is the mind→object relationship
itself. How Meillassoux gets there is not our concern here; suffice it to say that the two philosophers
share a fairly Lovecraftian attitude. They believe that there is a form of “realism” available to
metaphysics, even when mucking in the world of what will always be unknown to human
consciousness. This second Copernican revolution in philosophy, which situates the mind as one object in dizzying free-fall among many,
might seem “the end of the world as we know it” for normative humanists, but the speculative realists, like Michael Stipe before them, “feel
fine.” Harman,
for all of his concern with objects (his branch of speculative realism has been christened
“object-oriented ontology”), is not a materialist, and he’s certainly no empiricist. He believes that
scientific pursuits that seek the elemental building blocks of the universe are getting most of the story
wrong, for though we might be able to learn of the subatomic composition of, say, uranium, the banana or the West Nile virus, none of that
knowledge exhausts the ways that an object can affect reality — which is to say, the way objects can relate to each other. An idiosyncratic
feature of Harman’s philosophy is that “objects” for him are not just things, and certainly not just
natural things, but also concepts, imagined entities, and nearly any entity that can have some effect
on reality for however long or short a time, on however large or small a scale, and at whatever level of
availability to human perception or “science.” In Harman’s universe, then, not only are bananas
objects, but so are aggregate things we create out of bananas (like banana splits), the component things
that make up the banana (like the banana’s skin and its pulpy interior), imagined things we derive from bananas (like
the Bananaman cartoon, or, I guess, Bananarama), as well as the corporations behind the cultivation, delivery, and
marketing of bananas (like Chiquita Banana). This free-flow among a plethora of relations — from artificial to
nature, from human to nonhuman, from “thing” to “idea,” with no possibility for hierarchy or a
taxonomy — is a theme Harman picks up from “actor-network” theory, a creation of sociologist Bruno Latour, which posits the necessarily
“hybrid” nature of a reality in which an arcane experiment in quantum physics could be affected by a sex scandal, an epidemic, Hurricane
Sandy, political indifference, or a speed bump. Harman worked as a sportswriter while pursuing his degree in philosophy, and any baseball fan
knows that limiting your study of “reality” to the operations of physics misses nearly the whole story. Like a scientist, a fan might speculate on
ball speed, the fitness of players, and even the level of oxygen available in Coors Field, but the play-by-play is incomplete without banter about
the outrageous contracts, speculations about drug use, general kibitzing about the mythologies behind certain stadiums or franchises, the
scandalous press relations of certain players, the classic games, the world records, and so on. We can discuss “baseball,” then, as an object
composed of hundreds of other objects all in interrelation; to discuss the game merely on the level of physics — what empirical science would
be able to tell us exists — would be absurd. Harman is unusual in the metaphysical tradition in that he is comfortable with the fact that objects
will never be fully revealed and that they in fact are always in a state of retreat, not simply from the mind (which is just another object) but also
from each other. In Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy, Harman
enlists Lovecraft in his battle with epistemology
and materialism — Lovecraft himself expressed loathing for normative science, and certainly had no
love for legitimate academics — but also against correlationism: the conviction that all the mind could
ever know are purely mental phenomena, which ultimately led (and here we are brushing with broad strokes) to
the so-called “linguistic” turn of much 20th-century philosophy (most characteristically that of Wittgenstein and
Derrida). To that extent, Lovecraft’s failure to engage in the linguistic experimentation of his high Modernist contemporaries does not make
him some kind of recalcitrant provincial, but rather a sensible (if xenophobic) voyager who simply did not want to make the claim that language
was all there was. Lovecraft’s language “fails” only insofar as the narrators fail to get into words, to journalize, some experience that simply
cannot be fully available to the meager human senses and mind. For the most part, Lovecraft is happy to use language as a simple, functional
tool, rather than to insist at every moment through linguistic estrangement — like, say, a Stein or a Beckett — that language is not what you
think it is (and, consequently, that language is everything). For Lovecraft, it's the universe, not language, that is not what you think it is. So what
is it then? Well, weird.
Otherization
Cthulhu problematizes the naming of an ‘other.’ This creates a disturbance in language
such that minoritarian literature is made possible
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
Deleuze and Guattari tell us that "minor authors are foreigners in their own tongue. If they are bastards, if they experience themselves as
bastards, it is due not to a mixing or intermingling of languages but rather to a subtraction and variation of their own language achieved by
stretching tensors through it" (TP 105). The difficulty in placing Lovecraft within one (or any) "appropriate" genre reflects his characters' trauma
at finding they are both bastards without human genealogy and progeny of collective, unseen, and a-genus monster gods. It can be argued that
Lovecraft's literary forefathers, just as his protagonists' outer-dimensional ones, are at once alien to him and unconsciously influential
(especially in the case of, for example, Machen). Deleuze and Guattari point out that minor literature can only be found in what cannot be
that Lovecraft's project
"makes explicit the problem of naming all that is 'other'" (39), citing Lovecraft's claim that "I am not even certain how I
perceived but which can be accessed and encountered within this language. Rosemary Jackson argues
am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will
be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard" (qtd. in Jackson 39-40). Interestingly, Jackson places the literature of
Blanchot and Lovecraft within the same argument, suggesting that Lovecraft could be considered a poststructural as well as a fantasy author. In
minor literature the
"problem" of naming the other catalyzes a disturbance in language which stretches,
contracts and turns the tensors toward a minor literature, precisely because the other, so ubiquitous
in continental philosophy, is the minoritarian. Minor literature can access the variables and
distributions that are and are caused by the minoritarian "as a potential, creative and created,
becoming" (Deleuze and Guattari, TP 106). Lovecraft pleads for the reception of his language as a mediation
rather than as a description. Deleuze emphasises that mediation is the point where truth is insignificant in the face of relevance and
necessity (Negotiations 130). He also writes that minority discourse is created by mediators (Negotiations 126), among which
he includes both the writer and the reader, or precisely, the encounter and the pursuit.
We solve- the question that we ask of you as the judge is why are we so afraid of
these so called “horror stories.” Only when we accept our fear of becoming
minoritarian and encounter Lovecraft’s cosmic horror we can break from static being
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
It may seem ambitious to suggest that Lovecraft could be useful for negotiating problems faced by feminism,
postcolonialism, and minoritarian trajectories of desire. Just as Pelagia Goulimari attempts to rescue Deleuze and
Guattari's minoritarian politics from scathing criticism by certain corporealist feminists, so I suggest that the event of encounter with
Lovecraft's work is neither real nor fantastic, but is its own concrete, abstracting territoriality . Goulimari
says that Deleuze and Guattari's minoritarian politics might appear to be "totalising abstractions" that "ignore the concrete particularity of very
different territorialities" (115). However, Goulimari argues that "Particularity manifests itself in action, in the various majoritarian and
minoritarian processes at work within and between territories. Particularity itself becomes process and invention: invention of artificial
monsters are
singular particularities, and each demands a mobile encounter that is unlike any other. Our
encounters with Lovecraft's works and worlds are frightening not because of their population but
territorialities and minoritarian becomings" (115). Lacking genesis and destination, family and familiarity, Lovecraft's
because of the ways we are forced to populate the vertiginous vectors upon which they launch the
creative act of thinking through reading. Horror becomes ambiguous at best and trite at the worst; the political
question is "of what are we afraid?" Becoming-minoritarian is frightening. The final element of
becoming is the encounter with the imperceptible but nonetheless so terribly present, from which
point we access the beyond-becoming, the absolute potential without any minoritarian
destination, even though in becoming we know we will never arrive. Our encounter with Lovecraft's
cosmic horror requires the ethical turn that becoming requires, to be part of a community that is
neither real nor perceptible but that irrefutably and (irresistibly – in reference to the crucial role
desire plays in becoming) becomes our pack. Deleuze affirms that "whether they're real or imaginary, animate or
inanimate, you have to form your mediators… I need my mediators to express myself and they'd never express without me: you're always
working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own" (Negotiations 125). When
our pack is defined by movement,
quality, and the capacity to perceive their alterity, we are becoming-minoritarian. Lovecraft stretches
this limit and finds therein both wonder and horror. In our encounter with this particular mediator,
we express ourselves as limit-minoritarians; and through the terrifying creativity that Lovecraft's work
demands of its readers, we find an imminent opening out.
Politics
No Cede the Political--Lovecraft’s Writings Have a Larger Political Context and Are a
Prerequisite to Further Political Engagement
MacCormick, 10 [Patricia, Patricia teaches modules on continental philosophy, post-structuralism,
film, sexuality and feminism at Anglia Ruskin University and has a PhD in Philosophy, “Lovecraft through
Deleuzio-Guattarian Gates,”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v020/20.2.maccormack.html#front]
This essay extends what Deleuze and Guattari call unnatural participation, understood as an impossible yet compulsory relation to the
perception of cosmic horrors, in order to rethink the category of the human. The figure of gates of perception posits relation as an opening up
rather than as an elliptical return to genesis. Through
demonic relations Deleuze and Guattari seek abstract
machines of relation that are no less real for being abstract, and argue, along with Joshi, that Lovecraft is a realist
because of the function rather than the content of his work. This means that Lovecraft's writings can be understood in a
wider, political context instead of as belonging to a genre which distances itself from social life. Deleuze
and Guattari connect this idea to Spinoza's claim that ethics is produced not by commensurable relation, which privileges (usually) one form
and function over another, but rather by what is produced between the two. Lovecraft's literature
offers an art event that is
no less real for catalysing new gates of perception and possibilities of relation. By accessing
Lovecraft's necronomic gates toward the infinite and imperceptible but also the immanently present,
we are forced to think, first, potentiality as an encounter with alterity, and, second, the political risks and
imperatives of ourselves as becoming-other. This essay is structured as a series of "gates" in the sense of those bridges that
Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy, describe as creating a "new concept of perceptual space" (19). As becomings concern not what
structures relationships (between two reified entities), but what is produced through unnatural relations, gates of Lovecraftian perception open
what Deleuze and Guattari call unheard of becomings – not unheard of because they have never been heard before, but because they cannot
be heard through established, majoritarian vocalisations.
Zizek
The Reading of Lovecraft is Key to Identifying Zizek’s Concept of the Real
Noys 10, Benjamin.
Leads the Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester, research is focused in contemporary Continental
theory, cultural politics, literature, and avant-garde and popular culture. “The Horror of the Real: Žižek’s Modern Gothic” Page 1-2
The opening of H. P. Lovecraft’s short story ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) offers a concise statement of his
philosophy of cosmic horror: 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. The sciences, each straining in its
own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated
knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we
shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a
new dark age. (1999: 139) This modern Gothic vision of science opening up ‘terrifying vistas of reality’
that defy our everyday commonsense view of existence is uncannily consonant with the work of
Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek is it is the science of psychoanalysis that pieces together our ‘dissociated
knowledge’ into the truth that threatens us with madness: the kernel of reality is the horror of the
real. We flee from this insight into the ‘dark age’ of the ‘minimum of dealization’ that allows us to
bear this horror. If, as Sarah Kay argues, all of Žižek’s theoretical production can be considered as ‘thinking, writing and reading about
the Real’ (2003: 1) then his work is implicitly Gothic through and through. Žižek glosses the Lacanian concept of the Real as
‘the irreducible kernel of jouissance that resists all symbolization’ (1999: 14) – an experience of shattering
enjoyment that lies outside the field of representation. 1 Whereas Lacan noted that the concept of the ‘Real’
initially presented itself to psychoanalysis ‘in the form of trauma’ (1979: 55), Žižek figures this trauma as a
moment of horror. Although the ‘Real’ is positioned by Žižek as unrepresentable he constantly tries to approach it by allusion to
contemporary horror Gothic texts, from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) to the works of Patricia Highsmith and Stephen King. These texts
provide the figuration of the breakdown of representation in the revelation of the appearance of the
Real as a horrifying ‘Thing’. I want to go further, however, and argue that Žižek not only props his reading of the
Real on these texts but also deploys Gothic conventions within his own writing. In particular he uses that
convention, identified by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in which the Gothic text traces the effects of an ‘unspeakable’ horror through the
fragmentation and disruption of its own narrative devices (Sedgwick 1980: 15). The repetitiveness of Žižek’s texts, their leaps of subject and
their fragmentary nature mimic, in narrative form, what Sedgwick describes as the Gothic’s ‘despair about any direct use of language’ (1980:
15); hence, his
use of Gothic texts as a mode of indirect allusion, as a kind of stop-gap measure, in the
exemplification the ‘unspeakable’ Real.
