CCRU

CORE-CCRU

• Pandemonium
• Barker Speaks
• Y 2 PaniK
• Hyper-C: Breaking the net
• Meltdown
• Swarmachines
• Cyberpositive
• Cybernetic Culture
• Cthulhu Club: Origins
• Cthulhu Club: Vault of Murmurs
• Cthulhu Club: Leaks from the Miskatonic Bunker-Hotel
• Cthulhu Club: The Templeton Episode

META-CCRU

Hyperstition Primer

Whatever its specific variants, the practice of hyperstition necessarily involves three irreducible ingredients, interlocked in a productive circuit of simultaneous, mutually stimulating tasks.

1. Numogram Rigorous systematic unfolding of the Decimal Labyrinth and all its implexes (Zones, Currents, Gates, Lemurs, Pandemonium Matrix, Book of Paths …) and echoes (Atlantean Cross, Decadology …).

The methodical excavation of the occult abstract cartography intrinsic to decimal numeracy (and thus globally ‘oecumenic’) constitutes the first great task of hyperstition.

1. Mythos Comprehensive attribution of all signal (discoveries, theories, problems and approaches) to artificial agencies, allegiances, cultures and continentities. The proliferation of ‘carriers’ (“Who says this?”) - multiplying perspectives and narrative fragments - produces a coherent but inherently disintegrated hyperstitional mythos while effecting a positive destruction of identity, authority and credibility.

2. Unbelief Pragmatic skepticism or constructive escape from integrated thinking and all its forms of imposed unity (religious dogma, political ideology, scientific law, common sense …). Each vortical sub-cycle of hyperstitional production announces itself through a communion with ‘the Thing’ coinciding with a “mystical consummation of uncertainty” or “attainment of positive unbelief.”

Hyperstition through CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit):

• Element of effective culture that makes itself real.
• Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device.
• Coincidence intensifier.
• Call to the Old Ones.

Trent uses the term “hyperstition” for “cybernetic” belief systems such as these. “It’s not a simple matter of true or false with hyperstitious systems. Belief here doesn’t have a simply passive quality. The situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than to religious belief as we’d ordinarily think about it. Hype actually makes things happen, and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been.”

… “Perhaps it’s all make-believe,” Trent smiles enigmatically. “But don’t underestimate the power of belief to make things happen…”

Vysparov: We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition - a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real – cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signaling return: shleth hud dopesh. This is the ambivalence - or loop – of Cthulhu-fiction: who writes, and who is written? It seems to us that the fabled Necronomicon - sorcerous counter-text to the Book of Life - is of this kind, and furthermore, that your recovery of the Lemurodigital Pandemonium Matrix accesses it at its hypersource. …

Stillwell: Hyperstition strikes me as a most intriguing coinage. We thought we were making it up, but all the time the Nma were telling us what to write – and through them…

Diagrams, maps, sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits, are as real in a fiction about a fiction about a fiction as they are encountered raw, but subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows a traffic in materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be proscribed. Rather than acting as transcendental screens, blocking out contact between itself and the world, the fiction acts as a Chinese box a container for sorcerous interventions in the world. The frame is both used (for concealment) and broken (the fictions potentiate changes in reality).’

Apocalypse - Been in Effect? by Maria De Rosario

From the New England Educational Review, August, 1998

How do “aquapocalyptic” narratives about a return to the sea connect with the Millennium Time-Bomb? Maria D’Resario reports on “hyperfictional” and “ethnomathematical” studies of strange goings-on on the Web, and asks: Are the Cyber-Time Cults just the latest craze, or a new Millenial Mythology? You’ll be familiar with media scare-stories about “Cybergoths”. But, according to two young academics at Massachussetts’ Miskatonic University, it’s time to put aside the moral panics about synthetic drugs and cyberspace comas in order to take a more serious look at what the Cybergoths are actually doing.

The Cybergoths – and the other cultic bodies that are beginning to populate the Net – are not passing crazes, but “sophisticated contemporary belief systems”, more akin to popular religion than youth culture. “The Cybergoths are a Cargo-Cult,” claims Miskatonic’s Dr Linda Trent. “They integrate technology into their belief system, and transform the past into the future. Or vice versa.”

