Atlas27 entries
People
The Atlas
Here everyone in the CCRU cosmos stands in one place, the real and the invented, side by side. This is no oversight, it is the heart of the matter. The CCRU manufactured credibility through invention, and this register makes that visible rather than smoothing it over. Each person carries a mark that says whether they lived or were invented. Each page leads from the person to their works and to the volumes and objects that carry them.
Four groups. The core, the group itself. The invented, the figures it gave itself. The sources and ancestors it drew from. The influence and descendants that flowed out of it.
Core
Sadie Plant
Founder. Born 1964 in Birmingham. Plant gave the CCRU its genetic material and left before that material darkened. She came out of Situationism, her first book reread its revolt for the postmodern. At Warwick she made something of her own from it, a cyberfeminism that grasped technology not as the tool of man but as a female form. Her signature is the reversal of the sign, zero is no lack, the machine no domination, the net a weave with women's work at its beginning. Zeros and Ones works this out. In 1995 she founded the unit with Land, in 1997 she left. That departure is the fork of the whole cosmos. Plant's cyberfeminism was affirmative, it wanted an open, connecting future. When Land drove the group into the antihuman, she withdrew and soon wrote on other things. She is the origin of the CCRU and at the same time the road it did not take, the affirmative possibility that lay in the seed and stayed there.
Nick Land
Core, driving force of the second phase. Born 1962. Land is the axis of the cosmos and its danger. His early philosophy, libidinal materialism, sets Bataille, Nietzsche and Freud against Kant. Desire and technology are for him autonomous forces beyond human control, and the human is something to be overcome. His style is part of the argument. He does not write about a thesis, he builds texts like malware that infect the reader, what the CCRU calls hyperstition, the idea as executable code. In the Warwick years the group was no seminar but almost a cult, performances with electronic music, Land declaring himself serpent, werewolf, lemur, the annihilation of the self on the model of Bataille's Acephale. The core of the thought is a thesis about capital. It is a nonhuman intelligence, a kind of AI, deterritorialising everything and running toward the dissolution of the human into the technical. After a breakdown, personal and philosophical, Land went to Shanghai and from there into Neoreaction. His path is no break but a repetition, the same machine under new skin, demons become diagrams of sovereignty, the Lemurian spiral becomes patchwork states. With that the one question stands in the room that carries his page. Is the neoreactionary turn a betrayal of the early work or its logical consequence. Some read him as an indispensable diagnostician of the inhuman forces driving the present. Others see a man who never drew the line between analysis and complicity and so slid into the antidemocratic, whose antihumanism was from the start a politics only waiting to be spelled out. Both readings must be taken seriously. The cosmos owes Land its force and its poison at once.
Mark Fisher
Core. 1968 to 2017. Fisher carried the CCRU method into public and to the left. He began as a blogger under the name k-punk, and the blog was no sideline, it was a new form, theory in real time, between film, record and politics, written for anyone, not for the footnote. His signature is the politicisation of mood. What looks like private depression he reads as the condition of a society without a future. Out of that turn came his concept of capitalist realism, which the book works out, and hauntology, the mourning for futures that were cancelled. Fisher stayed the most accessible of the circle and thereby the most effective, his language reached a generation that otherwise wanted nothing from philosophy. In 2017 he took his own life after a long illness. His work goes on working since, and carries a large part of the present reception of the whole group.
Kodwo Eshun
Core. Born 1967 in London. Eshun carried the cosmos into the Black diaspora and then into art. As a theorist he invented Sonic Fiction and the thesis that the music of the diaspora is already science fiction, which More Brilliant Than the Sun works out. His signature is the passage from theory into practice. In 2002 he founded the Otolith Group with Anjalika Sagar and has since made essayistic films that weave archive, science fiction and theory, nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010. With that Eshun is the proof that the CCRU method need not stay in the text. He left the role of the commentator and became an artist himself, one who now makes the futures he wrote about.
Steve Goodman, Kode9
Core. Goodman is the circle in one person, theorist, producer and publisher at once. As Kode9 he makes the bass music, as an author he writes its theory, with Hyperdub he runs the label on which it appears. His signature is the unity of thought and practice that no one else in the cosmos drives so far. The same person designs the ontology of vibrational force and produces the bass that proves it in the body, the theory stands in Sonic Warfare. Where Land wrote texts like code, Goodman writes frequencies. Hyperdub is the place where hyperstition becomes an audible thing, the label produces the unsound the theory speaks of.
Robin Mackay
Core. Mackay is the reason the CCRU still exists today. He was no theorist of the first rank, he was something rarer, the one who preserved and built. After the dissolution he gathered the scattered texts, founded the press Urbanomic and the journal Collapse, edited Land's Fanged Noumena with Ray Brassier, and translated the continental sources, Meillassoux and Laruelle, into English. His signature is infrastructure. Without him the CCRU would have stayed a rumour, a few dead links on a vanished website. He turned a dissolved group into a body of work one can read, cite and carry forward. The cosmos owes its canonisation to this one publisher.