Unknown Key
Unlike much of classical horror, Lovecraftian fiction draws on the fear of the unknown
to strike our primal emotions
Lovecraft 27 (H.P., “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, published in 1927; http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx)
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear
of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and
dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic
sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid
idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader
toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has
survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound
and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and
permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness . The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it
demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free
enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary
feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first
place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But
the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of
the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite
annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or
tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and
closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though
not numerically great, minority of our species.
Man’s first instincts and emotions formed his response to the
environment in which he found himself . Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose
causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand—and the universe teemed with them in the early days—
were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having
few and simple ideas and limited experience. The
unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our
primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind
for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence
whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part . The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the
notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the
supernatural, that
we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has
become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must , as a matter of plain scientific fact, be
regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for
though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the
outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around all the objects and processes that were once mysterious,
however well they may now be explained. And more than this,
there is an actual physiological fixation of the old
instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious
mind to be purged of all sources of wonder. Because we remember pain and the menace of death
more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been
captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent
side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore . This tendency, too, is naturally
enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil
possibilities.
When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is
superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose
vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the
dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the
hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars , or press
hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse. With this foundation, no
one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will
exist ; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite
leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt
them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem “Childe Roland”; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr.
Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, “The Upper Berth” and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
social worker, “The Yellow Wall Paper”; whilst the humourist W. W. Jacobs produced that able melodramatic bit called “The Monkey’s Paw”.
This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically
widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to
be sure, has its place , as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing
wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural;
but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its
purest sense . The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to
rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be
present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception
of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only
safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. Naturally we cannot
expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven ,
and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in
memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the allimportant thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation
of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in
which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such
narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of true
supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author’s intent, or by the mere
mechanics of the plot; but
by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point . If the proper
sensations are excited, such a “high spot” must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged
down. The
one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a
profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening,
as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. And of course, the
more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the
given medium.
Psychological terror myths are firmly rooted in cultures all over the world that still
effect the modern genre
Lovecraft 27 (H.P., “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, published in 1927; http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx)
As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as
old as human thought and speech themselves. Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all
races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a
prominent feature of the
elaborate ceremonial magic , with its rituals for the evocation of daemons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times,
and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon
well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose
echoes extend obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and there
is
evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but
vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward
expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both of
random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabbalism, which had descended to
them . Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to
take the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, the
weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into
sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black Boreal forests
and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and
convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult
of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs—descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race
of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds—were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of
immemorial antiquity. This secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of
years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions
involved, was marked by wild “Witches’ Sabbaths” in lonely woods and atop distant hills on
Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe’en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle;
and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend , besides provoking extensive witchcraft- prosecutions of which
the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret system
of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous “Black Mass”; whilst operating toward the same end we may
note the activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical—the astrologers, cabbalists, and alchemists of the
Albertus Magnus or Raymond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the mediaeval horror-spirit
in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced
into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the daemoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among
the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a
most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest of Christian doctrines to the most monstrous morbidities of
witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists—Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr.
John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like—were born. In
this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre
myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by
modern technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of
mankind’s permanent heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, the
daemon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the
night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer—all these may be found in that curious body
of mediaeval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest,
the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their
strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.
The supernatural in horror combats realism
Lovecraft 27 (H.P., “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, published in 1927; http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx)
For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an
interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and
sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as
developed both through the fatigued reaction of “occultists” and religious fundamentalists against
materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and
broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing
astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present
moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is
unquestionably more cordiality shewn toward weird writings than when, thirty years ago, the best of
Arthur Machen’s work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure ’nineties. Ambrose Bierce, almost
unknown in his own time, has now reached something like general recognition. Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either
direction. In any case an approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while we may justly expect a further subtilisation of
technique, we
have no reason to think that the general position of the spectral in literature will be
altered. It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal as always to a limited
audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from
phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic
theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.
A/T: Death DA’s
Our analysis allows us to see the different ways that life functions in relation to its
thanatropic regression and how all systems share many ways in which they function in
relation to the truth of extinction
Negarestani 11, Reza. Iranian author, philosopher, pioneer of theory-fiction, currently lecturing on
the evolution of modern systems of knowledge. "Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and
Organic Necrocacy," in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism eds. Bryant, Srnicek,
and Harman (Melbourne, Australia: re.Press, 2011)
Since cosmic extinction is just as much of an irrecusable factum for philosophy as biological death—although curiously, philosophers seem to
assume that the latter is some- how more relevant than the former, as though familiarity were a criterion of philosophical relevance—every
horizonal reserve upon which embodied thought draws to fuel its quest will be necessarily finite. Why then should thought continue investing
in an account whose dwindling reserves are circumscribed by the temporary parameters of embodiment? Why keep playing for time? A
change of body is just a way of postponing thought’s inevitable encounter with the death that drives
it in the form of the will to know. And a change of horizon is just a means of occluding the
transcendental scope of extinction, precisely insofar as it levels the difference between life and death,
time and space, revoking the ontological potency attributed to temporalizing thought in its alleged
invulnerability to physical death.14¶ Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s thanatropic regression is an attempt to enact
eliminativism as an ultimate vector of enlightenment and emancipative disenchantment. Yet to cosmically enact eliminativism,
one must have a model to divest all horizons of interiority (from organisms to stars to galaxies and even matter itself)
of their ontological potencies and so-called vitalistic opportunities for carrying on the life of thought.
The model capable of guaranteeing such a great purge is Freud’s account of the death-drive. However, as Brassier knows, there are two
obstacles for the appropriation of Freud’s model: First, as we argued earlier, the allegedly inhumanist conception of capitalism and especially
Nick Land’s Freudian reformulation of Capital justifies capitalist indulgences of anthropic agencies as ethical and political vectors. Therefore, the
inhumanist conception of capitalism strategically venerates vitalism and its affirmationist policies on behalf of Freud’s theory of the deathdrive. The second obstacle is that Freud’s account of the death-drive merely includes a disintegrating transition from the organic to the
inorganic, which is to say, the thanatropic regression is peculiar to organic life in general. For this reason, Brassier
tweaks Freud’s
account of the death-drive by reinscribing and reenacting it on a cosmic level. This way the vector of
eliminativism can abandon the horizon of every interiority—whether of the organic or the inorganic (base-matter as
such)—and in doing so, ensures the cosmic unbinding of enlightenment’s project of disenchantment.
Concurrently, the cosmic reinscription of Freud’s account of the death-drive can terminate the sufficiency of
capitalist participation for accelerating the disenchanting emancipation harboured by the truth of
extinction. As even matter is deserted in order to unbind the abyssal realms of speculative thought, human participation for
accelerating capitalist singularity loses its momentum as the bilateral aspect of participation is
usurped by the unilateralizing power of the ultimate cosmic extinction. Yet the cancellation of sufficiency neither
guarantees an immaculate future for enlightenment nor provides adequate reasons as to why senseless human participations in capitalism
must be stopped. Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s model only manages
to successfully eliminate the vitalistic
horizon implicit in the antihumanist definition of capitalism proposed by Land. Yet it leaves the aporetic truth of
capitalism as an inevitable singularity for dissipation bound to the conservative order of the anthropic horizon unharmed. By leaving the
fundamental body and the primary front of the Landian definition of capitalism unharmed, Brassier’s own project of enlightenment ironically
turns into a dormant ethico-political enterprise with an utopianistic twist. Brassier’s account of eliminativist enlightenment, in this sense, basks
in the comforts of an utopianistic trust in opportunities brought about by the neurocognitive plasticity whilst peacefully cohabiting with
capitalism on the same earth.¶ In the next section, we shall see why Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s energetic model fails to disturb
the integrity of capitalism as a singularity for dissipation adopted by the economic order of the human organism in its accelerating pursuit for
intensive preservation and extensive sustenance (complexification). In this regard, we shall elaborate how singling out certain aspects of
Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression enables Land to erroneously attribute antihumanist and hence disenchantingly emancipative aspects
to capitalism. Also in the same vein, we shall argue that the persuasion of Land’s discriminating reading of Freud’s account of the death-drive
ultimately renders Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of the death-drive unobjectionable and oblivious to the aporetic truth of capitalism. The next
section will also attempt to answer the two questions posed at the end of section I.¶ In what seems to be the apotheosis of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, Freud writes:¶ In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the his- tory of the earth
we live in and of its relation to the sun. [...] It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state
of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at
one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as
a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to
say that ‘the aim of life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’. [...] For a long time, perhaps,
living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences
altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course
of life and to make ever more complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faith- fully kept
to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life.15¶ Freud then explicitly
characterizes the nature of this thanatropic tendency as a monopolistic regime of death supported by
economical limits and conservative conditions of the organism:¶ They [self-preservative instincts] are
component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to
ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism it self. We have no longer
to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every
obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.16¶ Freud’s account of
the death-drive or theory of thanatropic regression consists of three interconnected aspects, a speculative daemon with a tri-lobed head.
Despite having their own lines of speculative thought with their respective consequences, these three aspects are intricately connected and
cannot operate without each other. For the sake of analytical precision, we shall dissect these lobes or interconnected aspects as follows:¶ 1.
The first aspect (the disenchanting / objectifying truth of extinction): The
organism (as an index of interiority) temporally extends from the
inorganic state yet it is energetically driven—by all means and at all costs—to its precursor exteriority by flexing its contraction back to
the inorganic (decontraction). The thanatropic regression aims toward a death whose reality can neither be
indexed as a past state (hence not susceptible to retrogressive experience) nor a future point (hence independent of the reality
of the organism). The reality of the originary death is exorbitantly exterior to conditions of life to which it traumatically gives rise to.
Thanatropic regression harbours the disenchanting truth of extinction as an anterior posteriority
whose actual yet independent objectivity and unilateral demand for objectification make it
inassimilable for transcendental subjectivity. Since the actuality and independence of extinction concurrently precede and
supersede existential temporality, extinction is thus irreducible to varieties of death-spiritualism.¶ 2. The second
aspect (the praxis of dissipation): Although the thanatropic regression toward the precursor exteriority is unilateralized by the precursor
exteriority, its dynamic course and economy follows the conservative nature of the organism. The
accurately, the course of decontraction toward the originary exorbitant death is
dissipative tendency, or more
shaped by the conservative nature of the
organism. The energetic incongruity between the dysteleologic death and the organic conservative nature (i.e. the medium-course) causes
the thanatropic regression to be topologically, dynamically and economically conceived as a twist or an inflective curve. Life, in this
sense, is an inflection of death. Despite the inevitability of death, life’s dynamic and economic twist opens up convoluted horizons
for participation. The umwege of life or the inflection of death is twistedly open to praxis (hence the possibility of political intervention and
economic participation).¶ 3. The third aspect (the dictatorial tendency of affordance): Since the course and the medium of thanatropic
regression are determined by the economic order and conservative conditions of the organism, the modus operandi of the
organism’s
dissipative tendency is subjected to the quantitative and qualitative reductions dictated by the
economical affordability of the organism. To put it differently, conservative conditions of the organism impose an economical
restriction on the dissipative tendency of the organism so that the organism only dies in those ways which are immanent to, or more precisely,
affordable for it. The organism can only follow its own affordable and thus economically conservative path to death in order to decontract.