Like the Melanesian syncretic cults who turned Western detritus into religious objects, the Cybergoths use the relics of the information age as the sacred objects of a new mythic system. But Trent, who calls herself an expert in “Fictional Systems”, dislikes the term “mythology.””It begs too many questions, and suggests archaism. What the Cybergoth phenomenon shows, really powerfully, is the difficulty in pinpointing where belief systems come from.

In some ways, when you see the remarkable pattern-matching between the Cybergoth system and older belief systems, it’s tempting to see it is a case of revivalism, but that doesn’t seem ultimately persuasive. What needs to be accounted for is the convergences across Time: are they a coincidence? Which poses the further question: what is a coincidence? And that’s what the Cybergoths are all about.” Trent says that the Cybergoths are “natives” of Cyberspace, and the emergence of their culture provides a unique opportunity for studying the process of the formation of a belief system as it happens.

Trent uses the term “hyperstition” for “cybernetic” belief systems such as these. “It’s not a simple matter of true or false with hyperstitious systems. Belief here doesn’t have a simply passive quality. The situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than to religious belief as we’d ordinarily think about it. Hype actually makes things happen, and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been.” One key area of Cybergoth activity is their response to the so-called “Millennium Bug” (the computer glitch caused by the coding convention that renders years as two, rather than four, digits) .

The Cybergoths - whose own communications substitute the letter ‘K’ for the cyber-prefix - believe that the attempt to correct the Millennium Bug is in fact a program for “Gregorian Restoration”; that “cyberspace already has a calendar”, a calendar counting up from 00 = 1900 to 99 = 1999. To avert the reversion back to 2000=00 (=1900!), the K-Goths advocate not a “return” to the Gregorian calendar, but the “continuation” of an “existing K-calendar”, a continuation which will be achieved by adding not 2 extra digits, but one.

Instead of celebrating the Year 2000, then, the Cybergoths will be “chilling out” to the year K-100. This, apparently, has brought them into conflict with another ultra-secret web movement called “Hyper-C” whose “chronopolitics” are, if anything, even more weird than those of the K-goths. Little is known about Hyper-C, but its sporadically-issued Internet communiques celebrate the very “return” that the K-calendar is designed to avoid. Hyper-C seem to believe that computers have a message for us: there is only one century, that counts from 0 to 99, forever. “Hyper-C are another Cargo-Cult,” says Trent. “But the time system they operate with is very different to that of the Cybergoths. As far as I can glean, their basic drift is that computers should not be tampered with; that the Millennium Time-Bomb will explode western chronology. There are many elements in common with so-called ‘primitive’ time; for instance, the idea that there is only one year.

One phrase keeps recurring; from [the rap group] Public Enemy: ‘Apocalypse been in effect.’” The name Hyper-C puns on sea and C, connecting the radical biological theory of hypersea (which argues that “life on land” is an extension of the ocean) with key ‘C’ words such as Century, Cybernetics and Cycle. Its shady operations are webbed into a submerged world of what English theorist Kodwo Eshun has called “eso-terrrorism”, an “info-war” conducted principally through the (hyper) medium of “sonic fiction”.

The techno outfit Drexciya are only one example of a wave of contemporary eso-terrorists rumoured to be connected with Hyper-C. “In the sleevenotes to the ‘The Quest’, their ‘97 concept double CD,” Eshun writes, “Drexciyans are revealed to be a marine species descended from ‘pregnant American-bound African slaves’ thrown overboard ‘by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mother’s womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?

Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen, a premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported sightings of Gillmen and Swamp Monsters in the coastal swamps of the Southeastern United States make the slave trade theory startlingly feasible.’” Drexicya are part of the “hypersitious” network described by Eshun in his recent * More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction*, a network that includes Sun Ra, Public Enemy, George Clinton and Underground Resistance. For Eshun, a crucial theme in the sonic “discontinuum” he describes is abduction. “The idea of alien abduction,” he explains, “means that we’ve all been living in an alien-nation since the 18th century. The mutation of the African male and female slaves in the 18th century into what became negro, and into the entire series of humans that were designed in America.”

