Atlas32 entries
Works
The Atlas
The bibliography and discography of the whole cosmos. Every title stands in one place, with year, author and, where they exist, an account of its essence and its effect. The site hosts no protected texts, it records and orders, and leads to the free sources where there are any. Three depths, the primary work of the CCRU, the works of the core, the sources and descendants. The CCRU primary pieces, Pandemonium, Barker Speaks, the Lemurian Time War, the AOE texts, the Cthulhu Club, the Templeton Episode, are listed here bibliographically, their full place is the respective dossier in the Advanced Mode.
The CCRU Primary Work
CCRU, Writings 1997-2003
Collection. Pieces 1997 to 2003, gathered 2015, Time Spiral Press. The volume assembles the completed texts under the name CCRU, previously scattered, above all on the vanished website ccru.net. It orders by topic, not by chronology, and understands itself as pure documentation without later comment. To it the site owes almost all of its primary material for the Advanced Mode. It contains Pandemonium, Barker Speaks, the Lemurian Time War, the AOE texts and the glossary. The preface holds that no one claims authorship and that the errors of the texts were deliberately left untouched. Effect. It carried the rediscovery of the CCRU in the 2010s, became the ground for everything the Atlas and Advanced Mode draw from the primary text, and counts as the canonical archive since the website sank. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
Nick Land, Fanged Noumena
Collection. Pieces 1987 to 2007, gathered 2011, Urbanomic. The collection of Nick Land's writings edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier. It brings together the scattered essays of the Warwick years, from Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest through Meltdown to Qabbala 101 and Tic-Talk. It is the canonical edition of the driving figure of the second CCRU phase. Its appearance in 2011 set off the broad rediscovery of Land's thought. Effect. It shaped the accelerationism and Speculative Realism of the 2010s, became the ground of nearly every reception of Land, and counts as the book that made a marginal body of work canonical. Protected, listed here only.
Pandaemonium
Essay. From the Writings. CCRU. Pandemonium is the founding text of the Numogram. It takes the decimal system at its word and treats the ten digits as zones of a diagram. Out of the nine-sums arise the syzygies, out of their differences the currents, out of the cumulations the Gates. On this calculation the text builds the matrix of forty-five demons, each an irreducible distance between two zones. It joins strict arithmetic to a mythology that introduces Lemuria and the syzygetic demons. Its procedure is hyperstition, it treats its own construction as the find of an older order. Pandemonium is thereby less an essay than an operating system the other texts access. Effect. It shaped all of the CCRU's numerological work, became the strictest example of theory-fiction, a thinking that computes its own invention through, and found its readers only in retrospect through the collection. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
Barker Speaks
Interview, 1998. From the Writings. CCRU. A fabricated interview with the invented Professor Daniel Barker. In it Barker unfolds geotraumatics, the reading of the earth as a traumatised body whose glowing core stores the first trauma. He names this core Cthelll and reads geology as a record without an interpreting subject. Coming from cryptography, he carries the deciphering of signals over to rock, life and spine. The text supports Barker's existence through a dense, contradiction-free biography and makes the invention itself the argument. Effect. It shaped Land's later geological and numerical texts and Negarestani's Cyclonopedia, became the ground of geotraumatics, which turned into real history of science in Thomas Moynihan's book, and counts as the purest piece of CCRU theory-fiction. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
Lemurian Time War
Text. From the Writings. CCRU. The text tells the war of two parties over the constitution of time. On one side the AOE, a hermetic order that administers straight time, on the other Lemuria, the culture of the time-loop. It draws its material from the report of an unreliable witness, William Kaye, and from the Vysparov collection with its nearness to Burroughs. The narrative ties Lovecraft's myth, the pirate utopia and the numerical doctrine of time of the Numogram into a single front. It is the narrative side of what Pandemonium computes. Effect. It shaped the later theory of hyperstition and the idea that time is contested, became the ground of the Time War as a motif of speculative culture, and counts as the mythic core of the CCRU cosmos. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
AOE und Axsys
Text. From the Writings. CCRU. The text describes the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton and its programme Axsys. The AOE is an order that hides its secrets even from its initiates and builds the institutions of straight time, its sign is the ecumenical calendar. Its end coincides with the Omega Point, which the CCRU borrows from Teilhard. Axsys is the metacomputing in which reality is finally absorbed. The doctrine of the AOE demands that every account of it be treated with the utmost distrust, which immunises the text against its own authority. Effect. It shaped the figure of the time-closing institution, became the ground of the AOE side of the Time War, and counts as the dark counter-instance to Lemuria. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
The Cthulhu Club
Text. From the Writings. CCRU. The text depicts the circle around Peter Vysparov, the Cthulhu Club, and its search for the Lemurian tradition. It introduces the collection from which the Time War draws its material, and the encounter with William Burroughs. It is the authenticating piece of the counter-side, ordering the fictional origin of the sources. Effect. It shaped the narrative substructure of the Time War, became the ground of the Vysparov and Kaye figures, and counts as part of the Lovecraftian framing of the CCRU. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
The Templeton Episode
Text. From the Writings. CCRU. The text is about the invented Professor R. E. Templeton, who asserts the impossibility of empirical time travel and then falls into his own past. Out of his investigation of the time-anomalies comes the spiral structure the Numogram lays over time. It joins hyperstition to the Barker-Spiral and to the question of how the future writes itself into the present. Effect. It shaped the time-figure of the Advanced Mode, became the ground of the spiral structure over the diagram, and counts as the hyperstitional tale of time travel. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
Das CCRU-Glossar
Register. Appendix to the Writings. CCRU. The CCRU's own glossary, carried in the volume as an appendix because of its general reach. It defines the terms of the Numogram and the matrix in the voice of the collective. It is the primary source of citation for the glossary of the Advanced Mode. Effect. It shaped every later collection of CCRU terms, became the ground of the Advanced glossary, and counts as the lexical core of the cosmos. Freely available from the CCRU archive.