Accelerating the dissipative tendency through political and economic praxis, therefore, does not lead to divergence from the
conservative economy, but to the intensive re-enactment of such economy’s dictatorial foundations in regard
to death.¶ According to what we elaborated earlier in section II, Land’s libidinal materialist conception of capitalism as an inhumanist praxis
which is open to the liquidating process of emancipation accentuates the second aspect of Freud’s model. Yet at the same time, it also
relatively adopts the first aspect of Freud’s account of the death-drive within the terrestrial or rather a non-ubiquitous scope. Consequently, in
Land’s account of capitalism the politico-economic praxis (conceived by the detours and anomalies of life) meets and coincides with the cosmic
vector of emancipation. Yet, through the cosmic reinscrip-tion of the first aspect, Brassier elegantly shows that the
emancipative truth
of extinction ultimately annuls the vitalistic proclivities in the second aspect and widens the scope of
emancipation from the terrestrial to the cosmic. And it is this cosmic unbinding that inflicts a decisive blow
against the sufficiency of human interests and desires surreptitiously integrated within capitalism as
propulsive elements. Brassier cosmically reinscribes the first aspect of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression in
order to extend the eliminativist / disenchanting vector of enlightenment all the way to the cosmic exteriority as the
unilateralizing truth for the mobilization of speculative thought. However, Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of Freud’s account of the death-drive
also results in the cosmic unbinding of the second aspect (viz. the theory of umwege) which is inseparable from the first. Yet in this case the
increasing convolutions of the dissipative tendency do not suggest new opportunities for pro- longing the life of thought. Instead these
mazy convolutions bespeak of a twisted chain of traumatically nested horizons of interiorities which
must be deserted or betrayed, one in favour of another. Here umwege presents a graph for the external objectification
of thought, a turning inside-out of thought whereby the commitment to thought is supplanted by the
treachery of the object on behalf of extinction. This is why Brassier’s cosmic reinscription of the first aspect ingeniously
conjures a shadow of a non-vitalist ethics or a desertifying politics of eliminativism which aims at
objectifying every horizon of interiority (including thought and embodiment) so as to expose them to the
desertifying vector of eliminativism. However, both Land and Brassier seem to remain oblivious to the implications of the third
aspect (viz. the dictatorial tendency of affordance) and exclude it from their calculations in regard to capitalism and enlightenment.
A/T: Framework
The framework for this debate should not be about plans or what we should do;
rather, if the premise of Lovecraft’s description of the cosmos-as-hostile is correct,
then the primary question for debates is how they produce gaps in knowledge to
insulate us from the terrible horror of being.
Stefans 13 [Brian Kim Stefans, April 6th, 2013, Assistant English professor at UCLA, “Let’s Get Weird:
On Graham Harman’s H.P. Lovecraft”, http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/lets-get-weird-on-grahamharmans-h-p-lovecraft#]
Weird Realism opens with an idiosyncratic set of short essays that lay out the method of the book. Harman notes that there is a
choice that philosophers generally make between being a “destroyer of gaps” — those who want to
reduce reality to a simple principle — and “creators of gaps” — those who point to those areas to
which we will possibly never have access. He deems the latter “productionists” (in contrast to reductionists)
and writes: “If we apply this distinction to imaginative writers, then H.P. Lovecraft is clearly a
productionist author. No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of
language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.” He then describes the more
literary aspects of his method. “The Problem with Paraphrase” takes aim at critic Edmund Wilson’s tendency to rewrite the “content” of
Lovecraft’s stories in his own terms and then attack that effigy rather than the writing itself. “The Inherent Stupidity of All Content” develops
Slavoj Žižek’s theme of the “inherent stupidity of all proverbs” (in The Abyss of Freedom, in which Žižek amusingly proves that any proverb can
be entirely reversed and give us access to an equally wise perspective). Harman
combines both Wilson’s and Žižek’s
techniques — ridiculously literal paraphrases in a variety of styles and attempted textual reversals —
in a method of his own that he calls “ruination,” arguing that “after all, the fact that a statement can
be ruined means that this has not already occurred. It also means that we can use possible ruinations, and sometimes
possible improvements, as a method of analyzing the effects of a literary statement.” This is, in some ways, a scientific method: Harman wishes
to isolate qualities of Lovecraft’s writings by driving them out of their hiding places, like subjecting a bacterium to a stain, intense heat, or a
college lecture by Newt Gingrich in order to elicit new behaviors. The
practice of “ruination” demonstrates the incredible
precision with which Lovecraft approached description. If Harman is enlisting Lovecraft as a foot
soldier against bland, realist empiricism, he has to prove that Lovecraft’s apparent failures to describe
were a form of intellectual honesty rather than simply bad, clumsy style. Harman describes two
stylistic techniques of Lovecraft’s that highlight this very theme of failure. The first is the “vertical” or
“allusive” style, typified in this passage from the “Call of Cthulhu”: If I say that my somewhat
extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human
caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing […] but it was the general outline of the
whole which made it most shockingly frightful. For Harman, such a passage draws us away from trying
to recreate the creature in the terms of our loathsome, mundane world of Euclidean time and space.
Lovecraft situates the creature partly in the diseased imagination of a narrator who claims that the
description is “not unfaithful” but hardly correct, and also “asks us to ignore the surface properties of
dragon and octopus […] and to focus instead on the fearsome ‘general outline of the whole.’” In this
way, Lovecraft opens up a “gap”: things are moving along swimmingly in the story, with the narrator
sane and physical reality recognizably accessible and ordered; just at the moment when the narrator
experiences something truly astounding — the color out of space, the shadow out of time, like in the title! — language
breaks down, and all you are left with is the “general outline of the whole.” The opposite method,
which Harman calls “horizontal” or “cubist,” occurs when Lovecraft begins a description by claiming
that he’s at an impasse, but then lets fly with an abundance of information, as in this passage from
“The Dunwich Horror”: It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could
describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of
aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known
three dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp
of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous […] Above the waist it was semianthropomorphic; though its chest […] had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black,
and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worse; for here all human resemblance left
off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles
with red sucking mouths protruded limply. And
that’s just the beginning. “The power of language is no longer
enfeebled by an impossibly deep and distant reality,” Harman writes. “Instead, language is
overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surfaces and aspects of the thing.” It’s like one of those scenes that seem to
occur at the climax of any long-form Japanese fantasy anime: a creature starts to expand, but rather than simply getting fatter, every aspect
begins to take on its own form, like a Rembrandt turning into an Arcimboldo. Both
methods isolate moments of “crisis,” in
the sense Thomas Kuhn describes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: observations can be made
but there is no place for them in the dominant scientific paradigm and hence no language, setting the
stage for a “paradigm shift” that not only turns the apparent anomalies into “facts” but also drives a
few scientists bonkers in the meantime. Maybe that’s why Lovecraft’s heroes are always getting
nauseous when I, a Star Wars kid, would most expect them to be quite thrilled. The bulk of Weird Realism is
comprised of 100 mini-essays, many only a page long, each of which examines a short passage of one of Lovecraft’s major stories. Most expand
outward to examine narrative tropes and stylistic tics that recur across several stories. Fans of Lovecraft will be satisfied: Harman seems to have
missed nothing. Of the volume of writings by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred called the Necronomicon, Harman outlines the many ways Lovecraft
establishes its reality: by reminding us of the copies scattered in libraries across the world (notably a heavily-guarded copy in Harvard’s Widener
library); by having the book appear in several lists with actual and fictitious books; by referring to several translations of the book; and finally —
this goes beyond Lovecraft himself — by the fact of the book’s appearance in the stories of his circle of friends. (Curious to me is that Harman
doesn’t address whether or not the Necronomicon actually exists, if not as a book then as a concept that has reality-effects. But perhaps that is
a foregone conclusion for Harman.) Harman’s
take on a certain famous passage in which a sailor is “swallowed
up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved
as if it were obtuse” gives a particularly good sense of how he is able to skirt between literary and
philosophical language with ease: Lovecraft introduces a problem. Not only is Cthulhu something over
and above the three creatures he partially resembles […] we now find that even acute and obtuse
angles must be something over and above their qualities. There seems to be a “spirit” of acute angles,
a “general outline of the whole” which allows them to remain acute angles even in cases where they
behave as if they were obtuse. Not since Pythagoras have geometrical entities been granted this sort
of psychic potency, to the point that they have a deeper being over and above their measurable and
experienceable traits. While the lovers of novels might be less pleased when Harman makes grand statements about Lovecraft’s
greater importance to literature than Proust or Joyce (he does!), those of us with no visceral knowledge of the nooks and crannies of the history
of philosophy can find pleasure in learning that there is, after Pythagoras (and before Kandinsky!), a tradition of attributing “psychic potency”
to squares and circles. “[I]t
is unclear how the mere fact of ‘behaving as obtuse’ would allow an angle to
‘swallow up’ an unwary sailor,” Harman continues: Sketch the diagram of an obtuse angle for yourself, and you will see the
difficulty in intuitively grasping what has happened. If the phrase “she looked daggers at him” is an example of catachresis in language, a
misapplication of a word to gain metaphorical effects, then the acute angle obtusely swallowing a sailor is a fine example of catachresis in
geometry. We might as well say: “It was the number 21, but it behaved as though it were the number 6.” One way of reconciling this might be
to consider the problem of painting. Any image that pretends to take place in “Renaissance perspective” is bound to have a “vanishing point” at
which parallel lines will appear to converge. Consequently, in films — say an Expressionist one like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or the finale to
Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, or Michel Gondry’s delirious music video for the Chemical Brothers’ “Let Forever Be” — we are
repeatedly confronted with seemingly depthless triangles turning out to be boxes with hidden monsters or dancing girls in them, not to
mention the reverse (poor Wile E. Coyote): landscapes with deep perspective turning out to be flat, painful façades. But
Harman’s
approach is more interesting. Rather than treating the passage as a problem of ekphrasis (from my
perspective it appeared acute, but it was really obtuse), he treats it as a statement about reality: the
angle really is acute, but lo and behold, it has properties it simply hasn’t revealed to us yet! The
knowledge that acute angles actually have four equal sides, or that an acute angle is really the
discorporated spirit of Liberace, may be just around the corner. There are some places where Weird Realism seems to
fail, most notably when Harman makes evaluative claims about other writers; he doesn’t seem content to
merely situate Lovecraft among the likes of Proust and Joyce, but suggests, if only briefly, that he
surpasses them. He also doesn’t engage with any literary critical method later than that of Edmund Wilson and the New Critics. His
apparent conviction, expressed largely through exclusion, that no features of other writers seem to
produce the sorts of “gaps” that he finds so valuable in Lovecraft will no doubt be tested. I couldn’t
help thinking of John Ashbery’s mid-career poetry, for example, or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet,
both of which are filled with such mystifying gaps between object and description. The mini-essays seem to
peter out at around 85 or so, especially during the last 11, where Harman seems content to note how the late story “The Shadow Out of Time”
is just not as good as the earlier stuff; a little nip and tuck might have been in order. On occasion, it doesn’t quite seem like Harman is writing
“philosophy” so much as noting a feature of the Lovecraft universe — which is to say, he slips into writing “literary criticism,” and might be just
as happy citing Lovecraft’s linkages to Shelley and, say, later weird realist writers like Philip K. Dick or Samuel Delany as noting a feature of
Hume or Kant. But all of this points to what is one of the most salient aspects of Harman’s philosophical writing as a whole, which is that he
sees his project as an ongoing conversation with his readers and with other philosophers. The title of his excellent book on Quentin
Meillassoux, Philosophy in the Making, might just as well refer to his own work; philosophy, for Harman, isn’t just great minds articulating
correct ideas, but philosophers building a structure together, testing it, revising it, and trusting that they will continue to disagree. So the
porousness and apparent brokenness of these structural components of Weird Realism might just be my own misreading of the acute angle
that chooses to act obtuse — as if a critic of literature could ever hope for things to be otherwise.