Abduction, of course, has been a major preoccupation in the recent coverage of the Cybergoths, with outraged families complaining of their children being swallowed into a world of artificial drugs and schizophrenia. What abduction is really about, according to Trent, is “missing time.” “What’s happening out there?” she asks. “In a sense, you have to have been abducted to find out.” For Trent, the struggle between Hyper-C and the Cybergoths is part of an ongoing “time war” (“a war that’s only going to get worse, and which will affect all of us”). The Cybergoths have what Dr Trent calls an “extremely sophisticated” philosophy of time. “They use two interrelated diagrams or graphizations: the ‘Barker’ spiral and the ‘Stillwell’ Numogram (which includes the Pentazygon).”

“The Barker spiral maps a simple set of numeric relations, but these relations have enormously complex implications,” insists Dr Polly Wolfe, a colleague of Trent’s on Miskatonic’s Time-Lapse sub-committee. On one side of the spiral, Wolfe explains, all the numbers add up to 10 ( 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5); on the other, “occulted” side, 10 is subtracted, and all the numbers are “twinned” to make up 9 (0 +9, 1+8, 2+7, 3+6, 4+5). Important here is the operation of “digital reduction”, in which any number can be reduced to a figure between 1 and 9, by adding up its component numerals: for instance, 16 = 1+6 = 7, 17 = 1+7 = 8, etc. One of the many odd effects Wolfe describes is the interchangable role of 9 and 0. “In digital reduction, 9 always functions as 0. Try it out. Take, let’s say, 92: it = 9 + 2 = 11 = 1 + 1 = 2. The same applies for any number including 9. In a sense, you can just ignore the 9 – but only because 9, like 0, is everywhere.” “The Numogram could, in some ways, be seen as an elaboration of the Spiral,” Wolfe goes on.

The numogram describes relations that emerge by combining the operations of digital reduction with those of “triangular numbering”. In triangular numbering, you add up the sum of all the numbers in the numner-line up to and including the number you are dealing with; for example, 3 becomes 6: 3 = 1+2+3= 6. 9=1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9= 45 (which, interestingly, digitally reduces to [4+5 =] 9). Wolfe styles herself an “Aftermathematician” or “Mechanomist.” “I’m a dabbler,” she said . “I like to see how numbers behave; I’m not interested in reducing them to instantiations of some pre-existing logical system.” By contrast, Wolfe insists, insitutionalized mathematics can be defined by its “hostility to numbers.” Dr Wolfe takes seriously the so-called “numerological” traditions orthodox mathematics has defined itself against, noting the correspondences between the radical proto-“aftermathematical” theories she is interested in – Cantor’s transfinite numbers, Godel’s diagonal numbering – and older, “vernacular numeric systems”. “If you look at the work ethnomathematicians like [Ohio State University’s] Ron Eglash are doing, you see examples of exactly the kinds of strange looped coincidences and odd doublings Linda is interested in.

In one piece, Eglash describes the parallels between Senagelese sand divination systems and the Cantor set. No-one is seriously suggesting that there is a line of influence or evolution here; there are parallel routes to the same discovery. Numbers and what they do are no more something we invent than they’re already sitting in some Platonic heaven.” Hence mechanomics. “Mech because numeric dabbling is not representational, but practical. Following what numbers do is an act of production, but only because all production is really a matter of discovery not ex nihilo creation. Making things up is always a matter of subtracting from zero.”