Meltdown
Essay, 1994. From Fanged Noumena. Nick Land. The densest early text of accelerationism, delivered in 1994 at Warwick. It reads capitalism as a self-accelerating process running toward a melting point at which the human disintegrates. It joins cybernetics, science fiction and philosophy into a breathless pull. It does not assert acceleration, it enacts it in the style. Effect. It shaped all of later accelerationism, left and right, became the ground of the motif that the way out of capitalism leads through it, and counts as the founding text of a current Noys later summed up as a charge. Partly free, partly protected.
Qabbala 101
Text. From Fanged Noumena. Nick Land. Land's text on the decimal qabbala, which detaches the mysticism of number from the Hebrew alphabet and grounds it on the ten digits. It asserts an original decimal order against which the received qabbala is a late mutilation. It supplies the theoretical backbone of the reversal of origin the sources dossier carries. Effect. It shaped the numerological side of the Numogram and the figure of Chaim Horovitz, became the ground of the decimal qabbala as a procedure, and counts as one of Land's most esoteric texts. Protected, listed here only.
Tic-Talk
Text. From Fanged Noumena. Nick Land. The text unfolds the Tic-Xenotation, a notation that builds numbers without a modulus, from a single doubling sign and the jump to the next prime alone. It belongs to Barker's Tic-Systems and turns cryptography into a writing freed of all convention. It is the numerical link to the Barker dossier. Effect. It shaped the numerical aesthetics of the CCRU and later work on non-metric number, became the ground of the Tic-Xenotation, and counts as one of the most hermetic pieces of the work. Protected, listed here only.
Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest
Essay, 1988. From Fanged Noumena. Nick Land. One of Land's earliest and most cited texts. It reads capitalist modernity through the incest prohibition and valorisation, and joins Kant, Marx and ethnology into a critique of the limit. It marks the starting point of Land's road into his later radicalism. Effect. It shaped the academic reception of the early Land, became the ground of his joining of economics and philosophy, and counts as the text with which his work often begins. Protected, listed here only.
The Works of the Core
Zeros and Ones
Book, 1997. Sadie Plant. Plant's thesis is outrageously simple. The digital is female from the start. She draws for it a line few see together. The Jacquard loom steered its patterns with punched cards, weaving was women's work, and Ada Lovelace was the first to see that Babbage's engine does nothing else, it weaves algebraic patterns as the loom weaves flowers and leaves. Out of the punched card comes Hollerith, out of Hollerith comes IBM. The computer descends from the loom, and the loom belonged to women. Beneath it lies a metaphysical move. In the order of the West woman is the zero, the hole, the nothing against the one of man. Plant reverses the sign. Zero is no lack, it is the matrix, the weave, the net, the ground from which the one first falls. The digital net is thereby a female form that dissolves the closed self of man. Women and machines share a history, they counted as serving supports and now become self-acting. The autonomy of the machine is the woman's. The book does not make a thesis, it weaves one. It is itself a weave of quotations with no straight thread, the form enacts the argument. Effect. Zeros and Ones became the founding text of cyberfeminism. It is at the same time the place where the later critique ignites. To declare technology fundamentally female binds woman again to nature and weave, and it is exactly this binding that the xenofeminists around Helen Hester undo twenty years later. And the method, weaving instead of proving, makes the book intoxicating and hard to grasp at once. Protected, listed here only.