A/T: Lovecraft = Racist
Lovecraft’s racism does not impact his philosophical viewpoints or his theories
Joshi’01 (1991, , leading expert on Lovecraft, S.T. Joshi is the Paul Elmer More fellow in Classical
Philosophy at Princeton University. St Joshi is a critic of literature specializing in the works of HP
Lovecraft. Senior editor at Chelsea Publications. He has written over 20 books, with more than 10 being
on the subject of Lovecraft, “A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.’’)
The brute fact is that by 1930 every ‘scientific’ justification for racism had been demolished. The spearhead
of the scientific opposition to racism was the anthropologist Franz Boas (1857– 1942), but I find virtually no mention of him in any of Lovecraft’s
letters or essays. The intelligentsia—among whom Lovecraft surely would have wished to number himself—had also largely repudiated racist
assumptions in their political and social thought. Indeed, such things as the classification of skulls by size or shape—which Lovecraft and Robert
E. Howard waste much time debating in their letters of the 1930s—had been shown to be preposterous and unscientific even by the late
nineteenth century.And
yet, ugly and unfortunate as Lovecraft’s racial views are, they do not materially
affect the validity of the rest of his philosophical thought. They may well enter into a significant proportion of his fiction
(miscegenation and fear of aliens are clearly at the centre of such tales as ‘The Lurking Fear’, ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, and ‘The Shadow over
Innsmouth’), but
I cannot see that they affect his metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, or even his late political
views in any meaningful way. These views do not stand or fall on racialist assumptions. I certainly
have no desire to brush Lovecraft’s racism under the rug, but I do not think that the many compelling
positions he advocated as a thinker should be dismissed because of his clearly erroneous views on
race.
Lovecraft’s views on race were political, not philosophical
Joshi, leading expert on Lovecraft, ’01 (1991, S.T. Joshi is the Paul Elmer More fellow in Classical
Philosophy at Princeton University. St Joshi is a critic of literature specializing in the works of HP
Lovecraft. Senior editor at Chelsea Publications. He has written over 20 books, with more than 10 being
on the subject of Lovecraft, “A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.’’ SP)
What Lovecraft wanted was simply familiarity—the familiarity of the milieu in a racially and culturally
homogeneous Providence that he had experienced in youth. In stating that even art must satisfy our
‘homesickness ... for the things we have known’ (‘Heri- tage or Modernism’), Lovecraft is testifying to
the homesickness he himself felt when, as an ‘unassimilated alien’ in New York or even in latter-day
Providence, he witnessed the increasing urbanization and racial heterogeneity of his region and his
country. Racialism was for him a bulwark against acknowledging that his ideal of a purely Anglo-Saxon
America no longer had any relevance and could never be recaptured.¶ More generally, the increasing
racial and cultural heterogeneity of his society was for Lovecraft the chief symbol of change—change
that was happening too fast for him to accept. The frequency with which, in his later years, he harps on
this subject—’change is intrinsically undesirable’‘Change is the enemy of everything really worth
cherishing’speaks eloquently of Lovecraft’s frantic desire for social stability and his quite sincere belief
(one, indeed, that has something to recommend it) that such stability is a necessary precondition of a
vital and profound culture.¶ Lovecraft’s final years were characterised both by much hardship (painful
rejections of his best tales and concomitant depression over the merit of his work; increasing poverty;
and, toward the very end, the onset of his terminal illness) and by moments of joy (travels all along the
eastern seaboard; the intellectual stimulus of correspondence with a variety of distinctive colleagues;
increasing adulation in the tiny worlds of amateur journalism and fantasy fandom). But to the end,
Lovecraft continued to wrestle, mostly in letters, with the fundamental issues of politics, economics,
society, and culture, with a breadth of learning, acuity of logic, and a deep humanity born of wide
observation and experience that could not have been conceived by the ‘eccentric recluse’ who had so
timidly emerged from self-imposed hermitry in 1914. That his largely private discussions did not have
any influence on the intellectual temper of the age is unfortunate; but his unceasing intellectual
vigour, even as he was descending into the final stages of cancer, is as poignant a testimonial to his
courage and his devotion to the life of the mind as anyone could wish. Lovecraft himself, at any rate,
certainly did not think the effort wasted.¶
It would be anachronistic to presume the universal desirability of diverse cultures
throughout history
Joshi, leading expert on Lovecraft, ’01 (1991, S.T. Joshi is the Paul Elmer More fellow in Classical
Philosophy at Princeton University. St Joshi is a critic of literature specializing in the works of HP
Lovecraft. Senior editor at Chelsea Publications. He has written over 20 books, with more than 10 being
on the subject of Lovecraft, “A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time.’’ SP)
Lovecraft is, of course, entirely at liberty to feel personally uncomfortable in the presence of aliens; he
is even, I believe, at liberty to wish for a culturally and racially homogeneous society. This wish is in
itself not pernicious, just as the wish for a racially and culturally diverse society—such as the United
States has now become—is not in itself self-evidently virtuous. Each has its own advantages and
drawbacks, and Lovecraft clearly preferred the advantages of homogeneity (cultural unanimity and
continuity, respect for tradition) to its drawbacks (prejudice, cultural isolation- ism, fossilization).
Where Lovecraft goes astray philosophically is in attributing his own sentiments to his ‘race’ or culture
at large.
Fiction Solvency
Top-Level
Our use of fiction allows for new forms of knowledge production that factual analysis
cannot provide
Seeley 13 (Janel Seeley, Professor of Education writing for the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
August 18, 2013 “Storytelling as Pedagogy” http://tenntlc.utk.edu/2013/08/18/1704/)
How many times have you sat down to read a story (fiction or non-fiction) and find that you just can’t put it down? Story has the power to
capture our imagination and engage our thinking and emotions (Green & Brock, 2000). What if you could engage your
students in this way? What if they were so engrossed in what you were saying that they didn’t start packing up their bags five minutes before the end of class?
What if they could better remember what you say because of the stories you tell ?¶ You may be thinking storytelling is a great
idea for the K-12 the classroom, but stories are a powerful tool in the college classroom as well. Larry Brown (2011) shares his success in storytelling in the college
classroom:¶ All life is narrative, well at least narrative is how we perceive the structure of the cosmos, derive meaning, use language, and develop
community. That seems to be a universal experience. I cannot imagine teaching informally or formally without narrative, without telling stories. So in the
undergraduate or graduate classroom, or in alternative adult education, I do tell. I am aware that considerable contemporary research
has
indicated the value and effectiveness of story in teaching/learning, but I often structure the class period
itself as a narrative plot. The class (if not the whole course) is a process of awareness, ambiguity, complexity, roles,
and resolution. I have noticed from evaluations that my students connect with key concepts through the stories used in class,
or the narrative structure of the class.¶ We can use this power of awareness and valuing to improve student learning. Through story,
students can take data and facts that might seem to be disjointed pieces of information and tie them all
together in one picture (Simmons, 2007; Green 2004). Unfortunately, facts or “truth” are not always interesting or exciting, and sometimes
when presented in a factual manner, students are not always sure what to do with these facts. For example, as
children most of us learned the concepts of sharing or playing fair through fairy tales rather than our parents simply telling us to play nice. As students, we
could picture math story problems rather than a simple equation or understood the Holocaust
through reading The Diary of Anne Frank rather than reading a textbook chapter on the war. ¶ Sometimes
presenting something as a fact may even inhibit learning or further inquiry. For example, most of us
were taught that Columbus discovered America. Upon further inquiry, however, we have learned that native
peoples told that story very differently. Storytelling offers opportunities to begin a reflective dialogue
that can provide new perspectives and contribute to the construction of new knowledge (Alterio, 2003). By
telling our own story we make meaning for others and ourselves (McAdams, 1993). In turn, suspending our assumptions
that our story is the only true story and taking time to really listen to others’ stories, we may change our
own understanding. Sharing stories together and reflecting on their meaning through dialogue can often create
brand new stories and ways of understanding.¶ For additional information on how Storytelling can be a creative and engaging tool for
instructors, check out this brief article from Observer, April, 2004. ¶ How do you develop content as story? Stories used in the classroom may be personal antidotes
from your own or others’ experiences or may be stories that you find in books, movies or other media. If you are feeling creative and would like to try creating a
story from scratch, there are seven aspects that are common to almost all stories. ¶ ¶ Creating a character or characters.¶ Decide what they look like. Are they
human, what feelings do they have and what are their strengths or weaknesses? Listeners often identify with characters. ¶ Create a challenge¶ What sorts of
challenges are facing the characters? A challenge creates excitement and suspense and keeps the listener engaged. ¶ Give your characters some motivation¶ Why
are they behaving the way they are? Why are they doing things a certain way rather than another? Make their actions believable to your listener.¶ Describe the
setting¶ Where is your story taking place? Is the setting important enough that it almost acts as another character? ¶ Create some obstacles¶ What is getting in the
way of your characters ability to solve the problem or challenge? A smooth sail doesn’t make an interesting story. ¶ Build to the climax¶ This is where your
characters confront the challenges and transformation usually takes place. This is where the lesson happens. ¶ Closing¶ Tie up any lose ends and discuss how your
character feels now that the problem has been resolved. This is where the lesson is summarized or discussed. ¶ Think of yourself as a student of storytelling and take
advantage of this Tutorial and Worksheets on the seven steps to storytelling. ¶ ¶ Students as storytellers: ¶ Of course your stories aren’t the only way for students
to learn in the classroom. Encourage
students to share their own stories. The co-creation of knowledge through
storytelling can be a powerful tool in teaching and learning. Invite students to share verbal stories, written stories or digital
stories of their experiences with the topics in your class. Assign your students a storytelling project and have them use the guidelines and worksheets presented in
the link above. Or, try this popular method of digital storytelling, or using media to tell stories.
Narratives are crucial to creating a better mode of thinking by questioning the nature
of a fact and developing your identity
Gilbert et al 05 [Dr. Jane Gilbert is an educationalist in New Zealand. She was the Chief Researcher of New Zealand Council for
Educational Research. From 2014, Jane was appointed as a professor of education at Auckland University of Technology. Rosemary Hipkin is a
Chief Researcher of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Garrick Cooper has a Bachelors and Post Graduate Degree in Maori
studies and Anthropology. “Faction or fiction: Using narrative pedagogy in school science education,”
http://www.nzcer.org.nz/system/files/14292_0.pdf]
As we said earlier, one
of the strengths of using stories in science education is that they can be used as a bridge
between narrative thinking and the less familiar logico-scientific mode of thinking. However, we need to be clear
that the two modes are quite different, and that science “proper” isn’t stories. This is a key limitation. Understanding science eventually has to
involve understanding how scientists think. However, it isn’t necessary to do this right at the very beginning. We could just use stories to teach
science in elementary schools, not in high schools. However, we think that this would be to miss the point. The transition from narrative to
logico-scientific thinking has to be scaffolded—otherwise, for most people, it simply won’t happen. Science stories are, we think, a good way of
doing this scaffolding. However, people also need explicit teaching about what it means to “think scientifically”— how it differs from
“ordinary”, everyday thinking, why it is like this, and what this kind of thinking is for. If
we see science, not as a body of
established and accepted “facts”, but as a very particular (and very difficult) way of thinking, done for very
particular reasons, then learning science involves mastering a new kind of thinking, not a set of facts. It is a
long slow journey, from one kind of thinking to another. There are many hurdles along the way, and
many stopping off points. Seeing stories as one way to lower some of these hurdles allows us to use
the strengths of stories while at the same time acknowledging their limitations (in this particular context). A second strength
of using stories to teach science is that they can make it possible for learners to see a place for themselves
in science—as active participants, not passive spectators. Good stories engage people’s interest. As they are drawn in,
people “naturally” think about what they would do in the situation the story’s characters are in. They
imagine themselves being there, they engage with the characters, and, in so doing, they learn
something about themselves—their desires and fears, and their sense of who they are. Most science stories
are hard to engage with in this way. Sometimes this is because the people in them seem too different from us “ordinary” people. This can be
because we aren’t given enough detail about the characters to see them as ordinary people like us (usually because the main focus is on
providing “the facts”). Alternatively, it can be because the “characters” aren’t people at all–they are abstract concepts (like atoms, genes, or
forces) or inanimate objects (like rocks, planets, or chemicals). Because most learners will find it hard to empathise with concepts or objects,
and even harder to identify with them, the main lesson they learn from these stories is that science doesn’t have a place for them. This is
obviously a limitation.