Of key importance here is the role of “infinitesimals”, which, according to Wolfe, are a major theme in “Gothic numerics”. The term Gothic is “not idle. Differential calculus was once dismissed as a ‘Gothic hypothesis’, since it posits quantities irreducible to standard unitary quantification. In a way, zero – so controversial when introduced into Europe – is itself a Gothic quantity. And what the cybergoths call ‘Uttunul’ is crucially connected with Cantorian continuum.” “Uttunul” is one of the five “entities” that populate the Cybergoth system. (“It’s wrong, strictly speaking, to describe the system as belonging to the Cybergoths,” Trent interjects. “They use it, but its origins are very mysterious.” ) The five entities each correspond to a “Barker-twinning” or “Syzygy”, the pairings which make up 9 (1/8, 2/7, 3/6, 5/4, 9/0) and which together constitute the “Pentazygon” (“Five-twin”). The first three of these beings make up “the cycle of time”, whilst the other two are – in some sense – “outside” sequential time. The cycle the system describes, Trent points out, is “multi-levelled”; it is also, for instance, also a story about the journey from land to sea and back again. Katak.(5/4) is “associated with the desert, with heat haze and shimmer. In many ways, its key features – claw marks, teeth – seem to recall werewolf legends. Its time is a time of cataclysm; its appearance always presages disaster. Sometimes imaged as an hydrophobic or rabid dog, Katak can partly be characterised by a horror of what will supercede it in the cycle, Mur Mur (1/8), the Dreaming demon of submersion.

Mur Mur, meanwhile, carries echoes of the legends of Sea Beasts and ancient serpents; its time is the Deep Time of the ocean bed. Like Katak, it too, is horrified by what will follow it in the cycle; in this case, Oddubb (2/7), the amphibious entity, associated with the crossing out of water and the acquisition of lungs. What Mur Mur fears is the division that Oddubb brings, the splitting of the undivided waters. Oddubb is defined by ambiguous and elusive movement. As its name suggests, it is a ‘double-agency’, a duplicitous creature. It has a horror of dryness, of the state of being fully landlocked that comes with Katak. Which brings us full circle.” The two entities that are “outside time” - Djynxx (3/6) - “a changeling figure, defined by a jinking (eratic or zig-zagging) movement, a sudden cutting in or out” – and Uttunul (9/0), the “flatline” entity, connoting “continuum, zero-intensity, void – eternity not as infinitely extended time, but as No-Time” – are in many ways the most fascinating and disturbing of the set, associated as they are, for Trent, with old mythologies of “child abduction” and Hell. But is all this merely an attempt to populate a disenchanted world with old gods? Or is cyberspace – and the world – really crawling with these creatures? “Perhaps it’s all make-believe,” Trent smiles enigmatically. “But don’t underestimate the power of belief to make things happen…”

INTERVIEW WITH CCRU (1998)

“CCRU retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. …CCRU feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers +…. At degree-O CCRU is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosphy Department. Here it is now officially said that CCRU ‘does not, has not, and will never exist’.” —Communique from Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, November 1997.

Still nominally affiliated to the famously poststructuralist Philosophy Department of Warwick University, England, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit is a rogue unit. It’s the academic equivalent of Kurtz: the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results compared with the tradition-bound US military. Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.

According to CCRU, its frenzied interdisciplinary activity—as seen in its Virtual Futures and Virotechnology conferences, and its journals ***collapse and Abstract Culture—disturbed Warwick’s Philosophy Department, resulting in the termination of the unit. Just as Kurtz disappeared “up river” into the Vietnamese jungle, the CCRU have strategically withdrawn to their operational base in an apartment in nearby Leamington Spa. Institutionally, they’ve abandoned the university and linked up with renegade autodidacts and para-academic activists like O[rphan] D[frift>], Matt Fuller, and Kodwo Eshun.

CCRU was originally set up as a research unit for cybertheorist Sadie Plant, freshly recruited to Warwick from Birmingham University. With Plant’s unexpected departure in early ‘97 to become a freelance author (the acclaimed cyberfeminist polemic Zeros + Ones, the self-explanatory Writing On Drugs), the role of director of the CCRU was taken over by her ex-lover Nick Land. Land is the kind of “vortical machine” around which swirl all manner of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories—allegedly he went through a phase of only talking in numbers, and was once “taken over” by three distinct entities? True or not, there’s no denying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr. Land has been a “strange attractor” luring students to Warwick purely through his personal reputation and charisma. The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land’s sole book-length publication, is a remarkable if deranged mix of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the implications of Bataille’s thought. Prefiguring CCRU’s struggles with university bureaucracy, the book drips with anti-academic bile, occasionally spilling over into flagellating self-disgust.