Capitalist Realism
Book, 2009, Zer0 Books. Mark Fisher. The book opens with a scene from film. In Children of Men, Picasso's Guernica hangs on the wall of a government building, rescued, while the world outside has gone infertile. The art is still there, the future is gone. From that image Fisher draws his concept, capitalist realism, the sense that capitalism is not the ruling system but the only one that can still be thought at all. The new thing lies not in this thesis, which he borrows from Jameson and Zizek. It lies in where he relocates the critique. He leaves economics and goes into the psyche. Capitalism enforces itself through a mood, and that mood has names. Reflexive impotence, the knowledge that everything is bad coupled with the certainty that nothing can be changed. Depressive hedonia, the being driven to pleasure because no goal in the future pulls any longer. Fisher's students are for him not idlers, they are symptoms. Their anxiety is no private disorder, it is the inside of a political condition. That is the book's sharpest move, the deprivatisation of suffering. The second front is bureaucracy. Fisher destroys the myth that the market abolished paperwork. In the audit culture teachers and doctors document their work instead of doing it. He calls it market Stalinism, for as the Soviet Union celebrated its plan figures, capitalism celebrates its metrics. Above it lies business ontology, the quiet self-evidence that school and hospital are to be run like firms. The origin in the CCRU is here the key. Fisher keeps what he learned at Warwick, to read culture as symptom, to take the film and the record as theory. He only turns the direction around. Where Land affirmed acceleration and drove it into the inhuman, Fisher mourns what it destroys, the cancelled future. The same gaze, the same school, the opposite stance. Capitalist realism and accelerationism are two children of the same house. Effect. The book made one sentence common property of the left, that mental health is a political field. It carried the small press Zer0 Books, sold over a hundred thousand copies and gathered thousands of citations, unusual for eighty pages. Where the serious critique lands, it lands on two things. Fisher often equates capitalism and neoliberalism. And he delivers the diagnosis without the cure, he shows the illness more sharply than others, the way out he does not show. Protected, listed here only.
More Brilliant Than the Sun
Book, 1998. Kodwo Eshun. Eshun attacks the well-meant way of writing about Black music. The usual reading calls it soul, roots, the street, the true expression of lived suffering. For Eshun that is precisely the condescension. It holds Black music in the role of the petitioner asking for admission into humanity. He takes the other side, with the musicians who refused the human. Sun Ra, who came from Saturn, Drexciya with their underwater kingdom, Underground Resistance with their masks. He calls their music Sonic Fiction, sound that expresses no experience but designs worlds. The core is a militant posthumanism. Alienation is not to be healed, it becomes a weapon. Where humanist critique wants to win back the whole human, Eshun makes himself the alien. His music history runs not through origin and heritage but through breaks, intervals, the power of the false. The language itself is built, it invents terms like the futurhythmachine, it wants not to interpret the music but to make it once more. With that the book is the clearest transfer of the CCRU method to sound. Music is hyperstition, a fiction that summons the future, and alienation is no suffering but a raw material. Effect. The book became a cult book and laid the ground for Afrofuturism as a theoretical field, Goodman's Sonic Warfare carries it directly on. The critique lands on two spots. The dense, invented jargon shuts out many readers. And the refusal of roots and history has its price, whoever celebrates alienation risks taking the weight of slavery and diaspora too lightly. Protected, reissued by Verso, listed here only.
Sonic Warfare
Book, 2010, MIT Press. Steve Goodman. Goodman shifts the politics of music from meaning into force. Not the text counts but the frequency that strikes the body before the mind assents. He calls it the politics of frequency. His basic concept is the ontology of vibrational force, everything is rhythm and oscillation, and sound works as affect, not as message. The bold thing is what he lays on a single continuum. At one end the sonic weapon, the infrasound with which military and police make people ill, the sound bombs, the high-frequency devices against youths. At the other end the bass in the club that sets a body in motion. The same physics of affection, the same ecology of fear. Last, Goodman introduces the unsound, the not-yet-audible, the futural edge at which new frequencies pull the present forward. The link to the cosmos is double. It is the continuation of Eshun's Sonic Fiction, and it is the theory to Goodman's own label, Hyperdub produces the unsound the book speaks of. Effect. Sonic Warfare became a cornerstone of Sound Studies. The critique aims at its premise. If everything is vibration, the concept loses its edge, and by laying scientific and speculative claims on one level, Goodman buys the radicalism with a loss of discrimination. Protected, listed here only.