Understanding that there are multiple systems of knowledge production is critical to
dealing with all important issues
Gilbert et al 05 [Dr. Jane Gilbert is an educationalist in New Zealand. She was the Chief Researcher of New Zealand Council for
Educational Research. From 2014, Jane was appointed as a professor of education at Auckland University of Technology. Rosemary Hipkin is a
Chief Researcher of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Garrick Cooper has a Bachelors and Post Graduate Degree in Maori
studies and Anthropology. “Faction or fiction: Using narrative pedagogy in school science education,”
http://www.nzcer.org.nz/system/files/14292_0.pdf]
So far, we have been arguing that using
stories successfully in science education requires us to take a step back from the
conventional view of science as a fixed body of knowledge. We have argued that shifting our focus to a
view of science as a way of thinking, or a system of knowing makes it easier to see how to use stories
productively—while avoiding the pitfalls. This kind of meta-level, “big picture” systems thinking also helps us
to think about how to deal with the other important question raised in our discussion of the Tötika stories—the question
of how (if at all) to teach mätauranga Mäori alongside science in kura kaupapa Mäori. Science and mätauranga Mäori originate in very
different—and conflicting— knowledge traditions. People are at the centre of mätauranga Mäori while science, by definition, excludes them.
For some in the kura kaupapa Mäori movement, science epitomises Western European knowledge and is part of the language of the colonisers.
Thus it does not fit with the objectives of the movement and should not be taught. Some might argue that science knowledge (like mathematics
knowledge and knowledge of English) is necessary for success in the Päkehä world “outside” kura. In the words of the late Mäori leader Sir
Apirana Ngata “E tipu, e rea mö ngä rä o töu ao, ko tö ringa ki te räkau a te Päkehä hei oranga mö tö tinana” (grow and flourish during your
time in this world. With your hand [grasp] the tools of the Päkehä to provide you with physical sustenance).10 How then can science be taught
so that it doesn’t displace mätauranga Mäori or continue the process of colonisation? One way of dealing with this question is to acknowledge
(as the Tötika Teachers’ Guide attempts to do) mätauranga Mäori as one “way of knowing”, and science as another. However, if we only do
this, we find ourselves squarely in the middle of all the old debates about relativism—which “way of knowing” is “right”? Which is “true”?
Which is “best”? We need to find a way out of this trap. One way to do this, we think, is to treat mätauranga Mäori and science, not
as
“the facts”, but as discourses, systems of stories told in particular contexts for particular purposes,
that—and this is important—construct people in certain ways. If we do this, then dealing with mätauranga Mäori and Western
science isn’t a problem. Having access to two different knowledge systems becomes a resource, an asset—
not a problem. Children can learn about the different knowledge systems—how they work, what is
important in them, and when and where they should be used. However, at the same time they can
also learn to see knowledge in the “new” ways they need if they are to participate in the knowledgebased societies of the future. Just as being bilingual makes it easier to understand language as a system (and to learn a third or
fourth language), knowing about more than one form of knowledge makes it easier to understand
knowledge as a series of systems, and to learn to think in the kind of “systems”—or “big picture”—
ways needed in the new “knowledge workers”.
Stories create a performativity break down old knowledge systems
Gilbert et al 05 [Dr. Jane Gilbert is an educationalist in New Zealand. She was the Chief Researcher of New Zealand Council for
Educational Research. From 2014, Jane was appointed as a professor of education at Auckland University of Technology. Rosemary Hipkin is a
Chief Researcher of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Garrick Cooper has a Bachelors and Post Graduate Degree in Maori
studies and Anthropology. “Faction or fiction: Using narrative pedagogy in school science education,”
http://www.nzcer.org.nz/system/files/14292_0.pdf]
These two arguments focus on “business-as-usual”: that is, today’s ideas about what students should learn in science, and why they should
learn it. The third argument
for using the story mode more widely is oriented more towards the future. The
Knowledge Age literature tells us that the meaning of knowledge is changing. Knowledge is no longer “stuff” you
acquire and store away for future use. Instead it is increasingly being thought of as if it were a form of
energy, something you do things with, something you use to make new knowledge (Castells, 2000; Gee, Hull,
& Lankshear, 1996; Lash & Urry, 1994; Mulgan, 1998; Neef, 1998; Stehr, 1994). In this new age, people need new skills. They still need
traditional forms of knowledge (like science), but they now need them for quite different reasons. They need the “old” disciplines,
not so they can reproduce them and follow their rules, but so that they can use them to develop
completely new knowledge. They need the ability to put elements taken from one knowledge system
into other, completely different knowledge systems, re-arranging them to make them “work” in new
ways. (Lyotard (1984) calls this “performativity”.) This new “knowledge work” requires people to be able to move
easily between different knowledge systems, translating and mediating between them as they go.
They need to be able to think, not in terms of detailed facts, but in “big picture” or “systems” terms.
The result of all this, if we accept it, is that people need an orientation to knowledge that is very
different from the one they are given in today’s schools. They need to see knowledge, not as divided into separate fields, but
as a series of connected systems. They need to know, not the detailed “facts” of a discipline, but how that discipline “works” as a system, and
how it is different from other systems. They need to know what kinds of problems each system is good at solving, and what kinds of problems
might be best solved using another system. Preparing
people for this kind of “knowledge work” requires us to
rethink how we teach the traditional disciplines (Gilbert, 2005). One way of doing this is to think of each
discipline in terms of the stories it tells about itself–how it came to be, how it works, why it is important, who its main
characters are, and so on. Such an approach is, we think, capable of developing the kind of “systems-level”
understanding of knowledge that seems to be a defining feature of the Knowledge Age.
Education
Incorporating fiction into education allows people to explore different issues and open
up new ideas.
Gouthro 11. [Patricia A., professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, Holloway,
assistant professor University of Windsor Susan M., and Erin, “Creative pedagogical
approaches using fiction to prepare educators to work in international and intercultural
contexts” http://www.patriciagouthro.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2011SCUTREAPattiSusanErin.pdf, July 12, 2014, ALR]
In reading fiction, we enter into the world of another person, exploring their
environment, their speech, and taken-for-granted assumptions. In writing fiction
we investigate our understanding of where people are located and how they make
sense of the world. Canadian writers, for example, represent an array of diverse backgrounds, which comes through in
their writings that explore the harmonies and tensions of what it is to live in a highly pluralistic society. Fiction has the
advantage of allowing people to explore different possible visions for what
globalization will mean through symbolic representations of change. Using literature
not only broadens perspectives, but allows students to observe patterns of change in society, as
documented through literary texts. Educators may feel uncomfortable addressing certain issues in the classroom, particularly if they
are unfamiliar with the subject matter. Fiction can be used as both an outlet for learners who find
it challenging to vocalize thoughts and concerns, and as a forum for raising and
discussing sensitive topics. Analyzing such themes through the experiences and tales of fictional characters can
create a safe environment for sharing thoughts and opinions that otherwise would
be kept private. Fiction may also create identification with characters whose lives and circumstances are markedly different
from ours. The emotional investment this creates opens us to seeing and understanding the
perspectives of those we regard as outsiders (Jarvis & Burr, SCUTREA 2010, p.229). Some authors feel a
responsibility for authors to create dialogue around important issues that are addressed by different societies in various ways.
Author Garry Ryan talks about the importance of fiction writers taking up difficult issues: But who else is going to talk
about these issues? And where else are you going to discuss those issues, and explore those issues, and make
people think about those issues? If you look back at the race issue in North America, there were stories like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’...
‘The Crying Game’ explored those issues of not only race but also sexuality... All of those issues get
explored and discussed and people start to think about them, and they argue about
them, and they maybe get a different point of view from all of those things. Narrative
offers portraits of societies affected in both localized and larger systemic ways; characters, and the complicated nuances of their
lives, engage readers to 3 discuss complex power relations between individuals and the larger world. Fiction enables
exploration of difficult topics such as social justice, racism, and equity issues. In a
world which becomes increasingly influenced by technology, arts-based media in general provides a rich source of educational
material, and fiction is part of this teaching tool. In a paper discussing how media can be used within conventional pedagogical
situations, Jarvis and Burr (SCUTREA 2010) discuss the educative function of global media. ‘This includes examining their potential
as tools that teachers use to raise awareness of social and political issues and enable students to imagine a range of experiences and
possibilities’ (p.227). Using fiction in the classroom is one aspect of incorporating arts-based media
into education. According to Jarvis and Burr (2010), ‘fiction has the potential to initiate
transformative learning because it induces intense vicarious experience’ (p.228). Tisdell,
Sprow, and Williams (SCUTREA 2009) have also researched critical media literacy and its usage in educational contexts. Some
of the benefits they found in teaching using media were ‘people finding alternative narratives
about themselves and others; their expanded thinking about marginalized ‘others’
and hegemonic processes through discussion and analysis of media and semiotics;
and new insights through facilitated discussion and analysis’ (p.413).
Reading fiction allows for developing identity and a sense of globalization.
Gouthro 11. [Patricia A., professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, Holloway,
assistant professor University of Windsor Susan M., and Erin, “Creative pedagogical
approaches using fiction to prepare educators to work in international and intercultural
contexts”, http://www.patriciagouthro.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2011SCUTREAPattiSusanErin.pdf, July 12, 2014, ALR]
Creating a strong sense of identity as a learner leads to more meaningful learning
and understanding of others. Identity can be thought of as ‘having a sense of one’s self as a force that matters in the
world’ (Bracher, 2006, p.6). Reading and discussing diverse works of fiction which touch on a
broad range of topics can help to develop and strengthen one’s identity. Reading
fiction based on the learner’s geographical location can bring to light the social
and cultural mores closest to them, while works from intercultural contexts can
expand the learner’s global perspective. Fiction can be a window into society whether that is the most
familiar or the most distant from the reader. As one Canadian author, Christine Walde states: ‘In many ways, books are like mirrors
into who we are, who we want to be, who we don't want to be. They're just incredibly complex and fascinating little things we can
hold in our hands, we can open and shut’. By developing this multicultural perspective and
appreciation through reading works of literature, learners may become better
equipped to explore global issues such as violence, inequity, social justice, and
sustainability. At the same time, one cannot assume that using fiction writing and reading will automatically foster critical
thinking or the capacity for deeper reflection. Luke (2000) argues we should move ‘toward an explicit pedagogy of critical
vocabularies for talking about what reading and writing and texts and discourses can do in everyday life’ (p. 453). For adult
educators working in international contexts, these kinds of pedagogical approaches to teaching about globalization and its impact,
allows for 4 students to have divergent opinions that may well disagree at times, but the underlying premise of such an approach is
that all discourses are subject to critique for their vested interests. The strategies used to encourage educators to think deeply about
the issues raised within fiction are important, as not all individuals are inclined to be empathetic or particularly insightful when
considering alternative viewpoints. Educators must be taught to cultivate a “sociological imagination”; to make linkages between
individual troubles with broader social, political, and cultural concerns. This may involve developing what Beck (2000) terms as a
cosmopolitan approach to dealing with globalization.
Solving issues is a global endeavor and fiction is key to having these viewpoints.