In the early Nineties, Land used to describe himself as a “professor of delirial engineering.” After the relatively down-to-earth Sadie Plant’s departure, Land has shepherded the CCRU into an uncanny interzone between science and superstition, blending Deleuze & Guattari and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics with his vast knowledge of the occult, chaos magick and parapsychology: the I Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley’s kundalini-like energy force), Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, the eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna, etc.

human spine.jpg

It’s easy to see why Warwick University was consternated by CCRU’s research. Explaining one of their numerological diagrams (“an attempt to understand concepts as number systems”), Land describes it as gift from “Professor Barker.” Inspired by Professor Challenger—the Conan-Doyle anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism & Schizophrenia—Barker appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who reveals various cosmic secrets to the CCRU. “But we’d be a bit reluctant to say ‘imaginary’ now, wouldn’t we?,” cautions Land. “We’ve learned as much—well, vastly more from Professor Barker—than supposedly ‘real’ pedagogues!” Including Barker’s ‘Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma’. Following the materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human culture is analyzed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum. From the chemistry of metals to the cycles of capitalism, from the non-linear dynamics of the ocean to the fractalized breakbeat rhythms of jungle, the cosmos is an “unfolding traumascape” governed by self-similar patterns and fundamental processes that recur on every scale.

Libidinising “flows” and investing them with an intrinsically subversive power, Deleuze & Guattari have been criticised as incorrigible Romantics. CCRU develop this element of A Thousand Plateaus into a kind of mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU call “Gothic Materialism” (“ferro-vampiric” cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and walks the “flatline” between life and death), Anna Greenspan talks about how “the core of the earth is made of iron, and blood contains iron,” about how the goal is to “hook up with the Earth’s metal plasma core, which is the Body-Without-Organs.” Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the Deleuzian utopia, an inchoate flux of deterritorialized energy; Greenspan says they take the B-w-O as “an ethical injunction,” a supreme goal.

O[rphan] D[rift>] also talk about “metal in the body” and seeking the B-w-O. Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU’s prime allies: they performed at the CCRU-organised Virtual Futures 96 conference at Warwick, and are set to stage an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London’s Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as Fine Art students at the prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their ideas about creating a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic terrorism oriented around “schizoid thinking,” pre-linguistic autistic states and man-machine interfaces proved way too radical. Formed in late 1994, OD was shaped by two mindblowing experiences: “experimentation with drugs and techno,” and a 1993 encounter with Nick Land.

“Before CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very intensively for a while,” says Roberts. “We fed him image experience, tactile readings of the stuff he was buried in theoretically. He wanted his writing to kick in a much more experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful about having a man you could ring up and ask: ‘what’s radiation?,’ ‘what’s a black hole?’”

OD’s collective debut was a multimedia installation at London’s Cabinet Gallery. What began as a catalogue for the show escalated into an astonishing 437 page book, Cyberpositive. Like Plant’s Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text of sampled writings that aren’t attributed in the text. But where Plant offers footnotes; OD merely list the “asked” and “un-asked” contributors at the end. Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a sort of canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual universe, placing SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as post-structuralist theorists. “We treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as any notional theorist,” says Nick Land, “At the same time, every great philosopher is producing an important fiction. Marx is obviously a science fiction writer.” For her part, Sadie Plant regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and Cadigan as “more reliable witnesses,” precisely because, unlike theorists, “they don’t have an axe to grind.”

The most highly-charged passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty chunks of Plant/Land writing and Roberts’s and Mukherjee’s evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD experience. “I used to write a lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious,” recalls Roberts. “Tracing what’s happening in all the different sound channels and what they’re doing spatially and physically to you.” The language veers from masochistic mortification of the flesh (“deep hurting techno,” “the meat is learning to know loss”) to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession (“white darkness,” “the fog of absolute proximity,” “psyclone,” “beautiful fear”). “It’s trying to process the dissassembling of the self,” says Roberts. “Maybe what you’re calling abject, we’d call melting. The violence of the sounds in techno, it’s like you’re being turned inside out, smeared, penetrated.”