Luciana Parisi
Core. Parisi is the most scientific heir of the cosmos. Where the CCRU asserted, she works with evidence. Her path runs through two fields. First biology, where with Lynn Margulis she shows that sex was never two-sexed, which Abstract Sex works out. Then computation, where with Chaitin she shows that at the heart of the algorithm sits the incomputable, which Contagious Architecture works out. Her signature is rigour, she takes the group's two obsessions, the biological and number, and grounds them in hard science instead of conjuring them. Today she works on artificial intelligence and on a critique that begins with nonhuman thought. She is the proof that theory-fiction can become a serious science of the inhuman.
Iain Hamilton Grant
Core. Grant is the academic philosopher of the circle, the one who stayed in the university and did the strict work. While others went into music, art or politics, he dug into the philosophy after Kant. His signature is the recovery of Schelling. He reads the philosophy of nature as the road modernity did not take, a nature that brings forth the subject rather than being conditioned by it, which Philosophies of Nature After Schelling works out. With that he gives the cosmos's founding intuition its philosophical ground, the same productive, human-exceeding earth that Barker composes as geotraumatics. In 2007 Grant was one of the four founders of Speculative Realism. He is the proof that the CCRU's antianthropocentric stance was not only provocation but can be carried as rigorous philosophy.
Invented
Daniel Charles Barker
Barker is the proof that an invention can work without existing. He is not one figure among others, he is the CCRU method in person, the theory-fiction that puts its coherence in the place of its author. His own dossier works this out.
Echidna Stillwell
Stillwell is the invented witness who passes off the Numogram as a find and not a construction. Her function is delicate and precise, she shifts the authorship of the diagram from the CCRU onto a supposed Lemurian tradition and so turns an invention into a piece of evidence.
Chaim Horovitz
Horovitz carries the same shift for the mysticism of number. To him the CCRU ascribes an original decimal qabbala against which the received Hebrew one is only a late copy. He is the invented origin that authenticates Land's inversion of the sources.
William Kaye
Kaye is the sole source of the Time War and at once the most uncertain. That he admits his own susceptibility to delusion is no flaw of the narrative, it is its device, the other side can only be reported by a witness one must not trust.
Peter Vysparov
Vysparov is the invented collector whose circle makes the link to Burroughs. Through him a real figure enters the fiction, and the border between evidence and invention is made unrecognisable by design.
Sources and Ancestors
Norbert Wiener
From Wiener comes the one figure without which the Numogram is unthinkable, feedback, the circle in which the effect strikes back on its cause. The CCRU takes cybernetics at its word and lets time itself run in such circles.
Gilles Deleuze und Felix Guattari
They supply the CCRU with the tool it works everything else with, the machine without a purpose, the desire that produces, deterritorialisation. Land is first of all their reader, and accelerationism is their Anti-Oedipus stripped of every caution.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
From Lyotard's Libidinal Economy comes the disturbing thought that exploitation is also enjoyed, that a pleasure sits inside the misery. That is the seed of Land's affirmation of capital, against every moral safeguard.
Ilya Prigogine
Prigogine gives the CCRU a scientific backing for its founding hope, that order falls out of chaos. Far from equilibrium, where everything seems to collapse, the new arises, and that is exactly where the group wants to stand.
H. P. Lovecraft
For the CCRU Lovecraft is no author of horror stories but the inventor of the procedure it calls hyperstition. His Necronomicon, a book that does not exist and works all the same, is the model for everything the group later builds.
William Gibson
Gibson supplied the one word that describes the CCRU's world, cyberspace, and the image of the matrix in which data become space. The group treats his fiction as the map of a future already begun.
William S. Burroughs
From Burroughs comes the suspicion that language is a form of control, a virus, and the cut-up, the method of slicing the text to break that control. He is the godfather of the Lemurian counter-power.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Teilhard is the pious ancestor of the CCRU's most godless idea. His Omega Point, the end in which all runs together in God, becomes for the group the technical target of closed time, the singularity without consolation.
Influence and Descendants
Reza Negarestani
Negarestani is the heir who drives theory-fiction to its peak and then past himself. After Cyclonopedia, the densest work of the method, he turned to a rigorous philosophy of reason, as if he had exhausted the fiction to its limit.
Quentin Meillassoux
Meillassoux is no student of the CCRU but its neighbour. His attack on correlationism gave the group what it lacked, a strictly argued right to think the world without the human.
Ray Brassier
Brassier is the descendant who took the CCRU more seriously and at once broke from it most sharply. He edited Land's work and made extinction the ground of thinking, but rejected the speculative fashion he himself had named.
Benjamin Noys
Noys is the descendant against his will, the critic who named the strand he fights. Without his charge the word accelerationism would not exist, a rare case in which the enmity coins the name.
Nick Srnicek und Alex Williams
They are the ones who wanted to turn the CCRU's most dangerous thought to the left, acceleration without Land. Their manifesto gave the left a future back for a moment, and their retreat from the word shows how hard the thought is to separate from its origin.
Curtis Yarvin
Yarvin is the strand that shows where the antidemocratic consequence leads when no one stops it. His Neoreaction is the proof that the CCRU's ideas do not stay in the seminar but land in politics. The strand Neoreaction places him critically.