Gouthro 11. [Patricia A., professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, Holloway,
assistant professor University of Windsor Susan M., and Erin, “Creative pedagogical
approaches using fiction to prepare educators to work in international and intercultural
contexts”
http://www.patriciagouthro.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011SCUTREAPattiSusanErin.pdf, July 12,
2014, ALR]
As Johnston (1999) notes, Beck’s (1992) concept of the ‘risk society’ is ‘typified by uncertainty and risk’. Today,
problems
are increasingly interconnected, and no one individual or nation-state can resolve
these. Issues such as climate change, terrorism, and economic uncertainty must be
addressed on a global level. ‘To keep multicultural education relevant in the
shifting context of the 21st century, multicultural scholars must address
globalization as an area of curricular inquiry and a site of socio-political and
educational contestation’ (Gibson, 2010, p.135). Beck (2009) argues globalization is frequently depicted in a negative
way, whereby learners yearning for social justice or a better world often feel incapacitated. To counter this inertia, we need
thinkers who can move beyond local and even national borders, to consider how
interconnections can be forged in positive ways to resolve difficult issues. Students need
to think both abstractly and critically, and locally and concretely to be able to make changes. Beck believes that cosmopolitanism
involves having people come from different locales but be able to work across their differences to resolve matters. ‘The notion
of cosmopolitanism is widely discussed in educational theory as, among other
things, it concerns the fostering of citizens capable of participating in and taking
responsibility for a world increasingly characterized by global interdependencies
and risk’ (p.183). To achieve this, educators must shift from a neoliberal, marketplace focus of education to a more global,
critical focus. According to Tett (SCUTREA 2010), ‘Rather than a narrow conception of learning for the world of work the priority
would be learning for citizenship leading to a revitalized sense of democratic and social purpose’ (p.324). In his discussion around
international migration and learning, Williams (2006) argues that ‘cosmopolitanism facilitates intercultural exchanges’ whereas
stereotyping constrains possibilities for learning. He argues that a ‘willingness to engage’ is a prerequisite for various kinds of
learning to occur with individuals working with others from different cultural contexts (p. 598). Using fiction within
educational settings may be a way to encourage this willingness to engage with
alternative viewpoints and perspectives. 5 Educators must model the type of thinking they wish to develop in
their students. In a discussion on the role of adult educators, Boud and Rooney (SCUTREA 2010) identify the tools in an educator’s
toolbox: a critical perspective or ‘multi-faceted ways of engaging with and challenging diverse practices’; a broad perspective to
‘broker understandings of learning between those focused on different sites’; and ‘a new reflexivity that enables us to be aware of
both the possibilities and limitations of our own practices as educators’ (p.35). By teaching and presenting
material through this critical, global perspective, educators may strive to create
multicultural awareness in their students.
Politics
Fiction allows us to solve for politics
Van Belle 2012 (Douglas A., Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. , Nov
8, A Novel Approach to Politics: Introducing Political Science through Books, Movies, and Popular
Culture, Book pg 10, CD)
I have chosen fiction as a means to introduce you to politics for several good reasons. First, fiction
provides a much better variety of examples and analogies than does invertebrate zoology , but a very close
second reason is that fiction, whether it is presented on film, in a novel, or even in a Nickelodeon cartoon marathon, can be used to address the
difficulties inherent in the complex and individual nature of politics. As already noted, fiction
provides a window into an
environment where our conceptual frameworks more easily give way to the author’s creativity. By
viewing events through the eyes of fictional characters, we find it easier to set aside our own personal preferences,
ideologies, and experiences while at the same time appreciating the adventures that the characters
encounter. Thus, we can all share the characters’ experiences and perspectives on a conflict, a
struggle, or some other aspect of politics, and we can share that experience in a reasonably similar
manner. Fiction, therefore, gives us an opportunity to at least partially transcend the individual,
personal nature of politics. Second, by living through the characters in novels, we can get a taste for
political situations that we, as individuals, might never be able to experience in the real world, or would
never want to. For example, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four shows us how government can be used to control every aspect of
people’s personal lives.16 The narrative provides numerous extreme and obvious examples of how this might work, such as the government’s
placement of cameras in private homes and the use of children to spy on their parents. Most
of us have never experienced such
oppressive government, but through the eyes of the protagonist we can see how it works, and we get
a feel for what it might be like to live in such horrible conditions. For those of us who would rather not
have the government torture us by stuffing our heads into cages full of rats, there is the additional
bonus that we can get a taste of such an experience without having to actually live it. A third aspect of
fiction that makes it valuable for learning about politics is that it is fiction—the characters and
institutions are not subject to practical limitations. Authors and directors often exaggerate aspects of human interaction
that might remain hidden in real life. They do this for dramatic purposes, but these exaggerated social dynamics are often perfect illustrations
of the very ideas, influences, techniques, and principles that I want you to recognize as part of the underlying dynamic of politics. Many of the
books and films mentioned in this text are set in speculative contexts in which the authors extend particular aspects of politics, government, or
society out to their logical extremes. For
example, to show the dangers of powerful governments, Nineteen
Eighty-Four presents us with a government that is so extremely powerful and invasive as to be almost
unimaginable. Fictional politicians, such as the chancellor in the Star Wars prequels, can be portrayed as far more
calculating than any human being could possibly be. These exaggerated contexts and personalities serve to highlight the
forces that limit the characters’ choices or motivate their actions. It is much easier to recognize these forces in a speculative fictional context
than in real life, which is comparatively complex, murky, and very extremely beige. The
characters and plotlines of fiction can
also help us to develop insights into human motivation that lectures and textbooks could never hope
to match. This is crucial for the study of politics because, unlike courses you may have taken in biology, mathematics, anatomy,* or some
other straightforward subject that lends itself to multiple-choice exams, understanding politics requires an intuitive sense
for how people interact. Thus, a fourth reason for using fiction as a window into politics is that it is an
engaging and interesting way to help you develop an intuitive feel for the subject. Once you truly understand
politics, you can read a newspaper story or watch a television news account and come away with a much richer understanding of what is going
on because you have learned to read between the lines.
Knowing the underlying dynamics, you can sense the reasons
for actions that might not be mentioned in the report. You have to get used to uncovering the subtle
aspects of politics in society, and developing that skill takes a fair bit of work. You must think critically.
You must learn to be just as aware of the unspoken dimensions of how people, governments, and
organizations behave as you are of what they say about themselves or what others say about them . It is
the subtle details in William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies—such as the shipwrecked boys’ experiences of anarchy (a society without any
hierarchy)—that
prompt us to develop an intuitive feel for how that environment influences and drives
the collective pursuit of security.17 In the real world, where you will almost certainly never have to
deal with true anarchy, the fictional story may offer the only way for you to develop a feel for what
the experience would be like. An instructor can explain anarchy and lecture about it until he/ she/it is
blue/red/mauve in the face, but until you investigate the issues and encounter the politics in a
fictional yet realistic context, you will find it difficult if not impossible to imagine the implications of
the situation. Last, the use of fiction can support and in some cases instigate an active approach to
learning. In this text, I introduce a concept or dynamic of politics and then mention some of the examples available from novels, films, and
television shows.† Some of what I reference actually counts as literature, but more often than not you will see that I prefer to wallow in pulp
fiction, films, television commercials, or even children’s cartoons to illustrate my points. In doing so I avoid having to read too much of anything
that English professors might like, but I also am trying to entice you with popular fiction so that you personally engage the subject and resolve
to explore politics on your own, thereby learning even more than you would otherwise.
I believe that if you actively explore
the subject, you can discover more about politics than a professor can ever teach. The more you work
at discovering insights and examples in the books and films you enjoy, the more you are likely to learn
about the study of politics.
Dystopian fiction is a great tool in policy debates to bolster action on a matter
Cattapan 13 [Alana Cattapan, September 28, 2013, PhD Candidate in the Department of Political
Science at York University, “The Stories We Tell?”, http://arcattapan.ca/2013/09/28/the-stories-wetell/]
One of the important themes that emerged in the last few hours of the roundtable was the way that fiction might help us understand and
connect with otherwise abstract ideas about reproduction. In her discussion of Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild,”[i] at Thursday’s roundtable,
Professor Kate Sutherland identified how dystopian fiction might be used as a starting point to
interrogate themes of colonialism, gender, surrogacy, and intergenerational responsibility for
propagating the citizenry, amongst others. Her work, and the conversation that followed, helped me to start thinking about
the important role that dystopian fiction plays in my own area of research; public policy on assisted human reproduction in Canada. In the
long road to what would eventually become the Assisted Human Reproduction Act,[ii] stakeholders,
parliamentarians, and journalists made appeal after appeal to dystopian fiction to evoke a sense of
urgency and fear about what assisted reproductive technologies might bring. References to Brave
New World,[iii] Frankenstein,[iv] The Island of Dr. Moreau,[v] and The Handmaid’s Tale[vi] are found
in policy documents, parliamentary debates, media reports, and responses from stakeholders, often
with the intention of demonstrating science’s “temptation of going too far”[vii] or to evoke fear and
abhorrence about the possibility of reproduction without women; “manipulating the most
fundamental of all human relationships.”[viii] There are two reasons that I think dystopian fiction may
have been used throughout the policy debates. First, I think it was used to draw together the complex
and emotion-laden issues related to reproductive technologies. As is often true of fiction, appeals to
these works allowed for a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted nature of the issues, and created
a referential framework for common experience. Mentioning these works seemed to allow
policymakers, stakeholders, and the media alike to articulate their deep-rooted fears about the
implications of these unfamiliar technologies. There is something about changing the nature of human reproduction that
many find unsettling, and literary works helped people involved in the policy debates to better understand and articulate their concern.
Sci-Fi Solvency
Top-Level
Sci-Fi gives us new ways to think about the world
Brake and Thornton 03, “Science fiction in the classroom.” 2003 Phys. Educ. 38 31 Mark Brake is Principal Lecturer and
Professor of Science Communication at the University of Glamorgan. Rosi Thornton teaches the Science and Science Fiction degree at the
University of Glamorgan
The best science fiction tackles deep philosophical or ethical issues and widens the audience’s
perceptions of our universe. There is a rich heritage to be tapped here, including works such as The Time Machine ; Brave New
World ; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We ; Blade Runner and The Matrix . A number of significant individuals stand out in the history of SF: H G Wells and
Arthur C Clarke, of course. But also those like Philip K Dick ( Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? , The Man in the High Castle ), Kurt Vonnegut
( Slaughterhouse 5 , Galapagos ) and Ursula Le Guin ( The Dispossessed , The Left Hand of Darkness ). Today this richness can be found through
contributors as diverse as William Gibson ( Neuromancer , The Difference Engine ), Stephen Baxter ( Anti-Ice , Voyage ) and Iain M Banks (
Excession , The Player of Games ). The course in our Science and Science Fiction degree course at the University of Glamorgan we look to
address the place of science fiction within our society, and the genre’s treatment of science. We also provide a robust discussion of pseudoscience, itself a growing (and alarming!) influence on the public perception of science. So our degree is a course about science as much as it is a
course in science, since it encompasses the many influences brought to bear on the continuous development and consumption of science. The
course makes clear the real, tortuous history of science: the great discoveries, the misapprehensions, and the regular stubborn refusals by its
practitioners to change course. By teaching not only the findings and products of science but also communicating its critical method, we hope
to better equip academics and science educators with an effective bridge to the public consciousness, and provide opportunities to extend
science’s public franchise. Potential students are consequently drawn from a wide mix of backgrounds, though a fascination with the nature
and communication of scientific ideas is a common drive. The
science fiction element of the course is, without doubt, an
imaginative forum that focuses on the relationship between science, culture and society. Our aim is to
produce graduates who not only have a dynamic and pluralistic understanding of the nature and evolution of science, but can also critically
develop and communicate ideas about science and its cultural context. Science
Fiction is discussed in its philosophical,
historical and political contexts, leading to an exploration of the impact of science on all areas of life.
At each stage of the degree we look at what we call the ‘seminal milestones of science’, and consider their corollary within science fiction. We
look at the social and scientific revolutions engendered by the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, and go on to consider the implications of
the 20th century paradigm shift produced by relativity and quantum theory.