Despite her facial piercing and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts has a sort of burned-out, aristocratic air that suggests Marianne Faithfull circa 1969. A half-smile flickering on her lips, as if she’s privy to some kosmik joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter—as though some unutterably alien zone of posthuman consciousness hasn’t quite relinquished its hold. Which may be a pretty accurate description of the state of play. If CCRU have something of a cultic air about them, OD go a lot further. Combining Mayan cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they seem to believe that humanity will soon abandon the “meat” of incarnate existence and become pure spirit.

Throughout Cyberpositive there’s the recurrent exhortation “we must change for the machines;” while the book ends with the declaration—“human viewpoint redundant.” Not only do OD reckon Charles Manson had some good ideas, their East London HQ contains several cages of snakes—proof of their determination to get really serious about voodoo rites. The obsession was sparked by Gibson’s Count Zero, in which cyberspace has spontaneously generated entities equivalent to the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology). Throughout the interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches—daintily quartered, but containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. “Too radical for me”, I confess after one nibble. Rich’s eyes light up triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.

“Cyberpositive” was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land. First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon, “Cyberpositive” was a gauntlet thrown down at the Left-wing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term “cyberpositive” was a twist on Norbert Wierner’s ideas of “negative feedback” (homeostasis), and “positive feedback” (runaway tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized “negative feedback,” Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback—specifically the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilize control structures. “It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily but it wasn’t ever going to get anywhere,” says Plant. “If there was going to be scope for any kind of….not ‘resistance,’ but any kind of discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have to come from somewhere else.” As well as Deleuze & Guattari, another crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa’s idea of “capitalism as the system of antimarkets.” Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organizing activity: street markets, “the frontier zones of capitalism,” what De Landa calls “meshwork,” as opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds quite jovial, the way CCRU describe it now—a bustling bazaar culture of trade and “cutting deals.” But “Cyberpositive” actually reads like a nihilistic paean to the “cyberpathology of markets,” celebrating capitalism as “a viral contagion” and declaring “everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind.” In Nick Land’s essays like “Machinic Desire” and “Meltdown,” the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the “dark will” of capital and technology, as it “rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities.” This gloating delight in capital’s deterritorializing virulence is the CCRU’s reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic thought. “There’s definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely scleroticised, institutionalized thought,” says CCRU’s Mark Fisher. “It’s obvious that capitalism isn’t going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!” Exulting in capitalism’s permanent “crisis mode,” CCRU believe in the strategic application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos.

Hungry for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously renounce postmodernism’s wan fatalism (the idea that we’re at the end of everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left. In the process, they’ve jettisoned the concept of “alienation” in both its Marxist and Freudian senses. They speak approvingly of “surplus value,” sublimation and commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies. Where “Cyberpositive” noted how how runaway capitalism had accessed “inconceivable alienations,” CCRU’s collectively written essay “Swarmachines” goes further and climaxes with the boast: “alienated and loving it.” The idea, says Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend of Lyotard and Blade Runner—“the proletariat as this synthetic class, and revolution that’s on the side of the synthetic and artificial. The concept of ‘alienation’ depends on the notion that there’s some authentic essence lost through the development of capitalism. But according to Barker, everything’s already synthetic.” If reality really is a bio-mechanical, geocosmic continuum, there’s no reason to resist capitalism’s escalating dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the creation of artificial desires.

The mania of CCRU’s texts—with their mood-blend of euphoric anticipation and dystopian dread—is contagious. Much of the time they’re trying to create a “theory-rush” that matches the buzz they get from contemporary sampladelic dance music; they describe, half-jokingly, what they do as “sub-bass materialism.” “The musical model is really key to us,” says Land. “It’s absurd to say that music doesn’t represent the real and therefore it’s an empty metaphor. Every theorist who hasn’t a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia.” Not only do the CCRU derive a lot of their energy from music (specifically drum & bass and UK garage, which one member of the unit actually makes and Djs under the name Kode 9) but popular culture is where their ideas seem most persuasive. Right from its late Eighties beginnings, rave culture’s motor has been anarcho-capitalist: from promoters throwing illegal parties in warehouses to drug dealing. Even after its co-optation by the record and clubbing industries, rave music’s cutting edge comes from small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios, specialist record stores, pirate radio. Sadie Plant attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of welfare and “dependency culture,” which forced people “to get real and find some ways of surviving” but also to invent “new forms of collectivity” (the micro-utopian communality of the rave).