Abstract Sex
Book, 2004. Luciana Parisi. Parisi goes beneath the body, down to the bacterium, to show that sex was never two-sexed. Bacteria exchange genes laterally, without parents and offspring, without two sexes. This nonfiliative bacterial sex she takes, with Lynn Margulis and her theory of endosymbiosis, as the deeper ground. Two-sexed reproduction is then no nature but a late layering over an older, more formless process. What she calls abstract sex is the continuum of exchange that runs from the bacterial through the biological into the technical. From it follows a thesis about the present. Today's capitalism does not repress desire, it multiplies it, it experiments in the molecular layers of nature. Parisi thereby radicalises Plant. Where Plant made the digital female, Parisi dissolves woman herself into a machinic, symbiotic process. Effect. The book became a foundational text of feminist technoscience. Its critique has two sides. The apparatus of concepts is dense to the point of closure. And the dissolution of woman into molecular flows takes from feminist politics the subject in whose name it acts. Protected, listed here only.
Contagious Architecture
Book, 2013, MIT Press. Luciana Parisi. The ordinary suspicion says the digital is the realm of computability. Parisi claims the opposite. At the heart of computation sits the incomputable. She leans on Gregory Chaitin's Omega, a number provably not computable, and draws from it that the algorithm does not only execute what the designer foresaw. It generates randomness and indeterminacy, it brings forth the new. Computation is thereby a way of thinking of its own that escapes the human mind. This way Parisi calls, with Whitehead's process philosophy, soft thought. In architecture it becomes visible, the parametric forms arise from algorithms that bring forth more than their programme. That is the rigorous link to the CCRU's obsession with number. Where the Numogram claims that number is productive, Parisi carries the same thought with the means of information theory, strict instead of conjuring. Effect. The book shaped the theory of algorithmic aesthetics and shifted the question of control, for a power that rules over computation is haunted by what it cannot compute. The critique concerns the leap. From Chaitin's technical incomputability to a general mode of thinking is a wide, speculative road. And the abstraction is high. Protected, listed here only.
Philosophies of Nature After Schelling
Book, 2006. Iain Hamilton Grant. Grant reverses the basic move of modern philosophy. Since Kant it asks how nature appears for us. Grant reads Schelling against that narrowing. Not the subject conditions nature, nature brings forth the subject. It is not the finished product but productivity, a ground that precedes all ground, what Schelling calls the will of the depths. The self is then only one of its knots, the most tension-charged among all the products of nature. The book thereby turns against what Grant calls somatism, the habit of reducing nature to bodies and objects. To philosophise about nature means for him not to depict but to generate, thinking is itself an activity of nature. Grant drives this to a transcendental geology. Here lies the core of his nearness to the CCRU. What Barker invents as geotraumatics, the earth as a productive, human-exceeding ground, Grant recovers as strict philosophy. He is the philosopher of the productive earth in the cosmos. Effect. The book became a cornerstone of the Schelling renaissance and of the natural-philosophical branch of Speculative Realism. The critique aims at its sharpening. To set the whole post-Kantian philosophy on the axis Schelling versus Kant is a bold historical claim. And the book is of a density that taxes even practised readers. Protected, listed here only.
Sources and Descendants
Anti-Ödipus (1972)
The book that gave the CCRU permission to think desire as a machine and to celebrate deterritorialisation. Land reads it as a programme, not a warning. Protected, listed here only.
Tausend Plateaus (1980)
The toolbox of the cosmos. Rhizome, abstract machine, nonmetric multiplicity, almost every CCRU term has its grip here. Protected, listed here only.
Neuromancer (1984)
The novel that invented the matrix the CCRU is at home in. Gibson's cyberspace is less setting than prophecy. Protected, listed here only.
Naked Lunch (1959)
The source of the suspicion that language is control. From here come the cut-up and the pirate figures of the Time War. Protected, listed here only.
Cybernetics (1948)
The book that set feedback into the world, the circle out of which the Numogram makes its loops. Protected, listed here only.
Order Out of Chaos (1984)
The scientific backing for the CCRU's founding hope, that at the edge of collapse order arises. Protected, listed here only.
Der Mensch im Kosmos (1955)
The pious source of the Omega Point, which the CCRU strips and puts to its own use. Protected, listed here only.
Nach der Endlichkeit (2006)
The book that gave the group's antianthropocentric impulse a philosophical right. Protected, listed here only.
Nihil Unbound (2007)
The radicalisation of that impulse into nihilism, extinction as truth, by Land's own editor. Protected, listed here only.
Cyclonopedia (2008)
The ripest work of theory-fiction after the CCRU, in which oil itself becomes the narrator, the direct heir of Barker. Protected, listed here only.
Manifest für eine akzelerationistische Politik (2013)
The attempt to detach the thought of acceleration from Land and give it to the left. Freely available as an open text.
Inventing the Future (2015)
The mature, defused version of the left strand, which no longer names the word it came from. Protected, listed here only.