Politics
Science Fictions provides us a medium to critically investigate the present and future
through
Weldes 3 (Jutta, Professor at the University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, ”Popular Culture, Science
Fiction, And World Politics”,p9-11)
These nova provide “a door through which we step into a different way of looking at things ” (Roberts,
2000: 20), but they are also always “grounded in a discourse of possibility , which is usually called science or
technology, and which renders the difference a material one rather than just a conceptual or imaginative one” (7). This discourse of possibility,
rendering the nova plausible on their own terms, in their own universe, and thus providing explanations, or pseudo-explanations, for their
existence, distinguishes SF from other imaginative literature, such as magical realism. At the same time that the nova provide a point of
discontinuity from the known world, SF
allows us to confront that world by representing it through “metaphoric
strategies and metonymic tactics” (Broderick, 1995: 155). Through such strategies and tactics, the imagined SF world
“encodes a part of the real world” (Roberts, 2000: 12). In this sense, one might argue, with Roberts, that Blade Runner’s
androids—whose existence is hollow because of their built-in four-year life spans—are “a metaphor for the alienated existence of
contemporary life” (13; see also Lipschutz, this volume). SF
offers an exceptionally useful focus for analysis because it
concerns itself quite self-consciously with political issues; it directly addresses issues like technological
and social change, confronting contemporary verities with possible alternatives. For instance, SF often
extrapolates into the future. 11 As a strategy, extrapolation is “based on the metonymical extension of the ends of reality”
(Stockwell, 1996: 5). That is, it starts with the known and projects or expands some part of it into the
unknown. SF texts, in this sense, “reflect where this present is heading, both in terms of how they
envisage the future but also as cognitive spaces that help to shape and direct how people conceive
and make the future” (Kitchin and Kneale, 2001: 32). Utopias, for instance, tell us something about what we
hope the future will be, dystopias something about what we fear it might be. Dystopias, of course,
extrapolate negatively from contemporary trends. As a result, they often provide themes directly
critical of contemporary world politics. William Gibson’s “Sprawl” series12 is a good example. Rooted in a 1980s perception that
the state was declining at the expense of multinational corporations (MNCs), it portrays a genuinely globalized future in which states have been
eclipsed by cyberspace, global corporations, and global organized crime. The global market is dominated by the Yakuza and MNCs: “Power . . .
meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as
organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality” (1984: 242). Both Yakuza and MNCs are “hives with cybernetic memories, vast single
organisms, their DNA coded in silicon” (242). Technology has run rampant. This is a world of body and mind “invasion” (Sterling, 1986: xii); a
world of prosthetic limbs (Gibson, 1984: 9); eyes—“sea-green Nikon transplants”—that are “vatgrown” (33); and a cyborg dolphin, “surplus
from the last war” and a heroin addict (Gibson, 1981: 23).
Through such dystopias, we can criticize the trends of
contemporary politics. In Mike Davis’s words: “William Gibson . . . has provided stunning examples of how realist, ‘extrapolative’
science fiction can operate as prefigurative social theory, as well as an anticipatory opposition
Science fiction reflects the social norms of the present
Weldes 3 (Jutta, Professor at the University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, ”Popular Culture, Science
Fiction, And World Politics”,p11)
More important, of course,
SF tells us about the present. As Ronnie Lipschutz notes later in this volume, SF never really is about the
future: “It is about us and the world in which we live.” William Gibson agrees: “What’s most important to me,” he has
explained, “is that it’s about the present. . . . It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired
in me by the world in which we live” (in Kitchin and Kneale, 2001: 31). This is because SF “presents syntagmatically
developed possible worlds, as models (more precisely as thought-experiments) or as totalizing and
thematic metaphors” (Suvin, 1988: 198). These possible worlds allow us to explore elements of
contemporary society in more or less estranged settings. SF of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, used myriad future
scenarios to explore the consequences and possible ramifications of nuclear war. With its focus on alternative worlds, SF can
“accommodate radical doubt and questioning” (Davies, 1990: 4), thus providing space to interrogate
contemporary politics. On the face of it, SF can help us to understand world politics because it offers clear
and direct representations of themes central to it. We can examine the overt contents of SF for
reflections of contemporary trends and attitudes. As does other fiction, SF mirrors “attitudes, trends, and
changes in society (social preoccupations)” or expresses “the collective psyche of an era (social psychological
preoccupations)” (Kuhn, 1990: 16). This reflectionist model for reading SF might lead us to investigate Dr. Strangelove as a mirror for nuclear
anxieties and a critique of cold war paranoia. We might read William Gibson’s Sprawl series, as I did above, as a reflection of the growing power
of and threat from multi-national corporations. And we might interpret films like The Thing from Another World (1951), It Came from Outer
Space (1953), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) as depicting cold war fears of communist infiltration and subversion from within (e.g.,
Biskind, 1983).13 On this reflectionist approach, SF actually is about contemporary politics, and world politics, and in rather straightforward
ways
Investigation of science fiction produces a critical understanding of world politics
Weldes 3 (Jutta, Professor at the University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, ”Popular Culture, Science
Fiction, And World Politics”,p12-13)
But this is at best a partial understanding of the relationship between representation and “the real.” The
realities we know—the
meanings they have for us—are discursive products.14 “Because the real is never wholly present to
us—how it is real for us is always mediated through some representational practice—we lose
something when we think of representation as mimetic” (Shapiro, 1988: xii). SF is not just a “window” onto an already
pre-existing world. Rather, SF texts are part of the processes of world politics themselves: they are implicated
in producing and reproducing the phenomena that Gregg and others assume they merely reflect.15 Instead of reading
these texts as simple reflections of the real, we can read “the real”—in our case world politics—as
itself a social and cultural product. “[T]o read the ‘real’ as a text that has been produced (written) is to
disclose an aspect of human conduct that is fugitive in approaches that collapse the process of
inscription into a static reality” (ibid.). For instance, through its overtly liberal ideology and mechanisms like the Prime Directive—
which forbids interference by the United Federation of Planets in the normal internal development of technologically less developed societies—
Star Trek helps to produce U.S. foreign policy as non-interventionary and benign (Weldes, 1999: 124–127). World
politics, then, is
itself a cultural product. Based as they are on such assumptions, our analyses have more in common
with Cynthia Weber’s use of popular film to “access what IR theory says, how it plots its story, and
how all this together gives us a particular vision of the world” (2001: 132, emphasis added).
Power Relations
The investigation of science fiction presents a method of constructing the future and
confronting power structures.
Thacker 1 (Eugene, associate professor at The New School in New York, Bachelor's degree from
the University of Washington, Seattle, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, The
Science Fiction of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation and a Challenge for New Media Art)
SCIENCE FICTION MODE In order to approach such a question, it will be helpful for us first to attempt to outline something like a "definition" of
contemporary science fiction. To be sure, histories of science fiction as a genre refer to as many definitions as there are movements or types of
science fiction [5]. However, for our purposes here, we might begin with the following:
science fiction names a contemporary
mode in which the techniques of extrapolation and speculation are utilized in a narrative form, to
construct near-future, far-future or fantastic worlds in which science, technology and society intersect.
This is of course a provisional definition, but in it are three important components that characterize contemporary science fiction (most often in
fiction, film and video games). The first is the distinction between the methodologies of extrapolation and speculation [6]. Generally speaking ,
extrapolation is de-fined as an imaginative extension of a present condition , usually into a future world that is
"just around the corner" or even indistinguishable from the present ("the future is now"). By contrast,
certain imaginative leap, in which a world
speculation involves a
(either in the dis-tant future or altogether unrelated)
markedly different
from the present is constructed . As can be imagined, most science fiction involves some combination of these, culminating in
fiction's narrato-logical goal is the delineating of a
total space in which certain events occur; that is, the construction of entire worlds that operate
according to their own distinct set of rules that form their own "reality " (what has been called the "ontological"
mode in science fiction) [7]. Finally, more and more genre science fiction is coming to terms not just with
technical concerns, but also with social, cultural and political concerns. As such, the use of
extrapolation or speculation and the construction of ontological worlds move science fiction into a
realm that involves thinking about the complex dynamics between technology and globalization,
worlds that are at once strange and very familiar. Secondly, science
science and gender, race and colonial-ism , and related concerns. Such a complexification of science fiction has been
highlighted by critics such as Fredric Jameson as a critical function. In an article entitled "Progress versus Utopia," Jameson articulates two
critical functions that science fiction can have [8]. The first is characterized by the development of "future histories" or ways in which science
fiction places itself in relation to history. Discussing science fiction as the dialectical counterpart to the genre of the historical novel, Jameson
suggests that one
of the primary roles of science fiction is not to "keep the future alive" but to
demonstrate the ways in which visions of the future are first and foremost a means of understanding
a particular historical present. A second role Jameson ascribes to science fiction is a more symptomatic one. Referencing the work
of the Frankfurt School on the "utopian imagination," science fiction can form a kind of cultural indicator of a
culture's ability or inability to imagine possible futures. For Jameson, writing during the high point of
postmodernism, science fiction was an indicator of a pervasive loss of historicity and the atrophying of
the will to critically imagine utopias. Thus, not only is each vision of the future conditioned by a historical moment in which it is
imagined, but, increasingly, science fiction's main concern is with the contingency involved in producing the
future, as well as interrogating the constraints and limitations that enable the capacity to imagine the
future at all.
Science fiction creates multiple possibilities of the future
Thacker 1 (Eugene, associate professor at The New School in New York, Bachelor's degree from
the University of Washington, Seattle, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, The
Science Fiction of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation and a Challenge for New Media Art)
THE SCIENCE FICTION OF NET.ART This incorporation of science fiction by technoscience is, certainly, not the most optimistic alliance between
computer technology and bio-technology, and it is a complicated field, which contains as many promises as it does problems. However, looking
at biotechnology and the ways it incorporates technologies of simulation through the lens of science fiction reveals some important tendencies.
Clearly, the "science fiction" in technoscience is not the same "science fiction" that we are accustomed to in fiction and film. The science fiction
in technoscience does strategically utilize extrapolation and speculation. It does create visions of future worlds in which advanced science and
medicine have new relations to disease and the body, and in doing so it does make a comment on the ways in which future biotechnology is
largely dependent upon techno-logical development to achieve this future vision. Yet the critical function that Jameson pointed to earlier, and
which was in danger of disappearing in the postmodern, is markedly absent from the science fiction futures imaged by the biotech industry.
One way of discussing this is to mark the difference between science fiction in technoscience and science fiction as a cultural and critical
activity. Incorporated into technoscience (particularly biotechnology), science fiction plays the role of "actualization," the role of discursive
negotiator, with the main goal being the emphasis on scientific advancement and technological progress as the keys to a realization of the
future. In this mode, science fiction's only purpose is to ensure the realization of the future imaged by the biotech industry; science fiction as an
open-ended domain is thus displaced by science fiction as a pressing concern for making the future a reality. By contrast, the science fiction
that critics such as Jameson, Donna Haraway, and others discuss is both critical and multi-perspectival. In other words, the
critical mode
of science fiction is not about "actualization" but about "potentiality." Here potentiality serves to
signify futures that may exist, as well as futures that will not exist (or that should not exist-the critical
function of the dystopia). Science fiction as potentiality thus signifies a certain mobility to the
category of the potential (as what reserves the right not to exist as well as to exist). Regarded as
potentiality, as the work of imagining critical futures, science fiction is not locked into the narrow path
of simply realizing the future or actualizing it. In this sense science fiction can serve a critical function,
and it can do this by creating mobile zones whose primary intention is to comment upon, and
intervene in, the "history of the present." However, this distinction between science fiction as
actualization (science fiction as it is manifested in technoscience) and science fiction as potentiality
(science fiction as a critical mode) should not simply mean a return to the kind of literary, dystopian
science fiction works that served an earlier historical moment. In the same way that science fiction has been embodied
in the very techniques and technologies of the biotech industry (especially in its use of computer simulation and the Web), science fiction
can also work from within these technologies to create points of slippage, fissures in the production of
homogenous futures. Continuing developments in the areas of computer animation, 3D modeling and the construction of virtual
environments, telerobotics and motion-capture, as well as an array of technologies for presenting and broadcasting or Web casting innovative
work are all becoming available not only to scientists but also to artists, performers, and cultural activists. The challenge put forth to new media
art and net.art is thus to take up this critical function of science fiction and re-insert it back into the discourse of contemporary technoscience.