As well as being galvanized by music, the CCRU are influenced by the theory-driven leading edge of music journalism. One of their associate members is Kodwo Eshun, contributor to iD and The Wire, and author of the book More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction (Quartet), a study of Afro-futurist music from Sun Ra to 4 Hero. Eshun describes himself and the CCRU as “concept-engineers.” “Most theory contextualises, historicizes and cautions; the concept-engineer uses theory to speculate, excite and ignite,” Eshun proclaims. Like a DJ/producer, the concept-engineer is “a sample-finder,” free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value of a theory and simply use the bits that work (in the spirit of Deleuze & Guattari’s offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit rather than gospel).

“Concept-engineer” is a good tag for the outerzone of “independent researchers” to which CCRU is connected. Renegade autodidacts like Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak whose techno-zine break/flow brilliantly analyzes rave culture in terms of “surges of intensity” and “impulsional exchanges.” And like Matthew Fuller, a media theorist/activist with a background in anarchist politics and links to the hacker underground. Fuller’s CV of cultural dissidence includes flypostering, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast Breeder, the scabrous freesheet Underground, and a series of anarcho-seminars dedicated to the praxis of media terrorism. Fuller also put out the anthology Unnatural: Techno-Theory For A Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land’s “Cyberpositive.”

Discussing his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about dismantling traditional “modes of political address” and developing a sort of post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true concept-engineer, he believes in ransacking theory texts for task-specific ideas. “Publishers like Autonomedia and Semiotexte produce material that you don’t have to be an academic to get into, so it circulates outside those milieux. When I give presentations at academic events, it’s easy to see I’m in a more powerful position than the academics—I can steal all the advantages of their discipline, plus do something else with it that fucks it up totally.” Noting that Deleuze & Guattari are already being institutionalized into “the most dreary, saintly area of discourse,” Fuller says he’s dedicated to “cracking open those texts again, thinkers who originally opened stuff up to delirium and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the reader. In that respect, there’s a lot more to be learned from fiction than theory.” Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose forthcoming Writing On Drugs will include a fictional component, and who hopes her future books will become “pure fiction.” “The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang—Ph.D. students with attitude!,” says Eshun. Loathing the “necrotic side of philosophy, the chewing-over of dead thinkers’ entrails,” and bored limp by the “delibidinising” atmosphere of seminars, CCRU used to attend academic events, claims Eshun, expressly “in order to disrupt, undermine and ridicule…. They’d get into pitched battles with Derrideans!”

Weary of such sports, Plant and CCRU have all enthusiastically embraced the idea of escaping “institutional lockdown” by going freelance. The CCRU hope to become a kind of independent think-tank, selling “commodities” on the intellectual free market—like their strikingly designed Abstract Culture (each “swarm” consists of five separate monographs bundled together) and, in the future, CD’s, CD-ROM’s and books.

It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they’re out in the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says she couldn’t really go along with the trip into numerical mysticism, not least because she didn’t like finding herself “in the role of the sensible, conservative one — not a role I’m used to!” CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented their guru’s premature departure from Warwick. “Nick Land’s hermetic, he wants acolytes,” says Eshun. “Whereas Sadie’s this total communicator. Zeros + Ones is the return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can’t think of any other writer with the same ambition. Sadie wants the world and I think she’ll get it.”

For CCRU work, post-CCRU activity, and allied ‘renegade autodidacts’ check out these sites:

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit K-Gothic Datacomb K-Punk Hyperdub Kode 9 Abstract Machines Orphan Drift Matthew Fuller