This has already been happening in the intersections of art and technology for some time, and it is taking new forms with net.art and digital
culture, with groups such as Critical Art Ensemble, Mongrel, Fakeshop and Biotech Hobbyist [15]. Whereas literary science fiction was limited to
describing technologies in extrapolative, near-future scenarios, new media and net.art contain the capacity to actually embody and utilize these
"future technologies" in radically new ways. In an important way, then, such projects are science fiction in as much as they utilize the strategies
of science fiction to ask important questions concerning the future of the human-machine relationship.
Science
Sci-Fi gives ideas to actual scientists for the future
Brake and Thornton 03 .” 2003, “Science fiction in the classroomPhys. Educ. 38 31 Mark Brake is Principal Lecturer and
Professor of Science Communication at the University of Glamorgan. Rosi Thornton teaches the Science and Science Fiction degree at the
University of Glamorgan
A further example of this link is that the
European Space Agency (ESA) is searching science fiction for ideas and
technologies that could be used in future missions. Dr David Raitt, coordinator of the Innovative Technologies From Science
Fiction For Space Applications project (ISTF), and other ESA researchers are currently scouring novels and short stories
published in the early decades of the last century to see if technology has caught up with ideas that
were futuristic when first put into print. Any good ideas turned up in the search will be assessed to see
if they can help the agency in its mission to explore space. Knowledgeable fans are also being encouraged to send in
suggestions to help ESA identify potential sources of good concepts. Authors such as Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and Larry Niven have helped
NASA draw up ideas for a mission to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons and now known to have an icy surface. The agency
looked to the authors to come up with inventive ideas for piercing the ice to get at the molten world below. NASA is also conducting research
into futuristic ideas such as warp drives. The ultimate aim of its Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project is a massless engine for a spacecraft
that would be able to reach near-light speeds. The
genre of science fiction has always been used as a way of
examining the relationship between science, technology and society, both as an inspirational source guiding the
direction of scientific development and as a way of popularizing and disseminating scientific ideas. Commercially, science fiction has an
impressive history, and since many people’s main exposure to science is through science fiction, the portrayals of
both the scientist and the nature of scientific activity are of crucial importance for issues relating to the public’s attitudes toward science.
Unfortunately, the film industry has often portrayed scientists as being single-minded, obsessive, social outcasts, fostering unrealistic suspicions
about science in many public debates.
War
Cultural imagination is key to imagine a world of peace instead of war
Gray 1994 Chris Hables “Science Fiction Studies”
(http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/64/gray.htm)-M.H
Envoi. As this article has tried to demonstrate, there is an intimate intertwining of metaphors and
careers among the future-war sf writers and the postmodern US military, and the motivation for this is partly
ideological. There is a significant subculture around military futurology which cannot see any clear line between sf and real war. Such blurring
does not make for sound military policy and it no doubt contributes to the incredible public misconceptions about international conflicts (Gray
1994). Star Wars, for example, long discredited on scientific grounds, limps along with a new name into the 21st century on a reduced budget
of mere tens of billions of dollars a year because the inevitability of war is still beyond challenge in the decisive discourses. And
as long as
inevitable war remains an unexamined assumption there will always be some truth to it. For if people
are sure that "There will be War!" then there will be, for history has shown that he who prepares for
war, finds one. But like any good story, the inevitability of war is really just an elaborate construction of
images, characters, plot (history), and facts (created by non-human nature and/or by human technoscience). To be sure, the story has many
authors and even more readers but there is always the opportunity to change the ending. Simply to discuss this
pattern is to begin to challenge it, but the real change comes from imagination most of all. As much great
anti-war sf has demonstrated, new endings to old tales can be found by reworking old tropes (such as enemy) or through redefining key
metaphors and themes. Recognizing
ideologies, and the limits of thinking only in terms of ideology, is crucial
for this. Ideologies predetermine endings, imagination generates new ones.31 Perhaps technoscientific
imagination is now the crucial military factor, perhaps not. But cultural imagination is certainly a necessity
for peace. If we can't even imagine a peaceful world, how will we make one?
Appendix A – The Call of Cthulhu
The Call of Cthulhu
By H. P. Lovecraft
(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)
“Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival . . . a survival of a hugely remote
period when . . . consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn
before the tide of advancing humanity . . . forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying
memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . . .”
—Algernon Blackwood.
I.
The Horror in Clay.
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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed
us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and
human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze
the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse
of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in
this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will
accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I
think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would
have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George
Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been
resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be
recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor
had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after
having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the
precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that
some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was
responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am
inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his
papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my
quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American
Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much
averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to
examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in
opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier.
For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and
cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial
impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of
an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area;
obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion;
for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that
cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs
seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of
my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its
impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or
symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human
caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a
grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which
made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural
background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s
most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was
headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word
so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—
Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of
Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, &
Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the
queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines
(notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret
societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological sourcebooks as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely
alluded to outré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925,
a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the
singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry
Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living
alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius
but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd
dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk
of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he
had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from
other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite
hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the
benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He
spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed
some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything
but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and
record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation,
and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last
night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative
Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won
the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most
considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected.
Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and skyflung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered
the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a
chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by
the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He
questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the basrelief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when
waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his
slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly
out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or
societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When
Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of
cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit,
for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related
startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of
dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical
sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those
rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.
On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters
revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in
Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had
manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned
the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street
office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling
on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only
a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which
walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as
repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity
he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was
invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was
not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather
than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed,
astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality
since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three
days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had
vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless
and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me
much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my
philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those
descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox
had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of
inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for
nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception
of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses
than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not
preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and
business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result,
though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always
between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little
more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes,
and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have
broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox,
somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran
scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large
proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably
the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything,
reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the
dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which
the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings
toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and
expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.
Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted
some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All
of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor’s
questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the
given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London,
where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to
the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A
despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some
“glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native
unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New
York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland,
too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a
blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded
troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting
strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at
this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced
that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.
II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed
the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen
the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the
ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological
Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and
attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be
approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for
correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a
commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain
special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he
was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque,
repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It
must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his
wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish,
or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New
Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites
connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally
unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of
its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely
nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help
them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of
the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and
they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and
air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised
school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed
recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was
between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a
monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers,
a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.
This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat
bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable
characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre,
whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and
extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent
forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the
croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful
because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable;
yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—or indeed to
any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black
stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or
mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a
representation of half the world’s expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their
remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote
and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles
of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector’s
problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the
monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew.
This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and
an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of
Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high
up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux
whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and
repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with
shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made.
Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a
supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an
aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just
now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced
when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of
stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough
parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly
exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted
and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the
professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux.
There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when
both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so
many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana
swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being
guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had
repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran
something like this:
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible
his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached
profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed
an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least
expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the
swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured
descendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had
ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had
begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were
insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened
messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon
with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles
splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and
malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or
fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every
malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a
miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of
bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling
shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through
the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again,
each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of
unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black
arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and
untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which
dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that batwinged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there
before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds
of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew
enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area,
but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the
squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on
through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities
peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source
should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights
by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like
pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and
from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous
phrase or ritual:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the
spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad
cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting
man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s extent, clear of trees and
tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than
any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing,
and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts
in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which,
incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten
scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the
oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring
of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in
endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men,
an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and
unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I
later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of
the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond
the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and
although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on
their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and
chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but
in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in
haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two
severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image
on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be
men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of
negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a
colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became
manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and
ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their
loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and
who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and
under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult
which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would
exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest
Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the
earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult
would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind
was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit
the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The
carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No
one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not
the secret—that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at
R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to
various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by
Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted
wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did
extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to
strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made
man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled
on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told
him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time
before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to
the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and
brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had
shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When
the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were
wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay
in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious
resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some
force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise
prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst
uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode
of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of
chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones
shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came
right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and
resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the
Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men
shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to
shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy
and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient
ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something
had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the
waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass,
had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would
rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and
shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old
Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety
could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the
cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of
Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually
unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said
that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the
initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic
affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The
authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective
had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of
Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated as it was by the
statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention
occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face
occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at
the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It
is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise
upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who
had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland
devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered
alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an
investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young
Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to
heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected
by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the
extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So,
after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological
notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him
the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of
seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial
houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found
him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is
indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great
decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and
phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in
painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my
business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited
his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not
enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I
became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake.
They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid
statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not
recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had
formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in
delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism
had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp
Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with
frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu
fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his
stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard
of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading
and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in
dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle
had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly illmannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his
honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from
researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that
old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as
still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically
at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written,
excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient
religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of
absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the
coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s death was far from
natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign
mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits
of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison
needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is
true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper
inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor
Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go
as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.
III.
The Madness from the Sea.
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which
fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have
stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney
Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance
been avidly collecting material for my uncle’s research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the “Cthulhu Cult”, and was
visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of
note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the
museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It
was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign
parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which
Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed
to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my
flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:
MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA
Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea.
Rescued Seaman Refuses
Particulars of Strange Experience.
Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.
The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling
Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z.,
which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17' with one living and one dead
man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course
by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though
apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and
one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible
stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney
University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and
which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is
Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted
schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men.
The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March
1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', encountered the Alert, manned by
a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt.
Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the
schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The
Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots
beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the
savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior,
because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the
remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in
their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears,
they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and
six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story,
and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the
yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his
rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his
companion, died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or
exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader,
and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose
frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great
haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma
and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The
admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be
made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my
mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests
at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed
about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died,
and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation
brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what
deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable
significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm
had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously
summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank
Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March
23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the
dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s
malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And
what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox
emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old
Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery
of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must
be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous
menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for
San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of
the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too
common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had
made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned
that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive
questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his
old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the
admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty
court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained
nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly
wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and
well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible
antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen.
Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no
rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great
Ones: “They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate
Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn
day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in
the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that
the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with
palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in
black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English
that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had
told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as
he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a
walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window
had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance
could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart
trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest;
“accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical
matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it
on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and
strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the
vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall
never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in
space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and
favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake
shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had
cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which
must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under
control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel
the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert
he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which
made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of
ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead
by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar
sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coast-line of
mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible
substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless
aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay
great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles
incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the
faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God
knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great
Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be
brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the
cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance
that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone
blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal
statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in
every line of the mate’s frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke
of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad
impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper
for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because
it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions
apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven
seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked
perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven
rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock
and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it
was only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear
away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he
had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now
familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was
a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide
whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said,
the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were
horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately
around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the
grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—
and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the
acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or
somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the
queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved
anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive
quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst
forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the
shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened
depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound
down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight
and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted
outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never
reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be
described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch
contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What
wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that
telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his
own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent
sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for
delight.
Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any
rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three
were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he
was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute,
but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately
for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering
at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore;
and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines
to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began
to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan
Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then,
bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast
wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on
laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering
deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until
steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran
lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome
brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on
against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The
awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen
drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven
sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on
paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was
only a venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless
sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every
second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few
matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first
bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a
gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs
of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from
the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the
distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and
the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him
mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be
a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the
papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is
pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the
universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever
afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen
went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun
was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April
storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely
places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would
by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what
has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering
cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive
this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.